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Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
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4:45 am - The Coming Revolution in Highway Communication
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My presentation at Ignite Portland went pretty well. I'm not wonderful at speaking to 700 people, but that wasn't the main hangup. I didn't think the jokes I put in the slides would get so much laughter from the audience, and didn't expect to pause so frequently to let them laugh. But I said most of what I planned to say, and what was left out wasn't too important.
So here it is: http://blip.tv/file/2882069
Ignite was awesome. Can't wait for the next one.
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4:09 am
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Dear subconscious: please stop making me dream about ex girlfriends. Don't get me wrong, I love the dreams themselves, but waking up is always a bit jarring.
In related news, I have an urge to make a phone call to Japan.
EDIT: And apparently she's single again. Sigh.
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| Sunday, October 18th, 2009
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2:52 am
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Just got word that I've been chosen to give my presentation at Ignite Portland on November 19. I'm really excited about it, and I'll be piecing together my slides for the presentation in the next week.
It's called "Why Highway Communication Sucks and How We Can Make It Suck Less" and the proposal's here: http://proposals.igniteportland.com/proposals/364
I'm wrapping up my gig for the Yukon government web portal. God I love working with them. But I'll need to find some more work soon. I'm still working on Domodomo's KeyLime app, but it's not for money as much as helping a friend and getting a killer portfolio piece.
I finished designing my first Drupal theme last week. It's for a company I'm not fond of, but I'm not in a place to choose my clients yet. Personally, I think the theme's beautiful, but the developers ran into some problems and it's on hold for a while. At least I'll still get paid for it.
Fumi came to Portland last week too! It was awesome. We went to Tillamook, Multnomah Falls, did some shopping, the whole tourist thing. She bought 15 bottles of OPI polish for her salon. It's more than twice the price in Japan, so she was thrilled to grab as much as she could here.
I need to get back to Illustrator. By far the most used application on my PC.
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| Saturday, September 19th, 2009
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6:19 pm - My social media affair
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Sorry I haven't been posting to you lately, beloved LiveJournal. I promise I check my friends page at least a dozen times a day.
I've found another. It's really popular right now, especially in Portland, and especially among the creative / tech community. And I've already found jobs through it.
I won't mention its name here. But just know you're always in my thoughts, and I never hesitate to mention you're my first networking site.
Alright, the last two days have been this:
Phone conference
Meeting
Meeting
Phone interview
The Helio Sequence
We Were Promised Jetpacks
Phone conference
Drupal meeting
The Jealous Sound
Sunny Day Real Estate
The Long Winters
And tomorrow will be this:
Sleep
The Arrivals
Dillinger Four
Sleep
And the next day? Kites on the beach. Then a week of work. It'll be a marvelous week of hell. The best kind of hell there is, with good clients but lots of work.
And I'll try to post here more often from now on.
current music: Ringing in my ears
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5:30 am - I dare you to say your day will be better than mine.
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Who's going to the Crystal Ballroom tonight?
Oh, that's right. Me.
And for what reason?
Oh, nothing. Just Sunny Day Real Estate's reunion show. After ten fucking years.
That's right. My favorite band in the world, essentially my reason for wanting to move to Seattle so long ago, who broke up after I saw them play at La Luna, is playing tonight. And there's no way I'm not getting in. I don't care if this wristband doesn't guarantee admission. I'll be there hours in advance. Just like last time.
current mood: excited
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| Sunday, June 28th, 2009
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5:39 am - What a douche.
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If the owner of a small company said this . . .
"Corporations don't have the freedom to call potential customers idiots, but I do."
. . . how would you respond?
This is the same guy who got all pissy when a few of us called him out on ripping off other company logos and using terrible type placement.
Guess some people don't really need my business.
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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12:41 pm - NO WAY.
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Sunny Day Real Estate got back together.
current mood: confused
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| Sunday, June 21st, 2009
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6:35 am - Another trip south
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Pete, Noriko and I are going to spend the weekend of the 4th of July in San Francisco. Pete's looking at art schools in the area, Noriko's spending time with friends and family, and I need to make up for spending the whole time in the suburbs on our last visit.
How do you make a girl go insane? Stick her in a car for eleven hours with two type-obsessed designers. We'll be talking fonts the whole trip.
Unrelated: "Annan Water" gives me chills every time I listen to it. Especially the mandolin part after the first chorus. Chills.
current music: Decemberists: Annan Water
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| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
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6:29 am - More listing
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In addition to the previous wishlist:
New pants. I just stitched a four-inch hole in one of three pairs I own, and the others aren't too attractive either.
A rowing machine. It's my favorite kind of exercise machine, and they make them pretty small.
A second monitor. It's a really superfluous desire, but once I'm a little more comfortable at home (read: living somewhere else) I'll want a more efficient desktop setup, and a secondary display will really help with the design work. Especially Flash. Damnit, Adobe, why did you destroy the panels in Flash? I don't like being forced to use vertical panels when they've been horizontal up until now.
I know there's more I could think of. But if I don't write these down somewhere, I'll forget completely once the checks start coming in.
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| Monday, June 8th, 2009
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10:31 am - List time
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In anticipation of a much more gratifying job and much more substantial paycheck, it's time to plot out all the things I'd like to blow my money on, once I've started catching up on my loan payments.
I need at least one Project 2. It's the new One Drop yo-yo, it was released yesterday, and I know I told people (like Steve) that I was finished buying yo-yos, but this is a special case. It's the successor to the local underdog story of the decade. Take that, YoyoFactory. With your terrible logo ripoffs and horrendous type placement.
I should get a new computer. Parts of this one are coming up on a decade old, although the most important pieces are considerably younger. But the whole setup just doesn't feel like running anywhere near as fast as it used to. It's just time for a new setup. And I can use this one as a media center, Ubuntu box, or scrap it for parts.
I also need shelves. Lots of shelves. I've got crap I just can't put anywhere, and it deserves to be stored in an inconspicuous and dignified manner. Not in the middle of my floor, where a decent person would put a bed.
A new plotter would be nice, but I really need more practice on the tiny one I've got first. Someday, I plan on having a four-foot cutting plotter. That'll be awesome.
Since my headphones broke, I'm stuck with these shitty earbuds that came with my Sansa. I hate earbuds so much, and these make my ears feel funny. I need clips. And it's kinda hard to find them these days.
Oh! And a bread maker! I'd love to make my own bread.
That's about it. I guess my dreams aren't that unattainable.
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| Saturday, June 6th, 2009
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4:08 am - Someone has a new job.
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And that someone is me.
current mood: giddy
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| Monday, June 1st, 2009
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12:16 am
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I need to go to sleep, and I've got a terrible reason for not doing so. I've just been sort of bummed about a couple things this whole trip, and it seems I'd rather stay up dwelling on the fact that I'm bummed than just sleep on it and hope things get better soon.
It's really sort of foolish. I'm just trying to work out my feelings about a couple friends. My close friends have been whittled down to a small handful in recent years, and when one's friends number so few, one puts much more energy into each friendship. But that energy isn't always returned in such large amounts. Guess shit happens.
Alright, I'm gonna force myself to sleep now. Leaving for Portland in about twelve hours.
current music: Ween: She Wanted to Leave
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| Sunday, May 31st, 2009
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10:22 pm - It only gets better
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I finally went downtown today. I'd been wanting to walk around Castro ever since I got here, and I finally got the chance to do it. I don't want to live in SF any time in the foreseeable future, but places like this are what make it worth visiting now and then.
So while I'm stuck twelve hours from home on a laptop that doesn't do anything I need to do, I've got an interview to follow up on, I need to ask for half the week off from my current job, and apparently a client is wondering why my contract is taking so long. (The change order came in on Friday, so that one's not my fault at all.) So I need to get going as soon as possible tomorrow.
Thanks California. You're a wonderful place in small doses.
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1:28 pm - Berkley makes me a child again.
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I've been in the Bay Area for two days, and I haven't even set foot in SF. Don't know if I will this time around. No matter where you are, suburbs suck. While the suburbs alone here are larger than Portland, they still have this similar mood that sets them apart from their engine city. They don't feel complete.
Berkley's super rad, however. The very fact that I've finally seen 924 Gilman makes me want to listen to all my old Pansy Division and Operation Ivy tapes.
The Grocery Outlets here are insanely well stocked. Since they take overstock and rejects from local sources, of course they'd have tons more stuff here than the stores in Olympia and Portland. I'm gonna stock up on food before we head back home.
I'm still working on learning MS Expression Blend. It's basically a clunkier, dressier version of Flash, still with no right-click support, and really no obvious advantages to Flash. Plus I'm gonna have to learn a new language to make it do anything worthwhile.
Back to my training videos.
current mood: meh
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| Friday, May 29th, 2009
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12:47 am - Leaving for San Fran
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in about . . . four hours.
current mood: excited
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| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
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5:47 pm - To the Essef
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I'm getting a ride to San Francisco on Thursday. I'll spend the weekend there and get back on Tuesday. I'm hoping to get a feel for the UX community and available jobs down there, but I don't expect to land anything. It'll take a gigantic salary to pull me away from Portland. I don't know what constitutes a gigantic salary just yet, but I had to borrow three dollars today to buy dinner, so anything's an improvement over where I am now.
But I'll mostly be there to just be in SF. I know I've got a few LJ friends down there, and I wouldn't mind making some friends near the Bay.
(Also, company names would help, as I haven't done much in the way of research yet. Adaptive Path is my favorite company in SF, so anything along those lines.)
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| Sunday, May 24th, 2009
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12:50 pm
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Every time I do situps, a find a quarter on the floor. It's because I only have a quarter, and it falls out of my pocket when I do situps. But if I just forget it's always the same coin, I feel like the gods are rewarding me for exercising.
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3:39 am - Bay Area Job Hunt 09
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I've got a chance to snag a free ride and a place to sleep next weekend in San Francisco. I've been hoping to get down there and start looking for UX jobs. I don't know if I should, since it won't be an absolutely free trip (who could refrain from spending art least some money in SF?), but it won't cost me any time at work (three days a week is harder to chip away at than a full-time gig), and I'd really love to take a road trip, especially to San Francisco.
So I've got about five days to decide. I can already tell it's gonna come down to flipping a coin.
current music: Ween: Nicole
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| Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
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6:51 pm - Oh man so many germs stay away
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I just saw a lady in downtown Whole Foods wiping the handle of her shopping cart with an antibacterial cloth, pinky raised, while her other hand held a venti Starbucks, her brow so furrowed and her lips so pursed you'd think she actually envisioned herself fighting a horde of germs on the battlefield.
My first thought was, "Man, what a loser." Then my second thought was, "I'm gonna blog about this from my phone." Then my third thought was, "Oh shit, I'm the loser."
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| Saturday, May 9th, 2009
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4:34 pm - I shoulda gone with Vimeo.
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One of my yo-yo videos was removed by YouTube today in response to Stage Three Music's claim that I had violated their copyright when I posted a 30-second clip of a yo-yo trick called "Infanta."
Who the fuck is Stage Three Music, you ask? Who the fuck, indeed, for I asked as well. And I'm still a bit confused. They represent the band to some degree, although this wasn't always true. In fact, by the only images I've been able to find linking one party to the other, it happened when the band signed to a major label that has nothing to do with the question at hand.
So I wrote YouTube back. And according to their nicely-worded site, even responding to such an accusation may be legally claiming my innocence, therefore setting myself up for perjury later on. But I wrote anyway, because while I may not be 100% in the right, it sure isn't these stiffs to declare it so.
My missive to the Tube:
Does Stage Three Music have the right to file a copyright claim to a song on the Kill Rock Stars label?
I'm not going to claim anything that'll put me in line for perjury, but I know the band and label are fine with this usage. The only reason Stage Three found it was because I entered the band and song title in the video's description.
If it's that big of a deal, I'll go to Kill Rock Stars and get them involved. Otherwise, I think Stage Three is being a little overzealous in flagging 30-second yo-yo videos with a song recorded well before they became involved with the band.
****
So that's it. We'll see if they flag any other videos (I've got a couple major label acts in my yo-yo project--Foo Fighters immediately comes to mind, but again, it's 30 seconds), and if they do, I'll just rant some more, maybe post some reaction videos. You know how it goes.
Oh, also, Colin still owes me a pretty big favor. I'd hate to waste it on such a foolish game, but if I can still watch entire episodes of Home Movies on YouTube, they aren't playing very consistently.
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