While I have never before used VentureBlog to discuss anything other than entrepreneurship and venture capital, I have decided to make an exception to discuss why it is I oppose Proposition 8 here in California. I have not made this decision lightly. I don't believe in mixing business and politics. But I believe that Proposition 8 runs sufficiently counter to the basic tenets of fairness and human decency that power our democracy that I can not sit idly by.

I was not yet born when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. Had I been alive, however, I like to think that I would have been there cheering him on. I like to think that I would have stood against segregation and done everything in my power to dismantle that unjust system. I like to think that I would have put my legal background to work defeating those laws that made interracial marriage illegal. I like to think that I would have joined the picket lines, sat at the lunch counters, sued the school systems . . . done whatever I could to fight the injustice of segregation.

Today I think that Californians are at a similar crossroads. Like the courts that invalidated Jim Crow laws and segregation a half century ago, the California Supreme Court has determined that the State may not discriminate between heterosexual couples and same sex couples -- accordingly, the State Constitution requires that same sex couples be given the right to marry. In response to that ruling, thousands of same sex couples -- many of whom had been in monogamous relationships for decades -- rushed to get married. And, yet, those marriages are now in danger of being invalidated. That is just wrong.

A little over a month ago I attended the wedding of my good friends Ali and Laura. I came to know Ali and Laura as the moms of one of my son's school friends. Ali and Laura are smart, successful, caring women who, above all else, are wonderful mothers. Their sons are growing up in a stable and loving home. Yet, until this year, Ali and Laura could not contemplate getting married. Their wedding ceremony was as much a celebration of their love for each other and their powerful committed relationship, as it was the validation of their family unit. At the wedding, my son's friends celebrated the fact that they could have married parents just like the other kids in their school. It was truly a joyous day.

Yet, Proposition 8 seeks to take away that right. Not only would Proposition 8 strip Ali and Laura, and thousands of other committed gay couples like them, of their right to marry, it would strip their sons of their right to have married parents. Should we amend the State Constitution to not only take away Ali and Laura's rights, but also the rights of their sons? And if Laura and Ali can be stripped of their right to wed, why not also my brother and sister in law, who are of different races? Should they fear that their rights are the next to be stripped away? Should my niece be concerned that the citizens of California may deem her unworthy of having married parents as well?

To my mind, voting NO on Proposition 8 is very simply an issue of fairness. Proposition 8 seeks to amend the Constitution to take away the rights of same sex couples -- the very same rights that heterosexual couples have always had. That is not equality. All of my children, gay or straight, should have the opportunity to marry the person they love. Anything shy of that simply does not reflect the ideals upon which this country has been built. So I urge you to vote NO on Proposition 8 this coming Tuesday. Ali and Laura's sons deserve to have happily married parents. Who are we to take that away from them?

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -- Mark Twain

Why am I quoting this? Well, my desire for new adventures has gotten the best of me once more…Tuesday September 16th will be my last day with 1&1 and I’m off to join StudiVz (Wikipedia), a social networking platform for students, in particular college and university students in Europe. A little more about that in a moment, but first I wanted to say a few things regarding my current employment.

My time at 1&1

I joined 1&1 more than six years ago to grow, learn, do "stuff that matters" and have fun while doing it. I started in the online production, simple websites became more feature rich and I focused on JavaScript over time. Later I continued in the core development. During my time there, almost four years ago, Andreas and myself started with qooxdoo to find out how to improve web applications to make them richer and more impressive than ever before. qooxdoo is a awesome piece of software. I really enjoyed developing it.

At this point, it would be appropriate to call out some of the people I admire and that have influenced me in many positive ways and provided me with support and great advice while at 1&1, but the list would be too long, and I'd risk missing people out. So, look, you know who you are - and I thank you Many thanks to all the qooxdooers outside as well. It is a pleasure working with all of you!

So now on to StudiVz

I will move from the qooxdoo "headquarters" in Karlsruhe to Germany's exciting capital Berlin. It is a trip of 700 kilometers which means about five hours using the train. I'll be joining as the team leader frontend and will improve the whole interface of StudiVz to make it even more attractive and appealing. StudiVz is one of the biggest network portal players in the European market. Still quite a small company compared to 1&1, with currently under 200 employees.

But they have some impressive guys there. The interview was really interesting and I am still fascinated by their ideas and future plans. Thriving such a product to improve upon their current efforts is definitely a cool job. Berlin is also a very interesting and attractive city. Never planned to live there, but the parts I have seen recently are definitely worth at least a visit.

What's about qooxdoo?

qooxdoo, a "baby" of mine. Yes, I love this piece of software. I spent uncountable hours in developing and improving qooxdoo. Maybe I have to mention, that one of the most important tasks for me during the whole qooxdoo progress was to get this new layouting and theming into a release. I think this is the most important milestone for qooxdoo development since 0.1. And finally it's done.

For me this step means an interesting new option in my career with many ways to improve upon my current knowledge and experience. It means human responsibility and even more influence on software architecture. At the beginning I start with a small team of three or four developers, planned to increase to over ten over the first half year.

For sure I'll closely follow the qooxdoo development in the future and intend to spend a few hours each week to keep in touch with the newest development. But to be fair, my main job will be to improve StudiVz and not to improve qooxdoo. I hope to convince my new collegues at StudiVz to use qooxdoo. I personally really want to continue to use qooxdoo! Hopefully it will be possible to contribute new features to qooxdoo as well over time.

Finally

I can tell you this today - StudiVz is cool, the oh-my-that's-the-coolest-thing-I've-seen-and-I-want-to-be-a-part-of-it-kind-of-cool-thing that gets me very excited. Hey, it had to be to take me away from a job, the people, the company and a city I love!

Here is late-breaking news for those of you who keep in close touch with the qooxdoo repositories. There have been two major changes today:

• The backend part has been removed from trunk. Latest development was done in the legacy_0_7_x branch, and future development will be done in the qooxdoo-contrib repository, so there was no need to retain it in trunk. We are currently working feverishly to extract the backend from legacy and import it to contrib, retaining history, so this change is close ahead too.
• The directories beneath frontend were lifted up one level, obviating the 'frontend' folder. At the same time, the old application folder has been split into application (containing full-fledged, stand-alone applications) and component (containing projects that have a more complementary character).

I'm sure there will still be rough edges. We were working today to get the trunk back to speed. There is more and more authoritative information to come. Stay tuned.

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In an incredible breach of blogging etiquette, I have decided to change the titles of my posts from Shameless Self-Promotion Week. When I started writing this set of posts, I thought it would be nice to have a unified look to the titles. Thus, I adopted the "Shameless Self-Promotion Week: [Company X]" title format. But I have decided that I really hate it. It doesn't say anything about the posts. It is hard to understand out of context. It was just a bad decision. So my apologies but I'm changing titles.

In an incredible breach of blogging etiquette, I have decided to change the titles of my posts from Shameless Self-Promotion Week. When I started writing this set of posts, I thought it would be nice to have a unified look to the titles. Thus, I adopted the "Shameless Self-Promotion Week: [Company X]" title format. But I have decided that I really hate it. It doesn't say anything about the posts. It is hard to understand out of context. It was just a bad decision. So my apologies but I'm changing titles.

At last. I get it. I finally understand why it is that so many friends and colleagues have gently complained about the length of my posts on VentureBlog (and worse yet on SaysMe). It is, of course, abundantly clear to most of you reading this post. But it took personal experience before I got wise to the errors of my ways.

In recent weeks I have found myself with less time than usual for blog reading (this is caused, at least in part, by my acute addiction to Six Apart's new blogging platform VOX, which now occupies far too many minutes of my day). As a result, I find myself scanning quickly through Bloglines. And when one scans quickly through a feed reader, the first thing that falls by the wayside are the really long posts. They just take too much effort. If the writers of those long posts are lucky, they are saved for a later day. If not, they are clicked and cleared, without a read.

I have no doubt that many of my VentureBlog posts have fallen victim to such Machiavellian reading techniques. So in an effort to attempt to learn from experience, I am going to try to keep my future posts to a more manageable length. I'm sure I'll still have my occasional missive. But, for the time being, I am going to try to write shorter and more often and see how it goes. Wish me luck.

PS: Not so good so far. This post on writing shorter posts is now 4 paragraphs long and 267 words. Oy veh!