Paris South of Market
In the coming weeks, we’re going to be working on giving PariSoMa a makeover. We’ll be bringing in some new furniture and decorative knick knacks, debuting a new logo and rearranging things to make more space for co-working! We’ll also be offering different levels of membership for those who may not need a full-time desk, and more private space for those who do. Watch this space for updates! We’ll be posting pictures of the changes as they occur.
[blip.tv ?posts_id=1051761&dest=32403]
This is a screencast of always entertaining and informative Matt Cheney’s demo of Swish-E Indexer, at the San Francisco Drupal User’s Group hosted in June at PariSoMa. Swish-E plug-ins allow users to search within the contents of certain pages; Swish-E i
This video was originally shared on blip.tv by consultinggoat with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
For the first few months, PariSoMa had a skeleton crew of mostly American workers. In the last couple of weeks we’ve grown as we have added a new office administrator, visitors have come in from our French office, and now we have a couple of new French coworkers.
All of a sudden, small differences in office and general culture are beginning to pop up. Several different French people here have left the (main) room when they received a cell call, which is very common in France (and not unsual here, either). While that’s very polite, I can’t imagine it is an ideal solution in the long term, when the only other real room is a conference room. I can imagine one day in the future, 4 people huddled together in the corner between the main space and the conference room, trying not to be too loud on their phones….
Now, I know my noise tolerance is high because a) well, I’m American, b) I worked at a school for two years, and am used to plugging in headphones to cover the sound of kids screaming during their break. But in general, I assume an office will have a certain level of noise; people will be on the phone, or talking to one another in the office, etc.
This isn’t an insurmountable difference in working style, of course. It’s just very acute now that we’ve gone from a couple of us talking across the room and playing music, to 5 of us in the office being incredibly polite and noise conscious. I know eventually the membes of the space will define what the space will be like – and in the meantime, maybe the middle ground is to have a “quiet hour” in the AM, and then “headphones mandatory” hour in the PM?
Yesterday was my last day as Director of Technology at Presidio Hill School, where I worked for two years, had a great time, formed several great relationships and made friends with a bunch of talented teenagers. I have more moving and deep thoughts about that, but right now I’m in the midst of my first full-time day at PariSoMa, where I’ve worked part time for the last six months.
Already, I’ve had to change the wifi broadcast channel since our network keeps washing out; there must be some sort of electricity interference somewhere that changes frequency over the course of the day. I also just found out that the iMovie project I was working on – a simple screencast from last month’s Drupal User’s Group meeting – has disappeared. Gone. Nothing. All the work I did on aligning the sound with the video (recorded separately – still working on that…) – it was all for naught. This is after a week of waiting for Blip.tv to get me my new password, since apparently all email from Blip get’s marked as spam by SBC Global / ATT, and so I could never get my new password. (Blip support has been great, fwiw….)
No one said transitions would be easy. I’m glad I mentally prepared to not get anything done today – somehow, I just knew it would be crazy.
On the plus side, we are trying out a new office manager (say hi to Melanie, who is already posting on our PariSoMa blog), and we’ve welcomed a new coworker to the space. And if you’re reading this, then good for you – why don’t you come by next Monday night?
I made this handy map of cafes and grocery stores around the PariSoMa office in google maps. Let me know if there’s anything I may have left off!
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