After two years here at Emmis Interactive, Sarah is leaving us to return to school. Like Margaret’s goodbye, it’s a sad occassion… but a good purpose. For her send off, we decided to hold one of our traditional Peanut Butter Jelly days. For those who have been following this blog for a while, you’re probably familiar with the ritual (we’ve…
I have to say – watching and hearing Jane and TJ slowly realize they had matching outfits was priceless. Check it out: red shirt, jeans, and brown shoes. And the glasses are a nice touch. I have a friend from my childhood, Ward Poulos, who has a photo album on Facebook called Wall of Same. I’m not entirely clear whether…
At the end of this week, Margaret will be leaving Emmis Interactive. Along with her husband Justin, the two of them are setting off for Ohio, where Margaret will go back to school. After work yesterday, several folks from the office gathered at the nearby B&B for some post-work drinks. My photos weren’t very good from the night, so I’ve…
Around 3:00 PM, a bunch of us at work headed out as a group to take a break, and to pick up some smoothies. About nine of us walked down Michigan to Osaka for their wonderful fruit smoothies. While we were there, I fired up my Geocaching iPhone app and spotted a nearby cache. Walt had been talking with Jane…
We had another fire alarm/evacuation thing today, around 11:30 AM. I don’t really know what the cause was, but I’m guessing it was triggered by the construction that’s going on on the floors above us. Once again, the Fire department showed up and I’m guessing it costs DePaul a pretty penny for all these false alarms. I took some photos…
Several weeks back, Kevin P recommended that we all watch the Pixar documentary entitled The Pixar Story. It follows the arc of the company, from its humble beginnings and the incredibly successful period where it just kept on making hit movie after hit movie. Yesterday afternoon, we got a bunch of pizzas ordered and a room in our annex was…
The challenge in our office last Friday was taken from the game show Minute to Win It. This one is called “Don’t Blow the Joker,” and it’s pretty simple overall. A deck of cards is balanced on a bottle. At the bottom of the deck is a Joker, facing the opposite direction. Using nothing but your breath, you have to…
Around 10:30 AM or so, things were getting along to a regular Monday start at the office… when the fire alarm went off. We’ve had drills in the building before, and on hearing the alarm most every suspected it was another “exercise,” to test the fire procedures. Several folks began walking towards the office entrance, and began milling about. Sarah…
We got a quick project request to do an informal video “tour” of the company, and yesterday Chris (along with Jose, Laurence and Jane) did a lot of planning and zipping around to various departments. Jose brought in some crazy fancy gear, along with lots of lighting and a boom mike. Sadly, it’s an internal video only… so I can’t…
Earlier this week, we launched the newly redesigned website for Emmis Interactive. This site has been in the works for a good while, and a recent press release made last week an exceptionally busy one. After a flurry of activity, and another heroic push from Jane and Chris in particular, I have to say that this is one damn fine…
After two years working with us, we’re saying goodbye to Matt Miner. Matt’s case is a special one: though he’s been with us a long while, he was originally brought on as a temporary hire (via another company, Sogeti). He was, for all intents and purposes, brought on at the start as a hired gun. But he soon proved himself…
This year, as is the tradition for tech companies, we made a little interactive Holiday Card to send out to clients and friends. Here’s the concept: everyone at Emmis Interactive shares one naughty and one nice thing they’ve done. Visitors are encouraged to look through all the things we’ve done and to vote. You get to play Santa a bit…
This year, the Emmis Interactive holiday party was held in the office. On Friday we had a big Quarterly meeting that took a majority of the afternoon. We got out a bit early, and returned back to the office for some food and drink, later in the evening. Deb’s Moose (a gift from our Canadian friends) greeted visitors at the…
Though we had a ton of folks signed up for last night’s game, a lot of last-minute changes took place… and we wound up with only six people to play. But to my surprise, among that six were Deb and Rey (who wandered in just as we started, and decided to sit in). At the start of the evening, about…
After almost two years with us at Emmis Interactive, Nick is saying goodbye. He got a position as the user interface designer at Groupon, where he will be starting sometime later this month. Nick was around in the early days, brought on a few months after we first moved to State and Jackson. The Design team was probably half of…