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"I want to be
the girl with
the most URLs."
subscribe to poprocks.com
who?
Jess Barron
Los Angeles, California
I do web stuff
thoughts on the past and future of online journalism
Does Online Journalism Have a Future? -- share your thoughts
e a r c a n d y :
1. A guy who I don't know named Jeremy Abbate saw my website and wrote a song called "I Wanna Be As Cool As Jessica Barron". Another person in New York emailed the MP3 to me in Nov. 2004. The narcissist in me loves the lyrics and the song itself is pretty darn catchy. Don't you think?
2. In 2005 I had a weekly radio show on Pirate Cat Radio 87.9 FM in San Francisco from 6-8p.m. on Friday nights. You can listen online from anywhere in the world. Or
just check out our podcast.
3. Also, listen to my LAUNCHcast station
Be my friendster?
Some accomplishments
Who's on Top in 2006?
Goodbye 'Portal Shortall'
Elex Success!
Turning Away from Jackson's Breasts for a Moment.....
The Politics of Searching...
Photos and Video -- Halloween 2006 in Los Angeles
Halloweens I Have Known
You Haven't Lived Until You've Seen a Very Pregnan...
That's Right, I'm Very Knowledgeable About Purses ...
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
May 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
March 2006
April 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
November 2007
New Year's Eve 2005 pics
Mici's pics from the Pirate Cat Party (12/04/04)
Los Angeles (11/27/04)
2004 U.S. Presidential Election (inside Yahoo! newsroom) (11/02/04)
London (11/15/04)
Allyson's photos from our London trip (11/22/04)
Halloween 2004
Oregon beach house weekend for Esther's birthday (10/22/04)
Simone and David's wedding at Fairytale Land in Oakland(08/01/04)
Owen's 30th birthday (05/01/04)
Mirror Project Gallery, "The Make-up Mirror"
Daniel's birthday suprise party (04/23/04)
live band karaoke at El Rio (04/10/04)
August's closing party at Ebb Tide(02/27/04)
valentine's day weekend in NYC(02/16/04)
nice day, new convertible(02/08/04)
nostalgia for the present (02/02/04)
my 30th birthday(01/04)
August's art opening at Ebb Tide (01/03/04)
Jeff's 30th birthday (12/20/03)
pics from Yahoo Holiday Party 2003 with The Flaming Lips (12/12/03)
Nathan's band, the cables(11/15/03)
pics from Burning Man 2003(09/03)
photos from Burning Man 2002 (09/17/02)
pics from Allyson's wedding(09/03)
Cali Convertible Adventures with Nemesis(ter)(07/03)
Allyson's bachelorette party(07/04/03)
Dogpatch Sunrise - There are some visual benefits to waking up at 6a.m. when you live by the San Francisco Bay. (04/11/03)
Kicking it with Frank the KJ (04/05/03)
Bad Pioneer weekend - riding horses in Hollywood and swimming with dolphins in Malibu (02/14/03)
Dat Ass - hip-hop and ghetto tech party, SF, CA (01/25/03)
Jeno spins at House Plant - Oakland, CA (01/17/03)
Halloween Costumes at Yahoo! and in the Castro (10/31/02)
pics from Portland (10/26/03)
the story I told at Fray Day 6 in SF (09/23/02)
What is YOUR Anti-Drug? (09/16/02)
ugly kids (08/19/02)
Save poprocks.com
Picking Blackberries (07/12/02)
she said, she said (06/28/02)
The Phoenix Festival (07/10/02)
Photos from my SXSW road-trip (05/01/02)
off-site:
Esther
Allyson
Lana
Mary
Jen
Leanne
Fruitcake Brigade
Sarah
re-runs:
love letter to los angeles (11/09/01)
pics from Scuba with Migual Migs (08/11/01)
robots and warehouses in my SF neighborhood (06/19/01)
My pics from Burning Man 2001
My pics from Burning Man 2000
My journal from Burning Man '99
Meeting Monica Lewinsky (11/15/99)
What was Diane Sawyer really like? (11/17/95)
Turkish Delights (09/08/95)
The Scatman in Greece's Modern Ruins (08/26/95)
Caught in a Mosh (10/94)
Montreal Stripped Down (08/01/94)
sophomore year spring break in Russia (04/08/94)
conversationskill: a real life mellow-drama of Vassar students abroad in Russia (04/08/94)
pics from the Russia trip (04/08/94)
sophomore year road-trip to Mardi Gras (02/12/94)
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Take a Bite of Me:
10.31.2005
Can You Distinguish Substance from Fluff?
Dear fans of math and logic puzzles,  I have some questions for you to ponder. If Jess Barron was in New York City for 4 nights and I slept no more than 3 hours per night for a grand total of 12 hours...
1. How many fellow journalists did she exchange business cards with during the ONA conference?
2. How many cocktails did she consume?
3. How many hours did she spend in the post-midnight pre-dawn hours running around the city with co-workers and friends?
4. How many seconds was her face in lights on the enormous Reuters billboard in Times Square?
I've been pondering these questions for several hours myself on the plane ride back to the West Coast, and the only answer I can determine is A LOT. If you can provide more specific or accurate answers, perhaps you should consider applying to Mensa. Or perhaps you should stop stalking me.
Contrary to the popular belief of my co-workers (Dave Carpenter, for example), I do usually like to get 6-8 hours of sleep per night under normal circumstances. My body wants that much sleep, and on some greedy nights my brain would probably be happiest with 9-10 hours of sleep. But the problem I run into again and again is that there is generally so much I want to do and sleep merely gets in the way of my ability to get it all done. There are so many people love spending time with, there is so much work I want to accomplish, and there are also numerous personal projects. As a certain boy famously told me back in February 2002 "You have -- as we say in the office -- 'a tendency to overcommit.'"
It's become ever-increasingly true, and it seems like I'll never stop trying to stretch the space-time continuum. My professional work-type duties while in New York included:
My dad's advice when I told him on the phone about the podcasting panel, "Just don't drink too much the night before."
In addition to these professional obligations, I had planned to see my longtime friends Jeff and Lee and also possibly meet Jeremy Abbate who wrote a song called "I Wanna Be as Cool as Jessica Barron" after reading my blog without having ever met me. Of course, there were other friends and people I wanted to meet (including Brooklynite Ted Gesing who created the infamous and much-loved Nutria documentary), but I figured it might be prudent if I focused only on these three. Even though neither one of them has yet to compose a single song in my honor, I gave my scheduling priority to Jeff and Lee since they've been my dear friends for 16 and 10 years, respectively. (I met Jeff when we ran against each other for a student government position in 1989. I met Lee while travelling in Turkey in 1995.) After they've put up with me for so long, it's the least I can do.
I arrived at JFK at 5p.m. on Wednesday, and called Jeff and Lee during my cabride to the hotel (the Hilton on 6th Ave). Jeff took the subway to my hotel and we hungout in my room and raided my mini bar, concocting what seemed to be some really strong gin and tonics. Though you will actually be charged on your bill for the snacks and liquor you take out of your hotel room mini fridge, breaking the plastic seal on the door still feels more like "raiding" to me. It brings me back to hotel stays during barely-chaperoned junior high and high school class trips when we would physically break the cheap locks on the mini bars and spend the evenings getting drunk on the little nip-bottles we didn't quite understand how to combine and mix.
Jeff suggested the idea of eating at The Odeon in the East Village which he (and Citysearch) described as a place that had "a decadent heyday during the hard-partying '80s." Since I can hardly resist anything that's decadent, hard-partying, or from the 1980s, I announced that I was game. Lee called to say that he and his girlfriend Brett would meet us there for dinner. The food was decent. I had an heirloom tomato and goat cheese salad (my two absolute favorites) followed by an entree of broiled scallops. Jeff had a steak. We debated and discussed San Francisco versus New York City versus Los Angeles.
After dinner Jeff and I went to the Stone Rose Lounge, a big airy bar inside the Time Warner Center with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. We drank $17 martinis until about 2 in the morning. When arrived back to my hotel room, I couldn't sleep. Throughout the evening I kept calling the West-Coast-to-East-Coast time difference the "West Coast Advantage" to my friends, because it enabled me to easily party until dawn, but as I sat propped up on pillows in bed checking email on my laptop until 4 in the morning, it was clear that it wasn't quite an advantage. Especially since I needed to be at the Associated Press office by 8:45 a.m. for an all-day Flash class to learn how to build automated slideshows with audio soundtracks.
Wednesday night (umm, that'd be Thursday morning) I slept from 4:30 a.m. - 7:30 a.m., and I was still 10 minutes late for the class.
Though I generally have a strong aptitude for picking up computer applications, it was quickly apparent that I was the worst student in the Flash class. I had to ask the teacher to explain everything and show me everything personally one more time. I was pathetic. And, sadly I can't honestly blame my remedial status on the lack of sleep and amount of drinking. Between timelines, layers, keyframes and tweening, Flash is a complicated program, and it can easily explode your head. Or, at least it can easily explode my head. I wasn't familiar with being the slowest student in the class, and consequently it was a very difficult day.
When I got back to my hotel room a little after 6 p.m., Lee called and told me he made 8:30 reservations at Bread Tribeca. "I made reservations for 4 of us," he said, "So you can bring one of your friends."
I was starving, and I wanted to make the phone calls to see if Sam or Dave had arrived in New York yet and extend an invitation to dinner, but first I needed to close my eyes and attempt to extend myself an invitation to an hour-long nap. I set the alarm on my cell phone, took off my clothes, put on a t-shirt and curled up under the covers.
As exhausted and drained as I was from a day spent inserting keyframes and creating tweens in Flash class, I closed my eyes but could not sleep. Still, I was determined to keep my head on the pillow. At 6:45 p.m. my phone rang, and I jumped out of bed to answer the call. It was my friend Sam who works on content programming for yahoo.com. He had arrived at the hotel and asked if I wanted to go grab some food. I invited him to dinner and quickly got back into bed to try to catch that elusive nap before it was too late.
Twenty minutes later my phone rang again. It was Dave from the Toronto office. He had already arrived and headed out to dinner by himself, but suggested that we meet up later for drinks. I tried for a third time to nap, but quickly gave up and turned on the TV and started changing back into my clothes.
Sam, Lee, Brett, and I had dinner at Bread Tribeca. The food was decent. I had cauliflower puree soup as a starter followed by linguine with clams. We also shared a few bottles of red wine.
After dinner Dave called and said, "I'm at a really fun karaoke bar in the East Village called Second on Second, you should come over here." It was approaching midnight, and as much as I love karaoke -- I wanted to head back closer to the hotel. I honestly every intention of getting to bed at a sober and decent hour. With that in mind, I asked Dave to meet Sam and me at the W hotel bar because it was the only thing I could think of.
During our cabride to the W, Bill and Chris called. Bill was out with colleagues and asked me if I had talked to JB yet. I told him I hadn't but that I had left a message. I also told him that Sam and I were heading over to the W. Chris and the Yahoo! News team had just finished dinner and were wandering around Times Square near our hotel. I told them we were in a cab headed for the W. They said they might meet us there. Dave found Sam and I at the W, but by y 1:30 or 2, we hadn't seen Bill nor the Yahoo! News folks. We were wondering what to do when Bill phoned to say that he and JB were at a bar called Faces and Names near the Rihga hotel. We left the W to walk over to Faces and Names and phoned Chris and Ron on Yahoo! News to let them know. By 2:30 we were all hanging out together at Faces and Names.
By 3a.m. there was talk of heading back to the hotel. JB, Chris, Sam, Dave and I started the walk back, but were immediately seduced by the bright white lights of a neighborhood pizza place. JB ordered us a pie to go, then he and Dave went into the bodega nextdoor to pick up some beer while we waited for the pizza to be ready. We carried brown bags of pizza and beer back to the hotel and decided to continue the party in JB's room. I headed to my room to get Bocce since she had been cooped up in the hotel all day.
We ate pizza and drank beer until around 4 a.m. when we were kidnapped and gagged by guerilla marketers for Yahoo! News' Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. Bocce liked the pizza, but didn't necessarily enjoy her time as a walking Hot Zone advertisement. At 4:30a.m. Sam and Dave headed to bed.
JB, Chris, and I took the dog outside for a walk, and Chris snapped action photos of me picking up Bocce's poop. Can you say poop-arazzi? I thought you could.
After all that excitement, Bocce and I decided it was time for bed.
The next day I attended some panels and prepared for my own. It went fairly well (you can listen to a portion of my talk), though afterward I wished I had talked more about content for podcasts than mostly just focusing on the how-tos.
After the ONA-sponsored cocktail hour where I met Mark Fiore, some folks from CBS News, Anj from Yahoo!s Toronto office and many others, we all headed back to our rooms to freshen up and then bundle up and agreed to meet up at 8:30 at South's in Tribeca where we would have some more drinks before our 9:45 dinner reservation at 66. While back in my hotel room, I decided to don my Jackie Kennedy outfit which I had packed in case an inkling of Halloween spirit hit me. Post-cocktail-hour I felt it was a great idea to wear a bright pink suit and pillbox hat even though none of my other compatriots were dressed in costume. This is how I roll.
Lee and Brett met Sam, Dave, Anj and I at South's. Then Bill showed up carrying an unopened container of marshmallow Fluff that he said he had brought for me. "I hope you're not implying that our Yahoo! Broadband Portal content is fluff!" I said giggling and grabbing the container of Fluff.
After a while, the Yahoo! News crew (Neil, Ron, Oren, Chris, Sarah, and Peter) arrived at South's, and we all walked down the block to 66. Jeff and his boyfriend Daniel were sitting in the lounge drinking cocktails when we arrived.
Sam -- who was just meeting Jeff for the first time -- commented: "It was obvious that Jeff had known you for years because when you walked into this chichi restaurant dressed as Jackie Kennedy and carrying a giant container of Fluff, he wasn't the slightest bit surprised."
At 10p.m., we found out the hard way that NYC reservations for big groups rarely start on time. At 10:30 p.m. we were drinking ginger margaritas in the lounge area and noshing on appetizers as we waited for our back room to be ready. By 11 p.m. (I think) we were seated for dinner at three tables in our own room. I was seated at the end of a table surrounded by my NYC friends. Daniel and Jeff were on my left, Lee and Brett on my right.
Before any of the food started arriving on the tables, Bill instigated the idea that he and I would open the container of Fluff and offer it around to the other tables. "Would you care for some fluff?" I said as I did my best 1960s stewardess impression. Our hard work and dedication paid off. We were triumphant. We managed to get nearly every person to try a spoonful of Fluff -- and several brave souls plunged their fingers right into the container. Others used chopsticks.
The barbarous and uncouth "Fluff course" of the meal mortified my black-clad NYC friends. Living in San Francisco for five years (and going to Burning Man five times) definitely enhanced my already overactive capacity for absurdity. If a group of twenty of my co-workers are giggling and sticking their fingers into their mouths -- in my mind it was a great ice-breaker. It was the least I could do.
Dinner ended sometime after midnight. Lee, Brett, and Daniel headed home and many of my co-workers decided to call it a night, but Jeff, Anj, Dave, Oren, Sarah, Ron, Chris, Mic, Peter and I ventured to Second on Second. We arrived, got ourselves some drinks and put our name in for karaoke to do Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Unfortunately the stack of song requests on the KJ's podium was enormous and we left to head back to the hotel before our name was called.
This time the late night after-party was in Ron and Chris' rooms. We drank beers from the mini bars and chatted as music played from Chris' laptop. He played Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths at my request. The TV was on playing an endless loop of Larry King interviewing commentators about the Libby indictment with the volume turned all the way down. It seemed certain that Chris and I will become fast friends. And Anj and me too. Even though we just met -- she and I were having a great time hanging out together. Sam, Dave and I are already pretty tight after working together for over 2 years. (Dave and I have even partied in London together on a work trip...)
On Saturday I attended a bunch more panels. My favorite was Digital Visual Storytelling, though the Saturday afternoon panel "Journalism 2010: Who's leading the way?" (which our own Neil Budde sat as a panelist on) was also quite interesting with its now-seemingly-obligatory and impassioned blogger versus "dinosaur" bashing. Afterward we went to the Reuters-sponsored cocktail party.
Then we headed to a bar in the East Village, where we smoked flavoured tobacco out of a giant hookah.
For dinner we went to Il Bagatto (on Jeff's excellent suggestion). I ate with Daniel and Jeff while unfortunately my starving co-workers (Sam, Ron, Anj and Chris) and their entourage of young journalism students were kept waiting at the bar for almost an hour (unacceptable!). Luckily, they made lemonaide from lemons and befriended the perky bartender (she gave Jeff and Daniel three olives each in their martinis!)
After dinner we wandered around the East Village spotting (and accosting) folks in Halloween costumes. There were even more Ali G's this year than last year (this Yahoo! one was my favorite). Then we went to KGB for some drinks amid Soviet paraphernalia. We got back to the hotel around 2:30 and I took Bocce for a walk and then went to bed. I seriously needed some sleep.
On Sunday morning I packed and checked out of the hotel, and took a cab to Park Slope Brooklyn to visit Jeff and Daniel at their apartment and meet their Great Dane puppy Ace. Ace is beautiful. He's sleek and gray. He's also HUGE! He weighs 125-pounds and is still growing. Jeff and Daniel say he will soon be 50 pounds larger. Unfortunately it was difficult-if-not-impossible for 12-pound middle-aged Bocce to play with a teenage dog who was ten times(!) her size. Jeff and Daniel made us brunch of pumpkin pancakes, eggs, bacon, and Daniel's homemade (from scratch!) pumpkin pie. It was awesome. And then I got in a car to head back to JFK to fly home.
I'm sorry I didn't meet my personal songwriter Jeremy Abbate, but I'm psyched that I ended up getting my photo displayed in lights on the huge Reuters screen in Times Square (thanks Sarah!)
P.S. Almost all photos I'm linking to in this post were taken by Chris Sarah, Ron, and Jeff as I left my camera behind this time...
10.26.2005
From LAX to NYC for ONA
In a moment I'm about to take a cab to LAX to fly to NYC to attend the Online News Association (ONA) conference. On Friday from 1:30-3:00 I'm speaking on a panel called "What's Still New in New Media?" My topic is podcasting. I'm excited to talk to some other journalism folks, and also to hangout with my friends Lee and Jeff (Bocce and I are dying to meet Jeff and Daniel's Great Dane puppy, Ace!) and go out on the town with my work peeps.
10.19.2005
'There are places so dirty that we have to wear gloves.'
If my packing made Bocce nervous, the movers made her go completely ballistic. 
She was outraged and barked non-stop for the first 2 hours they were working in the house. I kept her locked in the upstairs bathroom, which unfortunately has a glass door so she was watching and giving her "This-is-an-outrage!"-bark as they removed all the contents from the house. I think she thought they were robbing us. Eventually, all the ferocious barking took its toll on a dog who is acclimated to a life of incessant langour, and she surrendered and curled up on my bathmat in an exhausted heap.
I didn't let her out until the movers were finished. It was best that she didn't witness the fast and furious dismantling of the household by three people we had never seen before. I wanted to shield her from the upheaval.
As the shelves and furniture were removed an embarassing abundance of dust was revealed on te hardwood floors. Dust bunnies, dust kittens, dust tigers, dust dragons -- we had a whole dust menagerie. "I'm sorry! I'm never at home to do housework," I said to one of the movers. "Is this place totally disgusting?"
"No!!" he said, becoming animated. "This place is not bad at all. There are places that are so dirty that we have to wear gloves." He made a sickened face.
"Ewwww! Really?! That's gross!" I said, feeling terrible for him, but suddenly feeling much better about my own dust menagerie.
I swept and vaccuumed after they removed most of the big pieces, and hours later after they left with all of my stuff in a giant truck on its way to Los Angeles, I let Bocce out of the bathroom where she had been locked away. She sniffed around at the empty house, nails clicking on the hardwood floors as she slunk around looking for a nonexistent cushy surface to curl up on. When she realized that Big Plum (the purple velveteen couch) and my bed were both gone, she looked perplexed by the empty house. I scrubbed clean the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, and began to pack my car full to the roof.
When the Beetle convertible was almost packed to the roof with the remaining boxes, I realized that the cactus plants were left up on the ledge in the upstairs bathroom. I didn't want to leave them behind, so after the car was packed full, I lodged them in the front seat between Bocce and me in the car. I left San Francisco at 7:50 p.m., driving East over the Bay Bridge with a very nervous thin-skinned dog perched precariously atop a shaky stack of clothing aside of an extremely prickly plant. She looked at me dubiously as we began the long drive south.
10.18.2005
Doggie 'Dark City'
Moving to a new apartment is stressful, even with professional movers who are supposed to pack everything up for you.  For instance, there are things you may not want your professional movers to pack up and handle. Perhaps you might want to pack the contents of your lingerie drawer yourself. Then, there are those hundreds of loose CDs lying around the bedroom because you've been ripping them to your PC and transferring them to your iPod. And if you share your place with housemates (as I do) you might have stuff that's mixed together that you need to separate out -- such as all the plates and silverware and DVDs of Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, and the Simpsons and games for the Playstation.
So, I spent all my "free time" (read: the 6-8 hours each day when a normal person might sleep) for the past three days trying to go through the house -- locating things and boxing some of it up myself.
When objects are being moved around and put into containers in the middle of the night, Bocce -- the small nervous Italian Greyhound creature -- knows that I'm packing. She's seen it many times before. We've lived in 7 different places in her 8 years -- Providence, RI (with Damien); Somerville, MA (with Ellen); Cambridge, MA (with Ellen); Los Angeles (with Jeff and Hillary); and 2 different Dogpatch live/work lofts (with Gareth) and the current dilapidated Mission Victorian (with Owen, Ric, and Sye). Additionally, I've gone on hundreds of trips all over the country and Bocce has gone on most of those as well. She's been on cross country flights at least 30 times. She's also been to exotic locations like St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. So, whenever she sees me packing late at night, she thinks she's either going to the kennel or she's getting on a plane. And though she doesn't really mind either of these things, the uncertainty seems to make her nervous. She may be wondering if she's going to be left behind.
Three days of packing has taken its toll on her. Furniture and books have been moved to unfamiliar places and Bocce is dubious about the piles of boxes creating a new wall in the living room.
She hides under the covers on my bed, nervously shivering. And I imagine that big moves like this are like some version of a doggie nightmare, akin to the movie "Dark City," where every night while the human population of the city is drugged into a deep sleep -- the alien overlords reconfigure all the buildings and city layout and change around entire households of people, importing new friends and family members from the existing pool of people. Yeah, moving is totally like "doggie 'Dark City.'" Her whole idea of reality will be 100% changed in less than 24 hours.
Has anyone moved with pets? Any horror stories? Also, did you see 'Dark City?' What did you think? The images and ideas in that movie stay with me, particularly the idea about escaping to Shell Beach.
10.17.2005
'Bi-Maintenance'
Laura, my new housemate at my new house in Venice, is a friend from work who I've known for about a year or a year-and-a-half. She's done the radio show with Allyson and me, and we've worked together quite a bit on news coverage at Yahoo!. She's on the Full Coverage team.
When we were discussing the idea of living together, I asked her "Do you think we'll get along?"
She said, "Yeah, I think we will!"
Then we went on to discuss our varying amounts of partying, sleep and work schedules, pets (she has a cat, I have a dog), standards of cleanliness and organization (both fairly clean and neat, though I have been known to throw clothes around in my bedroom).
I forget all the things I said exactly, but at one point Laura said, "You're pretty high maintenance."
"I am?!" I said. It kind of surprised me, as I can easily spend 8-10 days in the desert at Burning Man camping sans shower. Also, I happily don sweats and go to brunch or run errands with bed-head on the weekends. Of course, I also like to wear impossibly cute outfits (complete with un-ergonomically correct shoes) and get my hair professionally blown-out (a new luxury I treat myself to a few times per month).
And then, today as I was packing to move south to Los Angeles I realized that I have 3 medium-sized boxes of shoes, 2 medium-sized boxes of purses, and 2 medium-sized boxes of bath and beauty products. It was hard to argue that I was 100% "low maintenance." But I'm certain that I'm not high maintenance either.
To solve this disturbing existential crisis -- I coined the phrase "bi-maintenance," which I define as "a person who alternates between high maintenance and low maintenance behaviors and grooming." Please start peppering your conversations and blogs with this hot new Jess Barron-originated phrase.
Tomorrow I must move my bi-maintenance butt (and copious accessories) 385 miles south.
10.11.2005
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?
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