Subject: Technicalities Resent-From: staff.newyork@agency.com, tech.newyork@agency.com, tech.newyork.regional@agency.com, techmanagers.newyork@agency.com Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 22:26:39 -0400 From: "Mitch Golden" To: nystaff@agency.com, "Technicalities (Woodbridge)" Technicalities April 16, 2001 *) A Fable When I was a kid my parents used to read me bedtime stories. Recently I was thinking about one of them, realizing that I couldn't recall how it ended. It went something like this: "Once upon a time there was a happy land where everyone lived together in prosperity and bounty. The people and their rulers were as one, and they built great temples and monuments and the kingdom was the envy of all the other nations. "Then came one year when the crops were bad, and a time of great famine fell upon the land. The rulers looked around themselves and said 'No longer shall we live here as we have; let us each move to the towering hills of our great country and dwell near the clouds.' "And so it came to pass that the nobles and the priests and the princes and their courts all built beautiful castles up in the mountaintops, but the farmers and the ranchers and the fishers and the traders and the smiths and the storekeepers kept living in the Six Valleys. The princes would send down decrees, exhorting their subjects about the progress that was being made up in the lofty altitudes. "Yet even as the princes lived in the snowy heights, the army of the Kingdom Of The Wise Men was massing on the border. And it came to pass that the famine continued, and the people of the land were weak and tired, and the army attacked..." I guess I must have fallen asleep about here, because I can't remember how it ends up. Does anyone else know? *) Geek Reproduction By now everyone knows that Chris Stetson has had twin girls. Years ago I had the honor of knowing the first person to put up a web site to announce the birth of his son. Now that's commonplace, and most of the yuppies I know have sites regaling the world with every event of their lives. Yet Chris did manage something new: none of my other friends ever put up sonograms of their children all the way back to the images of them as multicellular spheres. (He refers to this as a fetus, but I believe the proper medical term for this stage of development is a blastula.) Extra geek points awared for using a Java Server Page for this purpose. (http://www.metadogs.com/family/feti.jsp) *) New Folks There are several new folks who have made the leap to join our intrepid band of geeks. David Goodine - used to work with me way back when, back in the dawn of the Web age. We worked for a company that blew up in a hailstorm of lawsuits and acrimony, long, long before such things were fashionable. David and I have always been ahead of our time, and anyone who's been around as long as David has must be at least a Tech Director, right? (As part of his full welcome to AGENCY.COM, they made him move desks his first week here, and his computer didn't really function for about 3 weeks. We're still working on getting him on the techmanagers alias.) Jennifer Sethman - worked for my friends at the Princeton Review. She's ready for us: they're undoubtedly even more nuts than anything we have around here. She's also been at Sapient, bless her soul. Michelle Anderson - decided that she just couldn't get enough of AGENCY.COM, so when the Avon office was closed she decided to move here. Dedication some call it. Others use different words. (The same ones people used when they described Ken Kringdon's move from Boston!) *) Karma Down We have some tough times going around just about now, with the just completed launch of the Cushman-Wakefield extranet, and the imminent eMaritz beta. Partly this is just the birth pangs of any project, and partly, well, "weeks in a row of Friday the 13ths" as David Goodine put it. Actually I am optimistic about both of projects - I believe that both sites will come up on time, and will serve our clients well, even if we have to do a bit of persuading of the clients about such matters. The stress of these jobs has taken its toll: David Bortnichak smoking again, and Yuju's even eating bagels. But on a more serious note - Peter Gluck was hit by a car a few days ago. Fortunately, as he put it, he "escaped Sirius injury". *) Karma Up We were supposed to have another tech dept karoke night a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't come off quite as planned. Due to a combination of e-mail foulups and the noteworthy lameness of all the ACOM/NY employees (as for example evidenced by the number of you who made such a big deal out of collecting a $200 corporate gift), many did not show. And Ritesh, who as usual encourages such activities but leaves me to foot the bill for them, blew it off as well. We had about 10 of our hometown nerds out, and Tony Ward never fails to miss any opportunity to collect free food and (especially) drink. Mia Banner also managed to limp into the restaurant as well. Since the novelty of last time had worn off, we took a slightly different approach. This time, people picked songs for other people to sing, and the name of the game was humiliation. Thus: Eugenia refused my choice of "Itsy-Weeny-Tini-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", but I did make Tony sing "Thank Heaven For Little Girls". Eugenia also refused to sing "Like A Virgin", which left it as usual to Scott Huang. (By the way, you might be interested to know that there is a substantial cultural gap between Madonna and the presumably Japanese producers of the video disk. The "Like A Virgin" disk featured lots of pictures of little children frolicking in the park. Yeesh.) In a vain attempt to humiliate _me_ someone made me sing "My Way". Clearly whoever thought that I would be bothered by that failed to take into account my exhibitionism and ego. You're going to have to do better than that. *) Letters to the editor It was a quiet week last time, so I didn't get much in the way of replies to my last missive. I think it was the lack of sexual content, and in its absence people just gave me grief about my numerology. Moshe Sambol pointed out that there are many possibilities for any given numerical series, and sent me this geek link to search it out: http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/eisonline.html Still, he and I got into a bit of a debate as to whether we ought to consider sequences of whole numbers, or whether fractions are also allowed. I still say 0, 4, 6, 7, 7.5, 7.75, ... but he prefers to think that it's zero next, as in the coefficients in expansion of Dirichlet series Product_p (1-(Kronecker(m,p)+1)*p^(-s)+Kronecker(m,p)*p^(-2s))^(-1) for m = -17. Deanne Draeger reminded me that I had forgotten about the initiative involving the plastic monkeys. (Please don't ask.) While I agree it had slipped my mind, I just don't think it counts, because there wasn't a number attached to it. *) A final note I just now finally finished doing my taxes. Took a long time, and it is a partial explanation for the long period between these newletters this time. Let me just say this - with my bill what it was, and ACOM shares where they are, I may have to start charging for these.