Ninjas

September 25, 2006

Update: Well that was a short-lived romance! The client has replaced our gorgeous whirlwind design with a completely different one, with which we had absolutely no involvement. Such is the life of ninjas for hire.

For the record, our website design looked like this. For the sake of inaccuracy and confusion (and a net increase of both) I have left the rest of the text of this post unaltered. Enjoy!

Cynthia Thielsen Screenshot

Oh. My. God.

Today we are proud to announce the launch of www.cynthiathielen.com, a joint effort brought to you by Brainside Out and Jake Ingman.

As some of you may know, Jake and I went to SXSW last year. We knew each other through a mutual friend from years ago, and happened to reconnect last year on the 37Signals personal ads. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we were snuggling with each other in the same hotel bed, fighting off hangovers and cockroaches together.

Jake Ingman is an incredibly talented designer and a huge usability geek (not to mention an avid mountaineer), and ever since SXSW we’ve talked about working on a project together. Life being as inconvenient as it is, what with brilliant theses to defend in the spring and wilderness to trample in the summer, we’ve never really had an opportunity to smash our heads together. That is, until this little ditty came along.

And what a ditty it was, let me tell you. Cynthia Thielen is running for US senate in Hawaii, and they summoned the great talents of Jake to help them with their website design woes. Jake is a brilliant man when it comes to dishing up design and layout in Illustrator and Photoshop, but he is always saddened when his delicate hands suddenly turn into honeybaked hams when he codes XHTML and CSS. Fortunately, that’s where yours truly comes in. Hand-coding XHTML and CSS is my game, man, and when I’m in the zone I can own that stuff with a capital ‘P’.

Thus armed, Jake with his l33t Illustrator skillz and me with my CSS judo, we banged out this site at a pretty good pace. Jake would cook up some delicious pixelly goodness, fire a copy over to me, and I would hammer away at the code until it worked as a rock-solid, standards-based website. Honestly, I was floored by the rate at which Jake could come up with design hotness. It would take him ten minutes to whip up a layout, where I would have spent two hours honing in on a color palette.

Likewise, Jake was seriously out of his mind about how quickly I could take his revisions and push them to the development site as XHTML/CSS. Our workflow bounced back-and-forth at a dizzying rate, him designing, me coding, him revising, me telling him that his colors were way too vibrant, him revising and pounding out new sections in the process, and me coding. Through the entire process we never traded a single Illustrator or Photoshop file. Jake would just do a screenshot of whatever it was he was working on at the moment, send it over via IM, and I would build it. We were so into Getting Real it was ridiculous.

With us claiming that there were all these mad ninja skills flying back and forth, it’s only a fair question to ask how long it took us to build this website. Well, Jake called me this morning, wondering how my scheduled looked for the rest of the day. I said I felt pretty good about it, so he went ahead and got project confirmation from the client. We both took lunch, and started work on the design at about 1:00 in the afternoon. The site went live at 8:15 tonight, right as Thielen announced her candidacy for US Senate.

Our elapsed time was seven hours, fifteen minutes.

Filed under Business, Web Design | Comments Off on Ninjas

Vibes

September 24, 2006

The application on my new place in Hood River went through, so I am now the proud lease-holder of… well… a lease. I’m moving into the upstairs unit of a duplex that in the last two years was completely remodeled with new applicances, new carpet, picture windows, a deck, and a killer view of the Columbia Gorge and Mount Adams and the White Salmon River.

Of course now that everything is dead and done, I can start wringing my hands and fretting myself into a frenzy. You see, I haven’t actually seen this place yet, and while I’ve been getting an awesome vibe from my new/future landlords, I still worry what I have committed myself to, sight-unseen. No doubt they’re worrying about me just the same. I mean, even some grainy digital photographs would have been comforting, but since that wasn’t an option for these folk I was forced to fly completely blind.

In all honesty, beyond satellite photos from Google Maps I don’t even know if this house exists. I very well may have put a security deposit down on a house that’s infested with bats, or has carpet made out of bent staples, or is in the process of burning to the ground. In hindsight my actions seem uninformed and hasty, but I can’t really see that I had any other options. There were a number of other available properties that I called about, but I got really bad vibes on all of them.

I could have moved to Hood River before securing a place to live, I suppose, but then I would have found myself burning money like crazy, renting storage space and shacking up in hotels and losing all my work productivity. Through all of this, my entire business infrastructure (computers and monitors and other expensive technical gewgaws) would have been rotting in my car, waiting for someone to walk by and pinch it.

No. I had to make a decision, and I think it is better this way. I hope.

Maybe this is a good sign. Whenever I feel like I’ve made the biggest and dumbest mistake of my life (moving to Hood River for the first time, moving to Bend to be a ski bum, taking the job at Alpine, starting Brainside Out) things have a way of working out anyway. They don’t necessarily turn out the way I had hoped or expected or even anticipated, but they typically turn out in a manner that I find acceptable.

What matters most is not that I always make the right decision, but that I’m learning throughout the entire process. Failure, as much as we go through life trying to minimize it, is often the best and most efficient teacher available. I’d be a fool to stop taking these risks in an effort to avoid failure altogether, because at that point my intellectual and creative growth would stagnate. I can live with dumb decisions, but I can’t live without making decisions.

So yeah, at this point I say bring on the fucking bats.

Filed under Hood River, Life | Comments Off on Vibes

Traction

September 14, 2006

It’s starting to gain traction. I sent in the applications today and if everything goes as planned, I’ll have a place to live in Hood River and I can start my grand exodus across the country on October 1st. I’m slowly rearming the cannons at Brainside Out and reconnecting with clients, and I’m learning that there’s no shortage of work to be done. Finally, this week I’ve been able to hack away at some of it.

A person far more ingrateful than myself might say “Fat surprise!” to a wealth of work waiting for him after three months incommunicado, but I prefer to go through life with far more graciousness than that. I am ever so thankful to know such loyal clients, to have such wonderful friends, that I can spend three months following a tandem dream, and still hit the ground running with a dream left in stasis back in May. I love guiding wilderness trips but I also love running my own business, and I’m really excited to see what the next year has in store for us.

Meanwhile, I’m a bit sleep deprived after a long weekend of hanging out with the family at the cabin, and whooping it up in Duluth with some old Wuda Wooch! friends. My 15-month old nephew was kind enough to give me his cold over the weekend, so I’ve been chasing that down for the last couple days. I think I’m on the tail end of this thing, though, so pretty soon here the pace will start picking up again.

Filed under Life | Comments Off on Traction

“Tookits.”

September 7, 2006

Okay, I seem to be getting better at this “modern world” thing that people find so grand. I shaved my mohawk, then I shaved my head, and finally I shaved my beard (but that’s where I draw the line). I’ve started wearing shoes again, even though I have caverns in my feet that are a quarter-inch deep. I had calluses that turned into blisters, which became new calluses, which in turn blistered. I’ve been doing fun stuff like playing frisbee golf with one of my Yellowstoners and hamboning with the Como Ave Jug Band and throwing away most of my worldly possessions so I can traipse across the country again. That’s me. Fit, lightweight and liking it.

Just today I started calling around Hood River, trying to find a place to live for the next couple whiles of my life. My timeline for departure is vague, as it depends on a Yakima car topper that is slowly winging its way across the country to the local REI, but I’ll probably hit the road before the end of the month. Looking into rental property, and crunching the finances thereof, really drove home the possibility that I may starve to death this winter. I’ve reflected on this a little bit, and have decided that it is a calculated risk. The world may be relentless and unforgiving, and running your own business carries its own special responsibilities, but in the long run it sure beats a real job.

If all else fails I can live off sugar packets and non-dairy creamers that I gank from local coffee shops. And I’m sure that lots of restaurants in Hood River don’t even lock their dumpsters.

As Hoagie would say, “Tookits.”

Filed under Civilization, Hood River, Life | Comments Off on “Tookits.”

Don’t Mess With Jesse Ventura

September 4, 2006

Jesse Ventura Backpacking in Yellowstone, August 2006

Hey.

Figured I’d let ya’ll know that I’ve uploaded all my Yellowstone pictures to my Flickr account.

Now go forth and be merry.

Filed under Outdoors | Comments Off on Don’t Mess With Jesse Ventura

Wilderness Survival

September 3, 2006

I don’t think I have the survival skills necessary to live in civilization, anymore. I’ve been back amongst the world of thumping bass and flashing lights and extended middle fingers for nearly a week now, and I can’t yet say that my acclimatization has been successful.

I run red lights. On purpose. Well, I don’t do it on purpose, but my brain does. I can sense it processing the decision, and I can feel that it’s the result of a flawed fight-or-flight response. My mind has decided that yellow lights are not worth hanging around and fighting, and instead it’s best to get as far away as quickly as possible. Yellow lights are not grizzly bears, the brain says. If you run they will not chase you down as prey. Yellow lights will not shred you into ribbons. Do not waste time standing your ground against this foe.

The trouble being, of course, that yellow lights are rarely yellow for long. They quickly turn into red lights, which are a different beast entirely.

Also, shopping is weird. I typically wander around stores in a daze until something catches my attention, and then I’ll stare at it for a couple minutes. Now, products that I am actually interested in buying rarely grab me… most of the time it’s a bookcase or a cooler or a prepaid phone card. Sometimes it’s a metal hatch in the floor. Extra points if it’s something shiny.

When I finally zero in on something I actually want to buy, it becomes a whole new ordeal. At Target I almost bought two of the same shirt, and only caught myself at the last minute in the checkout lane. By the time I got home I was wishing I had bought both of them anyway. What if something happens to one of them? What if I want to use one for trail and the other for camp? What if I become rich and I want to use it to wipe bugs off my car?

Another problem is feeding myself, mostly that I forget to do it. This isn’t a good thing, seeing as how I lost 15 pounds over the summer and I didn’t have much meat on me to begin with. The problem is that I’ve gone from stomping around the world all day with a fifty pound backpack, to hardly doing anything at all. With this sudden onslaught of inactivity I don’t really get hungry anymore, but I still get grouchy. The grouchiness goes away when I eat food, so I find myself eating only as a means to regulate my mood.

As far as meals go, I am hopelessly ADD. I will put on a pot of tea and crack open a Pepsi two minutes later. When the teapot whistles I can’t figure out what the hell that awful sound is. I lost a banana somewhere in the house the other day. I was trying to eat it while doing other things, and I think it ended up going through the washing machine.

I have an established routine after breakfast, too. The cereal goes in the refrigerator, the milk goes in the cupboard, and the toast gets rinsed off in the sink for some reason.

So yes, it seems like I have a long ways to go before I will be a well-adjusted, productive member of society once again. Fortunately, even with all the troubles with integrating myself back into modern life, I can still make one hell of a martini.

Filed under Civilization, Life | Comments Off on Wilderness Survival

End of the Beginning

September 1, 2006

Happy September. I assure you that I am not dead, that the Boundary Waters and the Superior Hiking Trail and Isle Royale and Yellowstone were all wildly unsuccessful at claiming my life.

Not to say that there weren’t a few close calls… I almost broke off my hand when I dropped a canoe on it while doing the Wood Horse portage. The guys on my Isle Royale trip were so beefy, tall and huge that I was convinced they would eat me alive if we didn’t bring enough food. I led a small army of twelve, twelve people along the Superior Hiking Trail, the mere logistics of which are enough to explode the skulls of weaker trail guides.

And Yellowstone, dear Yellowstone. I could tell you about how we stole a backpack from the girls’ backpacking group, and how I thought they would flay us alive when our paths crossed halfway through our trips… or how we had to detour around a buffalo who was standing in our trail, carefully picking a path through thermals and mud pots and cracked sulfur earth in the middle of a thunderstorm.

I could tell you about how we spent half an hour watching a pack of wolves no more than 100 feet away from us, and how a windstorm kicked up and began knocking over dead trees that narrowly missed hitting my guys.

Seriously, I could tell you all about how I fought off the trials of the wilderness, how I narrowly escaped death and destruction at every turn, except that this would be a gross mischaracterization of the last three months. My summer, it was brilliant and lovely and it exceeded my wildest expectations. I spent more than forty days guiding trips in the wilderness, sure, and I traveled out West no less than three times, but as with any good story the real magic was written between the lines.

And now I’m back, back here in Minneapolis, back here in civilization, in the land of ice water and abundant toothpaste and expensive scotch. Gone are the nights where the Milky Way gleams across the sky and the mornings where we shake frozen dew from our tent. No longer do I need to pump my water from a stream or ration my toilet paper or look at dandelion leaves in a special way.

So yes. I’m here for now, but in a few short weeks I’ll pack up this circus to move back to Oregon for more adventures. I’m really looking forward to firing up the smelters on Brainside Out again, churning out some websites and other new hotness, but in many ways I feel like my heart is going to be in stasis for the next three months.

Anywho, welcome to Dane-O-Matic.

Filed under Life, Outdoors | Comments Off on End of the Beginning