saturday december 22, 2007

Where have YOU been? / San Francisco, CA / 5 months ago

So it's been a while... and I'm not really sure where to start. Should I dump-off what I have been doing, what I have been working on, what's happening with Cuban Council or maybe what we're looking towards in 2008? Maybe I'll just try and cover it all.

September
As far as I can remember we had a busy September, though I don't recall if there was any travel involved. I think it was mostly the daily grind in SF going and back and forth between the house, the office and the occasional client meeting. According to the old calendar it was a busy month of project work with 4-5 of them getting underway at once in late August. Fortunately we had hired some outstanding folks earlier in the summer otherwise the load would have been completely unbearable. One project in particular that we are eager to see go public is some design work that we did for NASA through Lockheed Martin. Hopefully that will be released in the next month or two and will have maintained at least 95% or better of the design.

October
October started out much like September, though I did manage to get some personal time at the end of the month where Dara and I flew to North Carolina for a family reunion up in Asheville. With a good bit of travel and and great deal of drinking, we had a nice time visiting with everyone. On one of the days up in the mountains Dara and I visited the Biltmore Estate just outside of town. If you ever are in the area and have the chance to go, I highly recommend it. Aside from the sheer grandeur of the property and the house itself, there's a creepy atmosphere that comes with notion that this was an everyday living space.

November
November was a bit more of the same on the work front. I managed to get some maintenance done for both ANTI as well as Astro Gaming. Toke took a vacation to Denmark and the rest of us held down the forts in SF and NY. Once Toke returned, we locked in a new office space in NY, moving from the 42 RIvington spot just down the street to 88 Rinvington. The new space has a lot more room, much more to see from the windows and as of last week a whole new interior.

Later in the month Dara and I attended an art opening with Brett and Gina that was profiling Kellisimone Waits, daughter of Tom Waits, that was hosted down in SOMA at a place called the Luscious Garage. The show was great and afterwards we went with Brett and Gina to Farmer Brown for dinner. Shortly after we got to the restaurant, the Waits family joined us for fried chicken, macaroni and cheese and lots of iced tea. The dinner conversation was light and I learned a lot about the behavior patterns of buzzards from Tom, who seems to be well-informed on all types of interesting topics.

Thanksgiving was the usual event, though this year my brother and his family came out to visit us in SF. We took them to our usual favorite neighborhood restaurants including Tsunami and Nopa. We played a lot of guitar hero with his step-son and we all managed to catch a nasty head cold by the middle of the weekend, which more or less knocked us all out of commission.

December
The month of turning "33" and lots of travel. From Los Angeles to Portland to Seattle and next Charlotte, it's going to be a frequent flyer miles stack-up. Having covered the west coast this month for meetings and meetings following by meetings and more meetings, Dara and I are getting ready to head back to NC tomorrow for a week with my family. I assume we will be laying low for most of the trip, but I've learned that visiting with my family can be a busy time typically not offering much in the way of rest. I assume we will see some friends, shoot some guns and eat/drink a lion's share of beer, wine and cocktails, turkey, stuffing and snacks.
It seemed for me that all of the holiday parties this year were stacked at the end of last week.

First I went to the Kadium party where Rogue Wave played, and though I only faintly heard it, Zach and the band were gracious enough to dedicate a song to me. The next night we went to the KNI party out on the Mission/Potrero border where they had a best holiday punch "punch out" contest complete with gifts for all of the contestants and a special prize for victor. After the KNI party I stopped by the Gravity Mobile party where I ended up staying until 4am. At the end of it all Noah and I grabbed a late/early greasy breakfast before throwing in the towel and putting an end to my holiday party triple-header.

I recently helped a friend who is in involved with Iron & Wine put together a site to sell remastered music from live shows. The site is called Played Last Night.com and so far the only artist in there is Iron & Wine. The key difference for this site over other similar attempts is the quality of the recording and the subsequent audio engineering. The guy behind the whole thing is a master sound engineer for a local animated film company and he has put his love and expertise into the product, that's the pudding.

Tomorrow we are off to NC for a week and then to NY later in January...
While I promise to make a better effort to update more frequently in '08, I think what I really need to do is find a more general topic of interest, because my everyday life reads more like aspirin instructions than anything of interest or continuity. I don't have a poll on here anymore, but I would certainly like to know what you would find more interesting to read about...

• Everyday Life/Travel
• Projects and Clients
• Gadgets and Software
• Something else entirely?