Piggybacking on the “Busy is Good” post, I have continued to remain incredibly busy since the beginning of the year. I would have to say that I am not personally experiencing the downside of this recession yet and I hope that continues to hold true. I’m not one to “knock on wood” but I am also keenly aware that everything could melt-down tomorrow. But I have to say that I almost feel guilty when people ask “how’s business?” with a trepidatious tone and a hanky ready to wipe up the puddle of tears that is surely ready to pour forth as I confess all the horrors of dried-up business and clients gone belly-up and all I can say is, “I’ve never been busier.”

Now busy-ness is one of those blessings and curses kind of things. But even with the curses, its always one of those “good-to-have” kind of problems that you’d rather have than the lack thereof. One of the problems is outlined in the aforementioned “Busy is Good” post in that I just have not been able to make even quick posts to this blog. Some others are a disorganized desk and office evidenced in picture above (to be totally honest, I had to “straighten” piles before taking the shot ), playing catch-up with business issues like invoicing, bill-paying, collecting and so-on. Another frustration is not being able to work on your own marketing and self-promotion but the biggest frustration by far is, being too busy to spend quality time with my family. Being able to spend more time with my family is one of the reasons I am self-employed in the first place, so it goes without saying that when you are glued to a computer so much that your kids forget what the front of your face looks like, that you are frustrating your family even more than if you were working in an office or on the road all the time. At least that way they may be frustrated, but I daresay its a bit easier to deal with it, but when you’re there so close physically, but so far away mentally, that’s just provoking frustration. I have to say that I have a great family and they are very patient and very appreciative of the fact that my busy-ness will pay the bills (eventually), but I have greatly enjoyed this past week of breathing a little easier and while I’ve continued to neglect things like updating this blog and invoicing in a more timely manner, I’ve been able to relax and recharge with my family over a beautiful spring weekend at home and spend some quality and quantitative time with my girls (we even watched BBC’s Wives and Daughters together—now if that isn’t love…).

This week, begins a fresh round of deadlines and renewed busy-ness, but I am hoping and making plans to keep it from becoming as much of a trial as it was the past couple of months. I will be training my daughter in basic web-design and the ways of WordPress in order to take care of “two birds with one stone” so to speak as well as I will also be looking at sub-contracting out more work if the busy-ness persists through the next couple of quarters. In addition, I will probably look at bringing my daughter on full-time as her skills get up to speed and I am looking forward to that.

So, at least, I have a new post up, even if it is only about the tired excuse of being too busy to post—at least I have that excuse and for that I’m thankful.

It also seems ironic that the busier I am and not able to finish blog posts, I seem to get more ideas of potential good ones. For example, I’m just itching to write another post about AppleTV with all the news out the last week and a half about it. The only problem is that if you don’t sit down and start writing right away, specially if it involves breaking news regarding technology or politics, your final post–when you get around to finishing it–won’t be as fresh and relevant, not to mention, other news can break that might render your unfinished ideas and points moot anyways. So, the pressure is on to strike while the iron is hot and get that post finished.

In the meantime, back to werk!

I do have to say that the saving grace in this storm is that it was cold and the snow was light and fluffy. So, while shoveling light, fluffy snow can be a challenge in itself (think eating peas with a butter knife), it is not as hard as shoveling wet snow. And I have to give a big shout out to my neighbors who pitched in shovels, backs, snow-blowers and plow-equipped ATV’s to help everyone shovel out each other’s driveways. Even with all the help, I pretty much missed a whole day of work shoveling. And I work from home!

So, I’m enjoying the effects of Advil now and resting up for another storm supposed to hit on Sunday that they say will bring possibly another 4-6″ of snow. Bring it on. What’s 6″? Heck, I’ll take 12″! I just hope I don’t have to shovel 30″ of snow in my lifetime again!

I got a pleasant surprise when I went to MyFonts.com a couple of days ago and saw the new sneak peak at the beta version redesign. What I once thought was my little secret will now be completely out of the bag. No longer will other designers be put off by the almost amateurish appearance of the old site this is replacing. MyFonts was one of those sites whose functionality more than made up for its lack of design sophistication. But I always felt if there was any site that deserved a better site design, MyFonts was it. And now it has one. And it is several orders of magnitude in both the design as well as the functionality.

One of the features I loved was the ability to save your own albums of font designs with various text samples. The old site was frustrating in that you  had to go through a rather convoluted and hidden series of pages to even view your own albums let alone set a new one up. And then, when you wanted to add a font to an album, it would only let you add it to the “selected” album. You’d have to go back to your album page and change the selection. Now you have the ability to add to any previous album and even better, you can also create them much quicker without having to go through the old maze. You can do it from any font sample now with a very slick AJAX interface.

Another great feature that has been beefed up is the “WhatTheFont” feature. This is a great tool to identify an obscure typeface that you need to match. I have had good success with the old version but am even more impressed with the updated feature. You can either upload a graphic or point it to a URL of an image and it will then process the image and try to break it down into separate characters (which can be tricky for hand-written script style fonts) and then shows you what it thought was the best letter choice for each shape. Then you can enter in the correct character if there is any that are mismatched. It will then go through its database of fonts and show you a list of potential matches. In the new version, your original characters that you uploaded will stay stationary on the right as you scroll down through the list, so you always have a visual to compare the suggested fonts to. Very slick and very effective.

And then finally, is the overall design. I hate to rag on others’ designs in public, but the old design was not even good for 1998. It just never looked like it was designed by someone who truly appreciated fonts. But, it was mostly functional if you were willing to poke through all the navigation that was needed to enjoy its features. The functional reward definitely outweighed the negative of the design. And like I hinted at earlier, I actually looked at it for a long time as a designer’s advantage because I was hoping that others would be put off by the design and not realize what a great site it was and thereby giving me some sort of creative advantage. Shame on me, I know. But the new design more than atones for the old site’s aesthetic transgressions.

With all that said, not everyone is happy with the changes as is evidenced by some of the comments on the Feedback forum but I know from experience that will always be the price of moving forward. I’m trusting that the MyFonts team is listening to the criticisms with a grain of salt. I want to encourage the team to a job well done and wish them success in ironing out any final issues and getting the new design live. Kudos MyFonts! Would love to hear more about the process involved.

So, what is still missing? One of the things that Matthew mentioned was actually having a video Skype line open all day with one of his partners–basically transforming his home office into a virtual cubicle (sans cubicle walls). That was intriguing to me, because one of the advantages of real water cooler talk is the face-to-face interaction with associates, but without an actual remote business partner, that would prove to be a little difficult for my situation (random strangers might offer some interest–but too weird) and the people that I chat with on a regular basis probably wouldn’t be thrilled with the idea of surveillance. I think there is a privacy threshold that one has to take into consideration for most people. I know that while I wouldn’t mind the instant access, it is more than a little disconcerting to know that everything going on (at least within view of the cam) is observable and listenable by someone else. When there is a physical presence of others, we’re more likely to be on our better social behavior (you know, like not breaking wind or humming obnoxious songs), but without a constant reminder of someone else’s presence, we may behave in a manner that might meet with shock or irritation (or repulsion).

I know that you would conceivably have the video chat window open as a reminder, but unless you have decent screen real estate on at least two screens, the Skype window (or iChat) would be relegated to the back of open application windows while you’re working. Do I want to listen to someone tapping, typing, sniffling, coughing, yelling at others in the house (not that I do any of those things but I’m sure there are some out there who do) just to be able to have always-on access?

The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that IM and twitter are sufficient for the task for me. In fact, the water cooler has become a whole lot bigger and filled with more interesting people than just those who I used to work in an office with (no offense former office co-peeps). Not that I haven’t worked with very interesting people, but I’m referring to the more mundane small talk that more often than not characterizes real-world water cooler talk. You know, the type that you’re just looking at the clock thinking about the deadline that you’re on, but you don’t want to be rude to your co-worker as their glossing over their gardening cleanup day or about Stargate SG-1.

Twitter allows you that certain degree of rudeness because there’s not as much expectation of an immediate reply. Therefore, you can control the involvement based on your workload. One thing that is not missing is the distraction factor of water cooler talk from the tasks at hand and in this area I can confidently say that twitter far outshines reality for this ability. There are many times when I have to turn Twitter off and set my iChat to “Away” to focus on deadlines. Something that was always hard in open-office environments. But I continue to be amazed by my ability to be distracted (oh, look! shiny!), but I am getting better as Twitter and IM have woven themselves into the fabric of my workday. While there is some overlap for me between IM and Twitter I think Twitter has become more of the background chatter and banter while IM is closer to what I would call a true water cooler experience in addition to being a critical and effective collaboration tool–something that the water cooler was never able to provide. And as for email? Email is the new Snail Mail.

I still have several things to finish on it. In addition to rewriting a lot of the copy (I’m always on the look out for good copywriters!), I will be implementing more jquery effects on the frontpage main image area. I am also working on new CSS for the form on the Contact Us page and will be applying the design to a WordPress theme and launching a dedicated blog for WDWerks. Currently, the blog link directs to this site but that will change soon.

Would enjoy getting anybody’s thoughts or feedback on it. And definitely let me know if you see any problems with it.

Now one thing to keep in mind, shushing other people’s dogs is not really a recommended activity if you want to keep civil relations with your neighbors, that is unless they’re all watching Cesar Millan too. Which, happens to be the case in our neighborhood–so its all good. But keep in mind, when you deal with other people’s dogs, its not entirely unlike disciplining other people’s children in front of them–it just doesn’t sit too well with most people.

It’s an interesting phenomenon how we are blind to our own children’s (and dog’s) disobedient tendencies. We tend to rationalize it away and apply the excuse that it’s “their temperament” or it’s because “they’re that way because they’re Rottweilers” or “because they’re Irish” (I’m mixing kids with dogs–sorry), but the point is, we rarely look at the situation honestly and conclude that, “it’s me. I’m not a good dog owner” (or parent–but I’m afraid that’s gonna have to wait for another post).

After watching oh, say, some 20-30 episodes of the Dog Whisperer, we finally realized that we were the ones responsible for our dog’s behavior and that we were just enabling his desire for structure by allowing him to be the one who called the shots since we weren’t and not realizing that we were supposed to be the dominant pack leaders (yes, all of us). The video series has been a fascinating psychological study of not just dogs (which is what you’d expect) but even more so about people and how we in America have uniquely anthropomorphized our animals and projected human emotions and reasoning onto these wonderful creatures and have forgotten that what they really are is; dogs. Yes, I said dogs! They’re D.O.G.S.! And that means, that you’re the boss–not their parent (did I just mix species again?).

So, bottomline, is that rather than learn some neat tricks on how to “train” obedience into our cute, little alpha dog, we learned how to “project calm, assertive energy” and recognize that we are humans, and that our little Cody, while still being the cutest dog in the world (see left), is a dog and not a human. And after a few weeks of putting it into practice, we now have an amazingly obedient dog. So, on top of his cuteness, he’s now obedient too. Which pretty much makes him the perfect dog. Thanks Cesar!

Well, I wanted to whet the appetites of anybody who may have visited the site recently and been disappointed with the lacking portfolio that there are better things to come. So, I thought I would throw a little bone and post a screen shot of the new site as it currently stands. Now I know that someone might think that its easy to post a Photoshop comp of a non-functional site, but you’ll just have to trust me that this is the real deal. My target goal is to get this finished by this weekend and have it up and running by Monday, 11/17. It will also involve moving the site from its current hosting service to Media Temple as well as all the email server configuration, and WordPress setup, etc., so that’s a tall order, but doable.

So, without further ado…

This is all old news, but thought I would still go ahead and post this as we’re anxiously awaiting the release of WALL-E on DVD on November 18. Came across an inspiring article on the Hollywood Reporter’s website chronicling John Lasseter’s career that began at Disney after attending Cal Arts with peers Brad Bird, Tim Burton and John Musker, but came to a disappointing end after he was fired for going around a manager to pitch a project. The original 1977 release of Star Wars was an inspiration to John and so it seemed a natural for him to land at George Lucas’ nascent computer animation lab, hooking up with pal Ed Catmull that he eventually sold to Steve Jobs and which most know became Pixar Studios and as we all know, was bought by Disney just last year, bringing John Lasseter back around, full circle to not only return to the fold, but to become the shepherd of the whole flock that had been wandering in the wilderness of straight-to-DVD-sequel hell.

Also, on the design end of Pixar and WALL-E in particular, in a post on The Pixar Blog back on May 12, that in turn referenced an article about the movie in Fortune. The article chronicles how Jony Ives was involved in the design of EVE (Andrew Stanton was conceptually inspired by Apple’s iPod design philosophy), but being true to Apple’s notoriously tight-lipped secretive policy was unable to work into the design anything that hinted at Apple’s future technology–which back in 2005, most assuredly would have been the future iPhone and iPod Touch.

All that is to say, that I am looking forward to the years ahead as Disney is entering into a new golden age with some great talent at the helm that brings a totally out-of-the-box approach to animation, but at the same time, artistically and lovingly preserves the rich heritage of Disney Animation Studios and I hope will purge its reputation of the barnacles of cheap, shallow, uncreative sequel-itis. All hail John!