Have a blast off

If you've been following this blog for any length of time, and if you have perhaps you should use the Google to find better ways to kill time during the pandemic, you probably already know I have a somewhat compulsive side to my otherwise sparkling personality.

Breaking Bad. Bruce Springsteen. Sourdough bread. Las Vegas (in the before times).

One other quasi-obsession I have that I don't blog about much is space movies. Specifically ones about the golden age of the space race: the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs. There's been a lot of great movies about them: Apollo 13. First Man. The Right Stuff.

Going to change the subject for a sec, but I'll thread the needle on the back end. Here's the thing: we have way too many streaming services. The house is lousy with them: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime. Disney +. So when Apple TV+ rode into town, I wasn't itchin' to sign up and pay yet another monthly fee.

But as they say in the ad biz, nothing beats free. And come to find out that's exactly what Apple TV+ is. Seems they have a promotion going on for a free year's subscription within 90 days of purchasing any Apple device. Like, say, the wife's new MacBook Air.

Truth be told, the original shows on Apple TV+ haven't been getting what you'd call rave reviews. But the one that, predictably, caught my attention was For All Mankind.

Space? Astronauts? 10 hours? Apollo program? I'm in.

So for the past couple of days I've been bingeing it. I know, I'm as shocked as you are. And I"m here to tell ya it's really, seriously great. The premise is simple: what if the Russians had beat us to the moon, and the space race never stopped? It's alternative history fiction built around the space program.

And for all my show biz pals at the studios, listen up. It's also made me decide that, more than anything, I want to have a bit part in a space movie.

I want to be one of the engineers wearing a short sleeve, white shirt, skinny tie and thick frame glasses sitting at one of the rows of those bulky, green, Mission Control computers.

And I'm not looking for a showy, star turn. In fact the only thing I want to say is one line. During the obligatory pre-launch checklist scene, when it's my turn I want to bark out: "It's a go."

Start to finish, like the best series, it's a rollercoaster ride with unexpected twists and turns, surprising revisionist history and characters you can't help care about. It's making you cry and cheer one minute, gutting you the next.

So I'll be counting down until next season launches, and I'm sure I'll happily binge it a few more times before then.

My advice to you? Don't screw the pooch by missing it. Watch and enjoy.

Godspeed.

Office space.

It doesn’t happen often, but like the Harmonic Convergence, total eclipse of the sun, Halley’s Comet and client approval, if you wait long enough you’ll live to see it.

Dust off those childhood dreams: NASA is now accepting astronaut applications for the upcoming Mars mission.

No doubt, despite the stringent requirements, they’ll be inundated with applications from hundreds, make that thousands, of unqualified people who haven’t seen Gravity and think space travel is as easy as booking a flight on Jet Blue. It's not. For starters, the baggage fees on the Mars trip are much steeper.

I think if NASA wants to thin the herd down to uniquely qualified candidates, the one place they should definitely start recruiting from is ad agencies. Here’s why:

Creative people are used to keeping themselves amused during long assignments that seem like they’ll never end – and often times never do.

Agency people know how to subsist on to two-day old bagels, cold pizza and pumpkin muffins so hard you could slay Goliath with them. Dehydrated, freeze-dried, bite-sized foods coated with gelatin would be like dinner at Morton’s.

The part about wearing a suit they’re uncomfortable in, even for a short time, is something they’ve done before. And sadly, peeing in that suit isn’t anything new either.

Experience being trapped in a small space with three other people you have to pretend to like? Check.

Having no choice but to accept and make course corrections from nameless, faceless voices on the other end of a speaker is something creative people do all the time.

Once there, agency people have all the knuckles and know-how needed to make a great commercial to recruit future astronauts for subsequent missions. The toughest part will be going without a trendy restaurant with an outdoor patio for lunch.

Finally, agency people will give the Red Planet a short, memorable, meaningful tagline that can be used on t-shirts, mugs and banner ads no one clicks on.

No doubt with agency people steering the ship, NASA will have the right people for the job.

As long as the job doesn't start before 10 a.m.

Twelve chairs

From agency to agency, as a freelancer you have to adapt to all kinds of situations: tiny workspaces, unreliable wi-fi, uncovered parking, bad agency coffee. However those are much more easily overcome than what I think is the worst mountain you’ll have to climb – the communal writing table (or its equivalent, open cubicle seating).

I just returned to an agency gig after a three-month stint on the client side. While there, I had something I haven’t had in a very long time – no, not a 32” waistline – an actual office. With a door. That closed.

Not only was it a trip down memory lane, it was also extremely helpful in shutting out the world and the noise that comes with it. It was significantly easier to concentrate on my writing, or to make that extra special personal phone call to my doctor, banker or wife.

In one form or another, besides the few actual offices with doors reserved for upper management, almost every agency today has an open seating plan. I like to blame Chiat\Day and it’s phenomenal failure, the “virtual office” experiment almost 20 years ago.

The idea was run an office like a college campus. No one had any assigned personal space. You’d come in, see the “concierge” and check out a powerbook and cell phone. You were then free to work from anywhere you liked in the office. What this lead to was petty turf wars, people scurrying for private space and a high absentee rate since you could literally phone it in from anywhere.

The thought was all this togetherness would foster a more creative, collaborative environment and improve the quality of the work.

It did neither.

The other thought was that instead of building out spaces and moving walls to accommodate titles, it'd simply be cheaper to throw everyone into the mix and let them fend for themselves.

Chiat abandoned the experiment when they moved to their current Frank Gehry-designed space in Playa Del Rey. It's wide open, but at least (most) people have desks to call their own.

Whether it's open space or communal seating, it's like trying to work in the world’s largest Starbuck’s, where 200 baristas are yelling orders and names non-stop, and it all echos off the open-ceiling, exposed duct design. Or as I like to call it, Chiat-lite.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for a time when effort was better spent doing the work instead of trying to block everything else out so you could focus on it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to throw these babies on and get back to it.

byePhoto

Space. It really is the final frontier, especially when it comes to my computer's hard drive.

I'll be the first to admit it: I've had "drive envy" almost since I bought my laptop. That's because my 17" MacBook Pro, which I bought in February of 2009, came with a 320GB hard drive. Which I thought was plenty of space at the time, right up until Apple did what Apple always does. Three weeks later, they introduced a 500GB drive for my model laptop.

Thank you Apple, may I have another?

Fast forward to August 2012, and come to find out I only have 5GB of available space left. Not enough to load new or update old applications.

So I only have two choices: make more space, or replace the drive for one with more space. I decided to start with the first one.

Since I shoot mostly high-res pictures, I started my clean up in iPhoto. What I found was the curse of the digital age - that because I can just keep shooting and shooting, I had many, many duplicates of the same photo.

You no longer have to wait for the perfect moment. You just have to keep shooting then see if you can find it.

At any rate, I started deleting tons of duplicates I'd taken. Not to mention the bazillions of shots my kids had taken with my camera at ten frames per second.

I'm not nearly done taking out the trash on over 17,000 photos, but so far I've picked up almost 5GB in space.

I'm going to have to upgrade to a 750GB drive soon (it's the biggest the specs on my laptop will allow for), but until then it's nice to know there's actually an easy and somewhat productive way to gain a little more space.

Of course, the laptop we just bought my son for his birthday has a 1TB drive.

Thanks Apple.