Busy Busy Busy ... and then Vacation

It's been a busy few weeks. On August 15th, I switched jobs and started working with some friends of mine at a local company focused on the art scene. During the next 4 weeks, we launched 4 websites and 1 major feature. Unfortunately I can't yet talk about all of them, but I am excited about the ones that I can talk about.

Artcity Festival is a yearly festival of visual arts. Great people, fun time and launching the start of their new online home was a pleasure.

Free and Easy Travel is a Canadian based travel company that provides guided trips to South-east Asia. They have been doing so for a number of years and as such have tons of content, phenomenal photographs and are all around great guys. This site is on of my favorite designs from Ian Russell.

Structured Abstraction is the company that I now work for, and recently the guy who now does business development, Jay MacGillivray, was voted to be the Top 40 Under 40 in Calgary. Congratulations Jay! He was recognized for his phenomenal work in the arts community of Calgary. It will be a pleasure and a joy to work with him again. Because of his award there would be an increased awareness of what he has been doing and we wanted to ensure that we had a reasonable website up and going, so in one day we wrote the content, (harder than it sounds), launched the website and designed and implemented the graphical pieces surrounding the content.

Unfortunately I can't say much more about the other two, but suffice it to say that I was BUSY BUSY BUSY. Now, if you consider that just before I left Etsy Inc. we wrapped up a year long port of an older busted middle layer and replaced it with something that scaled horizontally. That puts the count up to 6 releases in 4 weeks!

So now I'm on some welcome vacation. It starts with a Week in Florida with my Family. Then, we spend less than a week in Portland, Oregon with my Sister and Brother in Law and their 1-year old DeLuca. Then we travel to Greece for 8 days and Beirut, Lebanon for 6 days to visit with my Wife's Family.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how relaxing it will be. :P

Ummm ... huh?

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/09/12/second-gates-seinfeld-ad-shows-ad-campaign-has-potential

Does anyone else get these? They feel like a bad version of The Office to me.

Lighting

I want one: http://gizmodo.com/5045555/stimuli-30-lamp-is-perfect-for-home-work-spaceship

By shifting around the panels with an internal 3 axis gearbox, light output can fill the light gap left by a waning sun, maintaining a constant light level through the day.