The long Arc of technology...

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 01/13/10)

When I entered the professional world in 1987, I had virtually no computer experience. While in college, I had played with the then all-in-one Macintosh 512K that the campus gallery had bought, and had drawn some abstract little nothing of a piece of art using MacDraw or MacPaint or some such program. But I basically had no idea they worked.

And then I was thrilled by printing an image out on a dot matrix printer. That would have been around late 1984/early 1985. The Mac was named the 512K because that was the maximum amount of RAM it would handle. Think about it. 512K. And a 400K hard drive. It had a 3.5" floppy drive, but that's what you ran your programs from. No seriously. I’m not lying.

Then in 1987 I got hired by a then-little-known company called Prodigy, which would become one of the first major consumer-oriented online services companies, I was trained on IBM PCs and really felt immersed in new technology. We were using PC ATs at the time, which were rather large units, probably the width and depth of a microwave, and about 8" in height. On top of the PC sat a 640 x 480 monitor, capable of 16 colors. Next to it sat a Hayes 1200 or 2400 baud modem (I have no idea how slow that is — I just know it's slow). We used a proprietary graphics program for generating sites and banner ads for advertising clients that used those 16 colors, and if we used any of 3 or 4 patterns, we could create the illusion of up to say 24. I remember the fervor over the news a couple years later than new PCs would ship with CD ROM drives. This would be a game changer for installing a more robust version of the service, and possibly expand the quality of onscreen graphics and product images. By the time Prodigy had a chance to expand the graphics capability of its software and service, the Internet opened up and off-the-shelf tools for creating HTML and GIF or JPG files buried it. (Speaking of Prodigy, its first CEO, Ted Papes, passed away on January 8, 2010).

In the mid-1990s I started a company with a colleague from art school and the first computer we bought was a Macintosh PowerBook 180c. We maxed it out with 14MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. A few months later we added a high-end desktop Mac, a PowerMac 8100/80 tower, which had a 80MHz processor, a beefed-up 24-bit color graphics card and 21" CRT color monitor. We used portable SyQuest drives with 44MB and 88MB disks for portable data. If you've never seen a SyQuest drive or disk, it's worth Googling. The were portable yes, but the drive unit weighed a good 8 lbs.

A year or so later, around 1996, I left that company and started to freelance as a graphic designer. The first system I bought myself was a used Mac IICi, but soon after that bought a PowerMac 8500 tower, with a built-in CD-ROM drive, 128MB RAM, another 21" color monitor, 24-bit color graphics card (that I had to install myself), Iomega Zip drive (remember those? 100MB disks, about the size of a 3.5" floppy disk), an Iomega Jaz drive (for larger jobs, 1GB and 2GB disks), a US Robotics 28.8K modem for dial-up Internet connectivity, and an external 2X CD-R drive for burning data to CD. Btw, while I had this system I upgraded the RAM with an additional 64MB, which then cost $369.00. Today, you can buy 8GB of RAM for a MacBook Pro for about $120.00.

Cut to last December, when my company purchased new some Macs - all of which have 3GHz processors, 4GB of RAM standard, 500GB hard drives. The larger iMac has a 1TB hard drive. I can't even do the math of how many times greater in speed that is from the old Mac 512K I used in college in 1985. All I know is that they super fast, and rarely crash. Wow, did I just write that?

It's mind-boggling to witness sea change after sea change with programs like Adobe Creative Suite and so many others that are so feature-rich. And yet the components of a computer continue to accelerate in speed and capacity and become smaller and thinner. Meanwhile, the price of a system remains constant, or in most cases, lower in cost year over year. It's good for businesses, like mine, whose technology start-up costs are far lower than in previous years. And it's something that I never cease to find fascinating. What's next? Looks like the iSlate (or whatever Apple decides to name it) is right around the corner. Get ready for another paradigm shift.

The highs and lows of 2009.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 12/23/09)

Another year as a business owner in New York City comes to a close. It was quite a blur. Without a doubt, the year was defined by the threat of a worsening economy. At the onset of 2009, I seriously considered the very real possibility that our client activity would suffer. At best, we'd lose a substantial percentage of gross revenue. At worst, we'd lose everything and shut down the company. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.

The first quarter started off well and even into the spring, business activity was on plan with previous years. In April, we purchased two MacBook Pros for ourselves as our older G4s were starting to chug through most websites. The first day my business partner left the office with his, he dropped it on a train platform on a rainy day, and it took us two weeks of scouring eBay for parts, and a full business day to repair it. It never was quite the same after that. But he'd have to limp along with it until we could replace it later in the year.

A difficult and welcomed transition took place in May. We do a fair amount of html emails and print direct mail for Time Inc. for many of their magazines. For years, they'd been stuck in the horrible world of a QuarkXPress 6.5 workflow, and when we upgraded our Macs to OS X Leopard in late 2008, QXP was renderd virtually unusable. Time Inc. also handles the print production aspects of many of our jobs for American Express Publishing's (also one of our clients) print promotions. Every project was agonizing. Then in May of 2009, we got word they'd be transitioning to Adobe Creative Suite 3. We were ecstacic. The world was saved. We were finally able to migrate both clients to CS3 and our productivity improved dramatically. And after hating Quark with such a passion for so many years, I could finally let go of my anger. Now I anxiously await the news of their bankruptcy. If it happened tomorrow, it would be 10 years overdue. There, I said it.

Then in late June I got married. We had fantastic wedding ceremony in NYC at Bryant Park Grill. Our honeymoon took us to Fiji — boy was that a pressure valve of relief from all the stress of the wedding planning and the business demands! We returned to New York City in early July after two weeks in the South Pacific feeling rested and so married.

Then in August, September and October, business activity started to slow. It was very worrisome. We began to plan for a serious slowdown and consider some contingencies. We halted contributions to our 401k plans. We watched our expenses very carefully. Somehow we managed to maintain salaries and just held on and hoped new projects would increase in number.

In September, I finally (for the love of God!) got an iPhone. What a great cell phone. It's about time us Mac users got a phone that worked seamlessly with our address book, mail and calendar apps. And the 3G version rocks. I immersed myself in the world of Apps. After 4 months, I still can't beat Scrabble on Expert level more than 10% of the time.

In November, business began to pick up again thankfully. Then we had trouble with our Epson large format color inkjet printer. When printing to large paper, the head would just lose track and slam into the inside of the housing. It's a sound that raises the hair on your neck. After Epson said to take it in for repair, I scheduled a drop-off with a repair center in New Jersey two days before Thanksgiving. A week later, the guy could find nothing wrong with it. Really, really frustrating. So a return trip to pick it up and bring it back to our office on West 38th St. took place after Thanksgiving. The Sony GPS I used to get me there started failing on the way back so I had to feel my way back to the city from Lodi, NJ, and get the Zipcar rental back in time. It was a total waste of time and effort.

Then in early December we decided it was time to make year-end technology upgrades. We bought a new 2TB RAID network storage drive for our office. (Kudos to my buddy Gary Morse who runs Razorpoint Securities. The guy's a genius. We had that drive configured and running in under an hour.) We also needed to upgrade most of our Macs and our large format laser printer. We bought a 21" iMac for bookkeeping, a 27" iMac for our production artist, and a new MacBook Pro to replace that sputtering, damaged older MBP for my biz partner. I'm just about through all the software upgrades/reinstalls for OS X Snow Leopard, and the laser printer is on the way, due Jan 5.

About a week ago, that iPhone I mentioned? It died on me. I put it to sleep one morning and it wouldn't wake up. However, a trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store on Broadway and 67th St. yielded a replacement. MobileMe was well worth the annual $99 that day alone.

All in all we had a few bumps in the year, but we definitely ended on a high note. And we even managed to make up for the months of 401k contributions we missed.

Just another tricky year of business ownership. Cheers. And Happy New Year!

2001 called. It said "hey, nice website."

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 12/23/09)

It's astonishing how quickly time can fly by and through it all you keep saying yeah I'll update that site next week or month or year. I've never been a procrastinator when it comes to self-promotion. But revamping my own website just seemed like a time suck that I couldn't afford at any point in the past 10 years.

Then again, having an outdated website is something I can't afford either. It makes me look like a soon-to-be extinct species of Tech Man. One that prospective interviewers (if there are any in my future) would inhale and say "Oooooh, wow. Yeah. 2001 called and said hey, nice website."

And this leaves me with few options. I can't just keep reposting new content to an archaic site architecture. There are too many examples of that already. (Craigslist.) What good is a portfolio, whose leather exterior turns people off? I have to move forward and embrace the new. It's certainly not a foreign concept to designers and programmers. Something new is always coming. And we adopt The New Thing fairly readily.

For me, the procrastination has been the result of some very real and substantive changes in career direction. Right around the time the current/outdated iteration of anthonywhetzel.com was built and launched online, I started a company with a copywriter/business partner. We started our company in June of 2000, probably one of the worst years you could do so, aside from say 2008. And this start-up required a lot of time, effort and development. In New York City, there's virtually no end to the demands: taxes, accountants, lawyers, office space, bookkeeping, rent, software and hardware purchases, office networks, routers, switches, high-speed internet providers, heat in the winter (as well as "we have no heat" calls to the super), telephone and cable service outages, quarterly estimated taxes, partnership filing vs. C-corp, new business development, sales, creative fees and rate cards, and on and on. And it's still happening now.

O2 Agency, as the company was named, still functions today, guided by the two of us and a freelancer, and almost 10 years later we're still a company clients will call. But the fallout of all this has been the abject poverty of my own personal portfolio website.

So with a persistent and gentle nudging from my wife, whose best friend's husband, Steve Hartzog, is a web tech guru and teacher, I decided to embark upon the process of upgrading my site again. I've begun the foundation work already: starting with a new re-branding of my name and identity (creative director/designer) with a new logo, fresh new fonts and soon, the roughing out of a new GUI, to which Steve will apply all sorts of cool code.

Needless to say, a lot has happened since I coded my own site using html framesets! Something else happened since the last time I built my website: smartphones.

Now I'm challenged with building a site that could be easily read by any of the recent crop of Web-enabled mobile phones. And since the iPhone and other models don't have a Flash plug-in for mobile browsing yet, the technology employed for the website will likely avoid Flash. Which is fine — there's an amazing array of slick Javascript tools that can make for a rich online experience. This will be fun. I hope. And demanding. But absolutely necessary.

I'm excited and full of new ideas. The holidays will probably derail my progress initially, but hopefully in the next couple months I'll have a site that I can once again be proud of.

Fingers crossed.