15 Steps, by Radiohead was blaring from the speakers when he quickly turned it down.

“It’s happening again…”

“What is?”

“The feeling…”

“The feeling.  What do you mean, the ‘feeling’.”

“That feeling I get when we’re here.  Remember, I told you about it…”

“Oh, the ‘feeling’.  Can you tell me more about it?”

“I don’t know.  It’s a feeling.”

“What kind of feeling.  Big, small, confining, loud, quiet, silly.”

“Well, some of those things.  It’s hard to explain.”

“Give it a try.  I’d like to know more about it.”

“I don’t know.  I just feel strange.”

“Strange is good.  Try and expand on the feeling.”

“I feel all confined…boxed in.  My hands are clammy…”

“Hrmmm…sounds like your standard anxiety attack.  What do you think triggered it?”

“The hell if I know.  I always get it when we’re here.”

“Interesting.  What do you think it is about here that triggers it?”

“I wish I knew.  I just want to be rid of this damn thing.”

“So why not stop it.  Stop the damn feeling and just be rid of it.”

“I don’t know how.  I wish I knew how to.”

“Are you sure about that.  You gave yourself the feeling.”

“No I didn’t.  It’s this place…it gives me the feeling.”

“How can a place give you a feeling.  Aren’t you the one looking at things, deciding what does not and does matter?”

“I…I guess.  But it’s complicated.  I just, I just want to be rid of it.”

“Complicated?  What’s complicated?  Holding on to an irrational thought that consumes you?  That doesn’t seem complicated to me…it seems a little koo-koo if you ask me.”

“I know, I know…I get all of that.  Fuck.  It’s getting worse.”

“Do we need to stop?  I can take over.  Let me know if we need to stop.”

“I’m not sure…what should we do?”

“Hell if I know.  You’re the one with the crazy feeling.  What do you think we should do?”

“I think I should stop.”

“Ok…let’s stop.”

He pulls the car over and leans his head on the steering wheel.

“What the fuck…I am so sick of this…why the hell is this happening?”

“Does that really matter?”

“What?”

“Why it’s happening?  Do you have to have a reason for everything?”

“I don’t understand…shouldn’t I want to know what’s causing it so I can face it and be rid of it?”

“Hrmmm…how often does that work?  Knowing the why?  Why don’t you just change what you’re doing.”

“That’s easier said than done.”

“Really?  So let me ask you this.  What makes more sense, trying to understand the why of why this thing has a hold on you, or allowing it to just take over your senses whenever it wants to?  It seems like you didn’t need to satisfy the ‘why’ by allowing it to become a debilitating behavior of yours.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Exactly.  There you sit wanting to know why, why, why…when you never asked why you shouldn’t have this feeling.  So I say just let it go…forget about it.  Stop feeling this way.”

“But how?”

“How what?”

“How do I stop feeling this way?”

“I don’t know…how did you start feeling this way?”

“What way?”

“The way you are feeling.”

“I don’t know…I don’t know how I started feeling this way…”

“Good, now we’re getting some where.  So how about we feel some way we want to feel.”

He turned off the car and sat back in his seat.

“Go on…”

“Let’s just start feeling another way.  This is an amazing car, so let’s think about that feeling when you first drove it.  How did that feel?”

“It was amazing.  I fell in love with how it handled and how it gripped the road.”

“Great…great…there’s a reason it’s one of the top 5 cars 3 years running.  So tell me more about that feeling you had.”

“I felt so connected to the car…I felt like we were one…I imagined that I was like a malleable fluid racing down the road, zipping in and out of traffic…I wasn’t excited or anything, everything just seemed to flow.”

“That’s wonderful.  Close your eyes for a bit and really visualize that feeling.  Imagine that you’re back there and that it’s here and now.”

He closed his eyes and imagined the scene and a wave of euphoria came over him.  He smiled slightly and laughed.

“Wow…I love this feeling.”

“As you should.  It’s your feeling.  A feeling you own. So you should just decide which feeling you prefer.  The one you want to know why you have or the one you know everything about.  In my professional opinion…I’d go with the one I know.”

He laughed aloud and started the car.

“Thanks for waking me up…I really needed…”

“Shut the hell up and drive,” he said with a wink and turned the volume back up on the iPod.

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- I think I understand.
- Oh yeah? But that’s what you said last time.
- I know I know. But this time it’s different. I can see it in my mind.
He handed her a slip of paper and a red pen.
- Okay. Go ahead. Give it a try.
- Don’t rush me.
- I’m not rushing you. I am trying to help. Take your time.
- Okay okay. Just don’t pressure me.
- No pressure. We’ve got all the time in the world.
She slowly began to write on the paper. He watched her for a moment and then turned to look out the window.
- It really is a beautiful day, he said.
- What? Oh yes, a beautiful day. Could you keep it down. I need to focus.
- Sure thing. Sorry.
He walked toward the open window and stuck his head out. The masses of people below on the street resembled ants scurrying about their business.
- I’m really surprised they let you open the windows fully all the way up here.
- What? Oh…they don’t. I paid a man.
- You what?
- I paid a man to fix it so they would open all the way.
- Why?
- Just in case.
- In case what?
- You know. In case. Now please, keep it down. The image is hard to hold.
- Sorry.
He stood with his head out the window wondering what the ‘in case’ situation might be, wondering if it meant what in his gut he imagined it to be. He thought she was over all of that. He shook his head and smiled slightly. When he turned to look at her he saw that the pen she was writing with had burst and there was now red ink all over hands, face and bed sheets.
- Again?
- I…I don’t know what it is. Honestly.
- Don’t worry. We have all the time in the world. Don’t worry…

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Starting to flesh out a new sketch from a LiveScribe doodle.

and an update

Some more refinements

A bit more tweaking on the way home

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Making a little progress on evolving the sketch from earlier in the week.  Had some app issues with C4D so I didn’t get around to making my grass with Mograph, so I opted for a quick 2D hack in Photoshop.  The model was built and rendered in modo.  It’s a mini progress, and I hope to evolve it a bit more and get closer to the spirit of the drawing.

The phrase, “If only I were a bird of prey,” is my little jab @twitter, since I personally find it an interesting technology, but one that doesn’t quite have the full set of wings to truly take off and evolve into something profound.  I know I know, it isn’t good to be a twitter h8r…but I am just being honest.

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A vision of the not too distant future in the eyes of Microsoft.  Some really nice stuff in there.

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Ka-kaw!! Ka-kaw!!

Recently, I’ve been going round and round about the value or lack of value of Twitter and it’s particular niche on the net. Everyone and their grandmother are tweeting this and that from CNN to the board room. As a designer I find the technology inspiring, but as a communicator, I am still grasping with its true place in our collection of tools.

Let me first say that I “get” what Twitter is about, and I think this is what I have the biggest gripe with…because of it’s transient nature people tend not to think about what it is they are writing (if it can even be called writing). Their mindset is to get to the net first with whatever rant, rave or opinion they have before the channel is full of noise from similar people posting similar rants. This is what makes it such a horrible vehicle for meaningful communication.

The only advantage I can see in twitter is the following sort of scenarios:

1. Following someone trekking across large bodies of land or water and who are documenting their travel but have no time for blogging

2. A secret militia moving thru hostile territory who need to communicate with one another

3. A way for people meeting up at an unfamiliar location to communicate with one another until they meet up

4. People fleeing from a natural disaster who need to know the safest way out from the flood lands

The above 4 examples are merely types of models where micro blogging work, but if you examine the nature of the scenarios, you could assume that SMS would suffice. I can SMS a group of friends my personal messages without flooding the nets with my nonsense…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am all for following and monitoring the people who inspire and influence my view of the world, but is following them in 140 words or less (or whatever the text limit is) doing that opinion of them any justice?
Anyway, I hadn’t planned on writing this much about something I don’t consider worth my time, but having written it, I am appreciative of the fact that I do place value on my time.

Here’s a thought. Maybe I should just start tweeting short short stories to inspire and entertain people. But I guess that would be too much like the Japanese phenomena of micro stories for mobile devices. Hrmmmm….my god, a twitter thought is born.

Here’s how it will begin:

“Her name was Helen, and when she opened her eyes this morning, she knew things would be different. She could sense the change in the air…”

tweet tweet personal challenge

-maybe an experiment of this nature is worth it…just to see where it takes me and the reader. Let’s see if I have enough discipline to keep it on course.

…to find a place for meaningless things is to offer them the hope of purpose and potential…

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The Mobile Nomad and Informed User

I like to travel to places I’ve never been, the only problem is that I sometimes don’t know where all the great places to go are.  Jacqueline and I were discussing some concepts the other night and we began thinking about leveraging the network of friends and their friends to make the experience of travelling that much richer.  So I got to thinking a little more as the night progressed, and decided to sketch down the idea before sleep set on.  Here’s a mindmap of the idea.  I’d love your feedback on it.

The true goal of this app is to leverage existing networks like Twitter and Facebook on a mobile platform to benefit the user from an experience standpoint, rather than merely informing them of random bits of status as we currently experience.
I will try and go into a bit more detail in the coming days about what I see as a problem of content versus noise with our existing social networking models.

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