Bianca

Radio Shack

	Welcome to my musings about the workplaces I've inhabited. These pages follow in the tradition of my travel pages. I market myself on the pages dedicated to my résumé. The two ought not be confused.

On 14 February 2001, Valentine's Day, the seventh anniversary of the founding of the company, I accepted a position at bianca.com, a tiny web-based company which has been on the web almost as long as I. It brings me back to my Internet roots, but using all current technology, which I suspect will be an interesting mix. I have ideas :-)

Known as Bianca's Smut Shack in the grand old days, nowadays it's just Bianca's (due to a maturation of its brand, not because of the Radio Shack vs. Bianca's Smut Shack brouhaha of years past). Founded in 1993, it was one of the first interactive communities on the world wide web; a vibrant force in the same vein as was the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL). In May 1999 it was acquired by Nerve Magazine but allowed to continue operation from its San Francisco home. (The company name, Biancatroll Productions, was taken from a drunken slur on "beyond control productions" by one of co-founder Chris Miller's boyhood friends.)

Bianca gets toasted :-(
Friday 9 March 2001: It's with great personal and professional sadness that I report the gutting of my new employer, bianca.com, by its parent company, Nerve. My boss of one week, David Thau, was informed yesterday that the technical staff was to be let go today and the remaining employees are to be put on half-salary effective immediately. The company has one month to become profitable, or else, was the news from New York. (I've been on for only a week due to our pre-joining vacation in Kaua'i.)

I'm most saddened by the demise of a wonderful working environment and the abrupt termination of such great possibility. We'd been planning (some might say architecting) an Java-centric XML personals tool as an upgrade to the rather sad one currently deployed. We had good people, good chemistry, and good ideas. I mourn what might have been possible with this great crew. Sigh.

Another holdout from the creeping corporate ennui on the 'net is gone. A sad day for all of us who hope for something more than e-commerce and corporate brochures on the web. The death of this working environment means our universe just got a bit smaller, a bit more homogenous, a wee bit colder.