Fitting 6 People in a Space for 2. Preparing for New York.

[Aaron Stanton]

Brian Bothwell recently joined the team, taking some of the programming weight off of Paul's shoulders.  Tony and Eileen both help back me up in terms of business development and communications, and Dustin can handle a good deal of UI and basic graphic work.  The heavy coding, though, has largely fallen on Paul since we took the project full time.  Brian has come on board to help share that burden.  Another friend of ours, Soren, will also be helping out part-time, which is good.

The upside is that our development pipeline just grew substantially.  The downside is that we now have too many people in our space.  What was once a fairly comfortable fit for 2 people has become the home of 6.  Luckily, Dan still Skypes into the office, meaning he's a floating head without occupying much physical space.  Dustin only comes into work after he gets out of school, which frees up some space during much of the day, and Soren is part time.  Still, we had to rearrange some things in order to give everyone a place to work.  I lost half my desk to Brian, and one of my computer monitors to Eileen.  *sigh*

You can see in the photo that we're sort of packed in there.  What you can't see is that I sit behind the wall to the side, and Dustin sits behind me.  Dan sits on a monitor on my desk.  It's a good thing we all get along well. 

We're preparing for the Tools of Change conference in New York next week.  We have to put together a presentation and solidify meetings with various different companies.  Internally, we're also having fun figuring out our insurance, since we now have enough people that we qualify for group insurance rates.  We have a meeting with a VC group here at 2:30 today, someone come in to rework the BookLamp introduction video on Friday, and had to reorder all of our business cards, because the original order was lost in the bad weather out east (we've been told we probably won't get them in time for the conference).  AND we have to rework the graphics for CanGoogleHearMe.

So I should stop writing on this and get to work.

Aaron

[Mandi Taylor]

Any plans on getting a bigger office space soon, or are you just going to work with what you have?

(The caption under the picture on Flickr makes me laugh.  Sounds like you all get along very well!)

[Daniel Bowen]

... well, if there comes a need for another employee it seems that there's no choice.  As far as i know (which I don't think is too far, on this subject), BL will probably be sitting like this for a couple of months.  I am pretty positive that Aaron and crew have discussed it though (I think I heard some talk of it over skype at some point).

[Brian Bothwell]

...once we have achieved world domination and have deluxe office accommodations with huge desks on our luxury office/spaceship/submarine. 

Thanks for the intro Aaron!  I am super excited to become a part of the BookLamp team, even if it means taking up 1/2 of Aaron's desk for now.  We are a bit crammed in our 145 square feet of space, but it's all part of the fun of start-ups!

-beb (back to the Perl code)
 

[Stephen Rollins]

Aw, that's no big deal; crammed spaces increase productivity.

(Actually, it probably doesn't, but let's keep saying that.)

When you guys do go for a new office, I hope it works out without a hitch... my employer has been planning to move since last September, and we still haven't gone anywhere.  Which is too bad, cause it'll be about half the drive time for me...   

[Therin]

Ha, could be worse... I came into work one day to find an empty space.   

Seems someone upstairs had decided to move my team and did so overnight without telling anyone.  Desks, chairs, filing cabinets, plants, even the curtains had been packed up and moved four floors... 

The only things they didn't move were the telephones - given my team lives on its phones it made for a very slow three days before Telstra came and hooked us up.   

[Jo Red]

I think too crammed up space could be Occupational Health and Safety Issue. I hope you have an emergency exit handy, in case somebody, you know, can't hold it any longer.

And smoking should be prohibited inside the office, in case everybody, you know ... , lets it reap simultaneously.

[Therin]

Strange  - it would never occur to me to mention smoking.  What with all that equipment and it being a leased building, I guess I just figured smoking was out.

I don't know about where you guys are, but it's getting almost impossible to smoke over here, basically it's an outdoor sport.  I haven't seen an indoor smoker, (other than residential) in years...   

[Daniel Bowen]

nobody smokes