My head is full of songs, my fingers spilling letters, my eyes lost in landscapes →
Latest Writing
Poppy at House of Blues, Dallas TX
Damn, that was a lot of fun.
I have mixed feelings about corporate, Ticketmaster-embedded venues, but House of Blues has always done right by me. You’ve got clean restrooms, a decent HVAC system, and a good PA. Valet parking is bougie as hell, and perhaps a bit cringe for a rock show, but I did it anyway. At this stage of life, I’ll take any opportunity to not park in some sketchy lot under a highway, walk to the venue in 100°F heat, and hope my car hasn’t been looted when I get back to it. Dallas suuucks.
I was there to see Poppy, but listened to the latest albums from both Thousand Below and LANDMVRKS before the show. Thousand Below sounded fine, but kind of nondescript. LANDMVRKS also didn’t grab onto me hard, but there were a few tracks that sounded interesting. Live, though, LANDMVRKS tore it up. Their performance was the best of the night. They had a lot of energy and a seemingly endless supply of high-kicks. Their vocalist was wearing an Eminem t-shirt, which made sense given how often he would launch into rapid-fire rap runs, usually in French (makes sense since they are a French band). They were super entertaining and I’m going to check out more of their catalog.
Poppy’s set was really fun. There were two eight foot LED-paneled risers on either side of the stage, and the drum kit was on the left one. Poppy stepped out on top of the other riser and would go back and forth between the riser and the stage throughout the show. CO2 smoke cannons fired a few times during the show, as did confetti cannons at the end. Simple, fun, effective. Kickass lighting effects, too? You know it!
Featured Work
Roxo Delivery Bot Touchscreen App
DEKA is a research and development company that has been working with FedEx to create Roxo, an autonomous delivery robot. Build atop DEKA’s iBot wheelchair base, Roxo will be able to easily navigate urban terrain like sidewalks, curbs, and even stairs.
Roxo has a 6-inch touchscreen for use by both employees who will prepare Roxo to make a delivery and ordinary folks who will be receiving deliveries. Users will either type a PIN code or scan a QR code to securely open Roxo’s doors. DEKA’s strength lies in its talented hardware development teams, so in order to produce a user-friendly proof of concept touchscreen application for FedEx to use in its initial delivery tests, they reached out to my employer.
Over the course of 3 months, I worked with DEKA’s Roxo team to produce an optimal user experience for both user types. This project was really fun and presented challenges that I hadn’t come across before. For example, Roxo will be used in a variety of lighting environments, from dim, indoor fluorescent lights to full-on sunshine, necessitating some branching of the FedEx design system to increase the size and contrast of text and buttons.
Latest Links
New, But Not Too New
Glenn Pajarito: “Loewy believed every customer walks around with two forces pulling in opposite directions. One is attraction to the new. The other is fear of it. His job, as he saw it, was to design as far forward as possible, to push right up to the edge of what people can accept, and stop there. The most advanced thing they’ll still say yes to.”
Jacket App
A thorough case study of a truly impressive personal project by Jon Hicks in his ongoing quest to find (or in this case, make) the perfect music app. Rolling your own app with Claude (AI) is something I've seen a lot on non-technical folks do, and Jon is perfectly transparent about the mix of potency and toxicity that can come from using such plagiarism-laden technology.
Eye, Hand, AI: a letter to my daughter
Julie Zhuo: “I’m a big believer that our souls need proof of work to sing. There are, in my experience, no shortcuts to excellence. One must love the hard work’s journey, not merely its fruits. So L, one question I keep thinking about is: what happens to the girl who never sews the crooked seam, because AI gives her a finished outfit immediately? What happens if she never learns to overcome the struggle? I fear that girl may never quite grow her Eye. When given two AI-created outfits, one singular, and one quite mediocre, I fear she won’t be able to tell which is which. That is the danger these tools pose, my love. Not that the machine is a bad Hand, but that in being so polished it decreases our capacity to obsess over the details, and in doing so to learn and grow.”
Your brain is an asshole.
Greg Storey: “Make like no one cares because you don't care what they think anymore. Do this enough and confidence shows up. So do the opportunities. More importantly, you'll be making instead of secretly worrying.”
The Courage to Stop
Jeffrey Zeldman: “The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise. Learn to be quiet on purpose.”
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