Guest Entry: Brendon
Back in 2000, this blog was on blogger and I first created it to be a group blog with all my friends so we could keep in touch with each other by posting to one place. It was ahead of its time but I’ve kept the entries others made.
Greetings programs!
I’m Brendon, a university buddy of Kevin. Hmm, here’s the quick synopsis: I quit university, worked for IBM for 6 months. It was interesting, but not going to make me rich, and I’m actually pretty sure I suffered permanent brain damage from working there. Oh well. So I quit, and started working for HushMail as one of their two programmers. I know, I know Kev, the web site sucks…trust me, I’m trying to get them to get their asses in gear. We didn’t have the money to get a decent web designer (and they wouldn’t let me touch it)…but now that we’ve raised $8 million in private funding, we’re getting ready to ramp up.
I spent the first six months working in Anguilla in the Caribbean. Not as fun as you’d think…although I got to do a lot of diving, there wasn’t much else to do. Work, work, work. We were working long hours in our living room (we had an office, but it turned out that the microwave LAN Internet connection worked better from our house), living, sweating, etc, together. We went through both Hurricane Jose (small) and Lenny (shit yer pants huge)…it was kinda sick: in the middle of Lenny, we had no power, no TV, but we had four laptops and four UPSs and a working phone line, so we could download realitime satellite iimages of the hurricane as it pounded the shit out of the other islands (“ouch, that’s gonna hurt!”).
I got to check out the Financial Cryptography 2000 conference on Anguilla, and hung out with some of the big wigs of the crypto world (including Ian Goldberg, Stephan Brands, and the R and S of RSA). It seems everyone wary but enthusiastic about what we’re doing for the world of consumer crypto. Oh, BTW HushMail provides end-to-end secure email via the web using public key cryptography, and a simple, yet patentable, technique.
Well, now that we’ve got the money, my salary’s about to double, and we’ve relocated the company to Dublin, Ireland to ‘ramp up’ the development and sales. I’m now the Development Team Leader (yah!)…it’s weird being on the other side of the interview desk. I’ve had to stop and realize the reasons I’ve refused to hire certain people…they smell; or there’s something slightly sinister about him; I don’t think I’ve looked at anyone’s grades yet.
Hmm, anything else. Oh yeah, I got married. Other than all of that, nothing new 
