What Am I Doing? (Jan 2009)

Happy new year, all. The holiday season is behind us, and as much as I had enjoyed it, I’m glad to be at the start of the new year with a few optimistic things to look forward to.

Freelance Client

The project with the freelance client is still in progress and is still very exciting. One thing I learned from being a freelancer is that it’s almost an art to have to know how much time tasks actually need to get done. I haven’t done enough freelancing at this point to provide a more accurate estimate of time required to do a project, and it’s easy to imagine an overall picture of the steps in my head, but it’s something else to actually do them. That’s why I feel bad sometimes (or often) because my current client needs the project completed ASAP, but it’s taking longer than I expect to churn out results. But one of the things that are motivating me to continue is my vision of how it’s going to look and function when it’s up and running.

Last Week of Peet’s

Next week will be my last week at Peet’s. It’s almost a bittersweet departure. Half of me knows I’m going to miss it, and the other half is glad to be moving on. The past few weeks, I feel that I’ve dramatically improved at the bar, and all I wanted to do my whole shift is to make drinks for customers. It’s like I’ve finally gotten used to how things work there and I’m just working like a well-oiled machine. But, I don’t want to get too comfortable to the point where the quality of my service and product goes down and I get stuck, which is why I needed to leave.

This job has not been all for nothing, though, and I never thought it was. This has been an excellent environment to learn about teamwork, customer service, multi-role relationships, and immediate problem solving. I would not learn anything like this or to this extent in an office environment. Of course, the office environment has another set of valuable skills that one would learn. So when you think about it, in a way, I’m glad that I took this chance to work in a fast-pace, high-volume, not always predictable retail environment before I presumably move to a more “corporate” or business-oriented world for the rest of my career.

Outlook

2009 seems like a great chance for improvement, in all fronts, no matter what the news says. As usual, I always see the future as a positive time to spend the rest of our lives.

Quote of the Moment

“The world is not waiting for you.”

Flush.

100th Post; Wish-to-Do List

Every night, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, a million things speed through my mind. I think about what I’ve completed that day and what I have yet to accomplish the next. It never stops until I am asleep. When I wake up, I already feel behind.

This is a problem. Even though I take pride in being someone who is constantly generating ideas, I inevitably have more ideas than I can execute. Yes, a lot of those ideas are probably not that good and practically trivial, but ideas are ideas, and until they are executed, they all weigh relatively equally as valid solutions.

So, to ease the pressure off my brain just a little bit, and to celebrate the 100^th post of Flush, I would like to share 100 things I have brewing in my head. (I have a lot more, as I’m sure you do as well.) Some are very realistic and executable, while others are more ideal and fantastic.

Site

1. Get all areas of the experiments section opened and working.
2. Have a creative About section.
3. Redesign Flush to fit with transparency theme.
4. Have the entire site be mobile and screen-reader friendly (in other words, accessible).
5. Have the site completely done by sometime next year, before I realize I need a redesign.

   Career

6. Continue with learning ActionScript 3.0.
7. Learn MySQL.
8. Learn Processing, whatever benefit I may get from it.
9. Learn AfterEffects.
10. Learn podcasting.
11. Learn a printing press.
12. Learn to hand-assemble a book.
13. Learn to use a type design program.
14. Learn to write a form that will update an XML file.
15. Finish my print portfolio.
16. Create a multi-functional business card.
17. Design a body font family, including ligatures and special characters.
18. Attend AIGA Design Conference 2009 in Memphis, TN.
19. Be a part of the Olympic branding committee of a Summer Games.
20. Buy a copy of CS4 (unless I wait too long and CS5 comes out).
21. Meet well-known design figures with mutual respect.
22. Design a self-promotional holiday souvenir.
23. Be part of an “awesome” project.
24. Own a copy of Sagmeister’s “Things I Have Learned From My Life So Far”.
25. Volunteer with whatever AIGA SF needs volunteers for.
26. Start a career portfolio archive.

    Experiments

27. Design and screen print shirt graphics with geeky design-related topics.
28. Make a poster/series with writing with light.
29. Make an info-graphic poster of the bodies of the solar system.
30. Print an image on the same sheet multiple times.
31. Print an image on separate transparency sheets and align the images in the light, then photograph it.
32. Create a poster series of the sun’s actual visible electromagnetic spectrum.
33. Design a reusable calendar.
34. Do a time lapse series of one location at the same time each day for a long period of time (e.g. a year).
35. Invert night sky photographs.
36. Overlay a high-resolution photo onto a low resolution version of the same photo.
37. Align panoramic Photomerge photos but don’t blend the edges.
38. Put supposedly-panoramic Photomerge photos in a grid in relation to one another.
39. Create a new typeface by overlapping two typefaces, then take the overlapping areas or dissimilar areas.
40. Use enlarged small type on screen as regular type.
41. Use Flash/ActionScript to write a visualization of two bodies orbiting.
42. Create a motion graphic piece that will show a writing with light, but the light moves with time, so the writing cannot be seen at any one time, but collectively.

    Life

43. Continue with learning either/both French or/and Japanese.
44. Learn Morse code, just because.
45. Learn Braille, just because.
46. Learn American Sign Language, just because.
47. Learn more about astronomy.
48. Learn more about physics.
49. Learn to surf.
50. Learn to ski and/or snowboard.
51. Learn to ballroom dance, for whatever future occasion.
52. Start life blogging again.
53. Get my life completely GTD’d.
54. Pay off my student loans and start being in the black.
55. Get a green job.
56. Live in a studio apartment.
57. Have a road trip of some sort across the country.
58. Go to an amusement park one of these days. It’s been too long.
59. Go mini-golf with friends.
60. Go on a road trip with friends.
61. Go on a cruise with friends.
62. Go to a beach where the water and the weather is not cold.
63. Be part of the excitement in Washington D.C. on January 20, 2009.
64. Attend an American/Western wedding. (I’ve only been to Chinese style weddings).
65. Attend a baseball game.
66. Attend an indoor concert with die-hard fans who sing along to all the songs.
67. Play more Wii.
68. Become a space tourist.
69. Experience Zero G in one of those planes.
70. Fly first class.
71. Ride in a Rock-Star-Style Tour Bus.
72. Spend a week in a cabin with friends.
73. Get into a habit of exercising and eating right (for the most part) for the rest of my life.
74. Return to a routine of swimming.
75. Get shampoo/body wash that takes out the smell of chlorine.
76. Have a crazy adventure night like in the movies, but with no one dying.
77. Buy myself things for the holidays that I’ve been longing for all year but have been really conservative with money. Or when I get a full-time design job.
78. Go on a “vision quest,” whatever that is.
79. Re-watch the Matrix Trilogy.
80. Watch something in IMAX.
81. Re-watch Motorcycle Diaries.
82. Re-watch the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony.
83. Have a movie marathon of Planet Earth.
84. Be an awesome and cool uncle when my niece or nephew is born.
85. Help build houses for families who need and deserve it.
86. Volunteer at a soup kitchen or something similar during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
87. Convince my friends that it’s “should have” and not “should of”, among other things.
88. Build something useful with wood.

    World

89. Visit New York City and live there for a month.
90. Visit Japan and live there for a month.
91. Visit Beijing and the Olympic area.
92. Visit Vancouver during the Olympics in 2010.
93. Visit London during the Olympics in 2012.
94. Volunteer to do something in Africa.
95. Visit Australia.
96. Visit Machu Picchu.
97. Visit France and try to live there for a month.
98. Visit Italy.
99. Visit Dubai and sight-see all the cool architecture.

100. Learn to live, and live to learn.

Let’s see how many of these I can accomplish by the 200^th post. I know I won’t be able to do all of it, but it’s still good to try.

Flush.

Oversaturation in Dubai

I admit that I don’t know much about Dubai, except that it’s somewhere in the Middle East, and that there’s a lot of business development there. A while ago, I heard about this “world islands” plan where they’re gonna have a group of islands that look like a map of the world. And before that, I saw this episode of Build It Bigger on the Discovery Channel where the host took a tour of one of the Dubai buildings under construction, possibly the tallest one ever.

But here’s what I’m thinking. Take a look at this post on designboom. There are so many interesting architecture designs, and it would be awesome to see them come to life. But the problem with these images is that, standard to architecture renderings, those buildings are visually isolated against all other buildings to emphasize certain characteristics and features.

That’s fine for other cities, because most of the time, all the other buildings in those renderings are probably mundane and boring-looking anyway. But in Dubai, there seems to be, or is going to be, an oversaturation of unique building designs that, together, might look more like a freak show, where they’re all special in their own ways but don’t really belong in the “normal” city landscape.

Landmarks are unique because they’re different from everything else around them. But here, the buildings are really different, so different that they’re going to look the same in their weirdness.

Perhaps that’s not the case at all. I don’t know how big Dubai is, so maybe those buildings will be more spread out, then in which case, it would be cool to get on some tour bus and make a dozen stops or something around the city to visit these buildings.

But for now, I can only imagine Dubai as a crowd of funky buildings, one next to the other.

Flush.