After a year and a half of commuting to an office next to the Port Authority bus terminal, I was really looking forward to commuting to Flatiron (which is a nicer neighborhood and way closer to our East Village apt).
At the end of work on Monday we all had to pack up our desks. Yodle was growing crazy-fast and we'd completely out grown both floors in our office and we're moving to a huge space on 23rd St and 6th Ave.
On Wednesday night the senior leadership team at Yodle went out for a holiday dinner. Milind, John, Nathaniel, Berk, Ed, Pablo, Ben, Aziza, Court and Joel.
Monday morning. Our dev team doubled in size in less than a year so we had to buckle down and figure out how to keep our Agile software development methodology running smoothly without taking up too much time in administrative overhead.
After almost dying on my bike ride to work on Thursday morning (a big truck pulled over into my bike lane and almost smooooshed against a row of parked cars), I decided to stop being an idiot and went to the bike store during lunch and bought a helmet.
Then it was on to the equally spacious convention center for more wireless "action." Actually, to tell you the truth, this convention was B-O-R-I-N-G! What I didn't realize at the time was that there are two CTIA events every year. There's the consumer-based wireless show that happens every year out in San Franciso (which is the one I went to last time). The other one that happens every year is geared more towards huge, corporate vendors and isn't consumer-focused (read: interesting and fun). Meh.
The only thing that was sorta cool was that big corporations = lotsa dollars, which means that they can afford to hire "big shot" keynote speakers. Like...
...TechFest 2005! (TechFest is an internal competition where our company breaks into small teams and everyone has one day to code a working version of a a feature they'd like to see added to our sites).
They flipped the switch and we got to watch traffic flood onto the new servers in real time! (This is the type of thing that only nerds like me find exciting).
On Sunday I stopped by work to celebrate the launch of the new software platform that powered all of my company's community sites: a project that was over two years in the making!
After the conference was over for the day, I headed a few blocks down the street to visit the offices of Chronicle Books. I'd shot Leigh Lezark for a feature on Nerve.com and Chronicle was putting out a book anthology of the article series I'd shot for Nerve and wanted to use one of my photos of Leigh for the cover of the book! (So that's how Tinny ended up on the dubiously named "Sex Advice From..." book!)
Then I spent the entire day wandering the enormous exhibit hall chatting with vendors and trying to figure out if there were any companies that my new company should be working with.
Wednesday morning was more of the same. Wandering the exhibit hall trying to sort through the hype. One of the few really fun exhibits was a vending machine that allowed you to purchase a drink by sending a text message and accepting a charge on your phone bill.
Fast-forward five days later, and here's me at work on Friday after having just returned to NYC from a
business trip out to San Francisco celebrating at my new company's monthly party. On the last Friday of every month, my work has a big party with food and booze to celebrate all the birthday's and work-anniversaries that happened that month. (Who says the working world is all bad?)
Monday marked the beginning of week two of my return to the working world. Here's a sneaky photo I took during a Monday morning "software development status" meeting while I was thinking to myself "Am I really here listening to this crazy-talk instead of being somewhere awesome?" Hahah.
After taking almost a year off of work to travel all over the world (and/or goof off in NYC) on Monday, September 12th I returned to the working world and started my brand new job as a Product Manager for Community Connect; an internet company that owns a bunch of niche social networking sites! (BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, AsianAve.com, GLEE.com, etc).
On Friday afternoon I hopped on the Eastside uptown bus near the United Nations to visit a certain someone at their new job at Playgirl Magazine. Can you guess who it was by looking at their desk? Let's see....Golden Girls DVD Box Set, Silly Hat and "Red Boy" Brand ginormous DILDO! Hmmm....If you guessed...
...Grant Stoddard, you are correct, sir! Back in May Grant briefly worked (as a Staff Writer? Editor?) at Playgirl Magazine. A few weeks after starting, his book sold and he promptly left.
Here's our totally ghetto-ass booth all set up the next morning at the conference. We ended up taking the "Fucked Company" banner down because we were worried that people might think that we were saying that we were a fucked company because the airline lost our banner - instead of realizing that AdBrite's founder had started a website called FuckedCompany. Da-da-disaster! Instead of trying to explain how we were feeling, how about I just show a close-up of Philip's expression?
At the office on Thursday the printer we were working with showed us a mock-up of the big company logo banner we'd hired them to create and on the mock-up was a test print out they'd done for another customer. We liked him so much we told them not to cut it and hung it up on our office wall.
Before being hired by AdBrite, I'd been using their service to sell advertising on this site - on Thursday morning, I received my very first paycheck for all the ads that had been bought! Wooooo!
I spent most of Monday driving around San Francisco looking for office space for our company so we could start hiring more people (and stop having to commute down to Menlo Park ever day). Office Space #1: Too expensive.
The sticker even goes as far to imply that if you did decide to disassemble the hub, you wouldn't be able to put it back together in working order. Then suddenly, it's like the thing is insulting you and then....it's on.
My office, day one. (See, I told you these pics weren't going to be exciting. After work each night I'd spend most of my time apartment hunting and trying to be homesick).
Putting labels that read "do not disassemble" is pretty much the dumbest thing you can do in an office full of nerds. No one would have even considered disassembling the wifi hub, until we all saw the big sticker that instructed us not to. Only because it begs the question "Huh, why shouldn't I disassemble it?" (PS - Note how Philip's hand is strategically placed to obscure the forehead stubble. Hahah).
I ended up flying into San Jose and staying near the airport there (neither Philip or I had any sense of the geography out here and at the time, this seemed to make sense) I checked into my room at the Hyatt (where my comments are appreciated) and got on the phone trying to find something to eat. Even though it was only 11pm, there was NOTHING open in the vicinity. My only choice was...
For those of you new to the site, for two months I took over running a small events company in NYC, that specializes in running scavenger hunts around town, called Watson Adventures (I left when it became apparent that our dreams of quickly doubling or tripling the size of the business weren't realistic). I helped them move the company out of the founder's apartment (where it had been based for years) and into a an office that we shared with Darryl Estrine (who's a really rad celebrity portrait photographer).
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