The creative side always doing its thing!
Kyle and I designed a new desktop. You can grab it over at the company blog: wecantstopthinking.com/#/our+blog/
Finally it happened, my headphones crapped out. I’ve had these Sony MDR-V150’s for 4-5 years and used them mon-friday for close to 8 hours a day. I hate when random things like these break because you are faced with a big decision… buy the same pair? try something different? or go for broke and get the upgrage?
Well I got the upgrade in the form of some Bose headphones and they sound incredible. I can’t work without music it is probably the most motivating catalyst for me to get work done. Thanks old headphones we had a good run.
this is incredible, found it on kanye’s blog
Focus Focus
I think wednesdays are the worst day for getting things done. Monday’s I come in refreshed from the weekend ready to really get some projects done. By wednesday I realize I am juggling like 4-5 projects answering emails and my focus just leaves for a day. I wonder what I can do to regain focus on wednesday.
Californication
Following my trip to NYC, I was given the chance to travel out to san diego california with my good friend Emma. Her family has a residence here close to the beach which they so generously offered for us to stay. My entire week was spent at the beach all day, followed by shopping and eating frozen yogurt at night at a place called yogurt land( it serves yogurt by the ounce with unlimited toppings).
It was amazing to get to spend so much time with an old friend out here, to give a little history I have known emma since high school and dated for some time, we have remained friends through it all, though we are not dating and have not been dating for some time (years).
We had dinner with one of there family friends Larry, he told amazing stories of his life and younger years during a wonderful dinner at “World Famous”. I am not a huge seafood fan but this place made a mean scallop as well as some great salmon. The next day after dinner we rode up the coast to la jolla to check out some seals, and the coastline. Fish Tacos, Fish Tacos, Fish Tacos was a huge topic of conversation during this whole trip I think Emma may be slightly obsessed with them. The main diet while out here was mexican dive joints that really had great food.
There is an amazing gift shop here called pangeas, it reminds me of world market without the furniture, I got gifts for some friends there and a stuffed octopus for me (trust me when i say, ITS AMAZING). This trip has been a great relaxing experience for me where I have let the computer more or less sit, while I have been on the beach dreaming up ideas and planning my next moves for WCST.
Special thanks goes to emma and her family for letting me stay out here all week and experience perfect weather, beaches, frozen yogurt, and everything else san diego has to offer.
NYC RESET.
That is no normal grass under my feet, that is the grass of central park. Friday morning I woke up and decided I needed to reset my mind, and a good way to do that was to travel. So after talking to Nicholas and Ryan… we decided that saturday we would get up and journey to New York City in the morning. The city is amazing, and has left me pretty inspired to come back to chicago and really get a lot of things that I have been wanting to get done.
I was able to meet tons of awesome people in NYC, the city is filled with young people doing amazing things with their lives. It should be noted that I don’t normally do things randomly like this, I think hanging out with my friends Jimmy and Janie has really in recent years started to plant the idea of travel, random adventures, and going with the flow more and more. So thanks friends. Also to note me and Nicholas always talked about packing up and doing something random… It finally happened.
Once I gather all the photos from this trip, I will work on chronicling the adventure in more detail. Thanks to Julian for putting us up at his place and showing us the city. Thanks to Eli for coming to hang out and showing me some of the best ice cream I have ever had. Hopefully I can make it back out to NYC again very soon.
* watch out for the brooklyn giraffe, its out there.
We finally put up our new site today after about a month of development, writting, and extensive testing. Kyle DeTella handled the programming lead on this one, building the site around a framework called “amino” that was built in-house and been used in our production work for about a year and half.
One of the biggest struggles for this site was the choice to use a non UI scroll bar. We set out to make something work as close to the UI scrollbar as possible which involved employing some rather unorthodox techniques like javascript injection, to be able to track the mouse outside of the flash movie more accurate.
Our Amino framework will eventually be released as an open-source project as soon as we can package it all up and document it clearly for others to understand. More on Amino to come in the following couple months.
This is what happens when I have to stock the mini fridge at the office. Doing ActionScript requires lots of caffeine, candy, and sometimes a whisky drink.
