For a start, I truly want to publicly thank the guys at Happener. Markus and Greg totally blew away any and all preconceptions I had about recruitment by being personal, fun, and actually caring about the outcome. It pains me to put them in the same category as recruiters. These guys went so far above and beyond the call of duty, and have become both people I respect greatly, and very good friends. If you are sick of the old ‘bums in seats’ approach to recruiting, give these guys a call – they are in the business of hooking up fantastic companies with fantastic people. In any event, I’ll have more to say about them some other time…

Secondly, I’d love to give a big shout out to the folks at Massive Interactive, who I have been working with for the last two months. Had I not had the opportunity to travel to SF, I would have signed with them permanently in a heartbeat – they are a bunch of incredibly smart people working on incredibly cool things. I hope that if I do come back to Australia to live in the future, they might consider having me back. This is despite them being a .NET house, and me being an OS guy, so that has to tell you something.

I’d also like to thank all the fine people at 3jam, the company that I’m trekking across the world to be involved in. They have bent over backwards to help me out at every stage, and I look forward to meeting them all over a few beers tomorrow night.

Then, there are all the wonderful friends in Sydney. You are all fantastic people, and having so many come up to me at STUB to wish me well last night was a fantastic feeling. While I haven’t been a Sydney boy for that long, you have all been very welcoming, and are very important to me in your own special ways. I look forward to coming back for visits, and I hope that if any of you find yourselves in San Francisco that you get in touch.

Of course, I wouldn’t be at this point in my life without the help and guidance of my parents, and the companionship of my girlfriend. But I will be talking to them in a not-so-public forum…

There will be a few posts coming up over the next few weeks about the process I’ve gone through to get here, and of course the experiences I’ll be having over there. I especially want to post information about the visa process, which was far easier than I thought it would be, even though I have never completed my University degree. Stay tuned, and I’ll be life streaming the whole trip on Twitter and Brightkite, of course.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.