Urban Castaway Porcelain RIngs

Thought these flame shaped porcelain rings were really captivating. These pieces were created by dipping second hand fur into porcelain, then shaping and firing them. Each is unique and impossible to replicate.

Visual Thesaurus

At first glance Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus might seem to only appeal to writers, editors and visual information junkies but after using it for about a year it is an amazing resource and reference tool for designers, and really, anyone who needs to come up with names, brainstorm, or generate ideas for a living. The user interface and encourages exploration and promotes lateral thinking in the creative process. A one year subscription is $19.95 but they have a demo that will allow a limited number of free searches.

Audio Cassette Graphic Design

Tapedeck.org showcases the various designs of compact audio cassette tapes from the 60's, 70's 80's and 90's. Looking through the images brought back a wave of nostalgia, afternoons and weekends making mixtapes, back then the average mixtape took 2-4 hours to make. Nowadays an iPod playlist takes like a minute to create.

New Workhorse

My trusty reliable G5 iMac was starting to show its age recently so I took the plunge and upgraded to a new MacBook Pro. After careful research and field testing I decided on the 15" 2.4 duo Santa Rosa.

Main considerations for getting a laptop this time around vs desktop:

1. My office is in Sugar Land and most of my client meetings take place offsite, so I was finding myself needing something that could show past multimedia or work in progress.

2. More and more I found myself working onsite on projects and often times the machine they put me on didn't have the right software, fonts or were unoccupied for a very good reason.

3. Wifi is everywhere, between meetings and errands I can check email pretty much anywhere inside the 610 loop.

After transferring all of my user and account settings to the new notebook I was cleaning up old emails and bookmarks and I noticed one for this blog that I set up way back when I started Stimulacra in 2005.

So here I am. Back in black.

Long term review of the MacBook Pro to come later.