Personally, I’ve been working on the browser start page along with a bunch of other related and unrelated projects. As some of you know, we are still looking for a front end web engineer to work on many cool projects related to the phone start page and the main website, so if you know me and know of a person that might be interested, drop me an email.

In a totally unrelated note, the feature also got mentioned on TWIT and dl.tv. For the most part, both mentions were pretty good. The only thing that irked me was Patrick Norton saying on multiple shows that we spent $40 million developing it, but I’ve seen this stated incorrectly in other places as well. The $40 million is what we budgeted to spend on it in 2007 including infrastructure and content licensing.

• Hacking Netflix
• NY Times
• Variety
• Forbes
• Gizmodo
• O’Reilly Radar

P.S. Thanks (or thanks again as the case may be) to all those people that were references for me, put me in touch with recruiters, or helped me figure out what I was looking for.

The oddest part of the whole experience was the feeling of relief to be done with work at the same time as the odd feeling from realizing that I really was leaving. The best part of the experience was the nice comments I received from random people in the office when I was making my last walk around the cubes (well, that and the thought that I will never have to answer some question about code that I wrote in 2001). I worst was probably the awkward conversations with some people where I really just wanted to have the somewhat obligatory handshake.

After reading Scott’s post about his vacation between jobs, I was wishing that I had taken off a few days to get caught up on my sci-fi book backlog (around 40 books at the moment), finally get my blog up at zibblog.com, get in some good running and yoga, get some use out of my netflix subscription, and organize my apartment. However, in the end, the book backlog can wait until my next trip to NE, my blog will get up in its own good time, I did some pilates and running over the weekend, and my apartment might as well stay unorganized since I’ll just be moving in a month anyway. For the moment at least, the new job is fun, there’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s nice to be enthusiastic about my work again. In somewhat related news, I’m having a lot of fun doing some AJAX and CSS reading lately, so expect some blog entries on random web technologies soon.

On a similar note, after a conversation I had with Scott the other day, I ran across a notice about Yahoo looking for an RSS Product Manager. This is one of those positions that they will probably get a pile of resumes for. I think it would be interesting, but I can’t decide if I think that there is a shape the world sort of potential there.

Anyway, for anyone that hasn’t heard, I now have a new job that I’m excited about starting in about a week and a half. Therefore, the whole job hunting thing has thankfully become a thing of the past for the moment (or for a while depending on our success in providing CD ripping for the masses).