Ooooooh... Shiny!

I invite you to skip this political rant

2012-01-25T13:32:00.000-05:00

In a political sense, I’m what used to be called a “moderate”… a little left on some issues, a little right on others, but primarily concerned more about policy than ideology. Regardless of who’s talking and what they’re saying, I tend to listen… not only because politics is my favorite soap opera, but because I feel an obligation to remain an informed and engaged citizen of this country.

I watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night, as well as the GOP response afterwards. After hearing Gov. Mitch Daniels lay out his points, I was struck by how he went out of his way to wrap his arguments in some really emotionally-charged language. I pay a lot of attention to words… once a language nerd, always a language nerd, I guess.

After noticing the tone of his presentation, I posted this status update on Facebook… “I’m saddened by the ‘us vs. them’ political rhetoric in the GOP response.” I was surprised by a couple of the responses I got, but you know what? WTF, I’ll take a stand. Here’s the underlying philosophy behind that status update.

I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I don’t see one single benefit – to our country, our society, or our culture at large – that comes from the ideological polarization and legislative gridlock that is becoming the norm in our political process.

I fail to see a silver lining in the storm cloud of culture war being waged on talk shows, and I am not okay with how sane discourse about relevant policy has been hijacked and drowned out by shrieking heads from both ends of the political spectrum.

Simply put, I’ve had my fill of the partisan dumbf**kery that has been substituted for actual governance in Washington. I truly feel that every time we remain silent and allow fringe players cast politics as a Holy War, the only thing we’re really doing is being the distracted idiots that political power brokers are counting on us to be.

Our country has compromise and collaboration – not inflexible conflict – at its very foundational core. Doubt that for even a second? Look no further than the words that lead our Constitution… “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”

See how easily they did that? They lead off by putting focus on some remarkably clear concepts: domestic tranquility, a more perfect union, promoting the general welfare. The Beatles were right, all we really do need is love! Please notice that the founders didn’t start the party with “We the People are for sale to the loudest nutjob with the most SuperPAC money, who can turn us against each other by exploiting our fears and differences, so as to best promote Corporate Welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for those of our friends and lobbyists first in line at the trough…”.

What I'm beginning to fear is that by being okay with our electoral process being supplanted by zero-sum Super PAC politics, we’re actually being okay with developing a ruling caste of incumbent one-percenters, from both parties, who are more concerned with maintaining power for themselves than with governing for the benefit of all. Wealthy career politicians, focused on maintaining a roster of elitist entitlements, more interested in dividing hope and opportunity amongst themselves than with making sure those fundamentally American promises are available to my children, and to yours.

For the people who seem to worship at the ideological altars of Beck, Schultz, Limbaugh or Franken… what can I say? When I hear you repeat the talking points I’ve heard others say on TV, I have no response for you. We’re coming from such different places in political POV that I find myself with no ability to relate to the arguments you make, or – really – why you even seem so Hell-bent on wanting to make them in the first place.

For the life of me, I can’t understand how an ongoing culture war within our borders could possibly be a good thing for this country, and I don’t appreciate the toxicity that political holy warriors of every stripe seem so eager to bring to every conversation. I may be naïve, but I truly feel that people can disagree with each other and yet somehow maintain a mutual respect… or at least not hate each others’ guts.

So, there you have it, America. I’m a moderate, and I’m as mad as hell at the people who seem to be spending a great deal of money to make my fellow citizens as mad as hell.

I have a feeling that I'll get some flak on this post, but I felt I had to get it off my chest. Respond at will, but at least please be civil… my kids read this blog.

Requiem for an App

2012-01-06T16:50:00.001-05:00

This post is just a quick little R.I.P. for the PostSecret iPhone app.

Before there were PostSecret books, fan pages, communities, apps and a traveling road show, there was the PostSecret blog. Simply put, PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard to a guy named Frank in Maryland, he picks 12 every Sunday, and then he posts them to the world. He's been at it for quite some time, and PostSecret is the largest advertisement-free Blog in the world -- so far, he's had over 500 million visitors.

One of those 500 million is me, and I've been reading the Sunday Secrets for a long time... maybe not from Day 1, but at least it was long before PS was a media empire. :-)

In August of this past year, Frank Warren decided to launch an iPhone application because, as he put it in the teaser trailer, "everybody has secrets."

What happened next was phenomenal... the app was downloaded by 250,000 people, hit the # 1 spot in the iTunes app store, and soon the user community had generated more than two million secrets.

Full disclosure: I was one of the people who dropped $1.99 on the app, mainly because I'm a fan of the site. Soon after launching it, I understood what I'd really purchased... a two dollar ticket to the Biggest... Emo... Party... Ever.

The secrets were pouring in from all over the world, the soul-baring confessions of loving moms & cheating wives, of cutters and dopers and lovers and friends, of self-centered whiners and body-mod junkies and -- most of all -- of people who seemed to feel so terribly alone.

Some were funny, some were sad, and a great number were simply not secrets of all, but statements (often pirated) that were posted to give comfort or amusement to whoever happened to stumble across them. Viewers were treated to a smorgasbord of TMI and NSFW confessions.

Yet amongst their kindred spirits, the people of the PS app forged a functional little community of proud dysfunction and seemed to do a decent job of policing each other. Every time a secret was posted by an individual, all other community members got a chance to "heart" it if they liked it or could relate, and all comers were given a chance to reply to the poster with a graphic secret of their own. Sure, there was less-than-civil behavior here and there but for the most part people posted secrets that mattered to them, and the responders were generally polite - even when in disagreement.

Then, unfortunately, the bottom dropped out.

First, there was an uptick in bullying behavior amongst the people responding to secrets -- name-calling like "attention whore" became a regular occurrence -- but the community seemed to soldier on. Then, however, things got worse.

A couple of idiots -- and really, it was literally just two individuals -- hijacked the app by taking it upon themselves to flood the newsfeed stream of incoming secrets with an apparently inexhaustible flood of scat porn pictures. Maybe they had been on the receiving of an unkind comment in response to a posted secret, or maybe they were just a couple of sucktards who were too dumb to entertain themselves in other ways. Regardless... it was juvenile, and it was vile, and it achieved exactly the desired effect: the community members swamped the PostSecret development team (and the facebook page) with an ocean of complaints.

After trying their best to police the app, the developers simply gave up. Seems like the decision to make the app truly anonymous so as to free people to feel empowered to share had backfired. There was no way to track and block the two idiots at the party who had decided to take a dump in the punch bowl.

By the end of December, PostSecret called it quits. Here is the press release that ran on their site January 1. 2012.

** ** **

The PostSecret iPhone App is Now Closed

It pains me to announce that the PostSecret App is now closed. In some ways, this is because of its success. It reached the top-selling spot in the App Store and users shared over 2 million creative secrets.

Like the PostSecret Blog, the App was designed so each secret was absolutely anonymous. Unfortunately, that absolute anonymity made it very challenging to permanently remove determined users with malicious intent.

99% of the secrets created were in the spirit of PostSecret. Unfortunately, the scale of secrets was so large that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening.

Bad content caused users to complain to me, Apple and the FBI. I was contacted by law enforcement about bad content on the App. Threats were made against users, moderators and my family. (Two specific threats were made that I am unable to talk about). As much as we tried, we were unable to maintain a bully-free environment. Weeks ago I had to remove the App from my daughter's phone.

Like many of you, I feel a great sense of loss from this decision but please know that we fought hard behind the scenes to find a permanent solution. We even tried prescreening 30,000 secrets a day. Deciding to remove the App from the App Store last week and holding back the release of the Android version cost us money but we feel it was the right thing to do.

To the vast majority of people who shared their earnest secrets and compassionate replies on the App, you inspired us with your honesty, humor and humanity. Even though this good faith experiment has come to an end what you shared lives on.

While the PostSecret App is now closed, PostSecret, and the PostSecret blog, are still very much open. Thanks for helping to keep the true spirit of PostSecret alive by mailing your secrets in 2012.

Sincerely,

-Frank Warren

** ** **

Soon after that post ran on the PostSecret blog, the user secrets started disappearing from the app, as if they were "expiring" as they each hit a one-week milestone in the newsfeed. I managed to capture some of them below, and put a larger gallery of full-sized images of individual secrets up on Webshots here if you're interested.

Some of the people in the user community seemed to be remarkably broken up about the closing of the app, and I feel for them. For some, maybe it was the first time in their lives they had truly felt they "belonged" somewhere. For me, I have to say the community was less of an emotional connection experience than a way to check out people's trainwreck-y secrets.

Nevertheless I'll miss it, and I think it's unfortunate that a couple of morons decided it was their job to screw things up for everyone.

So... on with the secrets. Click on any picture for a larger view.

Oh, and if you're wondering if I chose to put a secret up on the app myself? Yep, busted. In fact, I put up two... and they're among the 350 +/- posted in the Webshots gallery.

** ** **

Interested in more about this story? Check out these articles on The Washingtonian, Yahoo and The Washington Post. Looks like everybody shows up when the emo kids throw a party... :-)

Resolutions, 2011 edition

2011-12-29T13:01:00.001-05:00

This post is going to be light on eye-candy, so I won't blame you if you pass it by and come back next year for something more visually interesting. Instead it's a story about resolutions, and how even a simple one can have an impact on your life.

Every year I try to make a promise to myself that I can use to help guide my decisions and actions throughout the coming twelve months. I try to shoot for something meaningful, repeatable and lasting rather than a one-shot resolution like "quit smoking"... my goal is to aim high and try to make foundational changes I can carry with me throughout my life. Oh, but just in case you're looking to quit smoking and want to know how I kicked a 25-year habit with out really trying, here's that story: easy way to quit smoking.

My resolution last year was Drive Less and Live More, and it worked out amazingly well... in short, I made some life changes and traded two hours a day in a car for a 30-minute daily commute. To this day, I can't overstate the positive impact that hard-and-yet-simple promise has made in my daily life.

Normally I keep my resolution a secret during the year -- not for any sinister purpose, but to help keep myself honest & ensure that I'm making choices based on inner expectations rather than on external pressures. Towards the end of last year though, my son asked me point blank if I'd made any resolutions for 2010. After I told him my story, he handed me my 2011 resolution... use my newly found 'free' time to Be More Active.

I tried to make good on that promise throughout the year in a bunch of small ways... more bike rides, shooting hoops at the rec with the kids, passing on the big TV I wanted & instead investing in an amazing ping pong table for summertime fun in the driveway, etc. But the main way I worked to keep my word came about unexpectedly, when the company I work for began a Wellness Walking Challenge in June of this year.

As it turns out, being an office worker might just be the most dangerous job in America -- at least in terms of general health. The average office worker walks about 3000-3500 steps every 24 hours, and leading that sedentary lifestyle carries all of the negative health impacts you'd imagine it would.

In any event, my company issued pedometers to anyone who wanted one and then challenged us to walk at least 6000 steps every day. They even set up a website where we could track our steps and keep stats. The first three days were a real challenge for me and, looking back in my log I was averaging about 4500 steps a day... or about 2.5 miles.

Since then, I really tried to commit myself to walking more - heading out for long walks on the warm summer evenings, walking laps around the warehouse at lunchtime during the week, etc. -- and I managed to get into a pretty solid routine. The long and short of it is that I've ended up kicking ass. Here's a look at my overall stats over the past 200 days:

So I pretty much walked from Cleveland to Grand Junction, Colorado... with about a hundred miles to spare. (If you've never been to Grand Junction, I'd suggest checking it out -- I've camped there a few times and it's actually pretty nice).

In addition to causing me to drop a pants size, getting into a walking routine has also had a positive impact on my BP (110/71) as well as my glucose & other blood stats... plus it's been a fairly painless routine to get into; it's about 2:00 in the afternoon as I write this, and I've already logged about 13,300 steps just by heading out for a good hike this morning.

So there you have it, my interwebz friends... another case study of how making one simple promise to yourself can indeed change your life for the better.

As for me, the last thing on my to-do list for this year was to write this post and I leave you with this simple wish: may your New Year be filled with all the things that bring you joy and wonder -- happy 2012, and thanks for reading.

Ken

(Son of) Son of Steampunk Junkie, 2011 Edition

2011-12-21T11:35:00.001-05:00

As the end of the year draws closer, I once again find myself looking at Blogger stats to find a good crowd-pleasing topic to write about as I begin to wrap things up for 2011. For the second year in a row, it wasn't even close - my Steampunk posts are far and away the most popular in terms of page views and visits. (For those of you interested -- pure escapist bliss came in second place, with Remote Island Living leading the pack of my various island getaway fantasy posts).

So in the spirit of aiming to please, here is another installment of what seems to be turning into my annual end-of-year Giant Eye-Candy Steampunk Post... 2011 edition. (If you've missed previous editions, you can find them by clicking on any of these links: Steampunk Junkie, Son of Steampunk Junkie, and Steampunk Junkie Loft for Sale.)

Steampunk is a design movement that evolved out of a sub-genre of science fiction based on the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. In most steampunk stories, the general assumption is that modern inventions and discoveries occurred at a much earlier time than they did in the timeline of actual history.

For 2011, I'd like to share with you some of the sites I've stumbled across in my random acts of interwebz browsing -- whenever possible I've tried to include the urls and people responsible for this eye candy, and I'd encourage you to go check out their creativity. As always, I find myself awed by the amazing imaginations that float around amongst us. If you're on a slow connection, please accept my apologies in advance -- I've included roughly one million images on this post.

In terms of a broad topic list, here's what captured my attention this year as I stumbled around the internet... steampunk accessories, ray guns, decor, jewelry, fashion, robots, tattoo designs and photography. In terms of a higher level theme, what I can tell you is that the sheer volume of steampunk-related sites and merchandise has skyrocketed over the past year. Hmmm... maybe I'm on to something? :-)

In any event, let's start with the cool & often affordable merch available at Brute Force Studios, an awesome little creative shop located in that apparent hotbed of steam design known as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Feeling flush with cash? No worries... check out their special "You Can't Afford This" gallery. If you're someone of more modest means (like me), don't worry... this outfit offers everything you can imagine, including fun items like iPod & iPad covers. Here are a few of their more affordable & accessible items:

iPod Touch cover:

iPad cover:

iPod speaker / case:

Leather choker:

Bracelet:

Now if you've graduated beyond the need for semi-useful gadgetry and are totally into throwing money around like a drunken sailor, I have just two words for you: Dr. Gordbort's. Dr. Gordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators shop ("Where Science meets Violence!") is the brainchild of artist Gregg Broadmore, a conceptual designer for productions like District 9 and The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. He's pulled together a collection of limited edition ray guns that run anywhere from $300 to $800... as well as a poster that can be yours for a cool fourteen bucks. Here are a few of the designs from his shop:

Okay, now back to the affordable category - if you're looking for something small and gifty, just head for Etsy and search the word Steampunk. You'll be overwhelmed by the sheer number of results and the amount of interesting one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces that are available for relatively small coin. Below is a small sample of what I found - the first item shown is a little pair of radioactive cuff links.

Now instead of something available for purchase, perhaps you're just into visual stimulation for art's sake? I'd suggest you check out Allan Amato's "Boudoir Steampunk" blog. It's not always safe for work (tasteful nudes) but it is always visually stunning... check out some of the mood pieces below.

This next section comes to you courtesy of the folks at Steampuffin, a Victorian-focused studio in Boston. They're a shop specializing in Victorian home restoration & modern steampunk home design. In a bold act of putting their money (and imaginations) where there mouth is, they've pulled together a stunningly imagineered architectural showplace. A few of my favorite images are below, and I'd encourage you to go take the virtual tour for yourself.

One new trend I've seen appear this year is a real uptick in the variety and ubiquity of steampunk body mods, specifically tattoos. There doesn't seem to be a single site devoted to the art of steampunk tattoos yet, but samples abound when you search around. Here are a few of the designs that have caught my attention this past year.

Another fun new theme I've been seeing? Little handmade steampunk robots. I know it probably says something about my level of maturity, but these little creations crack me up. If you're looking for some examples you can buy, check out SpookyPop. Here are a few that made me smile.

Now if Blogger stats can be trusted, here's something I think you'll really like... a gigantic gallery of Steampunk fashion. Why do I think you'll like it? Mainly because it seems that fashion images are providing a major point of entry for visitors to my little blog. I won't get in the way of the eye candy, but would encourage you to check out sites like Organic Armor, Lilly's Workshop or Alice & Willow if you're interested in purchasing costumes like the ones below.

And last but not least, no steampunk eye-candy post would be complete without a few pictures of everybody's steampunk poster child Emilie Autumn:

So there you have it, interwebz... my 2011 Steampunk Junkie post. I'll check out my stats again in 2012, and who knows? If people keep pushing the theme to the top, maybe there will be another one next December. :-)

The Force is With Me

2011-12-16T15:18:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post to share a bit of Christmas joy, mainly that I was a big winner in the company ornament exchange.

My buddy Masa went nuts and made the awesome Death Star ornament shown above. He started with a clear plastic ball, cut it in half, lined it with Sculpey, cut out the 'dish' depression, painted it, covered it with glitter & glue, etc. -- all in one night.

How did I luck out and manage to pick the best ornament from a giant pile of packages? Let's just say that I didn't exactly need to pull a Jedi mind trick thanks to his custom wrapping paper:

He has truly achieved Nerdvana...

Mobile Moments

2011-12-14T14:35:00.000-05:00

Just a quick little post that's short on words & long on eye candy. Earlier this week for a project at work, I did a quick spin through my phone looking for interesting photos that could be used as visuals for a blog that's under development.

Posted here are a few of my favorites - boy do I love having a camera stuck to my hip.

Enjoy.

New Theme on an Old Meme

2011-12-13T12:12:00.000-05:00

For someone who was well out of the educational system when Facebook launched in 2004, I was a fairly early adopter and picked up an account in 2006. For me, the primary draw for signing up was work-related... I'm in the social communication business, and spend a lot of time thinking about relationship dynamics and the social mosaic we collaboratively weave with connections and language.

The network really only became interesting to me in late 2008, though... I think it was in December of that year that just about everybody I knew in real life - and a huge number of women -- seemed to sign up and join the party. My suspicion was that there must have been an article about Facebook in Parade magazine mixed in amongst the stuffing recipes... nothing else I can think of would drive that many 40-year-old women to sign up for a then-primarily-student-focused service.

The real fun began the next month, kicking off what seemed to be a 3-month "Meme Festival" of notes. Quick! Make a note! Tag all your friends! Have them tag you when they post their own! Woohoo, we all got laptops for Christmas and we're having fun! Yayyyy! :-)

Even though the flurry of earnestness & enthusiasm may seem all so silly in retrospect, there was one meme that I really enjoyed -- the "25 Random Things About Me" note. In fact, when I become Facebook friends with someone now I often peek into their Notes and see if they participated in that one, just to see what they said.

Why I like that theme is simple: those self-revelations came from a place of pure and fundamentally unfiltered personal expression, before Facebook evolved (devolved?) into everybody's personal PR machine. Before people got used to posting bland and crafted-for-mass-consumption status updates like "Just took my perfect kids to the rink for another FABULOUS skating lesson" or "Hey, I finished all my Christmas shopping three weeks early" there seemed to be a bright shining moment when people new to the network were brave enough to put their "real" face out onto Facebook.

We, as a social crowd, got to see the real DNA of personality through that meme. We learned who hated worms because they had no faces, and who considered themselves to be the world's worst bike rider. We got to see who had been a teenage falconer, and who sang along to Todd Rundgren's "Just One Victory" to bring themselves out of a funk. In short, we got a glimpse into what made our friends tick, and to me there has been little else as compelling to read on Facebook since that silly season three years ago.

In some ways, I wish that meme would come back... but only if it had the same spirit of authenticity that accompanied the Great Facebook Joining of Late 2008. I'd love to see what folks would bring to the party if the thread re-entered the social stream of consciousness. :-)

So, in that spirit of authenticity... here's my list from three years ago, with an occasional update.

I hope you enjoy reading a bit about The Real Me. If you'd like to send me a bit about The Real You - that'd be wonderful - I'd love to read it.

** ** **

25 Seemingly Random Things about Me

1. I’d much rather be reading random things about you than writing random things about myself.

2. I love foreign travel... I've been to France, England, Scotland, Mexico, Romania, and Holland. I've been to Canada too, but I think of Canada as being America's Hat and not really a foreign country (apologies to my Canuck friends). The remaining must-visits countries on my list are Australia and Ireland, but I wouldn't turn down any trip that resulted in passport stamp.

** UPDATE FOR 2011: Yep... Australia, New Zealand and Ireland still remain on my wish list. Here's hoping for more passport stamps in my future. **

3. When I was a kid, I had a variety of pets over the years... quails, hamsters, lizards, rats, snakes, rabbits, etc. I think it's because I read "My Family & Other Animals" and wanted to be Gerald Durrell. If you've read the book, you get it. If you haven't, I'd recommend reading it. :-) We had dogs & cats too, and my brother caught a bat one time. My mom was surprisingly understanding about it.

3a. Speaking of reading, “The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein has to be the best book I’ve read in years. Get yourself a copy, and thank me later.

4. I'm the youngest of seven kids... five older sisters, plus one older brother. They're all fine people, and I'd be good friends with at least four of them even if we weren't related.

5. I have a love-hate relationship with emoticons. It's complicated.

6. Some of the best times in my life have been spent tent-camping with a couple of my college buddies... the most recent time was probably five or six years ago. Tent camping with my friends usually consists of throwing sleeping bags, tents and crappy camp food into a car & then heading west. Did you know that if you split the driving, you can get from Cleveland to Rocky Mountain National Forest in less than 20 hours? I've been camping in middle-of-nowhere places all around Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. The only time I was a little scared was in northern Arizona, when I woke up one morning and found mountain lion tracks around my tent. Other than that, no worries.

7. I made one New Year's Resolution, but I'm not telling anybody what it is in case I blow it. (and no, it's not "quit smoking"... even though that is on my list of things to do this year).

** UPDATE for 2011... I did end up quitting that year, in 2009. **

8. I like hearing life stories, and collecting funny stories. Send me your most humiliating story, complete with embarrassing details! Either I'll write a book and treat you as an anonymous source, or I'll blackmail the living shit out of you. I'd say the odds are 50/50.

** UPDATE FOR 2011: Still true, more than ever. **

9. I know it makes me a bad person, but I can't help but laugh when I see someone wipe out on the ice when they're walking down a sidewalk. Especially if they have that "Scooby Doo" moment when their feet skitter around like mad just before they go airborne. Oh, and just after the skittering, when their feet are about equal height with their eyes – you know, the moment just before they drop and make that “squeaky toy” noise when they land! In fact, I'm laughing right now just thinking about it. I’m so going to Hell.

10. I had a pretty good high school experience, but now it feels like it happened to another person entirely -- and not to me. I really don't have strong memories or a close emotional connection to that time in my life, and felt more or less like a happy-to-be-there stranger at my last HS reunion. Nothing against the people or the school, I think it's just that I've done more "meaningful living" after I turned 18 than I did before... make sense? Eh, maybe I'm the only one who feels disconnected from High School this way.

11. Nothing gives me the willies like an ant crawling on me. Except for maybe a clown in the moonlight. Or the thought of my daughter getting her period (which I am POSITIVE will happen on my watch... ugh).

12. There are folks in this world who have real issues to be worried about, or real circumstances to be sad about. Every day, I'm thankful I'm not one of those people. When compared to the lives of people with real problems, my life is positively charmed.

13. I made it from Vegas to Cleveland in 40 hours once. Since that trip involves 34 hours of moving-on-the-road driving, it was near-hallucinogenic and really sucked. Still, the drive was a better experience than the wedding I was attending in Vegas. Long, funny story about that wedding... :-)

14. Speaking of number 13, I can't resist a good train-wrecky social situation.

15. Nothing against anybody reading this list, but my two favorite human beings in the whole world are my son & my daughter. They are genuinely cool little people, and I love hanging around with them & talking. Neither one is a teenager yet, so they still like me... I'm trying to savor it while it lasts.

** UPDATE for 2011... both are teenagers now, and yet still seem to like me. I'm one lucky guy. **

16. Sometimes I wish I had more hobbies. But, honestly, not enough to cause me to develop a new one right now. Time is precious now, and I’ll pick one up when I’m old.

17. Though I've had enough experiences where I should be smart enough to feel otherwise, I'm convinced that love and romance are real. I might be a sucker because of that, but I'm a happy sucker.

18. As far as friendship is concerned? Make me laugh, and I will be your friend. It’s that easy.

19. If somebody asked me to pick the most embarrassing song on my iPod, it would probably be a 100-way tie for first place. I have no good way of answering that question without digging myself into a very deep hole.

20. The first R-rated movie I ever saw was "Alien"... and I still like it.

21. My parents died four months apart when I was 17-turning-18. It sucked, sure, but don't feel sorry for me -- in fact, I'm putting this towards the bottom of the list so you won't think of this as my Great Defining Moment in Life. It was a life-changer, however, and I ended up a strong and self-reliant person because of it. (Hmmmm... reading this makes me realize that I'm still looking for my Great Defining Moment in Life. If you have one to spare, maybe I could take it off your hands?)

22. When I was meeting with LL Cool J, his ancient aunt called and gave him a shopping list of things to pick up so that she could make ambrosia for a family picnic. We immediately stopped talking biz, and he wrote down the list. He went right into little-boy-voice mode and was the nicest guy to her that you could possibly imagine. I think her name was Myrna. It was pretty cool.

23. I tend to be pretty frugal on a day-to-day basis, but when I splurge I go nuts. Like pay-cash-for-a-convertible-on-eBay kinda nuts. That being said, I'm financially solvent & have about $50 in credit card debt (bought the kids some Lego accessories on Amazon over the weekend).

24. I'm not addicted to Facebook. It's addicted to me.

25. If you want to know any really meaningful stuff about me, you're going to have to catch me in a much less public forum. :-)

** ** **

Okay... now it's your turn. Send me at least one random thing about you!

Mobile Man Cave

2011-12-08T12:28:00.001-05:00

What sleeps two and serves thirty? The ultimate luxury tailgating trailer, of course.

Check out this amazing eye candy, an awesome little pull-behind put together by interior designer Brad Ford as a one-of-a-kind item for an HIV/AIDS charity auction being held this month by DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS).

This cool little trailer features a pull-out full service bar, as well as a stunning amount of Moore & Giles leather work. Interested in placing a bid? The auction is open through December 19, and at this point the action is sitting around $36k.

Is your budget for outdoor entertaining a little smaller than that? No problem... you can enjoy these pics for free. :-)

Holiday Cheer (speed post)

2011-12-06T12:24:00.000-05:00

Today's shiny installment? Just a quickie little holiday speed post about beer.

When it comes to beer, I tend to select what I like based on the same criteria I use for wines... a nice label, a good story and a taste I enjoy. One fun little beer I've been into lately is called Session, and it's put out by a small employee-owned outfit in Oregon called Full Sail Brewing Company.

One of the clever touches I like about the beer is the caps they've designed -- a fun take on the old Rock Paper Scissors game that adds a sense of competitive drinkplay not seen since those old "Ice House" beers that featured bottle openers molded into the glass bottom of each bottle.

Don't doubt the power of the fun of RPS beer bottle caps -- it's hard to resist doing a 1-2-3-shoot against whoever you're sitting with, just to see who wins. Over a long summer's evening this year, my brother actually drew four paper caps in a row - a feat we still talk about, and fuzzily remember.

Here's a look at the standard caps for the Lager...

So why am I writing this post? Because last week I had a chance to sample their "holiday brew" called Session Fest. As a beer, it's an amber brew that's heavier than the lagers I normally like but, unlike other holiday beers, it's not so heavily spiced that it feels like I'm drinking a slice of pie.
The best part, though? They've apparently updated their caps... check out what they use for a holiday take on "Rock":

My advice? Next time you're out and about, look for Session and give it a try -- you may enjoy it!

Culture on the move... (speed post)

2011-11-30T12:37:00.000-05:00

You never know what you're going to stumble across when you're eating lunch at your desk & start crawling around online for cool design... and today, I got lucky.

When I saw this awesome little pop-up trailer from a Dutch design company, I thought it was pretty cool. Simply put, a team of designers pulled together a portable camper based on the Sydney Opera House.

This little beauty isn't a photoshop job -- it's actually in prototype phase and the company is looking for distributors.

Enjoy the eye candy!

Oompa Loompas in the News

2011-11-02T17:07:00.000-04:00

If you've known me for any length of time, you're probably familiar with my feelings of fear, loathing and morbid fascination for Oompa Loompas. I don't know what unremembered trauma lies in my past that has created the emotionally charged revulsion I feel towards the little (unholy and probably flesh-eating) little critters, but the feeling is there.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled across this news article -- to me, it's just further proof that Oompa Loompas are indeed the root of all evil.

Seriously, even the title tells a story: Drunk Oompa Loompa Given Community Order for Racially Abusing Asian Teens while Partying with Golliwog.

Yes indeed, folks... a guy dressed up as an Oompa Loompa got wasted one August afternoon in England and launched into an ethnic attack. Why? Well apparently the teenagers were giving his buddy a hard time about his Golliwog costume... which, if you haven't seen one, seems to be the British costume equivalent of a hate crime in itself.

Obviously these guys are idiots, but I can't help but believe that they'd be less so had one of them not fallen under the wicked spell of the doompity doo crowd.

Here is the article, reprinted in full... enjoy.

** ** **

Published on Wednesday 2 November 2011 06:57

A DRUNKEN ‘Oompa Loompa’ has been given a community order and ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work after he admitted racially abusing two Asian teenagers.

Robert Nottage, aged 21, pleaded guilty to abusing the teens while on a daytime drinking session in Northampton town centre on August 28, while dressed as an Oompa Loompa.

Northampton Magistrates’ Court heard Nottage was part of a group of friends also in fancy dress, including one who was dressed as a Golly.

Prosecuting, Julie Costello said Nottage, from Rugby, was on an annual Bank Holiday drinking session in Northampton when he began hurling racial abuse in Abington Street, at 5.10pm, while children and families were around.

The court heard Nottage shouted racial abuse at two Asian teens, challenging them to fight him, and also shouting English Defence League (EDL) slogans.

Nottage claimed he made the remarks after someone threatened a friend dressed as a Golly.

He had earlier pleaded guilty to making racial threats.

Presiding magistrate, Rosemary Read, said: “Mr Nottage, this was a bit silly wasn’t it? I think you realise that.

“I think in some ways it was out of character, you have a lot going for you in your life.

“You live with your parents, you have a job, a car, a girlfriend, you have an awful lot going for you.

“I hope you are going to put this behind you.”

She sentenced Nottage to an 18-month community order with a supervision requirement for 18 months and was ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.

He was also told to pay court costs of £220.

The Other Kind of Mafia (speed post)

2011-11-01T12:24:00.001-04:00

One sure sign I know that colder weather is on its way is that I find my mind wandering to escapist thoughts of warmer climates, and I take little lunchtime runs through pictures on the internet (need a good source for that yourself? Check out webshots).

Well, here's a place I'd never heard of before -- and apparently, not a lot of us have. There's a small treehouse resort on tiny Mafia Island that boasts spectacular views and empty beaches.

How empty? Published reports say that this place gets less than one thousand tourists per year.

Mafia Island is located off the coast of Africa, well south of the more-touristy Zanzibar, and its relative emptiness lets you enjoy Swahili culture while avoiding both the trinket sellers and the backpacking crowd. Another big selling point? The island hasn't been attacked by cannibals since the 1820's.

Sure, getting to Africa might cost a bit more than you might want to spend, but there is good news. See all the pictures on this post? They're from a resort called the Chole Mjini Lodge, and according to their 2012 rate sheet a personal treehouse will run you an unbelievably reasonable $180 USD a night.

Finally... an affordable dream vacation! :-) Enjoy the eye candy...

Watercolors (speed post)

2011-10-21T15:36:00.001-04:00

As part of my continuing quest to clear out a backlog of unwritten blogs, I'm taking three minutes between jobs to knock out another quick eye-candy post.

Please allow me to introduce you to Madeleine Di Gangi, a writer with multiple (and very entertaining) creative pursuits. Her "architectural puddles" tumblr gallery caught my attention some time ago, and I was mesmerized by the dreamy and collaged feel of her photographs. No kidding... I'd love to have some of these shots framed on my walls.

Here are a few of my faves:

Oh... and if you're in the mood for something, well ... not quite so moody... be sure to check out her (somewhat NSFW) collection of funny iPhone auto-corrects. :-)

Ghost Buildings

2011-10-21T12:22:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across something intriguing I'd like to share with you, just in time for the Halloween season - ghost buildings.

Well, maybe "ghosts" isn't the technically the best way to describe what's going on -- maybe it's more a case of "check out what's left after a building is torn down."

There's a Flickr group dedicated to the unconscious art of demolition, and I was fascinated by some of the haunting eye candy lurking there. I've included a few photos here, but I'd suggest checking out the gallery.

Want more along the same vein? Check out these three very different photographers, Jos Antonio Milln, Xenmate and Marcus Buck... each, in their own way, adds to the found-object-art narrative by capturing unique visions of creation within the destruction.

Xenmate in particular seems to have found a cool angle - his are the photos of the buildings in Barcelona that have been populated with the silhouettes.

And speaking of ghosts, it's time for me to disappear... I'll let the eye candy speak for itself.

Intoxicating Design, Part 2

2011-10-16T11:33:00.000-04:00

Sad to say, but I'm very susceptible to marketing when it comes to wine. Yep, I have no defense -- once I get in front of a big wine display, I'm all about judging a book by its cover. My name is Ken, and I'm a sucker for a good wine label. (hmmm... come to think of it, that may be why I have about 40 bottles tucked here and there around the house. Crap, I need to have a party soon and cull this herd...)

The top image on this post is a good case in point: it's the label for tempranillo called Radio Boca. A tempranillo is a Spanish red that's light and fruity, with a bold feel and a silky finish... of course I knew none of that when I bought the bottle. At the time, I was having a true "Oooooh... Shiny!" moment and popped the bottle into my cart based on looks alone.

The story does have a happy ending - the wine was only $7.99 at World Market, it tastes great and, as luck would have it, it turns out that I actually like tempranillo. Which is a good thing, because I've fallen for the "wow, that's a pretty label" impulse on tempranillos before... here's one I have laying in my rack now called Mano a Mano:

And speaking of mystery rack items, these next two bottles seem to suggest I have unrealized dreams of becoming a cowboy. The truth is less fascinating: actually these two were recommendations from my friend Julie (the wine manager at Mustard Seed in Fairlawn). She hasn't steered me wrong yet, so I'm guessing that both of these will be awesome -- whenever I eventually get around to opening them.

I bought this next bottle purely for the enjoyment, and to be able to someday say, "Hey... would you like me to pour you another half-empty glass of Pessimist?" It's a California cab, so I'm betting it will be drinkable on some level. And if it's not? Well, I'm only out ten bucks.

This 2009 cabernet is from r Wines Pty Ltd, an Australian concern that has since apparently gone out of business. That's a shame really, because this bottle is a real stunner... raised ink, a million little dingbats and details, and very nice typography. For me, this hit the upper end on what I'll spend on a wine just because I'm grabbed by the design... but check out the detail shots.

This bottle of Lost Sonnet was a gift, and is as close as I come to having an affinity wine (well, at least till I find something fun with a typewriter on the label). I like the design and the metaphor, and I can't bring myself to open it to see if it's any good. Personally, I just like looking at it for it represents in terms of eye candy and in story:

This next one, I have had the pleasure of drinking - it's a nice big cab called Box Head made by Hentley Farms in Australia. The vintner has remarkable processes and tales, I'm sure, but I bought this one because the little box-headed character cracked me up -- it's simply a bonus that the wine is good!

And last but not least, I want to close out with a cautionary tale. See this next label? You'd be hard-pressed to find anything more "plain Jane" than this one:

From a quality standpoint, however, it's amazing... a nice 98-point Meritage (rhymes with heritage) for under ten bucks. If you're out and you see it, pick yourself up a few bottles -- despite its boring label. :-)

A Clockwork Awesome (speed post)

2011-10-13T16:51:00.000-04:00

If you've read this blog before you'll know by now that I'm sort of a steampunk nerd. Steampunk, of course, is a fantasy hinged around re-imagining what the world would be like if the highest level of power available for mechanical design was steam -- more or less a technological future forever riveted to Victorian-era England.

Of the many tangential offshoots in the genre, one of my faves is Clockpunk - the same general principles apply, but instead of 18th-century steam all power is derived from 15th century springs and clockworks.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I stumbled across the first image in this post when searching for clockpunk junk, and seeing that one image led me to track down the person who made it.

Allow me to introduce you to a Brazilian artist named Jose Geraldo Pfau Kings. I won't pretend to understand a single word of what his website says, but I don't need to speak Portuguese to understand three key truths...

1 - Jose has some mad skillz.

2 - Jose has a whooooole lot of spare watches.

3 - Jose apparently has more spare time than any man on the face of the planet.

Perhaps ever.

Every one of the pictures on the post is a sculpture created by Jose... and each one is an awesome little motorcycle painstakingly created out of watch parts. A few of the pictures have coins or paper clips in them to help indicate scale, and that alone should tell you the level of detail he pours into these little buggers.

I'll get out of the way, and let the pictures tell the rest of the story. Enjoy!

And just so you don't get the impression he's too obsessed with wristwatches... here's one he made out of glasses. :-)

Intoxicating Design, Part 1 (speed post)

2011-10-13T11:13:00.001-04:00

A persistent case of the "busies" in life and at work has left me with a back log of blog ideas so, in the spirit of clearing out the pipes, I'm going to try and speed-post a few.

For starters, here are some images I stumbled across while searching online for a picture of a specific wine label for a friend. Though I found the label I was expecting to see, it was the unexpectedly fresh images of wine glasses that struck me.

Even though I have wine glasses around the house, I have to admit that they're not daring or different -- they're the same general shapes & sizes you'd see anywhere. When I saw this type of variety in design, however, I started realizing just how boring I really am as well as just how interesting some industrial designers are getting these days.

Since this is a speed post, I'll get right to the glasses. For the heavy drinkers in your life, here's one that comes pre-tipped for your convenience

These next two images are of a modular set - by screwing different globes into a universal aluminum stem, the theory goes, you can create an entire glassware set without having the accompanying storage problems:

This one? Well, I simply find myself responding to the crumpled shape:

And while not technically a wine glass, this martini glass really caught my attention. I love how the colors in this image work together:

Last, just a silly one - a set of champagne flutes that can be arranged to allow for a natural fountain effect. Whether practical or not, I do like the mechanical nature of the design.

Looking at these makes me feel like finding something a little more adventurous than the stemless globes I picked up at Target... but maybe I'll save that shopping trip till I have a little more time.

Jonesing for Something Different

2011-09-21T13:19:00.000-04:00

Okay, apologies in advance for the ultra-long post. I promise that I'll shut up eventually. :-)

So, anyway...

As part of what I do for money, I spend a lot of time thinking about (and researching) how people talk to each other, and also what they talk about -- anything from celebrating the happy moments in their lives to those crucial (and sometimes hard) conversations they need to have along their path in life. When I do research, it's always focused on learning more about people, and how I can help them do a more effective job at capturing what's in their hearts and expressing it to someone else... whether what they've got to say is one-to-one or one-to-many. (aside: I gotta say, I love my job).

While I was searching online for some demographic information on Boomers (by the way, there are a zillion good data sites out there), I stumbled across something that I hadn't seen before: the concept of Generation Jones.

Now I'm sort of a weird case, generationally -- my parents were "Greatest Generation" stalwarts who hit puberty during the Great Depression, did their bit for World War II, and then came home to go to college on the GI Bill & start cranking out babies. My six older siblings are all solidly Boomers and, in a lot of the meaningful ways dictated by a shared (and pretty wonderful) upbringing, so am I. My ethics and values are very boomer-ish and -- like many 'core' Boomers -- I place a high value on work ethic, individualism and experimentation.

However, once you get past that... well, it's generational reality check time for me.

Woodstock has no meaning for me -- I honestly have to work pretty hard to give a crap about it. Swear to God, I was three years old when it happened, and Hippies for me in general are something that only existed as archetypes in Cheech & Chong movies.

Moon landing? I was three. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were all dead before I turned five. Guess what else I missed? The Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations for JFK, RFK and MLK, risk of the draft into the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement and - get this - the Beatles. Yep, the Fab Four broke up before I had learned how to ride my banana-seated Schwinn without the training wheels atttached.

Do you want to talk about a meaningful musical connection to my coming-of-age years? Let's talk about how pissed off I was when I popped my new Pat Benetar Crimes of Passion tape into the under-dash 8-track of my '76 Nova and realized there was a track shift half way through Hell Is For Children. Hell is for children, indeed!

Sorry, but when I hear Boomers talking about how special they are in every way, sometimes I can't help but look at them as a big bunch of whiny strangers with entitlement issues.

Gen X - my traditional generational cohort - also never felt quite right. It sorta covered me, sure, but the fit was at the same time a bit too snug & a bit too loose. As a Generation, we were hip for like five minutes in the 1990's... our moment in the sun came and went pretty quickly, and it wasn't very sunny while it lasted.

After two or three crappy movies were made about us (see: Clerks, Slacker and Mallrats), we got written off as surly, lazy cynics. The main outcome of getting that label seems to have been that it convinced our Boomer bosses (ten years older than us) that it would be a really great idea to groom our Gen Y trainees (ten years younger than us) to get the good executive jobs when they retire, therefore leaving us to drift in the career-long doldrums of middle management.

There are a lot of things I simply don't share with Gen X... I'm not a child of divorce, I didn't spend any time being a Nirvana fanboy, I never watched "Remote Control" and I didn't grow up wanting to be Tony Hawk. I don't slack... if anything, I inherited the Boomer workaholic gene.

However, the things I do share with Gen X are indeed meaningful: I was a teenage self-doubt machine in the early years of MTV and a disillusioned young adult during the recession of the early 90's. My childhood was set against a backdrop of upheaval, and it was heavy on preoccupied adults and short on protection & supervision... and as a result I (and many fellow X'ers) had to fend for ourselves on a lot of matters.

Work-oriented comedies such as The Office and Office Space that show adult X'ers languishing in jobs distinctly less glamorous than they dreamt about resonate with me. And, proudly, I helped bring about New Comedy: a.k.a. the satire of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Seriously... when I was a 20-something, the hottest show on TV was thirtysomething. When I was a 30-something, the hottest show on TV was Friends - a show about 20-somethings. Talk about asynchronous life timing!

So where does this all leave me? With a familiar feel for Generation Jones.

Simply put, Generation Jones as a concept is called out as a distinct "second half" event of the Baby Boom, and overlaps in age what has been traditionally defined as Gen X. One of the reasons it jumped out at me is that it's the first time I've run across a generational definition that resonates with me on multiple levels.

Generation Jones isn't exactly a Utopian collection of people, mind you. They're described as pragmatic and perceptive, savvy but amoral, more focused on money than on art. Overall, they're labeled as being less optimistic, distrusting of government, and being generally cynical.

Here's a direct lift from the Wikipedia article on the subject:

Jonathan Pontell defined Generation Jones as a distinct concept, referring to the second half of the post-World War II baby boom. Its members are still usually identified with either Baby Boomers or Geneartion X'ers. Many have children that are in the latter end of Generation Y and the ealier part of Generation Z.

The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a "keeping up with the Jonese" competitiveness and the slang word "jones" or “jonesing”, meaning a yearning or craving. It is said that Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.

I have to say, the the cultural touchstones seem to be MUCH more meaningful for me: Watergate, Nixon resigning, The Cold War, beer for 18-year-olds, the oil embargo, inflation and super-high interest rates. By the way, I will always and forever associate the Resignation of Nixon with Evel Knieval's attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon... they were in the same news cycle, and I remember being bummed out that "adult news" kept bumping out coverage on ABC'S Wide World of Sports.

Musically, Generation Jones drank in disco from Donna Summer & the Bee Gees, as well as anthems from the punk & new wave movements. Like many Jonesers, I can proudly say I have a Ramones t-shirt that I wear wholly without irony (D - U - M - B / Everyone's accusing me!). C'mon... Can I get an All Skate?

The launch of MTV in 1981 will always be something musically transformative and tangible for me, not Woodstock. When I was a kid, Leave It To Beaver and The Mickey Mouse Club were shows you only watched when nothing else was on and your other choices were "Do Homework" or "Stare at a Wall While Waiting For The Internet To Be Invented." Johnny Sokko, The Brady Bunch and G-Force are the shows I remember tuning into every chance I got (shout out to my homies on Planet Spectra!)

Will Generation Jones begin to carry the same weight (or even cachet) of other named generations? Only time will tell, but a couple of things are making me think that this won't be the only time you hear about it.

For one thing, the concept got a lot of press in the 2008 as Gen Jones was identified as being a critical block of independent swing voters. As a voting cohort, Jones is actually bigger group than core boomers.

The other, of course, is that some of America's cultural thought leaders are amongst the people beginning to self-identify as Generation Jones... too young for the Boomer excess & consumerism, too old for the Gen X slackerdom and hopelessness. Want a few famous examples? How about Jon Stewart, Barack Obama, and Steve Jobs.

But really -- I feel like it's time for me to shut up on this issue. If you have a minute, leave a comment and let me know what you think... I really do want to know.

Thanks.

Steampunk Junkie 3: Loft for Sale

2011-09-08T16:41:00.001-04:00

Whenever I take a minute to dork out and check out my blog stats, I always see the same pattern: my Steampunk Junkie and Son of Steampunk Junkie posts consistently attract a great number of page views... week after week after week.

Personally, seeing the numbers makes me smile -- I know it's a niche design style, but it's one that resonates with me. I'm enough of a sentimentalist to enjoy retro typewriters & bikes, and it's good to know that some other folks share those same nostalgic tendencies.

Well, as long as folks are interested, I'm happy to share whatever I stumble across... like this for instance: a loft for sale in Chelsea (NYC). Check out the fully-functional "submarine" front door...

A filmmaker named Jeremy Noritz bought a vanilla-looking co-op for $1.3 million, and spent the past two years turning it into a Jules-Verne-inspired hideaway. Now for sale at $1.7 million, the one-bedroom two-bath loft is 1800 feet of pure steampunk fantasy.

He spent his time researching old Zeppelin interiors for inspiration and scavenging antique shops and foundry yards for gears and scraps. Oh, and that zeppelin sculpture hanging from the ceiling? It changes color, of course. :-)

There's not a lot of information to share about the place - other than the basic real estate listings, I'm not finding much background material on the apartment. But, really... I think that's just as well.

Words would just get in the way of this eye-candy.

Enjoy. :-)

As You Bike It

2011-09-06T18:08:00.000-04:00

I moved to a new city last year, and one of the unexpected pleasures of my new small burg is that it's a very bike-able small burg. There are nature trails throughout the nearby park system, the library & downtown area are just a quick ride away, and there's even a throwback "neighborhood grocery store in somebody's house" that's amazingly handy for those mid-cookout moments when you realize you forgot the buns.

To take full advantage, I bought myself a new bike this summer - a nice black-on-black coaster with big fat tires & the requisite retro comfort seat. It's a nostalgia-fueled no-frills transportation bike -- big, bold, sleek and ugly -- that gets me where I need to go. Being a dork, I added a couple of customizations... notably an LED light for dusk/dawn trips and some padded hand grips.

And I thought I was stylin' till I saw Villy Custom Beach Cruisers. Crap, I shoulda waited.

Wow, I gotta say I like these bikes AND the level of customization the site allows. Their builder lets you pick everything from the tires to the chain color and then, in just three to four short weeks, their shop pops out a one-of-a-kind rolling piece of artwork.
They're not horribly expensive - usually in the $600 to $700 range - and if you're out to make a statement, I think they're totally worth it. Interested? Here's a link to their builder tool. Oh, and this last one? It's no Villy, but at least it's mine. :-)

That Weird Age

2011-08-31T16:18:00.000-04:00

One of the fun parts of my job is that I get to work with so many interesting and curious people, and by curious I mainly mean "inquisitive" (though more than a few are just plain curious in their own right).

Today I went to a writing team's show and tell about Gen Y and, as Exhibit A, they presented the crowd with a post from a blog called Polka Dot Tea Pot. The writer did a great job of capturing what was in her heart and popping it out on a keyboard, and called her post "Twenty Four."

It reads, in part...

Twenty-four is a weird age because my friends and I are all in different places.

We are single, dating, engaged, or married. We are purchasing homes, renting tiny apartments, or living in our parents’ basement. We are pursuing degrees, realizing dreams, working at dead-end jobs, or unemployed. We are saving money, living paycheck to paycheck, or accumulating debt. We are walking with God or walking away from the religion our parents forced on us.

We are figuring ourselves out. We are making choices about relationships. We are deciding whether we’ll leave something good for the possibility of something great. We are battling fears of commitment, or fears of being alone. We are falling in love with others, or falling in love with who we are in the world as individuals.

We are deciding what the rest of our lives will look like.

I don't know about you, but to me that post isn't about being 24. It's about being within the human condition, whether at 24, 44 or 64 - each exists as its own weird age along the continuum of life. None of us has "the answer" figured out, and it seems the only truly important aspect of asking the question lies in the act of looking for an answer at all. I have friends and loved ones across every age spectrum who I see within those words and, truth be told, I see my own reflection as well.

My point? Well, ya got me there. I have no point.

All I have is a piece of borrowed writing that resonated with me, and I thought I'd share it with you. :-)

Enjoy.

The Old Man and the (Ctrl+) C

2011-08-17T16:20:00.001-04:00

I suck. Seriously, I totally suck.

I haven't touched this blog in months, and it bums me out. This past February I started pulling together some ideas for a post about Ernest Hemingway's hideaway in Cuba, a house built in 1886 called Finca Vigia... a.k.a. Lookout Farm. Since that time, I've done everything BUT write in my blog.

Here are my incomplete notes, as well as some obligatory eye candy. I hope to return to blogging soon but, in the meantime, enjoy the pics and scribbles of a post-in-progress.

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<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal0 falsefalsefalse EN-USX-NONEX-NONE

If you’ve read this blog before, you know I have a fondness for man caves, the testosterone-fueled architectural escape pods where a man is free to… well, a man is free to just “be.” This post may well feature one of the manliest of all man caves, and has been marinating in my head ever since I saw an article about a U.S.-Cuban joint effort to restore a little piece of history on a hilltop above Havana.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/01/21/hemingway.house.restored/index.html

That piece of history? Ernest Hemingway’s Finca la Vigia (“Lookout Farm”), his Cuban home from 1939 to 1960 and the place he wrote many of his classics… For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream. Here’s a pic of Papa H. enjoying the good life at his farm:

Random notes:

Hemingway paid $12,500 for the property in December 1940.

In the spring of 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which had begun when Hemingway met Martha. Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they almost immediately rented Finca Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), a 15-acre property 15 miles from Havana.

Hemingway, who had been disgusted when a Parisian friend allowed his cats to eat from the table, "developed a passion for cats" in Cuba, keeping dozens of them on the property.

Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West and Cuba during the 1930s and '40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho (where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961).

He took off on African safaris in 1952, shortly after publication of The Old Man and the Sea. The book made Hemingway an international celebrity, and earned a Pulitzer Prize for him in May of that year. In fine “don’t fly in small planes if you’re a celebrity” fashion, Hemingway was injured in not one but TWO plane crashes in Africa, and was never quite the same after that… drank heavily ever after to combat the lingering pain of skin burns, cracked discs, a broken skull and a dislocated shoulder suffered during those accidents.

After the Cuban revolution of early 1959, Hemingway was on good terms with the Cuban government, and even officially presented a trophy in Havana in the summer of 1960 to Castro, for winning a sport fishing contest named for Hemingway. Nevertheless, as depression and illness overtook him, Hemingway left Cuba in mid-1960, and the Cuban home that he had lived in for over twenty years.

In the fall of 1960 the Cuban government expropriated a great deal of foreign property, and the U.S. government broke off relations with Cuba in October 1960 and imposed a partial financial embargo. After the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and Cuba's announcement that it was a Communist state in May, relations between Cuba and the U.S. deteriorated further.

Hemingway was being treated for severe depression in the U.S. though the first half of 1961, and the Hemingways could not return to Cuba. Hemingway committed suicide in Idaho on July 2, 1961.

The official Cuban government account is that after Hemingway's death, Mary Hemingway deeded the home, complete with furnishings and library, to the Cuban government, which made it into a museum devoted to the author. Mary Hemingway, however, stated that after Hemingway's suicide, the Cuban government contacted her in Idaho and announced that it intended to expropriate the house, along with all real property in Cuba. Mary Hemingway negotiated with the Castro government for certain easily-movable personal property (some paintings and a few books), plus manuscripts deposited in a vault in Havana. Most of their personal property, with no way to move it out of the country at the time, had to be abandoned.

Pilar… the name of Hemingway’s 1934 custom 38-foot fishing boat.

Random Eye candy photos:

New Toy Camera

2011-05-23T09:21:00.000-04:00

When I downloaded the Toy Camera app this past weekend, I figured it would give me some cool filters to mess around with... but I didn't count on it making my photos look like something taken by Ansel freakin' Adams.

The app comes with a few fun pre-baked filters (e.g. vintage yellows or greens, high/low saturation, etc.) but the one that I'm having the best time fooling around with is a ready-set High Contrast B&W.

Below are some snaps from the last few days. Enjoy, and trust me - it was totally worth the $1.99. :-)

Lilacs in my kitchen

Starbucks trash can

Interstate 71

Mural at the Strip in Pittsburgh

My daughter in her natural state... texting.

Lilacs & a Nate Williams print in my kitchen, 1 of 2.

Lilacs & a Nate Williams print in my kitchen, 2 of 2.

My son (middle) at his baseball game.

My son (bored out of his skull) at his sister's softball game.

Corona No. 3

Statue at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

Acme Banana Co., Pittsburgh PA

And, just for good measure, here's a picture of a vase on my desk at work (using another one of the pre-set filters in Toy Camera).

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

2011-05-18T12:34:00.001-04:00

With commencement time upon us, I thought it would be a good time to share one of the most impressive pieces of writing I've stumbled across in my recent life... or semi-recent life, anyway. It's actually from 2005.

It's from someone you're familiar with, I'm sure... but probably not for his writing. Below is the text from Steve Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford University graduates in June of that year, in its entirety.

Enjoy and, as always, stay foolish.

** ** **

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Cheap Date (a guilt post)

2011-04-12T12:07:00.000-04:00

Hi, and welcome to a speedy little guilt post... it's been an excruciatingly busy six weeks at work, and I've been neglecting my blog. So howsabout this? I'll give you some leads on good cheap wines, and we'll call it even.

Deal? Deal.

Here are some wines that I guarantee you'll be able to find to be inexpensive, accessible at local retailers, and - most importantly - easy to drink. Since I'm a visual shopper, I've included pictures of the bottles and labels.

The first one is Bogle Old Vine Zinfandel, and you can find it pretty much anywhere wine is sold -- I usually pick mine up at the grocery store, or at World Market. It's a nice bold red that goes great with food or on its own, and you can normally find it on sale for $11.99.

This next one is a classic grocery store wine, Rosemount Shiraz. The bottle is round at the top & square at the bottom (I guess they're trying to reinforce their diamond label shape) and I've gotta say I like this one. It's fruity and silky, and tends to disappear pretty quickly. The price is hard to beat: $10.99 every day.

This next one is another bold & fruity Shiraz, this one from Paringa in Australia. A friend of mine from Melbourne was visiting this past Christmas, and clued me in on what apparently is a known fact down under: if you see an Aussie red from 2008... ANY Aussie red... buy it, because it'll be delicious. She told me that the combination of sun, rain and temperatures in 2008 created a once-in-a-generation perfect storm for wineries in the country and, so far, her advice been spot on.

I picked up this Paringa at World Market for under ten bucks and, if you've never shopped there for wine, I'd strongly recommend checking it out. They usually have an excellent selection, and they're helpful enough to mark Wine Spectator scores.

Here's another OVZ, this one called Gnarly Head -- as they say on their site, Old Vines Make Bold Wines. I usually see this one at about $15, but it seems to go on sale pretty regularly. Keep your eyes out, and you'll probably see it drop to the $8.99 or $9.99 range when its on special. Oh, and I gotta say: I really like their home page.

And now, since I know not everybody's into reds, here's a nice little summer white to keep handy. This is an Argentinian wine from the "Chill It & Spill it" category... good on hot summer days and, at about nine bucks a bottle, cheap enough to serve to gluggers. It's a Torrontes from Maipe, and so far I haven't been able to find it at my local Giant Eagle -- but I keep my fingers crossed.

Alrighty, blogosphere... gotta run. Go have a drink or two, and I'll see you again soon.

Getting Away From It All (speed post)

2011-02-23T12:27:00.000-05:00

This little post will be short on words, and high on eye candy... warm, tropical, escapist eye candy. I guess that's what happens when a guy looks out his window and sees nothing but snow for months on end. But I digress.

If you're looking to get away from it all - even if just virtually - take a look at a little resort called Loisaba in Kenya. When it comes to solitude, they seem to have things covered. In short, they offer a private little cabin on the edge of the African wilderness, complete with what they call a "Star Bed" that lets you sleep under the skies.

I only grabbed a few pics from the site to share, but would encourage you to take a look at their gallery to see more. If you're hooked, though, you might want to start saving your pennies... the daily rate is about $2600 a night.

That might sound steep to you, but I'm thinking it's well worth it... mainly considering that the package includes guards that keep the wildlife from eating you while you sleep.

Lucky Lens

2011-02-01T14:41:00.001-05:00

About six months ago I purchased a ~~collapsing hovel~~ foreclosed home and have since been chipping away at the remodeling job. On the worst days it feels like I'm adrift in the North Atlantic, sitting in a rowboat and endlessly trying to break apart icebergs with a BB gun. On the best days I feel like I'm making progress and can actually see a faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Over the past couple of weeks it feels like I've turned a corner after stalling out for a while with a case of the"got busy with the holidays." I managed to finish (with Kris' help) the painting & wall repair on the last two "major project" rooms and now have a sense that a weight's been lifted off my shoulders. Those last couple of rooms have been hanging over my head for some time and, because they weren't complete, I was having a hard time giving myself permission to work on smaller aesthetic jobs. I guess it's just the home repair equivalent of not being able to have dessert till you've finished all your vegetables.

Now that I'm feeling free to mess around with smaller jobs, I've been having fun doing little eye-candy projects around the house. I've been mucking around with photography for years and, as luck would have it, some of my favorite shots match my new decor nicely. I've been printing and framing them to help spice the place up, and so far I've been happy with the results. If you're feeling sporty, I'd recommend clicking on the images to see them at a larger size.

This first one is a shot that my daughter likes, and which now hangs in her room. It was taken at Stan Hywet Hall one rainy morning while we were on a 4th-grade "scavenger hunt" with my son. The whites on the flower match the trim & accents in her room, and the water beads really pop out on the full-size print.

These next two pictures are framed in white mats and happily hanging in the bathroom, with the blues in the images really popping against the color of the walls. The cat is street graffiti on a wall across from my office in Paris, and I spent a lot of time staring right into that smiling feline face.

This next one is a view of my morning commute, the daily walk from my room on Rue des Recollets to the office on Quai de Jemmapes. This is a view of Canal Saint-Martin and the humped bridge in the background is one of the places the Lost Generation used to hang out on in the evenings and get hammered.

The following series of photos were all taken on the same freezing winter night in Paris - and they just happen to match the browns and earth tones in my living room, where they hang as a set. The Eiffel Tower was empty that night because of the crazy-low temperatures and - swear to God - I didn't doctor the colors at all. It was just that perfect of a haunting, foggy and strange-lit evening.

The top photo in the series - an upwards view of the tower - was taken from an ice-skating rink on the 2nd level. The bottom image, of the strange glass globe, is actually pretty cool... one of the exhibits features a girder cut out from the tower and 'shaved down' to reveal the many different colors the Eiffel Tower has been painted over the years.

For those of you interested, here's a daytime pic of that same girder that shows the various colors from the different years - reds, yellows, bronzes and browns.

Doompity Doo

2011-01-31T13:25:00.000-05:00

Life has been a crazy blur since the holidays, and I haven't had a chance to fully write what's been in my brain lately - a cool eye-candy piece about what could be the manliest man cave of all time.

I'm still researching that topic, and hope to have the time to pull it all together soon -- if you'd like a hint about the place, all I can tell you is that it's in Cuba (and no, it's not some sort of rec room in the Castro compound).

In the meantime, I figured I'd brighten your day by sharing a few pics of what I feel are the most terrifying movie creatures of all time. Yes folks, I'm talking about Oompa Loompas -- and as far as I'm concerned they are the very spawn of Satan.

Do you doubt me for even a second? Just look at how they're gazing upon poor Charlie's uncle, with eyes that seem to be screaming "Hmmmm... where should we put the gravy?" You can't honestly believe they're innocent little fancies of imagination - they are so very obviously cold-blooded killers who Willy must have trained into servitude through feeding them human flesh and applying a regimen of regular beatings.

In any event, I hope to present you with something far less disturbing in the near future. Please enjoy the freak show.

This one is adjusting the temperature on his Severed Head Warmer.

This is the look they get right before they swarm and attack.

Preferring the taste of living flesh, a pack moves in for the kill.

Son of Steampunk Junkie

2010-12-31T10:52:00.000-05:00

The last day of the year always seems to present a good opportunity for looking backwards and reflecting on the highs and lows of the previous twelve months. Don't worry, though -- this isn't going to be some sort of emo "let's all share our feelings" kind of post. When I say I'm looking backwards, I mean I'm looking at Blogger Stats. :-)

According to the official site metrics for this blog, there's one post from the previous twelve months that got more page views than any other. For the people who tend to read and share this blog, my old Steampunk Junkie post is the big winner. To celebrate the close of the year and say thanks for reading, I thought I'd follow up with a little more eye candy from that genre in the hopes that it'll make you happy & keep you coming back for more in 2011.

Steampunk is a design movement that evolved out of a sub-genre of science fiction based on the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. In most steampunk stories, the general assumption is that modern inventions and discoveries occurred at a much earlier time than they did in the timeline of actual history -- for instance, what would it be like (and look like) if home computing had been discovered during the Victorian age?

Since technology wouldn't have kept up with ingenuity, so goes this assumption, these 'modern' inventions would have been built with the most sophisticated technologies of the time - namely steam power and watch mechanics. Being a science fiction nerd as well as a design geek, I find the whole combination to be intoxicating on many levels. I am indeed a Steampunk Junkie.

Many movies tend to use the steampunk design approach as a secondary yet organic element - for instance, most of the sets, props and gadgets in the Harry Potter series tend to reflect this low-tech-meets-high-imagination type of thinking.

There are also a host of movies where the steampunk design elements tend to play a much larger role... but be warned, most of them are awful. If you want to see good imaginative steampunk design, check out the following movies: Sherlock Holmes, Wild Wild West, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Golden Compass and Van Helsing.

I'd recommend getting a little buzzed and watching them with the sound off, listening to your favorite playlist instead of trying to endure the abysmal dialogue and plot. The movies tend to suck, but the visual effects will suck you in.

There's also a robust underground Steampunk fashion movement afoot, sort of a Goth Barbie take on clothing design. I'm sure the technical fashion nuances are escaping my untrained eye, but the general approach appears to involve the application of goggles, discomfort and pale skin in equal measure.

And now we arrive at some weapons-grade eye candy... literally.

There's a commercial aspect to the Steampunk movement, and hand-made ray guns seem to be the stars -- some of these hand-built models are going for $400 to $800. Below are a few of my faves, and there are whole micro-businesses dedicated to their design and manufacture.

And don't forget, steampunk can be fun for the whole family! This awesome little ray gun is actually just a decorated Nerf pistol:

So there you have it, my eye-candy 'thank you' for reading throughout the year. Hope 2011 finds your life full of the most wonderful things life has to offer: happiness, health, love and laughter.

See you next year!

p.s. If you want to empty your pockets and buy some steampunk junk at a more reasonable price point, just go to Etsy and search "Steampunk"... here's one I found.

Resolutions

2010-12-28T13:58:00.000-05:00

Another year is coming to a close and, for me at least, that means it's an opportunity to spend a little time looking inwards and thinking of a meaningful promise for the new year. This post is a little more personal than most I put on this blog, but I'm sharing it in hopes that it gives someone the urge to dream big for 2011. Feel free to skip it and come back again for an eye candy post later. :-)

In any event, this a story about a new year's resolution that worked out well, though I'm not much of a "new year's resolution maker" in the classic sense. I've managed to quit smoking and complete a couple of other self-improvement-type things here and there, but I don't like to throw that kind of do-or-die overhead onto myself. The way I see it, those types of finish-line-style resolutions don't really merit a year-long commitment.

Instead, I try to make myself a promise at the outset of the year and then use it to help guide my actions for those next twelve months. Rather than aiming at a specific outcome, I try to focus on something big enough and abstract enough to help me improve my overall long-term quality of life, something that has an ongoing kind of quality to it. One of my self-imposed rules is that I don't reveal my resolution to anyone until the end of the year. I don't know exactly why I do it that way... I guess it just makes it feel more personal and authentic if I keep it under wraps.

A few years ago, my goal was 'be a better brother' -- I come from a large family, and I was feeling that the hectic nature of life was keeping me from maintaining strong connections with the people who mean the most to me. After doing an okay job at that, I tried to build on it with something similar: 'be a better friend.' Though I don't know how successful I was on that front overall, I did manage to reconnect with some old school friends (some of whom may be reading this now) who now regularly enrich my life with friendship and conversation... as well as with the occasional dose of local wings and beer.

Because I tend to go big and ambiguous with my resolutions, it's rare that I wrap up a year feeling like I nailed it. This year, though, proved to be an exception - it's the end of December, and for once I can look back and say "yep, I did it."

In 2009, I realized that for years I had been spending a lot of time in the car. A crazy-insane amount of time, in fact. My daily baseline of time spent driving was two hours... I drove an hour and fifteen rush hour minutes on the way to work each morning, and then drove another forty-five rush hour minutes 'home' to a meaningless rental about fifteen minutes south of my ex's house.

My work commute to Cleveland was ten hours a week or, times fifty weeks, roughly 500 hours a year. If you want to look at it another way, I was spending about twelve-and-a-half full work weeks of each year sitting behind a steering wheel. And that was BEFORE I tacked on any extras, like grocery shopping (in the strip-mall hell otherwise known as Montrose) or visiting friends and loved ones (all of whom live in Cuyahoga county). The place where I was living - though nice - was also set up so that it was next to impossible to walk or bike anywhere. Even though the place was on the kids' bus route, I was still a 20-minute drive from any school event.

In short, I was feeling like instead of living life, I was simply watching it happen through a windshield. And believe me, that feeling really sucked.

My 2010 resolution was simple: Drive Less, Live More.

As best I could, I tried to let that promise guide my decisions for the year. I started off small at the beginning of the year, mainly grouping trips and practicing the Zen art of "staying put" whenever possible. If I had errands to run, I tried to get them done at lunchtime so I'd be able to spend more not-in-the-car time with my kids in the evenings. Even small steps like that really helped me feel like I was doing more in life than turning a key in the ignition. But what ended up being the turning point was that I started looking for an apartment about halfway between my kids (Richfield) and the rest of my life (Cleveland). Thanks to a little luck, a cratered economy and a glut of foreclosures, I took a leap of faith and bought a four-bedroom fixer-upper for less than my monthly rent.

The "drive less" impact was immediate; I shaved about nine work weeks off my annual commute to the office (now around thirty five minutes a day, round trip). As far as the "live more" impact, that's also been coming along nicely -- I can ride my bike or walk to shopping, and live close enough to my family and girlfriend to allow for spontaneous visits. Even my kids are getting a kick out of it - after growing up in The Land Without Sidewalks, they're now really getting into the Mayberry-esque lifestyle afforded by a walkable city center (plus they're totally digging the "HGTV"-like decorating aspect of rehabbing a house).

So there you have it, resolutions can pay off -- even the weird and ambiguous ones. If you're on the fence about taking a stab at making one, I'd say go for it. As for me, I can finally look back on a big goal and say "check... done." I'm working on a new one for 2011 and, even though I have a few thoughts in mind, I've still got a few days to finalize it. Got ideas? Let me know, because I'm open to suggestion.

Happy New Year, blog-land. May 2011 be your year to follow (and maybe even catch) your dreams.

Self Portrait of the Artist (speed post)

2010-12-21T12:37:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy week here at the fun factory, but I wanted to take a moment to share a little eye candy with you - along with a link you might find interesting.

LiveJournal has become known for weepy teen drama, web irrelevance and for largely unreadable emo diaries, but once in a while there's something worth attention. Personally, I'm thinking this find fits into that category.

It's a community journal devoted solely to people's self-portraits and, truth be told, every time I go there I see something that catches my eye. Below are a collection of random shots from the site. If you need a little break, I'd encourage you to check out the Self-Portraits Community Journal for yourself.

Need a Christmas Gift Idea?

2010-12-14T09:50:00.001-05:00

Looking for a Christmas gift for that special someone in your life, but you can't think of what to get? Well, I have an idea for you -- but only if you promise me you won't give it in some sort of crummy passive-aggressive way, okay? Instead of wrapping up a gadget or a new pair of gloves, maybe this is the year you can give someone a head start on their New Year's resolution and help them quit smoking.

Even though I quit smoking a while ago, I think people who know me would generally describe me as being anything other than a "militant ex-smoker." I go out of my way not to be that guy, mainly because when I was a smoker there was nothing I hated more than those sanctimonious jack-wagons who always seemed to be chiding me to quit -- usually with a preachy tone in their voice and implied judgment in their eyes. Even as I write this a few of those folks are springing to mind... what can I say, I tend to have no patience for the holier-than-thou crowd. (plus I still like the smell of second-hand smoke)

Anyway... I was a smoker for about 25 years, and I was really damn good at it. I'd tried to quit before, sure, but it never really stuck. I was the classic case of someone who "wasn't ready to quit," I thought, and I figured that I'd quit when I was good and ready. Well, here's the problem... I never felt ready. Not once. Heck, I liked it too much.

And so we come to the day in the Spring of 2009 when Kris made a "let's visit the Quit Doctor" appointment for me. I agreed to go see the doc mainly to keep her happy, but also because the appointment was months in the future at the time and I was hoping I'd be "ready" by then. Unfortunately when the appointment date rolled around - June 23, 2009 - I still wasn't ready.

Nevertheless, she and I road-tripped it to Perrysburg, OH to go see the doctor. It was a long drive and I must have smoked a half-pack of cigs in the car that morning. When we got there, the parking lot at the clinic was littered with butts... I noticed them mainly because I was standing there, next to my car, having a smoke before heading in for my appointment. Let's just say that my confidence was not high.

So we went in and saw the doc, Dorrin Birch. She's an MD who does all of the usual general practitioner stuff and - being a child of the 60's - she also has a more unusual side to her clinic. She's an internationally-acclaimed smoking cessation acupuncturist.

You can make up your own mind about that last statement, but all I can tell you about is my own experience. I walked into that clinic a stressed and not-at-all-ready-to-quit smoker who thought (and still thinks) that most new-agey crap is just that... crap. I wasn't ready to quit and, truth be told, I wasn't even really wanting to quit.

Then Dorrin Birch popped six needles into me, left them there for fifteen minutes while I laid on a table & listened to some local light-rock radio station, and I haven't had a cigarette since she plucked them out. That was 540 days ago or, at six bucks a day for the pack and a half I was going through at the time, about three thousand two hundred and forty dollars in cigarettes. It cost me $170 (I hear it's gone up to $190 since) and no -- the needles didn't hurt. I've sent a few friends there since, and they've had similar success.

So there you go... for less than the price of good iPod, you can help someone prolong their life and save thousands of bucks. Just click on one of the Dorrin Birch links to get the phone number and make an appointment, but please - remember our little bargain.

Don't be a jerk about it.

Nobody likes a church lady. :-)

Christmas Cookies from Yesteryear

2010-12-08T19:48:00.001-05:00

With the holidays almost here, I thought I'd post one of my favorite nostalgic recipes. My kids and I have a nice long holiday break coming up, so I've been working up a few fun family projects to keep things interesting. This little project is actually one of my mom's old cookie recipes, and my sister Ellen came through when I emailed around for the instructions.

This is a recipe for Spice Drop Cookies, sometimes known as Gum Drop Cookies. To me, they were just mom's Christmas cookies. Maybe it was because of my age when she was in full cookie-making mode, but my memories of these cookies mainly revolve around my two tasks in the process... cutting gumdrops and sifting stuff.

The sifter was old-school and, as far as I could tell, it was probably made in the middle ages and used in dungeons. It made an unholy grating/grinding/scraping noise that lodged like a parasite in the base of my spine, and the metal was always a little creepy to touch. There are seven of us kids, and I'd be surprised if this little tormenter wasn't still lurking around in the family somewhere:

The memories associated with cutting gum drops were decidedly more pleasant -- not only was there the whole "manly" aspect of being trusted to cut things at such a young age, but there was also the added benefit of being able to snarf up scraps seemingly at will! (We always used the spice-type gumdrops --as opposed to the way inferior sweet style -- and even today I still find them to be the tastier of the two.)

So here is my mom's recipe, courtesy of my sister Ellen. As far as quantities, use your judgment... my mom's starting point was to quadruple all measurements but, like I said, there were seven of us waiting outside the oven ready to eat these up. :-)

Enjoy.

** ** **

Gumdrop Cookies

Makes about 40 two inch cookies. Good for school boxes – they keep fresh and travel well.

Beat until soft:

* ½ cup shortening

Beat in gradually until light and creamy:

* ½ cup brown sugar

* ½ cup white sugar

* 1 teaspoon vanilla

Sift before measuring:

* 1 cup all-purpose flour

Re-sift with:

* ½ teaspoon baking soda

* ½ teaspoon baking powder

* ¼ teaspoon salt

Sprinkle ¼ of this over:

* ½ cup small gumdrops or large ones cut up

* 1 cup quick-cooking oatmeal

Beat the sifted ingredients into the butter mixture in about 2 parts alternately with 1 beaten egg.

Stir in gumdrops and oatmeal mixture.

Pinch off small pieces of dough. Roll them into 1 inch balls.

Flatten them with a spatula dipped in milk.

Bake the cookies in a moderate oven – 350 degrees – for about 10 minutes.

And, while they're warm from the oven, grab the sifter one more time... and sprinkle them with confectioner's sugar so they look nice and wintry.

High Society (Islands)

2010-12-07T16:42:00.000-05:00

Waking up to a second consecutive morning of snow and wind must have driven a chill into my bones and a vision of beaches into my head. And, as with most of the tropical island escape fantasies rattling around in my imagination, this one starts with a book... or rather, a specific author.

James Michener wrote an excellent non-fiction book in 1957 called "Rascals in P aradise", in which he told tales of about 200 years' worth of white guys who headed to the South Pacific to raise hell while they lived in heaven. He even included a section about Paul Gauguin's little velvets, which were painted while he was getting wasted on patron's coin and siding with the Tahitian natives on social issues.

Needless to say, my teenboy head was brimming with visions of this particular white guy heading off to a life of endless summers filled with topless, friendly native chicks. [Oh, wait... it still is. Nevermind.]

In any event, Jimmy was writing what he knew -- he was stationed on Bora Bora during WWII, and apparently soaked up a lot of the local culture. Lucky for him, the island spent the duration of the war wholly uncontested - apparently the biggest wartime worries were sun burn and drunkenness. The island of Bora Bora itself - part of the Society Islands first mapped by Cook in 1777 - remains almost absurdly beautiful.

Want some random South Pacific trivia? The native name for the island is Pora Pora, meaning "First Born." Want some more trivia? Well, it turns out the island is also home to one of the most expensive hotels in the world, the Le Meridien. They have all of the requisite island perks, of course, including the quintessential thatch-hut-over-the-water lodgings - so what could be better? Howsabout if they throw in a tame sea turtle who swims lazily around your lagoon as your personal pet? I'm not kidding... here's a picture of the turtle:

I checked prices, and if you get there during the off season you can catch a rate of about $775 a night... well, not including meals, alcohol, tips, or extras like transportation or activities. It may be pricey, but seriously - I'm thinking it might be well worth a trip if I stumble into a fortune one of these days.

Take a look at the pics below, taken from the hotel's site... I'm personally liking the glass floor over the ocean.

My pockets are a little light for this type of vacation at the moment, so for now I'll just have to be content with more practical dreams... so, anybody got a space heater I could borrow?

Got three minutes?

2010-12-02T10:11:00.001-05:00

For a staff meeting at work, I was asked to pull together 'about three minutes of something interesting to share' ... naturally I went with one of my favorite themes, small escapes & tiny places. The images that follow below are jpgs of the presentation I pulled together.

This architectural project is courtesy of Ross Chapin Architects, and is a cluster of little cottages built near Langley, Washington. In addition to my natural attraction for good design, I really admire how he approached a real puzzler... how to build nine dwellings on a 2/3 acre lot.

His solution is more or less the Mini Cooper of housing design; cottages that are small, sensual, well-engineered and reliable. All nine houses have been sold, and are lived in year-round.

Enjoy.

Man with a Plan (and a camera and a yurt)

2010-11-11T16:21:00.000-05:00

Whenever I need a quick recharge to get my creative little head back into an imaginative place, I run for a search engine and pop in a few random words to see where it might lead me. Often times I'm taken straight to a dead end (no cure for writer's block here, sir, just turn around...) and sometimes I find surprises that capture my imagination. Rarely, though, do I find something that really blows me away.

Please meet Abelardo Morell. I know I might be late to the party on this, but seriously... I never heard of this guy before a few days ago. He's a Cuban-born digital photographer living in New England who has an excellent eye and a heck of an interesting technique. You see, he has a yurt that he hauls around and uses as a giant traveling camera obscura to take long-exposure pictures. This image of a skyline, for instance, is projected directly upon the rooftop stones of the skyscraper where he set up his tent:

His portfolio site has many sample works, including photos of Italian landmarks, as well as a series of Central Park images taken during different seasons.

One of the things I like about his long-exposure work is that because it takes so long for the image to form, any moving life tends to disappear from the scene... giving the images a haunting and timeless feel.

Curious about what search phrase led me to stumble onto this one? Take a guess, and I'll let you know if you're close. :-)

Beach Bling

2010-11-05T17:04:00.001-04:00

(White Linen Necklace)

Have you ever had one of those magical summer days that you spent strolling down the beach picking up little bits of glass? Well, this artist sure must have had a lot of them. She's taken bits of sea glass and other things gathered from beaches, and created "Beach Bling" jewelry... half by her, half by Mother Nature.

Here's some explanation from her site, as well as some photos of her work.

-- -- --

It’s hard to believe the holidays are almost upon us and, if you’re anything like me, one of your favorite Christmas feelings is finding the perfect gift for each special person on your list.

The beach has always played an important role in my life... there has always been something about the peace and the power of walking the shore that resonates with my soul. I comb the beach for interesting things and, when I lose myself looking for polished glass and unexpected treasures, it seems that perhaps what I’m really looking for is that small and still quiet that lies deep within me... that lies within all of us.

Over the past several months, I’ve been working some of my favorite finds into a unique and stunning jewelry collection, a line of necklaces, rings and bracelets that I’ve come to call Of Beach and Bling. Each one-of-a-kind creation features treasures I’ve personally collected from not only the shores of Lake Erie, but also from beaches I’ve strolled along the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

I’d like to invite you to take a stroll on the beach with me, and enjoy some pictures of my jewelry at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ofbeachandbling/ -- if you see something that would be perfect for someone on your list, just let me know and it can be yours.

Be sure to visit often, as I’ll be adding new unique creations every few days!

With love always,

Kristen

** ** **

Come walk the lovely shores with me
Where precious treasures lie.
We'll gather jewels from the sea,
Let's walk there, you and I.

(Secret Glass - Necklace)

(The Bounty - Necklace)
(Fish on an Ice Cube - Necklace)

(Love and Prayers - Necklace)

(Long Drink of Water - Necklace)

(Green Energy - Necklace)

-- -- --

I thought I'd share this one with you just in case you're looking for something special to stick under the tree this holiday season. I'm no expert, but it seems pretty reasonably priced for handmade stuff (as well as a cut above the usual Etsy fare).

Enjoy!

The Mass of Men

2010-11-05T11:31:00.001-04:00

Thoreau famously pointed out that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" and, for the most part, I think he got it right. Based on my own experience, though, I'm thinking he needs a bit of an edit... I believe that the mass of men lead lives of quietly bemused desperation.

I realize I'm lucky enough to work in a loony bin, but it seems to me that just about every guy I know can walk into a crowd, tell a story about the bleakest moments of his life, and get a laugh -- I'm thinking that if you build a man a house at the corner of Stress & Crazy streets, it's even money that he'll try to throw a kegger in the back yard.

One contributing factor might be the application of Gilroy's Humor Theorum... Nobody Laughs When Something Good Happens. Seriously, think about it... if somebody runs into a room and yells "I won the lottery!", people smile... but nobody even chuckes. However if you start telling people about past Darwin Award winners? Now THAT will get people laughing.

I personally know folks with some really effed up stuff in their past. One guy, as a college work/study job, had to physically carry a midget from class to class on campus - bitterly - while she relentlessly bitched him out miserably at every step along the way. Another guy's favorite childhood tales involve such Walton Family Acid Trip moments as "mom forced me to search for dead bodies in the lake" and "I bought three shopping carts full of GI Joe toys with stolen drug money." And just so you don't feel bad about that second guy, lemme assure you... he brings down the house every time he lets loose with another story from his youth. And really, this phenomenon isn't the product of some sort of "my life is worst than your life" dysfunction contest -- I have more than one friend who has been able to turn the saga of their marital-meltdown-slash-divorce into what amounts to be a killer standup routine.

I'd love to find a collection of these sorts of stories, but I haven't been able to find a good one... so I had an idea. I'd love to pull together a book called The Mass of Men, and invite contributors to tell their side-splitting tales of dysfunction and pain. Anybody game? Just let me know.

p.s. yes, I have a few good skeletons in my closet as well - but you'll have to catch my routine in person to get the full effect. :-)

Trailer Treasure

2010-11-03T21:58:00.001-04:00

My ongoing fascination with interesting little personal hideouts continues... who knows, maybe it's my subconscious telling me that I need to go into hiding once in a while? In any event, I stumbled across a tidy little retro studio belonging to a blogging designer Sarah Spencer.

It's a great rehab job on a 1963 Airstream, and I love the interior & exterior touches. She seems to have tapped into the kitsch of the era while not losing the implied freedom represented by the travel trailer form.

Enjoy the pics, and take a look at Sarah's blog... some interesting stuff there.

In the mood to poke around one of my favorite chock-full-o'-interestingness sites? Take a look at Inhabitat.

Running into Trouble

2010-10-15T12:55:00.000-04:00

Though my brother and I are alike in many ways, the number of differences between us are legion. For purposes of this post, though, all you need to know is that I run a creative team and he runs marathons. Please refer to figures (A) and (B) for a visual explanation.

Figure (A): my brother.

Figure (B): me.

So it comes as a surprise (mostly to me) that I've signed up for the Warrior Dash. It started off as my friend Masa trying to talk a lot of people into signing up for the race, and ended with me falling prey to his "it'll be easy / it'll be fun / you'll get a free beer at the end" broken-Engrish sales pitch. After signing up, I started looking for a few pictures of the event.

The official event website offers several helpful training tips. My favorite is "Find the dirtiest pond in your neighborhood and snorkel in it... in your slippers, without goggles." Additionally, they recommend not showering or shaving for the last few weeks leading up to the event.

The course features a variety of obstacles such as the "Windstorm Warrior" (a gale-force sandstorm hazard), the "Junkyard Jam" (a sprint through a sharp and rusty scrapyard) and, of course, the "Breathless Bog" - lovingly described as a trudge through waist-deep muck and over logs.

Based on the information on the website, it appears as if Masa has lied to me about everything but the part about getting a free beer at the end of the race. In other words, it's par for the course of our friendship.

I have about eight months to get in shape for this one, and the only thing I have in my favor so far is that I (finally) quit smoking about eighteen months ago. This weekend I think I'm going to have to pick up a new pair of running shoes, as well as a big dose of reality. With any luck, though, this will be me at the finish line in June:

Sand

2010-10-11T12:38:00.001-04:00

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

Will all due apologies to William Blake, one of the things that's always driven me a little nuts is sand... or, more specifically, sand where sand is not supposed to be - in beds, on floors, in various crevices where one wouldn't want grit, etc.

In its element and subject to the whims of talented artists, though, sand can be a wonderful thing. This past weekend of remarkably warm weather got me into a beach kinda mood, and I stumbled across images from the World Sand Sculpting Championships.

Enjoy!

And I'm not sure why, but this one - titled "Closed-Minded" by its creator - is my favorite: