A jersey design, that is part of a website design I’m putting together. This was super fun, but the Scottish were smoking Scottish-crack when they invented argyle.

For those of you that don’t live here, there’s dog park somewhere under all that water. Downstream thousands of lost tennis balls are on a grand new adventure as they are swept out into the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently this if going to keep at it for a while, if you believe the world’s worst newspaper.

In an extended effort to stave off boredom on a rainy day, germ has been slinging some groovy web -shorts my direction. Alive in Joburg is kind of old, but still kind of pertinent as the director, Neill Blomkamp, is in theory at the helm of the as-yet-still-hypothetical, but supposedly-coming-soon Halo film. I generally don’t support video games being made into movies (the track record is absolutely dismal – there’s not enough space) but if this guy can make an interesting short out of apartheid-era news coverage and some cheap special effects, he might just pull it off. Of lesser fame but just as good (if not better) is the short TempBot, an interesting take on the modern work place.

I found myself thoroughly bemused by news-bit this week of the would-be car-jacker that was thwarted by a standard transmission. Personally, I think the automatic transmission makes is just a forerunner to the rise-of-the-machines style takeover by our technology. One minute you let your car shift for you, the next thing you know the governator is traveling back in time to kick your ass. That and it makes for less attentive drivers who slam on their brakes all the time, which is number six in my list of the world’s most annoying habits.

I’m one of those weird people who learned to drive a standard early. In my middle school to early high school years, my dad would give me a lift on his way to the plant, allowing me to avoid the undignified practice of the riding the big yellow dog. The Rice Rocket was an ’83 Honda civic wagon with no radio, no AC, failing ball joints, intermittently functioning windshield wipers (for a while we had a pull chain on them, but that only got you one pass, then you had to stop and push them back down manually), a sizeable library of mechanical engineering texts in the trunk for light reading and of course a standard transmission. We also never had to change the oil, the theory being that enough leaked on the driveway, you could just add a quart every time you filled up and it’d be fine. Also, in my senior year when I could finally park at school the exhaust plume was singlehandedly responsible for canceling a few band practices (Al Gore was twitching somewhere).

But I digress. On the way in to school, my dad would steer with his left hand and hold his coffee with his right. He never went for the travel mugs – he was hard core and just rolled with your standard mug, smoothly compensating for the dips and turns on in the road, calling out gears for me to put the car into. It was a pretty smooth operation. No wrecks, no coffee spilled. Switching from shifting with my left hand to right was a little weird when I took the wheel, but I got over it.

So each morning when I pull my Dukes of Hazard exit off Mopac to turn on to Bee Caves (yes, the Subaru horn does play Dixie) and downshift across four lanes of traffic, I think of my dad in the Rice rocket and our decidedly superior driving skills, while I try not to spill any coffee.

Like I’m going to spend four days mucking about at a design conference and not come back and change up the site design. Going to be upsetting a few other things as well as adding some more content.

You know you’re at a design conference when people laugh hysterically as the presenter jokes about the impossibility of Impact being bolded, or TrajanPro being lower-cased. Hilarious. That, and I’ve reached an odd point in my life when the pretty girl in the corner asks about ‘…building vertical facing pages in InDesign… ‘ or ‘…using the transform-proxy tool..’ and I find it seriously hot.

Any given airport terminal in the world is a buffet of people watching. The multitude streams in and out from different directions, walks, eats mingles and leaves. A little micro-episode that parallels what the rest of our time here entails and essentially sums up the generations before as well. Genes and environments lining up in a trillion different combinations to lead us all to this moment of bumping shoulders with this one particular portion of the rest of humanity. Like some kind of epic piece of music, with a crescendo in this very odd facility.

Then we jam into tiny metal tubes (oh regional jet, how I fucking hate you) and climb up to ridiculous heights, in ridiculously uncomfortable seats. Throw in fascist-Mormon flight attendants who yell at you repeatedly when you try to use laptop after they approve the use of cell phones once you land (once was enough, you power-mad maniac), and you’ve pretty much encapsulated modern life.

Yup, I’m traveling again. Spent the day skimming the tops of thunderheads at thirty-nine thousand feet over the south, to Atlanta for the HOW conference to figure out what real designer’s do and how they do it. Professional Development and all that. We’ll see.

First there was me. Then there was the California Dairy Board’s genius viral marketing site cowabduction.com. Then today geekloogie brought our attention to this prototype abduction lamp designed by Lasse Klein,which truly excels in it’s awesomeness.

It’s nice to occasionally have proof of your coolness, especially when (as with the internet) you can prove you thought it up before everyone else.