I got stuck in a elevator on my way back from lunch two days ago. This is not an uncommon occurrence in our building–about 1/3 of our company has gotten stuck at one time or another. However, it’s a bit awakening when it happens to you.
The elevator made a very sudden stop on going up from the 1st floor lobby to the 28th floor, sudden enough enough to give a moment of weightlessness. Fortunately I happened to be with my boss/good friend from work and it was just us. And fortunately we’d just come back from grabbing lunch, so starving to death wasn’t a worry of ours. We pushed the alarm button which just rings a loud bell attached to the elevator car. Nothing happened.
As I mentioned, other coworkers had also been stuck in one of 6 elevators for our floor, one time on our floor with the doors 7/8 closed–just enough to see in, but not enough to get out. When this happened, I thought I should try to be the hero and open the doors, after all, the doors were already cracked open, there were 5 very uncomfortable looking people in the elevator, and the primary function of doors in general is to open and close, so really why not try to open them? Well, another coworker watching the spectacle said, “No no, it’s a liability, building maintenance (or the fire department) will eventually come.” Maintenance did come, 20 minutes later, and opened the already open doors.
However, when you’re the one in an elevator, liability isn’t really a concern–getting out of the elevator is the main concern. So I’m thinking, this is bs, we shouldn’t be stuck in this stupid elevator. Time to give liability the upward fist. I push on the inner elevator car doors and they slooowwwly and heavily slide open and lock in place. We’re half a floor above the 18th floor. This is fortunate as our elevators only services floors 18-35. If we’d gotten stuck at floor 9.5, we’d be shit out of luck. I found the cam on the inner elevator doors to release and open the door. It slides open. Hmm, it’s a 5 foot jump down into the 18th floor elevator lobby. We contemplate worst case scenarios (edge cases as they’re called in our industry) — The elevator comes back to life and shoots upward as one of us is crawling out slicing the person in half at the waist. Or worse, the elevator decides to plunge 18 stories to the 1st floor with the same outcome as the previous case.
We decided that both of these cases are highly unlikely but just to be safe, we should exit quickly as opposed to leisurely straddling the guillotine of separation. I throw my pint of steamed white rice down into the elevator lobby and jump out. My boss follows with his combo #17 (fried founder sandwich on a wheat kaiser roll with fries). I push the up elevator button in the lobby like nothing had happened, we take a functional elevator to our floor, sit down and eat our lunches.
It’s probably a bad sign that recent blog posts are of photography at work, but here’s the view out *my* window. The plant is a coworker’s that was on the verge of death and ready to be tossed. I gave it some water and poof, back to life.
Worked moved offices not long ago. This is the view out one of the meeting rooms of the Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway. It was the home of the Standard Oil Corporation until its antitrust breakup in 1911. There is huge oil burning lamp atop the building.
We rolled out our new HD video player at work. It’s beta, a bit buggy, but still pretty exciting. The newest version of flash allows for streaming of h.264 content inside of flash objects which means no more FLVs and crappy encoding. Here’s a demo with some BBC HD content. You might have to wait a sec to allow the video to buffer. Also, the newest version of Flash is required. If this seems like a viable way to host videos…Vimeo’s going out, Motionbox is in.
Panasonic had this huge plasma thing on display. They also had a 150 incher, but, for some reason, it wasn’t as impressive. Perhaps, after a certain point, the screen takes on a sort of ballpark or movie theater display aura, something that most people have seen many a time.
Been doing a bit of traveling. Was in Vegas for work earlier this week for CES, the biggest, craziest electronics trade show in the world. Did some shooting, some filming, some schmoozing and some talking to the press. Didn’t have much time to get out, except for a nice cowokers dinner at Koi.
I’ll post videos in a bit, which show some of the ridiculousness of CES (harp playing woman, cheesy dance performances, and wtf gadgets), but for now, it’s just me and my room.
You can tell who actually reads your blog or wonders if you’re dead when you don’t post for a month and a half. Those people start telling you to update your blog. My apologies. Amidst some computer rebuilding, I, from time to time, neglect my blog. No wonder only 2 people read it on a regular basis…and one of them is me.
News? It’s officially winter in NYC. This is my first East coast winter, which is substantially different from a Bay Area or Santa Barbara winter. People more often talk about the weather. You must bundle up, or bundle down. My wardrobe was not prepared for winter, so I’m slowly procuring more garnmets that will keep me warm.
I’ve been working at Motionbox for about six months now. We announced today a series B round of funding, which will hopefully put food in my mouth and a roof over my head for a bit longer.
Sushi Club, our annual Campolindian get together, will be held on December 26th at David’s house. Come one, come all.
Below, David visited New York this past weekend. First snow of the year. First snow in NYC for me.
I’ve been working on the design and coding of our of email newsletter at work. Curious? Basically pretend it’s 1999 and use only tables and inline styles for design. Then assume you have these test cases…Mac and PC versus Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Safari versus clients Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook 03, Outlook 07, Entourage. Multiply all by all = test cases. Emailing 45,000 people in one fell swoop–all in a day’s work.
Here’s a happy little site: tools.google.com/gapminder. It’s a google labs flash tool for visualizing the disparities in life expectancy and per captia income by country.
Below, a airplane narrowly escapes nebulous clouds of toxic gas as lightning bolts shoot across the sky, one narrowly missing the jetliner. All the while, a coarse hail falls–some hailstones as large as soccerballs. In the distance a fire rages–a fire so hot that the sky itself has become engulfed in flames!
It’s strange to work in a touristy area. Work is a block from the New York Stock Exchange (building covered in patriotic clothing). You go outside for tea, go to and from work, and there are always tourists, slowing up traffic, pointing their cameras at the tall tall buildings. Sometimes after work, I’ll walk one block up to Federal Hall, sit on the steps and tourist watch.
