Sander van Zoest: Behind the Scenes

After about 8 months of filing passports, birth certificates, not-married certificates and affidavits with the state of california apostille stamps, Thanh and I are now allowed to be married this September 5th, 2003 in the Netherlands. Through this lengthy process our marriage will now be internationally recognized and we will receive an international marriage certificate. Maybe one of these days, I will write down the exact procedure, since there are a fair amount of not-so-obvious hoops to jump through.

Our main issues were related to the fact that three different countries from different continents were involved. All the different documents from Cambodia, the Netherlands and the United States of America needed to be recognized by all three countries or at least by dutch government officials in the Hague. I needed some documents from the city hall of the city that I left when moving to the California and they only provide those documents in person at the city hall. We also had to make payment to the resident affairs department in the Hague, where the only means of payment accepted was the dutch giro wire transfer. Thankfully, my mother had previously planned to visit my grandparents in the Netherlands and was able to take care of it in person after I provided her with a copy of my passport and a letter giving her permission to extract the information from the archive. Similarly we were almost required to make a trip to Bangkok, Thailand to have Thanhs birth certificate verified by the Cambodian Embassy and Dutch Embassy of Bangkok.

The procedure is long and confusing. The main part that makes it confusing is that each country only knows their part of the puzzle and you have to make your own conclusions as to how to get the document in the foreign country. We even got told that we needed the Secretary of State to sign one of documents. That, obviously, wasn't going to happen. It turned out that it needed to be signed by the State of California, Secretary which was much easier and had a well documented procedure.

We got our banns of marriage published by the Hague and we need to wait for that to complete. It is interesting to note how much religion is still integrated into government documents and procedures. I personally feel that religion and government are totally separate identities and they should not discriminate based on citizenship or faiths, but we still have a while to go before they are truly separate entities.

So, we have only a little more then a month to go. I can't wait. I am pretty excited about it. I'll try to provide updates on other happenings such as the San Diego Comic-Con
and geeky findings in a later Journal entry.

As someone who dropped out of college in the early days of the internet boom, I always wondered if I would go back to school. I have had many thoughts about returning to school and getting an MBA, Law or Music degree on top of my computer science experience.

I found my experience as a founding engineer of MP3.com to have taught me a lot about the field. Especially things that I didn't learn in school. Aaron Swartz is another person for whom school didn't seem to work. College is a place where people learn how to learn. After a few years of college, I wanted to practice what I had learned. so I could learn even more by actually doing what we got taught. It seemed to get to a point where I learned much faster and had a deeper understanding that way. There are times where I need to go back and look at old books, because I don't understand why certain things work a certain way, but all I know is that it does. The different perspectives have helped me on numerous occasions, since I questioned things, rather then taking the things in the books for granted. Sometimes things were designed a certain way for a good reason, but the reasons behind the designs no longer seem valid and could be simplified.

I am always intrigued to see articles, such as this one in top magazines such as Forbes that show that we aren't the only ones. There is hope for those who do not fit the mold.

It has been ages since I have made any changes to my personal site. So, this weekend, I decided to spend the time and update the look and feel a bit and make the site more modern.

I wil be making small tweaks over the upcoming months to make it fully compliant and bring back some of the old data I had on my site.

I also imported most of my old blog entries since 2000 that were scattered all over the net, which should provide a good archive for those of you who were not familiar with my previous writing.

These last few months have been very exciting and thought provoking. After working on many interesting and challenging problems to create an ecosystem of content, software and consumer electronics at DivX, I decided it was time to take a break. I have had a fantastic time working with some great folks on the underlying technology that powers a video on demand service in Italy, a whole new digital home platform named DivX Connected that is designed for portability and low cost embedded devices and building an architectural foundation to enhance productivity and maintainability for the company as a whole. It was a great experience and I would like to thank Jordan Greenhall for his trust in me and the opportunity to contribute to DivX.

I wanted to spend some time at home with the family. Doing this has been one of the best things I could have done. It clearly has created a much closer bond with my daughter and I have been able to catch some key accomplishments of her. It was uncertain for me as to how long I would be spending at home, but as soon as people found out I was spending time at home, I got a lot of inquiries, proposals and offers for new positions all around the world. The time off also allowed me to catch up with a lot of friends and old co-workers which was very needed as well.

There were a lot of events, such as DivX going public on NASDAQ and the Google/Youtube deal, that brought even more inquiries about when or if I would join another company again or if I would be interested in joining the founding team of some media startup, etc. All this buzz, did get me thinking about what I was going to do when I wanted to join the work force again. I contemplated on starting something on my own and spend a few years doing research. All of this opened a lot of doors and gave me an opportunity to keep my brain thinking about the online media space while spending time at home with the family.

After dozens of discussions with some outstanding teams and organizations, I decided to take on a Director of Operations role at a stealth media startup created by proven entrepreneurs who had put together a world class team of whom a few I had already worked with at previous companies or met through my involvement with Open Source. So, far I am really liking what I am seeing and applaud all the effort of the team that has put together what exists right now. It is truly amazing that this got put together in couple of months.

The company has been very quiet, although, recently has started to come more out of hiding and has said we can now talk more publicly about our jobs and the company we work for. Right now, the organization is publicly known as The Venice Project, but it will be re-branded at some point in the future when we are out of beta. If you are interested in what we are doing check out the company blog or sign up for a beta test account.

So, here starts another chapter in life. As I have come to realize, change teaches you a lot of things about what you had and what you have been missing out on. I am looking forward to learning more about both.