Blood Socks

I’d like to give a quick shoutout here to Micah Rich and his new company, a good company. He’s an A-class designer who, along with a partner named Caroline, are striking out on their own. Micah worked for thoughtbot for a time (he did their new blog design), plays a deceptively strong poker game, and is an all-around nice guy.

Micah and Caroline’s absolutely gorgeous blog is the best piece of foreshadowing you could get of their work quality. I especially love the individual article page, with its pleasing two-column layout, and the huge drawing done for each article. It’s the first blog to remind me of why the lucky stiff’s.

So if you’re looking for some serious design work done, or know people who are, now you know who to refer them to:

I’m subscribed to a few of the official Android mailing lists, and one message came along today that got my attention – a link to a New York Times article on how touch screen phones can help blind people, using the G1 as an example. Some excerpts:

Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction – up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.

Now that is brilliant – software that centers its UI wherever you first touch. Hell, I could see that being useful even for sighted people, like a stereo remote control app – just pick up the phone and start jamming with your thumb and it’ll do what you want. And for the future:

“How much of a leap of faith does it take for you to realize that your phone could say, ‘Walk straight and within 200 feet you’ll get to the intersection of X and Y,’” Mr. Raman said. “This is entirely doable.”

The article makes a good point, that it’s not just enough for software to read the text off signs; the problem is that the blind won’t know where the signs are to begin with. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that a massive, free map/geoinformation system like OpenStreetMap would be good for helping, by including a sign layer. Or maybe you could just have a huge camera on your chest.

Phew. I’m continuing to work hard on client projects, making up for the 5 or so weeks of largely downtime after leaving Blue State Digital. I basically wake up at 8:30, shower, go to a nearby cafe to work until lunch, come home and eat, work until dinner in my living room, eat over The Wire or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with MaryBeth, then carve out a couple hours (usually from my sleep) to play Persona 4, which is rapidly coming to dominate me. Then I sleep, and do it again the next day.

That may not sound like a hard life, and it’s not. I’m not complaining. In spite of the recession, my sector of the economy is still doing quite well, and now that I have actual work, I’m rapidly regaining stability. This is all wonderful. My real concern is that I’m going to get lost in the work-play-sleep routine and never regain steam on side projects. For right now though, that’s okay, as I try to turn my finances into something substantially less depressing.

So okay: Persona 4. This game is fresh and phenomenal, and at 11 hours in I’m completely hooked. It’s got honest and understated voice acting, interesting characterization and dialogue, and layers and layers of varied gameplay. I’ve never played a game where getting a part-time job constructing envelopes and watching your character laboriously make them on a table in his bedroom has been so fun. About every down-to-earth problem and possibility of high school and social interaction is turned into a game—with rewards that transfer into your other life, fighting in a demonic and perverse otherworld that causes brutal murders to occur in your town.

I haven’t played a genuinely great RPG since Dragon Quest VIII in late 2005 (and not for lack of trying), so to be able to just sink into it without reservation is wonderful and completely therapeutic. It’s getting fantastic reviews all around too, don’t take just my word for it. I’ll be enjoying Persona 4 for a while, as I rebuild and renew.

I can’t embed this video, as Universal disabled that, but this morning I found that the video to M.I.A.‘s Paper Planes (you know, “all I want to do is gunshot gunshot gunshot gunshot”) is shot in my neighborhood of Bed Stuy, like right near my house! Apparently M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam) lives here. It’s visually authentic too, you can get a good feel for what my neighborhood is like from seeing it.

M.I.A. – Paper Planes – Official Video

The song itself is also growing on me—I saw it last night in Slumdog Millionaire (an excellent movie), and before that it was on in the background of every car trip I took over the holidays with my family. So now I’m going to go buy it off the Amazon MP3 Store. I’m a sucker.

I had an awesome Christmas. Like usual, I went first to Catskill, NY
down to Dublin, Pennsylvania to spend time with all my family. I got to stay longer than last year, and even made a trip to the Q-Mart. Sadly, my Q-mart story from when I was 15, wherein I obtain a floppy disk filled with unofficial, animated, (and heavily pixelated,) Flintstones pornography, came out during gift-giving, and my family kept bringing it up for the rest of my stay.

Coolest gift: my hip mom spied me twittering about the comic chainsawsuit and got me the book! She even got it autographed for me. And this is only after me mentioning a few of my favorite strips. Wicked cool.

Upon first coming home for Christmas, I spent two very, very late nights working on websites. The first night I spent open-sourcing IsItChristmas, which now has a home on Github. Already, this decision is bearing fruit.

The other night was spent finally integrating Sir Kevin Burg’s redesign of my money site. Kevin actually gave me a mockup and HTML/CSS for the redesign back in like June, but my interests started veering in other directions and I stopped doing anything on the site. Maybe this will spark me into giving it some more attention.

Great holiday—very relaxing. It’s also been oddly grounding. My new weird freelancing lifestyle now seems somehow more real and “legitimate” after having been pierced by my lifelong holiday traditions. My world is not so different after all. One further effect: my two all-nighters were completely invigorating, and reminded me how much I miss working from internal motivation. These days, I regularly distract myself too much with books and games, and rarely binge on side projects. This has got to change…and now!

Who’da guessed that the most upbeat and inspiring article of the Christmas season would be on the Huffington Post:

Pay It Backwards: An Act of Coffee Kindess – and the resultant NBC news coverage

This is the first time I’ve stayed up until 6am in a long, long time—maybe not since last Christmas. Goodnight.

It’s hard to believe 2008 is over. It feels not long ago at all that it was January 1, and MaryBeth had come to my apartment to stay, joining the belongings she’d moved here about a year ago today.

And not days later, Barack Obama stormed onto my and everyone else’s scene by winning Iowa, and I began my long education into what an American presidential election truly was and could be. Maybe it’s because it was one long event, but his Iowa win doesn’t feel very long ago at all. I remember talking in the hall outside thoughtbot’s NYC office, on the phone with my dad, filled with the heady certainty that he’d go on to sweep New Hampshire, the rest of the primaries, and the general election.

Maybe part of what made 2008 go so fast for me is that I spent the first half of it numb, save for election news. Despite MaryBeth’s company, I had hit a rut, and I was pushing hard at doing something, anything to break the monotony and feelings of stagnation. It was about halfway through 2008 that I saw the glimmers of how to shake it up, and by the fall I was somewhere completely different.

Now, in the twilight of 2008, I’m somewhere completely different again, with a new set of faces and challenges walking into view. So for a year that seemed for a long time to exist solely to trap me inside cotton, it did quite a turnaround. I have some paid work now, but I still really have absolutely no idea where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing in even a couple months. I’m challenging myself to be self-sufficient, and to overcome a number of new and wonderful personal weaknesses. My feelings about that have run the gamut over the last 6 weeks, but as of press time, I find that to be awesome.

This month also marks the first time in history that I’ve consented to live in one place for more than a year at a time – my lease ran out Dec 1, and I’m going month-to-month until things straighten out and I can afford to move someplace better. That’s actually a pretty significant sacrifice for me, because moving has always been a huge emotional reminder that I’m continuing to change and improve. For now, my altered career will have to be reminder enough.

I didn’t think I was going to enjoy 2008 nearly as much as I have. For a long time, I thought I’d view it as a lot of wasted space in my memoirs, or omitted entirely. Instead, I leave it better than I entered it. And hey, there’s still 2 weeks left of it. Thanks, 2008.