Developing Usable Experiences

An Old Mission

December 2nd, 2007 9:20 pm —  185 views

old_mission_artistic.jpg

W. and I put up our Christmas tree today. I also put up some lights above the bar that lend themselves to the feelings of holiday festivities. Not sure why electric lights cultivate a sense of holiday spirit, but they do.

During this project I kept slipping away to work on a couple presentations I have this week. I’d review what others in my group had done since I last looked or would hunt for a picture that I could use to complete one of the few remaining sketch exercises I have to do before Wednesday.

I also had an interesting chat with one of my classmates tonight. She has two bachelor degrees and one masters degree…and is working on her second. She is bright but I wonder, what does one do with so many degrees? Seems like this accumulation is symptomatic of something. Do you use your smarts to to make someone else money? Maybe you use them to make yourself money? If you don’t use your brain to make money then you had better have a good reason for whatever you’re doing. Something that you find so interesting that money takes a back seat. But let’s be honest, I don’t know many people like that. Maybe I wouldn’t see them as I’m mostly chasing that dollar. That isn’t entirely truth though. School is interesting. And expensive. Maybe she has the right idea.

It all comes down to people wanting to do something interesting. Maybe that is the oldest mission in the book. Clicking a mouse for 9 hours a days just isn’t that interesting. Having to figure out what is important to a system evaluation is interesting. Or it can be interesting. More interesting than taking orders from someone that you wouldn’t invite over for Christmas dinner.

It is a Sunday night and I’ve been working on stuff for school all day and my brain is ready for a break. Granted I went grocery shopping with W. and helped decorate our tree, but she did the most of that and grocery shopping didn’t take that long. I completed about 5 sketches tonight and worked for a few hours organizing thoughts for a presentation. I also spent about a couple hours editing video clips into a montage to use as a presentation starter for my other class. I hadn’t done video editing before so that was interesting.

Now I’m going to go read some science fiction and try not to worry about classes this week. There is always tomorrow and it will be what it is. And I’ll be ready for it when it gets here.

Image: This is a picture that I Photoshop’ed to be artistic. I used this as an inspiration for a simplified landscape assignment then wondered what it would look like if I applied some filters on it in Photoshop. Not as fun to do, but not unlike how I approached it using pencil.

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2 Responses to “An Old Mission”

  1. Dawn on December 3rd, 2007 9:48 pm

    Traverse City, out near Old Mission something or other? I have almost the exact photograph taken this past summer.

  2. Spike on December 7th, 2007 8:28 pm

    Yeah, seems like we practically passed each other on the road coming and going. Such a gorgeous area, I sure miss it sometimes.

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