Three years ago, I left a powerful position at a large hedge fund in Connecticut, in hopes of finding a more fulfilling job. Over these three years, I’ve consulted to various financial firms, mostly to keep the cash flow as positive as possible. I’ve also worked with several startups and have a few articles published on a wide array of topics from hedge fund technology to psychology of online behavior to looking at politics online. At the same time, I have dabbled in essays and fiction.

My interests have focused on financial engineering, technological engineering to social network engineering. I have moved from a strong focus on online synchronous communities to blogs.

I have worked with blogs on blogger.com, and livejournal.com, to more complicated systems like MovableType and quite a few different Drupal implementations. My writings are scattered all over the Internet in no coherent manner.

I have networked at sites like Ecademy and Ryze. I have dabbled in systems like Friendster, tribe.net. and Deanlink

I have become highly involved with the Howard Dean campaign.

This week, I found, as I have been expecting, my current consulting project to a hedge fund is coming to an end. I need to figure out what I do next.

The most important advice I have gotten so far has come from many sources. They all say: Follow your dreams. I don’t know exactly where my dreams are leading me. One person tells me to be a political consultant. Another wants to partner with me on creating politically oriented websites. A third wants to do financial engineering with me.

I feel that the most important thing right now is to try and bring as many of these threads together. One idea is to get a single website that I can organize all of this at in as accessible a manner as possible.

This brings up a few very pragmatic questions. I live in a 100-year-old house. Its name is ‘Orient Lodge’. I have wondered about naming my site Orient Lodge. However, as I did a search on this online, I found many references to Freemasonry. Should I use Orient Lodge as a name, even if it carries an overtone of Freemasonry? I also have a site, Group Mine. I could perhaps use this site as well. What does everyone think?

Also, I need to decide what software to use. Should I use Drupal, which I’ve been doing a lot with recently? I like Drupal a lot, but I don’t really like what it does to URLs. Should I use MovableType? MovableType is quite nice. Or should I move to a more sophisticated system, such as Slash or Scoop, which I haven’t really played with?

Give me your comments and I will mull them over.

I am at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Toronto.

I'm currently sitting in another panel on blogs.

I've been blogging some of this on my MovableType blog

This is a test of the new API from the MOO.

People have been talking about Blogspot not working with the XML-RPC since Google has agreed to buy Pyra. So, I am testing from my MOO to see if my App still works.

This is a demo Blog entry to show Dogwood_guest at LogMOO blogging from a MOO.

I have now gotten a test environment running for MOOs to provide information about their mailing lists using RSS. I've tested it with a few clients. If anyone reads this and wants to test it, please take a look at
http://ahynes1.homeip.net:9999/1462

Please drop me a note to let me know if it is working okay for you, and which RSS client you used.

Thanks