Biking to Work

I have a sweet bike route going to work and back. Big shoulders, bike lanes, and even the Burke Gilman for a little bit. I go up past St. Edwards Park, down thru Juanita where I usually stop for tea in these wet lands and watch the birds on Lake Wa, then I ride along the waterfront all the way to work.

Here's some stats for you:

In May, I rode 309 miles.
28 miles per day.
6.4 miles of that is climbing hills.
Daily elevation gain is 1,730 feet (Stevens Pass is 4,056 feet)

Here's the boardwalk (Old Market Street Trail) which runs thru Juanita Bay Park. (These are other people's photos)

The Pandora Evolution

Pandora has a new offering - it's called Pandora One.

Pandora One player (desktop)

This is only available to subscribers (a whopping $36 per). What do you get? Higher audio quality, customizable skins for the web player, no advertisements, and a cool new desktop app.

There are 2 ways to listen to Pandora from your desktop. One is to use OpenPandora, which is an open source free download. The other is to download Pandora's desktop player. The advantage of these desktop players is that you can just put the icon in your Quick Launch tray and listen with one click.

I have recently switched to the new Pandora One player.

It's advatages are 1) smaller overall size, 2) bigger album art, 3) nice fade out when you nix a song, 4) a little alert that flashes in the corner of the screen when a new song starts, and 5) it does not prompt you with a "are you sure you want to exit" screen when you hit close or if you're trying to shut down by just hitting your power button.

It's drawbacks are 1) you can only see one album at a time, so if you want to go back and rate the song before last, you can't, 2) no support for Windows Messenger to show the song you're listening to.


Pandora One song alert


Open Pandora (desktop)



Pandora mini-player (web)



Pandora One full screen player - classic view (web)


Pandora One full screen player - night skin (web)

Motivated Buyer Looking for AMC Pacer

A friend sent me this ad today. A beautiful example of a charming Art Director somewhere that was able to sell this concept. I wonder if I could sell something like this to one of my Microsoft clients...

Phone Demo Jabra Dial 520

Another recent project at work. This was a really fun project because I got paid to build this phone in my 3D application. I've always thought it would be cool to do something like that. It was also refreshing to do something for a brand other than AT&T or Microsoft. Click in the lower left where it says "Get a quick demo here".

Here's a screen shot of modelling the phone.

Some Great Ads

History is written by the winners.

(so true)

Thyroid cancer is growing 6 times faster than prostate cancer. Ask your doctor to check your neck. It could save your life. checkyourneck.com

more great ads here

$2000 Cheescake

We went to a charity auction dinner on Saturday for this charity that I had donated my graphic design time to. It was a black tie event - I had to tuck my shirt in and everything. It turned out to be a very interesting evening. A LOT of MONEY was flowing in that room. They started the auctioning out with deserts. Someone at our table bought a white chocolate cake for $1000. It went nicely with our bottle of Dom. The desert that took the biggest price was the cheescake from the Cheesecake Factory at $2000.

Here is a video of a chocolate cake... not as big of a winner as some of the others... but still fun to watch how this guy works.

Grand total, they raised $261,000.

Stop Motion

I was a little bored at work yesterday, so I made a little stop motion video. This is the first time I've done this, which I find suprising. How have I gone 36 years w/o making one of these?