Prose, obsessed upon for far too long. Judge kindly.
You can remove the “Property” now as yesterday afternoon I got this email from the Christopher Williams the Interim Superintendent of Seattle Parks and Recreation:
Thank you for taking the time to submit your naming suggestion for the recent Seattle Parks and Recreation park naming process.
After receiving overwhelming support from the community, I have decided to name the park site located at 48th Avenue SW and SW Alaska Street Ercolini Park. This name will recognize the longtime ownership of this site by the Ercolini family and their willingness to sell this property to the City for a public space ...
I got to spend some time last week in the, hell, I feel like whatever I write will sound like a cliche when talking about New York, I mean, what the “Big Apple”? I heart NY. Sigh. Regardless, it was a blast. I saw some great old friends from Japan, some who were in town for a web conference, met a few new ones, and others who seemed to have followed me. I went to a Knicks game, traversed to the top of the Empire State Building and took a few shots of an eerily abandoned amusement park. The subways ...
As I’ve written about before my family recently sold a piece of property to the City of Seattle with the intention of it becoming a city park. The property was sold at very generous rate to make sure it became a park instead of condos and it’s something I’m quite proud my family did. Unfortunately, with the sale of the property a name wasn’t designated for the park, so Seattle Parks and Recreation is soliciting names for the working name of “Ercolini Park”.
My family and I would love to see the parks working name become ...
First off I just want to say thanks, thanks to my friends who decided to turn their sites pink for October. It’s great and it’s definitely made me think about doing the same. I’ve gone back and forth about the whole idea for a good week and I’ve finally decided not to. It’s not because I don’t think it’s a fantastic idea to spread awareness about this terrible disease, it is, it’s just not for me.
A few weeks ago I went down and participated in the Race for the Cure down ...
I was just spending a bit of time tonight checking out A Brief Message which is a fantastic new site by Liz Danzico and Kohi Vihn. The initial article there was a brief bit discussing the possibility of print dying. There’s some good commentary that follows, people talking about Newspapers dying off or it happening really slowly, but it spurred a memory for me a while back about a spot I’d heard on NPR last year about something actually dying off—the telegram.
It’s a great example because it’s a form of communication that actually has ...
Sure, you have your Facebook page, your Virb profile and your MySpace “thing”. You’ve got your Flickr stream, your Upcoming events, and your Twitter status.
But I’m talking about having a website. Those services are great, don’t get me wrong, and maybe you want to use one of them to create your website and that’s fine. What I’m making a case for is a stake in the internet ground to call yours. A little online personal identity. It doesn’t have to be much. Some of my favorites are just splash pages or compilations of ...
The debate about whether or not you should be creating mobile specific content seems to be at an all time high right now. With the release of iPhone people are excited about the mobile web because the device makes it so compelling. At Blue Flavor, we got excited about it too and developed Leaflets, which is optimized for the mobile web and specifically the iPhone.
Sure, I’ve seen the commercial too, with Apple touting the “real” internet. And I see their reason for promoting it. Their logic being is that’s what consumers want, they want the desktop internet ...
It’s been a busy past few weeks but I’m excited to announce that Blue Flavor has launched Leaflets. To quote from our site:
“Leaflets are small, mobile web-based applications you access from Safari on your iPhone. And since Leaflets are designed to run fast over AT&T’s EDGE network, you can use them anywhere: no wi-fi required.”
It’s been a huge team effort, but I got to work specifically on the design for Flickr as well as helping out a lot with both the del.icio.us and Newsvine Leaflets. If you’ve got an iPhone ...
If it isn’t readily apparent from my blog title and about page I enjoy the simple number pattern. Not only when the digital clock reads 1:10 or 12:34 (one, two, three, four) but also with dates, and today is a great one, 07/07/07. It just screams head to Vegas and hit the slots to me, but I’m going to have to settle for a brief smile on my face and the thought that it won’t happen for another thousand years.
The last time I have a distinct memory of something like this was ...
After waking up early, getting in line at 7:30am, making the local news, the front page of the Seattle Times online for a few hours, (thanks for all the emails and text messages), and even getting picked up by the AP. I’m now a proud owner of an iPhone. Apparently you can now just go down to the store and buy one here in Seattle but whatever.
Now, after spending 24 hours with it I’m still glad I waited. It’s incredible. It’s sort of creepy how good it is. I feel like it’s a ...
So there hasn’t been a lot of movement on my families old homestead to park conversion, but a few months back some of the initial concept designs were released to the public. It’s looking to be a great little park complete with a play area, a nice open lawn and some game tables. There’s been a lot of talk about working in one of the cities “skatedots“. The goal is to create something that works for all ages and I think this design, with the possible addition of the skatedot looks to do just that.
The parks ...
This post is directed to all you tall guys out there, the 6‘5” and above ones, but to also let the rest of you in on a little secret. After my post about the trials of being tall I realized there’s one thing I really enjoy. I call it the Tall Guy Connection.
Imagine you’re 6‘9” or at least 6‘5”, if you need to go get a chair on stand on it go ahead, I’ll wait. Alright, now you’re walking around a busy market, or at a packed party, or perhaps you’re ...
In case you haven’t heard the postage went up again yesterday from 39 cents to a whopping 41 cents. Now I’m sure for those of you out there who spend your time mailing like crazy this is big news, but for me, the infrequent mailer, this is just a huge annoyance. It means the stamps I’ve got are now no good and I either have to go buy some 2 cent stamps or just stick two stamps on the envelop and grossly over pay. Thankfully the U.S. postal service has figured out an elegant solution:
Enter ...
So last week I was driving down to Portland with my good friend Sean. We stopped off at one of my new favorite places near my house, Irwin’s, for some tasty baked goods. Sean got a few things and I picked up this awesome Marionberry Scone. On the drive down I was munching away when mid bite I looked down and saw bit of mold next to a berry. Now, I love Irwin’s and I can’t imagine them selling me an old scone, so I’m just going to chalk it up to it being a bad ...
It’s been far too long in coming, but it feels great to finally get the new design up. I think I did the original photoshop work about seven months ago, but doubts in the initial concept, technical hurdles, and countless other reason kept this site from finally getting done.
Yes, it’s very green now but it’s season based, so that’ll change. The design changes based on what the current season is or when you peruse the archives the articles keep the same theme based on when they were published. With this design had had many goals ...
I realized I haven’t mentioned this here yet but I’m speaking at this years WebVisions event down in Portland, OR on May 3rd. I’ll be talking all about the relationship web designers and developers have and different techiniques and methods to help make it all go smoothly. It’s an area where the differences in background and culture can really colide but it’s something where getting it right can make the difference between an okay site and a gem for that portfolio.
If you’re a web geek and in the area, or just want to ...
It’s been a good week and a half since I got back from South By Southwest and I’m just now feeling like I can talk about it a little. It was that intense. It’s a marathon and a sprint. Maybe it was because it was my first year, but even when I tried to pace myself I felt like I was doing too much. You’re meeting people constantly wanting to give them your full attention, to have that meaningful conversation, but then you’re off to a panel, or somebody needs to talk to you about ...
Tomorrow morning I’m getting on a plane, along with countless other web geeks, to make the annual pilgrimage to SXSW interactive. This is going to be my first year and I’m stoked. I’ve travelled plenty but never been to Austin let alone to the geek spring break that is SXSW. I’ve heard tons from the Blue Flavor crew about what to expect, how the panels work, and what the parties are like, but really after all the stories I’m trying to clear my head and take it all in with a clean slate.
Hope to ...
For those of you out there who don’t know, I’m tall, really tall. I’m 6‘9”. It’s often the first thing that gets brought up when I meet people, and the same conversations happen over and over again. How tall are your parents? Do you play basketball? How tall were you when you were 12? I’m used to it, I’ve been this tall since I was 14 and to me, it’s not that special.
It was great for playing basketball and comes in handy for things like dusting or cleaning windows, and supposedly ...
A good year and a half ago I broke up with a girlfriend I’d been with for quite some time. It’d been rocky, I’d moved out of the country, back to the country, we weren’t together, we were, we did the long distance thing, we didn’t. It was messy, it didn’t work, and yeah, it was rough on me. That’s not the point of this post though. At first everything I owned reminded me of her, that box, that plant, we’d exchanged a whole load of gifts and so there were a ...
For 22 years I had no cavities. Not one. My teeth were great, I even enjoyed going to the dentist. I brushed regularly but didn’t really do much special to take care of my teeth. I did do a nose dive over my handle bars back when I was 12 and ended up with two root canals on my front teeth but that was dental fluke and a result of my recklessness as a kid.
Then, when I was about to head off to Japan and was without dental insurance I headed in for an exam, figuring it’d ...
With my new gig I’m only about a mile and a half from work so I’ve been walking fairly regularly. Seattle winters have been keeping me from doing more than a couple of times a week but I’m always happier when I do.
A few months back I was heading in a little earlier than usual. It was the day before halloween and it was cold, well at least cold for Seattle and especially for that time of year, probably around 40. On the way I pass a park with a couple of tennis courts, but on ...
Tomorrow is the Keynote. If you’re asking what keynote then you’re obviously not entrentched in the nerdery of the Apple faithful.
Tomorrow at 9:00am the wizard himself, Steve Jobs gets up and starts convincing you that you need the new iWhatever, and you, well, you believe him. It’s a siren song even the most fleeting have a tough time avoiding. I’m already giddy with anticipation realizing in less than 10 hours he’ll be up on stage and I’ll be watching text scroll across my screen hoping he releases the coolest mobile device ever ...
It’s good to be back. After 36 hours of total travel time and jumping right into all the Christmas and New Years parties it really feels nice to be sitting on my couch in my apartment. I think I’m just happy to be sitting more than anything.
Still, my trip was incredible, originally I’d kicked around the idea of calling this post “Four Seasons in Two Weeks” since that’s really what it was. I left here in what was technically the end of fall, flew down to Santiago where it was 85 degrees and sunny, then ...