Director, Mostly

After working for Apple (see Working For Apple) and LucasArts (see When the Force Was With Me), I started contracting with people I’d met through HyperCard, but usually programming in another language, Lingo, which was part of a software authoring application called Director. I did projects for Visa, Discover, The Recording Academy (a recap of that year's Grammys with all the winners and a selection of performances), various educational projects (I can't even remember what they were about, though I have discs floating around somewhere), games (Wacky Jacks! and the one I did a prototype of in Chicago -- for a Berkeley company -- that never went anywhere), and a multitude of corporate jobs.

Visa 1991

The best job ever, was for Visa, of all people. I worked on software for both Visa and Discover to teach middle school kids how to manage their money. The Visa project was perfect because we were just porting an existing program from the PC/Wintel side to the Mac using HyperCard. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t much to do, all the programming and most of the art was original, but I was working with the same artist I’d worked with at Lucas and we didn’t have to worry about other people designing the software -- we just had to implement instead of having to constantly adjust to designers changing their minds. It went like clockwork. Also, I was doing it out of my apartment up in Fox Plaza so I didn’t have to commute anywhere. It was a delightful experience that would never be repeated.

China Basin 1991

The original China Basin Building in San Francisco is one of the most interesting buildings I’ve ever worked in. For one thing, it’s huge. 

In foreground with new ball park to the right.

It stretches for a full SOMA (long) block alongside a wharf, between two drawbridges on a small body of water called China Basin. At the time, this building and the 3rd street bridge were the main landmarks of the neighborhood but today the real landmark is ATT Park where the Giants play baseball -- but that came years later. 

The view from our offices of what would be the ATT Park site.

China Basin (the building) was big enough, and in a bleak enough neighborhood, that it could support an internal market, because there was very little happening on the streets outside back then. But the wharf between the building and the water was a splendid place to eat lunch and we were out there almost every lunch hour until it caught fire one night and burned -- nearly taking the building with it. They rebuilt the wharf later but it was never the same.

The wharf and bridge before the fire (these are my photos).

After the fire.

Townsend

From the China Basin Building we moved to a smaller building a block or so away on Townsend. We were still doing the same Director game development. What I remember about this place is that, back then, there were still railroad tracks in the alley, Bluxome, behind us. In fact there were still freight spurs running all over the place. They ran down most alleys, crossed major streets, and lead directly into many of the buildings with an industrial past. The neighborhood had been christened “Multimedia Gulch” by the city, but it was still mostly garment district with multi-story sweatshops everywhere. That probably sounds bleak, but the reality was anything but. I tended to walk over from Fox Plaza, but sometimes I rode the very convenient bus along with the sweatshop workers going to and from Chinatown. They always traveled in a voluble pack, never silent and usually laughing. I don’t know what the work and pay were like, but they seemed to be having a lot of fun.

But to get back to the train tracks, today you have to really know where to look to find any evidence that 19th century rail infrastructure ever existed in the neighborhood. It has been all but obliterated.

Wired

Another friend from the Lab was one of the original employees at Wired magazine (I have the premier issue of that magazine, too -- also the premier issue of Dwell). At first they had an office on South Park at 2nd Street. South Park was then the epicenter of everything High Tech and trendy and I was occasionally working for a little company a block away (the Discover job). To hang around South Park then felt like being at the center of the world -- like Palo Alto had been years earlier during the original Silicon Valley boom.

The Grammys 1995

And speaking of the Valley, in 1995 I was again taking the train down the Peninsula every day but this time I was stopping in Palo Alto where I was writing software about the Grammy’s for The Recording Academy. This was the most intense database work I ever had to do and I was a team of one. This job happened to fall in an El Niño winter (see El Niño). It seemed like every time I rode the train down to Palo Alto the stations were swept with rain and the tracks ran through large puddles/small lakes. What I noticed was that there was very little computer talk (or computer use) until you hit Menlo Park. From there south you would overhear snippets of computer -- and even database -- talk. The Silicon Valley was still the place you didn’t feel like a freak if you were into computers. Where you could reasonably strike up a conversation about the finer points of writing a database and even get useful advice. I think about this sometimes today when I go into a cafe and can’t find an open electrical outlet because everyone is on a laptop. Today I wouldn’t even need to ride down on the train as the content would be in the Cloud and I could access it from anywhere -- oh, brave new world, where were you when I could have used you.

Colossal

One of my most corporate, and also flakiest, jobs was doing a multimedia shareholder report for Schlumberger with (Colossal) Pictures. (Don't blame me for the parentheses, that's their brand.) We were creating game-like software that demonstrated the latest techniques in oil drilling. Again I was a consultant brought in late in the day to get the job done, and for weeks I closed up their building and took a cab home to sleep for a few hours (this site was really out-of-the-way). The best perk on this job was Buttercup, the rottweiler/pit mix. She was around a year old and could never understand why people would go back to their dull work-spaces when they could be rubbing her belly. I made sure she got a mention in the project credits.

Medius IV

Sometimes it is hard to recall how you made a connection. What I do remember is hearing Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” (a then current hit) several times over the course of an evening when I met with these potential clients at the old, still charming, Cliff House for drinks. Now there’s an elegant steel and glass structure on the site, but in the mid-'90s the place had a 19th century charm with a fireplace, red flocked wallpaper and lighting that resembled gas lamps. It felt like a San Francisco nightspot from the 1890s with Pacific waves crashing on Seal Rock out the windows. M__ and S__ (he Persian, she Hungarian) would become regular clients for the remainder of the decade on a long series of crass commercial projects for Acer, Symantec, Norton, and other High Tech clients. They were always running late with the design and art assets so I would always end up working for days straight as the deadline approached, trying to make up for weeks of wasted time. If they hadn’t been interesting people -- and I hadn’t been billing $50 an hour -- it wouldn’t have been worth the hassle.

Mostly I mention them because some reader might be one of the few, the proud, the fans of The Nine Lives of Chloe King. There is a plot line of that show that turns on a street near the Bay in San Francisco named Colin P. Kelly. When I first worked for Medius IV, their odd but wonderful office was in a small, older building on Colin P. Kelly, which is only a one block alley. I doubt any of my friends in San Francisco know the street exists, so imagine my excitement when I saw it “featured” on Chloe King?

After finally getting off work after 2am or 4am or 6am on Colin P. Kelly, I would usually walk home since buses are so scarce at that time of the morning. I would walk along the Bay, under the Bay Bridge, through the park between the bridge and the Ferry Building (once it came into existence), and then up California -- more or less like I had on that first late night walk in San Francisco back in ‘71. I particularly remember one late night when the tide was unusually high and the bay unusually calm -- it was even warm. Leaning on the railing near the Ferry building, the bay seemed like a big bathtub that I could wade into and then swim out to Yerba Buena Island, which seemed strangely near. It was so tempting. I was probably really exhausted.

Eventually, Medius IV moved into another industrial building in a less interesting neighborhood near Civic Center. Going home from here late in the morning was less fun and more dangerous. I actually got to use my pepper spray on some dolt who tried to rob me as I waited for the bus.  Employees tended to not last long at Medius IV -- for reasons -- but they almost always hired interesting people. H__ was fun but ended up moving to Ireland to raise babies. A__ introduced me to Whit Stillman and Henry Fool before she wandered off. M__ had one Brazilian and one Argentine parent and could make jokes at someone’s expense so fast and with such a lovely smile that they never noticed. She was also a dragon (in Chinese astrology) like me, which gave me the opportunity to refer to her as Little Dragon. L1 had escaped Afghanistan over the Tora Bora. L2 was a tiny, Mandarin speaking person who loved telling really pathetic dirty jokes. K__ was also Chinese but originally from Indonesia so she introduced me to that cuisine, and then to Vietnamese soups for good measure. S__ was ethnic Russian from Latvia so it was fun to take him hiking at Muir Woods where he could see a redwood forest for the first time. In one of those small-world moments, I helped Y__ move into an apartment in a little building across the street from from my old balcony in Fox Plaza.

M__ had been a student here when the Shah fell, and stayed. S__’s family arrived in the ‘50s from Hungary to escape the Communists. Imagine this: you’re fleeing Soviet dominated Hungary and end up living in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. The Haight didn’t become “The Haight” until the late ‘60s, but before that it had been a relatively conservative, racially mixed neighborhood of rundown, but beautiful old Victorian buildings with the usual mix of local shops and cafes. This was not the America I grew up in.