worry.

Contracting forever-ever, but scheduling more interesting things.  I've spent 20 minutes looking at configurations of bins and shipping palettes that should let me move a little more efficiently, and if not, put my every worldly possession into storage in a single location.

Right now, though, I feel more like a craftsman while poring over boring things I have ignored for years.  Pawing through Wordpress documentation and PHP I realize how much I have ignored in the pursuit of some more interesting thing.  I hope that I am getting more patient with ideas as I get older, instead of just slower.

Solid construction projects are underway.  Visited with design friends who are using 3D printers in a way that couldn't just as easily be achieved with ¢40 worth of hardware store parts, which makes me feel like more interesting things are in the pipeline.  

This is all so abstract.

What I mean to say:

Building a game for a client project in collaboration with one of my cohorts at my current job.  It's coming together nicely-- all of the NES nostalgia is getting me worked up about making things that operate as I would expect them to, or simply as I remember them.

Unbelievably, this is just about all I find worth posting right now.

Going to visit a 3d printer today in the hopes that I can start to see what's possible and on what scale.  PVD is the material at hand with the machine in the office, so if something as precision-scale as bar ends can be made, then the rest looks promising.

Making some hairpin furniture, in the hopes that it keeps me hanging around my place a little longer.  A friend of mine's office is moving back to the city from Mountain View, and I'm more than glad to inherit a slab of wood to to cut into useful bits.  The sketches I've worked out so far for a handful of pieces I had in mind will work well, and I'm glad I had the patience to wait for things to fall into my lap.

Currently making a short list of the tasks assembled below, in order to produce either a better schedule or the will to mow them down and see which regenerate.

Furniture construction by design

ImpactJS games - extraordinarily simple, ridiculously so.

Site redevelopment, tests for client work ( going A-OK. )

Lamp construction - from printable bits and pine.  ( Components on order, designs in hand.  Would like a whistle / tone control for this, or RFID proximity. )

3D Printable bits - For refurbishing or tooling work.

Leather work, and printable bits for framing and securing.  I would like to see how sturdy these printed pieces could be for producing fasteners or buttons, notions of all kind.

Works on the JS-assessment, just to be sure.  Got to maintain a certain level of familiarity with the good things.

Maps project, no longer on hiatus.  It's a return to working Rails / Node project.

That was more than I thought.  TIme to get busy with the scissors into making this list fit into my pocket.  

Putting together a short collection of projects from my notebook for prospective development.  My fantasy life depends on picking up a soldering iron and saw from time to time, so it's time I managed to actually start cobbling things together.  On my shopping list:

Cloth-covered cords

Bakelite plugs

pasty-white pine

a 3-d printed brass bowl

Laqueur for box-lids and sockets.

I'd like to talk to someone in a bike shop about who does their powder coating.  I was talking to a friend of mine in an industrial design program about what it would take to coat, dye, and otherwise seamlessly cover components.  I'm reminded of the beautiful dyed circuit boards pulled from the scrap heap recently, and wanted to try my hand and desoldering and embellishing with discarded boards.  I've always been inspired by the trash heap, and it might be time to go back to it with a more careful eye.  I'm still enjoying putting together sketches, which is a step forward from the usual day-dreaming that always comes with ideas about creating physical objects.  There's a practical demon that dogs my conscience about the waste and self-importance of creating physical objects: the elective supremacy of physical waste, the idea that what I'm making has importance and would need to, without having that awkward stage of production where things just suck.

Stuff doesn't measure up, at first.  It might not ever, but that's a different day's worry.  It's still important to make things.  It's easier to make things, electric clutter for instance, if it's intangible.  Making tangible things has the burden of ego attached.  It's also a risk, and it's hard to take risks sometimes.

There are a few lamps I'd also like to restore and polish this way.  I'm excited about the process.  If I could find a disused pile of identical vintage lamps, tension lamps or otherwise, I could try out the process, and look at a few in-progress objects to see how any of these approaches or finishes turn out.  The nice thing about working with garbage: no fear of losing anything more than time and materials.  Also, when it comes to metal goods, I usually prefer the look of vintage things redone with a subtle touch.  If I knew someone who worked in vintage auto restoration I could start to dig in.

A week later and I feel like I'm building design files I would like to receive.  The collaborative process builds some of the best design when there are only a couple of people at the helm, and this project has been a nice reminder of the good work you can do when you want to impress someone who actually knows what they're doing.  If anything, jumping into design ( it's a metaphor ) has given me a handful of things that I haven't lately been able to get from development: the feeling that what I'm doing is fresh, without the fear of being a novice.  This has also been a theme of the buckets of casual discussion on the topic of how best to jump in before becoming mired in best practices.  You have to crawl before you can walk.

There's a curve for incremental success that exists, somewhere; one that measures the ability to build the foundation for comprehension against flailing.  Somewhere.

Managed to avoid design for a very long time in any aspect besides interaction design, but have managed to fall back into lockstep design and development.  I usually keep my things distinctly undesigned, but that has become its own aesthetic and wears on my nerves when I see it everywhere.  For fear of falling into ironic non-design: began two label-related projects today.  Starting from wireframes and sketching over the top of them in Photoshop, already making decent progress.  Developer habits infiltrating design: fastidious separation of design layers prepared for development. If anyone has to look at these except for me, they'll at least know that I've taken care in maintaining divisions for portions of the document; something I've always appreciated in designers.

Got a good reminder from a friend of mine today of what it was like to work on projects that we cared deeply about: we shared a working space a few years ago when we were sure everything that we touched was brilliant and new or new-again-- true of what everyone else there was doing.  Caught a whiff of that inspiration again, and took a second look at a handful of old plans and designs I've had sitting around waiting to be executed.  I'm excited, but it came with this warning: 

Thinking about doing stuff feels as good as actually doing stuff.  Don't think about it too much.