On the 10th anniversary of my move to California, give or take a few days, I was in St. Petersburg for a writing seminar. This was the third in what I've come to think of as three different trips chained together, each to a different city.

This October will mark the 10th anniversary of the Halloween party where I first met (or at least, was first in the same room with) a lot of the people who've been part of my life here. That party led directly to working for Critical Path, going to Burning Man, and all sorts of other good social things.

This is how California became my home. And it's still my home, the home of a lifetime. But I can reasonably expect another sixty years in this lifetime, so I might as well explore a bit more, right?

There's a short list of places I think I could really enjoy living, besides here. San Diego, sometimes. Portland. Seattle. London, if I could find a job that pays in pounds. And -- ever since I visited last October -- Boulder, Colorado.

(Written for MAAWG, but it applies to many efforts. It should be noted that this is not anybody's official statement; it's just me blathering.)

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." -- Daniel Hudson Burnham

There are many different ways to develop a plan. Some -- including what we're attempting here -- involve defining the problem we're trying to solve, before we try to solve it. Crazy, I know, yet it tends to be fairly effective not only for the kinds of issues we're dealing with in MAAWG, but also for the kinds of minds common to this industry.

For this technique to succeed, we also need to understand some of the possible results of our effort.

Some people -- some friends -- are going to ask why I left a particular anti-spam mailing list after eleven and a half years, and what that means.

Here's a bit of a timeline: