| December 2, 2008 | Space Invaders Invaded My Office |
 I ordered some classic video game decals from Etsy to cover some of my blank, white office walls.Space Invaders was my brother's and my favorite game in 1982 when my mom (who was a waitress at the time) spent approx $225 to buy us the Atari 2600. We were the first kids in our neighborhood to own one. We played Space Invaders for 6-8 hours at a time, until we had blisters on our fingers. I'm not going to talk about how much time I spent trying to get all of these guys lined up straight. (And they're still not entirely straight...) posted by Jess Barron @ 11:18 AM 
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| November 18, 2008 | Maggie and Bocce, Working Like Dogs at My Office |
 Both Bocce and Maggie are here at the office with me today. Suddenly with a clatter, a guy appeared outside bravely cleaning our high-rise windows. The sight of someone on a platform dangling from ropes right outside the 7th story floor-to-ceiling window directly over Sunset Blvd drove the dogs absolutely ballistic. It defied their dog logic entirely. I'm just thankful that their barking and lunging at the glass didn't cause this guy to lose his balance. These guys must have nerves of steel! I know I couldn't do it.I was on an hour-long conference call with the team in NYC, and had to keep trying to press mute so everyone wouldn't think I was working from inside an animal shelter posted by Jess Barron @ 11:16 AM
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| December 1, 2006 | Goodbye 'Portal Shortall' |
 These past two weeks have been all over the place. I was up in Toronto to say goodbye to Greg Shortall (a.k.a. "portal Shortall") and to interview new editorial candidates for Yahoo!'s Canadian Broadband team. As Greg told the candidates we were interviewing to fill his vacated position, "Karaoke makes up about 18% of this job." How true! (Especially when I'm around.) The day after I returned to LA we moved into our new house (more on this soon), and my mom flew out to visit us from Boston one day later, and the very next day we drove six hours to Prescott, Arizona to see Chris' family for Thanksgiving. It was a lot of fun and a lot of craziness. Labels: greg, job, karaoke, mom, prescott, strimbus, toronto, travel, work, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 6:02 AM
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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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| July 7, 2005 | Awakened to London Blasts |
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When you work in online news, today is one of those terrible days when you wake up to 10 or more alerts from the AP coming in on your Blackberry one after the other. Pop. Pop. Pop. The messages say things like "LONDON (AP) Police have reported \'a number of fatalities' at one London subway station" and "LONDON (AP) Hospital officials say 190 people are being treated for injuries from explosions in central London." It is a terrible feeling. My phone rings before the alarm goes off at 7a.m. I wake up and pull the laptop off the floor and up into bed with me. More than 10 Yahoo! Messenger windows are active and highlighted in bright orange at the bottom of my screen as I sit in bed in a similarly bright orange Trainspotting T-shirt (that used to belong to J.P. before he disappeared). The active Messenger windows are all of my Yahoo! news co-producers (in Canada, East Coast, West Coast, and London) who are pinging me to join voice chats to discuss how to handle this news on our front doors and portal pages. Everybody is so on top of it, but still we're scrambling to stay on top of the latest angles: How many dead? How many injured? Is Al-Queda being officially blamed? My friend Clare in the Yahoo! London office is also telling me via Messenger that she narrowly missed getting onto the bus that minutes later exploded. She decided to take a faster bus this morning instead. I'm telling her that I'm glad she's OK, but this is all pretty horrible. If you want to read the latest news on this story, check out the Yahoo! Full Coverage page. The people working on it -- my friends and colleagues on the Full Coverage team -- are updating it with the best articles, info and photos available online. Also, check out the London bomb blast Flickr pool (sent to me by Esther). posted by Jess Barron @ 7:00 AM
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| June 17, 2005 | Make way for ducklings on Yahoo! Campus |
When I arrived at work today a lone female duck was roaming in the middle of the well-manicured grassy quad, quacking non-stop and looking confused. I thought it was a little bit strange. What did she want with Yahoo!? Did she have a usability issue?  Was she having a hard time communicating with our customer care department?An hour later someone heard peeping down a drain hole in the middle of the lawn, and saw a bunch of ducklings trapped down there... Check out my flickr photoset of their rescue. Labels: ducks, photos, rescue, work, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 5:26 PM
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| May 16, 2005 | Jess and The City |
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I'm in New York City for the week to meet with ABC News for work. Bocce and August and I flew in on Saturday and stayed at Mindy and Erik's place on the way Upper West Side near Columbia. (I think it's called Morning Side Heights?) We saw a teeny tiny baby squirrel in the park. We went to Erik's architecture school year-end party and then went to the East Village to meet Lee, Brett, Will, Daniel, and Jeff. On Sunday we packed up Mindy's car, so that she could leave for Carnegie-Mellon, and then we went to Lee's place in the Lower East Side (which is confusingly layed-out and furnished exactly like his old apartment in SOMA), and we drank a jug of red wine. Then we travelled to Park Slope, Brooklyn to Jeff and Daniel and Lance's compound where we sat at the silver table in their backyard garden and grilled steaks and drank Rasberry Lambic and more wine. Bocce humped Odie (Lance and Mark's dog) who is male and part Collie and much larger and was completely indifferent to her advances. This morning, August and Bocce and I took the F train to Coney Island where we saw Astroland and The Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone, and a clam bar. Bocce didn't want to go on any of the rides. August ate two hot dogs from Nathan's with sourkraut and onions, and I had cheese fries with ketchup. Now we're about to head to the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street, which I stayed at in 2001 when I was travelling for Microsoft to meet with Viacom to discuss interactive music television projects we were working on for UltimateTV. They have a pretty interestingly-designed lobby, and they allow small dogs. On Wednesday I'm going with my work peeps -- Dave, Jen, Heather, and Arleen to the Good Morning America show, but we don't know what the topic is yet. Labels: august, bocce, jeff, lee, mindy, nyc, travel, work posted by Jess Barron @ 3:38 PM
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| March 18, 2005 | What goes through my head when I'm doing my job at Yahoo! and I put up the headlines about Terri Schiavo... |
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A few months ago, my mom asked me to sign some official papers saying that I am her health care proxy if she is ever unable to speak for herself in the hospital. She told me she doesn't want "to be kept alive by machines" if something happens and her health is compromised. This document is helpful because it means my mom and I spoke about this topic, and that I "understand her wishes." I agree with her that this is what I would also want for myself in such a circumstance. However, I also think it's easy to say that you believe in this as an idea or a concept; I can't fathom how difficult it must be to make these decisions when something tragic actually happens. For instance, if my mom was ever in a coma and on life support systems from an accident, would I be able to tell the doctors to unplug her from the machines? Further complicating the issue, the younger brother of one of my friends was in a coma after an accident a few months back. Several of the doctors at the time said that his prognosis for recovery was very slim. Months later, he has slowly been making progress -- though he still requires a ton of hospital care and rehabilitation. I feel so terrible for all of these families involved in these rough cases. I also feel terrible for Terri Schiavo who will be remembered by like this rather than by who she was in the photos that were taken of her before the brain damaging incident occurred. Further complicating my feelings on Terri Schiavo, is that in the pre-1990 pretty photos of her -- she had been struggling with an eating disorder that some doctors say caused the very chemical imbalance that gave her this brain damage in the first place. So, was she ever really "OK"? And honestly, are any of us ever? posted by Jess Barron @ 12:41 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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| April 4, 2003 | The Party Car |
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About an hour ago I entered my apartment building and I walked into the elevator along with my neighbor. We were both coming home after at the conclusion of our day's at work. "I don't always carry half full bottles of beer in my gym bag," I said when he looked down at my half open duffle bag and noticed the Pete's Wicked Ale poking out between my sports bra and my running shoes. "I've just come from the party car!" He just looked at me quixotically. This evening -- after spending the past two years riding caltrain round-trip from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley almost every day -- I found out about the "party car," which apparently has been in existence for the past 8 years. Tonight I left work on the 5p.m. shuttle from Yahoo campus to the Sunnyvale caltrain station. I never usually leave as early as 5 p.m., but now that I'm starting work at 6a.m., I'm making an effort to leave on the 5 p.m. shuttle. So anyway, on the shuttle, everyone's all rowdy and talkative 'cause it's Friday (usually everyone's pretty quiet), and I meet this girl Jen, and she goes, "So, are we all getting on the party car?" "Ummm, what's the party car?" I asked. "On the 81 north train the front-most car is the party car. People bring beer and snacks and they play music and it's a party car. They even have a website," she said, "partycar.com" "What?! I didn't know you could drink on the Caltrain?!" I exclaimed, somewhat shocked. I had never seen anyone imbibing on the train before. Everyone on the Caltrain -- myself included -- always reads the newspaper, types on their laptop, or sends emails on their Blackberry and/or Palm. People don't often talk with the others around them, and no one ever has a flask, beers, or a bottle of wine... "I must experience this party car," I said to Jen, still doubting its existence. At the Sunnyvale station, we boarded the train in the front car. Jen told me that most of the party car peeps get on around Palo Alto. Sure enough, people boarded and started cracking open beers, and within five minutes they asked us, "Hey, do you ladies want a beer?" Jen and I met all the party car peeps and drank a few beers, and I hafta tell you, the hour-long train ride went by really fast. If you take the caltrain, I highly recommend you try out the party car. You won't be disapointed. Next time I'm bringing beer and snacks to share. The message of the story, dear readers, is never let the work-week get you down. There is often an unexpected party car somewhere on the horizon, just waiting to be discovered... The party car has even inspired some phat rhymes from its many attendees. It really doesn't surprise me. The artist behind this one, breaks it down about why the party car is far uperior to driving in your ass up the 101 freeway home to the city: driving on the 101: Mack truck on your rear head on collision traffic frustration mortal fear flirting with death stewing about some thoughtless ass getting cut off by a stupid jerk death wish insanity CHP ticker getting flipped off being stuck in a rubber-neck delay scream and shout breaking down with a car riding in the party car: joining in our weekly cheer ale vs. lager decision friendly conversation Tecate beer TGIF relaxing with Harp and Bass winding down from a hard week at work beer buzz serenity Schlitz Malt Liquor tying one on getting home the partycar way Guiness Stout fortifying with vitamin R Labels: commute, sanfrancisco, sf, siliconvalley, work posted by Jess Barron @ 8:26 PM
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