Aku Aku

Ten Techshop Locations Around the US!

Woo hoo! It's just been announced that by mid-2008 there will be ten TechShop locations open in the United States, including one in San Francisco. W00t!

Ten TechShops To Open in 2008!
I am very pleased to confirm that we have reached agreements with our first 8 partner groups, and we will in fact be opening TechShop locations in Sacramento CA, Los Angeles CA, San Diego CA, Portland OR, Seattle WA, Austin TX, Orlando FL, and Raleigh NC, and we will open our own company-owned locations in San Francisco CA and Sunnyvale CA, for a total of 10 locations. The target opening date for these locations is mid-2008.

2007 Bernal Heights Illegal Soapbox Derby

I took some Hi-Def footage of the Soapbox Derby today. This is a quick video production just to get something out tonight. Actually I didn't even use the best clips in this, I'll save them for later use on a more considered video. Scott has photos and more links on his blog.

Soap Box Derby 2007

It looks a lot better in Hi-Def. I think I'll upload that to the Internet Archive tomorrow....

By the way, if anyone who was at the derby today found my black moleskine notebook, please contact me.

5 of 52: 2007 Bernal Hill Illegal Soapbox Derby Video

I had actually planned on using a watercolor for this weeks art piece. I made it today while I was waiting for the soapbox derby to start. Then I lost my moleskine notebook. However I had just put my contact info on the first page of it this morning, so I'm hoping someone will return it. In addition to my watercolors, it had most of the art project ideas I'd been working on.

So to come up with something for this week, I whipped together a quick video from todays footage:

2007 Bernal Hill Illegal Soapbox Derby.

It's actually not too bad, especially when watching it in HD but its ok in the web format as well. I'll upload the HD version to somewhere tomorrow. I think the Internet Archive will host it since it's CC licensed.

dollars to dough-nuts

I should preface this by saying I'm not an economist (although I did read a great book about economists). I've been concerned this whole century (heh) about the long term outlook for the US dollar.  It's ironic, since I've been looking into a business strategy that depends on a stable dollar. This now from the head of the IMF:

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo Rato, warned Monday of a potential "abrupt fall" in the US dollar that could roil the global economy.

[...]

The outgoing IMF managing director spoke here as the European single currency hit a new high of 1.4347 dollars and global equity markets plunged amid renewed fears a US credit crunch could pitch the world's biggest economy into recession.

"The uncertainty ... comes from downside risks that are much higher than they were six months ago. The turbulence in the credit markets is a warning that we cannot take the benign (global) economic environment of recent years for granted," Rato said on the final day of the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.

"We still do not know the full effects of the decline in the housing market and the subprime problems of the US economy. Further disruption in financial markets and further falls in housing prices could lead to a global economic downturn," he said.

In addition to the housing market, there is the possibility of the global oil trading switching from basing all transactions in the dollar to the Euro. The fact that almost all countries buy and sell oil using US dollars has probably artificially propped up the dollar for a decade or more. With the dollar suffering  already against the Euro, it seems like it just makes sense if you step back and look objectively. Saddam Hussein insisted on being paid in Euros instead of Dollars though, and, well, he's dead now. But I don't think we can invade and kill everyone. The petro-Euro is still looming.

There's also the massive debt China holds over the US that they could liquidate at anytime.  Over a trillion dollars in foreign reserves, $700 billion of it in the form of Treasury bonds. There are reports that China is now using this to their political advantage.

It's a sad state of affairs. In today's Wall Street Journal there was a piece about the housing market. There are movements to get the government to bail out the mortgage industry and the people who took out  loans they couldn't really afford to buy houses during the insane recent speculative market years. As much as I don't want to see the economy tank, this really annoys me. Lenders and lendees both made bad financial decisions and now want to have the taxpayers bail them out.

It seems like no one wants to face reality anymore. We're a nation of credit abusers and poor financial planners and the piper is eventually going to get paid.

4 of 52: Jolly Roger

Since it's almost Halloween, and pirates are always in style, here's a Jolly Roger laser cut-out as my 4th of 52 things.

This one was a bit more technical than the last laser cut piece. I actually figured out how to work Illustrator well enough to do it as vector work, and I had to do some precise measurements to ensure that the pieces would fit together, but it was actually fairly easy. I decided to hand draw the skull and bones as I liked the look better than the one I did using symmetrical shapes. I was pleasantly surprised that I did that all right and didn't have to do any last minute adjustments at the cutter (other than setting the stroke width to hairline). I made a dozen or so of these out of 1/8" thick balsa wood. I'll give them out or just leave them around in public places.

Heroines of Halloween Past

Super Hero Fish and The Kerry Fairy

outsourcing

This morning I tried signing up at three Virtual Assistant companies. These are companies that will do pretty much anything you can do over the Internet or on the phone. Prices range from $7-20/hour. Usually the tasks are completed by English-speakers in India. At two of them (AskSunday and GetFriday), errors on the website prevented me from signing up. This doesn't give me much confidence in their abilities or professionalism. The third (and most expensive, as it is more geared towards business research) is Brickwork India and their sign up process seems to be OK so far.

Update: Steven Ludmer, a co-founder for AskSunday, wrote me back in about an hour to thank me for alerting them to the problem and to let me know it had been fixed. I've completed the sign up process now and will report back sometime on how I feel the service is working out. They have a referral program, so if you decide to sign up be sure to put my name (Dav Yaginuma) in your referral field.

3 of 52: Warm Water Cove Watercolor

I bought a cute little portable watercolor kit. It looks like a cell phone; the brush looks like the stylus for a Treo. I carry around a little jar of water with it. I've only used it once so far, to do this illustration from Warm Water Cove. This is the first watercolor I've done in nearly 20 years. I'm not too happy with it, but it's Sunday night and I didn't manage to get anything else done this week. I did say good, bad or ugly.

Free The Music

We're road tripping to LA this weekend. The main event is a Free The Music summit being held in Malibu. I'm not a big expert on the Music 2.0 scene, but it should be interesting. DRM free music seems to be all the rage with the major online distributors these days, so the momentum is right. There is a forum discussion in the late afternoon followed by a party with live music. It's held at my friend Todd's house which will provide beautiful sunset views over the Pacific. Todd has been quite active and visionary in this space and I'm looking forward to hearing more on the subject from his capable network of like-minded folk.

Bad M- (shut yo mouth)

You know that scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L Jackson tells the diner robber to reach into the bag and retrieve his wallet? The robber says "which one is it?" and Mssr. Jackson replies "the one that says Bad Motherfucker on it."

My friend B was ordering new credit cards (I think for his company account) and filled out a form with the name Bad Motherfucker. The card came in the mail a couple of days ago. He's looking forward to using it for holding a tab at a bar. So at the end of the night "which card is yours?..."

Bad-mofo-amex