it’s been an interesting year. this birthday preceeds my 1 year anniversary at whole foods which also marks 1 full year of doing web design as a real gig. there’s some big projects on the horizon, one of which may include a ridiculously overblown and official title down the road. the kids are a year older and growing up fast. there’s a black president. getting somewhat more nostalgic in my old age. turning into a chocolate snob. good times.
i threw this together using erin’s wacom tablet the other night. which just proves that a wacom can make anyone pretend their an artiste.
it started as an idea after doing the road trip cds because i threw some stuff on there that i hadn’t really listened to in years. erin and i started talking about stuff we listened to in high school, so i decided to make high school mix cds. if you’re interested in my somewhat more formative music years*, follow the link.
* i consider my formative music years to be earlier, in, like 6th and 7th grade, when i was into such wildly diverse music like boyz ii men, paula abdul, michael jackson, prince, pink floyd, the doors, poison, and kiss.
he’s started finding clues throughout the house. he says “A clue! A clue!” when he sees something paw-shaped around the house. this is a really post-modern experience for me and brings up an interesting question.
what is this thing that we’re finding clues for? i haven’t written down all the clues in my Handy Dandy Notebook or sat in my Thinking Chair to Think. Think. Think. yet, but still…
i also think we’ve found more than 3 clues. this is definitely an elaborate game of blue’s clues.
so we’re back from our road trip. i really meant to post a list of the fun and interesting stories that happened, but, you know, i didn’t have time. as per usual. i would like to state outright, however, that hitchhiking for gas in the middle of Nowhere, Utah isn’t very fun, but truckers can be awesome in a pinch. (I’d like to thank the guy from Underground Solutions who was driving to SLC from San Diego who picked me up, and also the guy from a local utah trucking company I can’t remember who gave me a ride back to the car. For anyone interested, we ran out of gas here — note how there’s nothing around…) that was the most interesting, but not the most stressful event that happened.
alas, we’ve been busy. we added a new phase to the thinktank reconstruction and that is converting it into a Wordpress CMS type site. i’ve said before that if you want to do a CMS, probably Wordpress isn’t the best option, but we want to have a bunch of wordpress themes that we’ve built that we can show off so we can show that we’re good at them, and for something small (although getting bigger all the time) like the thinktank site, it works fine. we’re still doing the theme switching thing, but we’ve only integrated one theme thus far. the prototype site is up over here and the old site will be pulled down once we finish doing the other themes (and then build some more).
also, we did a redesign of the kidsblog and imported that into wordpress also. erin did the design and we’re super-excited about it. i helped with the integration, but mostly it was her. meanwhile i’ve been playing with the laptop and discovered i can use the iSight (that’s what the camera is called, apparently) to make movies. gavin really likes seeing himself on the screen so we’ve started encouraging that by starting a vlog that’s posted on the kidsblog. i’m really hoping to make that a regular feature in addition to the usual news, updates, stories, and pictures of the kids. i’ve considered doing the vlog thing myself, but i still haven’t settled on it. so, until i do, this is all you get:
you’ve all heard it: a picture speaks a thousand words.
i don’t usually take pictures on my cell phone. there’s actual cameras for that (i have one) and people who do that seem to not be enjoying the actual event because they’re so busy taking pictures with their phone to document the event. case in point: the guy who sticks his phone up at a concert like a digital-age lighter.
however.
i did take some phone-pics on this last trip to cali, so here’s the adventure by way of cameraphone:
wired ran a blog post on what everyone in the tech biz is thinking (namely the iphone). it’s called wordle and what it does is take a body of text, or a blog, or something, and creates a tag cloud (like what i have on the right) based on the word usage. a pretty one at that. so i decided to run my own based on content from the blog and my wordle looks like an ad for thinktank studio. not that this is a bad thing. at all. (in fact, i’m kind of trying to up my thinktank page ranking by talking about it and linking to it a lot in the blog…so far it’s not working. this also brings out some of the particular idiosyncracies of my vernacular, which is interesting.
it’s been a long time coming, i finally updated the blog design. i’ve done a couple custom wordpress themes for thinktank clients now, and it was about time i did one for myself. it’s not really anything new, although the banner is totally new. but the css was recoded by hand. the overall design is keeping in line with the thinktank site — i really like that look.
so, if you haven’t heard, firefox 3 is coming soon. the mozilla organization is trying to set a guiness world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. so head on over to Spread Firefox headquarters and pledge to download on Download Day (date to be announced).
personally i like the idea of a wordwide “download day” — but i think it shouldn’t necessarily be focussed on one software. so my pledge and what i propose to you — all 5 of you, dear, dear readers — is to download AS MUCH AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE on whatever day mozilla decides to be “download day.” let’s put so much pressure on the servers that we clog the internets tubes, knock down a couple servers, piss off the riaa, whatever. let’s celebrate download day with some good old fashioned destruction.
oh, and if you were curious, trent reznor compiled a mix that features the artists he’s touring with this summer. you can download it for free — it’s got full art and stuff. pretty neat.
and in completely other news that’s pretty much interesting only to me — i noticed from my google analytics report that i got some bumps in hits and search referrals when i talked about gaeta and bsg. and it made me think, huh, so if i actually talk about stuff that people like — they’ll go to the site? weird. so i think i’m going to start dropping BATTLESTAR names to STAR TREK get some extra FREE PORN hits ENLARGE YOUR MEMBER. we’ll see how it VIAGRA goes.
Thoughtful
Scared
Busy
Working
Sick
Nerdy
Tired
