January 4, 2004
Maybe I'll make this blog a semi-annual thing.I dunno...I'll probably just get all my web publishing ya-yas out at my new Robinsononline.com site, but I don't feel like going through this whole (very manually generated) site and removing all the links to this page, so I'm writing this.
There, Inc. (the company where I work) is no longer in stealth mode...it's now perfectly legal to tell you that it is a 3D virtual world. Really fun product, fun place to work...we've grown to around 200 employees even have regular paying customers! The best news is that those very customers are absolutely rabid about our product...a good sign for the future. Read all about it on There.com.
That's it for now...I probably won't write anything here again unless I get a different job.
June 14, 2002
When it rains it pours.At least, that's what happened for me. A day or two after writing the May 9 entry below, I got a call from a former Netscape colleague who is now running the website for the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. She had a designer who was taking some medical leave, and wanted to hire me for a contract ranging from 3 weeks to 3 months. That was good news, but before I could even accept the offer, I had a phone interview with a company called There that went extremely well. The next day I went in for an interview and was hired on the spot for a 'temp to perm' position, starting that following Monday. Then, when I got home from the interview, I had an email from Yahoo (I'd sent them a resume via a friend 2-3 months prior), who wanted to give me a phone interview.
The interview process at Yahoo is exhilarating (you start by doing a 1 hour presentation to the design team, then they give you an hour to solve a moderately complex design problem, then lunch, then panel interviews the rest of the afternoon. It seems like a dream place to work (large, smart design team; great benefits; free espresso), but by then my contract at There was winding down, and they had given me an attractive offer, so I took it. Yay, employment!
You've never heard of There, but you will (if everything goes according to plan). They're a true startup: VC funding, crazy hours, a climbing wall in the office, the whole deal. Around 80 employees right now, with an exciting product (that I can't tell you about) completely different than Netscape. I'm thrilled that I didn't miss my chance to ride the wild 'Silicon Valley startup' thing working for AOL for three years.
Well, that's it for now...I'll write again when I feel like it.
May 9, 2002
Welcome to my weblog. I don't plan on updating this very often, I don't really have that much to say, and all of the hip weblog tools that I could find (Blogger, MoveableType, etc.) require CGI stuff that I can't use with AT&T, so this is a strictly manual (read: time consuming) effort.I will, however, take this opportunity to tell you a little about myself. I'm a graphic designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. I studied photography at San Jose State University, and while I was in school I fell in love with Photoshop. I graduated in 1995, just in time to jump in on the 'internet thing' fairly early on.
I got my first 'cubicle job' at AOL in San Mateo in the summer of 1998. It was during that time that I produced the In Transit website. About five of my fifteen minutes of fame were taken up by the resulting attention: I won a fairly well-known award for the site, and was featured on the TechTV (ZDTV at that time) program, Internet Tonight.
About a year later, AOL bought Netscape, we all moved down to Mountain View, and I moved into the design department. The experience was wonderful: challenging work, cool coworkers, and real, professional espresso machines in all the break rooms. Late in 2001, AOL moved all of their 'web properties' to Columbus, Ohio (where CompuServe is). I was asked to move (offered a pretty sweet relocation package actually), but couldn't do it...I have too many friends here, my wife and I are super involved in our church, and have grown accustomed to never needing to chisel my car out from under two inches of ice.
So, I've been unemployed since about the first of the year. The job market is definitely heating up, but there's a lot of talent out there, too. I did a contract a while back for Hyperion (that experience merits its own blog entry), I've done some volunteer work for my church's website, UpCyberDown, and I'm doing work for free for a startup that doesn't have any funding yet. Oh yeah, and I started a blog (in fact, built this entire website). You're reading it right now.
I'll post any more news on the job front as it comes, thanks for reading!