I was cleaning up my hard drive this weekend and discovered attachments to email and loose images floating around. Opening them up, I discovered a bunch of images documenting some of the people on my team at AltaVista. They date back to when James Young was Creative Director (early 1999 - before I took over from him) and he left to freelance and we had a goodbye lunch at Chevy's. Ryan Sims is in this pic - he went on to work for Peter Merholz at epinions - back before I had ever heard of him. I am not exactly sure when the rest of the images were shot (sometime in 2000) - I know not all were shot by me, since I am in one - but they are fun for reminiscing. The single designer image was sent to all of us who were let go in January 2001, by the lone remaining designer. He is having lunch at our lunch/work table.

Happily - we have all gone on to other interesting and challenging things with new people and new teams, but we still keep in touch.

Have started biking the Los Gatos Creek trail with my sister. She started riding while in Texas this summer and now has gotten me to join her. I have been riding with her for a couple of weeks now. We get up and get out around 7:30 - probably not as early as many biker type people, but about as early as I can manage, since I am a late nighter. Although I find myself going to bed earlier and earlier. The ride is nice, quiet and serene. Lots of marshlands and ducks and geese along some of the ponds. We turnaround at Vasona Lake and ride back to Willow Glen. Works out to be about 16-17 miles round trip and takes me an hour or a little under.

 

 

In response to the 9/11 tragedy. I hung the flag outside our front door. A lot of the neighbors did the same. It is very moving to drive around the neighborhood and see the flags on houses and the red, white and blue ribbons on cars and porches.
In a quite unpatriotic gesture, someone stole my flag this weekend.

Last week's tragedy affected us all in a horrible big way and in personal little ways. My aunt and uncle were on a flight back from Paris on Tuesday when they were diverted and stranded for several days in Newfoundland. His account is interesting and has pics from the area as well as of fellow passengers.

Before and After Click for the popup window (600x600) and cycle through the before and after shots of my side garden renovation. Basically I designed a patio, gravel path system for the side yard to expand the available beds for gardening while getting rid of all the grass. No more lawn mower - much to the chagrin of the dog. I found great 2 inch thick clay tiles and pink tinged gravel for the path that connects the two sides of the deck. The patio is edged in redwood. The dog area is covered in pine bark chips. The two piles of dirt in the pics will be the new beds. That comes later after I figure out what I will plant. We worked on this for a couple of weekends and the tile work began on the day the WTC came down. We finished the edging and spread the gravel and bark yesterday. In some ways this was a good way to work through all the emotions of this past week. Physical labor is a good cleanser. With bittersweet guilt - I am happy.

The front of the house shots show the new bed I created around Memorial day and have been working on all summer. Not much fl typing this year, but I expect a full blooming spring.

Tweaking my stylesheets a bit for increased legibility. How subtle is too subtle and when are things too garish? I guess it depends on your monitor, your platform and how old you are. Mom doesn't read the photolog because the type is too small. Ok - now it is bumped up a little. Hope it is better.

Sheila (my sister) had an opening this week. Originally scheduled for Tuesday, it was obviously postponed. She ended up opening on Wednesday and I shot the gallery space and her performance.

I am always amazed at her work - a combination of really interesting visual, beautiful lighting and always some sort of sound. There was a blend of music going on in the space. The paintings were 4x4 and created the floor, while the small oranges that were tattooed seemed small and somewhat insignificant next to the rich and luscious paintings. In the center of the space, Sheila was tattooing herself (for real) surrounded by a group of onlookers. The squeamish could watch from outside the gallery, as there were 4 video surveillance cameras set up.

I was very impressed with the "experience" and think in some ways, what she does is more experience design than what I do. Check out her site.

Some of my thoughts noted here.
Jason Kottke has great links and coverage from the personal perspective.

Last week when I drove up to San Francisco for the IA/UE Cocktail Hour, I snapped this picture of the San Francisco skyline becoming enshrouded with fog. Of course I was driving 65 mph and shot it with my PenCam so it has a really cool edgy fuzzy quality to it.

Spent today galavanting around San Jose participating in the A-Z City Challenge as part of the Lomo Sampling Games. These are happening all over the world over the month of September and then winners will get a trip to Vienna, Austria. Lomo is a russian camera that seems to have this cult following. We went to a gallery opening last night at Gallery AD - Anna Domini that had a showing of several hundred Lomo shots. I had heard about the competition via an email, but got more info last night and decided to participate. (warning: Trying out a new DHTML script for the popup page of images and captions. This popup window with the pics seems to make Netscape 4.x on the Mac crash. It is a little slow to load on Netscape on the PC but does work. Every now and then a weird error message pops up but it doesn't seem to keep the page from working. I am working to fix it.)

Sheila's dogs have the backyard and take full advantage of the various topography. They play, dig holes and drink out of the pool. They are crazy and fun and a pleasure to be here. This album - which contains 82 shots - is an experiment with the LowRes setting of the PenCam as well as a test of the MAC plug in that allows the PenCam to import/download into the Mac rather than the PC. If you are interested, I will post the plug-in - which by the way works through Photoshop very nicely.
Still working on the DHTML and javascript to have captions shown with the pics and also to show different size photos. All these images are the same size and I didn't rotate the verticals. So some more bugs to work out with the popup window but it is still cleaner than all individual HTML files. (warning: this popup window with the pics doesn't seem to move past the first image in NEtscape 4.x on the Mac. I am working to fix it.)