I have a day job. It’s a damn fine day job too. I work on movies and in the end the product is seen by millions of people all over the world. I’ve been doing this day job for over a dozen years now.

With every production I’ve been on there are crunch periods. If it’s not for you it’s for then you can bet someone else is working overtime. For the last couple of months I’ve been working Saturdays trying to drive to a deadline for the next feature, not even the one the rest of the company is trying to wrap up. The last couple of weeks have seen the workload and my hours increase a lot. Like near the 70 hour mark. I know. I know. First world problem. And don’t get me wrong, the overtime pay is coming in handy. I just get the feeling like it’s all work and then I just go home to sleep and barely see my wife.

Every so often I feel like I should be working for myself. I’m never going to get there if I don’t take steps now. I’m going to setup my own personal two-week sprints to see what I can get done while not at work and still keep my personal life in balance. I won’t be starting today or even this weekend, hours at work and a good friend’s wedding this weekend are going to chew up all my free time. If I can on Sunday I’ll map out the tasks I need to complete. Once I start I can’t turn back. To do so is to fail, and I don’t want to fail that easily.

I’ll post more as I can, but for now I’m keeping my trap shut.

Over the course of the last few years I have been fortunate enough to make friends with folks outside my industry and sphere of friends. Many of them happen to be in the developer community for Apple’s Mac and iPhone platforms. One of the people that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in person is Daniel Pasco, CEO of Black Pixel Luminance. Daniel is an amazingly smart guy¹ and I look up to him. If I had been living in Seattle when I switched jobs last year I would have held out to work with him and the guys at BPL.

Today Daniel posted an open letter about Black Pixel²:

We’ve developed almost twenty applications in the last nine months, including those we developed for our contract customers. We’ve spent much of our time working on iPhone, but at the same time, our work with iPhone and Apple has changed us, too. The expectations and demands we make upon ourselves as designers have increased dramatically.

Great design and interaction are a huge part of the user experience for iPhone applications, and the more we experienced and learned what is possible, the more we desired to refine our work and take full advantage of what the platform has to offer. Creating our first iPhone apps was a very fulfilling experience, but like an artist looking back at early sketches, we soon began to spot the flaws and see the shortcomings of our initial efforts.

We’ve made some great applications, but for a variety of reasons, our own applications have largely kept the same user interfaces that we introduced them with when the app store opened, and we feel that we can do better. The cognitive dissonance resulting from this situation started to become intolerable late last year.

By the time we went to Macworld we had already decided that we were going to focus on raising the level of polish and focus on our applications as much as possible. The addition of Chris Clark to our team raised the bar for us even higher.

Black Pixel means good design. To us, that means quality, innovation, beauty, and fun. We are pushing ourselves hard to develop applications that adhere to these principles. Effective immediately, we have decided to pull all of our applications from iPhone App Store until they are up to our own standards.

Daniel Pasco, CEO
Black Pixel Luminance
March 18, 2009

I’m excited to see what BPL comes out with. Daniel has always been concerned about the company and the employees. The addition of Chris Clark is huge. I’m looking forward to all the guys up there driving to better things and beautiful software.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is the right thing to do. In this case it’s hard to pull already released apps from being sold. That’s income and a public face for the company. I know that with a little bit of time the BPL team will come back stronger and better and more satisfied with their work than ever before.

Good luck guys. I’ll be here waiting to see what happens.

1. I mean, the dude has his work on another planet. So full of awesome.↩
2. The letter is quoted here in its entirety for posterity’s sake↩

Today, 3 February 2009, marks my twelfth year of gainful employment after graduating from university. I’ve been fortunate to have stumbled into a remarkable industry that has afforded me the ability to develop my mental skills and branch out to areas that were once unfamiliar to me.

In my studies for forestryforestry the professors not only taught what we needed to know about forests, but they also prepared us for life in the business world. We were prepped on how to interview and that we should always wear a suit to an interview to show respect, unless informed otherwise.

It was with that preparation, and a bit of dumb luck, that I ended up in Harrison, New York to interview with Blue Sky Studios. While studying for forestry I worked in the GIS lab assisting with classes, managing the workstations, and programming. As I was getting ready to graduate I contacted a friend from high school that was working at Blue Sky. She got my resume in front of the right person and before I knew it I was being flown to New York for an interview. Predictably I wore a suit and tie to the interview. That certainly made an impression, but when I accepted the job my soon-to-be boss told me that if I wore a tie again he’d make sure he cut it off. To this day I’ve only worn ties to formal or celebratory company events. That was in January of 1997. I had interviewed a few other places and I kept pushing them off waiting to hear back from Blue Sky. Once I got the offer from Blue Sky I accepted, packed up, and moved to New York. I really had no idea what was in store for me, but I jumped in feet first and started working.

I couldn’t imagine a better course of my life. I worked at Blue Sky for six and a half years with a small three month stint at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). I worked on many projects between those two places: Bunny, Ice Age, Fight Club, and Alien: Ressurection to name a few.¹ After those formative and fortunate years at Blue Sky learning more than I ever had in university I decided it was time for me to head west to California. I think I had always wanted to live in California, I certainly did like visiting there. As with Blue Sky and ILM I got my next job at Wild Brain through people I knew and had worked with before. The idea was that Wild Brain would be starting up on producing an animated feature and they needed people to help develop a pipeline. That was a fun three years with a very tight-knit group of people. In the end the movie never materialized and I decided it was time for me to move on.

Proving once again connections are key, I finally got my foot in the door at Pixar Animation Studios. I was in the Production Engineering group at Pixar. The group that supports the software tools used to (thus far) make every film there. I worked through the release of two films there, Ratatouille and Wall•E.² That was a great time and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but it lead me to my latest adventure.

Taking an opportunity to transfer within the Walt Disney Company I decided to embark on a new adventure at ImageMovers Digital (IMD). Getting to stay in a large and stable company like Disney was important, but at IMD we’re working to build the studio from the ground up while working on our first feature. Moving here also gave me the title of Senior Production Engineer. It’s something I was ready for and brings much more responsibility and learning with it. I’m getting to direct software projects and I’m finding out what people relying on you means with some long, but fulfilling, hours.

I don’t know what the future will hold. I’ll be at IMD for a while because it’s so challenging here I want to keep doing it. I often find myself drifting towards the possibility of indie work, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to strike out on my own just yet. Whatever may come in the next dozen years I hope it will be as awesome as the last twelve.

1. You can see my full credit list at IMDB.↩
2. With the long production times and overlapping production schedules at Pixar I actually did work for Up and Toy Story 3 as well.↩

I ♥ this:

Yesterday afternoon I was at home enjoying the remains of a great weekend with great weather with my girlfriend. I had talked to my mom a few hours earlier when they arrived back in Houston and were checking in with me. We talked about the weather and how things were going for them post-Ike.

At about 17.15 my phone rang and it was my sister. I had to tell her to calm down as I couldn’t understand her. She said they thought my dad was having a stroke and had collapsed. I made sure they had called 911 and then let her go to call the rest of the family in Houston. About 30 minutes later my phone rang again and it was my sister. They said the paramedics had worked on my dad and couldn’t resuscitate him.

I’m pretty shattered as this came very suddenly. I’ll carry on and help my mom with whatever she needs. I’m off to Houston for the memorial service on Friday @ 11am (not sure where it is yet).

If there is an afterlife I hope my dad is there and happy with my granddad and uncle amongst others.

See ya down the road dad.

Kenneth Dowell Weeks, October 17, 1950 – 21 September 2008

Update: The memorial service is at 11am on Friday the 26th of September at All Saints Catholic Church. In lieu of flowers please make a dontation to The Boy Scouts of America, The Girl Scouts of America, or the charity of your choice in my dad’s name.

Update 2: If you’re having trouble picking a charity it has been suggested that maybe the Red Cross would be a great place. They’re helping the people hit by Gustav and Ike.

Warren Ellis writes:

“The more creators who only took on housepainting as a part-time gig, the healthier this medium would be.”

Oh man, so true. This is why staring my own work up is very appealing.

What is it with people that they think I must be responsible but they can shirk on their responsibilities? Take tonight. I commute between work and home on a bicycle. There is a part of the route I take that is a greenway which is bikes and pedestrians but no cars.¹ It is also park-like and right next to several housing areas. People tend to walk their dogs along there and as long as they pick up the poop I don’t care about that.

Tonight there were two people off the paved path with two dogs. As I got close the dogs darted out across my path. I braked and as I did the lady reached out and grabbed my shirt sleeve causing me to skid out. Today I was on my road bike because I went riding with Everett this morning. Not only does that mean I was clipped in but it also meant that I had a bit of gear in my bag on my back.²

I came to a safe stop without falling and immediately blurted out “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” at her. The guy across the path and the woman both start claiming that I was going to hit their dogs. I pipe up that had I hit a dog we would have had something but I was breaking and that by her grabbing my shirt I could have crashed badly. She said I have to yield the right of way. I yelled not for dogs, looked her in the eye, and told her if she touched me again I’d break both of her hands.

Now comes my favorite part, she pulled out her phone and said she was calling the cops. I pulled mine out and said I’d join her and we could see if assault was still a reason for people to spend the night in jail.³ She said “Fuck you!” and stormed off. I looked at the guy and he just walked off.

Is it just me? Do people get shit like this happening to them too? Why do I have to be responsible for people’s dogs actions but they don’t have to control their animals in a public space? Yes, the comment about breaking hands might have been a bit over the top, but when my blood gets boiling I can bubble over a bit.

Ugh, time for a drink.

1. There is a double wide paved path and a single wide dirt path on it↩
2. Clothes, shoes, Camelback, laptop, etc.↩
3. See, I hadn’t touched a person or a dog at all↩

The future is born from the mind of visionaries. Arthur C. Clark is one of them. He first conceived of communications satellites in 1945. Ninety years is a good long run. Farewell ambassador from future times.

NY Times

My friend Rob¹ has written a nice article on Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds.

1. BTW, Rob is an insanely smart fellow. I’m glad I got to work with him if only for a little while.↩

I try to donate blood about every 60 days or so. I usually get a call from the Red Cross to remind me and set an appointment. Today at 14.00 I gave my pint (473.2 mL) and while I was donating they noticed I’m a pretty regular donor. Today they asked me if I wanted to see if I have a high enough platelet count to do apheresis donation. It takes longer but you get your plasma and red blood cells pumped back into you. If I qualify I’ll probably try it once to see how it is.