Five years ago we were living in DC. I was working from a home office for a dot com called Nine Systems. I’d only met a handful of my teammates - the ones that came over in the e-Media buy-out with me - the rest were in the main office in San Diego or the Network Operations Center in Denver. I was nearly a year into the remote office thing, going stir-crazy working from home. I am a very social person (ya don’t say), and was finding DC to be an incredibly hard city to break into. I hadn’t found many friends - Jef and the poor UPS guy were my only consistent links to the outside world. So I decided to start a blog. I had nothing to say, no real reason for starting it, other than it was something to keep me occupied.

I made my first post on February 6, 2003. It was the worst post ever. It basically said “Look at this here blog technology.”

By the time I’d made my fourth post on March 8, 2003, I’d been laid off. I should have seen it coming, but who would have thought after FIVE rounds of layoffs, I might be next? Not this girl. *smacks forehead*

Three weeks later I had moved to Austin and was looking for a new job. Jef kept his job in DC and would follow as soon as I found something, no sense in us both being out of work.

Besides those first few posts, the rest of this blog, all FIVE years, has been a chronicle of life in Austin. Five years… I can’t believe we’ve been here that long (I still ask for directions because “I’m not from around here”). I hope you have enjoyed it. It’s come a long way since those early days of building the site entirely by hand in Coffee Cup (we blogged uphill, both ways, in those days)! Besides the huge learning curve, it’s been a wonderful way to keep in touch, to journal my experiences and my work, and learn new technology. I think the future of Karmalized will be a lot like this past year. A post or two a week (if I’m lucky), some links, a bunch of pictures and a new look every six months because I can’t sit still.

Thanks for visiting, commenting and just generally sticking around this long. Happy blogiversary, and here’s to five more!