Joining Mashery

My unemployment streak is coming to an end. Earlier this week I accepted a position at Mashery as Senior Software Architect, where I will be working full time with XML and web services. This is now also going to allow me to spend more time working on these within the PHP code base as well as libxml2. It's great when you get to work full time on the things you like to do. I'll still be working from the east coast and make the occasional trip to San Fransisco, which although I don't want to live there, I really enjoy visiting.

Everyone I know keeps telling me how great it must be to have some time off and all that jazz. I am curious if they actually have ever gone through an unexpected and forced lay off. As I don't start until the beginning of February, and my time off so far has been spent on pursuing my next job, I am going to finally take a week off before I start and unwind. Something much needed after all of this.