I’m no longer the IT Director at Latina… because I’m now the Director of Information Technology and Digital Media! The promotion is something that had been talked about in the past, but official word got out from the Publisher/Co-President of the company on Tuesday afternoon:

It is with great pleasure that we announce Matt Fox’s promotion to Director of Information Technology & Digital Media here at Latina Media Ventures.

Matt joined Latina in June 2007 as IT Director.  While his primary responsibility was the network, all things IT here at Latina as well as IT troubleshooting, Matt soon began using his considerable talents to assist with Latina.com.  He has since been incredibly instrumental in executing our brand new re-design; beautifully so and in a very short turnaround time.

Boom.

I’ve had the chance to do a lot of really great work during my time at Latina; some of which was expected of me, some of which wasn’t (and was made painfully clear at times), and it feels great to know they’ve noticed the results. It doesn’t really mean much of a change from the work I’m already doing, but I will have a couple of people answering to me now.

There was plenty of time to think about my promotion, and some other stuff, during the train ride home on Tuesday afternoon. There was a fire in a switching tower outside of the Long Island Rail Road’s Jamaica station on Monday morning, causing a ton of train cancellations and schedule modifications all week long. I don’t know how the LIRR managed, but it turns out that they’ve been using the same switching system in the affected tower for 97 years. Considering the lack of upgrades, I guess it’s safe to assume that the majority of the $400+ I pay each month is going overtime pay for the hordes of LIRR staff working on the problem, and not proactive (and long overdue) upgrades. OK, that wasn’t fair – they do have a new system going online in 2 months, but they could at least work on keeping the “blue juice” from the toilets in the trains from getting on to the floors.

Monday was worse; The LIRR simply stated that train service would be suspended, and took a couple of hours to even explain what was going on. Luckily, my co-worker, Cameron had rented a car to finish up some personal items and offered to drive me out to the island. It worked out well – I got home and he was able to go to some of the larger chain stores out here. Sure there are Target and Home Depot locations in the city, but are they as huge as the ones out here AND conveniently located just minutes away from Taco Bell and White Castle? I got a shot of Cameron (above) posing with some buckets at the Home Depot. We have a friend named Luis. He loves the buckets. We don’t know why. We don’t ask.

As I said earlier, the extra long commute time back and forth from the city left me with plenty of time to think. It’s amazing to see just how much can happen over the course of a year.

About 12 months ago, I found out that Latina would be moving to new offices. The timing completely sucked. I was planning on taking a trip to Sweden with some friends, and the day we’d all be leaving the States happened to be the same day as the move. Needless to say, I had to skip the trip and work on getting the new office ready, prepare the network for relocation, etc. 2 months later, we were moved in to the new space and did so without any major issues. Once I had the chance to sit down and get myself settled in to the new space, I realized how unhappy I was. Work was boring the hell out of me, and there was an overwhelming amount of it to do. I had to put my side projects on hold and never seemed to have any time for myself or anyone else. Any spare time I had was used to spruce up my resume.

Around 6 months later, things were improving. I had some new, interesting, projects going on at Latina and I was able to make more time for myself. I was still pretty swamped with work, but I was much happier. Several months went by, and things were great. I went back to the drawing board on ledouche and came up with the hand-etched flasks idea. The creative juices were flowing again and it felt good. I was even taking the time, literally dropping everything, to relax and be around friends and family.

Things really were good, until I had a bad moment at work. I was having one of those days where things were piling up from all sides. Those happen to everyone now and then, and I can usually deal with them, but that day was different. I had a moment of anger and unintentionally directed it towards a good friend. I said what I said, packed my bag and left the office. One of my buddies happened to be working from home that day so I decided a walk down to his place, from 59th street down to 13th, would give me the chance to clear my head and get myself back to normal. That was about 2 months ago, and she still hasn’t talked to me since. I’ve apologized several times, and have expressed how ashamed I am of myself for what I said, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Hopefully she’ll speak to me again, someday.

Fast forward to today, and things are great. Sadly, a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about what a dick I was a couple of months ago, but I try not to dwell. There’s the promotion, I’m busy working on ledouche, and I’m keeping a really good balance between work and my personal life. Actually, the two of them bleed in to each other quite a bit, but it works out well. Overall, my health is good, but I may have to go under the knife soon for some preventative maintenance on the guts. I’ve also been boxing, only with exercise and stress relief in mind, for the past 6 weeks and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever decided to do. I work out with my heavy bag for about 30 minutes, and then ride my stationary bike for about an hour, 3-4 times a week. I’m feeling better, sleeping better and there’s a little extra room in those Fred Perry shirts I’ve stubbornly been wearing non-stop all summer.  On top of all of that, there’s a Suburban Legends/The Aquabats/Reel Big Fish show in November! Can it get any better? Of course it can – just add some buckets! BUCKETS!

I ran in to a situation at work today where an advertiser, wanting to place a tracking pixel on a sponsored piece of Web content, only wanting to know about visitors who have been on the page containing the content for at least one minute. The advertising system we use doesn’t offer a solution for this out of the box and I didn’t think it would be terribly difficult to make happen, but was surprised to not find any quick how-to guides anywhere.

The code snippet below outputs markup to a visitors browser 60 seconds after the page they are viewing loads. It was tested in Doubleclick’s Dart for Publishers as a piece of custom creative targeted to a ad zone used exclusively by the piece of sponsored content:

<script languagage="Javascript">
/* %u - keep Dart from complaining about no url */
setTimeout("firePixels()", 60000); //60 second delay
function firePixels(){
	var tStage = document.getElementById('trackerstage');
	if (tStage){
		tStage.innerHTML = "<img src=\"http://www.100781.org/happles.jpg\">";
	}
}
</script>
<div id="trackerstage"></div>

This solution worked perfectly, after replacing my test image with the advertiser’s tracking pixel, of course. This is also simple enough that it should be able to work just as well when delivered by any advertising system. Have a similar solution or tip? Share!

I got the opportunity to write a tech post for latina.com last week. It was about the 2 new Palm phones set to launch on Verizon Wireless tomorrow, which weren’t even mentioned by most media outlets until a couple of days later. Most tech sites had information on the phones as well, but it was pretty sweet  for people to come up to me and say “I just read about these in the Times, didn’t this go up on our site a couple of days ago?”

The post was edited by a member of the Digital team, to make it better match the tone of the website. This makes a lot of sense since it was originally pretty dry and factual, more along the lines of what you’d see on Gizmodo or Engadget. It was nice to be able to contribute in a way outside of the norm for me, and I’m hoping I get the chance to do it again soon.

latina.com

Latina.com underwent a bit of a refresh earlier this month. Cameron Moore, Latina’s Web Developer and I, along with the guys at Limachips put a ton of work in to the project over the past few months, and it was great seeing the newly refreshed layout go up smoothly.

Continue Reading…

NFTE, a former employer of mine, was mentioned in a NYT article over the weekend. Having worked there for over seven years, and seeing scores of lives changed by the program, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride in what was said about the organization.

From the article:

The president should also vow to bring the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NFTE, to every low-income neighborhood in America. NFTE works with middle- and high-school teachers to help them teach entrepreneurship. The centerpiece of its program is a national contest for start-ups with 24,000 kids participating. Each student has to invent a product or service, write up a business plan and then do it. NFTE (www.NFTE.com) works only in low-income areas, so many of these new entrepreneurs are minority kids.

In November, a documentary movie — “Ten9Eight” — was released that tracked a dozen students all the way through to the finals of the NFTE competition. Obama should arrange for this movie to be shown in every classroom in America. It is the most inspirational, heartwarming film you will ever see. You can obtain details about it at www.ten9eight.com.

You can read the full article at the New York Times Website.

Go Steve!

My brother and film student, Daniel Fox, recently completed two behind the scenes videos for latina.com. One features Kristina Debarge and the other is for a beauty feature in the October issue of the magazine. Check em out.

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Latina moved in to its new offices last Friday, and I’ve spent the past week and change getting everyone settled in. The move could have gone a bit smoother – our moving company forgot a ton of my equipment and I ended up having to go back to the old office with a friend to get it all. We managed to rebuild my entire server cabinet and network rack, and then realized that none of the cabling to complete the work was around. Once we got to the old office space and headed to my computer room, there was a big box in the middle with “server cabling” written on it.

Idiots.

I’m going to miss working in Times Square. Sure, I absolutely hated it when I began at Latina – the crowds, high prices and all of those “do you like comedy” guys, but it quickly became a second home. I guess we’ll see how things go in Midtown East…

It’s been a minute since I last posted anything. The past few weeks have been really hectic. Latina’s moving to a new office in a just under 2 weeks and I have a ton of work to get done beforehand. The new space needs to be rewired and some construction work completed, new service contracts need to be executed, and my mess of a server room needs to be completely cleaned out. I’m putting in the extra time to make sure it all goes smoothly, and will catch up on things outside of work after the move is complete and everything is running smoothly.

Between now and the end of the month, it’s all work with the exception of a Streetlight Manifesto show I’m going to try and get to on the 21st.

Aside from the physical exhaustion, last Friday took its toll on me emotionally. Everywhere I turned, people were bringing up the 8th anniversary of 9/11. I had a hard time restraining myself while a tourist and his family talked about their visit to WTC while on a line at Duane Reade. They made it sound like a trip to a reenactment of a battle from the Civil War or something – as if while the events were true, but what they were seeing had been created for their enjoyment. I seriously wanted to smack this one child in the head after hearing him say it was “pretty cool.”

I worked about 5 blocks from ground zero when 9/11 happened. I wasn’t at work that day; I worked late the night before and stayed home instead of heading in to the city. That night was the last time I walked through the trade center on my way to the E train. I even grabbed a smoothie from a place directly across from the E train entrance, something I had wanted to do for a few years but was always in too much of a rush to do so. I still have the receipt somewhere.

After getting a few hours of sleep, I woke up and turned my TV on and immediately saw the footage of the first plane hit the north tower. I thought it was a movie at first, then realized what time it was and that i was watching a live newscast. I’ve never been as terrified was I was at that moment. Every single employee of my then employer, along with tons of friends and family were in the area and I couldn’t get in touch with a single person. At the same time, a lot of people were trying to get in touch with me, but couldn’t either.

My laziness really paid off that day. There is a good chance that I could have been in the basement of the WTC when the attacks happened if I did decide to head to work that day.

By the time the dust began to settle, I was able to get in touch with all family that were in the area and got news that everyone from my office survived. My boss was hit with debris and ended up in the hosptital, but was physically fine within a few weeks. He was never quite the same afterwards though. I lost a few friends and business associates that day, but was extremely grateful for everyone that did make it out alive.

My office remained closed for a full week after the attacks. The next tuesday, a bomb scare cleared out the building I worked in early in the afternoon. The CFO and I, both of whom live on Long Island, were took spooked to take the subway to Penn Station so we ended up walking all of the way from Wall St. up to 34th. In the end, the suspected bomb turned out to be a box of soap.

Every year, I remember and give thanks to all of the individuals who lost or gave up their lives as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center. I also remember all of the faces of the friends, colleagues and commuters that I havent seen since then, and remember how lucky I am to be here.

In the end, remember to be a bit lazy now and then. It could just save your life.

Every once in a while, I get to do something out of the ordinary for Latina. Something totally unrelated with what I was originally hired to do, which makes working there not suck at all.

Several weeks ago, shortly before Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation, the idea of creating and marketing “Wise Latina” shirts was passed around the office. When the e-commerce component of the idea came my way, it was clear that we had to outsource. Immediately, 2 companies came to mind; MerchDirect and Merchline.

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I just finished refreshing opiate.nu after leaving it for a couple of years. It used to be the domain name for a small design/development business I ran with a few friends for several years, but we’ve each gone our separate ways since. I registered the domain way back in 2001, and just can’t seem to let it go. Anyway, I’m going to use it as a sort of aggregator for myself from now on. It’ll contain feeds from this blog and other services, info on projects I’m working on, along with my resume. Go check it out. It’s fucking yellow as hell!