My late New Year’s resolution is to start blogging again (it’s almost been a year since I posted here!). I will be consolidating a couple blogs that talk about technology and skateboarding and consolidating them into one. Looking forward to networking with other techies/skaters in the near future. In the meantime feel free to drop by and say hello on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/dbaldwin

Well I don’t, but some people do. I came out to my car several weeks back to see someone parked right next to my Beetle. I mean RIGHT next to it. I had no clue how they could have parked this close and even opened the door…..ridiculous.

I’m seriously considering some bumper stickers from iparklikeanidiot.com. How rewarding it would have been to put this sticker on their car:

Many people don’t realize how difficult it is to do design work with a built-in laptop mouse. I just bought a shiny new Bluetooth Mighty Mouse this weekend and was all excited about using it for my new job. What do I do? I left it at home. This is absolutely useless information, but I challenge anyone doing UI design to use their built-in mouse for a day. Absolutely painful! What’s almost as painful is the fact the Mighty Mouse (wireless version) runs $69. That’s definitely the most expensive mouse I’ve ever purchased in my life. Yet it’s no doubt worth the money because of the built in nipple-scroller. You can even scroll diagonally!

Wow. Where has the time gone. Just last week I put in my notice at SensorLogic and decided to take the path down entrepreneur lane. It was an EXTREMELY difficult decision as I truly believe in what SL is doing as well as all the brilliant people that work there. Yet I do believe there are better ways to bring this M2M technology (from an application perspective) into the mainstream. That’s one of the things I will be focusing on when I’m not doing work-for-hire to pay the bills. I left SL on great terms and will be doing a fair amount of consulting for them, mainly on the UI front.

My wife has been INSANELY supportive as we have a 3 year old daughter and another one on the way. That’s what made this decision more difficult than anything else. I’ve always wanted to run my own successful business and there has never been THE perfect time to get it going.  At times we have to take a leap of faith and realize that whatever happens, they can’t eat you. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s true.  It’s also calming to know that regardless of what foolish decisions we make in business everything happens for a reason.  The key is obviously to learn from those mistakes and become a smarter person because of them.  Anyway, this is starting to smell of an infomercial on how to make $5,000/day from home.

My point of this post is to announce my new consulting venture, Think Vanilla.  If you clicked that link near the time of this post you’ll see absolutely nothing.  I will be spending the next few weeks (in my spare time) building the Think Vanilla brand and marketing site.  This assumes that I don’t get caught up in projects, which is more than likely to happen.  I’ve been focusing on Web design and development for about 10 years now.  What I’ve learned more than anything is that simple and effective design is the exception, not the rule.  Everyone’s nephew or son-in-law can put together a Web page in 30 minutes, but can they build effective Web applications that solve real-world problems?  Possibly, but my point is that my consulting company will focus on building usable Web applications for customers that see the value in focusing on design and simplicity.

Think Simple, Think Vanilla.

The title seems a little harsh, but seeing this video really makes you wonder where the innovation lies. It seems that Windows Vista steals a few pages out of the OS X book. Although I remember the OS X dashboard concept being a page out of the Konfabulator book. So maybe there is no real innovation here. Inventions are generally improvements to already existing products or technologies. Why reinvent the wheel? I consider the 3D chess example demonstrated in this video to be blatant copying. I guess it doesn’t matter as long as we, the consumers, benefit from the game of cat and mouse.

It’s the little things that make me smile. A friend of mine was in Mountain View today and he picked up the access point listed below. This is a screen of Google’s unsecured wireless network with SSID “GoogleWifi”. Random, but cool nonetheless.