Tomorrow is the first day of my last week in the office at AT&T Interactive (ATTi).

It was a tough decision to leave behind the teams that I have built up at ATTi over the last two and a half years, but living in Oregon has long been on of my goals.  My step-daughter and grand sons will be four hours away, and I believe it will be easier to get my kids and extended family up to Oregon (our vacation stomping ground, growing up) than it was to get them down to SoCal.

Aaron Patterson will be taking over the ruby community relationship role that I was filling at ATTi.

Alf Mikula and JR Fent will continue to run the LA Ruby Meetup, and JR and I are going to continue to run the Los Angeles Ruby Conference.

My work with Confreaks will continue and we’re looking forward to recording and publishing the International Ruby Conference X in New Orleans.

G5 is a ruby shop and over time we will be building up the engineering team.

I’ve had a great time in Los Angeles and look forward to the new challenges in Bend.

There are way too many people to thank and to recognize, if I tried I’d only end up missing people, feel free to contact me at coby@randquist.us or coby@confreaks.com.

ATTi is a Platinum sponsor for this conference and one of my Sr. Engineers, Lori Holden will be presenting on ActiveORM, part of the merb + rails => Rails 3 project.

Instead I spent the day doing an internal web-cast of our (ATTi) all hands meeting.  Using technology and skills I primarily aquired while building out Confreaks.

Carl Youngblood my partner and Brad Midgley our as needed hired hand are actively working in Florida to post process what was recorded today and to prepare for tomorrow.  I regret that I was unable to be there, but we (that’s the corporate we again) had a major system upgrade scheduled for this weekend that I could not skip out on.  As it turns out we had to push the release off a little in order to keep certain partner agreements.  Regardless we have work to do this weekend to get things wrapped up for the full launch of this system upgrade in a couple of weeks.  So I appreciate my business partner and the effort he has put in to improving our systems and processes to make the AAC recording go smoothly.

Which leaves me sitting here, reading emails, my most recent copy of Communications of the ACM, and general playing around on the interwebs…  Just installed the Tweeter-Tools plugin for WordPress.

In the past that would be no big deal, but now that I’ve been working in this business for the last eight months it just started gnawing at me, so I made a note to put in a data request to address this when I got home.

So then we just kind of went exploring, took Chevy Chase east and then North, eventually ran into Vedugo and headed south.  Ultimately we found a little place called “Two Guys from Italy” and had a fantastic lunch.  While there we were playing with the YPMobile again.  Tried looking up the restaurant we were in, found it (almost), found an old record with the wrong address.  Infuriating… So I tried doing a search for Italian Restaurants and right there at the top of the list “2 Guys from Italy” 0.0 miles away, with the correct address.  Apparently we aren’t doing numbers to words in our search algorithm’s.  One more thing for me to write up tomorrow and get turned over to our search team.

We are making great strides, it is just an on-going issue to scrub and clean data on 18 million plus businesses accross the US.

If you’re interested in some of our progress on issues like these check out our Beta Labs site.