Traveling opens your eyes to the world. You see new places, new people, and new things you've never seen before. I enjoy traveling. I like the exposure. However there is nothing like coming home.

For the past ten plus days I've been eating (and drinking) my way thru the countryside of norther California with my family. The experience was beyond amazing. And, as travel usually is, inspiring as well.

We began in San Francisco, 'The city of Brotherly Love'. No, wait that's Philadelphia. I think they should should steal the motto though. Hell, if California can steal the Dairy Land title from Wisconsin by producing more milk, I definitely think SF out paces Philadelphia with more 'Brotherly Love'. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure what the motto for San Francisco is. It should be: 'The City of Irony', because The city is full of contradictions. Like homelessness and great food, or the fact that they serve Maine lobster yet you can see the Pacific ocean, or the gloomy idea that all the great architecture will one day be a heaping pile of rubble like in the earthquake of 1906.

One of the more ironic situations we found our selves in was our journey down Turk Street. A word of advice: If your in San Francisco, don't go down Turk Street. The first evening we were in town, we had reservations at Yabbies. Mapquest conveniently guided us from the Bart stop down Turk St. continuing to Yabbies. So we get off the bart and head up Turk. I think my fist sign that this was not a place to take the kids was the hooker in front of the boarded up Motel, and things just got weirder. It started to look like the crack house scene from New Jack City. I thought it was illegal to smoke crack on the side walk but apparently not, because, there were people on the side walk walk, in broad day light torching a pipe. Further down the street three was was a man passed out in the gutter with his hand still grasping a broken 40oz. If I only had the stones to take out my camera. And this was Tricia's first take of San Francisco. The irony here is some what in the location. Turk St is right off Montgomery, not far from from some swanky department stores.

All in all I felt out of place, but never in danger. Yabbies was great and Kyoya was excellent the next night as well.

The following day we meet up with cousins. We poked around the city. The Palace of Fine Art is an amazing place. Not to say the other attractions aren't. The Palace of Fine art just seems to provide more time for reflection than any place else we went. That is if you can reflect with throngs of tourists, but then again: Where in San Francisco aren't there throngs of tourists?

Stacy, my cousin, has already post some of her photos. She's so on top of things. I'd hire her for an important job if I was was a mogul or magnate of some type who doled out important positions (which coincidentally is still secretly my number one goal in life). We haven't posted our photos yet.

That evening we ate at Chez Panis in Berkley. We couldn't get in to the full fledged downstairs and, after eating at the cafe upstairs , can only imagine what the food must be like. The menu upstairs was creative yet traditional; combined with fresh ingredients: absolutely amazing. The next day we began Napa Sonoma portion of our trip. I'll have to write more later. Unfortunately, the reality of not being on vacation and have to go to work is really kicking in.

This past weekend I was in Chicago for the School of the Art Institute's Graduate show. I am always curious to know want kind on insight artists and designers have to offer. Overall there was a great deal of variety in the type and quality of work displayed.

Peter Miller's Projector Obscura used a projectors, rather than cameras, to capture the relationship between fixed elements in notable movie theaters. One element of the the work that I found particularly enjoyable is that the artist continues to use film. There are many nay-sayers who believe the medium (like analog tape) is dead. What the success of his work shows is that innovation follows imagination, and, that it is nay-sayer who should be mourning the loss of their mind.

Maria Flores's graphic work was quite impressive and not for the typical in your face wow that was cool kind of graphics either. Her work is graphically subtle and I'm sure many views missed the profound statements she makes about topics often not discussed such as black market organs. What I particularly enjoyed about her piece is the irony of the graphic treatment. Often times the graphic treatment referenced a graphic and typographic aesthetic from the 50's and 60's.

Alexander Stewart's Errata focused on the beauty of subtle degradation. He shows views how degenerative art can be created with simple devices such as a copy machine. The physical artifacts here are visually stimulating. The animated piece provided a new prospective in to the time base aspects of degeneration as well. The juxtaposition of degeneration/creation is a beautiful idea in and of it self.

There were also pieces that were disappointing, particularly the paintings. Painting is at a loss and has been in the post modern age. Because technology, specifically the camera forced paining into a role of expression and abstraction, viewers, are left to view paining a means of entertainment, and, that's a highly competitive arena these days. Much of the paining seemed lost, or without purpose, and, I couldn't help think: Couldn't many more options have been explored digitally before committing to the endeavor?

Another place where I found myself at odds was with Taiwon Choi's piece Technology Connivence Complexity. The designer had reconstructed every day situational objects such as a place setting, or, article's of clothing with blatant additions of technology to the extreme. The statement simply being that technology, although claiming to be a convenience, will eventually get in the way. While this is true, I could help but think that the artist has offered no solutions to the problem. They had only gone so far as pointing out the already obvious problem. Yes it would be annoying to have a keyboard on my plate, but then what is the answer, or, how can the problem be solved? Aren't artistes and designers, in theory, thinkers and problem solvers?

Overall the show was well put together. The only bump in the production of the show was the placement of the undergraduate work on the ground level. It was amusing to watch people walking in. You could see the look on their faces: Am I in the right pace?

The way marketing professionals manipulate our perception became particularly evident to me today while looking at a Windows's Media ad. The identity (left) attempts to convince viewers that it is guaranteed that your music will work, no matter what. Unfortunately this isn't true. Your music will not play for sure anywhere. Every portable music device on the market is limited. In some way there is a range of formats that it can play. No one can ensure that you any anything will work always. Even thought, the advertising executives at Microsoft would like us to think so.

The amazing work that I witnessed at FITC this year inspired me to do a few things (to say the least). Revisiting randomness is one of them. The graphic to the left is from a sketch that generates circles randomly. The circles have a random color, position and transparency.

I recently gave a presentation to the Development and Engineering Center of Excellence at Northwestern Mutual. The presentation was joint effort. I presented first and discussed user interface design patterns. Mark Bender, a coworker then talked about front end XML. Overall things went really well. There were a few technical problems getting the second campus connected through the video feed, but other than that things went fine. Researching patterns has been interesting. Coming from a design background, I've never opened a single pattern book. Most the documentation out the primarily has to do with architectural patterns and system design. I'm happy to see that professional in the community is realizing that there's action on the front end too. Jenifer Tidwell's book is going to be great when it is released. There is no other book out there that even comes close in its thoroughness.