I’ll be heading to Bilbao to speak at the Nonick Conference next week. Jesse Thomas and I will be representing JESS3 and speaking about the importance of social objects and storytelling in successful social media strategies. Looking forward to jamon, pintxos and tinto.
A disconcerting trend has begun to pop up of late. Perhaps it’s only here in the confines of the locavoracious organic farm-to-table obsessed Portland in this not so hot economy, but many restaurants have begun to charge for bread. Sure, it’s only a few dollars. Sure, they try to ease the pain of ordering your bread by including a small ramekin of extremely well described olive oil, or a small pat of some very special kind of butter, but let’s not fool ourselves. It’s not that special; at least not usually. What’s worse, is that at first I saw it only with really good bread, but now I’m beginning to see it occur when the bread is mediocre or worse.
I’ve been taking this in stride, and with every grain of salt that has been necessary to make it palatable, but this week it was all taken too far when @deecreature and I were at a restaurant that simply did not serve bread. At all. (Note: They were not gluten free, and served an amuse bouche on crostini… so clearly it’s not something about the bread itself).
Therefore I present to the world the concept of The Slicing Fee (time of birth 7:19pm PST, 05/06/2011). Continue reading
Joe Hewitt leaving Facebook may be one of the best things to happen to HTML5 in a long time. He’s taking off to return to his roots (as in Firebug) in order to focus on solving problems for developers working with the nascent and developing languages like HTML5, the cloud and mobile.
“Technologies have a way of growing faster than the ecosystem of tools needed to support them.” – Joe
I have no doubt that in this role as a meta developer, a developer developing for developers, Joe Hewitt will have a significant and sustained impact on helping new platforms be used to their fullest extent. It’s a lofty goal. Good on ya. Here’s to not just making a great app, but making tools that help an army of others make a volume of great apps – for all of us.
Good luck, Joe.
Color, the new geo-social-media-sharing app is being underrated by all the haters. I’m all for some good hilarious snark like the much lauded review of the app on iTunes. But we’re all forgetting that just because something does happen to contain all of the hottest trends and social elements doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have some really interesting stuff going on.
The most recent TWiT had a pretty even-keeled discussion of Color by Leo Laporte, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Xeni Jardin and Baratunde Thurston that managed not to totally pan the app, but couldn’t foresee many applicable use cases. Kirkpatrick brought up the idea of music festivals as somewhere it might become useful, and all could agree that nobody knew what the hell Twitter would be good for either when it first hit, and also that there’s a high likelihood that Color is going to have a serious data mining aspect that leads to revenue tucked somewhere into its back end in order to take advantage of the data all the prophesied users are going to be pumping into it.
Here’s the thing – I don’t think it’s all that hard to see the potential utility of this app. Continue reading
Jack Dorsey’s great 15 minute speech to his company “Square” in a town hall meeting on his 34th birthday. The story of the Golden Gate Bridge as a proxy for the importance of design in your work.
“Your homework this weekend is to cross the bridge.”
Do not demand cake of supnah. Supnah’s cake will find you when you have become worthy of cake.
I bet you keep saying to yourselves that you want to get in on that whole new Kickstarter trend where artists and makers of all types crowdsource the funding of their projects. Sometimes they’re projects that would never otherwise be made, but other times this becomes an investment/lending strategy that alleviates a lot of the pain for smaller and independent artists (like Matt the Electrician).
Efficiency (noun) \i-ˈfi-shən-sē\
(1) : effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost (as in energy, time, and money)
(2) : the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it
(from Mirriam-Webster’s)
Has modern efficiency created the capability to attain levels of perfectionism such that their attainment leads to more hours working than had we not been enabled by the efficiencies to begin with? And is attention to detail in a world of intricacies a new form of artisanship or just the new tediousness of production line work? Continue reading
Walking around the fish market in Santa Caterina Market, Barcelona, Spain. The variety and availability of such fruits from the sea is impressive. It made me wish I had the time and the kitchen in town to buy some of these things to prepare, but such was not the case for this journey.
Go full screen and 720 HD for any amount of detail. The lighting is better after turning the first corner.
Remember Who You Are
A painted storefront security door in Barcelona, Spain
In the corner you can see a URL for TheArtofChase.com where you can see more murals, commissioned work and other creations.
Spaniards Waiting Under Glass
An unexpected scene within Gaudi’s Casa Batllos in Barcelona.
Just back from a couple of weeks in Spain, and here’s a Flickr set of some foodie shots that I took during my travels. More info on them to come, but here are the shots…
Just back from a couple of weeks in Spain, and here’s a Flickr set of some icons and icon-type thingies that I found during my travels. Some of them strike me as awesome, others as interesting, and still others as just weird. More info on them to come, but here are the pics…
2011 – A new direction.
Bienvenidos a 2011.
Twenty Eleven
Two-Thousand And Eleven.
Dos Mil Once.
Feliz año nuevo.
Happy new year.
