>> Jim Updike: Jim Updike I'm Jim Updike, Senior
Vice President of Technology at The Newseum.
I used to laughingly tell people,
"If it plugs into the wall,
ultimately I have some responsibility for it."
And the fact is, that's very true,
because all of the computer support,
all of the museum technology, we run
an extensive broadcast operation,
that all falls under the technology group.
So there's a lot of maintenance
that goes on on a day-to-day basis.
I keep involved with that.
I keep involved with things as simple
as our daily front pages exhibit
and all the programming,
automation and processes that go
in behind what makes that happen every day.
It can be as simple as ordering toners for large
format printers -- or making sure they're here;
I don't personally order them
-- all the way up to a fleet
of photocopy machines for
the building that can be...
$8 million worth of gear.
So a lot of stuff goes on here.
It's not at all the traditional
business environment.
Within the walls of this building, there's
entertainment, there's hospitality,
there's food service, there is residential.
We had a pretty extensive
list of things that we wanted
in this building, and we
pretty much got them all.
Well, we are also a full-service
broadcast production facility.
Oftentimes we'll have as many as three different
shows going on in this building at one time.
There are days we start at 3:00 in the morning.
Now, do I always show up at 3:00?
No, but I do quite often, because
it's what I've done all my life.
So reality is, it can go from very early
in the morning until late at night.
Well, don't let technology pass you by.
You can't.
And I can't even at this point in my career.
I have to stay very current.
I read a lot.
For every job out there, there's a
trade magazine associated with it.
Never stop being curious, and be very observant.
You can walk into -- anybody can do this.
It's not just me.
You can walk into a room and pretty
much tell what people are doing
and why they're there if you're observant.
But if you just accept it
as part of the clutter,
then you'll never really see what's going
on, and you'll never learn anything from it.
My dad told me one time,
"If you do what you love,
then you'll never work a day in your life."
And I've raised my own kids
with that philosophy.
And I came here because I was in the news
business, I worked for NBC News for 15 years.
And I knew I didn't want to travel anymore.
I knew there were a lot of things about
the job that had become sort of common.
And I don't want to say "boring,"
but they weren't the challenge
they had been years earlier.
So I kind of targeted this job.
At the time, the Freedom Forum was a
wonderful, benevolent, grant-making foundation
in Arlington, Virginia and they were going
to start a little thing called the Newseum,
that grew from being basically a
research library on the 22nd floor
to being a fairly large and -- I call
it the starter museum for where we are.
And I worked through that
period, learned an awful lot
about the museum industry,
which I had never come close to.
I had never seen a museum
designer before in my life.
So if you talk about leaving one job
where you're very, very comfortable
and you've basically achieved anything
that you might have wanted to achieve,
coming to something totally
different was so refreshing.
But it still had the roots of what I had done
for so many years, which was news coverage.
I think the only thing I would say is stay
current, and find something about technology
that interests you, and use that as
a springboard to all the other things
that you may not even know are out
there in the world of technology.