Technicalities May 14, 2001 *) I am not, however, able to raise biscuits. Your humble scribe promises you that it's entirely a coincidence. The timing of my vacations is planned months in advance, so I can't possibly know what is about to happen when I fly away. Recall that the major collapse of internet stock prices happened when I was on a boat off the coast of Venezuela. Really, if I had known about it in advance, wouldn't I have shorted OGNC or something? Look - when I got my ticket for the first week of May, when I decided to go off to look at the Mayan architecture in the Yucatan, I swear that I had no way to know what people would be talking about when I got back. My theory is that I must be some sort of cosmic absorber/neutralizer of bad karma. From what I can tell, I play a role something like that of a box of baking soda in a refrigerator. It's not that the baking soda keeps the food inside from rotting - it's just that as soon as the baking soda is removed you know exactly how bad the eggs have gotten. I'm not claiming I relish this job. On the astral plane, I'm not even an ingredient. *) Peak 1 - Great Place To Work Someone who works here told me of a dream he had recently. He was in that half-awake, half-dream state, aware that he was still lying down, but about to go to work. His mind thus had transported his sleeping accommodations from his apartment to the center of the floor on the 13th floor of 20 Exchange Place. As he lay in his bed amongst the cubicles, he saw all his coworkers milling around, and they seemed to be packing and carrying valises thither and yon. He wasn't sure where they were going, but before he could ask he woke up. *) Peak 2 - Multiple Digital Channels We had a going away party for Tamara Helenius just before I left town. Tamara, for those of you who rarely visit the IT grotto on the back of 15, was one of the Unix system admins. I gave her job here originally, and her severance-free-free-will departure I wish I could have prevented. Gary Galvez is a unix admin who's not an old-timer and he was with us all that night. An interesting dynamic developed - there was a geek war within IT. Actually, strictly speaking I shouldn't say it was a war, and really it wasn't at all interesting. It was just the NT admins hazing Gary by going on and on to him about how wonderful Microsoft is, what an hombre Bill Gates is, how high MSFTs earnings are, how much Solaris sucked, etc. Not that any of the rest of us gave a flying... You know how insecure NT people are. *) Peak 4 - Fastest Growth James McHugh sent around an e-mail to the tech department last week. This in itself if hardly news. (Though, come to think of it, a week _without_ an e-mail from James to the tech department might be newsworthy). James's e-mail was an AP wire story about how iXL was about to lay off 300 people. I looked for it on the Yahoo newswire, but found only iXL's original press release, which spoke in glowing terms about how they were adding several new VPs to focus on market verticals. The second paragraph went on to describe, with an air of casual inevitability, how the restructuring would include a reduction of the web development staff from 1300 to 1000. Then the memo went back to listing the merits of all their new hires. The AP story decided to strip off the first paragraph, and the subsequent ones, and focus on the obvious fact - that iXL was reducing their staff by 23%. iXL must think that their shareholders are idiots. Ok, this they may be... but what about their employees? I am, as you doubtless know, a pretty twisted bastard, and upon reading this I went on to wonder something. AGENCY.COM has a goal of "fastest growing company in our sector". I'm a physicist, you'll remember, so I have to differentiate between velocity and speed. In the jargon the term "speed" refers to the rate at which a particle is moving no matter where it happens to be going - even if it's running around in circles getting nowhere. "Velocity", on the other hand, includes a direction as well. As used by physicists, "fast" is an adjective that applies to the term "speed". Now given that _positive_ growth seems to be impossible in our sector right now, how fast do we want to be? *) Peak 5 - Dominate Specific Award Segments I sent this around to the office before, but I'm happy enough to send it again. Boyds won an award for the best e-commerce site in the gift sector. Actually, winning such awards was one of their express goals when they undertook the B2B work. Thus they add to their previous trophy: most frequently resigned AGENCY.COM client. A bunch of us are celebrating on Wednesday night. *) Peak 7 - Focus on Client Value Just after the last Technicalities went to (virtual) press, the eMaritz team launched their long-awaited site. Fortunately the launch was right on time, unfortunately it was by the skin of our teeth. Nonetheless, the team's hard work did not go unnoticed. *) An entropic thought When one stares at Mayan temple one has a tendency to think about the really big picture. The pyramids are absolutely huge - stone structures the size of a 10 story building, with drastically steep steps running up the sides. Intricate carvings adorn them. Construction was arduous - the Mayans had no beasts of burden, no carts with wheels, and no metal tools with which to cut the rocks. The thought of putting something like that under those circumstances - under the hot Mexican sun, for good measure - is mind blowing. Yet thousands of these buildings were built - it's believed that they haven't all been located because of the depth of the forest. All the buildings the tourists go to have been reconstructed by archaeologists. Unless you've seen one, you can't really imagine what these structures look like when they are first found. Basically, they are just a rocky hill, with trees growing on them and stones thrown everywhere. After all the Mayan labor, what now remains is not all that different from the original forest. This month this seems somehow like something to think about.