Author: cosmo

The new office is finally starting to take shape. After several weeks in March of looking at places all around Longmont, including a “unique floorplan” (words to watch for in real estate listings!) ex-photo studio, I found a place that was really cool. Third floor, balcony, wonderful view of the Flatirons in the distance, and convenient to Boulder and a lot of restaurants. It was great. But after several more weeks of planning and anticipation, the deal fell through and I was left with nothing. Our current office was stuffed to capacity: seven people in about 400 square feet. I was feeling frustrated and a bit desperate.

The next day I found an office that was actually still being rented to another company that had folded, and it looked like I could sneak in and take over the space. It had all of the things I had been looking for: private offices for everyone, lots of windows and natural light, other nice offices in the building, and the location was nice– not as many restaurants, not as close to the ultimate field, farther from Boulder (sorry Brian!), but definitely more convenient for me: about a mile south of my house.

Here’s a view from the “lobby”, which is an open space with some really uncomfortable chairs. Two of the offices are visible, complete with the old furniture the previous tenants had left when they vacated.

Here’s a shot down a hallway with offices on the left and straight ahead and a file room on the right.

The ceiling is “industrial” but there are some nice lights– the offices also have the same lights. They’re fluorescent, which I don’t really care for, but they’re nicer than any fluorescent lights I’ve seen. There are cubicles on the right, and the lobby beyond that.

Well, time went by and I worked out a deal. After signing all of the papers it was time to give this place some character. The first order of business: remove all of the cubicles and existing furniture. The other company actually sold all of it to some business furniture auction place, so it cleared out the space.

Next, I felt like we had to spice up the walls a bit. The entire place– including the ceiling hardware– was painted a uniform cream color. After a bit of thought and some consultation with my good friend Christina, who agreed to lend her artistic eye to the process, we came up with a set of potential paint colors. Everyone was allowed to choose the colors they wanted for their offices. I guess it was no surprise that everyone picked something different. The end result is seven offices with fourteen colors. Yikes!

The other major change was the carpet. I’m barefoot all the time– even in the winter– so it’s important to me that the floor under my feet is nice. The office had ugly industrial-type carpet everywhere, and I like pile carpet. So it was time to rip up all of that and replace it with a high-grade residential carpet and a nice soft rubber pad on the concrete.

Without the cubicles, furniture, and carpet, it looks a lot less friendly:

But things started warming up when the paint hit the walls.

The file room, soon to be a break room with a sink and refrigerator, will have tile instead of carpet. Here’s how it looked this afternoon, prior to the grout work:

The paint and break room work should wrap up tomorrow, then carpet on Monday, and we’ll move in Tuesday. It’ll be exciting: a big step for Zing. And not a day too soon.

Today’s funny spam is a credit report:

I mean, here’s this guy just surfing the web or checking email, and his wife (maybe– she’s wearing about six rings) comes up behind him and starts pawing him. She whispers little sweet nothings into his ear: What’s YOUR Score?

This is just begging for someone to caption it.

Apparently the spammer sending me a LinkedIn invitation is in the “jeff” section of his mailing list.

I have mixed feelings about the new office.

Upside: Shower after ultimate.
Downside: The commute to the ultimate field will no longer be 90 seconds.

Of course one of the motivations for moving into our current office is its proximity to the ultimate field. This time around, the new office had a different set of priorities. I guess you can’t win ’em all.

I was working late this evening, as usual, and when I finished up I was poking around the internet a bit. I found a site I’d bookmarked long ago and checked to see if it was still there. Sure enough. It has hundreds of old Apple II games… the games that were on 5.25″ floppy disks. Classics that I played as a kid, like Lode Runner, Taipan, Night Mission Pinball, and of course Thom’s favorite, Black Magic.

I downloaded the disk images and the emulator necessary to run it. Reading some documentation, it seems like the emulator has even been ported to iOS so you can run these classic games on your iPhone or iPad. Since I have neither, I had to figure out how to run it under Linux. There’s a Windows version of the emulator, and of course it’s possible to run (some) Windows programs on a Linux system using Wine.

Off I went. I downloaded the latest source code for Wine and compiled it, then installed it on my desktop. The games sort of worked– Lode Runner came up in all it’s two-color glory, but the keyboard wasn’t working quite right. And yes, I actually still remember the keys to move the guy in Lode Runner!

I wondered if maybe Wine was the problem, so I looked for some old Windows programs to see if I could run them. I chuckled when I found an old copy of Netscape 4.8. I have newer versions, of course, but it seems like testing something from the mid-90’s would be a great idea. I ran the installer and voila! there it was: Netscape 4.8, running beautifully on my KDE Linux desktop.

Just for kicks I went to this blog site. Wow, it works!

The font styling leaves something to be desired (I think this version of Netscape was before CSS really existed) but hey, it’s not too shabby. It probably helps that I wrote the code for this blog a long time ago and it’s not using a lot of the CSS tricks that “modern” sites use.

It’s funny to remember those fond days of using Netscape Mail. Now if I can figure out what’s going on with the Apple II emulator, I can remember the even fonder days of Lode Runner…

I was looking at a web site this evening, and noticed some text on the page was blinking. Strange. No one does that any more… not since about 1994. But out of morbid curiosity I checked the HTML source:

Wow. The fabled blink tag. The one web programmers mock. I didn’t know it was even supported in modern browsers! Amazing.

So I’m looking online for a nice big conference table for the new office. I found something that looked promising but when I clicked the link to see it…

So it’s not available– which is kind of annoying but oh well– and the site’s other recommended items I “may be interested in” include hubcaps and SUV window pillars.

Uhh…

Alex was in the kitchen tonight with Laralee. He mentioned to her that the shampoo bottle in his shower was empty, and there wasn’t any more under the bathroom sink. She shrugged and said he could just use Kyra’s shampoo for a few days.

He was aghast. “But then my hair will smell like gummi bears!“

Well, Zing is certainly evolving.

About a year ago, there were three of us. Now there are seven, and I’m considering an eighth. We’re about to move into a sweet new office. Our client list continues to grow. Somehow we all continue to be busy.

It’s been an interesting ride over the past year. The dynamics of the team have changed quite a bit, for everything from playing foosball to going out to lunch together. Right now we’re all squeezed into an office that’s comfortable for four but most certainly cramped for seven. I think all of us are excited to get a bigger space where almost all of us (except the New Guys) will have private offices. It’ll be fun to see what happens with that, and how much more changes over the course of the year.

Onward and upward!

As a domain reseller, I often purchase domains on behalf of customers. When the domain is due to expire (typically annually), those customers receive automated email messages warning them of the impending expiration so they have time to contact me and renew the domain. These messages are sent 90 days before expiration, then 60 days, then 30, 15, 5, and 1. In other words, there’s plenty of warning.

One of my customers ignored those warnings for months, and contacted me a few weeks ago wondering why his web site was down. I explained that the domain had expired, I hadn’t renewed it, and now no one on the internet could find him. He decided he wanted to go ahead and renew it, but it had been too long and the domain had entered what’s called the “redemption period”. There are strange rules about expired domains– the general intent is to prevent competitors from seizing a domain that’s accidentally expired and bad-mouthing a company or whatever. Anyway, late in that period (which usually lasts around 45 days) the domain enters a special phase where no one, including the original owner, can purchase it. You simply have to wait until the redemption period ends, and then buy it as if it was new.

Strangely enough, registrars don’t always know exactly when a domain will become available. The global registry, run by ICANN, has internal policies that aren’t very transparent. Long story. Interestingly, this has led to the rise of registrars who offer special services to pounce on a specific domain as soon as it becomes available by essentially requesting to register it every few hours until the magic (and unknown) redemption period ends.

Long story short: some Japanese company did exactly that and purchased the domain that had belonged to my customer. It was legitimate, although sort of confusing since the domain was pretty specific to this customer’s business. In any case, they put up their new web site and the word awesome doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Since I’m not fluent in Japanese, I ran this page through Google Translate and was pleased to discover that the web site is advertising…

wait for it…

an armpit hair removal system. If you wonder why the woman is so shiny and happy, it’s apparently because she has smooth, bare pits. And look at the way the little anime boy just adores his armpit-hair-less girlfriend. Amazing.

Unfortunately for my customer, his only recourse is to approach this company and ask politely if they’d be willing to sell the domain back to him. Good luck with that.