Dan Lipert

Ok, ok, if you are one of my clients, then please calm down and read a few paragraphs and then if you are still freaking out you can fire me.

I sit at a computer of some sort almost all day. When I wake up, I bring my iPad downstairs, make coffee, and check my e-mail. After breakfast, accompanied by some RSS-reading and twitter tweeting, I head up to the ‘work computer’, an old Macbook Pro with a huge HD monitor hooked up. At lunch I catch up on e-mail again, then I might do some reading on the iPad, or if I have a deadline coming up, it’s back to work. Some more coffee, some more work, some dinner, some work, maybe relax and play some PS3, write some music on the laptop, or watch youtube or a movie. So, it’s pretty ridiculous the amount of time I spend staring at a screen.

Enter the bicycle. The value of being carless and riding a bike everywhere has been retold over and over, so I won’t repeat the standard earth-day arguments here, although they are compelling to say the least. I would say, if you are a technonerd like I am, riding a bike could be the best decision you make if you are looking for positive lifestyle change. You gotta go to the store anyway, so why not get your exercise in, absorb some vitamins from the sun’s rays, go out and interact with real people in real life, and above all, meditate.

Now, I’m not saying that you should zone out entirely while riding a bike. I always ride earbud free, and I make sure to ride the road fairly and pay attention to my surroundings. But I come up with some of the best ideas for designs and projects while riding. If I get code blind, or if I have designer’s block, taking that ride over to New Seasons to pick up tonight’s tempeh and broccoli ingredients is amazingly enlightening. You know that feeling you get when you’ve been in the shower for five minutes, and you are full of amazing ideas and you can’t wait to finish brushing your beard so you can jump back on the computer? Add the endorphin rush from peddling a few miles, dodging cars and jumping curbs. You can’t buy that kind of inspiration, unless you have some hippie friends with a sugar cube collection.

I, like many nerd/creative types, can easily get caught in the foggy netherworld of organization. I’m not a particularly neat person, but I do spend a lot of time mentally reordering my thoughts and prioritizing my todos. So of course, the ideal thing to do is to get some sort of productivity system in place and mentally unload all these small and large stresses onto a physical or digital medium. But, this presents a huge string of todo items in itself. I have to decide on a platform, a software suite, or a particular type of stationary. I then have to invest, on a time, money and emotional basis in my choice. And what if i’m wrong and it doesn’t work out, or I lose the info somehow and blah blah blah holy crap now I’m even more stressed out.

I think the key to getting away from being obsessed with so called “Productivity Porn”, is to stick with least complexity possible, and organically grow your system from that. If you are stressing about your productivity system, you probably aren’t busy enough to need one.

A few years ago, I was getting into all of the productivity stuff via 43folders, and I adopted the famed ‘hipster pda’. Now, at the time, I was anything but a hipster. I was working a 9-5 in Washington DC for the DoD, but at the same time, I just read Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week and was trying to figure a way to organize and automate and all that good stuff. So I had this little system with index cards sitting in an inbox, and I would clip up all the cards at the end of the day and take them home with me. When I was sitting there at work, e-mail at zero, I would shuffle the cards and grab one and rock it out. Afterwards I tore that card up with so much satisfaction and then went on a coffee break, came back and did another one.

This really worked out for me- I got a commendation from my boss’s boss’s boss, a navy admiral. And my coworkers were super impressed with how productive I was being. So this system was perfect, right?

Well it turns out that I wasn’t super happy with what I was doing and a combination of reading Four Hour Work Week, Walden, and hanging out with some way more hippie friends convinced me to quit my job. I sat on my ass in sunny San Diego, became vegan and cooked all day, rode my bike to the indie movie rental shop, and chilled HARD. At first I wrote things like “rent Le Samourai” on the cards, but, because I wasn’t actually busy, it wasn’t working out. I ended up chucking the hipster pda because I didn’t actually have anything that I HAD to do.

Fast forward about two years. I’m starting my own software development company. I have multiple apps on the store that constantly need content updates. I write for three blogs and am considering adding a fourth video blog. I work on open source new media art and submit work to shows. I’m promoting new apps and hunting for new clients. I DJ shows here in Portland, OR and write my own music for two separate projects.

And so, I use iCal. And I have a moleskine, plus two mini-moleskines. I have an Action Book from Behance. I use the amazing teuxdeux.com. And I am happy. All of these things actually make me MORE PRODUCTIVE! Imagine that.

I’m working on some new projects lately, so I haven’t been posting too much. Or actually, I’ve been posting on other blogs readying content for when sites go live. So, I really am alive, I swear.

My latest project is a series of iPhone photography, or iPhoneography apps. I’m really surprised how awful alot of the apps out there are, given that the iPhone is such a fun little camera, and Apple actually gives us decent control to mess with it. I’m planning on entering it into the Appsfire Appstar awards, so I’ll post here with that progress :)

Over at the iPhoneography blog, as well as at Life in LoFi, the authors are lamenting the fact that many iPhone apps save at a low resolution. And they are puzzled, as they should be. Why would some apps like CameraBag or MonoPhix save at nice resolutions, and yet others save at 320 x 480, the iPhone screen resolution? Well, the answer is… lazy programmers.

I can’t say that I blame the programmers though. Apple has not made it particularly easy to play with large image buffers in memory. Actually, they’ve made working with images extraordinarily easy, as long as you are just displaying them and maybe moving them here and there. But rotating, applying filters, working byte by byte with them gets a little trickier. I blame a particularly enticing line of code:

[view.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];

What this does, in one shot, is take whatever view and dump its display to a coregraphics context. Then, you can use UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() and you have a UIImage of whatever view you want. The problem with this, is that the maximum view size on the iphone is… 320 x 480. So that’s why you have tons of apps saving at that low resolution.

I will cover how to efficiently and safely deal with large images in another entry, but suffice it to say, it is hundreds of times more complex, and rotating, translating, and eating bytes of an image is pretty memory intensive, so special care must be taken not to crash your app. Interested developers should check out all the great info out there on coregraphics contexts. Or just wait for an upcoming entry…

If you live in Portland, chances are good that you own a bicycle. And even more amazing, chances are that you ride it. As a Portlander for the foreseeable future, one of the top things on my to-do list was to buy a new-to-me bike. I picked up a pretty janky complete bike at the recent Portland Bicycle Swap Meet for $150, and I’ve got a budget of about $150 to get it in sweetly working order. Now, I could just take that $150, slap it in the hand of one of our many capable local bike mechanics, and get a light tuneup. Or I could replace my awful cottered cranks, repaint the bike, get new wheels & tires, and learn a ton about mechanical gear systems, bearings, materials, and save myself thousands of dollars in the long run. What is an engineer to do?!

My first purchase, for a measly $12, was to grab a copy of Chainbreaker, a book/collection of zines of the same name from the always excellent Microcosm Publishing. Having been away from Portland for so long, I forgot the joy of holding a piece of independent publishing in your hands, attempting to decipher handwritten typewriter corrections, and make out diagrams that have been xerox’d a dozen times too many. And it really got me thinking - what is so independent, progressive, anarchist, and sustainable about zines? Is it the fact that anyone can cut out pictures, mangle together type, and head over to Kinkos? Or is it the content, and that it is the voice of people mostly ignored by corporate society… and how will future technologies change this?

It’s clear that print publishing is dying, and it deserves to. The new technologies arriving on the scene make a newspaper look as clumsy as a rack of scrolls. And, of particular importance, why are we still cutting down trees and shipping them around the world, when the electron instantly transmits any kind of information imaginable. Suddenly, punk zines are unsustainable.

Of course, the environmental argument is not a particularly solid one. For all the talk about green technologies, Apple is still struggling with it’s shareholders to implement any kind of real changes to their sustainability policies. And the ecosystem surrounding electronic components is widely known as being polluting and unsustainable. But maybe the primitivists should take advantage, or at least notice of what is happening. Corporate publishers are reeling, and companies like Apple have lowered the bar for independent presses to compete with the big boys. So who is going to the be the first publisher to have their works in multi-format web apps, pdfs, and eBooks, for 99c or free, and reach millions of people that a 1000-copied zine never could. And which designers are going to be the first to experiment with beautiful zine style layout in digital form?

In Chainbreaker, the authors talk often about how the bicycle is a revolutionary device, and I believe it’s true. The low cost and enhanced mobility are, dollar for dollar, the best way for many to improve their lives, locally and globally. I believe that the computer, the tablet, the netbook, whatever, ALSO have the power to be revolutionary, although we aren’t quite there yet. Unfortunately, the paradigm of the computer has been modeled around a television rather than a book, but somehow, we’ve managed to bring it back around. In my lifetime, I’ve been privileged to see an invention of importance on par with the printing press come into existence, and even more so I’ve gotten to be a part of it. And the most beautiful part is that anyone who wants to be involved can join in.

Right now, I am somewhat financially secure. Of course, I don’t think that there are many software developers out there who would say a guaranteed income of $1500/mo is secure. And I supplement this with a good amount of freelance work, but its mostly for the time being as I gather funds to move back to Portland, OR. So what am I doing?

Well, after reading this blog entry on why you shouldn’t become a freelancer, I realized that yes, these are valid reasons why the average person wouldn’t want to become a freelancer. But, if you are an ‘above average person’™*, then most of these negatives are actually positives. Granted, this might be the whole point of the article, but for me, and I suspect a few others, the impact is different. Because, while freelancing is lucrative but time consuming, it is only as lucrative but time consuming as you want it to be.

At this point, I schedule myself to work probably 20 hours/week of coding time. Add this with maybe another 10 hours of administrative junk and it seems like a decent chunk of time, but compared with other developers, freelance and otherwise, its pretty slim. That isn’t to say that I don’t spend a lot of time elsewhere invested, and thats why freelancing is so great for me. I can make money coding, and still have not only time, but energy to work on my personal projects.

Fortunately, my personal projects coincide and enhance long term goals as well, so it all continues to build and build, in a strictly real, and non-financial way (for now). I don’t imagine in the future that I will have gobs of money either. It’s something like when people recommend that you work hard now, make money, and save for your retirement. Except I’m working hard now, for myself, and hoarding my personal stock for a metaphysical payoff.

* ™ is so hot right now.

When I first went on YouTube, it was a revelation. I think it was my senior year of university, and YouTube had probably just launched that month. I was directed to it to watch the latest Naruto episodes (whatever! this is like season 1 alright!), but I stuck around to peruse the ridiculous amount of content that was on it even then. You see, I am of the generation where if we wanted to watch a funny video of “fat people getting hurt”, we’d have to go over to some kind of E/N site, actually download the video, and load it into windows media player. Watching the video stream nearly-flawlessly was at that time incredible, and im still dazed by all the rich content the YouTube model spawned.

But more and more, I hear people complain that YouTube sucks now, and I can see where they are coming from. When I try and find the latest episode of Kenny VS Spenny, it’s already DMCA’d. But there will always be sites like megavideo that don’t have the kind of money worth suing over to host pirated content, and with services like Hulu springing up to host copyrighted content properly, the idea of trying to catch something on TV is almost a thing of the past.

So what’s so great about YouTube? At YouTube, all that matters is content. Sure, there are little things here and there that let you promote your videos. You can comment on others’ uploads, create video responses, and now even pay to have your video show up a little higher in the ranking, albeit marked by a light gray div enclosure. But really, there isn’t the drama-llama userbase on YouTube which bogs down other social sites. Anyone can upload and by-far the biggest traffic generator is search. Thankfully, there are no forums, and therefore no moderators or power-users or elite circles or any of that nonsense.

Nowadays I watch very little television, but spend alot of time watching video nonetheless. It marvels me that things like The Third & The Seventh or Les Dangereux are immediately available, for free, around the globe, to anybody. I remember buying demo reels of MIT computer graphics courses on VHS. We’ve really come a long way as an artistic and creative community because of sites like YouTube that allow us to share both instantly and at no cost.

So next time you get bummed that the newest Naruto or Gossip Girl clips are nowhere to be found on YouTube, why don’t you sit down and watch a google tech talk. Or a video on how to plant a garden. Or a documentary. Or an amazing CG work. Or even, fat people getting hurt.

If you’ve ever been to Tokyo, or seen it in movies, you know that areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya are completely awash in light almost 24/7. There are huge neon structures peddling everything from pachinko and pornography to coffee and the iPhone. One might think that this incredible amount of advertising would be maddening, but for several reasons, Japan has managed to gracefully incorporate new technologies into their advertising while overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

Many of the signs you see away from the center of the city are strictly rainbow colored neon affairs, with multi-minute long sequences of various elements blinking and following in various rows and columns, often changing the typography and message of the signs in interesting ways. Here’s a music store:

As technology advanced, many stores went for LED matrices, mostly of the plug and play variety. They often had little SD slots to pop in whatever programming you had done up, and would play multi-color, multi-typeface messages with dozens of delightfully cheesy scrolling and flipping effects. Mostly, these are left outside all night, which is amazing because I think here in the US these probably wouldn’t last a few days.

Anyway, what I want to write about is the most inspiring thing I saw in Japan, and perhaps one of the best instances of the new forms of advertising and how effective they are. Outside of Shinjuku station there is an art installation called MYLORD Box, in an alleyway called Mosaic Street. It is a huge array of RGB LED’s combined with some simple infrared sensors to crudely detect touch. It is combined with an amazingly beautiful set of reactive visualizations, updated to reflect the seasons.

What’s amazing about this installation is that it is both truly a work of “new media art”, as well as an amazing advertisement. The name of the nearby department store is ‘MyLord’, and the amount of traffic gained from this thing is incredible. There are 2 or 3 people constantly with their hands all over it, as well as countless onlookers. And there are some small stickers proclaiming the name of the installation, a simple advertisement for the sponsors of the work.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication has been around for a long, long time (apparently its over 10 years old), but I have met few people in real life that are big fans of it. Usually it seems like some people (say, your parents) have never heard of it, or other people (like your average web-a-holic) tried it and didn’t like it. The reasons for liking and disliking it are varied, but I have finally come to the conclusion that I really, really like it, and it can actually make you more productive. And what better way to kick off project52 than to get meta and blog about blogging.

For the uninitiated, RSS allows you to take all the content from your favorite blogs and websites, strip the layout, and plop them in one place. Standalone desktop RSS applications used to be the standard but now, with Google Reader combining a simple layout with just a pinch of social salt, getting an RSS client setup takes seconds. The idea is that websites give you a little orange RSS icon to click, which will automatically load the page into your client, and then you don’t have to visit their site anymore.

SO WHATS THE BIG DEAL

This is amazing for so many reasons. First, it saves you time. Secondly, it saves your eyes from looking at tons of ads, although some feeds include the ads in their feed, at which point I promptly drop them. Thirdly, it lets you customize the type of information you consume every day. It becomes a sort of personal newspaper, with numerous articles and rich multimedia content, all created and curated by content providers that you deem worthy. But in my mind, the number one reason to get an RSS reader is to break your addiction to social news sites like digg and reddit.

QUICK LIKE A BANDAID, RIGHT OFF

There have been more than a few commentaries and essays appearing lately decrying the unfortunate effects of crowdsourcing on modern culture. It seems that everyone coming together, voting up and down this and that, doesnt allow for the best material to rise to the top. Instead, a bunch of boring, trolling, flaming shit covers the front of every social news site you can find.

Obama sucks, Glenn Beck rapes, cats are funny, why don’t girls like me, and there is no God. That isn’t some blackhat seo keyword list, that’s the exact same content that is posted day after day. What happened to the internet? Did all of the good content get used up already? What happened to the promise of unlimited education, inspiration, discussion, and enlightenment?

Actually, its still there, and the internet is becoming richer and more amazing every day. But with that comes an amazingly huge group of screaming idiots trying to sell you some product or idea at the top of their lungs. And so, we use RSS to hire our own, personal editors, because in addition to blogs like this one that produce original content, there are millions that post “inspiration”, or “reblogs” or “stuff I like” or “COOL LINKZ” everyday. And if they post something I don’t like, I can drop them and pick up one of the thousands waiting to take their place.

So my new year’s resolution, albeit a bit late: I am never visiting reddit or digg again. Besides, if something really important happens, I’m sure I’ll see it on twitter.

Since I started actively posting a few weeks ago, the site has gone through quite a few changes. At first, it was pure XHTML + CSS, and I was updating the front page manually. It was the case of having a design, but not having the skills to create it myself. I could have outsourced it for a few bucks to some entry level Javascripter in the Ukraine or India… or I could take it on myself, learn some jQuery, some Javascript, and learn about the GData APIs!

After watching the movie Objectified last night, I realized how opposing the lifestyle of these designers and the DIY movement are. A good portion of the movie is either designers talking about how important they are, or being a bit bashful about how useless and obsessive they might look to some people. And they deserve this perception! I was kind of shocked that in 2009 they would gloss over sustainability and ethical production issues. These are the greatest themes in cutting edge design today, and if designers want to stay relevant, maybe they should actually solve a problem instead of redesigning hedge clippers and then having Chinese workers pump them out for pennies an hour.

So how does this fit with my webdesign? I think one of the best ways to ‘go green’, ‘stay sustainable’, etc etc… is to do it yourself! The more aspects of your life that you take control of, the higher percentage of your life you will have complete control and knowledge of. When you grow your own vegetables, you don’t have to worry about the exploitation of migrant workers sitting on your plate. When you build your own chair out of sustainable materials, you don’t have to worry about the macroeconomics of importing cheap furniture full of chemicals from Sweden. And when you design your own website instead of outsourcing it to India, you get to display your creativity, you contribute to local economies, and you just might learn something. :)

So, this blog is powered by me. I used a combination of XHTML, CSS, jQuery, Javascript, and curiosity.