Category Archives: Work

I’m a Mythical Beast

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And it’s not just my wife who says so.

When I’m going to take a day off from work, I email our team to let them know I’ll be out. Here’s a recent missive:

Hey y’all,

I’m planning to take Friday off as a sanity day and to strip down, don the
headdress of the fabled jackelope, and beat a drum in a sweat lodge in the
woods for a while while shuffling around the smoky fire in ritual native
american dance.

Or maybe just enjoy a book and some tacos. Either way.

Laura, one of our awesome graphic designers, responded with this:

May the spirits guide you on your journey

Sean as Jackelope

Sean as Jackelope

Truly, I work with some amazing people.

High Ed Web 2008

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I’m currently at the High Ed Web 2008 conference in Springfield, MO. The conference is geared to web professionals in Higher Education, and is an interesting combination of marketers, technical folk, and the occasional vendor. There’s lots of good information to be had (as well as an immense amount of equally good food — who suspected that “travel is broadening” should be taken literally?), and all of us who are attending are getting a lot out of it.

Yesterday afternoon, James, Jeff and I did our planned presentation: University-Wide CMS Implementation: Failure, then Success. We had a lot of fun with it, taking a pretty irreverent approach to the history of our CMS project, and using some cool 3D timeline software to present our information in an interesting way.

Conference attendees have been using Twitter to communicate about the conference pretty extensively, so I told people at the start of our presentation that I wanted them to help me make all the people in other sessions feel as bad as possible for missing ours. Toward that end, I encouraged them to post the most outrageous lies about our presentation they could think of. Here’s the Twitter chatter that was posted during our presentation:

  • jesseclark: I have recieved more temp tattos in the past two days than the last 10 years!
  • tonydunn: live mexican wrestling in SAC4 session! AWESOME!!
  • stomer: Admiring the wrestling masks at SAC4
  • carlenek: SAC4, CMS Failure then success. They just gave each of us $5!!
  • stomer: In unison “politics”
  • stomer: “Uploading images has more steps than AA”
  • tonydunn: massive EPIC FAIL… what a story! if you ain’t in SAC4 ur missing it
  • tonydunn: @pberry blackops meetings… sounds like us 🙂
  • stomer: Another plug for adding content best practices along with CMS training
  • tonydunn: ‘brand the service, not the product’ – excellent advice!

I’m having a great time getting to enjoy some of my work friends in a more social setting than usual, as well as meeting people from other Universities and Colleges around the country, getting to see Springfield, and taking photos with team members in luchador masks in front of local landmarks. We have another day and a half of conference to go, after which I’m looking forward to the chance to meet up with my Uncle Rick and some old friends who also live in the area.

Sidenote: before leaving for the trip, I told the kids that I was going to Springfield for a conference. “Cool!” said Liam. “You’ll get to meet the Simpsons!” I launched into an explanation of the fact that one of the running gags on the show is that they don’t ever let on where Springfield actually is, and how in the movie Ned Flanders points to the four adjacent states, Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky, which are of couse widely spread. Thus I wouldn’t actually get to meet the Simpsons, because the Springfield they live in is a fictional construct, not the one in Missouri.

Ten minutes later it occurred to me that I would also not get to meet them because they’re cartoons.

Yep, I’m a dork.

QA Engineer Needed

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Hi all! Hideo, our superb QA guy up at work, is heading back to Japan at the end of this month, and we need to find someone to fill his shoes. If you’re interested in web application development and/or software quality assurance, please check out the listing I’ve posted on Craig’s List. Thanks!

IT Staff Appreciation Breakfast

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Just back from the IT Staff Appreciation Breakfast. A few notable awards:

All that, and breakfast too. (No burritos, but one can’t hope for perfection on this earth.)

What I Want for Lunch

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Feeling feisty, and not a little obnoxious, this morning, I responded thusly when asked what I thought should be on the menu for an upcoming retreat at work:

I would like the finest lobster, hand harvested by Poseidon and his entourage of mermaids and cooked to perfection by Maine’s top chefs (flown here for the occasion) with a side of mixed field greens grown in the dirt scraped off of Jerry Garcia by groupies during the time he toured with the Grateful Dead. Belgian chocolates for dessert, delivered on horseback by a Lady Godiva impersonator.

Or a sandwich. Either way.

Ron-A-Thon 2007

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The head of our department organized a Halloween Hamburger social for this afternoon. One of my friends, Kevin Huffaker — artist, mischief maker, and all around really nice guy — decided that this should be the year of the first annual Ron-A-Thon. The idea behind the Ron-A-Thon is to get as many people as possible to dress like Ron Akin, a venerable and much-loved figure within our department. Ron is tall, affable, and sports a long white ponytail and a self-imposed uniform of a long-sleeve white button-down shirt, dark blue jeans and open-toed sandals, and is thus ripe for imitation.

The Ron-A-Thon was a glorious success, with about a dozen people taking part, most with extravagant wigs, and all with the requisite combination of clothing. The trophy that Kevin had crafted — essentially a Ron action figure — was deemed too wonderful to award to a single individual, so Ron decreed that it should go to a public place for the enjoyment of all.

Photos from the event are here. Enjoy!

Ron-A-Thon 2007

Tattoos & Weblogs

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In our continued branding extravaganza, I bought 5,000 temporary tattoos featuring our Gato Project logo, suitable for handing out in training classes, distributing at parties, etc. We used tattoofun.com, who did a superb job creating them. Here’s me proudly modeling one of them:

Gato Tattoo

In other work news, we’re starting up a technical weblog where we’ll be detailing some of the technical aspects of our work. If you’re interested in technical stuff, especially web application development, come on by!

The Origin of the Species

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A few folks have asked about my recent purchase of luchador masks at work. Fazia has posted an excellent explanation over at her blog. (There are more photos on Facebook for those who just can’t get enough of knowledge workers dressed as wrestlers. Ooh, and knowledgeworkersdressedaswrestlers.com is still available! I’ll make millions…)