Technicalities May 8, 2000 *) Would You Believe PG 13? Nothing is ever good enough. Last week, my boss(es) were otherwise engaged, so it was my coworkers who voiced their disappointment with me. The main complaint seemed to be that the previous issue of Technicalities wasn't racy enough. Talk about performance anxiety, guys: imagine yourself surrounded by three attractive colleagues of the opposite sex telling you that what you're doing just isn't titillating them. I was "strictly G rated". Ouch. I think that we should all bear in mind that this is a newsletter about the goings on in AGENCY.COM/New York's tech department. I'm sure you can see what limited source material I have to work with here, and I hope that everyone can please set their expectations appropriately. This isn't Bill and Monica. (Or if there is anything like that going on, I don't have the singlemindedness of Ken Starr to ferret it out.) Perhaps I could tell everybody about the manner in which I found Eugenia Antipas's Barbie doll and rubber frog arrayed the other week. No, that really would be _too_ pornographic. *) Bank Withdrawal The big news this week is that Ritesh is finally coming off The Bank Account, since Margot Hyun is in town. We really wouldn't want the Tech department to go completely to seed, what with his subordinates trying to run it as we've been doing the past several weeks. *) We're Taking Over The tech dept's newest member, who starts today, is a theoretical physicist. Honestly, it isn't my subtle attempt to undermine Ritesh by hiring people just like me to fill his department. Just a coincidence, really. Marya Doery joins us with a Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook and postdocs at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, She's going to be giving an Inspire U class on "Ionization suppression in cold collisions of metastable neon". Keep your eyes peeled for it. *) He Has Too Many Talents Well, Tech and Creative are now tied. Eugenia moved from sitebuilding to programming, and now Henry Sauvageot - one of our Java gurus - is moving from being a tech consultant to a creative director. I guess he couldn't stand being with us nerds any more. At any rate, _we_ are definitely going to miss _him_. What I am trying to figure out is whose ear in the creative department he's going bend about thread scheduling and RMI. *) The Promise Of The Gucci Account Last Thursday Marysia Woroniecka, Sean MacDonald and your humble reporter were all wearing our Gucci shoes. (No, nothing untoward was going on. Lord, you folks do have dirty minds. I think you really need to get out more.) Thursday was day of the big presentation. Rick Swanson, our client, finally presented the work of the last three months of strategic discovery to Gucci's senior management. The good news is that at the last minute Rick's notorious slide with three circles made it into the presentation. The bad news is they hated it. The good news is they loved our strategy. The bad news is omigod now we have to do it. Marysia and Sean have been working like maniacs the last several months - and especially the last few weeks - to get this done. It feels great to see it fly. *) A Final Note On E-mail Viruses A friend of mine in San Francisco writes Flipping channels tonight with closed-captioning turned on, I encountered the following important message on a local news show: If you receive an unexpected female from an unknown source... Do not open it.