I had the first week at my new job this week and it was largely uneventful. The one remarkable thing was the striking difference between my current benefit package and my old benefit package at CPS. When I signed on there eight years ago, I remember thinking that it was sub-par, but I made sure to negotiate the differences into my salary. That kind of thinking was certainly a mistake on my part, especially when salary failed to keep up with health insurance costs. Now health insurance premiums are a very minor dent in my paycheck and the other benefits are icing on the cake.
I don’t think I explained before that my “new” job is actually the old job that I left to join CPS back in 1999. Back then I worked in a small office in Vancouver for a company called Splash which had grown successful developing a high quality RIP (raster image processor) that made it possible for computers to print to Xerox color copiers. Our little office was initially tasked with developing a similar product to drive Xerox’ line of wide format printers. Splash eventually attempted to diversify their product line and transferred the Macintosh-based product that had made them successful to the Vancouver office, thinking that it was on it’s last legs. Within a year after I left, Splash was bought by their primary competitor, Electronics for Imaging (EFI). Eventually all of the Splash offices were shut down except the little office in Vancouver, where the team I left continued to churn out high quality Splash-branded, Macintosh-based products for Xerox color copiers. That is the team that I joined this week. It was good to see some familiar faces and exciting to see new faces. I’m really looking forward to my future there.
Thomas is away on Mount Hood with the Boy Scouts this weekend. The BSA owns a snow lodge up there and Thomas’ troop goes up there once a year for inner-tubing fun. This week we celebrated Thomas’ 12th birthday. It’s hard to believe that we’ve had Thomas for that long and even harder to believe that he’ll be out of our hands in another six years. Last weekend he celebrated with his friends in a hotel suite for which a friend got a good deal for us. Tina described that shindig pretty well, so I won’t go into details here. Yesterday he used all the money he got from his birthday and some that he had been saving to buy an iPod Touch, which he has been dreaming about since the iPhone came out last summer.