señor taco’s travels

“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America - there’s the United States of America.“  — Barack Obama

Sometimes you get your wires crossed. You keep working but you feel like it could be better. For the last three weeks or so I’ve just been telling myself “red is positive, black is ground.” It’s all about keeping my head together, getting progress made on the project I’m on, and generally not screwing up until I get to go on vacation.

In a few days time I’ll be winging my way back to New Zealand for another snowboarding vacation. This time Keith and I will be joined by Cortney, Mark, and Ben. I’m looking forward to meeting Ben (he’s back at Blue Sky) and the other people on the trip. We’ll have our friend Mani as an instructor again so that should be a hoot.

I’ve put wax on the snowboard. I found the NZ power plug adapter. I’ve gotten everything I need for the trip. Now I just have to work on not exploding before I get out of here. I’m getting so excited to go because this will be a good stretch of time off and then I’ll come back and jump back into my project at work. I only wish more friends could have joined us on the trip, that would surely make the time feel like it’s going slower.

The flight is 12.5 hours or so.  I’m kind of looking forward to it.  Hopefully I’ll sleep most of the way and kind of use it as a decompression time. I’ll post updates if I can and for sure once I’m back. Until then you can see a smattering of the pics from our 2005 trip.

Today marks my first year anniversary of working at Pixar.  I’ve seen Ratatouille finished up and released.  I’m getting to work on cool projects with insanely talented people and I’m really happy and challenged at work.  Let’s see what the next year will bring, it should be fun, challenging, and sometimes stressful I’m sure.

I came across this article in the New York Times Magazine on-line today. It’s a pretty fascinating look at the development of the typeface that will be replacing Highway Gothic on highway signs in the United States, Clearview.

The work done by Meeker and Montalbano is awesome. They cared enough that they kept tweaking the design until it was great. Even looking at the Wikipedia pages linked above shows that Clearview is more readable than Highway Gothic, but we can’t forget the contribution Highway Gothic has had on our culture via the Interstate system. Long live Highway Gothic but bring on the Clearview.

There are some parallels with my work in software tool design.  We’re always trying to improve on what exists and make our products much better.  I just hope that one day I can author software that become useful and ubiquitous at my work (I’d like to say I did it once at Blue Sky, but I’ve been gone from there for a while and the memory fades).

My house mate, Keith, got interviewed by Animation Express.  You can read it here.  Way to go Keith.

I wish they would show this before every movie these days. AquaTeen Hunger Force rules.

Coudal Partners is a site that is “an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce.” I’ll take it. They have great stuff out and point to great little bits to kill time during typing breaks. One of their projects is Swap Meat. I won’t explain it, just go check it out.

Another one is the Fleet Identity Symbol System. Today I got a bunch of the stickers from Michele at Coudal. I haven’t yet put one on my car and I’m trying to figure out how to put one on my commuter bike, but I did put one up on my office window. Fun times, fun times.