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I get paid to type on a keyboard.

This fact will always blow my mind and I am incredibly grateful for it. Sometimes I even get paid for moving pixels around to make pretty pictures. Most recently I designed Yelp's mobile Webkit site, which is hitting over 8 million smartphones in a town near you. I wrote about the design process and considerations in this blog post, maybe you will find it useful.

Outside of work, I am a serial side-project starter. My most recent weekend hack was We Played Some Pretty Songs, which is just a little Python site that gives me the ability to share my playlists with the world. Two weekends before that I was working on BlogHopBar, which served as a way to reinvent web rings (lol). If you want to go all Inception, you can check out some of my webpages on BlogHopBar here. Other side projects, such as jQuery collection tools and a mini PHP packaging library can be viewed on my Github page.

I also find myself building like crazy during Yelp's 36-hour hackathons. I have made everything from a iPad app for our beer keg to a photo browser that programmatically chooses the best photos on Yelp to a friend finding application.

Beyond my hacking at Yelp, I designed the website for Wu Yee, a non-profit child care center in San Francisco. Less honorably, I have been maintaining a number of self-started projects, from blogging engines to dashboards to design blogs. Okay, I am rambling, here are some of my more recent designs:

Sometimes I take pictures but not too much anymore.

A couple years ago my dad found an old film SLR camera in a closet and gave it to me. Having never taken pictures on film before, I thought it would be a fun experiment. At that point, I could have never imagined how much I would suck at it. Lucky for me, this trusty old camera would make all my pictures look relatively passable, a huge plus. Way more importantly, I think if Thom Yorke (or even Colin Greenwood, I don't care) came across this lil' page, he might be impressed with these photos. And let's be honest, that is why I take pictures.

I made a small blog platform in 2007; I still write there occasionally.

1. Forever Longing The Golden Sunsets - Part 2

   If Ok Computer and In Rainbows were never conceived, Arcade Fire would have a running chance to be better than Radiohead (someday, at least). I say this with confidence after just seeing Arcade Fire put on an amazing show at the Greek Theater, a show that easily ranks in my top 5 best performances. Although, the whole time I kept thinking how much Joe, Hazz and Mark would have enjoyed it. Interesting to note, this concert came exactly five years after seeing Sigur Ros for the first time.*** Read More

2. This Must be the Place

   One huge philosophical qualm that comes with time travel is the tracking of self. Before we dive deeper into the matrix, I am going to assume that a) you believe in time travel and b) you believe that time travel produces a replicate version of yourself. If you do not prescribe, this would be a good time to go make a sandwich. So you get bored one day, make a branch of yourself and send it back six months in time (or however long, time is not the issue here, even though it totally is). You are now concurrently living two lives but which one is your life? The short answer is both, the long answer is neither.
   Read More

3. Certainly Everyone's Error

   I have been feeling a bit under the weather recently but I think I am coming back from it, so fear not. Anyways, there are outstanding topics that I need to tell you guys! Such as, did you know that Coffee Grounds in Rancho actually has grade-A coffee? Surprising, huh? However, not everything is as ~*blasé*~ as that, I promise! For instance, I think that the fact that I bought a generously sized tub to put assorted crap into is pretty cool. The aforementioned tub is actually a Roughneck Jumbo and I put my own person Seal-of-Approval on it. Read More

Still not enough?

Things I have been into recently on certain sites.

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