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20080308

The Exit

AUTOMATICALLY REDIRECTING TO BLOG.DCDOMAIN.ORG.

Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.comIn a scene that played out all too often at work, our boss began the morning by dismissing my coworker's efforts, continuing to work deeper until he was attacking her personally. Walking into my office with tears streaming down her face she finally said she was giving up. She couldn't take it any longer. And while we both had entertained the thought of quitting we didn't expect it to happen quite so soon.

He took perverse satisfaction in belittling those around him, whether they be employees or artisans. In fact, a good amount of our time was spent conducting damage control, repairing relations with the various vendors my boss treated poorly. Many times I wondered how he made it this far, attaining his level of success while severing so many relationships. When negotiating, the terms were always drawn up to benefit him, the risk was absorbed entirely by the vendor. There wasn't much in the way of mutual benefits. I suppose enough of them wanted access to his client list to put up with all his crap.

You would be criticized for not being civilized for not hanging up your coat in the morning. Yet he would take meetings while in his bathrobes. In the middle of said meetings, he would waste plenty of your time by taking phone calls, yet yell at you when you spent too much time away from your desk (even though we were discussing work related matters). When we approached him about operational issues his eyes would gloss over ignoring our requests for as long as possible hoping that they would resolve themselves. Yet when it came to issues of design, he would hover over you nitpicking every little detail. He chose what he could understand and ignored everything else. Guess that's the benefit of having employees, to do everything he didn't want to deal with.

Annoyingly, he enjoyed having an audience and unfortunately, when no acquaintances or suppliers were available, he made do with his employees. The same old spiel about how he helped Clinton win the presidency, how great of a photographer he was; or the many times he patted himself on his back while taking credit for the work or ideas of others was mind numbing.
In the end, I think he wants to be remembered (he's been trying to publish a book about his travels). There will be few who will definitely remember him but for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, my coworker and I left without giving any notice. He didn't deserve the two-weeks anyway. But to bring closure to this dark chapter in my life I am going to finish up the project I was working on, I think I'm pretty close to being done anyway.

To get you all caught up to speed, this all played out on Thursday morning. 10 minutes after I made my decision, I spoke with Kevin and asked him when his Nagano snowboard trip was. Turns out he was leaving the next morning. While I packed my things, Retardo did me a favor and looked up pricing for tickets to Japan leaving that night and the next morning. At around a grand roundtrip, it wasn't bad at all. My mother's travel agent couldn't beat the pricing so that afternoon the flight was booked via Expedia and twelve hours later I was on my way to JFK.

Tune in next time when I review Japan Airlines Flight 047 and my first impressions of the Land of the Rising Sun!

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20080228

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe



Was planning on hitting up the Guggenheim on Saturday with Retardo, Natisha, Jake and Malasa (and probably Sergio and Bea). That plan got shot down this morning when my boss 'suggested' that I come in on the weekend to work.

Anyway, the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition will be up through May 28th so I'll have plenty of time to visit. The first and only exhibition of his that I visited was underwhelming, Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument. From what I've read so far, the Guggenheim exhibition should be way better.

So, no idea who Cai Guo-Qiang is? He's my favorite contemporary Chinese artist. I'll post a review when I actually visit.

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20080227

One dense post, hope you find something interesting.



Another delayed post, started this post in mid-February. The only reason I'm mentioning this is I wish I got it out sooner, over at Ain't It Cool News, they had a clip of the Where the Wild Things Are movie. It's been yanked, no matter, apparently they are making major changes to the movie so much of the project is being redone and I think it's been pushed back a year.

Fables. Jeez, I can't believe I waited until now to get into the series. And to think I only started reading it because of James Jeans' covers. You can download the first issue at DC's Vertigo website. It starts out slow but give it a shot. The last story arc was amazing (issues... late 30s, early 40s). If you are in a hurry, there's a torrent of the majority of the issues out, including the spinoffs. But remember, show them some love and buy the graphic novels or the back issues. I'm waiting for the entire set to pop up on eBay so I can snag it all in one go.

Freak Angels, a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Not only is it free, I'm totally digging the art. And Warren Ellis has given us Global Frequency, The Authority, and Transmetropolitan, need I go on? The plot is still relatively thin (don't have that much to go by), but the setting seems to have been done to death... still for a free comic, I'm a fan.

I forget who sent this Youtube video to me originally, it's a Batman: Gotham Knight preview. Haven't heard of it? Well this description was posted on IMDB. "Anime-inspired direct-to-DVD anthology film. Comprised of six short stories, from diverse creators, including Academy Award-nominated Josh Olsen (A History of Violence), Batman Begins writer David S. Goyer, and comics scribe Brian Azzarello. It's planned for a release window of two to four weeks prior to the release of The Dark Knight, and would bridge the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight."

This article gives me hope for my architecture degree. Care to know who designed the majority of the Air Jordans (including the very first one) in Nike's lineup? An architect named Tinker Hatfield. Found that out while I was watching the CNBC special, SWOOSH Inside Nike.

Firefly will never die, or hopefully it'll get revived on the small screen. I've already professed my love for the short-lived series on this blog. Now an established author has one upped me by writing a Firefly novel. And guess what? It's totally free!

Daily Monster. There have been similar projects in the past, but not many of them includes a video of every single monster! Great stuff.

Saw a photo of this Target promotion in this month's Fast Company. Thanks to Cathy for the article. Too bad I missed it, what the hell was I doing at the time? I was working a block away...

I really should get started on the knitting. This R2D2 knit beanie is FREAKING AWESOME.

Resources:

How to Speak, a lecture given by MIT professor, Patrick Winston. I think MIT pulled the video from Youtube, but check the comments. There's a link to a video hosted at Harvard. Going to be honest here, haven't sat through this one yet... And Chip Kidd presents The Learners. Haven't sat through this video either. Subject matter sounds like fun though.

Wokai.org. I guess it's similar to Kiva.org, but this microfinance site is concentrated on China. My little cousin is heading over to Beijing this summer to intern for them. Very exciting! I don't know when I'll be over there for a few months of study, but I'd love to get involved when I'm there.

Core77 has a link to three great rendering tutorials. I swear I'll sit myself down one day and go through them. I really need a studio I can go to.

For a time I was hooked on pudding tea. More recently I started going back to Whatever, a dessert joint in Chinatown my brother introduced to me a few years ago. Check them out for fresh fruit drinks, and they aren't that expensive! Prices are similar to pudding / boba tea.

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IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad love fest

Some of the content in this post may be a bit stale, started this post on the 16th of January and never finished it until now, just after Lenovo's official X300 announcement. There seems to be some sort of love fest between Business Week and Lenovo. In January, Business Week had a nice reflective article on Richard Sapper, designer of the IBM (now Lenovo) ThinkPad. If you would like to dwelve more into the history of the ThinkPad's design, Tomoyuki Takahashi, Yamato Design Center Manager, has a great write up here. Some of the hardcore fans will be familiar with the bento-box story.

More recently, leading up tothe X300 launch, David Hill divulged that a BW journalist had been allowed access to the team that designed the X300 early in the design phase. That resulted in this interesting article, Building the Perfect Laptop.

Yearning for more IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad information? Check out a book titled IBM Design from Japan. I had to order my copy from Japan, fortunately the book is in English as well as Japanese. Came across the book in 2004, finally got it in the middle of last year. Some of the images in the book can be found in this PDF from MIT (thanks to Gator from the ThinkPad forums).

So what of the X300? Looks great, though I was disappointed with my T61, the difference in build quality is noticeable compared to my T42 (prior to Lenovo's purchase). The plastic covers on either side of the keyboard don't give when you press on them, saving you from the annoying popping sound I always get from my T61. Anyway, I suppose I'd pony up the cash for the SSD on the X300, but I've been thinking for a while now that the next laptop would most likely be a tablet. The idea of purchasing a desktop has been dead for a while now, I'd say in five years the same thinking will apply to just regular laptops. Tablets or bust! Loved the amount of attention and thought that went into the rubber feet for the ThinkPads. Just fondled mine, yup they are lovely.

And before I end my IBM/Lenovo post, will someone please tell them to make TrackPoints standard on everything. Not including them on the IdeaPads line was dumb dumb dumb. The screen and hinge as well as the finish looks great on that line, but it'll never sell to individuals like me who almost NEVER use the touchpad.

And as for other laptop builders? HP's marketing has gotten better over the years though the talking bodies of celebrities are beginning to wear thin. This HP Office Orchestra is new to me though not as impressive as the Honda Acapella commercial. Then again, not many commercials have approached the level of Honda's marketing efforts in the U.K. Not even this funky Ford commercial.

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20080220

Total Lunar Eclipse tonight!



For the few who haven't heard, the last total lunar eclipse for us North Americans until December 2010 will occur tonight (8:43pm - 12:09am). The meat of it is from 10:01pm - 10:51pm. Hope you have your telephoto lens ready and a nice place to view it from. For more information on the event, check out this page over at NASA.

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20080218

Fun with CSS3


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I haven't been following CSS3 much, didn't even realize some of the functionality is already implemented in a few of the current browsers. Heck, I have my hands full just trying to figure how to get things working correctly in IE.

Came across the 'Fun with highlights' experiment earlier in the day. Go ahead, try selecting the text up above in FireFox or Safari (blech). Cool huh? Erik used CSS3's ::selection pseudo-element and PHP to get the effect. For more information about CSS3, check this blog out.

Update: Guess Blogger does some weird things with the HTML when I publish. Had to dump the generated code in a separate text file and use a PHP include. Stop stripping the includes damnit! Thundercats GOOOOOOOOO!

Update 2: Took a longer look at the CSS3-Selectors document, check out 6.6.5. Structural pseudo-classes, don't have to alternate the color of the table rows via PHP and CSS anymore, you can do it just within CSS!

Newspapers (Khoi Vinh, Design Director for NYTimes.com, I'm looking at you) are going to go crazy over the ::first-line pseudo-element and the ::first-letter pseudo-element. Rather than having to enclose each first line or letter with the CSS tag, the first line or letter will automatically adopt the styles!

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20080217

Orange cheats on orange with banana

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20080215

Whistler while you work; not anymore...

Stay away, I have rabies!
Yes snowboarding is this much fun. And look, everyone in the photo won't be present for round two. Sad.

As I lie here beneath my sheets, slowly counting down to what will surely be a horrendous weekend, I'm looking back at the past few days with a grin. The skies teased me on Tuesday, washing the urban scape with pure swaths of white only to take it all away the very next day with a torrential down pour (so bad that they had to close Mountain Creek). I guess we brought back some of Whistler with us, and a touch of Vancouver too.

Rounding the corner to my apartment building I saw representatives of both DHL and UPS waiting at the door across the street. The two guys were smiling, joking around. All we needed was to add FedEx and USPS (one of their trucks passed me as I rounded the corner) to the mix and it would have been worth it for me to run upstairs to grab my camera. Definitely brightened up my evening.

How about that weather today? Unbelievable blue sky, temperatures warm enough to walk around in a long sleeve shirt. Guess Mother Earth came through big for Valentines Day this year. Hope all you ladies got your chocolate and freshly cut greens. Would it be a waste if I suggested that you all use that chocolate for submarinos? Do it anyway.

So while I'm still disappointed about the prospect of going into work this weekend, spending hours with the boss, listening to him go on and on about how great he is for the nth time, I'll come to terms with the fact that a number of my friends will be out on a mountain riding. Enjoying whatever packed powder there may be. Cutting the gnarliest lines through those iced-up groomers of the East Coast. And hopefully they'll feel it. The peace that surrounds you when the volume is muted, motion slows and you and your buddies are just flying down the mountain, taking advantage of every little hit on the side or the rollers approaching the Timberline Park.

People always asked last year how I could stand commuting to Killington every weekend only to strap myself to some fiberglass / plastic covered plank and windburn my way down a few hundred feet of death cookie riddled creme brulée trails. Well I'm sure the few of you that picked it up this year know now, and if you still don't, I hope you feel it soon.

Because next year, and the only thing that keeps me going at this point, you'll have to come out to ride with me in Portland. Mt. Hood awaits.

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