I signed up to get the daily local newspaper a month ago. The salesman was one of those nice high school kids with lots of reasons why I should sign up. How its a win win for all parties. Something about him getting money for college, a discount for me, etc. But the paper never came. I never tried really hard to get it to come. Just wrote down my address on his form. I got a couple of calls from the paper asking if I had received a paper yet. I told them no, they asked questions like if my apartment complex had a gate etc. (It doesn’t) But the paper never came so I called to cancel. It was easy enough and in a couple of weeks I got my 8 dollars back. In the form of a check. From Lee Procurement in Davenport Iowa.

 How does that work? My guess is that the paper outsourced billing to these guys. Makes sense. Now I am not a privacy watchdog but it was interesting that this random company in Iowa has my name, address etc. It is amazing how interconnected our world is.

I love soccer.  I was so happy to hear that Seattle had finally gotten an MLS team.  Last night the Sounders pounded last years MLS Cup finalists, the New York Red Bulls 3-0.  Seattle really showed its love for soccer as the 32,000 seats sold out in days.  I am excited to see some matches after this semester ends and I head home. 

I love Apple. I also love the environment. I lived in the Bay Area and now in Seattle, so I guess it makes sense. But my two loves were recently at odds with one another. When I bought my iPhone, they took the wall charger out because a couple of them were faulty. I filled out the form and a couple weeks latter this package came for me.

  3 and a half inches of foam on every side. For a little wall brick? Isn’t this a little overkill? You could almost stick this thing in a manilla envelope and it would be fine. I am a fan of less packaging and less waste. So I saved the box to send something else. Something important that actually needs a ton of padding.

We went out to my roommates car in the morning and found that about half a foot of snow had piled up overnight. In his car, as his sunroof was open. Luckily, it was very cold, so nothing melted and it was easy to remove the snow. I thought in the end, it was pretty funny.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoZgCZwN0D0?wmode=transparent]

This is a quick video I made for the BYU chapter of Engineers Without Borders. They did some work on clean water and solar heating down in Peru last year. This year they are returning to see which projects worked and which didn’t. I made this with Animoto. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out at Animoto.com

This is the first creative project I have undertaken with photoshop.  Most of the time when I used photoshop it was to make a flyer, or something.  This is based on this tutorial by abduzeedo.  I kind of took it my own way.  I really didn’t know what i am doing yet.  If practice makes perfect, I have some hours to put in.  

CS 4 came in the mail today. I liked the packaging. Especially the orange to black inner sleeve. (Third picture) Completely unnecessary, but it makes you feel better about dropping thousands of dollars on software. The installation didn’t go so well. The first CD finished and ejected but a notice came up saying invalid serial number. Which was weird because they checked that before i started installing. So I had to force quit the installer and start over. Not nice. But all is good. Time to make something sweet.