I am not sure why, but somehow this new year feels like a fresh start — a giant step beyond the adversity of the past two years of my life. I suppose things could have been worse (they can always be worse), but I won’t lie and say that it has been fun.
While I spent two years taking stock of all that I lost, I forgot to pay heed to what I have gained. Goodbye to 2007 feels like the first warm day after months of cold, dark winter.
Amen to that.
I became a vegetarian during my freshman year of college. The transition from meat-eater to herbivore didn’t happen gradually, but rather all at once when in my freshman year Biology class I was presented with a frog and my very own mini-guillotine with which to dispense of my frog. I didn’t have access to a farm as a child and my father was an avowed animal lover (saver of stray dogs and misguided turtles) and so I found myself wholly unprepared for the moral dilemma that results when one creature takes the life of another.
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I have been working more with the gradient mesh tool to create some detailed icons for the Sharpcast Desktop application. The mesh tool is a great way to get more realistic looking gradients. Until recently I drew most of my icons in Illustrator and then added complex gradients in Photoshop making it kind of impossible to transform them for the most part without placing a larger form and then adding the gradients all over again.
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I have always wanted to launch a design blog and finally, that day is here! Please visit my new design blog, Lickable for all the latest design objects and news!
I have been on a quest to improve the seo (search engine optimization) of my site and I found out that there are a few simple things you can do to really make a difference in your traffic.
1) Sign up for Google analytics — it is free and it is really fun to track your progress.
2) For wordpress users, there are quite a few great SEO plugins out there. I used the all-in-one SEO Pack and SEO Title tag in conjunction with the Ultimate Tag Warrior . All of these require a little bit of manual work to add tags and keywords for each post and page.
3) Let the world know your content has changed. By pinging services when your content has been updated, you let them know it is time to crawl and index your site which increases your site’s popularity. I am using Pingoat
4) Get on the social bookmarking wagon. Make it easy for other to bookmark your site. I found many wordpress plugins out there to do this. I am using Sociable
5) Trade links with other sites that have like content. I haven’t exactly figured out an optimized way to do this yet, other than emailing people I know and asking them to link to my blog. I have found a few services out there that match up people who would be willing to exchange links, but I haven’t tried any myself. If anyone knows of a good service, please let me know.
6) Add rel=”nofollow” to all of your hrefs linking off your site to signal to Google that this is not comment spam. Check out the Google blog for more information on when and where it should be used.
7) Create a site map. I use a Wordpress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator. This will not necessarily increase your traffic, but will make it easier for Google to index your site which may result in a more complete index of your pages.
When my friend and former colleague Audrey Roy left her job we talked briefly about doing some illustration projects together. It never quite got off the ground until last weekend when we spent the whole day drawing. We plan to create enough illustrations between the two of us to launch a site where we will sell t-shirts, note cards and other miscellaneous items.
This is one of the illustrations I did this weekend — our theme was cupcakes.
A few weeks ago I had one of the coolest dining experiences — through a fortuitous affiliation of friends of friends I was invited to eat dinner at Quince restaurant at the Chef’s table. I had never heard of a chef’s table before, but apparently quite a few restaurants have them. Quince’s chef’s table is located in the lower prep kitchen one floor down from the actual restaurant and it has only one table which is cozily nestled in between a shelf of homemade pasta and a flurry of pastry chefs.
It was easily one of the most interesting and varied meals I have ever had. We had our choice of a three or four course a la carte menu from which I chose a parmesan and morel custard, a pici (house-made Italian pasta) and fiddlehead fern (which I chose mostly because the idea of eating fern seemed like an adventure) and finally a nettle pasta with house-smoked ricotta. Our host went to high school with the sommelier and she helped us to pair each of our courses with a different glass of wine.
Sadly, the kitchen at Quince is being remodeled, so the chef’s table there is soon to be a thing of the past.
I am still mildly recovering from my all-nighter on Thursday/Friday. You know you are getting old when staying up for 34 hours, once merely a challegning feat, is now a catastrophic event. I went home on friday and slept through until 9 am the following morning.
All in all it was a pretty great experience. I was blown away by what everyone was able to acomplish in a mere 24 hours:
–a board game that takes advantage of our sync platform
–a version of mobile hot or not that allows you to take pictures on your mobile phone that appear instantly on hotornot.com
–a collaborative whiteboard space
–push to the web and face tagging
–instant messenger with presence
–and SkyNet which allows us to track actions performed in the desktop app
Cockroach won the prize for most creative. Check out some pictures from the event
It is 5:18 am and if you know me at all, you certainly know that I would never be up at such an ungodly hour, unless of course I never went to sleep. A week or so ago Sharpcast announced that it was going to have its first ever Hack Day. For those who don’t know, a hack day is a 24 hour period in which the engineers can build whatever they want, however they want to build it with no mettling from PM and other such irksome pests. The only rule of our Hack Day is that it must utilize our sync technology.
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