2005
DecemberBest tunes
I missed out on the Michigan record last year, but I'm catching up, Sufjan Stevens Illinois, by a mile. How you get some Philip Glass + Brian Wilson + Ira Glass + High School Chorus and make it sound this good is beyond me.
October The podcasting monks
Leaving Bridgeport was great, but our neighbors the monks were hard to leave behind. So it seemed fitting that I try to take it all with me. They were just about 10 minutes away, but getting up on Sundays and driving, well... Making their site gave me some exposure to setting up blogs, and podcasts which work out stunningly. I still haven't broken 100 subscribers, but you can help by signing up. Next best thing to being there.
August Moving on up
Sold our house over a long weekend. I think we priced it too low although we did end up selling it to Sabrina Raaf and Greg Lundeford, so it was sort of like going back to Elizabeth and I getting the place as young artistes. I must say good riddance to Bridgeport, although our pad was cool. Hello Oak Park!
May Stop, it's the police
Started a project for the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois. That's quite a bit, but add on Oracle consulting and a trip down the street to cop central - police HQ. They need an IA to figure out a new system for them to report all crime in Illinois. This will be deployed across the state and replace a dozen or so disparate systems to allow users to report, manage, investigate, arrest, prosecute and ignore all crimes. Best get out my sketchpad. This is slated as a 3 week assignment, but check next year when it finally wrapped up...
April Water Tower
Did some work, and left plenty undone for my friend Nick - the soon to be mogul of the western world. Still, his family business "Water tower realty" is quite an impressive set of property, including our lovely flagship apple store. Someday I'll get all this stuff on the web, but I did get to work with a Nikon DSLR and get a feel for the kind of pics you can get out of it. Nice.
February Do you Yahoo?
Got a call and a plane ride to Sunnyvale and had a few too many free espressos at Yahoo interviewing for Design manager. It was a fairly rigorous Q&A with about 7 people, who mainly complained about Yahoo and how hard it was to get web stuff done. Found out Yahoo's first server was Akebono - reminding me of the good ol' days in Sumo town and kakuii Chiyonofuji. Tried for dinner in SF, but took the wrong turn and ended up in Berkeley (strangely enough by the CCA where good ol Steve Beal is dean or provost or something). Well, SF is quite pretty, but I'll stay in Chicago for the time being.
January Redesign and Interwoven
The process continues, after doing the intranet and extranet, comes the internet. This was more conceptually difficult for the strange process, working with Carter Caldwell over the phone, with designers in Houston along with demos for Scott Klein every couple of weeks. So, overall the look is curves and drop shadows. Trust me, it was a great improvement over the old design, but what made it worthwhile was the old design was XHTML, so this only took a stylesheet change to implement over the 800 pages or so. Not to mention a new architecture and focus on getting users to act, rather than read made for a good IA overhaul. However, not so quick, it still used Interwoven Teamsite, with the training and uselessness (perl interpreters?) it put the project back months to just wrestle with the templates. Argh.