the new bag

Well, after over 7 years at Nickelodeon Online, I've decided to move on to a new position I'm quite buzzed about - CTO at World Wide Biggies. The company is headed up by Albie Hecht, former President of Nickelodeon, and is focused on building gameToons, a hybrid between cartoon episodes and gaming. I guess I'd like to think I'm going to put the 'game' in gameToons.
There will be time for reflections on Nickelodeon Online, but for now I'll just say that there are some truly great people doing fine, fun work for kids in atmosphere that is not always easy to work in, and that the work I've done there I'm very proud of.
Right now though I'm focused on getting some core systems running, and if anyone would care to comment on choices or alternatives I'm all ears.
So we have an account up with Rackspace, for e-mail, blackberry, DNS management, website hosting and one secure, stable development machine (subversion and wiki). As we're short on technical folks (much more on that later) I need to outsource this functionality wherever possible, I frankly don't want to burn one minute doing sysadmin tasks unless absolutely necessary. I still don't see a lot of viable choices for calendar syncing outside of Exchange with the possible exception of Zimbra, and as we're in bootstrap mode I wanted to start with a known (if strongly disliked) entity.
We're up on Basecamp as well, very excited to see Highrise and people starting to develop custom APIs for same. This is just more functionality we don't need to manage in-house. The OS X widget for basecamp is cool.
Ah, and I'm moving as well, checking out of Columbia subsidized housing and into a reasonable deal (for new york anyhow) on a fine apartment down in South Harlem/Central Park North.
Sort of 52 card pickup for my life at this point but hey, it's time for a change.