As I’ve publically announced a while back, I’m no longer an active member of the Humbug project. I’ve spent the better part of the past 30 months with Humbug, working on bringing something new to the world – a brand new approach to preventing fraud. In the world of social networking, reader driven news and crowd wizdom – Humbug, at least in my view, was to telecom fraud what facebook was for social networking. Ok, by no means am I comparing the two, I’m simply stating that it brought a fresh new approach to doing something, something that was usually related to mega-companies likes AT&T and Verizon down to mom-&-pop.

Am I right or am I wrong? I have no idea, only time will tell. I truly believe that the Humbug service is a wonderful idea. I truly believe that it is a needed service and that it carries great value to its users. I really hope that it does well. Contrary to what people believe, I have no grudge. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in contact with people in the company on a weekly basis.

I guess that life is somewhat of a coffee shop, you come in, take your pick out of the menu and hope that you ordered well. If you didn’t like what you got in day one, you can always come back the next day and get a different item from the menu. Several friends asked me if I’m sad about leaving Humbug. Or to be more exact, if I have reservations about me departing the company. Well, honestly, I don’t. Sometimes, you need to take yourself out of the equation, in order to be able to look at the equation. What can I do, I’m a mathmatitian by nature, and I can’t really stop myself from looking at life from a mathematical/analytic point of view.

Right now I’m back to doing what I like best: consulting, writing code and most importantly, being a dad. When I left Humbug, I took a few days to myself, to stay at home and kind’a wind-down from everything. During that time off, I spent a great deal of time with my daughters. My only recommendation to all us Hi-Tech slaves, stop for a while, look around and see that life isn’t all in the office. A friend of mine recently came back from a visit at Facebook HQ. He said: “Facebook bought the old SUN HQ, who SUN employees used to refer to as SUN Quentin”. Facebook employees have no reason to leave the campus, they have everything inside. I think that if companies such as Facebook and Google would have been able to bring the employee’s entire family into campus – they would, only for him not to leave. Trust, leave your office for a bit, take some time off, it will do you good. I used to stay in the office everyday, till 1am in the morning. I’m the guy who used to believe that the entire world will collapse if I’ll go on vacation. Funny enough, it’s not true. When I left m-Wise, the company didn’t cave and when I left Humbug, the company didn’t cave.

Ok, enough babbling, I sound like a nostalgic 80 year old…