Merry Christmas,
I know that I've been awful about keeping in touch. I want to make
sure that I get a chance to wish you a merry Christmas this holiday
season.
I'm still in Seattle, and I'm still working at Amazon.com. Despite the death of
most of the ecommerce pure-players, we're going strong. It's been
exciting to see Amazon go from startup to "real" company. In January,
I moved from being a web developer to managing a group of web
developers. We lauch new areas of the site like photo, kitchen, and wireless phones.
Everyone on my team is
wonderful and I really enjoy working with them.
Owen (my younger brother) graduated
from Union College last spring. He
is now working in the marketing department of Amazon.com, and is living in Seattle.
I'm really excited to live in the same city as my brother and the two
of us are having a grand 'ol time drinking lattes and dodging rain.
I traveled to several wonderful places this past year. During last
year's holidays I went skiing
in Whistler with my family. I am still seeing/dating/involved
with the amazing Alex Edelman (who also works
at the zon), and the two of us had an intense journey to Morocco last
January.
To celebrate the college graduation of my brother and my cousin kerry, my entire extended family rented
a villa
in tuscany
over the summer, and I finally got to see Florence. On the way home
from Italy, I stopped in Detroit to visit with my close high school
friend Kim Painter, and to witness the wedding of my college friends
Jeff Lockman and Alison Schirmer. The wedding was in the temple Beth
El and it was beautiful. It was the first time I'd been to Detroit in
4 or 5 years. In a couple of days, I'll leave for my last trip of the
year. My family is going to spend the last week of December skiing in
Austria.
There has been a burst of web activity in my family this year. My
mother got her own domain name, haymountain.com. And she's
become an html master. Now you can read all about what's going on
in my family. Both of my extended families (hay & brown) have started a little web
experiment. Each family has a shared weblog where we have little
snippets of ongoing conversation. It's pretty interesting. If you
want to post on either of them email me and I'll send you the
password. I also have my own weblog, my own website and a lot of public amazon customer data. So if you have a burning desire to spy on me, it
should be a fruitful endeavor.
For the past year and a half I have taken up photography. I
also had a brief flirtation with Tae Kwan Do, and have become an avid
spring and summer gardener. I would like to be able to say that I am
hard core, organic, have my own compost bin and plant in the
fall and winter as well (that's possible in Seattle, amazing eh?), but
that would be a big pack of lies.
I wish you a very merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a wonderful new year.
Sincerely yours,
-jordan
- I've been reading:
- The
Foundation Trilogy
- The
Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
- The
Clustered World
- Native
Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee
- The
Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
- The
Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
- Harry
Potter 4
- Harry
Potter 3
- Founding
Mothers & Fathers
- Gods
and
Generals by Jeff Shaara
- The
Great
Divorce by C. S. Lewis
- Children
of the Mind by Orson Scott Card
- Haroun
and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
- The
Arabian Nights
- The Economist
- The New York Times
- Salon.com
- I've been listening to:
- Miles
Davis
- Thelonious
Monk
- Julie
Ruin
- Mermaid
Avenue Vol. II
- Sleater-Kinney
- Belle & Sebastian
- Mahler