So few will probably get it without explanation, but this is a reference to The Office. It is hard for me to watch the intro without Yachi's voice saying "Maaarrquesss turn it down. Its too loooooud." Technically I am not very good at converting the text in to Yachi's voice, but you can picture it. This is partly because I watch the TV at a volume a "couple" steps higher than herself, but also because the very end of the intro really does become obnoxiously loud.
Anyways to the point of this whole post, I have finally posted pictures from the office. They are on my flickr account which I am really trying to use. There is a plug in that will export directly from iphoto to flickr and this gives me the best chance of actually maintaining photos there. If it could only sync I would be in heaven.
As you can see from the photos, the office is wide open. There are very few barriers and the only thing that protects my "me space" is a little green thing that is not even fully attached to the desk. Everyone at the table is on my team so when there are any issues that I need to speak to them about I just turn and say "I have an issue I would like to speak to you about". Obviously this can be quite distracting at times, but the immediate turn around really helps so I am still unsure where things sit in terms of productivity.
The problems I have with it have less to do with the openness and more general design issues. For instance I have worked in an open environment before and it was nice because there was adequate meeting rooms to aid privacy. Here there are few conference rooms and they are always booked. There are these green thingees which are meant for small meetings, but I am kind of already too big for them. Also I am too loud for them (but you already knew that). We also have phone booths (the old London office had these too) to use for personal phone calls, but as they clearly state inside, these too are not sound proof. For the most part I have been able to cope, but having phone interviews is a little weird because other people tend to overhear the questions you are asking. Afterwards they tell me how they would answer the question and I do my best to try and not un-hire them.
Another complaint is that IT thought they were doing us a service by putting fancy plasmas in the conference rooms. Problem is they are quite small and useless for reading a document from anywhere but the front couple seats. It just makes no practical sense.
Finally the space is already too small and we have only been here 2 months. Our group is supposed to grow and I am already gluing my divider down in preparation. The 2 months is at least one month longer than it will take the new Bellevue offices to run out of space with its new offices. That plan seems to almost rely on attrition to fix the over crowding. Problem is they will probably get their wish.
The office actually reminds me a lot of the Seattle Public Library. It looks great and has bright colors that make it look cool, but it doesn't quite function like you would expect it too. This all being said I still like it more than the Bellevue office and when you throw in the surroundings it is almost impossible to beat.
There is shopping and food everywhere as soon as walk out of the building. For some reason I though that our offices were in Picadilly Circus before I got here, but they are actually in Covent Gardens. The area is pretty touristy, but I can get past that. It is close to Leicester Square which is where all the big movie premieres are. It is also situated among an innumerable amount of theatres. Within a 5 minute walk I can see any number of performances like Hairspray, and Spam-A-Lot. Chicago is on the same block. Not my thing exactly, but still cool.
Of course it satisfies the after work drink requirement too. Usually we just go on Friday's but as you can see from the pic there are plenty of people in the streets drinking even on Thursdays.
On a (long) side note, I am also making an effort to geo tag my photos. Some of the tagged photos are pretty rough. For instance I have put up my Beijing photos and at this moment they are all centered on Beijing. I am not ready quite yet to place every single photo at the location it was taken. However for place like London I am trying to be a little more specific.
One of the primary reasons I kind of wanted the iphone was because it will do his automatically. I have found it to be a little sketchy, but as long as it gets one right it is easy to fix the others. Doing my other camera has proved a bit trickier and I have found a solution though using google earth.
This ended up leading to a personal triumph. It will be boring to you so feel free to skip this paragraph. For some reason using the application to update the exif info on my photos was not working properly due to an error. After investigating I found that there was a way to suppress the errors however this wasn't really an option with the program. Luckily I was able to find the perl script which was doing the updating and alter it so that the warnings were ignored. In the end this was really simple to do, but still felt like an accomplishment. One because I don't really know perl that well and it kind of goes to show that language knowledge is pretty transferrable. Secondly it makes me feel better about not writing my own application to do this sort of thing. Being able to program is supposed to give you this power, but honestly I am too lazy to do anything about it. It was good for me to find a problem and then work through to a solution.
Here are some flickr links.
i'm not convinced that you really live in london. why aren't you in any of the pics?
Posted by: ann | August 06, 2008 at 05:34 PM
OMG!! I thought I was the only one highly confused by why Yachi listens to tv with the volume on SO low!! LOL!! :) Oh Marques! How we miss you so! Your spirit is sounding much more "Marques" glad to hear it!
Posted by: sara | August 07, 2008 at 09:57 AM