suffernfamily.com

I finally sent out the notification e-mail for our new design business. No interest yet (not that I was expecting any after two days), but only very sweet e-mails from Mom and Mrs. Wall. I picked up our business cards a couple of days ago too, and that, to me, was the most exciting part of it--having something physical and tangible, as opposed to the quasi-virtual environment of the web and even print design, makes the whole endeavor seem more real. Not only that, but it motivates me to really invest and be diligent in doing the things I need to do to make sure this gets off the ground.

I've been learning PHP at work and home. It's a very powerful and flexible web programming language that allows you to make interactive websites, and not just static "brochures." Many, many online forums, e-commerce sites, blogs and news pages are programmed using it. I've just started, but already it's a lot of fun to be able to create forms and such that output differently based on user input. Learning it, I have to restrain myself, slow down, code by hand, do little self-generated exercises and really absorb the language. I figure if I spend an hour every day working on learning it, and after PHP, MySQL (database language), then before long I'll have the ability to make full-fledged e-commerce sites for people. That will be a nice tool to have in my belt. Yes, as a male, that's really how I see these things.

I finished the Soviet SST book. It was well-written overall, though there were many passages that smacked of redundancy from earlier paragraphs. Having been written in 1989, before the fall of the Soviet Union, it was a little dated, but I enjoyed doing research to fill in the book's speculation over now-revealed aspects of the Tu-144's development and service life.

This is next on the reading list. I've started it, and already I'm impressed with the sheer scope of Edwards' knowledge. He writes about insects, rainbows, theology, philosophy and among other things, a subject I always find compelling, aesthetics. His examination of what makes something intrinsically beautiful, excellent, right and pleasant is fascinating to a designer who is very much concerned with creating things that elicit an aesthetic response. Contrary to popular perception, very little of design is arbitrary, never mind the specific concentration (graphic, web, industrial). There's a reason and a worldview fragment behind every almost every decision, every line and curve. So much of our lives is multidisciplinary in nature, and while the older philosophers, scientists and theologians seemed to see this, I wonder if we haven't lost something in the fragmentation of expertise so prevalent nowadays. I really do want to know as much as possible about everything, and I feel utterly safe in that desire knowing that a good, rational, transcendent God created and sustains the universe. That foundation undergirds and ties everything together. How could anyone approach the pursuit of knowledge consistently and, dare I say it, honestly without that foundation? Goodness... There are volumes I could write on this, but for now suffice it to say that I'm very much enjoying Jonathan Edwards.

Kind of an embarrassment of riches in my cubicle at the moment...though I'm sure it's nowhere near the concentration of monitors Paul has--I hear that he has at least half a dozen displaying various weather radar maps and schematics from divers areas. But I do enjoy having multiple screens. The closer I can get to the interface in the film Minority Report, the better.

Interface design is one of the big challenges of industrial design. Think about what we have to do just to communicate via a computer versus communicating with our friends in "real life..." At least on the phone we have the benefit of voice inflection--trying to get a point across with these machines means we have to squeeze our thoughts through our fingers onto keyboards with keys that were expressly designed to slow down our communication speed. And then reading it on a screen--using only one of our senses when face-to-face conversation involves sight, sound, gestures, sometimes contact and all the rest. It's a complete bottleneck. At least with an interface like, for instance, the one displayed in several scenes in The Matrix: Revolutions, where the operators used intuitive movements and so much more of the available space around them... I witness those things and get excited about the prospect of technological progress in that way--the potential for increased efficiency, the sheer intuitiveness of it all... It's an industrial designer's dream.

Maybe a better way to approach the issue would be to imagine a world without computers, but the knowledge that they could be and had to be invented--starting with a completely blank slate (and we may be the last generation that can easily imagine such a scenario), would you really design a computer with a screen the size of a large piece of paper, with a little plastic lump with two buttons on in to your right and a plastic tray festooned with little lettered squares under your fingertips? I surely wouldn't. We get used to these things far too easily and become so entrenched in the technological status quo. Infrastructure pops up and our habits dig in all the more, when really we should be learning, growing, moving, progressing...

...And in a perfect world we would be, and there would be nothing to fear from the movement. But human nature being what it is, doubts, hesitations and reservations appear in lock step with every bit of philosophical prodding. And the human mind so easily falls into the trap of thinking because we can do something, we must do it. Technological progress gets corrupted just as easily as the next thing without the filter, the foundation of a biblical worldview to rein it in. This is essential.

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Lots of web goings-on these days. I finally purchased a separate hosting account for sufferndesign.com, so that's up and running, and the full ImageWorks site is up, both "sides" designed by yours truly. Not only that, I'm doing a bit of reverse engineering on a e-commerce template purchased by the company in order to incorporate the look and feel of the current site, with which management is very pleased. It involves dealing with a lot of server-side code, something I don't have a whole lot of experience with, and it's .asp (Microsoft's proprietary server-side web language) to boot, so I'm not a fan of that... But while it's a challenge, it's not insurmountable. Onward...

I'm in the midst of revising the website a tad. As many burgeoning designers are wont to do, I got overambitious and made too much site for the content that I had, imagining the content would magically appear and fill the empty space. But time and reality dictate a better approach: Make the initial site small and expand it as content expands. It's certainly not hard to do.

So I'm taking down our two "non-blog" links and redirecting the "Design" link to the new Suffern Design page, currently under development. When that's done it will have its own standalone URL. The "Links" and "Gallery" links will remain, pending content. I found a great gallery management program called Lightbox that I'll be using when I get some pictures formatted, so look for that.

Just some housekeeping. Carry on.

Diane sent me this article this morning. Read it--the whole thing. I commented afterward that it is, in large part, a sort of Closing of the American Mind for the internet set--it has the potential to have that large of an impact if widely read. Not only that, but I fully expect these sorts of articles and studies to become increasingly frequent if thinking people have enough good sense to take a step back, a step away from the screen, and think critically about the internet revolution very much in progress. But for starters, the article is very much a must-read.

Appropriately enough, a few days ago I made my first trip the library in several months, and was startled with the realization that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. Looking through the directories, scanning the call numbers on the sides of books, finding the section I was looking for and browsing the adjacent titles... I missed it. I picked up a couple of books on web design, the collected works of Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther's commentary on Romans (one tome of a much larger series), and some, shall we say, "recreational reading:" Soviet SST: The Techno-Politics Of The Tupolev-144, which I've been enjoying very much.

I don't think I would be overstating the case to say that the entirety of my consciousness enjoys the experience of the library: my memory enjoys the recollection of frequent trips to our neighborhood location with my mom and brothers, my emotions are satisfied with the serene experience of delving into a thoughtfully-written book, my mind is engaged in whatever material I'm reading, and above all my spirit praises and thanks the God Who gave us the creativity to make and communicate and disseminate thought in this way--more than that, Who Himself communicates to us through the written Word. The whole scope of the experience agrees with me.

Just a little bit of snake oil, tin foil
It takes so little charm

Really been enjoying the Weepies lately, although I will say their latest album, Hideaway is something of a disappointment, being slightly more "poppy" and less "folksy" than their first. For a band that straddles the line between the two genres as well as any I've heard, a seemingly small shift like that is fairly significant with regard to the subtleties of their sound. Deb Talan's voice is less affected and more straightforward (read: less interesting) and Steve Tannen sings on fewer of the songs than he did previously. Don't get me wrong--it's still a great album, but the first seems to lend itself better to repeated listens.

We found a new home for Brie, our kitten. Diane's allergies were out of control, to the point where her eye developed welts and she had to visit the eye doctor, and Luke, although he loved her, was absolutely terrorized by her. Imagine being 4 years old, strolling from one side of the house to the other and being ambushed from behind the couch by a frisky, unpredictable kitten, standing on her hind legs, paws flailing. She hardly even used her claws, but loved to bite and nibble, which was enough to spook him continuously throughout the day. It got to the point where he would go into his room and shut the door just to get away from her.

Diane had had the feelers out for a new home for her for a few weeks now, and on Saturday my father-in-law came through with coworker of his who had just moved down from Michigan and whose family was looking for a new kitten. We made the arrangements, got Brie all packed up, they dropped by in their conversion van, we visited for a little while and Brie left with her new family. It was sad, yes, but like I told Diane, they really are the perfect "distance" from us, in terms degrees of separation: not so close that we see Brie frequently enough to really miss her, and not so distant that we'll never heard about her again. It was a blessing to find her such a good home.

Music recommendation: Jose Gonzalez. Despite the name, he's of Swedish extraction. His style resembles "quiet is the new loud" artists like Sufjan Stevens and Kings of Convenience. Most of the songs on his album Veneer are pensive, intimate songs played in a minor key. The musical structures are simple but on repeated listens reveal nuggets like odd time signatures and carefully placed strums. Highlights include "Heartbeats" (an excellent cover of a The Knife song) and "Stay in the Shade."

I first heard Gonzalez about a year ago on Radio Paradise, which I used to listen to far more frequently before they cracked down on audio streaming here at work (bandwidth issues), then a few months ago I heard him do an excellent cover of Massive Attack's "Teardrop." The funny thing about all these artists I recommend is that I have absolutely no idea how popular they are. I haven't listened to mainstream radio in several years--I have no idea what the stations are here in Winston-Salem--and we don't watch television, so I could be unknowingly recommending the it-band or artist. It would be like if I lived in the mid-'60s and told everyone, "Hey, there's this great new band you should listen to! They're called the Beatles and they're really good." But... As I say that I'm reminded that talent transcends popularity to a certain degree, and just because they're popular doesn't mean they're not good; quite the reverse in the case of many, but not all, and recently not even most, bands and artists.

This kind of thing is so telling. It makes two things crystal clear: The distinction, in academic circles at least, between "science" and "religion" is rapidly disappearing, especially with quotes emphasizing "the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning." And those who write these articles and adhere to their assertions are absolutely blinded to the logical and practical absurdity of trying to live honestly with such a worldview. Science is no longer just a tool, a means with which we can gather objective information about the world--it has evolved (pun intended) to the point where it can provide us with meaning itself. Not only can science describe the facts, it can tell us how to interpret them in light of a whole other host of ways we think about ourselves, or so the intelligentsia would have us believe. Amazing.

Been listening to a lot of Derek Webb lately. He's one of those artists who had bounced around the periphery of my music consumption for a long time and I've just recently given a second listen. Diane's been a fan for ages, and we even included one song on our wedding soundtrack. The only album we have is She Must and Shall Go Free, and despite the overuse of certain poetic descriptors and adjectives (freedom, dressing, wedding imagery) it's a gorgeous album, theologically dense, and even the "overuse" mentioned above I suppose could be a sign of thematic cohesiveness. I particularly like the song "Lover" for its hymn-like quality and deliberate gait. It reminds me anew of the utter beauty of God's character and the theological ideas we study that flow from it. It's so easy to get bogged down and treat them like a dry, dusty academic subject until we remember that concepts like "atonement," "imputed righteousness," "redemption," "sanctification" and all the rest are rooted in the very character of the Lord and are Truth and Excellence and Perfection defined. Beauty, in other words. Good listen.

It's been too long since I posted and I feel slightly guilty about that. During the last hiatus at least the site was undergoing a revamp, but I can't use that as an excuse this time. In any case, it's just hard to feel inspired these days. Or more precisely, the opportunities where inspiration and time converge are few and far between. I'm reassured, when I read old journal entries, that the paucity of my current output has more to do with lack of time than lack of thoughts or insights to share. Those still come fast and furious, and Diane gets the bulk of them whether she likes it or not (I trust she does).

Penelope has found her first word, or the first sound she's made that resembles one, and I'm quite pleased with it. When the mood strikes her, indiscriminately (as far as we can tell), she will say "Da-da... A-DAda..." She probably doesn't mean anything by it except exercising her nascent speech skills, but hey, I'll take it for all it's worth. She is beautiful and round and BIG. It will be a sad day when she completely outgrows her Baby Bjorn. She's almost there, and it's her favorite place to be, really. No crawling yet, but she certainly knows how to roll over and reach for things. Her preferred means of investigating is to point. If something comes within arm's reach that she has to figure out, she will curl her little fingers up, extend her index, and feel it with only that one finger. Sometimes, especially with Granddad's mustache, she will use both hands and do a double-barrel point.

Luke is speaking in nearly full sentences now. He seems to have mastered, for the most part, the you-I distinction, and now calls Mommy and Daddy by name, which is wonderful. His favorite thing right is Google Earth and zooming from place to place and in and out with Daddy. He loves to visit the Space Needle in Seattle, Crater Lake, the Burj Dubai and Ayers Rock. We try to limit his time, not wanting viewing anything with a screen to become too much of a habit, but it's fun when we do get on there.

Also, we've adopted a kitten. She is, as of this writing, twelve weeks old, pure white, and her name is Brie (like the cheese, the horse in the Narnia book, or the town in LOTR, though those last two are spelled differently). She is, bar none, simultaneously the sweetest and most playful cat I've ever seen. She loves people, and cozying up to people, and she also loves tearing around the house, attacking the furniture and anything that moves (and doesn't move) and terrorizing Luke even though he's an order of magnitude larger than she. He's finally getting used to it, but having her jump out from behind the couch at him, paws flailing (claws always retracted) was distressing him for a while. Poor kid.

I am starting the Master Cleanse fast today. I think I picked a sorry day to begin, given that it is my sister's first Bridal shower today and my family is grilling steaks later on. I am debating whether or not to begin today...just as I am a quart of the NASTIEST stuff I have ever willingly consumed.

When my mom would have a stomach ache she would stumble into the kitchen, crashing around trying to find the baking soda. Mixing it with warm water, she drank it with relish, claiming it cured the sourness in her tummy. I tried it once and threw up. Counterproductive, I'd say. She and my father also swore by salt water gargling for sore throats. I don't know...something about having warm, salty liquid anywhere near my throat (close enough to swallow) has always triggered a powerful gag reflex.

So, here I am...drinking a quart of warm sea-salt water first thing in the morning to "loosen" things up. I am down to the last five gulps and, I can tell you, my body is not taking this without a fight.

Update: my words have never been more prophetic.

This post was started about a week ago, but on account of divers things I haven't completed it until now. The pictures don't have much/anything to do with the paragraphs they're next to, but I haven't got our Gallery working yet, and I figured you all might appreciate seeing some images. Enjoy!

Aaron and Casey's wedding a couple of Saturdays ago was wonderful. It was in Durham, and Diane and I and the kids made a weekend out of it, traveling back to Chapel Hill on Friday and returning on Sunday. Diane and I went to the rehearsal dinner on Friday night and I participated in some "groomsmen activities" on Saturday morning. Aaron is a triathlete and most (all?) of his friends are at the least very athletic, and at the most pretty hardcore like himself. Saturday morning we convened at the rehearsal dinner location and embarked on a "nice, easy" run for the better part of a hour, after which we played water basketball in the UNC pool. I was exhausted for the rest of the busy day, but it was good for Aaron in that he was able to get some jitters out through the exercise. All the groomsmen (myself included) had a lot of fun, too.

I miss the people in Chapel Hill. I grew up with them, but it's more than just nostalgia or familiarity--these are godly families: warm, hospitable, caring, thoughtful, genuine, strong, and the list goes on... Diane felt the same way, and she's only met them a few times. We think about our own family and there are so many traits and qualities about them we would emulate. A common link between my family and many of those in attendance at the wedding is homeschooling. Talking with my mom afterward, though, I decided that while homeschooling certainly provides a framework within which family relationships can more easily be as they were designed to be, it's not a foolproof structure. The foundational element is a Christ-centered family worldview and parenting approach. The families are believers first, homeschoolers next. And we're committed to perpetuating that example.

Luke has been loving the Play-Doh lately. He makes letters and numbers and takes pieces from some of his puzzles and presses them into the clay. He's been drawing and writing (yes, writing) a lot too, and with his grasp of phonetics can actually spell most words in a rudimentary way. For Grandpa he'll sound out and write "Grampa," for Jupiter it's "Jupitr" and for Pterodactyl it's "Tradactl," and so on. He's becoming more conversational too and this really shows around the dinner table, where we'll talk about the day, say funny words and imagine scenarios.

My daughter is 8 months as of yesterday. Still no "Mama" or "Dada," but utter glee at most things and an all-consuming desire to do everything she sees her brother do, including walking and talking.

Eating mini Milky Way bars as an after-lunch treat reminds me of skiing in France. French students go to school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and a half day on Saturday, with Wednesdays off. Also, the schoolday finishes closer to 5 p.m. than to 3 p.m. like it does here in America. But the free Wednesday is a great break in the middle of the week. In the winter, my mom would send my best friend, Timothy, and I off on a day trip to the nearby ski resorts further up in the Alps. I remember playing a prodigious amount of handheld LCD gaming and really solidifying my friendship with Timothy. For energy during the day-long skiing, my mom would pack miniature candy bars in most of my coat pockets--European candy like Mars bars and Lion bars. Like Milky Ways, though, they contained caramel, and I remember my semi-frozen fingers fumbling and they unwrapped a bar on a chairlift, only to discover the bar itself was half-frozen as well and took a few minutes to thaw in my mouth. I remember darkness too... Those trips punctuated the winter weeks, keeping them from running together and fixing my memory on details like the trip home in late afternoon when the sun had already set and I squirmed on the scratchy fabric of the bus seat, unable to find a comfortable position to assuage my tiredness. Still, I wouldn't have traded those days for anything.