But now, I'm an employee of the Mozilla Corporation, and I feel like I found a little-known cheat code for getting into the place where all the cool stuff happens. See, I just got back from this thing called the Mozilla 2008 Firefox Plus Summit—and if I was overwhelmed by the initial Mozilla Firehose after coming on-board, I'm entirely gobsmacked now.

The event—having taken place in the bear-infested, rockslide-prone, electricity-deficient wilds of Whistler, BC in Canada—was attended by not only employees of the corporation itself, but a selection of invitees from around the Mozilla community. Throughout the course of the event, I felt humbled by the efforts of everyone and have come away with a feeling that I really need to step up my game. Somehow, it seems I managed to sneak into the place without having first run the decade-old traditional gauntlet of meritocracy and contribution.

Being a newbie of just a few months, I barely know anyone at Mozilla, so I was quite overwhelmed socially. That the early-morning power loss also knocked out my CPAP and left me sick and surly on the last day didn't help my already introverted tendencies. Nonetheless, I talked to a lot of people, attended a lot of sessions, partied a bit, played some Rock Band, and have a lot that's percolating in my brain-meats.

There's plenty coming up to work on in my own assigned sphere of webdev—but I'm also pretty jazzed about the Mozilla Labs projects Prism, Ubiquity, and Weave. Not sure what I can do yet, but would like to do something to help out those efforts. And maybe by the time of the next summit, I'll still be in the Mozilla sphere and will have met and helped a few more Mozillans with whom I can connect face-to-face.

There was also a lot of talk about the future and continuing mission of Mozilla, all very inspirational and telling me that this is the center of things where I've always wanted to be. Now, I just have to work hard to make sure they're not sorry they hired me! I'm running much slower than I'd like, since I feel I have a lot to catch up on while in the midst a lot of disruption and change—between the intensity of the last few months (or even the last year) and readjusting to being back in the Mitten with homeownership all anew and many plans having taken unexpected turns.

But, things are shaping up in a sort of too-good-to-be-true configuration, and I suspect I'll be just fine if I sharpen up a bit and roll with the changes.

Well, I'm not sure about my success in imbuing it with the required sexiness, but it's at least been noticed by someone.

Update 2: It didn't quite go like clockwork, but this widget is now showing estimated downloads by countries, rather than pledges.

Thanks to the completion of bug 435967, I can offer this totally unofficial hack of a mega widget (better late than never):

If you'd like, you can include this on your own site with a Copy-and-Paste of the following:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://decafbad.com/2008/download-day-top-ten.js"></script>

This is a total 2-hour cut, paste, reformat, and slight rejigger of Kent Brewster's work on Content Syndication with Case-Hardened JavaScript. Hopefully it works, because I'm releasing early before I've had a chance to check it out on anything besides the browsers in my lap.

Being a noob, I haven't started anything earthshaking yet. But, I have gotten a couple of starter bugs thrown my way:

• Bug 395271 - Use memcache to cache output pages for non logged in users

  SUMO is support.mozilla.org, a humongous and mostly volunteer-driven support effort for Mozilla products. I've never really been to the site before myself, so this bug is an iceberg-tip intro to the effort for me. I'm wading chest deep into TikiWiki and plonking memcached into the middle of it to try to make knowledge base wiki page views a lot less expensive.

  Oh, and the source I'm working on is in subversion. Weird. Like, you could go look at it right now, and tell me how bad my code is.

• Bug 419647 - Add a sexy theme browser

  AMO is addons.mozilla.org, another humongous effort to support distribution and developers of extensions for Firefox and more. This is a site I've been to plenty of times, but never as an extension developer. And so, here's another opportunity to start wading into the deep end. For this particular bug, the goal is to work up a presentation of themes more easily scanned visually.

  Nothing checked into SVN for this one yet, so you'll have to withhold ridicule for a little bit yet.

I'm really working on squashing my nerd fanboy tendencies. Because, I remember downloading the original Mozilla Open Source release, staying home from work to compile it on Windows with Visual Studio, and getting just one or two page views out of it before it fell over and caught on fire. And of course, long before that, I remember using the original lizard in monochrome on a Sun workstation, freaking out over everything and looking up Earth 2 episode guides.

So, although I'm kinda subdued in general right now—subdued as in beat about the head and shoulders—I've got a serious amount of breathlessness going on while trying hard to just kinda be nonchalant.

I think I'm done bouncing around now, though: As you may or may not already know, I've started working for the Mozilla Corporation—I've got a username and everything! I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment by changes and drinking from a new firehose, so my enthusiasm may not yet be readily apparent. But, remember that I'm a complete web geek—and it's hard to get closer to web geekery than this.

But, one of the nicest things about this new Mozilla gig is that I'm going to start telecommuting. And the reason that's nice is because—and here's the next big thing—my wife and I have bought a beautiful house in Livonia, Michigan, and we're moving back to the Midwest in a month and some change.

Why? Because, after almost two years out here in the valley, we've discovered that being away from family and old friends while trying to make new friends and adjust to a very different locale was a lot harder than first imagined. And, well, it would've been much longer than we'd've liked before we could have afforded a house at all—let alone something anything like what we'll be enjoying back in Michigan.

The thing is, though, I've still got a lot of love for the Bay Area and its goings on—I've been pining for this place since at least the age of eight, after all. And, we have made a few good friends out here, despite the difficulties we've experienced.

So luckily, this Mozilla gig looks like the ideal thing. I'm hoping it will ensure regular return visits to enjoy SuperHappyDevHouses, the scent of star jasmine in the summer, and amazing cloudless skies lasting for days.

But, on the other hand—although I'm certainly not relishing the thought of readjusting to cold, clouds, and snow in a few months—I'm getting excited about the prospects of being back in southeastern Michigan. Our house will be pretty close to both Ann Arbor and Detroit, and it seems like some interesting things have started warming up since we left. Also, I suspect (and hope) we'll discover a lot of friends and like-minded associates in short order upon our return.

Lots of change. Very busy. Not a little exciting. But, I'm hopeful that things are going to get a lot better very soon.