January, 1994 and July, 1994

In the winter of '93 I worked at the MIT Media Lab on the News of the Future project called Fishwrap. The idea was to generate custom newspapers based on people's interests and deliver them over the web. This involved a lot of perl scripts. Have I mentioned that I like perl? Well, in any case, these perl scripts were written to process information like the Associated Press news feed and weekly events calendars from the Boston Globe.

Well, in the course of this project, like most Media Lab projects, we got a lot of important visitors. I'm not going to bother mentioning them all, mostly because I can't remember, but also to avoid being boring. One in particular, is relevant. A guy named Jean-Claude B-something or other french sounding, who was the Director of Special Services at the Associated Press came to visit. It turned out that "Special Services" meant electronic news delivery, or something very close to it. We hung out and I complained to him about the inconsistent formatting of their news feeds and then he left (not because of my complaining).

So, many months later, in July '94, I was in New York City. It was one of the first consulting jobs net.Genesis had for Time Inc. In any case, after my work there was done, I found myself in downtown Manhattan standing outside the Time building. I walked a couple of blocks and bought a hot dog, and noticed I was right by the Associated Press building. I thought, "Hey, why don't I go visit that guy who visited us at the Media Lab. He had said something to the effect of 'if you're ever in new york, drop by'. I hope he was serious." So, I walked into the AP building. I went up to the front desk, at which point I realized, I couldn't really say, "Hi, I'm here to see that guy who's first name I forgot and who's last name starts with B and is french sounding." The receptionist said, "Hello, can I help you?". I thought quickly and said "Do you know if the Director of Special Services is in today?" She replied, "Oh, JC? Yes, he's in. Here, dial 1802" She handed me a phone. At this point I realized that he might not even remember me, that I couldn't just walk away and not dial the phone, so I dialed. He picked up and said, "Hello, this is JC B-something french sounding". I said who I was and that I had met him at the Media Lab, and much to my relief he remembered me. He invited me into his office, gave me a complete tour of the AP news offices and we talked about news in the future, net.Genesis and MIT. It was fun. I decided I must be a real person if I could be on a business trip to New York City and "drop in" on a guy in a big company who had the word "director" in his title.