GizmoLA.com

Time for Fall cleaning. Dogs don't like baths in the sink though.

Tracy has taken a new job as a staff consultant with Blackbaud Inc, a Charleston South Carolina based software company that sells fundraising and accounting systems designed for non-profits and schools.

My lifelong pal, Tim Phillips married Alicia Crawford on Saturday June 9th, 2001 in Malvern Pennsylvania.

On Friday night we attended the rehearsal dinner courtesy of Tim's parents David and Gretchen. Tim's mom also happens to be my godmother, and a special lady with a great sense of humor, spirit of adventure and appetite for literature. It was great to see her up and about after her recent illness. The dinner afforded us an opportunity to meet some of Alicia's friends and family and see old friends like Brian and Susan Dye.

On Saturday we attended the marriage ceremony, and I managed to snap a few photos with Tracy's Fujifilm Finepix 1300 digital camera. The finepix is a relatively inexpensive 1.3 megapixel camera (1280x960 max resolution) with an lcd screen on the back.

Both photos on this page were taken at the reception held at the People's Light Theater in the town of Paoli, where I grew up, and where my parents still reside.

I was relieved not to have to make any speeches at the event, although I did don a tux for the festivities. There were some excellent toasts made by Alicia's brother-in-law Tad, Tim's brother in law (the best man) Vince Connelly, and a sermon from Tim's older brother Andy, who is a practicing minister in Virginia.

Alicia's parents threw a lively reception featuring a buffet dinner, a better than average band that specialized in classic soul and motown hits, and several hundred enthusiastic guests.

I bought and assembled a Smith machine, which is a sorta home gym weight rack a while back, and set it up in our basement room. Gizmo likes to sit out on the porch entrance and monitor the stairway while I'm working out.

It's been a long time since I updated, primarily thanks to the demise of my DSL Internet connection when Northpoint went bankrupt. Apparently, my house is just a bit too far to from the local pacbell central office for me to get reliable DSL service (even though I had it for over a year from Northpoint!). I tried two seperate ISP's and in both cases waited weeks only to find out at the last minute that they couldn't provide me service.

I've found a new one and am keeping my fingers crossed. Fortunately, I was able to colocate the gizmola server with Kent Bulza, who has been nice enough to help get it and my mail going again. Thanks Kent!

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.

In post Z news, The Synj has landed down in San Diego at Presto Studios, makers of the Journeyman game series and now doing a Myst title. Congrats Dan.

Looks like I'm gonna be playing some hockey down at Culver City with my old pal Ted Henning. He apparently has a new company Scream Therapy doing some interesting web entertainment stuff, including animated horror episodes. It's a heavy flash site, FYI. If any x-z.comers want an intro let me know. Check out some of their sample work Here.

Peter Filardi's film Ricky6 has emerged from it's legal squabbles and has been playing the festival circuit and has been getting some nice reviews. Our old pal Hobbs and a buddy of his have done an official site, which includes the trailer for the film.

Well, I have finally decided what to do with my life. Military service! I've enlisted and am now private first class in the:

Ah unemployment. Lately I find myself with plenty of time to read, work on little projects, and scan negatives. I've done another RedHat Linux upgrade on Gizmola, and added some notes on using rpm. Tracy recently snapped some 35mm photos of the Scrapples, and we liked one in particular. I scanned the negative, and with a little help from photoshop, we have the thumbnail on the left. Click on it to see the photo gallery.