Wow; on February 3, 2004 I started rockyrook.blogspot.com
Ten years ago I was a bright-eyed college grad who had been working full-time for 3 years. In 2001, I started working for a big company who promised me that I would have a long career with them - that I could have multiple positions and jobs over the course of my career without having to change companies. This appealed to me because at the time, the common career path was to either start working for a ".com" company or work for one of the consulting firms. You would put in 60-80 hours a week and then after you get burned out, you could find a more stable and sustainable job someplace. This wasn't too appealing, so I decided to go with a stable career path with the big company.
Then, 9/11 happened, the ".com" bubble burst and the economy took a hit. The big company who had told me they had not had lay-offs and would not have lay-offs were suddenly laying people off. In late 2003 I had two options: 1) go down a heavy technical path with lots of tech certifications with the long-term view that I would have to keep those certifications current or 2) go get an MBA and take the management track with the big company or some other company. By January 2004, I had decided to take the MBA path.
During the course of investigating what it takes to get into a good b-school, I found that there were various blogs out there that had a wealth of information. I decided I would blog about my own MBA journey and thus this blog began. I published two posts in 2004 and then didn't return to the blog until 2006 (read this post); and ever since, I've been a somewhat regular poster.
Now, in 2014, I'm still with the big company; I've been promoted several times - the MBA did help with those promotions. And because of those promotions, life gets busy; thus I've not been blogging as much.
But, I'm still playing chess; doing lots of tactics at chesstempo. I love chess.com and the app on my Android - spending lots of time between those two sites.
I still need to get started on the chess books reading list. I've been nibbling at The Immortal Game, but I need to just finish it already and post a book review and then move on to the rest of the list.
Anyway - here's to another 10 years of chess blogging.
