Chance Bliss

Here’s a shot of my work space in my company’s new office. I’m literally 5 feet from my neighbors head. No dividers. Ugh. Not very conductive to actually concentrating on anything.

This is what happens when “the suits” design the office with no input from the people who actually have to work in the space. I’m guessing they think programmers and designers sit around yelling out brilliant ideas which then triggers a “creative orgy” until the next brainstorm.

I really shouldn’t complain given I was previously in a basement underneath a nail salon and dance studio. The new space is light-years ahead and no brain cancer causing fumes. It’s just missing that one critical piece…a productive space to work. Oh well, things can only get better from here.

Some reading material on office space:

• A Developer’s Field Guide from Joel Spolsky (Good work space thoughts)
• 10 best workspaces in tech (Pixar’s space is pretty nice)
• 10 worst workspaces in tech (Yahoo’s space looks surprising like mine…not a good omen)

I love looking at screen shots from old video games. It brings back the days of me on my Commodore 64. Some of the game concepts back then were really wacky. I guess after the success of games like Donkey Kong (a Italian plumber, a princess and a gorilla throwing barrels?) anyone with a half-baked idea became a game designer.

Just the other day my son and I were playing Zelda Link to the Past and we had to beat a floating cat dressed in a white nightshirt shooting lasers out of it’s head.

“It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever” – David St. Hubbins (Spinal Tap).

Browse for your favorites at The Video Game Museum

I can’t believe I missed Campaign 84′. What I wouldn’t give for some Walter Mondale telephone canvassing action right now. 

In my life I’ve had a couple of friends that really inspired me. One of those friend’s was Richard Markle. Richard was my friend through Middle and High School. I lost contact with him during college, but I never forgot how he inspired me to read and imagine.

Richard was always reading, drawing or doing something creative (especially with his hair color). He was mostly an outsider who didn’t fit into any group or category. He got into trouble with drinking and drugs later on, but he always has a passion for art (especially comic books and science fiction/fantasy).

Recently, I learned that Richard died in a freak accident in 2006. I was completed shocked. First, because Richard was someone who I always remembered fondly, but also because he was working at a CGI studio in Berkeley (Tippet Studios). My dad had taught both Phil Tippet (the founder) and Richard at Palomar College. Phil Tippet is a pioneer in stop-motion and CGI animation who received an Oscar for his work on Jurassic Park. Around 1998 I got a tour of the studio with my dad and mom (who was friend’s with Phil too). I thought to myself that it would be my dream come true to work someplace like that. The whole atmosphere was so cool. Models of dinosaurs, Imperial Walkers and other monsters were everywhere.

Richard was the lead rotoscoper/paint artist (rotoscoping is a particular animation technique) at the studio. He worked on a number of movies (Charlotte’s Web, Hellboy, The Matrix, etc.) and commercials from 2000 to 2006.

While I’m sad he’s not with us anymore, I’m glad he finally found his way and ended up doing something so creative. He was a smart guy.

Here are some pages about his work.

Richard Markle at Wikipedia
Richard Markle at IMDB

The table is a little less than half the size of an official table, but it actually works. Notice the fine use of business cards (good work Vijay). The First Annual AdverbZetaGrit (inside joke) Ping Pong Championship starts today. Let’s get it on like Donkey Kong.

Here’s a fun game to play. Take a band’s name and do a mash up with a book’s name. Coudal Partners calls it “Booking Bands”. Here are some of my favorites:

• Great White Expectations (Anything with 80s hair bands works for me)
• Horton Hears a Hoobastank (This just sounds nasty)
• A Tale of Two Bay City Rollers (“Turn off the soccer game and put on the Bay City Rollers” – So I married an Axe Murderer)
• Mein Camper Van Beethoven (Good punk band name)
• Corey Hart of Darkness (This works on so many levels…”I wear my sunglasses at night so I can…”)
• Slaughterhouse Jackson Five (Disturbing)

View the full list.

Here are some of my own.

• The Lord of the Sex Pistols
• The Handmaid’s Black Sabbath
• A Farewell to .38 Special
• The World According to Molly Hatch
• The Satanic Fat Boys
• A Room with a Foreigner
• Gloria Estefan and the Art of Miami Sound Maintenance
• Naked Hair Cut 100
• The Cult of Innocence
• The Call of Los Lobos

Some good ones from Matt…

• Into Thin Air Supply (Genius)
• The Velveteen Revolver (Soft, plush and deadly)
• Oliver Twisted Sister (We’re not gonna take it! Anymore!)
• Booker T-Factor Diet (Unexpected use of popular diet book. Good work.)

A friend of a friend email me the other day about becoming a project manager. I talked with her in more detail over the phone, but here’s hit list of pros and cons I sent her.  Hopefully, I didn’t scare her off. The world needs good project managers.

Pros

1. It’s a good way to understand and get involved in every aspect of a project. I would basically do anything to get the project done from copy writing to programming. As a PM, you are exposed to and gain a lot of experience that others don’t such as a programmer or designer. It keeps things interesting.
2. The PM position is a good stepping stone. Because you know all the ins and outs, you can move into a number of management positions. After 5 years as a PM, I was able to move into a product management position which I really enjoy. Like with every position, you need to have good project management skills to succeed. The experience has and will continue to help my career no matter what path it takes.
3. You are the one with all the answers (even if you don’t know them). It’s nice to be the person in the know. Also being in the know gives you exposure to pretty much everyone within the company from the CEO on down to the IT person who installs software. You will make many more friend than enemies.

Cons

1. No one reports to you directly. This is not necessarily at bad thing (no annual reviews), but you have to use a more “indirect” way to get things done. This can be exhausting especially in dealing with a difficult or under-performing team member.
2. You are there from the beginning to end. It’s your responsibility to carry the project through it’s completion. This can weigh heavily on you especially when things beyond your control go wrong (a difficult client). Once I had to run across midtown Manhattan (in 90 degree weather) to buy a scanner at CompUSA to order to scan hundred of product labels that needs to go into a site the following week.
3. Everyone dumps on you. Since you are the nexus of the project, everyone will come to you with them problems. Again, this can weigh heavily on you as you end up solving problems (personal, family, etc.) that are totally unrelated to the project. On occasion, I’ve had people break down crying in the middle of a status meeting.

Beards and moustaches have really fallen out of favor in the past 20 years or so, but these guys don’t abide by our cultural norms. Especially, this guy, aka “The Kaiser”.

World Beard and Moustache Championship Gallery

This recent post by 37signals, Why we skip Photoshop, got me thinking about the most influential web development project I worked on. It was a corporate Web site redesign. The creative director and I simply sketched out on paper three different ways in which the information could be organized. The sketch was just a box in which we arranged blocks of content. Very simply, but it cut to the heart of how the user would interact with the entire site.

From those sketches, I was able to create three prototypes (HTML/CSS) which we could all click through and actually experience interacting with the content. This was all done within a week’s time. No Photoshop. No rounded corners. No fancy background gradients. Graphic elements were added later on, but technically the prototype went right into production. And guess what? The project went according to plan. No mad dash at the end to re-think, re-do or re-slice anything.

After that project, I finally began to understand ‘interactive’ design. To this day, only until the entire site has been prototyped do I even begin discussing color, font, images, etc. While those are important in presenting or highlighting functions and content, it doesn’t get to the heart of how a user interacts.

The sad part is that I will probably end up getting one.