Incredible as it seems, my life is based on a true story.
Ashleigh Brilliant
Much of what’s on this site is not specifically personal or autobiographical, though of course you can tell a lot about who I am and how I think by the subjects I choose, the opinions I hold, and how I express myself about them. I’ve been told many times that I should write a book, perhaps about living in Italy, India, or just my life in general. I don’t think I’m ready to tackle my memoirs just yet – for one thing, I should probably wait until a number of my co-protagonists can no longer make objections.
But, for those who want to know all about me, or for people who are coming back into my life after years (which happens, with the vast reach of today’s social media), here’s an attempt to organize the truly autobiographic material on this site into chronological order. This is, of course, a work in progress.
A brief intro to my life that I made for TikTok (hence the [unheeded] warning to wannabe catfish at the end):
Caveat: Memory, Truth, and the Stories of My Life
1962
Born in New Orleans on November 28th, of Bairds, Cooks, Tiemanns, and Straughans.
The Hundred Years’ War (video)
1963
Attended my first Mardi Gras as a vampire baby with something red in my bottle.
Kennedy was shot just a few days before my first birthday.
1964
Moved to Beaumont, Texas, where my dad was teaching German. Got pneumonia due to chemical refinery pollution.
1966
Moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where my dad had a year of Vietnamese language training.
1967
My mother and I moved to Bangkok, Thailand, while my father went to Vietnam (video!) with USAID, trying to develop what everyone else was trying to blow up. The theory was that, if you could make the Vietnamese more prosperous, they wouldn’t want to be communist. Dad came to Bangkok on leave every six weeks or so. I had very little understanding of what he was doing or where, except that it was dangerous and he could even be killed by the Viet Cong. I didn’t know what they were, either, but some how “Cong” became conflated in my childish imagination with “Congo” (about which I also knew little), and I feared that black men in grass skirts were going to stick my daddy with spears.
After a quickly-aborted attempt to attend a local Thai school, I went to Mrs. Stevens’ School for 1st and 2nd grade.
1968
1969
Dad moved to join us in Bangkok, where he continued to work for USAID. We traveled to various parts of Thailand, and were among the first tourists to Nepal. I did 3rd and 4th grade at the International School Bangkok.
Themes
These are pieces that cover wider arcs of time, such as my schooling.
Another Brick in the Wall (to 1981)
Third Culture Kids (ongoing)
A Peculiar Experience of Privilege
1970
1971
My brother Ian was born.
1972
My parents split, my mother remaining in Bangkok with my infant brother; she soon remarried. I saw her once, a year later, after that we did not meet again til I was 18.
The Boys’ and Girls’ Book About Divorce
My father and I went to Pittsburgh, where he started grad school. I did 5th grade and started 6th at Liberty School, then did part of a year at Shady Lane School.
1973
1974
After my dad was hospitalized for something he’d picked up in Mexico the previous summer, I spent part of my 6th grade year living with my aunt Rosie and cousin Casey in Coupland, Texas. In April, my father married Nancy.
To try to repair my mangled schooling, Dad got me into Ellis School, an elite private girls’ school in Pittsburgh, for one year, repeating sixth grade.
1975
I started 7th grade at Reizenstein, a brand-new middle school in Pittsburgh.
In October we moved to Norwalk, CT where my dad took a job running a drug rehabilitation clinic for rich kids. I finished 7th grade and started 8th at West Rocks Middle School.
1976
We moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where my dad was the country head for Save the Children. The American school there only went up to 8th grade, and didn’t have room for me anyway, so I did 8th grade by myself on correspondence. Both my parents were working and I had no friends of my own age; this was a horribly lonely time for me. And it was a difficult place to be growing into a woman’s body.
1977
For 9th grade, I went to Woodstock School, an international boarding school in Mussoorie, a hill station in the Indian Himalayas, and stayed there for four very happy years, with visits to my parents at Christmas and in the summer. My dad and Nancy moved twice during this period, first from Dhaka to Bangkok in 1978, oddly enough returning to live at Red Rose Court where my dad, mom and I had first lived in 1967. But my real home was, and in some sense remains, Mussoorie.
1978
That summer, we visited friends and relatives in various parts of the US on home leave. Had my first kiss from a nice Jewish boy in Pittsburgh who probably went on to become a doctor. Had my hair disastrously permed.
1979
1980
I did a lot of textile arts at school: embroidery, weaving, batik, a quilt top… The photo shows me with some of my work at Dad and Nancy’s place in Khon Kaen, a town in northeastern Thailand where I spent several vacations with them.
1981
I graduated from Woodstock School on June 25th, then flew to the US, where I hopped all over the country visiting friends and relatives (including my mother and brother, after a hiatus of 8 years) before beginning my freshman year at UC Santa Cruz.
Having spent many of my formative years in Asia, I tried to come “home” to America once before, when I graduated from high school in India and entered college in the US. Like many, I had felt out of place (though not unhappy) in the exotic countries I’d lived in, where I was very obviously foreign even after being there for years. I dreamed of returning to a country where I would feel wholly at ease and be accepted as a natural part of the scenery. It was a rude shock to discover that this homeland, for me and others like me, is a myth. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was a “hidden immigrant”: on the surface seemingly a local, but in reality a not-quite-native, which manifested in ways which confused and irritated the real Americans. – from Coming “Home” to America
That winter I visited Dad and Nancy in Semarang, on the eastern tip of Java. My return to Santa Cruz involved a Fabulous Flying Jeep Trick.
1982
One of the pitfalls of expatriate life is that, unless you’ve planned ahead and made arrangements, you may not have residency for college tuition purposes in any US state. My dad soon realized that he could not afford the University of California’s out of state tuition, but the University of Texas was a bargain in those days even for non-Texans, and my aunt still lived in Coupland and worked in Austin. So I transferred to UT, where I eventually settled into a major in Asian Studies and languages, in part because the US government kept paying me to study Hindi. During the cutbacks of the Reagan era, these FLAS (Foreign Language Area Studies) scholarships were kept alive at the behest of Secretary of Defence Casper Weinberger, as a matter of national security. I suppose the hope was that some of us would go on to work in defence or intelligence.
The Making of an Online Career
1983
Sometime around this year I began writing my still-not-completed fantasy novel.
Tag, I’m It! – Five Things Not Many People Know About Me
1984
I went to visit my dad in Jakarta, Indonesia, intending to obtain a student visa to go on to do research of some sort in India. Instead, I ended up working at the US Embassy (commercial section) in Jakarta for six months. During this period, we had death threats from the Islamic Jihad.
I returned to Austin in the fall and took up my schooling again.
1985
My dad and stepmother split during a summer home leave in the US. Nancy went on to the School for International Training and eventually began working for the UNHCR in Peshawar, Pakistan. I never saw her again.
In September I joined the University of Wisconsin’s College Year in India program in Benares (now known as Varanasi). Traveled a fair amount in north India during this academic year.
Servants
Melancholy Baby
Gender Identity Crises
1986
I returned to the US, determined that I had enough credits to have finished my BA, and ended up living in the Washington, DC, area, in part because I had met Enrico, who was doing his PhD in mathematics at Yale: How My Italian Adventure Began.
1987
1988
A Theater-Goer’s Diary: Anything Goes
1989
I moved to New Haven, married Enrico, and our daughter Rossella was born.
1990
1991
Enrico finished his thesis and won a ricercatore position at the Politecnico di Milano, so we moved to Milan, Italy.
Rossella began full-time daycare.
That summer I took a freelance job writing software documentation for an unusual Italian high-tech startup company, Incat Systems. At the end of that project the boss, Fabrizio Caffarelli, said “I like the way you work, but don’t have any more work for you at present.”
How I Became an Italian Journalist
Asilo Nido & Scuola Materna (to 1994)
1992
Fabrizio and I wrote Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, published by Random House in early 1993.
1993
By the time the book was finished, I was working full-time for Fabrizio, doing documentation and other technical and marketing writing. In December of that year he moved the engineering staff of Incat Systems to Silicon Valley.
1994
I began traveling four times a year to Silicon Valley to work for Incat Systems, doing technical writing/documentation and online customer service. Only much later did I understand that some initial difficulties I had with American colleagues were due to me being a third-culture kid and hidden immigrant. Other difficulties were due to their suspicion that I was having an affair with the boss (I wasn’t). Meanwhile, back in the Milan office: The Taming of Mr A.
Rossella began attending elementary school in Milan.
1995
In August, Fabrizio sold Incat Systems to Adaptec, who hired me as a consultant and allowed me to work from my home in Italy – when I wasn’t in their Milpitas offices.
1996
I visited India again for the first time in ten years. This was the start of a series of annual or biannual trips, mostly to Woodstock School to see friends and do things at the school. I was a heavily involved alumna: secretary of my graduating class of ’81, did the school’s first website and helped train staff to use the Internet, spoke to students about careers in high tech, helped raise funds, attended and organized reunions…
I traveled a great deal, both alone and with the family, happily mixing work and play worldwide.
1997
My resumé at the time.
1999
While still working full-time (from home when I wasn’t traveling to the US four times a year), and being a wife and mother, I started an MBA with the Open University Business School.
Thanks to my Woodstock classmate Jeet, we celebrated the end of the millennium in style at Chateau de la Bourdaisiere, Montlouis sur Loire, France.
2000
Adaptec decided they didn’t want to be in the software business after all, and spun off our software group as a new company, Roxio. I persuaded my family to give me a year or two to see what I could make of my career in the Bay Area, but for the first 9 months I was there alone, working 14 hours a day, traveling back and forth to Europe every 6-8 weeks, still working on the MBA at the same time, and generally exhausting myself. At Christmas we met for a family vacation in the Caribbean.
2001
It became apparent that the family was not going to move to California with me. I returned to Milan and, not long after, quit my job when my mother-in-law got breast cancer (which was cured by surgery and never recurred).
At the instigation of long-time fans of my Adaptec/Roxio newsletters, I began publishing an email newsletter on my own behalf. Over time this evolved into a website (the one you’re reading).
I had money saved up from lucrative earnings during the dot.com boom (though I had also paid out a lot in taxes to both the US and Italian governments during this time). I spent some of my savings (and a great deal of time and energy) on my daughter’s passion for horses. In September we went to England and bought Hamish.
I began writing about travel in Italy:
Volterra: An Ancient Town in Tuscany
Castelli: Traditional Ceramics from the Hills of Abruzzo
Ross and I traveled:
Coupland, Texas – At Home in the Country
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – My Favorite Obsession
For the first couple of years after quitting Roxio, I had some interesting and well-paid freelance work, thanks largely to friends and a good reputation in the industry, but this dwindled as the effects of the dot.com crash deepened. I ended up with a lot of time to spend on the nitty-gritties of website design and analytics, SEO, web advertising, and what was beginning to be called “social media,” as well as the actual writing for my site and newsletter. I wasn’t paid for most of this, but I learned a lot.
A Theater-Goer’s Diary: Private Lives
2003
Another Rite of Passage Completed
Enrico moved up a rung on the Italian academic ladder to become a professore associato. The Politecnico di Milano asked him to move to their branch campus in Lecco, a mid-sized town on the southeastern tip of Lake Como. This enabled us to get out of Milan, a city I was fond of but whose pollution was quite literally killing me.
Got my Italian driver’s license. Barely used it.
Imaging in Italy -A Photographic Walking Tour of Rome
Had a cartoon portrait made for my (old) website
Ross broke her arm falling off her horse, Hamish, requiring surgery.
2004
As my savings dwindled, we had to give away Ross’ beloved Hamish
2005
We moved to a beautiful house high on a hillside overlooking Lake Como. In the summer, Rossella finally accompanied me to India, a trip we had both been looking forward to for a long time.
^ MBA: Collecting My Dues from the Open University
I was working for Fabrizio Caffarelli at his new startup in Milan, pouring lots of creative energy into my work in return for very little pay and a killer commute. Because the company’s business was about videoconferencing and video content sharing for consumers, I wondered just how difficult it might be for ordinary mortals to share video online. In 2005, it turned out to be very difficult indeed. I joined the brand-new Yahoo videoblogging group, learned a lot, made some friends, attended the first Vloggercon in New York, and, of course, began doing my own vlogging. One theme in my career has been using new technologies to communicate (often on behalf of a company, with its customers), so video was a natural next step for me.
In Loco Parentis: Supervising School Trips in Italy
2006
KidSpace: Public Places Where Kids Can Be Kids
^ I spoke at FemCamp Bologna 2007
2007
Rossella applied to spend A School Year Abroad at Woodstock.
In the spring, frustration and poverty drove me (happily!) to take on contract work with Sun Microsystems. I began using Twitter: “just arranged travel to Colorado for next week! 2:27 PM Mar 12th 2007“
In the summer I had a lump scare and a biopsy, then had to wait a long time for results.
Rossella left for Woodstock in July, I spent six weeks in August/September in the US on Sun work. By the time I returned, I no longer had a job with TVBLOB – to my relief.
Twitter: July, August, Sept, Oct
In mid-November, after giving an early Thanksgiving dinner, I went to India to visit Ross at Woodstock (working remotely for Sun from there) until the semester ended, then we spent the Christmas holiday together in Delhi and Mumbai with classmates, and I returned to Italy for New Year’s Eve.
2008
In March, Sun offered me a job on condition that I move to the US. I instantly agreed, on condition that I be allowed time off to attend my daughter’s graduation from Woodstock. I moved to Colorado, deciding to start at Sun’s Broomfield office to give myself a quieter place to re-acclimate to life in the US.
After her late May graduation, Ross came to the US in July to start… the Hindi-Urdu Flagship program at the University of Texas. Yes, this was all my fault. Enrico visited us both in August, Ross and I spent Thanksgiving in St Barth’s, and we both went back to Italy for Christmas.
Twitter: July, part 2, August, part 2, (hmm, missing some Twitter here), October, part 2, November part 1, part 2, December part 1, part 2
The Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone
2009
Ross left school and began working in January.
Twitter: January 2009, Pt 1: Italy, Ireland, UK, France
By February, I knew that I was done with Italy.
Twitter: 2009-02-08
I traveled a LOT for Sun, including, during June and July, an epic trip to Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia – where I met a Sun colleague, Brendan Gregg. I also attended a Woodstock School reunion in Tennessee.
At the end of August, after a road trip vacation together in the US, I split from Enrico.
During much of this year, starting with rumors about IBM in March, Sun Microsystems was in the throes of being acquired, as well as going through several rounds of layoffs. This added still more turmoil and uncertainty to my life:
Part 1: Resistance is Futile: The Oracle Acquisition
Part 2: What to Expect When You’re Expecting – to Be Acquired
Part 3: Fishworks and Me
Part 4: Into the Belly of the Beast
Part 5: The Last of OpenSolaris
Part 6: Diaspora (not yet written)
2010
I spent Christmas with an old friend and her family in Arkansas, then we drove to New Orleans (my first visit there in over 30 years) for New Year’s.
In January, my mother announced her intention to cut off all contact with me and my brother for 12-18 months, saying that dealing with us was “too painful”. In some way that I don’t even understand, I was failing to be her definition of a good daughter. She placed the blame for our estrangement on my father, whom she had divorced 35 years earlier. Which does not explain why she also can’t get along with my brother – she raised him.
On February 15th I (and most other Sun employees) became an employee of Oracle Corporation.
Made a trip to India for Sun/Oracle Tech Days in late March, returned to Colorado on a Monday night, finished packing my things, and Thursday morning started driving to California. I arrived and moved into my new apartment in San Francisco on April 3rd, and was very happy to be there.
The day before Mother’s Day, I received a letter from my mother to let me know that she had legally adopted a woman a year older than myself – “your new big sister” as she put it. She left it up to me to break this news to my brother. I declined to do so, and decline all further contact with her. Unfortunately, there is no legal mechanism by which an adult can “divorce” a parent. Maybe I need to ritually burn something. Seems as if my whole family aspire to be characters in a Tennessee Williams play.
In the summer/fall, I edited the DTrace book, while battling a severe sinus infection with heavy antibiotics, a balloon sinuplasty, and finally surgery.
On December 1st, I began a new job at Joyent, joining several illustrious Sun colleagues in a very hot area of technology (cloud). I was the Director of Technical Education, which boiled down to helping geeks share what they know – something I’d already been doing for a long time. I ended up doing many other things at Joyent.
2011
Too busy to blog; the best way to keep up with me is Twitter.
In August, I changed my job at Joyent to become the SmartOS Community Manager. A week later, my father died. In October I had a dream vacation in India. In November I was paid to go to New Orleans for the Hyatt hotel’s re-opening, and filmed my cousin Celia talking about Katrina.
Dec, 2011
2012
July: Spoke at FISL in Brazil on Using Video to Communicate Technology.
November: Celebrated my 50th birthday in New York and San Francisco.
2013
Spoke at Monktoberfest on Marketing Your Tech Talent, and was an a panel on Women in Advanced Computing at USENIX LISA 13.
Was interviewed about Woodstock School on the Kamla Show.
My mother-in-law, Graziella Ballanti, died.
On my 51st birthday, flew to Australia for a month’s vacation.
2014
May: left my job at Joyent
June: began my new job at Ericsson
November: diagnosed with and began treatment for breast cancer
December-January: Australia trip
2015
2016
Still recovering from cancer treatment.
Photographed and interviewed for the Techies Project (another long story of my life!).
November 9th: we were on vacation in India when we learned that Trump “won” the election. This is the face of a woman looking at the future of the entire planet, and not liking a single damned thing about it:
2017
…went by in a blur of travel, events, and happenings, gains and losses. We all lived with terrorism. Mid-year, I quit Ericsson and began working for Amazon Web Services (as my friends at RedMonk put it, Amazon Web Services keeps hiring for experience: Deirdré Straughan). I reflected on workplace bullying. And makeup (which I can rarely wear, post-chemo).
2018
Elfquest ended, and I thought about what its authors, Wendy and Richard Pini, have contributed to my life.
I spoke at conferences on Marketing Your Open Source Project.
I was Three Years Post Cancer.
My Career Evolution from Tech Writer to… Many Things
2018, a Retrospective in Pictures
2019
I started the year excited about the possibilities of my new garden, and reflected on A Lifetime of Gardening.
In April, Brendan and I got engaged and, with the help of many friends, I began planning our wedding. This included having an amazing wedding dress made. Index of wedding posts.
Brendan meanwhile was writing (and I was editing) BPF Performance and Tools, which finally saw print late in the year.
We honeymooned briefly in Kaua’i, then in September made a trip to Lisbon, where Brendan participated in the Linux Plumbers’ Conference. From there we flew to India where I was joining the board of Woodstock School. We had a bit more honeymoon after that, in Goa. It wasn’t a great time of year to be there – the beaches were still clogged with monsoon debris – but we ate good food and relaxed in a beautiful hotel.
2020
I had big plans for the garden and, as it turned out, had a lot of time to work on it. We were largely in self-imposed isolation from early March through December.
Mid-year I changed teams at AWS (something that Amazonians do a lot) and started learning how to be a Product Marketing Manager, with responsibilities for a large portfolio of AWS management and governance services. There was a lot to do, especially in the run-up to re:Invent (which was held virtually) – I always enjoy a new challenge.
End of the year: moved to Australia. Which involved packing many boxes, and a great deal of stress about whether we’d ever actually get there. But we did, and then spent Christmas and New Year’s in hotel quarantine.
2021
We got out of quarantine on January 6th and were (mostly) free to explore Sydney. But we urgently needed to figure out where we were going to live. We ended up making our new home in a rented apartment overlooking the ocean in Cronulla.
Our choice to get a place with a view turned out to be correct: Sydney was in lockdown from late June into October, as Australia desperately tried to get its population caught up on COVID vaccines.
I did some writing, some about my many thoughts on remote work.
I gradually realized that I was unhappy in my AWS job, but also that (after a few interviews) I wasn’t very excited by any of the other work available to me. It took a little longer to sink in that I am once again in a country with good public health care, so I no longer need to keep a job in order to have health insurance. A little more thought and accounting revealed that I already have enough money to support myself without working. And, very thankfully, a husband who supports me in whatever I want to do.
We were still stuck at home, so I did a bunch of work on this website, adding in galleries of photos from my life in tech and miscellaneous longer thoughts/reminiscences, including a piece about efficiency and processes.
In the context of the remote situations many of us found ourselves working and hiring in, I thought and wrote a lot about the need for Equal pay for equal work – globally. This was top of mind for me because, by October, I was being head-hunted by Intel. Negotiations were protracted, but well before the end of the year I knew that I’d be starting with them as soon as paperwork could be cleared – which dragged on such that I didn’t actually start the job til mid-January.
I rounded off the year with thoughts about Problematic employers in tech, and why some people have to keep their jobs even when you disapprove of their employer.
2022
January: I started at Intel as the Director of Open Source Community and Evangelism, with instructions to hire a team as rapidly as I could. This included, eventually, recommending my friend and former colleague Arun Gupta for the position which includes being my boss, and hiring two formidable women friends, Shirley Bailes and Nicole Martinelli, to key positions on my team. Working with friends can be a little weird, and I don’t like what corporate hierarchy does to relationships. Lessons to be learned here, but we’re all still friends.
We continued the intensive search for a home to buy in Sydney, finally finding the right place in April. We completed the deal barely in time to leave for a joint business trip to the US, where Brendan was also joining Intel. The trip began with a conference in Palm Springs, then we spent a few days at Intel in Santa Clara before I flew on to New York to see my daughter and son-in-law (whom I had not seen in person in over two years, since before they got married!). Rossella and I spent a few intense days together, hanging out and seeing shows – the post-pandemic I had dreamed of included Broadway.
Brendan went back to Sydney, I flew to Portland to take part in a face-to-face offsite with my Intel peers – it was nice to be with live people after so long!
Back in Australia, winter was setting in, and we were dealing with house renovations (fortunately nothing major), with a deadline to move before Brendan had another business trip to the US in late July. I was supposed to have traveled again for an onsite with Arun and his new org in June, but Intel austerity measures kicked in and travel was curtailed. I was frankly relieved not to make that trip again so soon, though it meant that I did the team meetings for two days from my 2am to 10am – time zone differences can be hell. Brendan, being an executive, could have gone for his meetings, but decided he’d prefer to stay in the new house more before traveling again. We moved in mid-July, though some work was still being done on the house.
Before we left the Cronulla apartment, I filmed many hours of ocean views from our balcony in Cronulla before we moved.
In September I was finally able to travel to Woodstock School again for board meetings.
In November our dear friends Myrna and Steve came for a long visit, staying part of the time in downtown Sydney, partly with us (we have a guest room!), with a side trip to New Zealand. Brendan and I were both mega-stressed with work so did not have as much time and energy as I’d have liked to spend with them, but it was still wonderful to have them here.
We still had not had a vacation since February of 2019.
Mitchell finished primary school.
2023
Slideshows of our 2023 travels and other activities
January: Mitchell began high school (which, in Australia, starts with year 7).
February: I quit Intel and retired again. Currently still recovering from severe burnout, spending a lot of time on Lego.
April: Brendan, Mitchell, and I went to Japan.
June: Brendan and I went to Singapore.
July: Mitchell and I went to the Bay Area so he could see his friends and I could see mine.
September: My friend Sue accompanied me to Delhi and Mussoorie for vacation, fun, friendship, and (for me) Woodstock School meetings. I was elected to the school board (after three years serving on the General Body).
From Delhi I flew to Paris, where I met up with Brendan who was speaking at the Kernel Recipes conference, my daughter Rossella who was on her way back from New York, my son-in-law Dan, and my stepmother Ruth. We all stayed in a “charming bohemian” apartment, ate a lot of food, saw a lot of sights, and generally enjoyed being together. After four or five visits, I’ve fallen in love with Paris.
October and November were fairly quiet until Rossella arrived in Sydney the night of my birthday, November 28th. In mid December Ross and I went to Melbourne, then all four of us (with Brendan and Mitchell) went to Uluru. Christmas was mostly about a large meal at home, followed by a quiet New Year’s eve (insofar as that is ever possible).
2024
Rossella was with us through most of January before heading back to Italy to take on a film gig. One of the last days she was here we all went for a hike on the Cape Bailey Track.
Throughout the Sydney spring and summer (and indeed most of the year), I’ve been gardening a lot.
