| October 26, 2008 | Uncanny Ability to Inspire |
 We saw these "can sculptures" of Mr. Potato Head, WALL-E, and The Little Engine That Could when Chris and I went to our gym at the Water Garden in Santa Monica. Their goal is to bring attention to a local can drive. They built Mr. Potato Head because potatoes have nourished hungry people for centuries... It's such a strange thing to think about in LA where most of the people I know (including myself!) avoid carbs and starches as if they were a plague on humanity. These sculptures were a clever -- and successful -- way to get our attention and remind us that we need to make a donation to the can drive. Labels: art, la, losangeles, santamonica posted by Jess Barron @ 11:03 AM 
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| November 12, 2005 | Sake Bombs Over Beverly Hills |
Andy is in town visiting from SF, and he met me and the Santa Monica Yahoo! crew at Ariake in Beverly Hills for  sushi dinner and many, many bottles of sake, including sake bombs with gold flakes in them (to keep hangovers away!)You really need to look at Chris' flickr photoset to understand just how the Yahoo! Santa Monica posse rolls. We can't even eat sushi without going completely cray-cray. I put my bright red lipstick on Peter and Yun, everyone wore my cream leather coat, and Andy declared that it was all very different than the Yahoo! get-togethers up in Sunnyvale. Afterward, around midnight when we all got back to my house in Venice. Kim and Mary Jo brought 30 people over dressed in wigs and flamboyant clothes for a Dance Dance Revolution / Karoke Revolution party. They were their friends, and my Venice-area neighbors who had been drinking all night at The Whaler. This went on until 6a.m. when the beer (and everyone's energy) ran out. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), Chris' camera's battery died around when the party started, though there is this one random pic. Labels: andy, chris, ddr, karaoke, la, party, sake, santamonica, sushi, venice posted by Jess Barron @ 1:55 PM
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| October 11, 2005 | Why Am I Leaving San Francisco for Santa Monica? |
 I'm excited to announce that next week I'm relocating to Yahoo!'s new Santa Monica office. I'll continue to fulfill my current role as Senior Editor for the U.S. broadband portals (SBC, BellSouth, Verizon, and Plus), but I'll be working among the Full Coverage and Yahoo! News teams who have recently moved down south to be part of the new Yahoo! Media Group. "Why the hell are you leaving San Francisco?" at least hundreds of people have asked, yelled, emailed, and pinged me. It sounds like some people think I have a lotta explainin' to do -- so here are the main reasons why I'm so glad to be making this move: 1. It's a great opportunity to work among colleagues in the Yahoo! Media Group where most of the new original content on the Yahoo! Network (including Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone ) is being created. I've worked in online web content creation for the past ten years (can you believe that -- ten years?! That's making me start to feel a bit old.), so now that Yahoo! is making a big commitment to creating original content it makes sense for me to be located where it's all happening. 2a. I love San Francisco, but to be honest I don't see as much of it as I'd like to. For the past five years(!) I've made the arduous commute from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley -- I worked for two years at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View and for the last three years at Yahoo!'s campus in Sunnyvale. I spend ten hours per week driving on the 101 freeway, and that's 10 hours too many at this point. Sure, I still do cool things up in SF, like produce a weekly pirate radio show with Allyson and go to my friend Derek's Walk-In Movies and occasionally to see bands -- but the truth is, I'm in Sunnyvale in the midst of Silicon Valley waaaay more hours per week than I'm up in SF. And since I never want to live down in the suburban sprawl of "The Valley," I'm looking at many more years of commuting ahead of me if I decided to continue living in San Francisco and working a decent tech job. Pretty much all the best tech companies: Apple, Google, Yahoo!, and eBay are each headquartered somewhere down on the Peninsula, an hour's drive from San Francisco. I love it when Bay Area people comment about all the traffic in Los Angeles. My commute in Northern California is far worse than any Southern California commute I've ever had. 2b. In Los Angeles, I can live near the Yahoo! office and still live in a great area with cafes, bars, and shops that I'll enjoy. My friend Laura and I just signed a lease on an amazing house right across the street from the beach in Venice . It's only 4 miles from the office, and it has trees in the living room growing down into the ground! (Have you ever heard of such a thing?!) And I just might *gasp* ride my bike to work along the Venice to Santa Monica beachfront bike path. 3. I've lived in San Francisco for exactly 5 years. I arrived in SF in October 2000 just as closing time was setting in over the drunken magic of the dotcom days -- the music was turned off and the dim lights were turned up and everyone had to go home alone to their cold, lonely beds.) My instincts are saying that five years is long enough to stay in one city at this point in my life. I've experienced two neighborhoods in two different housing experiments: I spent 3 years living in a loft in Lower Potrero/Dogpatch and 2 years living with some guy friends in a dilapidated Mission District Victorian. I've met tons of amazing people and been to great parties and seen some incredible things. I'll certainly miss my incredible SF friends (August, Owen, Bethany, Allyson , Bryan, Andy, Jen, Deneb, Derek, Leanne, John, Shannon, Daniel, Mici, and everyone else I'm not naming) and I'll definitely be back to visit, but it's time for a change. 4. I actually like Los Angeles. Here's what I wrote about it in my blog back in November 2001. (Four years ago!) I hope that I'll still like LA now that I'm five years older. We'll hafta see. I'll be sure to blog about it as always. 5. My dog and I are fans of warm weather. Bocce, my tiny fruit bat of a dog -- though velvety -- is practically hairless (and fat-less!). San Francisco weather -- though temperate when compared to Boston -- is still not warm enough for this little dog to go running on the beach. I also enjoy wearing flip-flops every day and walking barefoot in the sand. Do you love or hate Los Angeles? How about San Francisco? Do you have any tips for me? Well-wishes or anything to add? Labels: commute, la, moving, sanfrancisco, santamonica, sf, work, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 5:40 PM
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| March 11, 2005 | Rules for Employees Traveling Together |
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In order to contain the potential loss and disruption associated with a catastrophic accident, Yahoo!'s policy is to limit the number and mix of key employees who travel together and are placed at risk. This applies to airline flights, trains, cars and any other mode of transportation. I'm about to jump on a plane to LAX with the entire Yahoo! Full Coverage team (except Molly). You have seen The Full Coverage team's handiwork if you ever view the headlines underneath the "In The News" heading on yahoo.com. Yes, as I have pointed out in the past many times, actual humans choose our news stories. It ensures that the news mix and relevance is better quality than than what can be found on computer-generated headlines found on some other competitor websites. Anyway, please do not tell the folks at Google News that we are all travelling together. We will be spending the weeking at the Loew's in Santa Monica to see the new Yahoo! Media Center and to look for housing. Luckily, there are no rules in the company handbook limiting how many employees may drink together. Labels: drinking, flying, rules, santamonica, travel, work, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 8:42 AM
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| January 27, 2005 | Los Angeles, I'm Yours(?) |
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"There's a city by the sea A gentle company I don't suppose you want to... Oh what a rush of ripe elan Languor on divans Dalliant and dainty Los Angeles I'm yours..." -the Decemberists "Los Angeles, I'm Yours" (a bitter love letter to the city off of a decent album) "Are you moving to Los Angeles?" several friends emailed and called to ask me this week, after reading Wednesday's LA Times article about Yahoo!s new office in Santa Monica. Though I am not among the group of Yahoo! folks who have been told they must relocate to LA -- you know how I like to keep you all guessing. As you know, I love San Francisco and my friends here but the truth of the matter is -- though I live in San Francisco, I don't work in San Francisco. Sunnyvale is such a long commute -- 2 hours each day down the traffic-encrusted, ugly 101 freeway that runs through the middle of Silicon Valley. When you work 12-hour days and then commute 2 hours round-trip on top of that, it really doesn't leave you with very much "life" left for experiencing the city, seeing friends and going to movies, or well, anything except maybe sleep and sometimes eating. The only time I see my friends and go out in the city is on the weekends. And even that is so tough -- because by the time friday rolls around mostly all I want to do is curl up in my bed and not go out to a club see a band. So, the option to live in Venice or Santa Monica and work at an office in Santa Monica seems rather appealing to me. As does the ability to be part of the group of people building Yahoo!'s editorial, news, and content realm. As someone who's worked in an news programming job at Yahoo! for the past 3 years, it's awesome to see the company getting behind the ideas of media and content, once again (after a bit of a hiatus after the dot-com downturn). Plus, as you know, dear readers -- unlike most people who love San Francisco, I also love Los Angeles. By doing this, I am breaking one of the cardinal laws of San Francisco, which is "You must look down dismissively at Los Angeles." I'm sorry -- but Los Angeles is much more of a cultural center than Sunnyvale, California. And Silicon Valley has at least as many ugly strip malls as LA. And plus, the housing and rental prices are still (a bit) cheaper down there. These are things I am thinking about. Labels: commute, dotcom, la, sanfrancisco, santamonica, sf, web, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 4:47 PM
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