It's the afternoon of 24 June 2008. I'm bored, so I decide to start poking around on Google to see what toys they have to play with when I stumble across their blog posting service. Interesting enough, I decided I might as well sign up for it. No big deal, no big surprises, till I get to the part that asks for the URL I would like to use. I put in "mpoese.blogspot.com," and much to my surprise Google informs me that URL has already been taken. Given the scarcity of people with this last name, I find it hard to believe, so I go directly to the URL, and yep, somebody started a blog with that URL back in August 2003, with nary an entry since. Actually, even the 2003 blog was nary an entry, just consisting of some "Welcome to my blog" gibberish. I'm perplexed, spend quite some time trying to figure out who would have signed up for the URL, when some faint memory strikes me that I might have done it a few years ago, bored, after a couple of drinks. I can't actually remember doing it, but it seems like something I would have done, the forgotten about, and I can even imagine myself on the old blue, dog-chewed sofa as I wrote that first entry five years back. So, to make a long story short, I try to guess what my old login credentials would have been, and owing to my lack of creative thinking back then (which continues to today) I am able to guess right on the second attempt. I was able to login and claim my long lost blog, and here I am today, just shy of five years later, putting in my second entry.

So, what has transpired in those five years? I've left Silicon Valley, moved to Seattle, worked for yet another now defunct Internet startup, purchased, run, and shutdown my own business, put my two dogs to sleep, put up with one or more opposite-gender mindgames, and am now in the process of trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, just ahead of my milestone birthday. I'll try to backfill the missing pieces in the next few entries, and bring things up to the present, but for now I'll just post this and try to figure out where to start.

BTW, if somebody stumbles across this in 2013 and there have been no subsequent entries, please send an email to mpoese{at}gmail{dot}com and remind me that it's still here and I should continue updating it.