Ian Westcott

IT Manager :: New York office

Ian began his life with the Barbarian Group as an intern in the Boston office in early 2005, but he soon proved he was useful enough to be knighted as a full-fledged Barbarian. Before joining TBG, he found himself growing up in the adorable state of Rhode Island. It was in RI that Ian created his first site (“The Whack The Pud Contest”) at the tender age of 12. Later on in life he found work as a librarian for a group of archaeologists, who apparently rivaled the Barbarians in their drinking prowess. At some point he grew a beard.

Ian’s tasks at TBG include keeping tabs on a growing company’s ever-evolving server infrastructure, as well as helping care of the day-to-day IT problems that make some Barbarians yell technologically insensitive epithets at their computers. He’s also been known to write a few lines of code here and there. Ian has 1.5 degrees – an AS in Computer Science from Johnson & Wales and a BA in New Media from Emerson College. Aside from patience and street walkin’, he has skills in the realms of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and many other things not really worth mentioning here.

In 2007, Ian gave up the 2-car trolleys of Brookline in favor of the 8-car trains of Brooklyn and joined the ranks of the New York office. Rumors abound as to the reason for the move; Ian claims he was drawn to the vibrant cultural scene and world-class public transportation system, but his bosses seem to think it was because he “met a girl or something”.

(whew)

Dear Earth,
How are you doing? I just wanted to congratulate you on not imploding into a giant black hole when the Large Hadron Collider was powered on last night! I’m sure you are as relieved as we are. Remind me to buy you a drink next time we are at the bar.
Oh, and thanks for all the air and water. It really does make all the difference.
Your pal,
Ian
P.S. – Maybe we can get some real snow this winter?

More Formal Friday!

Recent New York transplant Hams and I kept Formal Friday alive today in the New York office, which was rather empty due to the impending holiday weekend.

I Made A Flickr Group

Flickr groups are normally nothing to get too excited about (with one possible exception), but this is my first one, and I’m rather proud of the premise (and surprised that it didn’t already exist).
It’s called “Won’t Budge”, and it features immovable objects and the people who attempt to move them. So far there aren’t many contributions, but I know it’s a popular theme in the world of amateur photography, so I’m trying to get the word out about it. Feel free to contribute something if you have it. Below is a random sampling of what we’ve got so far.

Remote Cupcakes

Video Conferencing Is Great...
Video conferencing is awesome, but unfortunately it does not allow you to eat remote cupcakes.

Cyclone!

Some friends and I rode our bikes down to Coney Island on Sunday to bask in the sunshine and ogle the weirdos. I bought a Flip Ultra just for the occasion. It was totally worth it. See for yourself:
More soon.

I Went On Vacation

I returned this week from a 10-day vacation overseas, which is nothing special if you’re Kevin, but it had been almost 8 years since I’d left the country, so for me it was kind of a big deal. I even had to renew my passport.
Anyway, I took a lot of pictures (just over 1600), which, again, isn’t really that special, especially when you consider that more than 3 times that number of pictures gets uploaded to Flickr every minute, but I actually plan on going through my pictures and publishing the ones I like, so, again, it’s kind of a big deal, but this time in a rather cumbersome way rather than a really exciting way.
Though I guess it is still pretty exciting, being able to sort through all the pictures I took while I was tooling around the Bavarian countryside and relive all the memories, blah blah etc etc.
But it’s gonna take a while to go through over 1600 pictures and evaluate each one on its nostalgic and/or artistic merit, so in the meantime I decided to just stitch ‘em all together into one big index print using Ruby and ImageMagick and plop that onto the Internet instead:
Vacation Index Print
I think it makes for an interesting study of how I go about taking pictures. Plus it’s the only way you’ll get to see just how many drunken pictures I took out the back window of the taxi-wagon I was lying in the trunk of after my great-uncle’s birthday party. Yeah.

Oh Hell Yes

New Video Conferencing Setup
It’s ON.

My Fortune Cookie...

...says “A new wardrobe brings great joy and change in your life.”
Are they saying that my nerdy t-shirt collection is setting me back? Well, WHATEVER, fortune cookie. I’LL SHOW YOU.