By David Gewirtz
Over the past week, we've gotten a number of concerned emails and voice mails, most of which we haven't yet been able to return. No, we haven't been swallowed by a sea monster. Instead, we've been moving -- from North Brunswick, New Jersey to Palm Bay, Florida, shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
You're not in New Jersey anymore. Picture courtesy City of Palm Bay, Florida Web site. (click for larger image)
Both Denise and I grew up in New Jersey, but we both lived in warmer climates as well. Denise lived in Hawaii and I spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley, where the snow stays in the hills and you can visit it if you're bored.
Despite its reputation, New Jersey is a pretty wonderful place. There's a lot to like there and a lot we're going to miss. But one thing we're not going to miss is the cold winters. Each year, we'd lose about five months of outdoor freedom to the cold.
If you live in a northern climate, you know about winter. It's not just shoveling the car out when it snows, it's wondering whether you're going to slip on a patch of black ice, and it's bundling up just to go to the corner store.
Neither Denise nor I like winter at all.
As many of you know, Denise and I are co-founders of ZATZ and have worked together for twelve years. In January, after years of friendship and co-worker team spirit, Denise and I finally got married. Seven months later, for the record, I'm still the luckiest guy in the world.
After getting married, we tried to combine our two households into one condo. This proved to be quite difficult, especially since we also do most of our editorial work from home and we each have a lifetime of stuff. It soon became clear we needed to get a much larger place.
Yes, we could have looked for a house in New Jersey but Denise and I run an Internet-based company. Our servers are located in a secured facility in a former Air Force base in Illinois, our editors live all over the world, from New York to Honolulu and from the United Kingdom to Australia. Our advertisers are also all over the world, from India to Malta (and most of the countries in between).
We thought about this a lot. All we really need is a solid broadband connection. We can run our company from just about anywhere. Why shouldn't we live where we want? Why, we reasoned, shouldn't we live somewhere where it's warm all year round?
Why not, indeed?
And so, after many, many months of preparation work and some exceptional support from our hosting provider, Prominic.NET (at http://www.Prominic.NET), we moved. I'm writing this from our new house in Palm Bay, Florida.
Unfortunately, the move was a bit harder than expected. Not only did we have to pack everything (and kudos go to Denise for a superhuman effort!), but the movers weren't exactly the most responsive people on the planet. They showed up a day late to pick up our stuff and took a lot longer to load than expected. That meant we wound up setting off for Florida two days later than we wanted.
On the flip side, the movers also showed up with our stuff five days later than they had promised. So, what should have been a four-day down-time (mostly over a weekend), turned into a week and a half adventure. Finally, yesterday, the movers showed up and our stuff arrived, mostly intact.
What makes this story so cool, of course, is that even during the heart of the moving process, the ZATZ magazines were published on time, all the content was available, and the latest news was posted each and every day, thanks to the efforts of News Editor Heather McDaniel.
Denise and I, however, didn't have the best access to our email. While there are many WiFi hotspots all across the country (although, for some reason, Georgia doesn't seem to have either Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts at all along Route 95!), the WiFi hotspots we did find choked on the quantity of email we both get.
By the time we finally got the computers set up here in the new digs, we had almost 17,000 email messages we had to sift through by hand (there were literally too many messages for our spam filters to handle). Finally, I finished all of them! Replies will be going out to everyone for each email in the next day or so.
And, so, we're here. We're tired and there's a lot more to do, including unpacking nearly a thousand cartons, hooking up miles of wires, and buying the world's most kick-ass barbeque grill I can lay my hands on.
Before I sign off for this week, here's our new contact information:
- New phone: (321) 722-4620
- New address: P.O. Box 110579, Palm Bay, Florida 3291
All the ZATZ Web sites will be updated in the next few days, but for now, at least you know where to find us.
We're in Florida, baby!
P.S. Oh, and for the record, while summers here are undeniably hot, all week it's been an average of seven degrees cooler than in New Jersey.