Twenty some-odd years ago, I sat at a table daydreaming about what I’d do when I grew up.

This was well before I knew anything about computers. I did not have the slightest inkling what my adult life might hold, and I had no appreciable skills beyond daydreaming.

I didn’t have much to go on, other than I knew I wanted to have fun at my job. I didn’t know what the job would be, but I don’t remember spending much time worrying about that.

What I did spend time doing — rather a lot of time — was imagining how and where I would work.

In my head, and then on a piece of paper, I drew big white cubic rooms, layered in whiteboards, with a single light hanging from the exact center of the room.

I imagined the exterior wall full of different-sized doors in odd locations, Willy Wonka style, through which I would pick a different entry every morning. This was, I told myself, a great way to keep oneself from getting stuck in a mental rut. (You’d be trying a new approach every morning! Literally!)

I imagined a door full of doorknobs, only one of which would work. (It would not be the one in the normal spot.)

I gathered all these ideas together for the place I would one day work. What to call it? Adults worked in an office. This was not an office. An office was a place to go work on boring things.

Instead, I began to think of my imaginary building as a “doofus”.

I liked this name for two reasons:

1. You can’t take yourself too seriously in a doofus.
2. A doofus is where you DO things!

Meanwhile, back in 2012

Just a year ago, Figure 53 was three people in three different states. Now we have six people, and four of us are in Baltimore.

When the team in Baltimore grew, I scrambled to find a place for us to work. We nestled ourselves in with another company who graciously shared their building, but could only give us a month-to-month lease.

This, as they say, was a problem.

As the company continues to grow (stay tuned) a month-to-month lease is an increasingly tenuous arrangement.

In short, we needed our own home.

Welcome to Area 53

I am very proud to announce the new, permanent home of Figure 53.

This, friends, is our new doofus:

As of today, you’ll find us at 2443 Maryland Avenue, Baltimore Maryland, 21218. Right around the corner from the Autograph Playhouse, home of the Baltimore Rock Opera Society. Also around the corner from the best coffee shop in Charles Village: Charmington’s.

This is our new, permanent home. We own it. From today onward, it’s our creative laboratory, hacker space, hang-out, headquarters, home base, technology canvas, art project, flex venue, classroom, and whatever other role we can bend to the purpose of creative delight.

And?

Open-door hack days?

Co-working days?

Make our space available for classes and meetups?

We don’t know exactly what yet, but we’re interested in connecting with our neighbors and doing fun things.

A hall, a hall! give room!

And let us fill this space with people and projects and coffee and code and cork boards and sound and light and art and tools!

Photos by & copyright Shaw Jelveh Design.

Old luckydave:

New luckydave:

People who have known him for years have walked up to introduce themselves. I can’t blame them.

Toolbox: Flip camera, Final Cut Express, ScreenFlow, Soundflower, WireTap Studio, and QLab.

Music: Hey Pocky A-Way, The Meters. (Amazon, iTunes)

Well maybe now you do. Figure 53 will be sponsoring two (count ‘em: two!) full student passes to this year’s BSMC.

Here’s what you’ll get

• 1 ticket to a Broadway show (American Idiot) on Friday May 21
• 2 days of classes May 22-23, with breakfasts and lunches on those days
• An invitation to a cocktail reception honoring the Live Design Sound Products of the Year on May 22
• As much schmoozing as your little heart desires

Check out the full schedule of activities to see all the delicious details.

Here’s how you get it

Make us want to sponsor you.

That’s it.

I don’t care how. Be creative. Email me at chris@figure53.com, and tell me why you want to go, or why you ought to go, or tell me a joke, or impress me with your latest QLab project, or send me a video of you doing your best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.

I’ll compare notes with the guys, and at our whim and discretion we’ll pick two of you to sponsor.

You’ve got one week. Contact me by midnight on April 24th. Got it? Good! Now GO!

The reporter, Gus Sentementes, also posted extra notes from the interview on his blog. This includes a video of me attempting to summarize QLab in 60 seconds. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Thanks Gus! (And thanks to all the folks on the QLab mailing list who sent Gus a quote! You guys rock!)

In the meantime, check out the new stuff!

Streamers is for folks working on film scoring, ADR, or foley.

Lockstep is a handy utility that does one thing: convert incoming linear timecode to outgoing MIDI timecode.

Chroma Tickets Tixato is our new project to re-invent online ticketing. It’s just getting started, and we hope you’ll join us in the fun as we make it.

Finally, we round out the updates with a great new QLab tutorial from Jason Knox covering signal flow in QLab.

Not a bad way to start out a new year! Hell, a new decade! And damn, what a decade it’s going to be. So much to make! So much to do! So many ideas to channel into code!

From all of us on the Figure 53 team: happy new decade. The ride is just starting. I think it’s safe to say: this is gonna be fun.

I feel I owe you something in the way of an update.

It’s not that we’ve been out of touch, exactly. I released QLab 2 six months ago, and in that time my inbox has been graced with thousands of messages. Some days I’d get up at 6 AM, respond to emails until 6 PM, eat a quick dinner, get back to writing emails, and still have more mail at the end of the day than when I woke up that morning.

In a time of global recession, our sales have exploded. Yes, we raised our prices, but it’s not just the revenue that has gone up, it’s the sheer number of licenses sold. The combined result looks like this:

Truly it has been a stunning six months. Every day we hear from new venues, new customers, new schools. We hear from people who are just starting out and people converting from years of using other software. It’s exciting, it’s exhausting, it’s an honor, and at times, it’s all just a touch chaotic.

Which leads me to today, and my feeling that we owe you a status report. Because this explosion has left us scrambling. Scrambling to respond to every inquiry with the full attention and detail it deserves. Scrambling to pounce on every bug report, feature request, and sales inquiry. For a company that’s built a reputation for fast release cycles and attentive customer service, we haven’t been able to keep up with everything in the way we are accustomed. Sometimes an email will take an extra day to answer. Sometimes a bug sits in the fix-it queue longer than I like. Nothing terrible, mind you, but just enough that I sat down at my desk today and thought “You know what? Let’s give everyone some more information about what’s going on over here.”

So here we are! And here’s the update:

New Support Desk

Routing all support requests exclusively through Mail.app works okay for just one person, but we’re not just one person any more. (More on that in a moment.) Now, when you write in to support@figure53.com, you’ll be routed through our new support software HelpSpot.

What does this mean for you? Basically, better support. We can have more eyes looking for incoming questions, and more fingers to type out the answers. The system also keeps a full archive of our correspondence which you can review at any time.

New Employees

As you already saw in this space, we welcomed Sean Dougall to the team on June 1st. If you recently wrote an email to support@figure53.com about a sales inquiry, a license question, or other basic QLab questions, there’s a good chance Sean took care of you.

Less widely known is that Sean is not the only new person on the Figure 53 team. We also just brought Jesse Kriss onto the team as a part-time contractor. Jesse’s work spans everything from The History of Sampling to the New York Times Visualization Lab to the original version of QLab. Yup, he was there at the beginning, working with me over iChat at three in the morning while I avoided my grad school research. Then he went off to build amazing things at IBM Research. But now he’s back. And he’s brought his kung-fu gear with him.

New Office

The Maryland branch of Figure 53 (i.e. me) outgrew our previous space. Setting up test machines was excruciating and time-consuming.

That’s all changed now, as I’ve just completed moving into a nice big office where I can set up a proper test lab. This is great, but as with any move, the process has taken time and attention that I would otherwise have spent on, say, coding. But it’s done now! This is good.

New Features

I have pages upon pages of feature requests sitting in my inbox. Many of them are excellent ideas. We will be adding some of them as fast as we can. We promise. We just can’t guarantee when, exactly.

New Products

It’s time for Figure 53 to grow beyond a single product. Having one killer product is awesome, but to make sure we’re here for the next thirty years, we’d like to have more than one.

In the coming months you’ll see announcements for several new OS X products going into beta testing. These will range from specialized utilities for the entertainment industry to a new, full-featured application we have affectionately code-named “Big Screen o’ Buttons”.

We’re also working on something even bigger, which is not an OS X application at all. We are very excited about this. No, you do not get to know what it is yet.

New Website

I love our current website, but it doesn’t really handle more than one product very well. In order to release these new products, we need a better structure for the site. So we’ve got that on the plate too.

New Branding

Finally, it has been high time for Figure 53 to have a beautiful, professionally designed graphic brand. I commissioned award-winning designer Eric Kass to develop a brand for us, and I’m thrilled with the result. You’ll see his work featured on the new website, in our new invoices, quotes, and receipts, and through any physical paper you may get from us in the mail.

And what else?

Ain’t that enough? It has felt like a ton on this end, let me tell you.

That’s what’s up at Figure 53. I thank you for your patience as I’ve worked on making this company better. And if it took me a few days to get back to you instead of a few minutes, I do apologize. I’m doing my best to set things up so I will again have more time to do what I love, which is working with all of you to make great software.

Thanks for reading. I mean it.

If you have used QLab 2, you have already benefitted from Sean’s skill. He designed and built QLab’s SMPTE timecode synchronization mechanism and the entire license and authorization system.

I feel extremely lucky to welcome Sean to Figure 53. He communicates with care and precision, he writes code cleanly and efficiently, he is a first-rate engineer with a deep involvement in the arts, and above all he is a good guy with a sense of humor. His creativity has helped me out of a coding jam more than once.

Sean is based in California, and will continue to live and work there now that he has joined Figure 53.

In addition to his development work on QLab, Sean will gradually become available as a second support resource, allowing us to improve the support “coverage” we can provide across the world’s time zones. (I might even get to take an occasional vacation!)

Moreover, Sean will be working on some brand new applications. We’re not yet ready to announce the specific nature of those apps, but I’m excited to begin broadening the stable of Figure 53 products.

More about Sean: He started his undergraduate pursuits with a double major in oboe performance and electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, finished them with a B.A. in music composition at Carleton College in 2002, and followed them up with a graduate certificate in film scoring from the University of Southern California in 2004. He joins Figure 53 after several years independently creating OS X applications for film scoring and post-production. In addition to his development work, Sean is an instructor in USC’s Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program, where he torments students with the arcane details of music technology. (The dude is a timecode ninja. Seriously. If you have questions about timecode? Ask Sean.)

Please welcome Sean to the Figure 53 team!

The result? Next year we’ll be doing a lot of our coding wearing this:

Now, we were so tickled by this design we started thinking other folks might want one.

So here’s the question to you: Would you buy this shirt? (American Apparel, probably around 15-20 bucks.)

Leave a comment or drop us an email. If there’s interest, we may print up a limited number for distribution.