I guess some might think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth. Actually, I took some much needed vacation last week and am in California on day-job business this week. The trip to California has been very interesting, I’ve been on site at AMD, Virage Logic, and Cadence. I met with Mrinal Desai of CrossLoop for drinks and a dinner on the side. I met Mrinal through that other social networking site that starts with a “d”. It is always interesting to meet someone in person that you have meet through an online networking site. One thing that we both agreed on is that there needs to be more interaction of members of such sites. He was quite impressed that I had made a number of personal contacts through such sites.

During our conversation he mentioned he was good friends of the CEO at jobster.com. I immediately thought of jobs.dzone.com, and thought that there might be an opportunity for Rick to improve, or at least add to, the DZone service. I whipped out the cell and gave Rick a quick call and asked him to check it out. I will need to follow up and get the two in touch when I get back to Texas, but the interesting thing was the whole six-degrees-of-separation effect. Rick knows me, I know Mrinal, and Mrinal knows the CEO of Jobster.

Last night I went out to dinner with a few coworkers and some members of the IEEE 1481 working group. While there, someone that knew my boss walked up and started talking to him. I got lost in conversation with other members of the party, and someone else walked up. In a few minutes the second person says to my boss, “One of our previous employees went to work for you, a guy named Stacy Doss.” My boss points over to me and says “That Stacy Doss?”. Turned out it was one of my prior coworkers. He hadn’t recognized me because I had bleached my hair since I had last seen him. So, another case of six-degrees-of-separation, that actually turned in to a loop.

A bit of strange occurrences, over a few days. I have a second IEEE 1481 meeting tomorrow. It is a lot of hard, tedious work, but yet it is fun and I get to extol the virtures of ODF.

I’ll be starting my “Picks of the week” article series next weekend. In the series, I will pick about a half dozen stories from DZone and discuss them in a blog post. If you have suggestions for which DZone post to highlight, please feel free to email me at stacy (at) dzone dot com.