Archive for the 'work' Category

The Times Wins 5 Pulitzer Prizes

NY Times newsroom, Pulitzer announcement

Photo by Soraya.

The New York Times, my employer, won 5 Pulitzer Prizes today, “for work on sub­jects as varied as America’s wars in Asia, the sudden down­fall of a polit­i­cal titan, art from ancient to modern, and a history-​making pres­i­den­tial campaign.”

The inter­est­ing one, from my point of view, is the award for break­ing the Gov. Eliot Spitzer pros­ti­tu­tion scan­dal. No, not because it’s sala­cious or bawdy, but because the exclu­sive wasn’t held for the next morning’s paper – it was put up online, on NYTimes.com, in the middle of the day. I think that this will be an impor­tant mile­stone in the evo­lu­tion of qual­ity journalism.

The Nieman Lab points to a funny anec­dote that ran in the NY Observer last year:

Back in the day — you know, five years ago — when a big news story had been writ­ten, edited, fact-​checked, vetted, proof­read, and anguished over one last time, an adrenaline-​pumped editor would cry out, “Run it!” As in, the presses.

When The New York Times was ready to report that Eliot Spitzer, then gov­er­nor of New York, had been impli­cated in a pros­ti­tu­tion ring, man­ag­ing editor Jill Abram­son yelled 20 feet across the news­room, “O.K., hit it!” As in, the button to pub­lish the story on NYTimes.com.

I love that. Con­grats to my col­leagues in the news room, and let’s keep it up!

April 20, 2009 » Tags: , , , , . » 1 Comment

New York Times Anthrax Scare

Who?

Equipment and officials from some government agency that I’ve never heard of, in the lobby of the New York Times Building in midtown.

The lobby of The New York Times Build­ing, where I work, was closed this past Wednes­day, after an employee on the 13th floor opened an enve­lope that con­tained a pow­dery sub­stance. (The 13th floor is where the edi­to­r­ial board and some colum­nists have offices.)

It turned out to be a hoax, but for sev­eral hours the build­ing was in near lock-​down mode. Unfor­tu­nately, I decided to dis­re­gard warn­ings and went out to meet Lisa for lunch. When I returned, I was locked out for almost an hour, as the police had roped off the building’s entrances. Peer­ing through the win­dows on the 8th Avenue side of the build­ing, I saw a huge cur­tain stretched across one of the ele­va­tor banks. Some fire­men went in with a stretcher, and the broad­cast news media started con­verg­ing on the street. (Apolo­gies to the very friendly NY1 cam­er­a­woman, for refus­ing to talk to her on camera.)

All I could do was to take some photos, and wait to be let in. After about an hour, I received word from a col­league inside that they were let­ting employ­ees back in through the freight ele­va­tors in the load­ing dock down 40th st. That was about all the fun I could handle for one day… back to work.

More Photos below the jump.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘New York Times Anthrax Scare’

October 29, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 0 Comments

How Hackers Show it’s Not All Bad News at the New York Times

Apologies that this blog looks a little New York Times-y lately, but I had to share this – O’Reilly’s Andrew Savikas wrote a very inter­est­ing post on some of the inter­est­ing stuff we’re doing:

…there‘s some­thing going on at the Times that prob­a­bly won‘t make it to Sil­i­con Alley Insider, much less the main­stream busi­ness press, and it‘s some­thing that‘s start­ing to make me think the Times just might suc­ceed in adapt­ing to the chang­ing rules of the media and pub­lish­ing game…

So what’s the Times doing that’s so impor­tant? They’re hacking.

Savikas goes on to list a lot of exam­ples, but the best one that I can pro­vide is the coming release of our APIs, which will enable people on the out­side to play, tinker, and mashup NY Times con­tent. There are only a few APIs cur­rently public, but there will be a flood of releases in the coming months.

[via Jeremy]

UPDATE: Oh man, a bit after I pub­lished this today, we launched our Visu­al­iza­tion Lab – a part­ner­ship that uses IBM’s Many Eyes tech­nol­ogy. More Info Here »

October 27, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 0 Comments

Ready for David Pogue

Shadows

Me, standing in, as lighting is set for a David Pogue shoot.

Today, myself and a few col­leagues helped Zach Wise set up and shoot some green screen video of New York Times Tech­nol­ogy Colum­nist and near-​Broadway per­former David Pogue. The video will be inte­grated into a mul­ti­me­dia piece that Zach and I are work­ing on, which should be done before Thanksgiving.

This is the first real video shoot that I’ve worked on, (having in the past done a lot of voice-​over work with sound engi­neers). What’s scary is that we did this largely by our­selves – Zach found a studio at the nearby CUNY Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, we hung the green fabric, and we set up the light­ing with a little help from their engineer.

David Pogue came in a short while later, I grabbed a boom mic, and we were off to the races. It was a lot of fun, and Pogue nailed the takes – I have no idea how he did it with­out a teleprompter, but he had us all laugh­ing sev­eral times. And he was very patient and friendly through­out the shoot, even when we had to embar­rass­ingly scram­ble back to the office for more P2 cards.

So, that was the hard part – now we have to design and build this thing.

October 16, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 0 Comments

Economix & Green Inc. Blog Headers

The Times is in the process of beef­ing up its busi­ness cov­er­age online, adding new ver­ti­cals on the econ­omy and green energy. As part of that roll out, we launched two blogs last week, and I was tasked with the header designs and illus­tra­tion assignments.

I really enjoy the little bits of art direc­tion that I get to do at the Times. It’s fun to search for the illus­tra­tors, work with them on con­cepts and sketches, and in the end they do all of the work.

Economix

Economix Blog header

Illustration by Headcase Design

Economix is writ­ten by David Leon­hardt and Cather­ine Ram­pell, and will focus on both the global econ­omy and the per­sonal deci­sions read­ers make everyday.

The illus­tra­tion was done by Paul Kepple’s team at Head­case Design, with art direc­tion and design by myself.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Economix & Green Inc. Blog Headers’

September 28, 2008 » Tags: , , , . » 0 Comments

Farewell Sean & Louise

IMG_2875.JPG

Cupcakes! – Photo by Villafranca.

This week, the nytimes.com Design group says farewell to two really tal­ented col­leagues – Sean Vil­lafranca and Louise Ma. Sean is leav­ing to become Design Direc­tor at time.com, and Louise is going to free­lance, full-​time.

I’m still new around these parts, but Sean and Louise made me feel at home. We’re going to miss you guys! (But, we are hiring…)

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Farewell Sean & Louise’

May 2, 2008 » Tags: , , . » 2 Comments

Outlook 2007 & Gcal

I’m one of those stiffs who loves his Power­book, but is forced by neces­sity (and Cor­po­rate IT) to work in Win­dows XP and Out­look all day. Meet­ing requests come in and tasks are assigned, all using Out­look. How­ever, because I rely so much on Gmail in my per­sonal life, I store per­sonal events online with Google Calendar.

Every­thing works seam­lessly on my mac, as Apple’s iCal soft­ware allows sub­scrip­tions. But there is no way to get Out­look 2003 to sync or share data in the iCal­en­dar format… in fact, I think that Out­look stores its infor­ma­tion in some Microsoft pro­pri­etary format, by default. I think you can import/export ICS files, but there is no sub­scrip­tion or pub­lish method.

Gcal Subscribe

Gcal allows subscriptions to iCalendar feeds

I shouldn’t forget to men­tion the excel­lent open source project Remote­Cal­en­dars, which allows you to sub­scribe to iCal­en­dar feeds, with a bit of tweak­ing. But, this wasn’t quite what I craved – I wanted to not only sub­scribe to my Gcal cal­en­dar, but also allow Gcal to pick up my work appoint­ments. That way, I can get reminders of early meet­ings, etc., when I’m away from my work desk.

Outlook 2007 beta 2

Enter the new Office beta. Not only is this ver­sion the Bravest Soft­ware Upgrade Ever, it also added a lot of great func­tion­al­ity to Outlook.

Out of the box, you can sub­scribe to iCal­en­dar feeds, such as those pro­vided by Gcal, 30Boxes, or other online apps. More impres­sively, you can pub­lish your cal­en­dar to either your own WebDAV server, or to Office Online directly. Then, you can sub­scribe to the pub­lished iCal­en­dar feed in any online cal­en­dars that sup­port the stan­dard. Out­look will peri­od­i­cally update the pub­lished file as you make adjust­ments or addi­tions to your calendar.

Publish to Internet

Outlook 2007’s Publish to Internet feature

So, now I have access to both my per­sonal and work cal­en­dars at all times, no matter where I am. (Hell, if I wanted to pay Cin­gu­lar for band­width, I could use Gcal­Sync to push every­thing to my RAZR.)

The only real caveat is that you have to pub­lish your Out­look cal­en­dar with “Unrestricted Access” — because Microsoft uses their LiveID tech­nol­ogy to grant access on a per-​user basis, and Gcal (or any other ser­vice) won’t be able to authen­ti­cate unless it’s public. I’m not sure how secure this is yet, but for the moment I’m too in love with this setup to let that bother me.

Another minor caveat – you’ll have to unin­stall Acro­bat 6, as it causes Out­look to crash a lot.

Other than that, it’s a pretty stable beta.

Digg This

June 26, 2006 » Tags: , , . » 1 Comment

Productivity

October 21, 2005 » Tags: . » 3 Comments

Latitude

Well, I feel a bit guilty about this, but they gave me a laptop at work this week… a Dell Lat­i­tude C640, 1GB RAM, 40MB GB HD, etc. Why do I feel guilty? Well, my friend used it until she quit last week… so, it feels like some­one else’s PC.

Now, I can VPN in, and work at home! Hooray!

“sacrilege” on Flickr.

May 4, 2005 » Tags: . » 4 Comments

Trados 6.5 dongle

dongleFor 2 years, work­ing in Local­iza­tion, I had to scram­ble around for a Trados dongle when­ever I had to do some analy­sis or Trans­la­tion Memory main­te­nance. Though I work for a major local­iza­tion vendor, with global offices and almost 2000 employ­ees, we still had to share dongles… expen­sive little buggers.

Today, how­ever, I finally received my own. I was so accus­tomed to the old Parallel-​port ver­sion, that I was excited to get my hands on the smaller USB one.

Only prob­lem is, now I can’t use the excuse “I don’t have a dongle“, when my boss asks why I’m not working.

February 10, 2005 » Tags: , , , . » 4 Comments

October Scare – 2000 Redux

What hap­pens when you’re a new publicly-​traded com­pany, and you announce that you’re not going to meet the quar­terly projections?

Stock free-​fall.

  • Bad news? Lay-​offs and ter­mi­na­tion. 10 people at our site, about 10%.
  • Good news? They fired some really use­less people. Also, the only team men­tioned in the meet­ing as doing well, was my team and my project.

Whew.

Still, it is scary – like it’s the year 2000 all over again. Strangely, I wore my defunct dot com fleece jacket to work today. What a bad omen.

October 13, 2004 » Tags: . » 1 Comment

Smart-Target

I peed into a plas­tic cup this morn­ing for the first time since my job appli­ca­tion to Wilson Farms con­ve­nience store, when I was six­teen years-​old.

Why, you ask?

Well, some friends and I are going to spend the week­end dri­ving a Smart­Car around Boston, dressed in Target logos from head-to-toe. We’re sup­posed to make our­selves seen to all of the return­ing col­lege kids, remind­ing them that there is a cheap place to dress up that gray-​brick dorm room. I’m 26 years-​old, so this is a bit embarassing.

But, It’s only 2 days, I’ll be a couple hun­dred dol­lars richer, and I get to tear around town in a car that is roughly 1/6 the size of your aver­age SUV. Should be safe…

Last year, they gave my friends Target Vespas — but, there was an acci­dent or two… appar­ently it’s safer to shill on 4-wheels.

August 25, 2004 » Tags: , , . » 2 Comments

Backup

My boss is Out of Office again this week, so sud­denly Project Man­agers are turn­ing to me in meet­ings, and asking the tough questions.

It’s been interesting… and grat­i­fy­ing, to know that I can manage to sound artic­u­late and knowl­edge­able, when called upon.

August 9, 2004 » Tags: . » 1 Comment

Old Times…

Pres­ley and I were invited out last night with my old boss, who is vis­it­ing Boston on hol­i­day from his teach­ing gig in Japan. It was the usual shitty ser­vice at the Enor­mous Room, and then across the street for a little rock n’ roll Upstairs, cour­tesy A.M. Stereo and The Glow. A.M. Stereo was fun, Indie post-​punk — each member singing in turn, (except the drum­mer, who looked like some­thing out of Spinal Tap). The Glow was a tighter, keyboard-​driven, cross-​over ska outfit, which I really enjoyed — their gui­tarist reminded me of Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse… decide for yourself.

It was good to see Bob — I prob­a­bly know him the least out of every­one last night, having just been hired a couple of months before he left. But, his sto­ries of teach­ing Eng­lish to Japan­ese kids in a small, remote vil­lage, were funny… I can’t imag­ine com­mu­ni­cat­ing, alone, in such a for­eign envi­ron­ment. He’s a long way from Tokyo.

But, it was also good to be out with work mates — we work so hard on a daily basis, and we each have our own lives, so it’s rare that we go out for a few drinks. But, having been out with Bob last night, I have the feel­ing it was a lot more common before he left…

August 6, 2004 » Tags: , . » 1 Comment

Doppelganger

Apparently, I have an evil twin in my office building… people keep telling me that they say “hello” to me, and I act as if I don’t know who the hell they are. Doppelganger!

November 20, 2003 » Tags: . » 2 Comments

Sales Adjustments in IT

WorldmachineRan­domly brows­ing the web today, I found that the web shop I worked for in down­town Boston during the waning days of the inter­net boom, World­ma­chine, appears to be back in business.

It was just about two years ago that they called all of us into the con­fer­ence room to announce lay­offs and that they were shut­ting the com­pany down. The obvi­ous reason given at the time, was lack of new sales.

This I still find inter­est­ing, because the excuse all sales pro­fes­sion­als seem to offer in this dread­ful econ­omy is that the sales cycle is much longer — some­times 18 months or more. At my new com­pany, a com­pany which focuses on local­iza­tion and test­ing, my co-​workers and I were treated to a sales pre­sen­ta­tion recently, in which the same kinds of excuses were offered.

Unlike Worldmachine’s woe­fully under­staffed Sales dept., how­ever, this team seems to be adjust­ing to the “new” New Econ­omy. They’ve accepted that the IT market is a shirk­ing pie, and that price com­pe­ti­tion is get­ting too cut­throat. Instead, they are look­ing to new ver­ti­cals for growth.

In Boston, the Bio-​tech boom is pro­vid­ing a new market in the life sci­ences. As drug man­u­fac­tur­ers look to market their prod­ucts over­seas, part­ner­ing with a top local­iza­tion firm is going to be crit­i­cal. The planet’s pop­u­la­tion is only going to get older.

An inter­est­ing theory our Sales team is going to try, is to group their teams by ver­ti­cal, rather than by loca­tion. Though it may have made sense a few years ago to send your Tokyo team to Hong Kong clients, and your Cal­i­for­nia team to clients in Los Ange­les, the real­ity of a long sales cycle and a need to patiently edu­cate clients is forc­ing a recon­sid­er­a­tion. Sales needs to edu­cate them­selves first — and to do that, they need more involve­ment from pro­duc­tion and oper­a­tions people. People like me.

The good news is, we are prof­itable, and I’m con­fi­dent that the com­pany I’m part of now is on sound foot­ing. I wasn’t at all con­fi­dent of that in Sep­tem­ber 2001.

September 26, 2003 » Tags: , , . » Closed

W32.Welchia.Worm

It’s worm week here at my work­place. The lastest little virus is the W32.Welchia.Worm, which has attacked our inter­nal servers here, and spread like wild fire.

The funny thing about this virus, is that it’s pur­pose seems to be to clean up last weeks’ mess, the MS Blast worm. The Welchia goes into a system, deletes the MSBlast virus, and tries to down­load a patch from Win­dows Update. How friendly!

At least it’s a friday — maybe we can all get out of here.

August 22, 2003 » Tags: , . » Closed

Delivery Nights

We have to deliver stuff to that cer­tain $oft­ware com­pany at 7am, and, here we are, still at work, at mid­night — trying our damnedest. This cer­tain $oft­ware com­pany is a stick­ler about scheduling.

So, on this 18+ hour work day, I had BBQ for dinner, a few cof­fees, a diet coke, and 2 beers (gotta love it when the senior man­ager invites you to make use of his mini-​fridge). And it’s 93 degrees in this fuck­ing place.

I feel like There’s More to Life Than This.

May 14, 2003 » Tags: , . » 1 Comment

Looking at the Work Week Through the Eyes of a Gigolo

When I leave work tonight, I will submit a timesheet that, on sum, will be greater than 90 hours for this week. 90 hours. My co-​worker Akiko will exceed 100 hours.

I know we get paid by the hour, but doesn’t that strike you as a high-​tech sweatshop?

April 19, 2003 » Tags: . » 3 Comments

Job Update

Just a little update on my cur­rent employ­ment — I’m being taken off “contract” status, and made a tem­po­rary employee, which is ter­rific news. That means I don’t need to submit for a P.O. every week, which takes around a decade to process.

I need cashola. Unem­ploy­ment ran out in Sep­tem­ber, don’t even ask me how I live. And the sad thing is, since I’ve got this gig, I’ve been spend­ing like a madman. Good thing, that.

UPDATE: Miria, another con­trac­tor that I shared my cube with, quit today. I don’t think she liked sit­ting in front of a com­puter for 9 hours, doing tedious, repet­i­tive work. God Speed… I wish I could afford to have standards!

March 18, 2003 » Tags: . » 5 Comments

Shoddy Flash

So, my new job involves local­iz­ing and updat­ing Flash demos of prod­ucts by a pop­u­lar soft­ware cor­po­ra­tion. The orig­i­nal eng­lish files were pro­duced by said cor­po­ra­tion, and I’m sur­prised at how truly spotty they are.

We were given a spec­i­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment to use as a ref­er­ence, yet the orig­i­nal files rarely match their own spec. So I find myself rebuild­ing the movies, tweak­ing and writ­ing action-​script, and debugging… more than just swap­ping out a little Eng­lish for Spanish.

It’s hard to imag­ine how these things get past their qual­ity assur­ance people – the eng­lish movies are being used with the gen­eral public, as we speak. It makes me think that it’s, a) not so hard get­ting a job at huge soft­ware corps, & b) they don’t require you to do good work…

Although, I could be talk­ing about the work of one person. I guess that shouldn’t count for too much.

March 12, 2003 » Tags: . » 2 Comments

Damn the Flavia Machine

I’m absolutely addicted to the Flavia machine here. $0.50 a cup, but a cup is like 6 oz. It’s Yum.

UPDATE: Note to self: Cafe­te­ria closes at 1:30. You will not eat a late lunch, unless Dorito’s and Ramen out of a machine count.

March 6, 2003 » Tags: , . » 7 Comments

A New Era

Today marks a change – I’m finally work­ing again, albeit as a con­trac­tor, for a local­iza­tion com­pany west of Boston. Which means sev­eral things:

  1. It actu­ally mat­ters when I get up in the morning
  2. I have some­where to be
  3. I am in charge of some other people
  4. The words “Flash” and “Specialist” are part of my job title
  5. I have a cafe­te­ria that sells all kinds of hot and cold meals, very cheaply
  6. I like every­one I meet here
  7. My dead­lines are intense, and there are whis­pers of required weekends
  8. I don’t care about that, because I’m paid hourly.

That is all. Oh, and I feel just awful com­mut­ing 20 miles every day. I am not doing my part for the envi­ron­ment, and I am dis­ap­pointed in myself.

March 5, 2003 » Tags: . » 9 Comments

Fire up the Flash Skills

Good news, mes cama­rades! Just when I thought my job search had hit another record low, a woman from a mul­ti­me­dia local­iza­tion com­pany con­tacted me to do some Flash work.

They take Eng­lish mul­ti­me­dia and web­sites, and trans­late them for inter­na­tional audi­ences. Then they hire people to swap out the eng­lish for the Japan­ese, Span­ish, etc. It sounds like grunt work, but I’m just happy to say that I have another inter­view for next week.

February 13, 2003 » Tags: . » 5 Comments

A Kick in the stomach

Yes, so the other shoe dropped today, as I found out that I fin­ished in second place for the BHCC job.

I kind of knew last week, when I called a woman there who was, up until then, giving me ter­rific sig­nals. She acted very stand-​offish, but polite on the phone, and I should have guessed what mes­sage was being con­veyed. The VP for Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the big man, said that they went with some­one who had more expe­ri­ence, (yet the person in the posi­tion now has no expe­ri­ence, design or tech­ni­cal, in making websites).

I really want to wring some necks, but obvi­ously I am fail­ing to con­vince people that I can do the job. Either that, or there is a glut of talent in Boston, and too few oppor­tu­ni­ties. I’ll go with option 2.

January 28, 2003 » Tags: . » Closed