Tuesday, December 26, 2000 - 11:19 p.m.

Tuesday, December 26, 2000 - 11:19 p.m.

Lori took the day off. But she came in to work at lunch time and brought food and we had lunch together. It was very nice.

Of course, there was nothing to do at work today. I let Lillian go home early and Dave go home early because they said they were sick. I mostly played on epinions all afternoon.

We've discovered that the problem with the computer is actually related to Internet Explorer. No thanks to the losers at Earthlink who never bothered to respond. So now we're back to using crappy Netscape again. But that's fine because now the DSL connection isn't responding at all.

I must have walked at least 5 miles tonight. I feel pretty good. I left at 9:35 and didn't get back until 11:10 and walked almost non-stop (only stopping to wait for walk lights). I don't know if it's doing any good, but I enjoy the walks. It'll be nice being able to walk with Lori once her foot is healed, but I also enjoy the solitude of my walks.

Anyhow, some more recapping. While in college I stumbled onto a website. I didn't like its design and it had some coding errors. This was when the internet was really in its infancy. I wrote to the guy and gave him some suggestions. He liked them and commissioned me to do a layout for a television guide grid. I did and he sent me a check for $40. Then for nearly a year he bugged me to do more work for him. I finally agreed and I would do 10 hours a week for $20 an hour and every Friday there'd be a check in the mail for $200. It came from a publishing company in Wisconsin which was weird since this guy was supposedly in California, but the checks all cashed fine, so I didn't ask a lot of questions. Then in late March of my senior year Kevin and I drove down to California where I met David Cronshaw for the first time. He was working at KCAL 9 TV right outside the Paramount lot. The website, TVnet.com was his hobby site, a way for people to find out more about local television stations and a way for people who worked at television stations to connect with one another. I found out that an executive from NBC had found the site, contacted his friends in Milwaukee at the publishing company and that they were in the process of converting it into a business, which is why I was getting paid and paid so well. So I went back to Washington and at the beginning of May I talked to Jeff Rowe and he offered me a job for $30,000 a year plus $1,500 in moving expenses. I said sure and got a check in the mail pretty quickly for $1,500. The day of graduation (May 19, 1996) Bria (my then girlfriend) got into my Audi 5000S and I got into the U-Haul and we began heading towards Los Angeles.

Originally we were supposed to tow the Audi and we would be able to drive together to keep each other company and to make the drive go quicker. Turned out the car didn't have the clearance to make it up onto the trailer. Bummer, but I was very lucky that she agreed to make the trip (I had purchased her a ticket to get back). I had already lucked into an apartment in a complex I found on rent.net and David had been by to say it was very nice looking. It was a second floor corner unit and I really hardly ever heard my neighbors. I quickly became spoiled. The day we got there David showed up with a laptop that was borrowed from NBC and I used that until Jeff finally completely left NBC. At that point he brought over his own personal Mac and I used it until we bought computers of our own for TVnet. We didn't have offices for several months, we all just worked out of our apartments as they put together the staff and looked for office space. When we all needed to meet, we'd meet in my apartment. Finally we got office space that -- get this -- was 10 minutes from where I lived. They had been looking at Santa Monica, but Jeff lived in Encino and David out in Woodland Hills and they got tired of the commute just from the number of times they went out there looking for office space. So we were in Encino and it was pretty cool. Greg Frank joined the team during his summer breaks from school (his dad was a big guy at NBC and friends with Jeff) and we added Jon Ofstead -- who Lori and I still work with running MovieClicks.com -- and Camille - [redacted]. She got hired to be MIS but she didn't like MIS so all she did was try out new technology stuff. Not to mention she didn't understand MIS. There was Nadine who I didn't get along with at first but after I left she and I became friends over AIM. Later there was Michelle who was really awful, Jessica who was really annoying (an actress-wanna-be biding her time). There was Crazy Mary who shaved her head and was good friends with Camille. And Larry Laffer. Most of you won't remember this but there used to be this serious of hilarious games where you played a character named Larry Laffer and you were supposed to walk around different locales trying to get women to have sex with you, but you were so pathetic that it never happened. Anyhow, this guy Larry was a nice enough guy, but he was a salesman and he never sold anything. He would borrow my laptop when he went on sales calls outside of Los Angeles and when he brought it back the cache would always be full of porn websites. There was Matt who had been there longer than me. But then again, he lived somewhere far away and worked remotely. He did a lot of freelance work and also had a full-time job. He made lots of money. And then there was Scott Teeman. I picked out Scott's resume when we were looking to hire someone because Greg was going back to school. Scott eventually got stolen away to do writing projects but he and I and Jon were great friends and we had a lot of fun in the office. Until late December when Jeff asked Scott what he saw himself doing in 5 years. I guess Jeff didn't like the answer because Scott wasn't working there much longer. Then in February, Jon was gone. And then in April 1998, I was gone.

But while I was there, we totally improved the site and did a lot of things. First, we changed the name. First to UTV: The Ultimate Television Network. But then we got sued by United Television, a group of television stations. Internally, they used UTV, but never externally. Well, they started slapping it on all their press releases and had lawyers send us letters. So, we changed the name to UltimateTV. (I came up with both names.) UltimateTV was a great name. When Tribune bought JDTV, the publishing company, they sold the name UltimateTV to Microsoft and DirecTV and changed the website's name to Zap2it.com. Really lame name.

I designed the grids for their television guide (ironically launching nearly two and a half years after I developed the first grid for David that got me noticed), built a store called TVStore.com -- which was sold to an outside company and a site called UltimateMovies. It was a little side project they let Jon and I build one afternoon because we heard that E! was going to build a similar site. But they didn't let us work on it much after that and after we left we built a better one called MovieClicks.com. We also designed the site for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. It was later taken over by another company. I think that was one of the reason they got rid of so many of us, because they lost the contract for Buffy. The site was really cool and the only thing that remains is this thing called "The Postingboard." The postingboard is a very simple message board. You type a message, it appears at the top pushing all the others' down. The reason it was so successful is that stars from the show would come on from time to time to talk to the fans. (I had set it up so that they had access to codes that would let them put in their name and no one else could put in their name, plus they could post in color while no one else could.) 9 months after I built, people started planning a party. It was a grand party, held in February in Los Angeles. It was attended by about 200 fans from around the world and most of the cast and a lot of the crew from the show. It became the "First Annual Postingboard Party." I was a celebrity. It was pretty incredible. A lot of the fans in Los Angeles get togther for dinner almost every week. Most of my friends down here are other fans of the show. (Lori and I even have a Christmas party every year just for Buffy fans.) We have another friend who throws a second party each year on Halloween Weekend in Las Vegas that's well attended and now preferred over the Los Angeles party that's gotten to be too big and too loud. I'm not attending the party this year and I never post on the postingboard anymore. Most of the people who were there when I was posting regularly are now gone and the stars rarely show up anymore and hardly anyone there would even recognize who I was. But back in the days there was a girl living in Oregon who wanted to move to Los Angeles. I had talked to her before on the board but didn't really know anything about her. She planned a trip down to go apartment hunting and she wrote to people down here asking if anyone wanted to get together while she was in town. They contacted me and someone else scored us a bunch of tickets to a comedy club and we all went, I met her, and that's pretty much the whole story. She went home after that weekend and we spent every night typing on the computer until morning learning more and more about each other. (I was mostly unemployed at the time, having already been fired at that point.)

When Tribune bought JDTV I got a check for $5,000. That was very cool. I can't believe Jeff and David haven't jumped ship yet. It's gotta suck being there. The site is so bad. The look was changed somewhat after I left, but I think it only got worse. Jeff had a different idea each week and they always conflicted one another so we were constantly running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to fulfill all his demands without pointing out to him that they conflicted last week's demands. We were all too immature at that point and too stubborn. It was a small company and we all thought we ran it. It's a shame really. I have a lot of fond memories of my time there. I know there were a lot of unpleasant ones, too, but I've mostly blocked them. I do remember an email from Nadine which simply said "F_ck You" which I printed out and taped to the side of my computer for all to see, but I'm happy to say that I've blocked so much from my head. I do know at one point I had a gigantic desk, probably 8x4 on the main section, a maroon marble on cherry wood, but that wrapped around to the side and behind me with cabinets to the ceiling and the wrapped around some more with room to have a refrigerator right in it. It was only there because we were subletting and someone told us it would cost $4,000 just to have it carted away because the marble was so big and so heavy. I loved that desk. It was just too cool and I loved showing people pictures of me working at it.

Anyhow, that's the story of my first job here in California and a little bit of info into how I met Lori.

And that took over 30 minutes to type.