Well, let’s just say I jumped on the opportunities, and they’re starting to pay off.

As I write this, I’m sit in the bay window of my new home — an apartment my girlfriend Shannon and I share in San Francisco. We made the move out here over three weeks ago with only her new job and a pull-out couch in our friend Nick’s place as knowns in a vastly swirling sea of variables. I also have two job offer letters in my possession, with one more a near certainty. Not bad, considering January ended for me with the notification that I was being laid off from my job, which all but eliminated my chances at working remotely — even if just for a short time while I made my transition.

Those who have been following along on Facebook and Twitter should have a decent idea of some of the ups and downs, but I plan to go back and share in the outlines with full color details and insights to my life as it was through all this transition, and life as it happens in this new land of opportunity.

Here’s to the adventure!

Well, here we are.  Is everyone ready to close out one of the most turbulent and historic years in a generation? I think I am. It’s certainly been big in my life, both personally and professionally, and its the professional side that I want to pump a bit here.

As of December 15th I am no longer an employee of Lime Wire, as my inclusion on the former employee list clearly shows. That’s nearly 3 ½ years at the Lime Group offices in lower Manhattan, and boy did I get to see an awful lot in that time.  The place changed quite a bit from when I started, and grew so fast that at times it felt like riding inside a tornado. But it was that crazed energy that kept things vibrant. The whole of my experiences there certainly lived up to my expectations, but as with all things in life, there comes a time to move on.

Say Hello to the New

Creek Bed Industries goes 2.0

This leads us to my freshly revamped portfolio site, Creek Bed Industries. Using as many of the new skills I’ve been learning in the last few years, I gave everything a top to bottom revamping for the first time since at least 2005. A great deal of ideas put into my head first at FOWD ended up being used. And I have to say I do so love the background art I came up with.

Future plans for the site included trying to build a Ruby on Rails version (a great learning experience) and adding more of my previous projects to what is already up there. I am also going to spend some of that time fixing up the blog as well. I see the styles of both of them converging to show a larger connection between my personal and professional sides — just like me in real life.

Future plans for myself are slightly less clear at the moment.  If you have project or some freelance  work available and would like some quality web and graphic design skills at your beckon call, you may want to drop me a line.

Final Thoughts

Goodbye 2008.  Hello 2009. ^_^

With all my resurgent personal attention to the blog and its upkeep, I thought I would practice writing a bit with WordPress on my iPhone. With no copy and paste options currently available, I have to keep a better mind on what I’m writing than I usually do.

There are certainly days when I have tons of important thoughts I wish I could tell the world. This…is not one of them.

Of course, its also ill timed because this Monday coming up six month anniversary with Jill, and I want to be able to enjoy that with her. Yes, my first real long-term relationship, for those keeping score. On top of that, it’s kept me from being able to work this week, which just made me feel like quite the lazy bum (along with a personal side project).

Fingers crossed that things clear up with my bit of rest this evening.

Vices at Montauk 

Been a busy stretch around these parts, so I figured it was time to do a bit of recapping — professional, personal, and visual:  

• At work it’s the story of the ever-expanding Lime.  On Friday the LimeSpot team moved into new digs on the 9th floor of our building, and on Monday we almost doubled in size with our three new employees starting.  Exciting times!
• Got word that some freelance design work I did late last year has finally shown up in public over at MyBloop.com. That layout and those soothing pixels may have been touched by my Photoshop skills, but the effort and coding to bring it to life was all theirs.  Big thumbs up, guys!
• My 31st birthday came and went.  It was good.  I mean, just look at these smiling faces….
• On Saturday night JIll and I went over to Brooklyn and the Montauk Club for something known as the Dances of Vice.  Think old Victorian clubhouse with people all decked out in early 20th century garb — like stepping into a time warp.  Lots of fun, and I made sure to take plenty of pictures (including the one above).

That is all.  Carry on.

Past advocacy and a change in thinking

I’m on record here somewhere in the archives proclaiming my love for NetNewsWire.  I still think its a damn fine program (and free now, too), but I’ve switched to using Google Reader as my full time feed reader.  I had been using it mostly with a slimmed down collection of favorite feeds that I would access from my cell phone while waiting for busses, in lines, etc. during my daily life.  That speaks pretty highly of the versatility of the Google Reader, considering the web browser on my phone is total crap.

Still, it took an outside influence to make me change habits I’ve had since 2002.

The impetus (and my odd way of thinking)

Sometime shortly before I was slated to head out to Austin for SXSW, my Powerbook started to forget how to charge its battery.  It’s a problem I still hope to fix without having to throw money at it, but because of the age of the thing and the abuse its seen, I’m doubtful.  Anyway, that laptop — and only that laptop — is where I did all of my reading with NetNewsWire, so I could read and reference things when I was either at home or the office.

True, there are synchronization features built in that I could have used to get around this, and I used to trust them.  They worked fine most of the time, but you only have to be burned by a bad sync and lose subscriptions to the ether one time to be wary of using them — and I’ve been burned at least thrice.  With the laptop, I could easily keep up with my reading both at the office and at home without having to worry about losing track of feeds and which posts I’d already marked as read.

Once I was forced to plug in my laptop and cold boot it every time I wanted to use it, I started to do so at home less and less.  But I still wanted to read feeds from my desktop.  At that moment, a centrally hosted service like Google Reader started looking better to me than it had in a long time.  I auditioned it for a week as my full time reader, and here we are.

Clearing the logjam (and the voice in my head)

Once I made the switch, it was time to start catching up on some overdue feeds.  All the pre-SXSW work and laptop-centric habits and issues left me with about a month and a half worth of posts to catch up on, which after two weeks is now finished.  Yes, I could have just marked all as read and started from where I was, but that didn’t seem so desirable to me.  To my mind, this was a challenge; a mountain of information taunting me to digest it, with cries of “feed me” springing forth from my cerebral cortex, urging me on.

Now that I’ve managed to zero out my inbox, I’m in process of cutting the fat from my daily reading so I can keep it that way.  This includes trimming down how many feeds I have — judiciously weighing their quality and post volume.  If your a site that updates 50 times a day that’s great, but if I breeze by 90% of those posts, then I’m probably better off just skipping the feed altogether.  Besides, there’s a great deal of overlap in stories on the blogs I read, so in the end its really just cutting down on the redundancy factor.

Bonus content:  a gripe about the severe lack of full posts

In the process of streamlining, I’ve been frequently reminded of an online pet peeve of mine.  To those of you publishing content out there, I beg of you — PLEASE put full content into your feeds!  Not just links.  Not just excerpts.  Full content.  You can even tack ads onto them.  Hell, I even promise to click a few (which is more than I do now with web ads).

I want to be able to get my reading done and get back to all the other crap one has to do in any given day.  Nothing irks me more than having to jump back and forth between browser windows to read my news when I’m trying to get things done.  I don’t care if you want to make sure everyone comes to see your beautiful site layout (this coming from a designer) or you want more page views for your many ads.  If your story is interesting enough, I’ll open the page in a new window on my own for a more in depth reading.

You’ll get your page views regardless, but you’ll probably have more loyal and appreciative readers if you let them choose how they consume your content.

Final thoughts

If you made it to this point and are still reading, then I’m honestly shocked.  Really, this couldn’t have been that interesting, could it?

The doors open and I’m propelled forward, trying to jump between open spaces.  All of the sudden when I’m knocked into by someone and nearly thrown off balance.  Had I fallen, there was about a two foot difference between being launched into a wall or back towards the now-departing train.  As I pressed forward, my head filled with utterances and before my mind could send the signal to my mouth to clamp down and prevent any syllables from escaping, I curse loudly.

Happily, nothing came from this, but its just the latest incident in an ongoing trend.  These foul words have moved from the back of my mind to the front; low grumbles to softly spoken specks of spite.  I fear the day I lose complete control of my internal censor and I say something loud and vulgar enough that someone takes action against me.

Just something I’ve picked up more and more from my northern home, I suppose.

Some pieces of the work that has been keeping me busy for the last few weeks.

My head’s been down for for quite some time, so a lot of what’s happened between new and when last I wrote is like a big blur on my mind. Things started getting frantic, trying, and tiring just about the time I got this little email, confirming my registration for SXSW 2008 Interactive; submitted and paid for on behalf of my employers. It was decided that Austin was going to be the venue for the public launching of two new Lime Wire projects: LimeWire Store and LimeSpot (the project of which I am a member).

It’s not like I’ve been a hobbit, and its not like I’ve lived without drama in no way related to work. I’ve just managed to either find myself tuning it out or just not having the time to write about it. This includes coming home from work one evening to find the fire department checking my building in a carbon monoxide, which led to repair work that led to me losing hot water in my apartment for close to a week. I mean, that’s the stuff of pure mindless blog fodder right there!

Anyway, I’m now just mere minutes from hopping in the car to head out to LaGuardia. So I leave you with some more links to mull over in your spare time:

• Lime at SXSW, if you want to keep track with what we’re doing SXSW.
• My schedule of interests, in case you’re interested in talking to (or stalking) me in Austin.
• Lime Party at SXSW, if you’re interested in the checking the launch party. Music, beer and general geekery.

Over and out.

A Sunday at the Gates (2:56)

It certainly isn’t the first (YouTube has many, many more clips that showed up in a much more timely fashion), and I can’t say it’s the greatest — modesty prevents me from that. I can say, however, that it is the latest. ^_^

Of course, the real impetus in all of this was giving myself some kind of subject matter to practice with as I made the transition from the iMovie workflow to working with the professional grade Final Cut Pro. I took to it fairly well, too. I think I went from zero experience to first completed video took about 6 hours total. Granted, it’s still a very rudimentary understanding, but I’m sure that will grow the more I play with it.

For once, the primary in my state matter. New Jersey is part of the Super Tuesday primaries, in which 24 states are going to hold either a primary or a caucus. And you better believe I’m going to take part in the process.

In 2000, I voted my conscience and went with Nader (which my friend Don likened to the choice of RC Cola vs. Pepsi or Coke). As such, the primary process wasn’t going to effect the availability of my candidate in November.

In 2004, I had my hopes pinned on Howard Dean, but by the time the New Jersey primaries came around, his campaign had all but exploded. I was left with a hollow, yet hopeful feeling when I pulled that level for John Kerry a few months later.

So this time around, I want to do all I can to make sure my man Obama is still left standing come November. Whether you agree with my choice or not, I implore you all to get out there and make your voice heard.

(Video found via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

Partially I speak of a nice little web site theme I whipped up for South — one of the bands we’re planning to work with as we start to push LimeSpot more into the public eye.  They handed me a PDF of some album cover artwork that I was able to pull apart in Illustrator and reconfigure in Photoshop with a pretty exciting result.  Whoever they tasked to make the artwork in the first place is friggin’ brilliant, I must say.  All I had to do was reach back into my past experience of playing with Colorforms to get all the guidance I needed for the design side of this work.

But I also speak on the puzzle that is my mental image.  As of yesterday, I’m done with my weekly visits to the therapist.  The last year and a half have certainly given me a sea change in the state of my mental health and the overall quality of my life, and I’m quite happy I put in the time I have.  But at least for now, it’s time for me to move on and work more in the field of practice than in the realm of theory.  I’ll probably check in every now and again, but it’s just mental maintenance.  I mean, you don’t have to rebuild the engine in a car every time its time to change the oil, right?

Confused and Drunk: A sketch I had floating around in one of my sketch pads from Sept. ’07. Photographed and Photoshopped into its current shape.

To say this year has been off to a raucous start for myself is an understatement. Now how interesting said raucousness is to anyone outside my circle of friends and family is up for debate. That said, I hereby inundate you all with the nuggets of detail.

Football Weather

The winter touch football league started up, with my team being 2-2 at the moment. Besides the soreness of a slightly rolled ankle from the first game, I’ve been lucky to avoid any major injuries — just enough aches and stiffness to remind me I’m out of shape and need to do this kind of stuff more often. Other on my team have not been so lucky, as we had one of the girls on our team come dangerously close to breaking her ankle in our last game. Even semi-casual league football is not for the timid.

Speaking of Football…

Not like it’s news at this point, but I just have to say it for posterities’ sake: the Giants are in the Super Bowl! Woo!!!

That’s a Negative on the New Digs

Late in ’07 the apartment above mine had opened up and I had a tentative agreement with my landlord to take the place, which is at least 3 times as large as what I have now. Well, scratch that. Instead, he’s going to rent it out to the person who’s also taking over the restaurant space below my apartment. Sure as hell can’t say I’m surprised, but then again the new tenant is the one who’s going to have to deal with all the fixes that place needs (and believe me, there are a LOT of fixes needed).

No Idle Hands Here

Work wise, I’ve been busy (as always) and contented. There’s a ton of work that has to be done in the next two weeks — both print and web — well in advance of the Lime making their presence felt at this year’s SXSW Interactive. The best part about all of this in my eyes is the fact I’ll actually get to go to SXSW and see how all this hard work is received. Looks like Austin is slated to be the first city west of the Mississippi River I’ll get to visit.

And Out Go the Lights….

A good chunk of this month has also been involved with the courting of a lovely young woman. Good times out on the town. All but one, that is. I managed to get tangled in a netting of too much drink on a night out at an Antibalas concert, and tangled so badly I had trouble remembering the details of how the night ended. Sad doesn’t begin to describe me that night, and by sad I mean “pathetic”.

I told all of this to my therapist, who just the week before I told I was going to be ending sessions with at the end of the month. After my story so confronted me with the claim that I’m something of an alcoholic — at least by her clinical definition. I can see where she’s coming from, and it has certainly given me pause this past week, but i still doesn’t change my plans. For one, I need to be able to see that all I’ve discussed and discovered about myself in the past year plus can be put to good use, and for two, there had been many weeks I felt I was paying for the privilege to be a tech consultant.

For the Sake of Perspective

Historically, January has never been a very good month to me. So while there’s some bad with the good (and boy do I ever still feel like I’m reeling from the bad), I’d say the balance has certainly been more in my favor this time around. A portend of things to come for the rest of the year? We shall see….

Into that mix I can add a touch of enjoyable social upheaval this past week; catching up with old friend, meeting new ones, and thrilled by both aspects. I’d love for both to continue well into the first month, but I think instead of just wishing on a star and hoping for the best, I’ll actually put some time and effort into those things and see what I can foster to grow in these cold January days.

So far, so good, 2008!

 

I thought I did worse this year than last, but the numbers don’t lie:  105 posts in 2007 vs. 66 in 2006.  Of course, those numbers are much closer if you take away my little experiment in increased frequency back in October.  And they’re both a far cry away from 529 posts I made back in 2002.  Hell, in July of ’02 alone I posted 81 times.  I can’t even fathom having that much to write about these days.

Usually I’m against the tradition of the new years resolution — empty promises that are given up far too easily — but if I have to make one, then I resolve to get back to 2004 levels (about 3 posts a week if you average it out).  Of course, to do that I think I may need to resolve to go out and live a bit more of an interesting life.  Unless you all enjoy reading meta navel-gazing site posts, that is.  ^_^

No posting from the future today.  Just a return to writing, then plenty of vegging out.  And  why not, seeing as how I’ve been working like a dog most of the weekend, and running for my life part of it, and having my guts twisted in knots for the remainder.  No, sorry.  It’s probably not all as interesting as I’m trying to make it sound.

Along with the attempt to resume semi-regular writing here, I’ve also snapped myself from the self-imposed hiatus of freelance work over the past month or so.  Well, as often happens when I take on projects outside of office hours, there was one of those wonderful confluences of deadlines that kept me tied to a desk and monitor for quite some time.  When that happens, it’s usually at the expense of my writing time.

But at least there are results to be seen.  For one, if you’re a New York area music fan, you might want to take a look at the venue map over at BrooklynVegan.  My first mash-up project!  Kind of fun to do, except for compiling all the data — there is no part of any data entry task that can be deemed sexy.

Then there’s the future work.  Mock-ups for a forthcoming redesign of MyBloop.com, which a friend and former co-worker has wrangled my attention.  And I have to say,
I’m quite happy with what I’ve whipped up.  I can’t wait to show it off, but when that will be is still a matter of small discussion.  I can say that whatever design rust I claimed to have been suffering from lately seems to have been knocked off.

And when I wasn’t coding or painting with pixels, I was getting shot in the head, chest, and ass with paintballs.  Yep, a good chunk of the Lime Group folks went out early Sunday morning to shoot each other in the name of an interesting outing.  The side I fought on lost 5 of the 6 matches.

Finally, to top it all off, I had to watch the Giants give Dallas help in beating them in a battle for the NFC east.  Seriously, how many games to you have to take yourself out of with stupid penalties before you learn not to commit them?  I still have faith that they’ll make the playoffs, and hope that they get to take on Dallas one more time to get a measure of retribution.  Of course, I’m not counting on either of those things for the moment.

As you were.