This evening I watched President Obama address the nation with regards to the debt ceiling controversy that has been raging in DC and beyond for a few months now.  I also watched Speaker Boehner’s response to President.  Both men made it clear that it’s the opposing party’s inability to compromise that is “holding the economy hostage”.  Both men asked God to bless America, reminded American’s that we are the greatest country that has ever existed in the entire universe, and spoke of the need to grow our economy and put American’s back to work.  It wasn’t so much what they said that I found lacking in understanding of the issues at hand – it was what they and nearly every politician has neglected to say for months if not years now.  No, I’m not referring to the fact that we’ve been in multi-billion dollar wars with third-world countries for nearly a decade now – nor how morally corrupt it is to continue to provide multi-millionaires and billion dollar corporations with amazing tax breaks and incentives to hide their wealth and transfer their workforces overseas.  The 800 pound gorilla in the room that either nobody sees, or nobody wants to confront, is that the world has changed and the cause is not politics, religion or immigration policies – it is the conflict between our rapidly growing technology and our archaic economic system.

Our current economic system, which finds its roots as far back as medieval times, is based on a simple principle that every third grader knows – Supply and Demand.  The concept is simple – there is a finite supply of everything, and prices are set by the demand for that item versus its relative supply in the marketplace.  For the past few centuries, this system in its various incarnations, generally worked.  A community could only produce so much product, that product would then be divided based on the needs of that community and how the members of that community decided to spend their earnings relative to their station in life.  While there was certainly trade, for the most part, a community’s resources was limited by its geographical area and the skills of its people.  Over time, with advancements in transportation and communication, the scope of what a community could source grew.  Even so, no one would have imagined in 1900 that the majority of the products people in the United States would be using a hundred years later would be coming from China and other foreign nations.  The notion that someone in New York would be eating a tomato grown in Mexico would have seemed ridiculous.  Yet, as transportation costs and low-cost labor benefits stacked up, suddenly American’s were importing the majority of their goods rather than producing them.  Today it’s estimated that only 2% of clothing purchased in the US is actually produced here.¹

Now we mustn’t get nostalgic about the glory years of NYC’s garment district – those were never the most desirable jobs available, and most went to first generation immigrants who worked painfully hard in less than ideal situations.  My point is not that we need to look for the “Made In The USA” label – it’s to highlight how the technology of the 20th century, which primarily focused on greater industrialization and massively improved transportion, radically transformed the world we lived in.  A century that started with the horse and buggy ended with satellites and airplanes circling the globe.  All the while we patch-worked our economic system, supported struggling industries, lamented the closing of America’s industrial strongholds, and continued to ask our politicians where the jobs were.

Now, in the 21st century, technology is racing at a far greater pace, and still we seem incapable of recognizing the radical shift that is occurring all around us.  The simple fact is that technology is created by technology.  There could not have been televisions, until Edison spread the understanding of electricity.  There could not have been computers had there not been the invention of the television, and the various technologies discovered in its development.  With each breakthrough in understanding, the capacity for greater breakthroughs arise.  Many are familiar with the observations of Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore, referred to as Moore’s Law, that processor speeds for computers double every two years.  This is the result of the fact that the technology itself creates its own improvements, and thus “the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.” ²

This phenomenon helps explain why the rotary phone in the house I grew up in was not particularly dissimilar to the phone my parents used when they were a child, and yet I’ve upgraded from a flip phone, to an iPhone, to an iPhone 3G, to an iPhone4, all in the scope of five years.  The fact is, our technology is growing at an exponential rate, and thus each next iteration is greater than the past version by greater and greater measures, in less and less time. And, what applies to circuit boards applies to almost every facet of our lives.

The consequences of that are far-reaching, and yet seemingly ignored.  Several times this year I’ve had conversations with friends or colleagues in which I’ve stated the next industry to disappear is the publishing industry.  I’m not referring to books or authors, just the printing of text on paper, and primarily the stores and distribution methods setup to support this industry.  One only has to download one free Public Domain book on their iPad to suddenly realize they will never purchase a paperback copy of Plato, Thoreau or Shakespeare at a bookstore again.  In fact, I can’t really imagine why I would purchase a new book in its traditional form ever.  Arguments to the contrary typically state, “oh, but I love the feel of holding a book in my hand” or “I love the smell of ink on paper” or my favorite, “I like to be able to give my books to someone else when I’m done” (a wonderfully altruistic argument, I must admit). I typically just smile and shake my head, as I imagine folks in the last century century must have done when friends argued how much they’d miss their daily conversations with the milk man.  Yet, just last week it was announced that Borders, one of the largest bookstore chains in the US,  will be closing all 500+ of its stores.  The company had not made a profit since 2005.

So what does the closure of Borders have to do with the global economy?  Ask the 19,500 employees of Borders who are now looking for a job.  If you can’t reach them, perhaps ask one of the 60,000 individuals that Blockbuster employed in 2009.  You might still find a few of them if you look hard enough, but you better act quickly… what few shops remain will be closing soon, and no amount of political magic will bring them back.  You won’t find any employees from its major competitor Hollywood Video either, they closed the doors of their 2000+ stores in May of 2010.

Why have all these videos stores and the thousands of jobs they created disappeared?  Those damn Democrats?  Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy?  No… Technology.  Very few folks are interested in jumping into their cars and driving to the local video store to rent a movie they can either have delivered to their home or streamed over the internet thanks to Netflix or iTunes.  The only problem is that Netflix doesn’t need to employ nearly as many people to manage their supply chain as a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video (not to mention all the contractors and constructions crews, electricians and custodians needed to build and maintain physical stores).  In fact, I would argue the recent Netflix price increase is nothing but their less than subtle attempt to ween folks off of mailed DVDs, and force them to watch streaming only videos.  Why?  Less folks to employ.  Whether one copy of “Mad Men” has to go out, or ten thousand, when you do it digitally online, it takes no more effort and no more human interaction to make it happen.  No envelope stuffers to hire, no mail sorters to pay, nobody to scan this or mail that. Beyond that, it’s far more advantageous for the customer to just download a digital copy, than hope there is a physical copy at the local store.  I remember when Batman came to video when I was a kid.  Our local Blockbuster had 100 copies, that took up nearly three floor-to-ceiling shelves.  But each time for the first few weeks I ran to the the New Release section in hopes of getting a copy, not a single one was to be found.  There just wasn’t enough to go around.

And thus we come full circle to the original thought that triggered this post – welcome to the age of limitless supply.

We are only just entering what will be the most radical shift in human culture since the advent of the written language – the age of plenty.  Whether its books, music, clothing, food, medicine, or just about anything else one can imagine, there is either now, or in the very near future, going to be an unlimited supply available to us.  ”BUT GREG, OUR NATURAL RESOURCES ARE SO SCARCE… WE WON’T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH WATER FOR EVERYONE IN TWENTY YEARS.”   First, stop using the caps-lock, that’s annoying. Second, you’re forgetting Moore’s Law.  You’re trying to solve future problems with today’s technology.  That’s like trying to get to the moon in 1900.  You need the Wright Brothers before you can have a Neil Armstrong.  The problems of our future will be solved by our unbelievable technology – devices and sciences that are unimaginable today, but will be reality in a mere decade.  Then those technologies will rapidly develop even more profound technologies.

When politicians speak about what things will be like in 2040, they always seem to imagine that 2040 will have all the same technologies and scientific understandings we have today.  That is beyond ignorant.  Just as profound as the technological advances from 1980 to 2000 were, the advances from 2000 to 2020 will be exponentially greater.  Not twice as much… exponentially greater.  As there was no internet in 1980, there will be new technologies and improvements to transportation, medicine and communication 20 years from now that not even someone who daydreams about technology as much as I do can foresee.  When you consider how disconnected and fragmented our education and scientific communities were a mere decade ago before the rise of the internet, one can hardly imagine the impact that this technology is and will continue to have on the future of those professions.  The amount of information being shared and thus learned today overshadows even the greatest libraries and universities of the 20th century.

The consequence however, is that our economic system and our culture as a whole is not setup for this.  It is setup for a world in which there is a ton of work that needs to be done, monstrous sums of production required to create the goods we need, and thus anyone willing to work can certainly find employment, get paid, and acquire the goods they desire.  But as population continues to grow alongside technology, we will soon, if we have not already, surpass the need for our available workforce.  We will either have to force industries to deprecate the technologies available to them, or find alternative means to determine an individual’s worth.  We either ban digital copies of music, videos, books and applications, or we accept that fact that the millions of jobs those various industries created in their 20th century manually distributed means are gone.  As each new industry begins to defend itself from technology in a desperate struggle to save jobs, whether it be teachers, nurses, customer service reps, oil rig workers, cashiers, mailmen, gas station attendants, realtors, travel agents, lawn care professionals or  Yellow Page salesman (yes, my good friend Gary sold ads for Yellow Pages until a year ago) – more and more folks will find themselves replaced by technology, and politicians will offer more promises of a better tomorrow, and blame the other guy for the lack of jobs.

Certainly, in a perfect world, there could never be enough doctors and scientists and artists – individuals living to full potential, sharing their gifts and passions with the world.  Sadly, while our technology continues to double, our compassion for our fellow man and our understanding that we are all in this together does not.  We point fingers and long for better days long gone, instead of recognizing how amazing the time we live in is and will be.  How profound a time we are soon approaching, when man struggles for nothing.  Where man can dedicate his time not to labor, but to family and community.  That his value will not be measured by his paycheck or his hours worked, but the happiness and fulfillment he finds in each limitless day.  That instead of fighting for scarce resources, he shares in the abundance of the good life with friends, family and neighbors alike.

BUT GREG, THIS SOUNDS LIKE COMMUNISM, AND COMMUNISM HAS ALREADY FAILED.  Again, stop with the caps-lock.  Technology does not lean to a particular political ideology, and neither do I.  Any attempts to share in the bounty life provides in the past would have no doubt been crushed by the reality that there truly was a limited supply and a great demand.  Class systems inevitably form when demand outweighs supply, and thus any attempt to share the wealth is pointless when there are limits to that wealth.  My point is simply that those limits are coming to an end – and not 100 years from now, or 50 years from now.  They are ending now.  Our economic system is crumbling not because of politics or greed, but because it is archaic, outdated, and if one spends a few moments trying to figure out where money comes from, completely illusory. (hint: it’s not gold… and even if it were, that’s just a mineral we’ll most likely be able to replicate in a decade or so, the way we do with diamonds today).

On New Years Eve in the year 2000 I sat in a room with several friends and I suggested a scenario.  Imagine you woke-up tomorrow morning and opened the Best Buy circular (I believe I said Circuit City at the time, but they closed their 567 stores in 2009), and they announced that all television sets were free that day.  How many would you get?  Some folks said two, a few others were greedy and said five.  I decided to be the most greedy and I said I’d probably get at least 10.  I’m not sure what I would do with 10 tvs, but if they’re free, why not?   Most everyone then agreed that they would probably carry out as many TVs as they could fit into their car.  I then said, what would happen the next morning when you woke-up and Best Buy announced again, that today, all television sets were free.  How many would you get then?  The room fell silent. When you have everything you need, you long for nothing. In a world of limitless supply, there is zero demand.

Just imagine.

The internet is constantly evolving, and as the owner and lead developer for a web development studio, I am in the constant state of re-teaching myself how it is that I perform the work I do. While I imagine workers in most fields need to keep aware of whatever is occurring in their profession to stay on top of their game, web development has the unfortunate bonus of also having to exist on multiple devices – whether they be physical devices like computers or phones, or even virtual devices, like web browsers or custom viewers in web-enabled apps. And don’t even get me started on the various sizes, dimensions and resolutions of monitors.

For a long time I was a Flash guru – knocking out cool Flash sites for agencies and cash-happy small businesses and spending late nights troubleshooting abstract errors. In recent years though, the calls for interactive Flash websites occurred less and less, and more often clients were looking for clean HTML/CSS websites, with a solid CMS to manage their content, a blog or news engine, and some means of chatting with their visitors, whether through Social Media or eNewsletters. When I did try to put together sites like that, I had to outsource a majority of the work as the CMS had to be developed (typically in PHP), the CSS had to be coded, and troubleshooting WordPress and the like were a nightmare. It was neither efficient nor profitable – it was time to get to work and learn some new skills.

So about a year ago I began to re-teach myself HTML and CSS.  I had a “good enough” understanding of things which I’d developed over the years, typically on smaller projects with budgets that couldn’t afford Flash development.  Unfortunately, I had a lot of bad habits and misconceptions, many of which I wasn’t even aware of.  One of the disadvantages of working in a small shop is I’m typically the “senior” everything.  Anything new I typically have to teach myself, and there’s no one there to say “you’re doing that wrong.”  So first and foremost, I needed to see what clean, well-written code looked like.  I downloaded a few site templates from ThemeForest.com and studied how they were put together, read various articles online, learned to build a WordPress theme from scratch and researched CMS solutions. I ended up switching most of my websites over to the Adobe Business Catalyst platform, which gave me more control over the final environment. This forced me not only to learn a new platform, but also a lot of Javascript to get things looking and working the way I wanted.

Still, I missed some of the motion and visual appeal of Flash. I pushed further and began studying jQuery and many of the new javascript libraries that are out there, that really achieve many of the same effects previously only available to me via Flash widgets. Not only did the image faders and banners look just as good as they did in Flash, they worked on iPhones and other non-Flash devices. I was able to fade in the content of a page, and add interactivity as well.

It’s frustrating to have to learn something new when you know in the back of your head how you’d accomplish it the old way.  But as you begin to study you discover just how flawed the old way was.  As concepts that were initially challenging became understood, I was able to push myself further and soon found myself just as comfortable in the new code as I’d been with Flash.  As more and more ‘experiments’ began to workout, the realm of what’s possible grew.  I also discovered solid resources online that I could return to when issues arose.

It’s been an exciting year of discovery, and we’re on the cusp of releasing a whole series of websites that utilize all that I’ve learned. The first out the door was Magnum Opus, which we launched this week. Their previous site was one of the first sites I built when I started my business – and it was a seven year old Flash site.  The upgrade has made a huge difference.  Not only can the client now manage their content – the site is far more visible to Google and integration with Facebook will start growing their base. It’s exciting to hand tools like that to a client and see their eyes light up when they realize they are going to be getting actionable insights and feedback from their site – and they have the capacity to truly engage with that audience.  The new javascript libraries make certain we don’t have to give up anything visually to make that accessibility possible. Gorgeous background images still fade in and out, a hovering slide-show captures the energy of their studio, and where Flash is still cool, we drop it in, on the products page.

In the coming weeks we’ll be launching a handful of other sites, including a huge upgrade to the Central City Concern website.  All built on the Adobe Business Catalyst platform and taking advantage of the latest tools and tricks. We’re super excited over at The Interactive Dept, and looking forward to some major bragging this spring.

One of my favorite things to do is cook.  I was lucky enough to grow up in a home with fresh cooked meals prepared nightly (not including Friday pizza night of course) – and so shortly after college when I found myself living out on my own, I began to try to teach myself how to make the various meals I enjoyed while growing up.  Once I had mastered my chicken parmesan and could knock out pork-chop night by memory, I began to expand a bit further than the old family kitchen.

There are tons of great cooking websites out there, with excellent recipes rated by thousands of visitors, with delectable looking photographs of the finished product. If you have the Food Network, there’s an endless parade of celebrity chefs with examples already waiting in the oven to show-off.  But for my money – the place to start for new recipes is YouTube.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about YouTube for some time now, because I get the impression when I explain to folks where I’ve learned this or that, they are surprised to hear it was on YouTube. There are literally thousands upon thousands of informative videos, with an endless array of hosts and narrators, and an equally wide range of production quality, available on YouTube, all for free.  There are videos on almost every topic imaginable.  In just the last year I’ve watched videos to fix my toilet, learn the mandolin, build iPhone apps, begin studying Chinese, figure out which video games to buy, and as previously mentioned, learn to cook a wide variety of dishes.

My first foray into cooking with YouTube was about two years ago, when I decided I wanted to make one of my favorite childhood side-dishes – potatoes augratin – from scratch, rather than the box style I’d become accustomed to.  I found some basic recipes, but I couldn’t be certain how things were suppose to be prepared.  It occurred to me that there might be a video up on YouTube that could help – and I discovered Dave, the world’s greatest chef.  Well, at least that’s what it says on his apron.  I don’t know what possessed this big Carolinian to do his own cooking show – but it’s not only bizarrely hysterical, he has a damn good recipe for those taters.

Another potato chef I came across in the early days was Betty.  While I opted not to go with her canned butter spray approach – the rest of the recipe was pretty darn tasty – and I found her voice was rather nice to listen to while I followed along. When watching videos like this – I often can’t help but ponder what this person does when they aren’t using a flipcam in their kitchen.

Some of the folks on YouTube record numerous videos.  I recently decided to start learning how to cook lebanese food after I found half my budget going to Nicholas’s on Grand. I came across DedeMed – a great channel started by Denise Hazime.  In 2007 Denise found herself living on the west coast with no quality lebanese dining options, so she began cooking the meals herself, and decided, along with the help of her husband, to start a website and YouTube video series.  In 2010, her hummus recipe became the #1 hummus recipe on YouTube, with over 400,000 people watching it!  She now continues to make great recipe videos, but also sells spices and other ingredients via her website.

One of my favorite YouTube cooks is Maria, who currently has over 300 recipes on her channel, ranging through all types of dinners, desserts, appetizers, and soups. About four years ago she decided to start a blog about the dinners she made for her family – and began recording herself preparing those dinners.  Over time she’s learned better filming techniques, and how best to show various stages of preparation.   Even though her videos are well made, Maria doesn’t have a film crew, and she has a hungry family to feed, so there are no second takes, or clean cuts.  In one of my favorite recipes of her’s – gnocchi verdi – the family cat jumps in front of the camera right as she is explaining the meal.  It doesn’t phase her for a second. The purpose isn’t to create a great video or become famous – it’s to show you how dinner was made. She’s not using fancy cooking equipment and chatting with a studio audience – half the time there is a tv playing in the background and the dog is barking. But it’s the quality of the content that matters on YouTube – and her recipes are great!

As video equipment and publishing tools become easier and cheaper, more and more individuals will begin sharing their talents, passions and bizarre interests online.  Once engaged, they will begin to see not only how others perform those same tasks, but also how others present their lessons, and so the quality of content being produced will radically improve.  We are only in the first stages of a video publishing revolution, that will wildly shift where people get their information and entertainment from.  The days of content being produced by the few, for the masses is coming to an end, and YouTube is a hotbed of creative content producers experimenting with a completely new communications platform.

For dinner tonight I made Irish Stew and brown bread.  It was one of my 50 Goals For the First Quarter – and I turned to Maria for the recipe for the stew.  It was absolutely delicious – and took me back to The Lord Edward – a small pub in Dublin across the way from the ChristChurch Cathedral that my father and I had a great lunch in.  For the brown bread recipe, I came across a video clip featuring Mary Murphy from Schull, Ireland of the County Cork.  That video clip led to a blog post about making brown bread. It had a few helpful YouTube videos, the bread looked great, so I made it.  It turned out absolutely perfect.

How else but via the internet and social media could you acquire a handwritten recipe from a complete stranger?

Being a full-time web developer and all around tech geek, I spend a lot of times with various electronic gadgets that interact with almost every waking moment of my life. And considering I use my iPhone as an alarm clock, I guess I depend on several of them when I’m sleeping as well. Once you become familiar with a piece of software or a type of camera, it’s easy to stick with it and not look around for other options. From time to time though, either through necessity, frustration, or a recommendation, I upgrade these things, and almost always it’s an improvement. I’ve listed below my top five upgrades for 2010 – the new stuff I got that improved my life – or at least made it easier.

1) Upgrade of iPhone From 3 to 4.
I was a relatively early adapter of the original iPhone (one of those lucky fools who bought it at a higher price, so I got a rebate later on).  I of course broke that version, and ran out and bought an iPhone 3.  I then managed to hold-off purchasing the 3GS.  When the 4 came out though, my contract was up for renewal and I picked up the latest model relatively early on.

There are several major improvement to the iPhone 4 that makes it a remarkably better instrument than its predecessor. The new camera actually takes pretty solid 5-megapixels photos.  The 2-megapixel photos on my iPhone 3 really weren’t useful for much more than looking at them on the phone.  The HD video camera is another great new feature.  The OS has really matured as well this past year, adding multi-tasking and folders, which allows you to manage all those apps a lot easier. The App store is filled to the brim with creative and I still feel, unbelievably inexpensive applications and games to help you do everything from organize tasks and banking, to throwing birds into pigs. It’s almost silly to call it a phone, as making phone calls has become such a small percentage of what I do with the device over the past year.

2) Switching To Using Google Chrome As My Main Web Browser
As a web developer, my absolute worst enemy is the web browser.  I produce my masterpiece using the latest and cleanest code, post my files, and then begin the sad process of seeing how the various (typically older) web browsers interpret my work.  Internet Explorer has a particularly nasty reputation, but any older version of a decent browser platform can present challenges.

Because I have to test my work across all these tools, I always have a handful of browsers available to me on whatever machine I’m using.  For the past three years or more, my browser of choice has been Firefox.  I work almost exclusively on Macs, but I never really dug Safari.  I find it to be clunky, and opening new tabs is painfully slow.  Recently though – I began testing more and more in Google Chrome, and I found myself really liking the way things were setup.  Of course it has all the features any web browser has, but as is typical with Google, it’s cleaner and faster.  I also enjoy being able to sync my browser to my account, so any machine that I own (I have three I use regularly) have the exact same bookmarks and plugins.  The Google App Store is also an interesting concept I’m beginning to explore, and apps like bit.ly are starting to find their way into my workflow.

3) Purchase of Nikon D3000
While I have long fancied myself a photographer, in at least the sense that I attempt to take creative photos wherever I go, not just snapshots of me in front of things, I have always just used a hand-held Canon Powershot.  I had owned two in a row that I really loved – had recommended them to lots of folks, and still would.  In June however, I was planning a trip to visit Ireland with my father for his 60th birthday, and I figured it was as good an excuse as any to upgrade to something more capable.

I did a lot of research, and settled on the Nikon D3000 because I always enjoyed the quality of the shots I saw taken with Nikon – and the D3000 seemed to bring the most bang for the buck.  It takes gorgeous 10.2 mega-pixel resolution shots, and you can use almost any Nikon lens.  The kit I purchased came with two lenses, an 18-55mm and  a 55-200mm. The quality of shots I got to take in Ireland and ever since have been absolutely great.  Plus it’s small enough not to draw too much attention, or be a pain to take around.

I had a bit of buyers remorse at first that I hadn’t spent a bit more and gone with the next model up that also includes an HD video camera feature – but having recently just purchased a Canon Vixia HFm31 HD video camera, turns out it would have been overkill for my Nikon anyhow, so I’m glad I went with that model.

4) Switching Business Email Over to Google Apps For Business and Switching From POP to IMAP
I’ve paid for two servers for many years for my business.  Many of my clients websites are hosted on a Media Temple Shared Server, and I also maintain an old GoDaddy server for a few legacy sites.  My business email migrated from GoDaddy over to Media Temple several years ago and generally was okay.  No major problems, although a few of my clients did report issues here and there.

This year, at the recommendation of Brant Walsh over at Salem Mac Guy, our official IT solution at The Interactive Dept, we started using Google Apps For Business for various clients to specifically manage their email.  For organization under 50 users, Google Apps For Business is free, and comes with a solid email system, on par with Gmail.  You use your own URL, and clients have no idea that it’s being sent from Google.  You can use POP or IMAP, and your favorite desktop application to check and store messages.  When away from your desktop, you can use webmail with the familiar Gmail interface. We ended up bringing a handful of clients over to Google Apps For Business, and everyone seems to be happy.

I also switched from using POP to IMAP – another recommendation from Brant.  Having all my various instruments synced up with the exact same email and folders all the time is a life-saver.  Can’t understand why I ever had it another way.

5) The iPad
There are upgrades, and then there are upgrades. While technically the iPad didn’t replace another device in my life, it has replaced numerous other types of instruments and systems I would have previously used, to accomplish all the things I do on my iPad.  For example, books.  Let me make a bold prediction – I will not purchase a single physical book this entire year.  Why on earth would I?  I can just as easily download it to my iPad, and take that and dozens of other titles with me anywhere I need to.  Then there is that whole matter of cutting trees, and inks, and transporting… UGH.  Sorry printing industry, but 2011 will be the year of the digital publication, even moreso than the past year.

In addition to reading, the iPad became my new video game system.  I haven’t turned on my Wii in months now.  Games played out on a beautiful large screen that you’re holding in your hands are not only scarily addictive, but when played from the comfort of your bed before falling off to sleep (as is the case of my addiction to Words With Friends), are wonderfully convenient to sneak in time for.  The iPad has begun to replace my laptop at certain meetings and events, and with awesome new apps coming out all the time, more and more tasks previously taken care of in notebooks or desktop apps are being taken care of digitally from the comfort of the office couch. I still haven’t found a stylus that I really enjoy using – but once I can start writing actual notes on the iPad, it’s all over for paper at the office.

I’m flying down to San Francisco at the moment – 20000 feet in the sky – writing a blog post on my iPad. In fact, minus a few obvious items like clothes and an assortment of travel size bathroom products – I brought little more than my iPhone and iPad on this trip.

I didn’t even bring a ticket. I checked in last night online, and simply scanned a barcode on my iPhone at security and prior to boarding. Just walked off the Max and right through security.

Typically when flying my carry-on is stuffed to the gills with magazines, a book or two, a handful of cables and chargers, my camera, an iPod, along with print-outs of tickets, hotel reservations and several Google Maps I would print out with locations to the various locales I was planning to visit on my trip. I would then lug this turtle shell around with me throughout the trip.

These days I bring so much more but carry so much less. The majority of my music collection now resides on my iPhone, so no need for the iPod – although even that remarkable device was an enormous upgrade from the CD Walkman days where I’d carry my music portfolio in a separate carrying case larger than the player skipping it’s way through the music (not to mention a ziplock bag full of batteries to sustain the consistently drained device).

With my upgrade to the iPhone4 – I no longer feel compelled to bring my digital camera on most trips, as the new camera on the iPhone4 does the trick most of the time.  When I traveled to Ireland with my Dad earlier this year, I of course brought my Nikon with me because I knew there would be some great photo opportunities. But even with that camera in my bag most of the trip, I still found myself using my iPhone most of the time, as it was smaller and more convenient. Plus with the addition of video I’m slowly beginning to capture more events and experiences through that medium then simply taking pictures. The thought of bringing a video camera with me on a trip 5 years ago would have seemed excessive – but now it just sort of tags along.

With just the iPhone, you already save a good deal of luggage bulk, but with the addition of the iPad, the need for most other travel accessories vanishes.

I fly home to the east coast at least three time a year, and those 6 hour flights require a lot of entertainment. With the iPad, I might as well be sitting in my living room. I have a huge collection of books and magazines to peruse throughout my trip – exponentially more than I could have ever packed (or carried in general). Many of the popular new apps I have work just as well offline as on, so I have a sick gaming system to entertain me – and it’s size makes it a lot more usable in a cramped airline seat than even my tiny MacBook.

Speaking of the MacBook – I still take that along with me – but I find I use it less and less – and I can imagine not bringing it on a shorter trip, where I knew I wouldn’t need my major applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.).  I can’t imagine we’re too far away though from touch-screen verions of many of these popular apps, even if just “light” versions at first.  Adobe already has a Photoshop prototype app for the iPhone.  I imagine the integration of Photoshop or Illustrator with touch-screen technology would radically transform graphic design techniques and style.

The first time I came to San Francisco about seven years ago, was to attend the Flash Forward Conference.  The final day, they had a drawing for various prizes.  I was psyched when my name was called – but soon discovered my prize was a collection of instructional books from O’Reilly – about 15 or so 100+ page books.  Now typically, I’d be thrilled to get a huge increase to my library.  One problem… I was standing at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco – and my office was in Portland, and I had a flight to catch in two hours.  There was no way I could carry that many books out to the Oakland airport, and shipping them would have been insane.  I grabbed the five or six that seemed most interesting, and left the rest behind.  The book, even with its unmatched capacity for sentimental connection, is a horrible distribution device.  Heavy, easily destroyed, hard to share.  Digital changes everything.

So as I’m wrapping up this post, I am now back in Portland (yes, a blog post can take minutes to read, but days to write if you’re as scattered as I am).  I was running late on Sunday – and had yet another great iExperience on the way to the airport.  Having not previously checked-in, and having overestimated the speed with which the BART train would take me to SFO, I began to get that nervous feeling that this might not work out so smoothly.  Once again I reached for my iPad – and while driving through an underground tunnel I was still able to connect to the United website, check-in for my flight and have the virtual-ticket emailed to my phone.  Five minutes of my time, no ink required.

There were countless other times I took advantage of GPS and search to find various restaurants or bars – reading reviews and rating and making sure I was headed in the right direction.  Santa-con was in full force, so the camera was in steady demand as you can imagine – and because I could just as easily be reading a text-message you can get away with some great shots that might not be so wise with a bulky camera in your hand.  And finally, while walking through Chinatown on my last night I decided to start recording some video – and came across this old man playing a beautiful instrument.  Having an HD video camera to capture moments like this is just ridiculously awesome.

Thank you for letting me geek out some – but serious, I live in the future and I love it!

This episode is actually a composite of two design reviews we had over the past couple weeks. I love my clients – but sometimes you really just have to smile and keep your mouth shut.

For the heck of it, we’ve now recreated these conversations in this 4-minute animation.

It’s been a rough couple weeks.

A close friend lost his sister in a car accident three weeks ago – and just when I was beginning to breath regularly again and not self-reflect the incident on my own reality and my own beloved family – I received a Facebook message from one of my closest friend’s girlfriend.

Greg. Please call me ASAP. Teyla was hit by a bus in Sydney yesterday. She is on life support at Royal Prince Albert Hospital in Sydney. I’m flying there tonight.

Teyla, whom I called Kendra (or Bendra most of the time) had been living in Australia the past three years or so, getting a Masters Degree in Nursing. She was the first friend I made in college – and the two of us along with my friend Mairin moved out to Oregon together in 2001. She was my partner in crime for living the life less ordinary – sharing my passion for non-stop traveling, meeting as many people as possible and doing all you can to make their lives (and thus your own) more fulfilling.

I immediately called Leah and received the awful news that Kendra was most likely not going to make it. It’s hard to express just how powerfully such news alters the moment – and changes your perspective on just about everything. I suddenly realized I was in Portland – and she was in Australia – and this small world became painfully enormous.

As the emotional dust began to settle in my mind – I began typing Kendra’s name into Facebook – and pulled up her profile. What I found there has been a source of comfort and insight the likes of which I never would have expected from a website. And that’s because Facebook and social media in general are more than just webpages and iPhone apps – they are becoming the virtual reflection of our relationships. What I found on Kendra’s profiles was the shared anguish of hundreds of people whose lives she’d touched. There were cousins, her sister, Leah, friends from college, co-workers, neighbors and all her new-found friends in Australia. What had been a profile she once controlled had become a shared vigil as we all hoped and prayed and wished for her recovery. It became a place to share news of what was happening to someone we loved who was so far away. As others discovered the tragic news from status updates of friends, the vigil grew.

When the sad day arrived that Kendra was taken off life-support, the vigil became a memorial, and more photos and heart-ache poured out upon its pages. People wrote good-bye messages to Kendra – but in reality they wrote those letters to everyone – sharing their unique moments and personal sorrow with the collective.

This was a stark comparison to my first experience with death and social media. In April of 2006 my good friend from growing-up, Lucas, lost his younger brother. Tim passed away in the evening – and news reached me several days later. I was completely devastated, but I credit that event with a complete shift in my life that led to a 30-day train trip across the US and Canada shortly thereafter, followed by the endless travel and the awakening that my experience, even if I lived it in full would be too short if I wasted a single moment. Events like these reminds you that the “average lifespan” is not a guarantee – nor enough time in its own right.

Some time later I pulled up Tim’s MySpace profile – and do so even to this day. As opposed to Kendra’s, Tim must have had comments locked, because it is frozen in time from the day he left. No good-byes or well-wishes from friends, just his life as it was the day he left. It acts as some sort of modern-day tombstone – a place I can return to and reflect on his young life – and all the talent and beauty he left behind. Unlike a tombstone it does not stand silent – instead it tells me of the songs and music and books he read – of the friends he had and the thoughts and opinions he shared. You never die on social media – according to MySpace Tim is 28 now – and part of me prefers that virtual illusion over the reality. I have no doubt that I will continue to return to Kendra’s profile as well, and leave comments as the years go by. It will be no substitute for the plans we had – but it can be a source of comfort when the inevitable presence of her absence is felt.

A day after Kendra’s passing I received two messages from individuals I had never met. They had known Kendra though and she had clearly told them about me – and through Facebook they decided to contact me to make sure I was doing okay. I was unbelievably touched. This is a direct result of the power of social media. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken the news to get out to me in Oregon from Australia without Facebook – and I most certainly wouldn’t have been consoled by an Aussie who never met me.

You are not alone – you never were in fact. More people love you then the mind is capable of recognizing – and any fears or personal defeats don’t have to be fought alone. Social media unlocks the promise of a community somehow lost over the last century. While advances in transportation and urbanization have allowed us to go further and live more dispersed lives – up until recently, it has seemingly only broken the social bonds of family and friendship. With Facebook and the social media revolution however, I believe the pendulum has begun to swing back. Both tragedy and personal triumphs can be shared. Rather than having a couple of friends that you do your best to stay in touch with, you can now be connected to an entire community of people, and easily keep up with the events in their lives, as they share in yours. While many folks worry about privacy concerns, I am convinced “privacy” is an out-dated concept, the result of isolation and fear of the potential harm strangers bring. The more we get used to sharing our lives with others online, the more we will realize how much in common we have – and the more we will begin to cooperate in the success of others – and collectively mourn our tragedies. New “communities” are forming – that will be larger and more connected than traditional communities ever were.

We need not fear social media. What we should be more concerned about is loosing the connections with those around us. Stay connected.

This week Apple announced their highly anticipated iPad – a revolutionary new device that creates an entirely new category someplace between the laptop and smart-phone. While the media and pundits may have been more focused on the name – my mind has been on fire the past three days thinking of nothing but the potential. I have never been more convinced that The Interactive Dept. and it’s partners of creative designers and developers – as well as photographers, videographers and writers, have a long and exciting career ahead of them. I have also never been more convinced that now is the time to work for yourself or with a small collective of creative types – because the publishing revolution has begun!

The title of this blog post comes from the title of a book by Bill Gates, written in 1995. I was a senior in high school at the time – and Bill Gates was the richest man in the world. It seemed unlikely that a dork such as this would be the richest man in the world, so a dork such as I was quite fascinated, and ran out to purchase this book the moment it hit the shelves. In it, Bill Gates explained his vision of the content revolution – of an internet that everyone participated in – video cameras and interactive touch-screens allowing for instant access to knowledge from anywhere and instantly.

“For more than 500 years, the bulk of human knowledge and information has been stored as paper documents. On the information highway, rich electronic documents will be able to do things no piece of paper can. The highway’s powerful database technology will allow them to be indexed and retrieved using interactive exploration. It will be extremely cheap and easy to distribute them. In short, these new digital documents will replace many printed paper ones because they will be able to help us in new ways.”

While a statement like this seems trite today – one has to remember that 15 years ago, the declaration that paper documents would be replaced was almost ridiculous.  Let’s recap technology for just a second:

1995 I use my parents IBM Aptiva Desktop with a 386processor, a 4800-baud modem and a dot-matrix printer and I go online for the first time with 5-hours of overpriced internet via AOL.
1996 I go to college and get a Gateway Desktop with a ginormous monitor, a bubble-jet color printer and a T-1 line
1997 I buy my first scanner – a giant flat-bed that takes up my whole desk.
1998 I buy my first digital camera.  Under 3-megapixel and a battery life of about 5 minutes it seemed.
2000 I purchase my first cell phone that just makes calls, sometimes…
2002 I get my first laptop – where I can take my computer with me. A giant, heavy Dell.
2007 I get my first smart-phone, the iPhone.
2008 I replace my broken iPhone with a new iPhone.

When Bill Gates declared I wouldn’t need paper anymore – if I had wanted to bring a map with directions on a drive, I had to go down to the basement of my house, fire up the Aptiva – connect via the phone line to Poughkeepsie ($0.35/minute at the time) – wait for Webcrawler to load up – find a mapping service via the search engine – and then try to print the map on my crappy dot-matrix printer. Today I would simply turn on my iPhone, pull up the map, and have it find me or any other location in the world and easily map the route. No need to print it either, as I can simply bookmark it and take it with me.  I haven’t had a printer setup in my apartment in 5 years. Bill was correct.

Along the way Bill obviously got side-tracked, because Microsoft certainly hasn’t been on the cutting edge of this revolution.  I like to think Bill’s philanthropic desires overshadowed his otherwise prophetic business mind – but regardless, it has been Apple that has carried the torch of this great evolution in information to our current moment.

It was Apple that changed the music industry forever – by allowing me to put every song I could have ever wanted to hear in a device I can carry along anywhere.  While Sony Executives were bragging about the endless bounds of their CD-Discman’s Skip-Protection capacity (”We’re up to two whole minutes of shaking!“) – Apple realized folks might wish to carry more than a single CD’s worth of music with them.  Oh – and while we’re at it – why not create a marketplace that makes the purchasing of music a gazillion times easier. I can now listen to music from bands who have never stepped into a corporate recording studio, whom I have never seen live.  The transaction, if any, can be conducted between us.

It was Apple that changed the telephone forever – by creating an entirely new interface and experience with a phone that for the first-time ever made having a cell phone truly useful. I could now listen (or not) to voice messages in the order I wanted to, with actual useful controls that didn’t require me to remember bizarre number combinations.  They created a phone that could be used for all the things you never imagined a phone could be used for.  And again they created a marketplace where I could easily purchase or download thousands and thousands of applications to make my life easier or more fun.

With the iPad – I truly believe Apple has created a device that will change the way we interact with tons of things we take for granted today – especially all those documents that still require paper.  For example, I still bring a notepad and pen into meetings. I don’t like the sound of typing or looking at my screen when I’m trying to discuss a project with my client so the laptop doesn’t work for me.  I would however take digital notes, or even record the audio of the meeting with a device like the iPad.   It would result in less scraps of paper around the office – I could immediately sync it with the clients files – and the ability to pull up samples of work or other websites right there in the meeting would be huge.

At home – I can finally see myself using an eReader.

I’m sorry Kindle fans, but when I look at one compared to the iPad, I think “how 90s.” I’m psyched that Amazon has had so much success, but the market for a solid eReader was WIDE-OPEN, and I think Apple has just taken over. Not only does the color screen allow for supplementary photography, video and audio – but once again they have created a solid marketplace for purchasing and downloading books from the comfort of your bed – and I’m particularly interested to see what happens to the publishing industry, as lessons from the music industry are learned, and new under-discovered writing talents begin creating their own marketplaces for selling their writings directly to the public. There is no art-form that requires so little to produce, but so much to share, as writing – and a solid eReader has been the last hurdle for unleashing the full potential of the publishing revolution.

Imagine students no longer having to lug around text-books. Think of a world where you can search for thoughts or ideas through endless epochs of written word, find something of interest, and begin reading it in its entirety – all while sitting on the train during the morning commute. Imagine a world where our need for paper is diminished, and our forests flourish.

The way scientists perform research, students study, academics write papers or even simply how a child writes a book report is going to change gradually but profoundly. Upon completion of a book, rather then a written page of “other books by the author” – those will be links – and those links will have links – and a new type of dewey-decimal system will develop of its own design based on our informational needs as knowledge is reorganized and rediscovered.

I look forward to playing video games in my hands – watching movies from my bed – and showing large and gorgeous photos and home movies to my parents.  I look forward to the next round of devices that will expand upon what Apple delivers.  I anticipate shared touch-screen applications in all sorts of places and locations we don’t experience them now. I look forward to seeing the ways we replace old technologies and concepts with touch-screen applications.

In this new world, a screen on the wall could be my light-switch, my music remote, my phone, my weather, my recipe, my security, my door bell or my art work. Apple has made the first step, with an earnest attempt to remove the keyboard and mouse. How will we develop products and interfaces that have no bounds?  That first digital camera I bought in 1998 looked like it still had film inside of it. They wanted it to feel like a camera still.  Now most digital cameras are slim and have redefined how a camera should look and work.  With the iPhone – the camera took on a whole new shape.  So many other devices still cling to their industrial heritage – but as the iPad begins to acquire their tasks, new applications and interfaces will be devised to create efficiencies that were impossible in a physical world.

Steve Jobs said in his speech this week that there will be a new gold-rush.  While I agree that there will be plenty to be made producing applications and tools for these devices – I disagree with the terminology of a Gold Rush.  Yes, there will be some wave of success at first – but this isn’t some new patch of territory that is going to be quickly discovered, claimed and cleared.  Rather – this is a new economic era.  For thousands of years, man has traded goods and services.  These primarily have been tactile items – foods, clothes, tools, etc.  Over time, things like education and knowledge became prized.  The arts flourished, and someone could be paid for their creativity.  However, there could only be so many books published, so many painting painted, so many students taught.  With the publishing revolution – that changes.  Suddenly there is an endless supply of a whole new world of products never before imagined.  I can design and build a game of my own imagination – produce it myself – sell it on the App Store – and make a full-time living having never left my home or created anything tactile.  The more our money chases virtual products of the imagination – the quicker our economy will have to evolve.

The solution to unemployment isn’t getting the old jobs back – it’s awakening to the new economy.  It’s acknowledging the publishing revolution has begun.  It’s educating the next generation of children not simply how to memorize, but to learn. I was lucky that Bill showed me the Road Ahead when I was 17. It shaped my path through college, it gave me focus in my 20s as I bounced from various start-ups.  It gave me the confidence to start The Interactive Dept – and it fills me with overwhelming excitement when I see a product that will transform the way we communicate and share ideas.

I have seen the road ahead – and it is beyond exciting.

As someone who spends a good deal of his time in front of a computer (that coincidentally is next to another smaller computer) I spend a lot of my time online.  While there are a whole variety of websites I might use on a semi-regular basis to manage my life, inspire my imagination, or simply pass the time while I’m waiting for a .zip file to download – there are a handful of sites that have become so valuable to me, that I can’t imagine going through a single day without them.  Similar to the way I ponder how anyone managed to find a particular location before GPS or at the very least MapQuest – I’m beginning to forget how on Earth I accomplished any tasks before I started using these website.

LogMeIn
www.logmein.com
cost: FREE

In a perfect world I would have one computer in a mystical realm of the internet, and at home and at work and everywhere in between, I would just have monitors and keyboards that could connect to my computer – and so all my files and applications would be available from any location, any time I needed them.  While that world is rapidly approaching – in our current moment I would often find myself getting home only to discover I had forgotten a file I needed back at the studio.  I have struggled with .Mac accounts, MobileMe accounts, and iDisk accounts – and nines times out of ten the file I needed was never where I needed it.

With LogMeIn I simply register my various computers (currently three of them) with my account – and once logged in, I can control the desktop of any of those machines through the web browser.  I close down applications I may have left running – I can post or email files that are only on one machine – I can even use software that I only have a single license for.  I’ve converted video files, for example, using my Mac Pro in the studio, from a web browser on my MacBook at home.

There is also a paid version of the website that has more features – like being able to drag files onto the browser to place on another machine – or creating a virtual network between all your machines online.  However – I’ve been fine with the free version.

FunctionFox – TimeFox
www.functionfox.com
cost: $35/month

Time is money as they say.  Never is that expression more true than when you run your own services business such as myself. While we typically quote a flat price for larger projects such as websites or branding packages – much of our time is actually spent making smaller updates to websites and applications we’ve created for clients in the past.

On any given day I might do work for 6 or 7 different clients.  Some of these might be multi-hour tasks, while others might take as little as 10 minutes.  However – over the course of a month those smaller tasks add up – and if you’re not counting them, you’ve just lost a good deal of revenue.

There are a lot of Time Tracking applications and websites out there and I’ve used a variety of them over the years.  But I haven’t found anything that works for my needs like Timefox.  It is purposely under-designed and under-featured, to handle the one thing I need it to do – record my time for various projects from numerous clients. It is then super easy to generate a variety of reports, so I can quickly determine what I need to invoice each of my clients – or how we are doing on a particular project based on initial estimates, and what time we’ve put in to date.

Plus – about a year ago my colleague Jessica and I were contacted by the CEO of the company, Mary-Lynn Bellamy-Willms because she was going to be in Portland and wanted to take a few of the long-time customers out to breakfast at The Heathman.  Now I’ve spent a lot of money on a lot of services over the years – and never received so much as a thank you – let alone a complimentary breakfast and some great conversation.  Take a tip from a Canadian company – that simple breakfast not only made me a customer for life – but also a part-time sales rep, as I now recommend FunctionFox even more than I did before.

Mint
www.mint.com
cost: FREE

While I can’t say I’ve been the best accountant for my ever growing small-business (and as of 2010 have handed most of those reigns over to a spectacular new CPA) I have always been good about keeping track of every expense and income the business made, using Quickbooks.  It is a pain sometimes to muscle my way through it, but since the very beginning I have known exactly what my business made and where that money went – and that knowledge was vital.

When it came to my personal life, however – that was another story.  The closest thing I had to records was my monthly statement from my bank – and when I went paperless a year ago – I all but lost any record of where my money was going.  I was like the federal government – only without the capacity to print more money. That’s where Mint.com stepped in.

Mint is like a very slimmed down version of Quickbooks (and as of late last year, is owned by the same company).  You attach your various personal checking and savings accounts, any credits cards or investments, car payments, etc. – and Mint.com does most of the rest.  I was able to quickly create a monthly budget by entering in the various recurring bills (rent, cell phone, netflix, etc.).  When those transactions occur – Mint.com updates my monthly budget so I know how much I’ve spent in the various areas of my life.  Once you’ve identified what type of an expense each transaction is (and it actually does a pretty good job guessing) – the next time you go back to that vendor, it fills in that information for you.

Best of all, Mint.com is free!

So now I can very easily determine how much I’ve spent on food, or utilities, or even beer.  It’s a lot easier to understand what you’ve been doing (or at least spending your money on) when your personal life is broken into a pie chart.  Other tools on the site help you to create strategies for working off debt, building a saving and more.

Smashing Magazine
www.smashingmagazine.com
cost: FREE

There are a lot of great websites out there to gain inspiration from in my field.  I’m lucky to be a part of an industry that is rapidly changing at every moment and in almost every facet.  New trends form in web design almost every day – and the trap of falling into your same style or layouts is always present. That’s why I start out almost every day checking out Smashing Magazine.

Not only does their Twitter feed drag me to their site several times a day – but anytime I find myself hung-up on a technique, or trying to find a simple design solution for an eNewsletter or campaign site – their lists of “Best Of”s always have something that solves my dilemma.  And no – I’m not just saying this because they featured our website for Aviation Gin on a blog post about websites for the alcohol beverage industry.

Some of my favorite posts have been:

25 Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity

50 Fresh Portfolio Sites For Your Inspiration

Web Design Trends for 2009

Expecting Rain
www.expectingrain.com
cost: FREE

This is probably the site I go to every day that would be the least useful to anyone else.  That is unless they happen to be a fanatical Bob Dylan fan.  Expecting Rain takes its name from a line in Dylan’s classic “Desolation Row” (Everybody is making love. Or else expecting rain.) The site is a collection of all Bob Dylan news stories and ramblings from across the internets.  On any given day, 15-20 links will appear, ranging from blog posts on obscure bootlegs to concert reviews from German press outlets.  It never ceases to amaze me that one man could have so much written about him on a daily basis – but apparently the world of Bob Dylan never stops.

The site also posts links to stories about Dylan collaborators, cover songs and great YouTube clips (which are usually removed from YouTube a few days later at the request of Columbia Records).  Certainly not for the casual fan – but for those with a bit of a Bob Dylan obsession – this site is a life saver.