I absolutely respect Lane. Great site, great writing, and he seemed like a really nice intelligent guy in my too limited contact with him at SXSW.(Truth be known I was a little intimidated by the Deep Leap posse. They are a really talented bunch.) I do not, however, think that this site could be quantified as “the bare minimum of creativity.” I, however, have been wrong about these things before.

https://www.bump.net/2000/03/2230/

I’m taking a break for a few hours to spend some time with Kate and eat some sushi. You can see my progress in turning the previous Photoshop comp into an actual Web page here. I just realized that the angles on the curves in the picture module don’t match the ones in the Weblog module, so I went back and redid them. I’ll be putting that up when I get back to it. I think you’ll agree that it shows more inspiration and effort than any of the previous designs that I have built, even the ones I decided not to post.

Just so you know I’m not joshing you, here’s a peek at what the new Bump looks like. I have at least one day of refinements and a day or two of production left to make this happen.

Donuts are now upscale?

This is really really really not a good idea. I wouldn’t get an Internet phone from Sprint for this reason alone.

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It’s spring here in Atlanta, and I love this time of year. Time to reach into the closet and pull out all of the winter clothes to put them away until next year. It’s always strange to me how early spring really hits here in Atlanta after living in the NorthEast all of my life. I see the thin green film of pollen on my car, so allergies should be about to kick in shortly.

It’s also NCAA basketball march madness this week. It’s my favorite sports time of year, better than the Super Bowl and World Series and NBA Finals etc… I’ve been slightly more disconnected from it than normal this year because of my trip to SXSW and my preoccupation with all things arthouse. Today is really the first time I’ve had a chance to check out any games. Go UCONN!!

I guess I have my own sort of march madness too. Some comments made at the Weblogs panel at SXSW have opened up a flood of emotions and the floodgates of self expression too. It was an unintentional aside too. A reference to something someone had written previously that was simply being used as an example in an answer to a question.

I find myself reading and writing far more than I have in years over the last few days. I feel this incredible need to create things and to digest things that others have labored to create. To redesign all of the crappy Web interfaces I have created. To build new apps that I have floating around in my head. To reexplore my relationship with Kate. I have a fiendish amount of energy. Where has this energy been hiding for the last year?

It’s not all good, the emotions that were tapped were really painful for me at first. It was like someone had punched me in the gut. It was a moment when I realized my isolation from those around me, that it was self imposed, and that I could choose to cut it loose. I have a feeling that this happens to a lot of people my age. You reach a point when it’s suddenly much harder to form close friendships with others. Not in a social sense necessarily, but emotionally. I’m not sure if it’s the ability to trust others becomes more difficult, or that, as you become more set in your ways, it becomes near impossible to find others you can connect with.

The bottom line is that I realized that I rarely was expressing my inner stuff. I’m not letting stuff out. Sometimes not even to myself. I gotta work through this because that’s really unhealthy.

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Slowly Downward is the personal site of the gentleman who has been responsible for Radiohead’s site for a while. There’s a bunch of good fiction here, and some other content worth exploring.

Okay, so I meant to post last night, but I was exhausted by the time I got home. My office had scheduled two meetings for me yesterday afternoon, so I got off the plane, drove straight to the office, then hit my first meeting. The second meeting was offsite and went until almost 7 pm, so I was just absolutely shredded by the time I got home.

It feels good to be home.

Now that I’ve had a day to digest SXSW a little, I think that the number one thing I brought home with me was inspiration. I talked to so many talented people who I found so inspiring. People who aren’t afraid to do great things and hold themselves to a higher standard no matter what kind of project they are working on. So if you talked to me at SXSW, thanks, you made a difference in my life in some way. You inspired me.

I sorted through the 300+ pictures I took now to find the ones that are suitable for use here. I got about 60 good ones that I will resize and get up on the server tonight. Hopefully over the weekend I will post them to a set of pages.

Harrumph has the best thing ever from SXSW: movies of web people dancing. hehe go there. Her pictures are also really high quality.

I’ve become re-interested in Applescript for some reason. In tune with that in some equally bizarre way, Hell’s Half Acre released some nifty icon oriented Applescripts today.

I read In The Beginning …Was the Command Line tonight. I don’t think I’m part of the target demographic for this book. I found it over simplified, and I can’t agree with all of the assumptions and assertions that the author makes, most of which are driven by the authors evolving OS preference. For someone with a limited technical background, and very little awareness of the history of computers, it’s not a terrible introduction.