The Manhattan Project

After the huge updates I made in 2008, I guess it’s time for my bi-annual (?) blog entry:

I’m sitting at my computer at home, thinking about the business and about the coming year. The quick and dirty update is that we secured the United Nations contract of a couple hundred thousand images and have been working on it a couple months now. The myriad warnings I was given from those who have worked with government about not being paid for a few months have proven to be true. And I’ve proven ignorant and over-idealistic in expecting different with the UN. Thankfully, I have a trusting family member (who happens to be my dad) extending his credit line to our business to keep things going a little while longer in hopes of payment by the 3-month mark.

We’re entering the new year with big hopes and big fears. We’re moving into a slightly larger space downstairs on February 1st, and will need to line up some more big work by the summer (or have consumer confidence kick back in) to keep the business afloat. Competition for ads on search engines is increasing and therefore making it more expensive, so we’re going to try and switch to the ‘organic’ strategy of paying an SEO (search engine optimization) company to help us get links for free by ranking high under google and others for such terms as “8mm to dvd new york” or “photo scanning service nyc”. Look out world!

Going into the new year I’m feeling a bit more balanced between the extremes of “holy shit I don’t know what I’m doing” and the opposite, “wow I can totally do this and we are going to take over this town”. Since we’ve grown and I’ve been able to kind of delegate more work to others at the studio it feels a little less heavy on the shoulders, but my posture is as bad as ever (I don’t know why but I prefer leaning forward when working on the computer). Speaking of that, I was leaning pretty heavy toward an early exit from the business this year, but the economy and my own increasingly balanced approach have forced/inclined me to see this as the full 3-4 year project I had expected when moving out here. Hell, maybe it’ll even be longer at this point.

This past weekend it was approaching 0 degrees here in New York withOUT wind chill factor. My god, it’s like shock therapy when you walk around outside in that kind of cold. I stupidly decided to trek 20 minutes in this weather just for a piece of pizza, which basically served to put feeling back in my face after eating it, whether or not it was particularly tasty I couldn’t tell.

But let me get back to the business, of which this blog is meant to consist. We have some promising prospects with Columbia University, and less promising prospects with Backstage Gallery, which has millions of rock and roll photos from photographers with backstage passes, dating over the last several decades. I think if I can find that particular spark I had going into the business, I can spread our net a little wider over the local area and maybe even get some jobs like these.

Borrrring. I don’t why much of this would interest anyone, but I felt like writing something. As is stated in this blog’s upper right corner, it is meant to make you feel less satisfied with the internet.

Well, despite my inclination for fatalism, we are still here and 2009 smells pretty good.

That’s right, it smells good. Look out for pics of the new space in February!

This blog is a stinking carcass, floating in the island of trash along with all the others on the internets.

But stinking carcass or not, this blog persists. Read it and weep.

Since this is supposed to be about the whole DiJiFi project I’ll shed a little light on the subject. Being local to so many millions (of people) and hence so many billions of things needing to be digitized it’s seemed somewhat easy to stay afloat. Ya, we got some profit. Ya, we bid on a job scanning a couple hundred thousand images for the UN archives (keep the fingers crossed or whatever you do for superstition). We treat people well and try to enjoy ourselves and build our local network of trust and all that good stuff. But what I really want to know is, what is it all about? Why are we trying to preserve this person’s collection of memories or that organization’s historical archive? What is it?

The more I get into the world of business and how you go about it, the more it comes down to what motivates each person or each group to do what they do out there in the living, breathing world of everything that there is. This may sound depressing, but I promise it’s not! It’s just interesting. Everybody is running around giving and getting and putting in their two cents while they do it. And yet!

And yet. That is really what somes up my experience so far. I set a goal, and I get on my way. I meet a goal and I set a new one. And yet! I add a few more characters to the list of those met and not seen again, but remembered forever. And yet… there is still something. Something out there pulling everyone around in their orbits. Pulling me around in mine. I feel my orbit change and skew and yet here I am. And yet.

Ya, I like the big questions.

Hi hi hi.

 A happy new year it was. It included family from California racing around town for a week and even making it outside to Central Park (the closest we could get an hour before midnight) to watch the ball drop. You haven’t seen crowds… I’ve seen crowds. I’ve also seen close to zero-degree weather the last few days. No comment.

The new office is sah-weet. Here’s some pics:

Ya that wee desk on the lower-left is something Andria found on the street being thrown away. I couldn’t resist. And the window is my “office view” of, well… other offices. No, it’s actually a nice view of the river and Pulaski Bridge. But that’s a story for another time.

 Cheers to you!

Imagine that sound made by the invading aliens in the movie War of The Worlds with Tom Cruise. That is not unlike the sound heard by millions of New Yorkers when our first major non-internet advertisements hit the street. They took the form of a 1 inch by 1.5 inch box that announced our arrival to the marketplace, establishing our dominance of the photo-scanning market even louder than the dermatologist next to us announced his dominance of whatever it is he does (joke).

The New York Daily News, ladies and gentlemen, featured us next to one of their major stories of the weekend. The story of the Nazi dog. I cried tears of joy to know that we were in the company of such fine journalism. And I also appreciated the size of the Chase ad to the right to make sure us little guys knew exactly how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. Yes, as exciting as our little ad is, it is also tragically small.

 But the purpose of the ad was to get the Google promotion of $2,000 towards an ad early next year. A bigger, bolder add, at least 3 inches wide. Maybe 4. So you see, this is but the small step towards the brighter future. One giant leap for DiJiFi kind. I don’t know.

 On the personal front, I’m still eating leftover Turkey and learning to enjoy the warm cave I share with 2 other humans and 7 or 8 computers. I can’t keep track at this point. We move the biznass to Brooklyn this weekend. And then… well, you remember the rest of the plot. The aliens take over, everyone dies. And then the aliens catch a stupid cold. But not us!

Reading your own writing (blog writing, that is) is a bit like hearing a recording of your own voice. You tend to not like it.

But I can’t let that stop me. It’s been another busy/successful month for the biz. Looking forward to getting it the hell out of this apartment because I am becoming increasingly useless as I get more and more comfortable with the business here. Customers have commented on my lack of shoes when they come in (jokingly) and I find myself more and more distracted by homely relaxations such as digging through YouTube with Joey for random bits of video we thought we could never find, like Captain EO from the classic Disneyland 3-D attraction.

 Plus, I find that working and living in the same place makes your world impossibly small, and it messes with your mind!

I’ll stop complaining though… what else… the weather is finally getting chilly, but definitely not the eyeball-stabbing cold I’ve experienced here before. So I’m holding out hope that it gets to that point soon. Just so I can be sure it was really that cold on a previous visit.

Andriana and I snuck in a trip to Catskill Park in October and got a little taste of the fall colors and trees over here in the East. It’s a pretty cool thing, literally and figuratively. We found an awesome oasis of a beer store in the middle of the place that sold all of the great craft brews of California as well as some good’ns from New England. The ‘Magic Hat’ is a current favorite brewery, if you ever get the chance to try it we will recommend it.

What… else… I’m still pretty excited about the whole entrepreneurial side of life, although I find little things like ‘cash management’ and ‘keeping the books’ to be aquired tastes. I’m currently racking my brain to figure out how to make a machine that has an opening you dump peoples media into and at the other end it pops out a disc with everything digitally organized. For now, we’re doing it the hard way though. For now.

As the ancient philosopher Talib Kweli once put it… “fuck the harder way, we’re doing it the smarter way.”

Has nothing to do with building a business (the board game, that is), but it feels like it involves about the same amount of rolling the dice. Here’s a pic of the new loft space in which I put a considerable amount of the available business cash to secure. We’ve had a pretty phenomenal start so far, so… why not, right?

Having fun, but really needing to learn not to worry so much. I find myself constantly thinking of what could go wrong and then realizing that none of it really does. Shut up, mind. Just get stuff done, relax a little, push it a little, and see what happens. Ya, just keep telling myself that.

 Well, that space I found is in Greenpoint, which is the northwestern tip of Brooklyn. I have about a 20-30 minute commute there starting December. Part of that commute involves walking over this bridge with an excellent view of midtown Manhattan. The area is really cool too, lots of little companies buzzing about.

Alright I need to get out of this apartment for a night. Goodbye internet. For now.

So… you would like to change. You have an idea of the person you want to be, and you don’t know exactly how to get there.

It’s funny to be in a place like NYC, and meet the people that are part of the ‘bigness’ of human dreams and accomplishments. There is definitely an energy permeating this place that is both powerful and pitiful. Some customers of mine are very wealthy, fit, determined people you would imagine building a 50-story tower to represent their abilities or their work in life. Then there are people like the accountant I hired for a day who obviously never leaves the office and looked worse off than a homeless man (literally), working in one of the really nice towers near Rockefeller. He seemed overwhelmed and intimidated and I never used him again. You want to tell him “Stop working man! Get outside and live at least a couple days out of your week.” But no, he likes living in the shadow of the powerful dream that is represented there.

I’m still on the fringes of this society, slowly seeping in for a better look. I think I have a bit of both the accountant and the tower-builder in me, but neither are who I want to be. Or need to be. DiJiFi seems to be a welcome idea around here and we’re setting our sights on a loft space somewhere in Brooklyn. When you have an idea and people flock to it, it’s a strange and wonderful thing. But where do you take it? It’s a challenge, and it can take you to the top of your tower or to the shadows of another’s. Here’s to hoping I can take it as far as I need to. Want to.

Okay, here’s some pics of the business/home/hostel: from the bedroom (Joey lives on the left, the futon is his bedroom), the bedroom, DiJiFi headquarters (ya, I thought I ordered the small roll of plastic, but apparently not), the kitchen, the bathroom. It’s cozy, verrry cozy. But hey, we love it.

I shaved my beard, but no picture of that quite yet. I look roughly 18 years old. So that’s cool.

Ummm, not a whole lot else. Business is steady this week. Weather’s fine. Yep, everything’s just fiiine.

(awkward silence)

Well. I gotta go.

This is not a ‘real’ update. But the weather has taken a turn… for the cooler.

 Of course this happens after we buy an A/C on CraigsList. By the way, we’ve basically furnished our place, including the A/C unit, a futon, an armoire and a chair for just over $200. A-come-on-a-yeah-ha, as Case would say (via Jack Black).

 Business is slowing down, but now I can get the administrative stuff done. Meaning I have to administer the business, which basically means I have to fiddle with papers and pens and pretend that it’s meaningful. Very important business humph humph and all that. “Come on Jess take a break and come hang out with us.” “Not now damn it! I’ve got these bills and flublllghrphlmpha to do.” “What? You’re just surfing the net, you’re not even…” “SILENCE. I must ADMINISTER things. Leave me be you devils!”

 Anyway, it was funny in my head. And also, the thing about the pizza being hot and crusty is… there’s a pizza chain in Manhattan called “Hot and Crusty.” After my initially tickled reaction, I actually started feeling hungry.

An encapsulation of the past month: We packed our stuff, we put it in a Budget truck with enough room in the back to setup a mini-bedroom for the road. We hit the road. We saw Yellowstone, Denver, Crazy Horse, Mt. Rushmore, Badlands, Madison, Chicago, Pennsylvania, and last but not least, New York City. We unpacked. We adjusted to the lifestyles of the ultra-compact. And now we sweat.

It’s currently 80 something degrees, with a healthy dose of humidity, and it’s after midnight. I’m sure outside it’s actually really nice, but we have more than a few computers running in here, making it a small weather system of warm-wet and hot-wet seasons. But hey, at least our skin won’t go dry.

DiJiFi is off the ground and running. We’ve had over 10 orders in the first week, and if it continues this way there is an office space, where nobody actually lives, in its future.

I setup a toll-free line where I have to have a greeting and have the customer press a number to go to a certain department. There’s just me, though, so when people call they are asked if they want to speak to a technician, and to press 1 if so. And that’s it. It’s like calling me on my cell and getting a message: if you want to talk to me, press 1. You just pressed 1, which means you want to talk to me, press 2 to confirm this is really what you want… sorry customers, it’s all I can afford right now.

Well, it’s late and I need to shower. Here’s a picture of the Crazy Horse Memorial: