Monkinetic Weblog

At this exact moment, I'm sitting in my kitchen, working on a freelance project, and listening to jazz on the radio over the muted din of the dishwasher.

Random R.E.M. moment:

This Adaptive Path interview with Michael Bierut (partner at Pentagram, contributor to Design Observer) is chock full of interesting commentary and insights on designers, the design process, politics, etc. Part I, Part II.

It seems every few weeks these days, I'm asking myself why I'm blogging. I haven't yet come up with a "resonable" answer, but I also know that I'm still really enjoy it, even if my posts have become sporadic at best.

Amazing what a little Father's day cash and some inspiration can get you.

I had some fun with GarageBand, iMovie, and a favorite R.E.M. song. The video was inspired by the intro, which comes from the bootleg "Low", as Michael Stipe introduces "Belong".

Content Connections (the company I work for) is launching a new online learning tool called My Power Learning. MPL is a learning style preference assessment - it helps students (especially) as well as parents, educators, or anyone - understand the modes in which they learn and communicate. The assessment is followed by a lengthy and personalized report that explains how you can study and communicate better, based on what you now know about your own learning style.

Mark D. recalled my attention to the following hilarity:

I got some pushback from folks I trust, or at least like, and decided the flash header needed more work before it was ready for prime time.

I've been having some fun with Flash lately - witness the new header on this site. :-) It's not perfect, I haven't figured out the font embedding correctly, so the quotes seem to appear in some default (Times?) font on any machine but my own. Grr. Still working on it.

This morning a coworker was commenting on how cool it was that Dojo includes functionality that will compress their JavaScript library by converting all human-readable javascript to short identifiers made up of underscores and numbers or letters ("_a","_1", etc). Compression births obfuscation.

You know, I've worked in all kinds of environments doing web development, and Flash is making me crazy. I've been bangning my head on this thing for a day now, and it's just leaving me hot under the collar. Grr.

Simplicity is profitable: right on. Southwest Airlines rocks.

After Merlin posted about this cool little get-simple wallet, I had to have one. My old leather hip-brick is beginning to cause chiropractic problems, and I'm all about getting simple these days.