Venting alert…

Gah. I’m getting so frustrated with life in the ‘real’ business world. It’s no wonder that corporate America takes forever to get anything done.. Here I am, a designer, working on a project with a company that was/is a client. I did their website (they’re web consultants), and now I’m on their ‘team’ for one of their projects. Basically what they’ve told me: “Attend meetings with our clients, some of which will be 5 hours or longer… Take notes on stuff that will help develop a brand and website/application… Okay, so now that you’ve taken all these notes and gone through all your discovery excercises… do NOTHING… Write a ‘creative brief’ but don’t design any logos or any sites yet… We’ve got another company to do the logo, despite the fact that a) you’re better and b) the amount of time we’ve allotted in the budget for you is nowhere near the amount it would take to write 1 document… So you’ve got 45 hours left in the next 3 weeks, but just don’t do anything ‘creative’ with that time, even though you’re our ‘creative’ team member.” GAGH. And the real end-client WANTS me to work on the logo. THEY want me to, but this jerk who thinks he’s a project manager is telling me not to, because the company that did their shitty logo is doing the logo for the client… so my time has been budgeted, but not for logo work, so therefore, I cannot do work on the logo even though I know that the people actually doing it won’t do anything that the client will like. SO frustrating. All of a sudden, working at a cool Lower-Downtown office with rad people seems like something I was CRAZY to leave. -Sigh-

2 CPUs, here I come…

I can’t even begin to describe my joy at the machine which will reach my doorstep in an estimated 6 days: Dual 533 G4 with nVIDIA Geforce 2. Nice.

Know your X heritage

For those interested in how MacOS X came about, check out this image of what is believed to be a 4 release of the NeXTStep OS. Notice a few things: 1) Mail.app 2)Terminal.app 3) Grab.app 4) Preview.app 5) Clock.app… Applications that haven’t even changed in name. Very interesting, and it makes me happy that this stuff didn’t fall by the wayside, like BeOS. Which makes me wonder… if NeXT hadn’t been puchased by Apple, 1) Would Apple still even be around, and would we be looking at 7500s like we look at these NeXT Stations? 2) If Be had been purchased, would NeXTStep still be around in one form or another?

My guesses would be ‘yes’ to the first question, and ‘no’ to the second.

DS(hel)L

Why is it that this article gives me a feeling of deja vu. Oh yeah, because it describes what it sounds like tech support is doing when you call (ie. lying).

Seriously?

Now, I’m all for Mazda. I mean, come on, the company that created the RX-7 and the Miata deserves some fucking props. But the Mazda MP3? Seriously? Named after a digital music compression technique? Maybe it’s just a coincidence….

Reducks

How did it go about that Apocalypse Now is being re-released this summer without me knowing? A new version, including ‘a wealth of new footage.’ Does ‘new footage’ mean longer that the original? I guess I still will have to go see it.

Proud Dad

– sniff – I just taught my 3-year old to say ‘Mac,’ and ‘Linux.’ It is an important day, indeed.