GizmoLA.com

In all seriousness, I'm doing some java coding these days. Mostly JSP pages for a big medical system project. No I did not really join the military. Sheesh some folks are gullible.

Now for a short trip down defunct internet startup memory lane. In the early days of any internet startup company, there's many a late night programming session, or so the lore of the internet startup industry would have you believe. While combing through my vast archives, I found this image taken from the early days of Z, just after we moved into what was the Z.com building on Empire Ave. in burbank.

One such night, I snapped a photo of a couple of chaps working away on some project or other at around 2am. In the foreground you will notice the original edit station cluster with the cool flat lcd screen monitors, and a mini DV recorder visible. This corner of the building was known as the "tech area".

One can also see the super bright halogen lights, which eventually were enclosed in filtration screens to diffuse their iris burning intensity.

I'll forgo naming the subjects of the photo, but from what I hear they currently reside at a web design firm called www.digitalhaiku.com

I have it on good authority that quite a few ex-z folks have ended up at Sony Pictures Digital entertainment. You might want to consider it yourself. They still have numerous openings and I hear from a reliable "source" that things have stabilized there.

I've dedicated a machine to keeping my music cast going, although live365.com loses it's mind from time to time, so if this doesn't work, don't blame me :-) Since i listen to the stream myself, I reset it when it goes south. I upgraded the stream quality to 56k, which is easily as good as FM radio, if not better. Click on the Live365 image to access some free tunes.

Z.com and I have parted ways. 1999 was a very tough year for dot-coms, and Z suffered during the economic down swing as did so many other companies. After a tremendously enjoyable and challenging year, it appears that the Z.com I knew and loved, was coming to an end, the victim of lean times in the online advertising market, and the complete retreat of the venture markets to invest in anything online. I'm not 100% sure what will happen to Z.com. As of now it still appears to be humming along, serving up entertainment. I wish Joe and Mike the best with Z, and of course I'll be rooting for it to survive in some capacity, or at least to see some of the great entertainment sites built at Z, reborn in acquisition. I will miss all the creative and talented people at Z. Oh yeah, and I need a job! :-(

Z.com continues to grow. We successfully launched the new Zhomesite, code name Z2home, and it came out pretty well. We built a publishing system run on coldfusion, Win2k servers and Oracle database to support it, and I'm working on enhancing the ad serving piece of it. I need some sleep. Anyways, check it out at http://www.z.com

• Z.com "soft launched with 20 something sites at the end of May. Since then, we've had millions of page views, so things are going pretty well. Check out the site if you haven't. Among other cool things are animations from The Synj, Monsters in my Tummy, with monster e-cards
  to send to that certain someone who screwed you over, and the animated Rotten Fruit, which has lots of funny dirty english phrases.


• I created a new GizmoLA masthead, as you probably noticed. It's
  a view from the opposite side of Grand View Drive, looking towards
  downtown LA. I took a couple of photo's on a clear day. Here's what the photo looked like originally:
  
  

The new Comedy.com launched last week. Check it out at www.comedy.com.

• Z.com is chugging along towards our official launch. We did a recent docu-site following Tommy Lee's band Method's of Mayhem. The site is at mayhem.z.com.


• We also launched our first game show, Dare for Dollars. The show revolves around people who need cash and are willing to do outrageous things for it. If we like a Dare, we will offer to film you attempting it, and pay you an agreed fee if you pull it off.


• We decided to offer people the opportunity to get their own z.com email address. These will go fast, so sign up now at our front page.


• I've put up a new section with photos of our new house here.