Sorry for the paucity of updates last week. In between not having my usual computer setup and being in meetings from 9am till 9pm at times, it was hard to find the bandwidth. I spent two days in Berkeley & San Francisco, meeting old friends and making new ones, and then three days in Mountain View, doing more of the same with different people, both from Mozilla and not.

Lessons learned:

• When a tall, very dapper gray-haired man in an very nice suit comments on your Python t-shirt at the car rental desk, it isn’t so crazy to think that he looks like Vint Cerf. Very classy — he didn’t even make me feel self-conscious about my sartorial inelegance.
• Traffic between Berkeley and SF isn’t so bad as long as it’s Columbus day.
• Everyone has an opinion about MailCo and Thunderbird, and lots of people genuinely want to help.
• People will say things in comments on blogs that they would never say in person.
• Everyone at Mozilla Corp. seems happy to help MailCo, and is eager to see positive movement on the Thunderbird front.
• The current process for creating Thunderbird is complex, and many hands touch it. It’s going to require careful surgery to excise it and transplant it into a new organism without damaging it.
• In California, wine and books are cheap.

But the biggest one by far is that I’ve started to get a feel for what needs to get done — now I need to find people who want to help.

In addition to posting about possible Thunderbird futures, I’ll be blogging about some of the roles I’d like help with in the short term, in hopes that the readers of this blog either might be interested, or might know people for whom it might be the dream job. (I’ll be doing more private-channel recruiting as well, of course).