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It’s All Coming Together—Finally!

After a week of worrying more than we should about the details, the Big Move to the Big Apple is starting to come together. (Which is a good thing since it happens in like 5 days!)

The movers are coming on September 13 to pack all of our stuff into myriad boxes and containers. It is weird to see an estimate for the weight of all your worldly possessions. In our case: 6,400 pounds. I am still trying to figure out where all that weight is coming from. Must be dishes. Anyway, they come back on the 14th to load everything onto the semi that will ship it all cross-country. They pick up our Beetle the same day to ship it across country on one of those scary trucks carrying vehicles that look as if they’re going to fall off at any moment (I checked about insurance).

We fly out the next day—Sepetember 15th—on jetBlue flight 56 from OAK to JFK which gets us into New York at around 8 o’clock that night. This will be a flight of firsts. Deb has never flown jetBlue and experienced live DirecTV while on an airplane (it’s cool! 6 hours of CNN HeadlineNews). And neither of us have flown with our kitties. Yes, that’s right, Nala and Tundra are taking to the air… (We bought sedatives.) The funny thing is, we have to get to the airport extra early to make sure the little menaces are properly screened before they can board. Those poor screeners.

Once we get to New York, we’ll be staying at the Marriott Marquis right in Times Square. Ironically it turns out to be one of the cheapest places to stay in the city on such short notice, and it is about 2 blocks from our office at 1155 Avenue of the Americas. Deb and I—and the kitties—will be staying here until October 1st or until we can find an apartment of our own. I think both of us are hoping to find the apartment sooner than that since we remember living with both cats in a hotel for 3 weeks when we first moved to San Francisco. The hotel’s high-speed Internet connection also means it will be Deb’s office until we find our apartment.

Wish us luck!

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Iconize Me!

Perhaps you may have noticed the icons of Matt and I in the upper right hand corner of our site. They are actually little icons that Iconize Me! created for us by working off photos we sent them.

We love them and use them as our AIM icon. One of my co workers was able to recognize me when we met for the first time from it.

If you get one, let us know so we can post it!

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Geek Mail?

As we’ve told people that we have a blog, both Deb and I have heard that we’re now certifiable geeks (though we’re maintaining that my dad’s as-yet-unmet need for a pocket protector makes him the most certifiable in the family).

While I probably enjoy the geek-style envy (c’mon you know you think it is cool) of friends and family more than Deb does, we both (sorry Deb) now have that quintessential über-geek calling card—a Gmail account. We don’t actually check email in the accounts, we just have them so everyone knows we’ve got our West Coast creds. [debells@gmail.com and mattells@gmail.com]

Google is still beta-testing their much-talked-about free webmail service which gives you one gigabyte of storage for free. The service is quite good, with messages in the same thread collapsing into neat “piles” and the Google ads you’ve probably read about are very unobtrusive—and maybe even helpful since they are so content-sensitive. It seems everybody wants a Gmail account, and the process of getting one has turned into the latest pyramid scheme.

Since the service is still in beta, you can only get an email address at gmail.com if you are invited, and Google has gone to great lengths to turn the beta-test into an effective viral marketing effort. And it seems to have worked—you are only on the inside if you have a coveted Gmail address and the only way to get one is from someone who is already a member. This air of exclusivity has assured massive interest among the technorati and all but assured a successful launch of the service once it is out of beta.

Anyway, since I’m on the inside and you’re not, let me know if you are the least bit curious and I’ll send you an invite (oh! the power!) to open a Gmail account. It’s so utterly ridiculous and yet so compelling to one’s inner-geek that, as a marketer, I have to respect what they’ve done…

I’m told Gmail does not stand for Geek Mail, no matter how relevant the moniker.

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Japanese Earthquakes and Such

My cousin Justin is currently living in Japan. He moved over there not quite two months ago with his Japanese fiancée Mayumi. I have to imagine they’re plenty happy to have made it back there in time for the two big earthquakes that just hit that country.

In any event, we wondered how they were doing when we heard about the quakes. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology (he has a blog, too) (actually he had it waaaaay before we did), we were able to log right in and read his thoughts about the first quake, the second quake and his (brief) post-game analysis.

Glad you guys are okay!

Who else has been in an earthquake? I remember the first one Deb and I were in out here in San Francisco wasn’t very strong (4.2 sticks in my head for some reason?) and as we shook, we were very confused about what was going on. And when we finally figured it out—which took a lot longer than it should have—we were pretty psyched. Probably as much since it wasn’t the “big one” as because it was “our first.”

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‘Tis True…

As some of you will have heard by now, it is true. I am headed back to Dow Jones. My last day at my current job is September 14th and I will be back at Dow Jones starting on September 20th as Sales Development Director for Dow Jones Integrated Solutions.

I’ve loved my time at Business 2.0—and I will be leaving behind a group of people I’ve really enjoyed working with—but the opportunity at Dow Jones is just too good to pass up. Plus we’ll be moving to New York which is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while now…

So exciting!

Deb and I am are beginning the process of figuring out where we should live (any thoughts?). It is going to be a hectic couple of weeks, but we cannot wait to get out there to NYC and start wearing all black!

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