Thinkcage

Yeah, I picked up the new Pearl Jam collection today, Lost Dogs, a collection of about 30 b-sides and unreleased tracks. But those aren’t really the lost dogs of which this entry refers.

Yesterday the company I work for laid off several of my co-workers. While I certainly understand that these things happen in the world of business, it still is difficult to stare at the empty desks of people with whom you used to work. It has been a rough couple of days and I find myself equally dispondent and grateful that I am still employed.

I wish each of them the very best.

Its odd outside today. I left the office at lunch to pickup my CD and it was suprisingly warm — nearly 70 degrees but it smelled of winter, of cold. Odd.

I discovered the MODIS Rapid Response System as Hurricane Isabel hit the US East Coast last month and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite sites on the web.

The site features the output of a land-mapping satellite that is primarily concerned with surface anomalies that can be detected from space such as weather and fires. The images posted on the site are extremely beautiful and detailed — all the way down to 250M per pixel! Pictures of Hurricane Isabel showed just how massive the swirling storm was and I was particularly amazed at the transparency of the water from space as you could see submerged landmasses and the general variations in the depth of the water.

Today I have been viewing pictures of the massive plumes of smoke stretching out over the Pacific Ocean from southern California. If you have the appropriate software that will let you view the pixels 1 to 1, I highly recommend that you download one of the massive 250M images and marvel at the detail. Zoom into a major city area and you can see the cold concrete metropolis. Fascinating.

Take a look at these images:

Hurricane Issabel | San Diego Fires

Finally, Apple has done it. They took their fantastic MP3 player/organizer/music store, iTunes, to Windows. I am user of both Mac and Windows computers — in fact I have both side-by-side at work and at home. I use each for its strengths, though the PC is getting used less and less each passing day. Music is one thing I do only on the Mac and iTunes is the reason.

Not only is it a fantastic MP3 player with neat playlist management, but iTunes also is great for organizing your collection. Using the MP3 format’s ID3 tags, iTunes automatically and behind the scenes organizes your music into folders on your hard drive based by artist and album. Change the artist field of a song within iTunes and it will automatically reorganize your music folder to reflect the change. This is a really under-discussed feature that is now available on Windows computers, too.

And of course having one-click access to hundreds of thousands of songs for $0.99 is great. Apple, combined with its marketing partners, AOL and Pepsi, is sure to own the online music download market.

After downloading the Windows version of iTunes I was thrilled to see it is a complete and identical port — feature-by-feature, the same user experience as the Mac version. Look for many shared playlists in the office very soon!

Now, if I only had an iPod.

I’ve been reading this comic strip for years. I have always identified with Jason, the youngest son of the Fox family (especially because of his pet iguana, Quincy — I had small reptiles as pets for much of my childhood).

But what has most delighted me of late is cartoonist, Bill Amend’s embrace of the geek. With increasing frequency, Amend has begun to speak to a very select community (geeks) from the confines of one of the most popular mainstream comic strips. Surely he knows that many of his readers will not appreciate the geek jokes to the extent that your typical slashdot reader might. But then, maybe to a non-geek these cartoons are funny from a completely different point of view. The point of view where geeks are from another planet.

A little bit of browsing took me to the current Foxtrot website, which for all intents and purposes is Amend’s weblog. I was particularly amused by a post discussing that he had received several corrections to the programming code that appeared in a recent cartoon!

Good stuff.

P.S. I can’t help but wonder where Gary Larson is in all this.

A University of Toronto study: Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness.

I’m a creative. There are many titles to describe the things I find myself doing in my professional life: Graphic Designer, Web Designer, Web Developer, Art Director, Product Designer, Software Designer, Information Architect, etc. To me those titles don’t matter so much, but what I do is create, design, make, build. I’m a creative. As in Creatives vs. Suits creative. But the thing is, this kind of creativity doesn’t feel pure — it feels forced, contrived.

I think high school was the most creative time of my life. I drew, painted, read, played, imagined and dreamed. Am I merely lamenting the loss of my childhood innocence or is there more to it? I often wonder why we grow up and what that means.

I spent most of my high school class time drawing. I drew my teachers, my friends, strange things, pretty things, and things that filled my imagination. I spent much of my free time reading. I read tons of novels — mostly of the heroic fantasy type; Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien, Piers Anthony, etc. Those books filled my mind with places and people and ideas; Moorcock’s concepts of time and space amazed me. Much of what I drew was based on these ideas and images. Today I don’t really draw any of that stuff. I never draw just to draw. Sure, I fill a couple of sketchbooks a year but they are filled with website interfaces, site maps, code ideas, logo designs. And I don’t read those things anymore. I read heady books about design and science which are fascinating but don’t always inspire (With all apologies to the cited Kurzweil book by which I am fascinated and inspired and plan to cover here in detail very soon.). What I don’t know is why. Did I grow up and lose interest in those things, dismissing them as trite? Or did schedules and work leave them in the dust and put my imagination on a shelf?

Don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a creative person and I do solid, creative work. I consider myself an “idea person” foremost, but it’s cheapened by its business applications. See, in the real world you can be creative but it must be from 8 to 5. And it has to be a creative energy toward a company project and it has to meet business requirements and the client has to be happy and the artist doesn’t matter. In business, creativity is a process you go through to keep ideas in production. But what happens to the those out of the blue crazy ideas? Where do they go?

The general office/business environment seems to be the exact opposite of creative. The model is to bring in creatives and apply them to a problem. But what if it worked the opposite way? What if the environment fostered creation with no boundaries? Perhaps nothing useful as we know it would come out of it. The creatives might never build a website or design a logo. But what would they make?

What would you make?

I have been refreshed at work by a new wave of creativity — the opportunity to rethink everything in a collaborative environment. But as I look around the group as we argue ideas I wonder what we would make if no one told us what to make.