Updates, Trips, Business

The last two months have been quietly violent with activity. July was steeped in product design, China calls, organization and other business related activities. August came fast and furious.

It was awesome to have a social sandwich! Before my vacation, my buddy Jonathan Yeager came back west for a wedding and some friend time. I took him to City Liquidators and we explored the upper levels of chair hell. He said, “Man, this place is Craigslist!” Very true.

A few days later, Girlfriend and I traveled east to Rhode Island with the family. As she had never been on the east coast before, I rented a car and we went from RI north through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. Lots of lobster and crab was consumed. We stayed for about a week there. It  was great to see the family and more so, it was great to have some amazing bonding time with my sister.

We came back to PDX for the night and then in the morning flew back out to Montana. We attended the girlfriend’s cousin’s wedding on a huge cattle ranch, danced, and spent days by Flat Head lake in the family cabin. It was a really swell time.

Since I’ve been back in town, I’ve been patiently catching up with my clients and partner companies. Downstream and I are going to start working on some international projects with a brand on the other side of the planet that is the size, if not larger than, Proctor and Gamble. CCD has a continued partnership with Pinnacle Exhibits  to handle their overflow of awesome projects. My favorite with them these past two weeks was coming up with some concepts for Waste Management for Staples Center down in Los Angelas.

Before I left on my trip I also got an interesting email from a PR firm regarding a company called Sunglass, a subsidiary of Design Play Technologies Inc. They contacted me because of the week long series I did on Life Hacker last month. Sunglass.io is a pretty interesting technology. You can think of it as Google Docs for 3D. It might be an amazing partnership if I can offer a digital classroom on PolyPlane.com that let’s me connect directly with my audience. I’m going to head down to San Francisco in the fall to meet up and talk more. Maybe grab some dinner with those guys and see what comes of it.

I also updated the landing page of GabrielMathews.com to be much cleaner. As it is just a portal anyway, why not treat it as such? Less fluff, more meat.

Technology Taper

With all of the developments on the business side, it is only appropriate if I take a good hard look at all of the technology I’ve acquired over the last year and a half to assist my business.  I got a message from Flickr.com that my account was going to terminate in a couple weeks if I didn’t renew. I spent about 15 minutes getting a batch downloader and downloaded all of my stuff from Flickr. Let it die.

I’ve also gotten myself multiple copies of Team Viewer so that I can remote into all of my computers from my laptop. It is going to make some serious improvements in the way I work.

I’m also considering getting rid of more old stuff that I don’t use any more such as my Xbox, some hand tools etc. Really trying to slim down more. It isn’t that I own that much. As a matter of fact, I probably own less stuff that most people in my corresponding demographic…however, I really enjoy my nimbleness and am always going to find ways to advance it.

Later taters,

G