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My buddy Mike and I made our annual trip to Bumbershoot last weekend. This year was our third year in a row, but unfortunately for us, the third time was not a charm.

We showed up at around noon, and I ended up having the same thing for lunch that I had last year: bratwurst with sauerkraut. I also had a small cup of what tasted like Minute Maid lemonade that cost around $3. The lunch was good, though.

Unfortunately, and somewhat inexplicably, they decided to forego on one of the sound stages they had the previous two years (and likely many years before that) so that they could put in a vert ramp for skateboarding. The only problem with this decision is that the professional skateboarders they hired only performed for two half hours the entire day, and while it was entertaining to watch, the rest of the time resulted in far fewer options in terms of musical acts to enjoy.

Mike and I walked the grounds of the Seattle Center quite a bit more than we did in previous years, mostly because we were killing time between acts and hoping to find something interesting to look at, listen to, whatever. We managed to stumble upon Flatstock, which was pretty cool because there were all kinds of concert posters on display and for sale. However, there really wasn't all that much else to see outside of the few musical acts playing at any given time.

Even the musical acts left a little to be desired this year. We listened to Grynch perform as we ate our lunch, and while he was entertaining, his raps didn't quite live up to some of the beats he was rapping to, which were pretty impressive.

After Grynch, we ended up walking around and killing a lot of time before we finally ended up in Memorial Stadium, which is where all the main acts play, a little after 6 o'clock. We caught Band of Horses, whom I'd never heard of, first, and they put on a pretty good show. Their sound was really good, which I probably wouldn't have even noticed had it not been for the set that followed.

The headlining act for the night, and the main reason Mike and I decided to choose Saturday for our annual Bumbershoot experience, was Beck. I had seen him before in a much smaller venue when he was touring for Sea Change, but I knew this set would likely be much more upbeat given his new release, Modern Guilt.

The main reason I now can comment on the decent sound of Band of Horses' set is because the sound of Beck's was anything but. His microphone was cutting out throughout the first handful of songs and every now and then a high-pitched feedback would burst through the speakers. Other than the drums and bass, the rest of the band sounded like nothing but noise. Luckily, there was a brief interlude of about three songs in which the entire band was at the front of the stage, wearing headsets and playing all kinds of sounds on what Beck referred to as 808s, after which the sound problems had been mostly taken care of and we were able to actually enjoy the music.

The combination of the sound issues and the sparseness of musical acts to listen to throughout the day made for a less than memorable Bumbershoot this year. I had a good time catching up with my buddy Mike, though, and I'm sure we'll give it another shot next year. We'll probably just be a little more careful about the day and lineup we choose.

Red Beck courtesy of Flickr user mash187.

I’m trapped in the irony of this situation I have created for myself. Now that almost 20 others have taken up the invitation to work through the Artist’s Way together, I’m feeling the heat to be a good participant myself. Said irony is provided by this week’s topic — Recovering a Sense of Safety.

Dwelling in this irony reminds me of something that is too often true for me — the person creating this heat is me. The lack of safety I usually feel in expression and creativity comes, not from others, but from me. I have all sorts of conversations in my head about how others might hear or respond to what it is I haven’t yet said. (Case in point, I’m wondering even now how many times people will need to read that sentence to make any sense of it.) But the reality of those conversations is that, well, they happen in my head. For me, safety needs to come in caring a little less.

This reminds me of a quote by a hero of mine, Dr. Seuss, which I have mentioned before): Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

Speaking of quotes, here are some from the first reading that have been present in my thoughts this week:

• Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. — C.G. Jung (pg. 26)
• Young lawyers may be pushed toward lawyering, a talky, word profession, or into medical school because they’re so smart. And so the child who is himself a born storyteller may be converted into a gifted therapist who gets his stories secondhand. (pg. 27)
• To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. — Joseph Chilton Pearce (pg. 29)
• Remember that in order to recover as an artists, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. (pg. 30)

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artist’s way reflections: week one

There is a really, really good interview with Chuck Geschke, one of the two founders of Adobe, in Knowledge@Wharton this week. He goes through a bunch of the history of the company, talks about how Adobe made the transition from PostScript to regular Software, and there are a couple of digs at Microsoft.

It’s long but worth the read. Having been an internal employee for a little over a year, I think it gives good context to how and why Adobe does certain things. The interviewer, Kendall Whitehouse, has some additional thoughts worth reading.

Adobe has officially announced the announcement date of Creative Suite 4 (you know it’s a big deal when they announce an announcement). On September 23rd we’ll be unveiling the new stuff and show off the bundles, features, and products that will be included in the next version of Creative Suite. You can register for the special webcast here and see all of the action live.

This will be my first Creative Suite launch as an Adobe employee and I’m excited. There’s a ton of great stuff in Flash CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Photoshop/Illustrator that are going to help designers and developers come together to create great applications. More commentary over on BTL, and Lee’s Blog. As Lee says, this isn’t the launch date, just the unveiling of the suite and its various configurations.

Today marks the launch of my second blog, and first new one in over four years: A House By The Park. Please head over and have a look-see! Why a second blog when I only post to Mike Industries a few times a month? Well, I’m building a house, together with Build LLC. The first thing I [...]

I gave a talk at 360|Flex on how to use the new features in LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 to handle online/offline synchronization with your AIR applications. It was probably one of the worst talks I’ve given. For whatever reason I just wasn’t on my game. But I did create a code sample and I’ve got the slides for anyone who wants to jump in and try it out. I highly suggest checking out Christophe’s demo from which I drew a bunch of my inspiration. He’s implemented the functionality in Java while I’ve done it on the ColdFusion side. Hopefully if nothing else the ColdFusion developers out there will find the code useful as a starting point.

You can grab the code from my SVN repository or from the zip file. The ColdFusion files are stored in the cfc directory under the src directory. I’ve included copies of my XML configuration files (the services-config.xml and data-management-config.xml) in the destination_files directory. Everything else should be pretty straightforward.

There’s been a lot of good talk about Google Chrome and what it means for the web. I actually like Chris Messina’s take a lot partly because he’s so enthusiastic, but also because he’s generally right. Mozilla has failed the web in a lot of ways. It’s hard to move things forward when you’re also working through the standards process and a legacy code base doesn’t help. So Google did what Google does. They stepped over everyone else, used some standards where they could, took others that weren’t quite baked yet, and created a browser for the future. It’s hard to argue that what they’re doing is bad. Separate memory spaces for each tab (and therefore each application) and integrated Gears for offline and caching access. So where does this leave Flash and AIR?

I haven’t seen anything definite on whether or not Chrome will include the Flash plugin, but the comics mentioned plugins, so I’m taking it as a foregone conclusion. The ability to see which plugins are misbehaving should help both the engineering teams at Adobe and Flash developers to identify problems in code. But as Chrome moves upstream from typical browsers it moves into the space of Adobe AIR, and I think that’s where things get interesting. I love the model for Adobe AIR. We haven’t quite seen the “application hell” that a lot of folks expected. Instead it has allowed web developers to rapidly iterate on and build desktop applications. That’s led to some cool stuff. Everything from Twitter applications, to email clients/news readers, to social networking applications, to a host of other things. And one of the things that make it compelling is that you can talk to the operating system. You can write to the hard drive, you can create custom chrome, you can incorporate file types. We brought web application developers onto the desktop in a big way. Chrome wants to bring web developers closer but it still wants you to live in the browser for everything.

I continue to struggle with the trendy pick of everything being delivered inside of the browser. Look at the response to Chrome and it hasn’t even been released yet. People are completely fed up with how the browser works. Google’s powerful but can they fix all of the problems? What about, as Hank points out, the 25% of people still using IE6?! Are we going to be able to bring the browser-cloud promised land to them? Or is the best way to reach a majority of people through a metaphor they already understand: native applications?

I think what’s been decided is that the web wins. Web languages, web technologies, and web services are the future. Maintaing the flexibility of how we can use those technologies together is something that I see as important. I want to be able to build desktop applications with my web skills and while a ton of what I do will be in the browser, sometimes I just want to break free.

This is part of an ongoing series called Blinders where I explore some of the ways I streamline my computer workflows to minimize distractions.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the old 12″ G4 PowerBook. (That’s a guilt-free way of saying that I coveted one every time I saw one in the wild.) It’s thicker and heavier, but it’s the poor man’s version of the MacBook Air.

Earlier this year, I spied an original 867 mHz 12″ Powerbook on Craigslist at a price that was too good to be true. Of course, this served to remind me that the old G3 iBook used by our kids for educational purposes (wink) was much too slow. The iBook found it’s way to ebay, and the PowerBook found it’s way to a new home…our home.

I can look you in the eye and tell you that this little gem gets used more by our kids than it does by me. But, I admit I had some other ideas for it from the start. What could it be like, I wondered, to have a smaller laptop that I could use when I needed to hunker down and focus?

So it wouldn’t conflict with what my kids do, I created another account on this blinder workstation and set it up with a few essentials for a distraction free experience:

• Pages, Scrivener, Ecto, OmniFocus, and Yojimbo — If I’m going to be in a reflective or in a content creation mode these are my essential programs for taking notes and writing.
• MobileMe — Besides the standard features of syncing my calendar and address book, MobileMe also syncs Yojimbo and OmniFocus, both of which are important in my workflow.
• SugarSync — SugarSync is what made this possible. It syncs selected files or folders between computers. While I don’t want, or need, all of my documents on the PowerBook, with SugarSync I’ve been able to have available what I do need. 10gb of storage sets me back $2.49/month, and I get hassle free access to docs and a little extra backup.
• Most important might be the things I didn’t install or set up: Growl, Twitterific, NetNewsWire, iChat accounts, or Firefox bookmarks.

If you don’t have kids to use as an excuse to buy another laptop, you could do something similar by creating another user account on your laptop with only the essentials. Or you could just be more disciplined than I am when it comes to distractions. But then you wouldn’t have a reason to get a 12″ PowerBook…or a MacBook Air.

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the blinder workstation (or, the poor man’s macbook air)

The Artist’s Way Collective begins today. Week 1 focuses on Recovering a Sense of Safety.

For those who are participating with us, you can share your thoughts in the comments below. If you are using your blog to process your experiences, please leave us a link.

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the artist’s way collective: week 1 hub

I’ve become familiar with Michael Pollan through books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Tonight I ran across the images above, which are pictures of his writing house. He built it himself (which is documented in an earlier book called A Place of My Own). Larger pictures are available on his website.

I think he’s got Creativityist HQ pretty well beat.

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michael pollan hq