Goodbye, Laurence
In a bit of mixed news, Laurence is leaving Emmis Interactive – but on the upside, he’s going to be working with Jose again.
In a bit of mixed news, Laurence is leaving Emmis Interactive – but on the upside, he’s going to be working with Jose again.
Today, a group of us said goodbye to Jeff – who leaves us after five years of managing our servers and infrastructure. A group of us went out to Epic Burger, for a farewell lunch.
It’s been a year since our first ever kickball game as a company, and a lot has changed in that time. We’ve got a new team, a new name… and some awesome new shirts, courtesy of Jane.
Our name this year is Mandatory Fun, which is a play off of a phrase used by Chris C in one of his company-wide emails. I forget the original context, but the email spoke about some required function, and his phrasing was something like: “This will be a fun (mandatory) event.”
When we took submissions for names and the votes tallied out, this is the name that won.
Hard to believe how much time has passed, but after almost six years… Nattaporn (Bee) is venturing out, starting a new job as a web developer with Charles Schwab.
Bee was very subdued in her exit, and me, Justin and Chris ended up running out to catch her, as she was saying her goodbyes.
When everyone got together, we did several runs of people practicing their kicks… and then split up into two groups, practicing a lot of catching and throwing the ball around. Tim had the section I was in doing several drills, and by the end of it I think we all felt pretty comfortable.
We met up with Liz, and a group of us walked over to Chicago Curry House for a nice lunch. It was a brief visit, but a lovely way to close out the week – sharing a meal with old friends (and the new guy).
A nice thing about our workplace is that oftentimes, when we have a big weekend… we’ll end up having a half-day Friday. Our office is officially closed on Monday for memorial day, and we closed the office today at 1:00 PM.
Several folks at the company have been hard at work on a new project, and yesterday we had a scheduled break during lunch. This being my first “official” project on the Product Dev team, it was a bit new to me. In the past, this event involved spaghetti in some way… but yesterday turned out to be Pizano Pizza day.
Over lunch, a group of us headed out to Millenium Park during lunch. While a majority of folks were from the Dev and DB side, the group also included Product Dev, QA and Design – basically anyone who had been a part of the project, or worked on it in any way.
Recently, Chris has been playing a game called Fez and part of the game apparently utilizes 3D. He was in need of some glasses, no one in the office had any… so he ended up ordering glasses online.
On his last day, we realized he was the current office Rock, Paper, Scissor Tournament Champ. Since we couldn’t simply let him walk away with the trophy, we held an impromptu tournament in the large conference room.
The company I work for, Emmis Interactive, has been hard at work developing a lot of tools for HD Radio. Specifically, Matt, Chris, Allison and Ben have been developing an HD app prototype that’s currently being shown to a lot of broadcasters at the NAB Show, in Las Vegas.
Our most recent Friday challenge last week involved a bouncy ball, and a little Domo-kun, dressed inexplicably as some kind of luchador.
We were originally going to head over to Plymouth, but by the time we arrived… the place was already packed, with a 90 minute wait to get to the patio. We did an audible and found ourselves at the Tilted Kilt. It was the day before St. Patrick’s day, a Friday, and the weather outside was stellar. We found some tables, and counted ourselves lucky.
Today was not just Rey’s birthday, but his 50th Birthday! As a surprise, Deb organized a ton of things to pull off a small surprise in the office for him. Her goal was to gather folks in the kitchen at the end of a Mangers Meeting. At the meeting’s close, Rey would walk out and be surprised by the food and folks in wait.
On Tuesday, there was a ceremony in the afternoon for a big occasion: Ben had hit his 10 year mark at Emmis Interactive, and was to receive his 10-year watch. We had several folks from Emmis Corporate in town yesterday (in particular our CEO Jeff Smulyan, who would be the one to give Ben the watch).