Things I want to do on a Motorcycle

Sorry i haven't been blogging. i hope no one had any nervous breakdowns due to my sudden disinterest in blogging here... heh... I got a random idea last night though. a new blog should be in the works soon, and that always spawns new inspiration to write.

for now, i'll leave you with a list of adventures that i hope to complete on a motorcycle. this is something i've been thinking about a lot latley since picking up an old DR350 and making it street legal. as of now i have no official plans to make these things happen other than doing smaller weekend trips and getting more experience on the bike, but if you're interested let me know and we can actually make plans.

1. Ride Yellowstone National Park
2. Ride from the east coast to the west coast on nothing but dirt roads on the Trans-America Trail (or at least a decent section of it)
3. Ride from California or the Pacific North West to Alaska and back with my dad and brother.

thats it for now.

Valentines Day

Seriously... what has this holiday come to? before you even have a chance to send flowers to your valentine, you're getting not so subtle hints about it. what makes people think that being told/required to be romantic on a certain day makes it romantic? It's really hard to show you care when you don't get the chance to make it your idea. if someone asks you about sending them something for valentines day before you get a chance to even carry out plans you already made to do so, then that at least partially discounts the whole "this was my own initiative and i love you" idea. it turns into "I know you want and expect this on this day so i guess i'll buy these flowers, and this pre-printed card". It kills the idea that you did it all on your own... or at least shots it in the foot.

There is nothing romantic about this "holiday" to me. Its very hard to make something genuine and special when 1. Its required of you, 2. its expected (as in not a surprise), and 3. everybody else is doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. On top of that, if you want to go out to dinner you have to deal with the mass of people that are all trying to get a nice dinner at the same time.

On a much more lighter note: a buddy i know from riding motorcycles got fantastic news this week about his battle with cancer. quote: "there are undetectable levels of the cancer byproducts/components appearing in my blood. It means we can assume there is very little cancer in my body."

I've been following the whole process over the past 9 months or so through his blog. I've learned a lot about what it takes to get through something like this. I can only hope that if I find myself in the same situation i can hold it together as well as he seems to be. Congrats Andre. well done.

Site Launch

We've really been working hard on the development of this site over the past month. Its very complex with lots of AJAX and some tricky CSS performed by my awesome co-workers. Its still got a couple small bugs to work out, but it was a really great effort with a short dev timeline. I actually created this design at about 11 at night while i was in austin doing the Phizzpop challenge, and Ken did all of the mark-up in the middle of doing the mark-up for the red site that i mentioned in a previous post.

The client said this upon delivery yesterday:

• We just spent the morning going through the site & it looks great. In my experience, this is one of the best development efforts I’ve ever seen in translating the creative comps into reality – and you’ve done so in just one month. Thank you for going the extra mile & working extraordinarily hard at making Port 25 a great experience. I’m very much looking forward to pushing this out the door and seeing customer reaction to the upgrade. We have a vocal audience and I expect no shortage of reactions

MyBabyOurBaby.com

A good friend of mine, Ray, launched a really cool community site that he's been building with a friend over the past 4 months or so called MyBabyOurBaby.com. Its a community site built around creating "books" about your kids. The cool part is that you don't just invite people to see or follow the book (although you can do that too). You actually invite your family and friends to build and contribute to the book right along with you as your child progresses. Its a great way to keep a good record of your child.

Once you get other friends and family members on the site, they can then create books for their kids (or you can start it for them if they're not very savvy internet users), and their books get added to your home page where you can keep track of activity on all your books, and make your own contributions.

Props to Ray and his buddy, Beau. Nice job guys.

oh... i almost forgot my favorite part. When you write a new entry, called "stories" on this site, it automatically gets the date and time from any picture that you upload and orders your book accordingly. when i first started my book i thought i would have to start from the begining (4 years ago) and work my way up if i wanted things in the right order (like a normal blog works). Thanks to this feature, i can start where ever i want as build it out as i go... new stuff, old stuff... it doesn't matter!

Site Launch

A site that we did for the mothership (mic ro soft) (avoiding the search engines) launched today. it is for a charity headed up by Bono, and actually had to be personally approved by him.

We only had about a day and a half to design the site, and about a week and a half after that for approval, changes from the mic ro soft team, and from bono's team, and for mark-up and development. it was very rushed, pretty hectic and involved a lot of hours by a variety of people to get the job done. the site design that got pushed through is actually more of a collaboration between myself and my creative director, Sean. You can see one of my other comps that i was hoping would get picked here.

The final product looks pretty good, and we're proud to have been a part of it. its also kind of fun that the whole project is getting a lot of press by various sources including the new york times web site.

Les Savy Fav

Steve and I went to see Les Savy Fav on friday night at the Palladium Ballroom in downtown dallas. I've seen them twice at Rubber Gloves in Denton. The first time was amazing, and the second time was pretty good too, but a bit of a let down in comparison. They more than made up for it with this show though. What a fun, rockin' show. The picts i managed to get with my cell phone above only represent maybe a 10th of the antics.

Other than coming pretty close to duking it out with some kids up in front of the stage, it was a great night. It was kinda wierd though, I've always been the kind of guy that avoided confrontation. Its not my thing, but that night I was ready to go. I wasn't starting trouble, or looking for trouble, but these kids were being dicks and i wasn't going to put up with it.

Two Point O'ed

I'm sure most of you reading this blog (assuming anyone is reading this blog) know what the term "Web 2.0" refers to. Basically it just refers to a breed of social networking and user driven sites, but it's also been associated with a trend of web design that we've all been submerged in for the past 2 years. I like to refer to these shiny, wet, reflective, star burst sites as being "Two Point O'ed", but we really should come up with a more deserving and appropriate name. Pictured here you can see a fine example of what i'm talking about. It's got most, if not all, of the key elements: plenty of shine, reflections, cyan, magenta, star burst emblem, networking badges, gradients, etc. Please, help me classify this trend in design so that we can engrave it into a shiny headstone and put it to rest.

Steve and I were introduced to a term while at FOWD that I love and quickly adopted: Flashterbation. It refers to the gratuitous use of flash animation that happened a few years back. It's so perfect, and fun. This shiny trend needs something just as suiting. Maybe it's already out there and I don't know about it, or maybe it just wasn't good enough for me to remember it... i dunno....

450 Singles

At this point I'm a little unsure what my immediate future in racing is. I feel a little bored of racing the smaller bikes I guess. Mainly due to trying to attend too many races this year. I feel like i've reached a point where i'm getting pretty decent at it, and really want to move up to some bigger bikes, even if they're still minis. the issue i have with that is: 1. i don't want to spend the money on a new bike right now, and 2. I feel like i've reached a level in my abilities that is allowing me to push myself and the bikes i've been racing closer to the edge which has resulted in some wicked crashes compared years past. I feel like i'm riding a thin line between getting faster and knocking the shit out of myself. Thats why i'm thinking i might take a year off and do some enduro racing on the dirtbike for a while. Start a new challenge.

Anyways, that wasn't really the point of this post. the point is that i really want one of these 450 single bikes! It looks like several organizations across the US are building a class for this new bike, and if they're not making a specific class for it, then they'll squeeze you in with another class where you'll be competitive.

So, I think that most of you know what a motard is by now. basically it's a dirtbike fitted with 17inch wheels, slicks and suspention adjustments for roadracing. Now there is a new breed of "motard" and they're callling it the 450 Single. Its a 450 four stroke dirtbike chassis and motor with upgraded suspension parts, 17inch wheels and slicks, some sport bike style clipons and rearsets, and its fitted with a road racing style fairing. I think this would be the perfect bike for me to race if i was to move up to the bigger bikes. Its not crazy fast, it looks fun as hell, and if they build restrictions into the classes so that you can't dump 10 grand into the motor to win all the races, it'll be very competitive and maybe not crazy expensive.

Graffiti

I've been telling a lot of people about Telligent's new product, Graffiti for a while now. Well, its finally out. A lot of people have been loading it up and seeing what its all about and i've heard a lot of good things about it. as soon as i get some free time I'll be redoing this site and building it on the Graffiti platform.

For those that don't know, Graffiti CMS is meant to be a really simple content publishing platform for individuals and small businesses. It's designed first and foremost to be simple. If you still don't know what I'm talking about, it's along the same lines as wordpress, but much more powerful.

Gotta give big props to Steve Ray for the design. I'm jealous that his first site to go live here at telligent/sound creative is so kick ass.

Phizzpop Design Challenge

Last week myself and two others from Telligent (Ken Hanson, markup master, and Kyle Beyer, backend genius and generally kick ass at attacking a challenging project with a good strategy) traveled to Austin to compete in Microsoft's Phizzpop Design Challenge.

The format of the competition makes for an interesting challenge. You get a day and a half of training on microsoft's new Expression Studio. at the end of the training on the second day (tuesday afternoon) they present the challenge that we have to design for and send you on your way for the next 2 and a half days to design and develop your solution and prepare a presentation to sell your idea to a panel of 3 judges. I think this format has potential, but there is one major flaw. The Expression Studio software is very new, and isn't even complete yet. I understand that this is a great way for microsoft to get some feedback and input on their new tools, but it makes for a very stressful, and sometimes disastrous 3 days of furiously paced work.

Microsoft had people on site to help us with the software through out the competition, but they could only help so much (big props go to Josh Holmes for his help and efforts). They were of great service to us and the other teams, but didn't seem to know much more than what we were able to figure out on our own. Adding to the software's downfalls were our own. We found out we were going to the competition about a week before hand, so we were looking at the expression studio software for the first time monday morning at the training. some of the teams obviously know quite a bit about the software already giving them a huge advantage, but obviously thats the nature of competition and its no ones fault but our own.

On the other hand, it has some really nice features as well. If Fireworks would adopt a few of the cool features and tools found in Blend i would be a happy man. They also have a very nice philosophy for work flow from designer to developer. I hope that this continues to evolve... adobe needs to take some notes.

Overall we had fun, created a really nice piece, and I got to work and get to know a couple of cool guys. We worked furiously with lots of heart and effort. Our 10am to 4am work days took a toll on us and by the time i got home on saturday i was basically sick from exhaustion. We didn't win (that honor went to thirteen23 and they deserved it), but I think we came up with a great, realistic solution. If we had been able to develop some more of our silverlight pieces and created a flashy presentation I think we would have had a real chance at winning. It was very dissapointing to not win, and i think it made it worse that they don't tell anyone what place you came in. There was no closure. No satisfaction. No tangible results to tell us how well we did.

I tried to keep a record of our design process, and you can see some of that in my flickr stream. The home page design is here and the interior pages along with some misc picts and things can be found here. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, feel free to post it up here or on my flickr account.

Oh, and did I mention that I had to present our project in front of a packed bar full of people? I haven't had to do anything like that in a loooong time. It went reasonably well though.