2009 was a very excit­ing and inter­est­ing year for me both per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally. I’d fin­ished up my first year at my day job and have found the time to take on a good deal of free­lance work to fuel my more cre­ative inter­ests. On top of all of that my wife and I are expect­ing our first child in April. I have a great feel­ing that 2010 is going to be an excit­ing year and will con­tinue to be prosperous.

Some of the work I did this year can be found in my Work sec­tion of the site; some high­lights include the brand­ing and web­site devel­op­ment for West­ern Spray Foam, wed­ding invi­ta­tions for my sister-in-law’s wed­ding that I just attended, as well as a gen­eral design touch-up for my own site which I recently completed.

I’m cur­rently fin­ish­ing up a new web­site project and will post it soon. I’ve found lately that it’s much eas­ier to find work devel­op­ing web­sites than graphic design, pri­mar­ily because fewer peo­ple tend to know how to design and code a web­site. This is great for me because web­sites tend to be longer term projects and can often allow for con­tin­u­ing devel­op­ment after the ini­tial launch, which helps pro­mote longer term client rela­tion­ships as well.

One of my favorite projects I did this year was for myself. It was a sub page of this site called Things I’ve Recently… The site was pri­mar­ily devel­oped as a cre­ative out­let for me to review and speak about inter­est­ing albums I’ve heard, films I’ve seen, and books I’ve read. I’ve found it’s much eas­ier to update a site that I can feed on a reg­u­lar basis with cre­ative input than to write a lengthy, well thought out blog entry about design. I think in the com­ing year I may incor­po­rate the updates from that site into the blog for this site so that it’s sort of a mixed bag of updates in case oth­ers haven’t found my RSS feed for the other site.

2010 is look­ing like a great year and I’m excited to see what devel­ops cre­atively and in my life in other regards. I’m super excited to become a Dad and can’t wait to meet my new daugh­ter. With­out fur­ther adieu, here are a few of my New Years Resolutions:

• Update both blogs more frequently.
• Work on more cre­ative projects for myself.
• Develop a web­site for my Daughter-to-Be as a place for friends and fam­ily to see pho­tos of her and get news about her (No we don’t have a name picked out).
• Enjoy life.

In an effort to get myself to blog more, I cre­ated a new part of my site called Things I’ve Recently…, essen­tially this is a log of my media con­sump­tion. Things I’ve read (nov­els, mag­a­zines), heard (albums, pod­casts), or seen (tele­vi­sion, films) I will write a review for and share my thoughts about. When think­ing of things to write blog posts about in the past I’ve always strug­gled with hav­ing an indi­vid­ual voice and con­tribut­ing some­thing of inter­est to the blo­gos­phere. Because I read, hear, and see so much it’s a much eas­ier out­let for me to describe in short my thoughts about each given item, in a man­ner than can be done quickly as well. I hope you enjoy the new part of the site. Also, if you’re a Google Reader fan, add my RSS feed so you’ll get updates when­ever I’ve added some­thing new to that part of the web­site. Ide­ally I’d like to update it once a week talk­ing about the media I con­sumed that given week.

So I’m absolutely lov­ing Hel­ve­tireader, a free user script for turn­ing your Google Reader into a slimmed down, mod­ern feed reader. You have two options for using the script, you can down­load Greasekit, and use it in a vari­ety of web browsers (basi­cally it uses cus­tom CSS to change the way Google Reader looks); or you can use an appli­ca­tion called Fluid to turn your Google Reader into a stand-alone appli­ca­tion, styled of course to look like Helvetireader. I pre­fer using the Fluid method, sim­ply because I treat my RSS feed read­ing as a stand­alone expe­ri­ence and pre­fer not to install scripts into my Safari and worry about bug­gi­ness later from Apple.

The basis of what makes Hel­ve­tireader effec­tive and attrac­tive is of course it’s use of Hel­vetica for text clar­ity and either tak­ing away or hid­ing cer­tain Google Reader func­tions. For exam­ple, after you’re done read­ing a post you have a mul­ti­tude of options at the bot­tom of the post (i.e. Add Star, Like, Email, etc.); Hel­ve­tireader hides this option until you hover over the area, so unless you choose to do one of these things your view­ing area isn’t clut­tered. It’s use of white space is also another huge ben­e­fit of using this script over the typ­i­cal Google Reader, you really feel like you’re just view­ing one post at a time instead of a screen full of text.

Because I use Google Reader every day, hav­ing an option to make this expe­ri­ence sim­pler and more visu­ally attrac­tive is def­i­nitely some­thing I’m inter­ested in. I posted a few screen­shots below to explain what it looks like, I’ve also made a cus­tom icon for my dock which works out very well. If anyone’s inter­ested I’ve posted the link to the cus­tom icon right here.

Space + Type = Space Vow­els, a lit­tle bit of space good­ness from yours truly for a rainy August evening

Some­times there’s noth­ing bet­ter than not using a cell phone, iPod, or the inter­net for a week, and I did just that, how refreshing.

Only down­side is that you return to this:

Poor Google Reader.

“Every now and then, you are intro­duced to a char­ac­ter who is eru­dite, has charm, wit and is worldly. You may be left feel­ing a lit­tle inse­cure about who you are and how you con­duct your­self or you may feel inspired to put on your best shoes and step for­ward into the world with a lit­tle more joie de vivre. Well as they say, “we give you Mon­sieur Boudin” that styl­ish lit­tle daschund from Paris.”

Absolutely lov­ing these greet­ing cards via Print & Pat­tern:

So I’ve def­i­nitely never been what I’d con­sider a ‘fan’ of vam­pire films, in fact I can’t say I’ve really even enjoyed them. Typ­i­cally they are cov­ered in soft-focus and roman­ti­cize the idea of being a vam­pire or com­pletely ostra­cize them from soci­ety, yet never giv­ing an audi­ence a very detailed under­stand­ing of what a vam­pire is. Insert HBO’s newest release on DVD, True Blood. A show about vam­pires for peo­ple who don’t really even like vam­pires shows. This isn’t Buffy and this isn’t Blade, or what­ever god awful ver­sion of vam­pire show/movie has been around for quite some time. What is amaz­ing about this show is the shear fact that it breaks most all con­ven­tions of ‘vam­pire’ shows, from dis­prov­ing vam­pire myths or at least explain­ing them, the show adds a lot of depth to a genre most of us either don’t like or aren’t informed about.

Alan Ball the cre­ator of my favorite HBO show Six Feet Under is back to tell the tale of Sookie Stack­house, a 25-year-old wait­ress liv­ing in small-town Louisiana where a year or two after the gov­ern­ment has began to offer equal rights to vam­pires (what the show called ‘com­ing out of the cof­fin’). One day the new vam­pire in town strolls into Sookie’s bar they become friends. I won’t go into too much detail on the premise of the show con­sid­er­ing there are lots of other reviews and/or descrip­tions out there. Ball pro­vides a sim­i­lar style of expo­si­tion as he does in Six Feet Under where the show is essen­tially an ensem­ble cast but quickly breaks into the pri­vate lives of all the key play­ers and relates them back to the group. Each of the char­ac­ters is so intrigu­ing, from the main char­ac­ters to the less impor­tant ones, I could really watch a show with any of them as the key actors because they are all very inter­est­ing in their own way.

If you’d like to see a won­der­ful show full of all that HBO good­ness (the sex, vio­lence, lan­guage, and grit) with a fan­tas­tic cast which I can’t get enough of, watch True Blood, out now on DVD with Sea­son 2 start­ing on June 15^th, I’m really want­ing HBO now.

On a equally impor­tant side note, another genre-breaking piece of vam­pire ephemera I recently saw was the amaz­ing Swedish vam­pire film Let the Right One In. This film is won­der­ful in so many ways, from the sub­tle use of color to the aus­tere Swedish land­scapes, the film cap­tures a place in time that feels both old and new while telling a story that feels time­less as well. I won’t bother talk­ing about the details of the film, but highly sug­gest a viewing.

I have sort of a LOVE/HATE rela­tion­ship with sites who post lists of great designs on the inter­net. I really LOVE the fact that they are a con­stant source of inspi­ra­tion, and offer a sense of con­ve­nience that some other indi­vid­ual has taken the time to scour the inter­net in search of what is great out there that’s worth see­ing in the world of design. I HATE the fact that so many exist yet col­lec­tively have a lot of the same con­tent. This is mostly a prob­lem because if I check my daily web­sites and see the same things posted in 4 dif­fer­ent sites, the inspi­ra­tion is lack­ing and feels like a lot of peo­ple are talk­ing at once yet no one is hear­ing one another.

This is one of the rea­sons I’ve really con­sid­ered not hav­ing a blog at all. Yes I’d love to have a place to share my thoughts and inspi­ra­tion about design, but do I really want to become part of the cacoph­ony ? Sim­ply hav­ing blog posts link­ing to other people’s blog posts seems counter-productive in the efforts to share indi­vid­ual and unique thoughts (what I thought a blog was for). Within the last few years how­ever there have been a few web­sites that really get the idea of col­lec­tive blog post­ing right. The idea that users could visit the site see what every­one col­lec­tively thought was inter­est­ing, but not hav­ing to deal with repeated ideas.

Sites like FFF­Found come to mind and just announced today We Love Typog­ra­phy offer oppor­tu­ni­ties for users to visit the sites, get inspired and feel like hey this is exactly what I was look­ing for, a place that has a lot of great exam­ples of work yet not just deriv­a­tive lists of links to other peo­ples sites, well sort of. Okay both of these sites do link to other people’s sites and exam­ples of work, but it’s done in the right way, by a ded­i­cated com­mu­nity of like-minded indi­vid­u­als that find great stuff and post them all in the same place, elim­i­nat­ing the need for a dis­parate group of web­sites link­ing back to the same content.

It’s becom­ing more and more appar­ent that the future of the inter­net is not to have all of these ‘peo­ple’ out there with web­sites that really aren’t related to each other, but to have col­lec­tive web­sites where every­one con­tributes to a sin­gle thought and idea. Take Wikipedia for exam­ple, only one indi­vid­ual actu­ally works for Wikipedia (the tech/web site guy), and every­one else whom ‘builds’ the web­site are vol­un­teers, or oth­ers on the web, every­one talks, but they also lis­ten, which cohe­sively pro­motes a sin­gle, shared idea. The same can be said for web­sites like Digg or even Face­book; with every­one link­ing back and forth and pro­mot­ing shared expe­ri­ences peo­ple are bridg­ing the gap between hav­ing pri­vate inter­net lives, to pub­lic, shared lives.

I think as a whole this is a great thing, espe­cially because the inter­net wouldn’t work at all if every­one wasn’t com­mu­ni­cat­ing, but what I think is most impor­tant about this tran­si­tion to a social web, is that every­one needs to speak clearly, and when applic­a­ble speak col­lec­tively. Sure every­one out there has some­thing inter­est­ing to say, but if your point of view is the same as another’s, why not speak together to more clearly com­mu­ni­cate what you’re try­ing to say?

So I’ve been a pretty big fan of min­i­mal, grid-based designs for a while and hadn’t fig­ured out an appro­pri­ate way to imple­ment them into the web­site, with­out look­ing too ‘min­i­mal’, or as the un-initiated might say “plain”. But I’d been think­ing a lot lately about why min­i­mal design works on so many lev­els and it all boils down to one thing: clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

This is very impor­tant when it comes to graphic design because no mat­ter how good an idea is, if it isn’t exe­cuted clearly it fails. Ideas work best when they speak for them­selves and do not need expla­na­tion. I’ve seen a lot of designs where it may look inter­est­ing or have artis­tic value, but beyond the gloss of the piece, does it clearly com­mu­ni­cate the idea? This brings me to a crux in my design career, how do I clearly com­mu­ni­cate my work and my thoughts and let them mean what they say? Minimalism. Clean lines, less clut­ter and sim­ple, gloss-free “win­dows” into my work as it is.

So I humbly present the next phase of my web­site, a sim­ple, ele­gant solu­tion to a world of web­sites clut­tered by gloss. More new work shall be posted soon.

I gen­er­ally love every­thing Apple usu­ally releases, espe­cially their line of iPods which seem to be get­ting bet­ter over time, includ­ing new fea­tures, larger stor­age sizes and cheaper prices, but I must put my foot down and oppose the new iPod Shuf­fle. First of all, how was the 2^nd Gen­er­a­tion Shuf­fle not small enough in size? The new ver­sion fea­tures a ‘much smaller size’, I’m sorry but I don’t think I’d enjoy los­ing my new Shuf­fle three days after I bought it because it slipped out of my hands and for­ever got lost in a sofa. Also, I’m not sure about you, but hav­ing a robot voice tell me what song I’m lis­ten­ing to isn’t an appeal­ing fea­ture, in fact I think it com­pletely takes away from the organic expe­ri­ence of hav­ing a Shuf­fle. I had a 2^nd Gen­er­a­tion Shuf­fle and loved it. It allowed me to expe­ri­ence my music in a new way, I wasn’t dis­tracted by con­stantly see­ing what song I was lis­ten­ing to, but my music just flowed with my day either via full album or a won­der­ful mix.

I think in the case of the new ver­sion Apple was try­ing too hard to pro­mote new fea­tures with­out accept­ing was was already great about the prod­uct. I think that in new devices hav­ing a voice over com­mand is a good idea, but with the Shuf­fle, need­ing to spend 5 min­utes to get to an option to change your playlist seems coun­ter­in­tu­itive, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that most peo­ple would prob­a­bly be using the device while run­ning. I think the best fea­ture about the new prod­uct is it’s upgrade in size, with­out increase in price, $79 seem­ing to be the high­est most peo­ple are will­ing to pay for some­thing the size of a paper­clip. In addi­tion, mov­ing the con­trols to the ear­buds is also a good idea, con­sid­er­ing, unlike the iPhone you’ll always be using your ear­buds when using the device. All and all I would have to con­sti­tute the new gen­er­a­tion of the iPod Shuf­fle as a fail, but as with other iPods Apple will most likely go back and forth between the designs while fig­ur­ing out what users really want (see the iPod Nano size and ori­en­ta­tion between pre­vi­ous versions).

Hey every­one, so in the spirit of this week­end I wanted to share a few posters I made for the event. The first is a nice rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what ‘Love is in the Air’ might mean, and the sec­ond is because not every­one is enjoy­ing sun­shine and rain­bows for their Valentine’s Day, a lot of peo­ple get won­der­ful rain in Feb­ru­ary. For­tu­nately, here in Port­land we were spared the rain and had a mostly over­cast day. I hope you enjoy. (Each poster image links to the actual PDF if you’d like to have a copy, enjoy.)

Love is in the Air

Rainy Days and Mon­days Always Get Me Down

So it’s been a few months since I last wrote a post, mostly because I’m really lazy, but partly because I’ve been work­ing a lot and try­ing to find the time for a site re-design. I’ve been in the habit of re-designing my site about once every few months as I learn more about Word­press and deter­mine how I want my web iden­tity to be per­ceived. I think this cur­rent ver­sion (Ver­sion 8.0) will be some­thing I won’t try to touch for a while. I was striv­ing for a clean, min­i­mal­ist style that allowed my work and my thoughts to stand for them­selves, and feel that I achieved that pretty well. While I’ll be fuss­ing a bit with IE and try­ing to make my site look equally good in that browser as well as all oth­ers the site as it stands is pretty much up-to-date.

In the next few weeks I’m going to try and find the time to update my work sec­tion with new projects I’ve worked on in the last few months and actu­ally hav­ing the infor­ma­tion be accu­rate and rel­e­vant to the images seen next to it. I’ve always strug­gled with a way to dis­play my work with­out hav­ing too much super­flu­ous con­tent, so hope­fully I’ll arrive at some­thing that’s sim­ple and elegant.

If any­one has any sug­ges­tions to parts of the site that don’t work for them or feel could use some improve­ment, let me know, I’m always look­ing for feedback.

So on Octo­ber 11, Alli­son and I finally got mar­ried! We had been dat­ing for nearly 4 years and it was so great to finally be able to offi­cially be mar­ried. We’d felt like we’d already been mar­ried for a while now, so being able to offi­cially call our­selves hus­band and wife was a won­der­ful thing. We went to San Fran­cisco for our hon­ey­moon and it was awe­some. The weather was per­fect and we got to see / do just about every­thing we wanted to. We’d never been to San Fran, but have wanted to for a while, so being able to check that off our list of Places to Travel was awe­some. Now that the wed­ding is over the site we were using for all things wedding-related (allisonloves​jared​.com) will now most likely be a more per­sonal, fam­ily related blog, we’ll put pho­tos up of our wed­ding and other things related to that on that site.

That being said, I am going to start focus­ing more on hav­ing this site be design-related and try (key­word: try!) to update this site a lot more often. I’ve really only been focus­ing on updat­ing this blog with maybe one entry a month, and that sucks. I read tons of design-related blogs and love the fre­quency that they update them, it’s what keeps me com­ing back. Now that I’m a lit­tle less busy and plan­ning to hope­fully push for­ward with some new busi­ness strate­gies and actu­ally take on more work, hope­fully things will get mov­ing and I’ll be able to turn this site less into a per­sonal web­site, and more into a business-related / design-related site. But, we’ll see. Take care and keep read­ing, I swear there will be more to read.

So I real­ize I haven’t yet writ­ten an actual per­sonal blog about me yet, mostly just movies and design stuff, so here’s my offi­cial update to the world:

• I am offi­cially now work­ing for a won­der­ful large com­pany doing graphic design, I of course won’t post their name on here, but thought it would be nice to say I have an offi­cial full-time job doing what I love. No more temp/freelance work to make a liv­ing, I can actu­ally start feel­ing com­fort­able about plan­ning for the future. 
• I am get­ting mar­ried on Octo­ber 11^th to the love of my life. She and I have been together for almost 4 years, and have had many won­der­ful adven­tures includ­ing going to Italy and France, Hawaii sev­eral times (her home) and soon we’ll be mak­ing a trek down to San Fran­cisco for our hon­ey­moon. If you’d like more info about our wed­ding go to our wed­ding web­site Alli­son Loves Jared Dot Com. 
• I finally have a won­der­ful new com­puter set-up with a 20″ iMac with 500GB Hard Drive, 4 Gigs of Ram and a 1TB Time Cap­sule for all my back­ing up glory. This may not seem that great, but Alli­son and I have liv­ing off of a Mac­Book for far too long with way too much music and pho­tos (about 50 Gigs total) and not enough space. Hav­ing all of our con­tent on our com­puter and not hav­ing to plug in an exter­nal hard drive every time we wanted to look at our pho­tos or lis­ten to music is a huge relief. More on my Apple love later.
• My birth­day is next Tues­day (August 26) and I’m going to be 23. A lot has hap­pened in the last 4–5 years that have really changed who I am and where I’m going in life, and it’s always inter­est­ing to be a year older and real­ize how dif­fer­ent you are and what’s hap­pened since your last birth­day. It’s prob­a­bly best not to think about this too much, but I can cer­tainly say the last year of my life a lot of really great stuff has happened. 
• For a while now I’ve been sup­ple­ment­ing my income by doing design work under my free­lance moniker Jared Pen­der­graft Designs, it’s worked pretty well and I’ve been able to get a decent amount of extra income work­ing with clients I’ve met along the way. A friend of mine had recently con­tacted me with the idea of start­ing a new media group focus­ing the tal­ents and ambi­tions of sev­eral peo­ple to work in a cre­ative col­lec­tive. I’ve been a big fan of this idea for quite some­time and I’m really glad my friend brought it up. Not only do I think design­ers typ­i­cally aren’t good at mar­ket­ing, but they also shouldn’t be spend­ing a ton of their time not-designing. By using a collective’s tal­ent you can get more clients, do more work, and focus on bet­ter design (at least if you’re a designer). I’ll keep up to date when more develops. 

It’s hard to explic­itly say why Funny Games is a really great film with­out see­ing it. It’s basi­cally a film about non-sensical vio­lence that wants the viewer to feel bad for want­ing to see a film about non-sensical vio­lence. Michael Haneke recre­ates his 1997 film of the same name (this ver­sion being the Ger­man director’s first English-Speaking film). Prior to Funny Games the last Haneke film Amer­i­can audi­ences were able to enjoy was Caché, and if you’ve seen this film the pace and style of Funny Games will not sur­prise you. Of another inter­est­ing note this ver­sion of Funny Games is a shot-for-shot remake of his older film (an exer­cise in futil­ity as a film­maker I suppose).

Basi­cally Funny Games is about an afflu­ent fam­ily (Naomi Watts & Tim Roth, and son) who visit their vaca­tion house for a typ­i­cal week­end away. Upon arriv­ing to their gated com­mu­nity of other afflu­ent fam­i­lies Ann (Naomi Watts) rolls down her win­dow to shout out to a neigh­bor inquir­ing about their game of golf for the next day, the neigh­bor is accom­pa­nied by two young men dressed in all white golf clothes and acts very strange. A few scenes later after the fam­ily has arrived at their own home one of the young men has come to Ann’s door to ask to bor­row a few eggs for the other neigh­bor. The young man acts clum­sily and drops the eggs and ‘acci­dently’ drops Ann’s cell phone into a sink full of water. The young man now intro­duced as Peter (aka Tom, aka Beavis), acts very polite and apol­o­gizes for his clum­si­ness and pro­ceeds to ask for addi­tional eggs, Ann becom­ing very short obliges and whisks Peter away. All the while George (Tim Roth) and son Georgie are out­doors work­ing on their boat, and their dog is bark­ing non-stop. A few moments later the other young man from next door, Paul (aka Jerry, aka Butthead), appears at the door look­ing for Peter. Unknow­ingly Ann lets Paul inside to wait for Peter pri­mar­ily because Paul acts so politely and appears to be a nice young man.

With­out going into too much more detail a few scenes later Peter and Paul have com­pletely turned the tables and have basi­cally taken the fam­ily hostage in their own home by tak­ing a golf club to George’s leg, crip­pling the patri­arch and in the world of the film ren­der­ing the mother and son help­less (a point of con­tention for some viewers). After hold­ing the fam­ily hostage Peter & Paul announce that they are going to play a lit­tle game, and basi­cally bet that the fam­ily will not be alive 12 hours from now, and the fam­ily must bet that they will. So at it’s heart this film is sort of a home-invasion movie, but the trick to it all is that the vic­tims are only as help­less as they want to be. After this premise is revealed the plot sort of runs it’s course and other ter­ri­ble things hap­pen to the fam­ily. But what makes this film so bril­liant in this aspect is that the vio­lence doesn’t have a spe­cific pur­pose, it’s never revealed to the audi­ence why Peter & Paul want to inflict pain onto the fam­ily other than ‘just because’. This breaks the gen­eral pur­pose of a horror/suspense film genre in that we can’t blame or iden­tify with the antagonist’s for the bad they are doing. With­out being able to say ‘oh those guys are pure psy­chopaths who are only pure evil’ we as audi­ence mem­bers can’t feel sym­pa­thy for the vic­tims and root for the good guys to win.

Such unusual things as one of the antagonist’s walk­ing off screen to make a sand­wich while the other one shoots a fam­ily mem­ber is another very weird per­spec­tive often not seen in this genre. By Haneke pro­vid­ing these scenes between the scenes views of what might be hap­pen­ing off screen the film feels all the more ‘real’, which is another aspect that I feel is nec­es­sary to con­vey the mes­sage he is try­ing to pro­vide. Will you like this movie? Prob­a­bly not. Most peo­ple don’t because they go into the film think­ing it’s just going to be another horror/home-invasion movie and that the good guys will win, but they don’t. The film ends with­out the sat­is­fac­tion of any of the mod­ern struc­tures of films we’ve come to know. The bad guys get away with mur­der­ing the fam­ily and con­tinue on to a next unsus­pect­ing fam­ily. What’s the point of this? Well like No Coun­try for Old Men, the film is a the­sis on our mod­ern soci­ety and the idea that not every ends with hap­pi­ness, that there is vio­lence in the world and there’s a lot that peo­ple get away with. I think most peo­ple who go into this film with the under­stand­ing that this film is try­ing to say that ‘hey, why are you so inter­ested in see­ing glo­ri­fied vio­lence in film, it isn’t a good thing, and you shouldn’t be excited to see it, even from the safety of your couch’. One other small note about the film is that even though it seems like this film is vio­lent or intends to be vio­lent, all vio­lence is shown off-screen.

Pixar’s newest film Wall-E is excep­tional. Excep­tional not in the way that ‘hey this is really great ani­ma­tion’ but excep­tional in what it does for ani­mated films. I think it’s the first film to finally bridge the gap between ani­mated films for chil­dren, and ani­mated films for adults. Mind you, sit­ting in the the­ater wait­ing for the film to actu­ally start was a daunt­ing task, as you’re sur­rounded by chil­dren, and every god-awful trailer was tar­geted for what seems to be the exactly wrong crowd for a Pixar film. Of course the only good thing about sit­ting through the trail­ers of any Pixar film is their new orig­i­nal short film, this time around it was Presto, and I’ve got to say, it is one of their best. 

One of the strangest things I noticed in the first few min­utes of Wall-E was Pixar’s use of what appeared to be either real video footage, or ani­mated footage made to look very real. I’m not sure the exact pur­pose of doing this, other than to per­haps illus­trate the that this new dystopian future por­trayed within Wall-E was what we’d become, if we were to con­tinue using the planet at the rate we are now. Speak­ing of plan­e­tary respon­si­bil­ity, that’s another huge step for­ward for Pixar; in Wall-E, Pixar actu­ally tack­les a real social issue. They tackle this issue in a some­what un-cartoony way as well, by show­ing harsh exam­ples of what the world would become if we were to be waste­ful and unin­volved, for exam­ple, humans aboard the space­ship The Axiom sit in float­ing chairs with video screens in front of their faces, con­stantly ‘drink­ing’ food, and are grossly obese. This sort of por­trayal I think is nec­es­sary to trans­late a more com­plex idea to chil­dren as well as adults, where more spe­cific adult-oriented ideas in the film such as highly consumer-inflated lifestyles are present to adults. 

All social issues aside Wall-E is a won­der­ful love story. In the past, Pixar films have tended to be more ori­ented with issues of friend­ship and fam­ily (i.e. Toy Story or The Incred­i­bles), and less focused on some­thing as sim­ple as a love story between two char­ac­ters of dif­fer­ent back­grounds. Wall-E is a trash com­pact­ing robot left on Earth to clean up after a des­o­lated planet, when Eve (a veg­e­ta­tion prob­ing robot) comes to Earth look­ing for any signs of real life. Instantly Wall-E falls in love with Eve because to him she rep­re­sents all that Wall-E wants, com­pan­ion­ship and some­one to hold hands with. After a some­what com­plex sce­nario, Eve even­tu­ally real­izes Wall-E’s ded­i­ca­tion to her and returns the feel­ings. The film really is as sim­ple as that, but wait, there’s so much more. From the amaz­ing ani­ma­tion to the very Apple-esque visu­als Wall-E com­mu­ni­cates it’s base emo­tions with lit­tle to no dia­logue at all. 

All and all, what makes Wall-E a fan­tas­tic film is it’s abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate to mul­ti­ple audi­ences with mul­ti­ples mes­sages and still be a very enter­tain­ing film for peo­ple who don’t want to think about social issues or how great the visu­als look. If this film is any indi­ca­tion of the direc­tion Pixar is mov­ing I’m very excited.

So I’d held off for a while think­ing I really “needed” an iPhone, I mean of course they’re amaz­ing, but I’d been going along with hav­ing just a shuf­fle for almost a year, and it really did what it needed to — play music. But just yes­ter­day thanks to Apple’s always won­der­ful “Back to School” pro­mo­tion I was able to get my hands on a free iPod Touch, a just-as-good as an iPhone with­out the has­sle of a cell phone plan music player. I must say this new lit­tle toy is fan­tas­tic. Every­thing I wanted out of an iPhone — the abil­ity to get on the internet, to be able to have beau­ti­ful album art­work while lis­ten­ing to my music, being able to watch videos, and of course hav­ing all of my con­tacts and iCal events — this won­der­ful device has.

Most peo­ple might argue that “you can only get on the inter­net when you have a WiFi con­nec­tion” as a huge down­fall of the iPod Touch con­sid­er­ing that is one of the main dif­fer­ences between the Touch and the iPhone but I must argue that this is a good thing. By this I mean I’m sick of this super-connectivity that peo­ple seem to deem so impor­tant in their lives. Do you really need to be able to check your email while you’re stand­ing in line at the movie the­ater? I think that hav­ing the occa­sional option (when close to a WiFi con­nec­tion) of being able to use inter­net ser­vices and use the iPod Touch for the other pur­pose it has aside from play­ing music is a great thing, and pre­vents peo­ple from using their iPod as a rea­son not to make social con­tact with other human beings.

When I first saw that the iPod Touch came out I was baf­fled as to why any­one would buy one, con­sid­er­ing you could buy an iPhone and that the Touch was essen­tially just a phone-less iPhone (which it is), but after play­ing with it I can really see why they are actu­ally sell­ing, and that’s because the core base of peo­ple buy­ing iPods in gen­eral want it to do what it’s sup­posed to do, play music. All of the other super­flu­ous extras like being able to use the inter­net and send email are just that, extras. Don’t get me wrong if you’re going to go all out and get an iPhone I really do think you should be able to do all the things it’s sup­posed to do because you are pay­ing a monthly sub­scrip­tion for some of those things, but for most peo­ple we want the sim­ple things an iPod is sup­posed to be, with­out hav­ing to feel super-connected.

If you want some­thing that has great tech­nol­ogy (specif­i­cally the touch func­tion­al­ity and tight inte­gra­tion with all the major Apple apps), while still being a great media player, you should con­sider an iPod Touch. If you want the has­sle of check­ing your email in the bath­room buy an iPhone.

So I’ve given in. After nearly two years of the Wii being out, I now have to have one. Am I just hop­ping onto the Wii Fit band­wagon, well prob­a­bly, but who wouldn’t. I’ve never con­sid­ered myself a gamer, or felt like I had enough time to play video games, but with the release of the new Wii Fit, I can trade up the costs I would nor­mally fork out for a gym mem­ber­ship and buy some­thing that’s both good for you and fun to play.

I have friends who really love the Wii and have been telling me how great they are since they’ve come out, and until now I think that the mar­ket the Wii is really excit­ing to has never been the kind of per­son I am. Wii Fit really changes all of that by offer­ing a rea­son to buy a video game con­sole with­out nec­es­sar­ily hav­ing the inten­tion to play video games, but instead to get to play video games when hap­pen­ing to get some exer­cise. Another aspect that really makes the Wii Fit enjoy­able for those of us who aren’t used to sit­ting for hours and play­ing video games, is that by offer­ing short-burst like games, the idea of play­ing won’t get boring.

One of the things that’s always amazed me about about the Wii is how smart it is, and how play­ing games and inter­act­ing with your Mii char­ac­ters become part of your lifestyle, not just plug­ging in a game and play­ing. On top of all the other way cool things the Wii offers, you can buy old clas­sic games you grew up play­ing. Don­key Kong, Super Mario, Zelda if you’re so inclined; all of these can be down­loaded directly to your con­sole via a wire­less con­nec­tion and stored on your machine. You sim­ply buy a “Clas­sic” con­troller and you can play any mul­ti­tude of old games with­out hav­ing to pur­chase mul­ti­ple con­soles, and clean up some space for the super­flu­ous acces­sories you have to have.

So after work today or tomor­row I’m going to go get my Wii, and with a friend’s help a Wii Fit too, and this week­end I will get Mii fit.

Last week­end I had an oppor­tu­nity to join the 65,000+ peo­ple in Portland’s Water­front Park to see Barak Obama and I must say wow. It’s not so much that Barak is a politi­cian as he is a great speaker, who really makes you believe what he’s say­ing. I’m sure for many peo­ple it’s dif­fi­cult to look at the idea of hav­ing a new pres­i­dent and be excited to hear what they have to say. For years and years all peo­ple have felt towards politi­cians is a sense of dis­trust and over­all apa­thy for their ideas and the posi­tions and which they stand for. Early on I could see that with Barak Obama this would be different.

Many peo­ple have sug­gested that sup­port­ing Barak lately has been part of “Obama Fever” or what­ever buzz term they’re using to describe his unprece­dented approval rat­ing and over­all fan­dom. I cant’ say this is the case, I mean if you’ve had a chance to lis­ten to the man speak, it’s not about lik­ing him for being pop­u­lar, it’s about lik­ing his ideas, that also hap­pen to be pop­u­lar. I won’t go into detail regard­ing why the things he speaks about are good, because I’m sure you already know why they are, but I will say that the charisma in which he presents his ideas is awe inspir­ing an d unmatched by any of his opponents.

I stood in line for just about 3 hours on Sun­day in the heat of an unusu­ally Summer-Inspired Ore­gon day, and was amazed not only with the amount of peo­ple who were in front and behind me in line, but with the positive-oriented inten­sity in which all these other fans of Barak Obama had gath­ered to see and speak about Barak. I was pretty dis­ap­pointed I missed The Decem­berists, con­sid­er­ing they played an hour-long free set, but being part of the line to see Barak was more of an expe­ri­ence than is typ­i­cally asso­ci­ated with a polit­i­cal rally, or rather wait­ing in line for any large event.

All and all I’m extremely excited to see Barak Obama take the pres­i­dency, and for me it’s not so much about a “change” that each can­di­date seems to be promis­ing, but it’s the integrity and over­all good-hearted-ness that Barak brings to the table. Lis­ten­ing to him speak I actu­ally believed every­thing he was say­ing, mostly because he was inspir­ing peo­ple not by promis­ing them things (which most can­di­dates can’t deliver), but by sug­gest­ing how by every­one work­ing together, we can improve Amer­ica. That’s the key, he isn’t the cat­a­lyst for change, we are; and by de-throning him­self and putting the power of pol­i­tics into the hands of Amer­i­cans, there might actu­ally be a hope for this country.