team picnic yesterday underneath this really awesome tree. looking up through the lattice of branches and leaves

just spent a week in dulles for work. it snowed 7 inches on thursday night. my first snowfall in seven years. these were shot from my 9th floor window of the hotel.

Cooking at HomeChef. My group has an offsite: before the layoffs. We cook Chicken mango salad, vegetable enchiladas and chocolate chip bread pudding. It was great fun and great food.

Layoffs at work today. Again. Second time since I have been there. This time it affected my group in a big way and tomorrow I will start picking up the pieces. It has been a terrible day, an emotional day and a very difficult day.

My boss left the company this week and I have now moved up into his role. I now have 9 people in my group. Yikes! Exciting. I also have a new boss who I am excited to be working with - I think I can learn a lot in this new space in this new role.

I have had so many bosses. 4 now, here at AOL - in a year and a half - less than some I know. I went through 5 in the two years at AltaVista. When we were Zip2 I had essentially the same boss the whole time. This is crazy - just when you get used to someone, you get reorged or they leave.

It was great fun for all, good for team building and super for ringing in the holiday season on a light note. Particularly for this year.

There are some definite positive advantages to working for AOL, being in Dulles on business this week and being involved with the Community team.

Just got back from a special AOL Screening of Harry Potter. Cool stuff. It's going to be a hit. Lots of clapping and cheering for all the AOL Time Warner previews before the movie. The kids in the audience seemed engaged, but the adults laughed the most throughout.

Like most places, people dressed up for Halloween at work today. We, the larger UI team, held our weekly Design Open House and walked through a new Design Review process with a mock Halloween product. Of course, this was all in costume and there were several interesting people(?) in attendance - including a "new" design manager. Mike "hula lady" won. Here are the pics I shot with the PenCam.
Note: page crashes Netscape 4x on the Mac

 

 

Layoffs at work today. Ugh. :-(

Ugh. My boss is leaving AOL. I am really bummed. I was looking forward to working with her awhile and learning about running a large organization and still maintaining sanity. Up to now, I have always worked for men, most of whom were engineers. I was excited about having a female mentor to navigate around this giant corporation. I am not 100% sure what happens next. The timing definitely sucks and I am being selfish because she is moving up in her own career at another really great company.

Aaack! I have been hacked. My account at AOL has been compromised and shut down until I get my computer blessed by the powers that be. It is a crazy place on AOL. On the Web I never really worried about things - I have a router with a firewall and have set up the correct settings on my PC to make sure people can't get in. But working for AOL, you get all kinds of wacky email - some of which looks exactly like our internal areas. All it takes is a click on a link and boom - you are booted and someone else has your account. I liked to think of myself as a saavy net person, but this is definitely humbling. I am 3 weeks new (again) on AOL and I feel kind of stupid.

Live and learn.

(from April 8 - accidently posted to the wrong blog)
I survived my first week at the new job. Wow, these people have their act together. Very organized, good process and things seem to be done right. That's not to say there are not issues, but coming out of AltaVista, which seemed to be perpetually running around like a chicken with its head cut off, this is a refreshing change. I think the key is to not take on more projects than you can handle and to set realistic deadlines.

I am learning all the terminology and acronyms and have been thrust into meetings already.

I am amazed at how insular groups get with their own lingo and how second nature it becomes. It is only when someone new joins and starts asking what that means do people stop and realize that the terms or the language is not obvious.

I think this will be a good place to be.

Welcome to AOL I have accepted a job at AOL. I will be working in the Community divlet, managing the design team that creates the community products - groups, chat, message boards etc. This is a chance for me to get back into creating tools for people and AOL is certainly tha place to do it. I have gotten emails from my friends congratulating me and the friends at Microsoft jokingly call me a traitor. Of course when I went to WebTV - owned by Microsoft - all my friends not at Microsoft called me a traitor going to the darkside. Either way it will be interesting to be back at a large corporation where you have to make impressions in small ways. To me it is about the work and making tools and places that make a difference in the way people interact.

The ironic part to all of this, is that I had an AOL account many years ago - so long ago that I had "emalone" as a screen name with out any numbers. Once I became more saavy with my ISP and stopped doing work for AOL (which paid for my account) I cancelled my account and have only had my emdezine account since. Now I will be getting an AOL account again and will probably have to pick a number for a screen name. In the road to individual freedom and the empowerment that the online world has given to people - we are all ultimately reduced to being numbers.

Just finished up three weeks of consulting work at NBCi redesigning their Search area. Let's hope it actually launches. It was interesting work and a good transition from the chaos that was AltaVista. I commuted on the train for several days each week and had time to catch up on some heavy duty reading. I will be able to fix a few things around the house that decided to break after I got laid off.

Close to 3 1/2 weeks without fulltime work and I am starting to get bored. I am working on the San Jose Rep site and that is keeping me busy and creatively inspired.

I am doing lots of job hunting, tons of phone interviews and lots of driving up and down highway 101 and 280. In person interviews suck - reminds me of sorority rush. It is difficult to know if you are making a good impression or not. Ultimately it is about personalities and those initial connective vibes.

I am also becoming intimate with the job hunt sites like HotJobs.com. Some are better than others, some are maddening in their user flow and I would like to redesign them. FlipDog has this interactive process that flakes out every so often and also doesn't really allow multiple selections. I found that HotJobs shows different jobs if you select a "channel" than if you just enter a keyword in the search box. Even if the keywords are the same as the what you enter in a channel. Haven't quite figured that one out yet.

Anyway - it is slow going and I know the right place is out there. In the meantime, I may take some of these consultant projects coming my way.

So I got laid off last Thursday, along with 275 or so of my fellow coworkers. The news and press release reported only 200 but talking to the PR person after the fact, she said it was about 270 + another 35 who resigned.

It was strange today not going into work. That place has been my home away from home for the the last year and a half and for better or worse I kind of liked a lot of things about it.

On a good note though, more interviews scheduled, two last Friday, one more tomorrow, already talked to a couple of recruiters and I expect more will come out of the woodwork as my resume makes the rounds.

I miss every one already.

One year anniversary of our Live! product launch. Everyone who is still here was congratulating each other for still sticking around. It was a little bit black since we are in the process of evolving and cutting whole areas of this section of the site. When it is all over it will probably take us longer to kill it than it did to create it.

I realized tonight that I have been thinking about high school friends a lot lately. Must be the fact that this spring is reunion time. For everything you hear about the internet being a great way to find people, I am having the hardest time finding old friends. I'd like to email some of them and say hey - how did you turn out?

My first web log entry and my first layoff process.
We had layoffs at work today - 225 people, 25% of our work force. It has been a crappy week all week. They announced that these were going to happen on Monday so everyone basically stopped working for the rest of the week.
As a manager, I had to instill good moral and positive thoughts to my team but how do you do that when you are feeling somewhat disillusioned yourself.

There were a few surprises today and some of my friends were let go. I had to personally lay off two members of my team. That sucked!

Hopefully next week we can all move on, move forawrd and get back to business. I just want to make cool products.

I need to get off my butt and get back in the gym. My few weeks off has turned into a year and I feel terrible since I stopped lifting weights and doing yoga.