Tonight, Kate and I are playing a game. It is called the Don’t Drink the Bacon Grease game. The first person to drink the bacon grease loses the game.
So far we’re both winning.
But I think Kate might be pulling ahead.
Category Archives: Life
Setlist, 08/10/09 – 08/22/09
August 22, 2009
San Francisco CA > Minneapolis MN > Grand Island NE > Sidney NE > Fort Collins CO > Estes Park CO > Rocky Mountain National Park > Fort Collins CO > Cheyenne WY > Kearney NE > Des Moines IA > Minneapolis MN > Madison WI > Bloomington IL > Bloomington IN
It’s been a long two weeks.
Directions to Mark’s Work
August 14, 2009
Out to vine. Cross vine, straight to welding. Right side of welding. Two-track entry to nature. Entry behind. Natural area. Straight. Between ponds. Fenced-in area. Right of chain link fence. Straight. Little hill. Up it. On top of berm along river. Left on dirt single track, fifty feet to railroad tracks. Left to get on rails, cross river on rails. Immediately to right is Mark’s building.
After a lovely summer…
August 6, 2009
Tomorrow is my last day at Adaptive Path.
Tomorrow is the last day I ride Spry through San Francisco.
I’m gonna try real hard not to cry.
Meanwhile, back at the farm…
June 22, 2009
I flew back to Minnesota for the weekend to catch Rock the Garden with Kate. We were too busy filling up on beer and wine to catch much of Solid Gold and Yeasayer, but Calexico was a sweet breath of hot desert air blown in from the Great American Southwest. Then, The Decemberists played The Hazards of Love in its entirety, rendering me a weeping ball of blubbery, emotional goo for sixty minutes. They followed it up with a killer encore, which had me trying to reel my jaw back up into my face.
Those cats can play, man. They’re the real deal. Kate proposed we move to Portland because, you know, The Decemberists are from Portland, and I believe she makes a sound argument. Moving to a particular town in order to be closer to your favorite band that otherwise tours nationally on a regular basis makes complete sense.
But.
Last night we (kinda, sorta) invited ourselves over to a dinner party at the Ingman Estate, where our tremendous peals of laughter dared set off car alarms in the street. We discussed such things as Super Fantastic tomatoes, sucker-popping, and a brilliant marketing campaign for propane.
We ate and drank and laughed and talked until the wee hours of the night, and this morning Kate and I woke up bright and early so we could get new iPhones. It’s a good thing we got a head start on the project, because we ended up traveling to three locations and spending four hours getting our plan in shape. Luckily we scored an incredibly helpful representative at the AT&T store, who got us all squared away after an hour of tireless effort.
Kate dropped me off at the Minneapolis airport where I spent a good half-hour going through security, and I made it to San Francisco just in time for a most-experiential ride on the BART. The doors didn’t work properly, the conductor spoke in an awkward and confusing cadence, they rebooted the train computer by shutting off power for a minute, and a homeless fellow panhandled us on the train. Which is mighty bold. Seriously, San Francisco has standards.
Fragment
June 18, 2009
Phew.
Long day. One last jam-packed ride on the 49 Muni to Japantown for Andrew Crow’s closing Interaction Design workshop for UX Intensive. An intense day of prototyping followed by a closing party, complete with an open bar and wonderful new friends with Minnesota and Bay Area connections alike. Then, a dash across town to the Adaptive Path office, for further drinks and entertaining in our inspiring design space.
Back to work tomorrow, with sketching on the menu. Sketching, sketching, sketching.
It is a good life.
I can’t wait to tell them about the exploding moon.
June 11, 2009
I woke up at 6:30 this morning and realized I had to give a 30-minute presentation to the company at noon, introducing myself to the entire gang. I was gunning for a largely visual deck and had flagged a number of photos in Aperture for this purpose, but I hadn’t even started assembling the presentation in Keynote.
It was definitely a cram and I think I pulled it off, but I did learn a thing or two about narration. If you introduce a character, say a car named the “Green Dragon Wagon”, your audience will become confused and uncomfortable when you replace it, unannounced, with a silver Subaru. Then, your audience will become downright hostile if you present a photo of an old pickup truck, unintentionally suggesting that this is your car, with nary a mention as to what happened to the Dragon or the Subaru.
You see, people interpret and grow attached to things, be they rhetorical conveyances or characters in a narrative. If you unintentionally toy with their emotions by flippantly dismissing or substituting these characters, they’ll call you on it. If they like you. If they don’t like you they’ll silently judge you for it, for the rest of their lives.
Also, in wrapping up my presentation I described to the company our concept work for Dane and James’ Lost Dreams, which is, for those who have forgotten, what you get when you combine a cruise ship with a roller coaster (you get Awesome, with a capital AWE). Yes, Dane and James’ Lost Dreams is a true work of user-centered brilliance, a cruise ship designed for the type of person that is most often attracted to cruise ships in the first place: chiefly, people who wear faded black Harley Davidson shirts with the sleeves cut off. Upon reflection, I wish Andrew could have been there for the “sharing out” of this, given his career history. Even so, we got some largely positive feedback on our work:
“Are you insane?!”
Probably. They’ve got eight more weeks of this, and they don’t even know the half of it yet.
Urban Excursion
June 7, 2009
You can tell a lot about a neighborhood in San Francisco based on how frequently they need to clean the streets. While biking around Sea Cliff today in a super-ritzy part of town I noticed that they have scheduled street cleanings twice a month.
My street? Three times a week.
I went for another bike ride today, starting out towards SoMa then up Embarcadero into Fisherman’s Wharf. I took lunch at the In-N-Out Burger, based on its legendary status in certain enclaves. A number of folks from WWDC were haunting the joint, along with perhaps the rest of humanity. Tables were scarce, and people were hunched over their claim hissing at passersby who would dare wrest it from their filthy clutches. I stood and waited for fifteen minutes in that awful purgatory between “In” and “Out”, getting jostled and manhandled by every other packet of flesh in the joint. That’s the thing about cities. No matter where you are, someone else always wants to occupy the space that you are taking up.
As for the burger? Not very good. The fries have promise, being truly potato-based in origin, but mine were as though they had been dipped in tepid oil and set to soak through their paper basket.
I continued on my journey, stopping at the Palace of Fine Arts on my way to the Golden Gate Bridge. I crossed over this time around, buffeted by strong winds for the entire length, and got to witness firsthand the circus that is the parking lot at the north overlook. I crossed back and continued west to Land’s End, a decidedly classy locale where a woman with a solid gold tooth asked if I could point her to the nearest restroom.
I dropped in at Seal Rocks and headed south past the Cliff House, and swung back east through the south edge of Golden Gate Park. Following my usual route I went out through the Panhandle, and took the Wiggle to Sanchez to Delores Park. It was here that the jeans got noticeably tighter, the keys began dangling on carabiners clipped to belt loops, and the U-locks were safely stowed in the left back pocket. I spun down Valencia and was soon hauling my (beautiful, lightweight) bicycle up to our third-floor flat.
All in all it was probably a 25-mile bike ride, and I’m hoping I slathered myself with enough sunscreen to stave off any further burns. My arms are peeling like crazy after last week’s ride, and everywhere I go I leave a disgusting trail of skin in my wake.
Kate noted how funny it was, that I had to move to one of the biggest cities in the country to become active in the outdoors again.
I’ll bet you can’t guess how this one ends.
June 5, 2009
The new bike is fast. It shaved five minutes off my three-mile commute this morning.
Chris, John and I, in celebration of surviving our first week as interns, took the Muni from SoMa through Chinatown to Italytown to grab some tasty slices of pizza. We ate them in a park while an old woman lurked behind us, waiting impatiently for Chris and John to give her their hurriedly-emptied cans of soda. Meanwhile, I gestured at pigeons.
Then we went to a baseball stadium and watched the opera.
