Hello from the Land of Enchantment! In October, our family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico – our fourth state in two years. Understandably, blogging has been a bit slower, but we’re finally getting settled, so I’m going to start with some basics before doing research updates and then expanding on some of these things.

The day after the election my then-fianceé Emily got offered a fellowship at the National Academies of Science. We packed up and left for DC, for what we thought was just 6 months. In order to keep us afloat, I took full-time work at the Internet Archive. We got married in May and when she was offered a (semi-)permanent position, we moved to suburban Maryland.

The Archive does heroic work for preservation and access, but was not a good fit for me, so in January 2018 I started a new position at Cornell University, working on the arXiv Next Generation (arXiv-NG) publishing platform. I’ve gotten a kick out of the fact that I moved to an organization with the exact same URL pronunciation (archive.org → arxiv.org), and the work we do has tremendous impact on scientific communications, with over 22 million monthly article downloads.

Skipping ahead to June 2018, our son Javier was born. With expenses already at their limit before adding a child and the challenges of employment in Trump’s Washington, we had to relocate in October. After triangulating what was important to us in a home – a bilingual blue state with sunny weather, low cost of living, and a lack of anti-vaxers – New Meixco was our choice. It’s definitely delivered on the promise: not a day goes by where I wish we were back East. There’s something exciting about being on the frontier, somewhere no one in my family history has ever lived.

tl;dr: moved 3 times, got married, had a baby, archive.org → arxiv.org