August 26th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

I always get reflective when I watch the Olympics. I remember where I was the last time there was an Olympics, who I watched it with, what was going on in my life at the time. Like a lot of other people, I bet, I also remember my own experiences with the sport as I watch.

It’s always the Summer Olympics that stir up the most memories for me, and this Olympics in particular provided a number of fun flashbacks.

Swimming was a huge part of my childhood, and I was on multiple swim teams at any given time. I was on a dive team for a while as well….although, I guess a more accurate description would be that my swim team wanted a dive team, and a few of us tried it out. But as soon as a friend of mine did a face plant into the board during a backflip (ala Greg Louganis), we were told to stick with swimming.

I was a damn good swimmer, if I may say so, although how I did depended on which team I was swimming for. At summer camp, I pretty much always placed first. At home, I swam for second, no matter what event it was. Relay, solo, I always placed second to someone on my own team. Nice that my team always went one-two, but still… The only time I placed first at home was in butterfly (which is an evil evil stroke that I think I was only forced to swim because I was the only one who could do it), but I was disqualified for having a “left inverted pinky toe.” I didn’t understand what it meant then, and while I kinda think it had something to do with my foot pointing the wrong way, I still don’t get the inverted toe reference now.

I loved swimming, though, and nothing could keep me out of the pool, not even a cast on my broken wrist that wasn’t supposed to get wet. The cast sure did come in handy during camp color war, though! I looooved color war, and it all always came down to the last day, when we had a full day relay race with baton passing and all. I was given the swimming event, of course, which just happened to be the final leg. The baton caused some difficulties for other swimmers, since they couldn’t figure out how to hold it while swimming. Me? I shoved it into my cast! I did ultimately pay for swimming with the cast when I got it off (my arm was a wreck), but I don’t think I would have given up that moment for anything.

I did the AYSO (kiddie league soccer) thing, although I was terrible. I may be the only goalie in history to score a goal for the opposing team by drop kicking the ball straight over my head. Still not sure how I lived that one down…if I ever did. But every time I see a goalie kick a ball away in a soccer game I remember that moment.

Basketball, well, I’m tall, and my dad loves basketball. Wasn’t it a given that he would be my basketball coach when I was a kid? I hit high school, played one year on junior varsity and quit. Wasn’t my thing.

But volleyball? That was my thing. I still wasn’t very good - the only sport I was ever really good at was swimming - but I was decent enough to play. And I’m competitive as hell. My volleyball team had a pretty fun rivalry going with another school, and when we met at tournaments, it was a crazy thing. Spikes to the face, the whole bit.

(here’s where I date myself) I was in high school, playing volleyball, the last time the US men’s team won the gold. My team became obsessed with the Olympic team. Every day, we would charge into practice, all excited to emulate those amazing men. We would be slightly bleary eyed from watching a match live the night before - from Korea - but we were still driven to be like those guys. We even dubbed each team member with a counterpart on the Olympic team. Me, I was Steve Timmons, although I had a crush on Karch Kiraly. The men won the gold, and we beat our rival team. It was a great year.

The men won the gold again this year, and all the games were narrated by none other than Karch Kiraly. It was a blast to watch, and the memories came flooding back. I’d watch someone spike, remember someone else who’d done that. Watch another person set a ball, think back to our setter (who was, without a doubt, the best player on our team. She was awesome.). Watch someone serve a ball out, remember myself doing that. Hey, I said I wasn’t very good.

I loved everything about sports then. Winning, obviously, was best, but even practices could be fun if you were in the right mindset. Those practices during the Olympics are probably my fondest memories of volleyball. Swimming endless laps in a pool gets boring. But pretending you’re an olympian? Now that’s fun.

I may not be Michael Phelps, but I still have a huge box full of ribbons and trophies all my own. And every four years, it’s just fun to look back.

August 6th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

I have “officially” moved my blog over here, my LiveJournal blog is no more. All posts there are gone, and thanks to wordpress being awesome, all of the posts from there are now here. Yay for archiving!

Anyway, here I am. Wordpress and Dreamhost. Thanks for all of the recommendations!!

July 28th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

I’m still working on things, but I gotta admit - Wordpress is as friendly to use as people say.

It isn’t EASY, or at least, not for what I’m doing - the one-click install didn’t fly - but it is still remarkably user friendly.

And I’m posting this through ScribeFire, which I just adore, but had poor LJ support.

Hopefully will be ready to fully pull the trigger on this blog by the weekend. Woo!

July 27th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

I am starting the long-overdue process of moving this to dreamhost, which unfortunately is forcing me to switch the DNS before it is ready.

So, for the next few days, stephaniebambam.net is going to point to a kinda wacky page. stephaniebambam.livejournal.com will still be here and all functional until I’m ready to move over.

FINALLY!

July 21st, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

I don’t know how this happened, but some random dude’s avatar is currently the logo on twitter. Harmless, but too funny not to share..

And yeah, my twitter obsession continues…

July 17th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

See you all there!!

July 14th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

Really! That’s not a joke. I have had surprisingly “good” experiences with cops across the board, but this one takes the cake.

I was pulled over about three weeks ago for rolling through a stop sign. I’m absolutely positive I did it, I was late to an appointment, and I’m very aware that when I get rushed I drive a little more erratic.

Cop runs my license and discovers that it was suspended in Virginia (I had kept my Virginia license/registration for a number of reasons) for “lack of insurance.” Cop was also holding a valid insurance card. I think he was slightly entertained by the situation, I was stunned at hearing that my license was suspended and can only imagine how silly my reaction was.

He gave me a ticket with a court date, and waited while a friend of mine picked me up (since I couldn’t drive away with a suspended license) instead of towing my car.

Since then, I have gotten my Virginia license reinstated, have letters from my insurance company in both Virginia and California stating that I am insured, AND got my California license and registration. I also discovered that my license had been suspended due to my Virginia insurance company telling the DMV that I canceled my policy, not that I transferred it out of state. If they think you’re uninsured, your license is automatically suspended.

This morning was my court date. Driving under a suspended license is an “uncorrectable” misdemenor, which means a trip in front of a judge. Waited on a looong line to see the clerk, who discovered that my ticket didn’t exist. From there, I was sent to the city attorney’s office - same, my ticket didn’t exist. The cop never turned it in.

My theory? The cop didn’t really want to ding me for a situation that really was a mistake, Virginia reinstated my license as soon as I faxed them my insurance letters with no questions asked. I still don’t know how long my license was suspended for. I think the cop did, however, did want to give me at least some grief for not registering my car/getting my license when I moved here a year ago. So, he made me spend a day running around the city waiting in lines.

I understand that, and would rather waste a day on lines to verify that I didn’t have anything to do, than worry about standing in front of a judge.

So to whoever that cop was - thank you. I have no idea what would have happened in front of a judge, but I’m very thankful that I don’t have to find out.

July 8th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

I have a horrible tendency to only write blog entries when I have something to complain about. I was always that way with my diary as a kid as well, if I was writing in the diary, something was VERY wrong.

So, in an attempt to break that habit, here’s a few random happy fun things:

- I’ve seen tons and tons of people get pulled over for talking on their cellphones without a headset, which is entertaining. It’s always the people on the phone who drive the worst.

- I drove past the Hills (MTV) crew filming a certain blonde on my way to work this morning, which made me think about another blonde I knew that I hadn’t talked to in a few weeks. Two hours later, that person IM’d me.

- I finished watching John Adams, and it was fantastic. I spent a few years living in Mt Vernon (Virginia) when I was a kid, and from then on loooved the colonial period. My perspective on it was always very skewed towards virginia, though, all George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and stuff. I knew very little about John Adams by comparison, so the movie covered a lot of new ground for me. Really interesting.

- The Doctor Who season finale was fantabulous. I need to write up a whole big Dr Who rant, but I’m gonna save that until after the finale airs in the US.

- I recently learned to play Blackjack counting cards. It’s really cool, and I’m getting pretty decent at it!

- I will be at two conferences coming up – BlogHer ’08 next weekend, and Casual Connect the week after. I’m on a panel at Casual Connect, and reading an entry from this blog at BlogHer.

- I think my cat just locked himself in my bathroom. He’s done that far too many times now, you think he’d learn. (ok, maybe that’s not “happy” per se, but entertaining nontheless) The other cat is inside my bookcase, staring out at me from behind a pane of glass. Dunno why she loves it so much in there.

And on that note, I’m off to rescue the cat. Or just taunt him from the other side of the door. I haven’t decided which yet.

June 25th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

This blog entry is in response to this article from yesterday’s Boing Boing, where Josh Harris, founder of Pseudo.com (the startup I worked at for four years), called the company fake. An experiment in performance art.

First off. We were in no way fake, or not a “real” company. Pseudo did what we called “interactive television,” or what we now call podcasts.  We had employees, expenses (oohh did we ever have expenses), and put out new content daily. I even had a contract.

When I first started at Pseudo, we were a rather bloated company with 300+ employees running a bunch of different content channels.  Some channels did ok, like 88 Hip Hop, some didn’t really get many viewers at all. The channel I worked for, All Games Network (Wikipedia entry), was one of the top channels at the time. Live five days a week, and available on demand at any time.

My life was pretty much Pseudo. I could be found in our chatroom all day, nearly every day. I was on-air or producing 4 or 5 shows at any given time. We were a bubble startup and every single stereotype of bubble startups applied to us. A lot of work to be done by a small number of people, so everyone ended up doing some of everything.

Josh? He was rarely, if ever, in the office. He did throw us great parties, though, always with the seekrit room in back.

It was always pretty clear to us, as employees, that the company was being mismanaged. We were cool and hip with offices in an amazing location, but we had no business model.  We spent massive amounts of money on all sorts of stupid things. I remember very clearly spending one night on a business trip taste testing various kinds of sherry with a coworker of mine. Because I’d never had it before, and because I could. Loved that corporate card, and the idea of a limited “expense account” didn’t exist.

Pseudo even funded an all-female Quake tournament – Female Fragfest ’99. We flew finalists to NYC from all over the United States (one person came from Alaska), put them up in a nice hotel, took them around the city, and had our finals live in person. We got tons of press for doing it, girls playing Quake was a novelty at the time: Wired, the Village Voice, and SF Gate, among others . The tournament didn’t exactly bring in money, and it was hardly cheap to pull off.

I don’t honestly remember which happened first -  the layoffs, or Josh leaving – but it was all around the same time. Pseudo dropped to 200 employees, to 150, then finally to 75. Josh was replaced by an old-school experienced CEO from CNN.

The new CEO did his best. He reorganized the company entirely, including a really nasty round of layoffs, and changed us from lots of different channels, each with their own line up and schedule, to one channel with different shows. I became what they called an “EJ” for Electronic Jockey (get it? VJ? EJ) – and while I still concentrated on gaming, I also worked on a number of different shows, politics, wrestling, girly stuff. I filled in wherever a host needed someone to be on-air and in a chatroom at the same time.

The company still didn’t get the financial thing down, though. Kind of ironic, given that Silicon Alley Reporter was one of our shows. Instead of hunting for a viable business model, we spent a fortune covering the Democratic National Convention. It was neat, we were the only website to have a skybox at the time, but it didn’t really do anything for the company.

As with most of the bubble startups, one day we walked in and were told we could either have our final paycheck or two more months of health insurance. We were bankrupt.

It was the end of an era for us, and for many other folks who worked in startups. We had truly put our heart and soul into something we loved, something we believed in. Those of us who were still there the last day were there by choice, we’d been warned by senior management that we were probably going bankrupt months before. We were there because we believed in what we were doing, because we thought we were going to change the world, because we were young and willing to do whatever it took to make the copmany succeed.

And you know, I truly think we did something remarkable. Podcasting, ten years ago. Sure, we called it “interactive television,” but same difference. The interactivity was unique at the time, but it is no longer a special feature to create a single company around, it’s expected. No matter what you’re doing, you better have open communication.

A bunch of my old shows from AGN (the All Games Network) are still online (Real player required, because, well, that was the streaming tech available at the time). Sometimes online, anyway, they don’t always work. That was a pretty common thing at Pseudo.

The All Games Network still lives on, although it has gone through a few makeovers since the Pseudo days. And while I’m no longer part of the company, I still keep in touch with a number of people from our community then, and I imagine I always will.

Pseudo was very real and special to us. As for Josh Harris? Thanks for the memories, and good luck with your apple orchard.

June 25th, 2008 by StephanieBamBam

Come ON, he just ruined the Andromeda Strain. Now he’s on to yet another of my absolute favorite books of all time?? I’m starting to think this is personal.

Unlike the Andromeda Strain, Brave New World has never really been done well on film. It was made into a TV movie a few years back, but it didn’t quite work. Maybe it’s one of those books that will never work on camera? Like the Andromeda Strain, it isn’t exactly a story with lots of action.

The Stand (Steven King) was the same way, I think. No matter how good the film production was ever going to be - and it wasn’t bad - it would never hold up the way the book did. You just can’t “show” fear and psychological terror on a screen.

Brave New World. Coming soon to a theater near you.

Ugh.