This morning I ate breakfast listening to Rodney Joe Smith at our Digett sponsored Boerne Chamber of Commerce Networking Breakfast at Enchanted Springs Ranch. Boy, Rodney can sing and play. It was a real pleasure.

I also had a pleasure to meet Lynn Myers: Guitar, Fiddle, Vocalist & Band Director of the Thousand Hills Cowboy Church Band. I love that ol’ Country Gospel music and I am looking forward to checking him and the band out soon.

This evening, I had a chance to sit down with Harley Dean and play some country bass lines from his album, There and Back Again. I like Harley’s songwriting and he has a great singing voice.

In the meantime, the Digett team will be enjoying the tunes of client, Joel Rafeal (http://www.joelrafael.com/) this Friday at the Kerrville Folk Festival.

Next week, I’ll be at the Roots/Blues Workshop in Kerrville Tues – Thur. I’m looking forward to meeting Sue Foley, Thad Beckman, Steve James and the other instructors, and learning some new licks and techniques.

The Northern Lights will also be down from New England for the festival. I’m looking forward to meeting up with them. In 2003, I had a chance to share the stage with these great bluegrass players and the late Vassar Clements at the Elkhenge Music Festival in WV. If you are into authentic bluegrass, don’t miss their show.

Support Texas Music this summer – Its going to be a good one!

Dave Child has posted a number of Web development related cheat sheets in .pdf and .png format on his blog. These include CSS, xHTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and MySQL.

Thanks Dave!

This month’s issue of Wired is jammed pack with information pertaining to the next Green Revolution, and ‘tech meets nature’ topics such as: sustainable business, our looming environmental crisis, eco-friendly products, eco-chic lifestyles, and a feature article on the resurrection of Al Gore. To me, all of this talk is old hat. To be perfectly frank, I was beginning to feel as though the neo-eco mindset would never catch on. All of this discussion in a magazine as cool as Wired sheds new hope on the Green movement.

I once took an Environmental History course as an undergrad that turned out to be one of the most inspirational classes I have ever taken. The class turned me on to authors such as Edward Abbey, Carolyn Merchant, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Teddy Roosevelt, etc. The semester experience and discussion of relevant topics fueled me to adopt a ‘Voluntary Simplicity’ mentality and lifestyle that I have held on to ever since. For me, it clicked… and the point is…I just thought it was cool, so I adopted it as part of my identity.

All of this talk of conservation and simplification is nothing new. We all know this. I have often pondered: “What would it take to make it stick in the mainstream?”

In the article, ‘Rise of the Neo Greens,’ Daniel H. Pink quotes Ken Kurani on consumer motivation to purchase hybrid vehicles:

“Lower resource consumption is part of an identity people are constructing. They want to be seen as someone who’s concerned about the world around them. At the same time, they want others to see that they’ve done this, so that others might see themselves doing this.”

In other words, it is more about style, being hip, and being seen being hip. Like it or not, this is a very big part of the Neo-Eco mindset. I would also venture to guess that this was a very big part of the first Green Revolution. Yet, the first time around there was something missing: mass appeal.

I feel this may be the Green Movement’s only hope in creating a Tipping Point. For those of you familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s salesman-connector-maven triad, the first order of business must be: To be green must be hip to the masses.

Caroline Schoeder Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat.

Unfortunately, it will take something extremely powerful to encourage people to change before it is absolutely necessary.

So what does this have to do with a neo-Green Aesthetic?

Before something is hip, it has to appeal to people visually. My experience in education, culinary arts, business, and the music industry has taught me that people are influenced greatly by what they see more than any other sense. To be successul in any field, one needs to pay very close attention to visual details. In education, we say students have a visual learning style, and we arrange classrooms to ensure sucessful learning outcomes. In the culinary arts, your customers’ first impression is the presentation of the food. Extremely important, yet so often overlooked. In any professional field, we talk of ‘Dressing for Success.’ In the music industry, we pay close attention to lighting, dressing to fit the part, and providing a visual experience for the audience. Perhaps far more than we realize, people are controlled by what they see.

Yet, all that being said, people also yearn for authenticity.

This creates a very interesting environment for a movement, a tipping point, a revolution, whatever it is you’d like to call it.

Do you suppose the answer is a fusion of clean, minimilist visuals such as represented by Apple, web 2.0 design, Toyota, Samsung, even Sony with the green aesthetic trend setters such as Whole Foods, Sun microsytems’ new eco-friendly line of servers, and Patagonia?

Are you seeing/experiencing the fusion/overlap of these aesthetics in your daily consumer/producer/professional decision making? Are you being influenced by this type of powerful imagery? I know I am, and I am consisitently seeing others being influenced as well.

So what killed the authentic, natural aesthetic the first time around? Ask a baby boomer…many will tell you that at one time it was hip to be green. So what happened?

the awful 80’s aesthetic – it even ruined the authentic beauty of Neil Young. Have you ever watched ‘Live In Berlin’ from 1986? Please don’t. It’s horribly painful to see Neil in parachute pants and a wireless headset.

The dirty hippy aesthetic: As fun as it is to be free and uninhibited, no one wants to hang with the guy who reaks of body oder, and is dressed in a burlap sack…And who is going to take him seriously? Take a look at home-grown websites: Let’s compare: Sun Organic to Wild Oats. One must not negelct the power of visual imagery when creating materials that promote the authenticity of your business/yourself etc. In this day and age, it is a recipe to not be taken seriously.

I’m sensing that this neo-Green aesthetic is a much more powerful one; One that has much more potential to appeal to the masses. It is going to be interesting to continue watching it evolve.

By the way, did you know Walmart sells organic food? They have been for quite sometime. I am now of course being the facetious devil’s advocate. There will always be those that take something remarkable and taint it, but to me the fact that the Global Corporation is selling organic food is a significant indicator of a change in consumer behavior.

How can you, your business, and your business community benefit from supporting this movement? It is something to think about.

I often demo games to determine if they could be used to teach the learning objectives set by the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. While there are many games that theoretically could fit this ‘standards’ mold, there are also many other challenges to implementing video games in the classroom effectively. (possibly a future blog post) I have tried games such as Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City, and they all were a hit for a relatively short amount of time. Simply put, they just dont have the long lasting excitement of a game such as Halo 2. It is very difficult to keep children engaged. Mark Prensky calls it “Engage or Enrage.” I couldn’t agree more. I have been watching for the release of a new game: Spore. Will Wright’s new release, due out Spring of 2007, offers new hope for an exciting game that may serve some educational purposes.

from the TEA website:

(8) Science concepts. The student knows that complex interactions occur between matter and energy. The student is expected to: (A) define matter and energy; (B) explain and illustrate the interactions between matter and energy in the water cycle and in the decay of biomass such as in a compost bin; and (C) describe energy flow in living systems including food chains and food webs.

…from the Spore website.

What is Spore? Spore is Will Wright’s (Sim City, The Sims) new masterpiece. Spore starts a player out as a single-cell organism swimming around in a primordial soup. As Will Wright explains it, this stage of the game is essentially like Pac-Man, and you basically devour microbes smaller than you while avoiding those that are larger. You can upgrade your cell by adding cilia, flagella, and other defense mechanisms in order to gain any advantage possible for a single cell. From there you’ll move on to the “water world” phase of evolution. Your single-cell organism becomes a multi-cell organism. At this point, the gameplay switches from 2d to 3d but is still essentially the same: devouring the less fortunate and avoiding the bullies. As time passes, you will be able to lay an egg and evolve further; rid yourself of fins and acquire legs. Once on land (should you choose to emerge from the sea), you’ll find yourself a part of a rich world inhabited by other player-created creatures. Unlike traditional massively-multiplayer on-line games, you won’t be squaring off against other players in real time competition. Instead, when a player creates a new creature it is saved to a master on-line server. Your world will be populated by creatures that will help bring balance to your ecosystem. In this way, you will experience the off-the-wall creations of other players without having to worry about being bullied. As Wright demonstrated at E3, you’ll be able to teach your creature new behaviors by combining preexisting ones. A creature that knows how to eat can pick up food in it’s mouth and drag it to another location, for example. The possibilities presented to the player in terms of creation are truly remarkable. To continue evolving, you must find a mate by emitting a mating call. What follows is romantic R&B music highlighting sweet love making. You creatures will begin to band together once their brain has evolved far enough. At this stage of the game, the player must manage a tribe of the creature they created. Players can upgrade huts and add items to camps such as a campfire. Still, this is just the beginning of Spore. Before long, your mere tribe will be a full-fledge thriving city. With these upgrades in technology, players may customize their creatures further by adding additional upgrades. The cities themselves can be tweaked in almost any way imaginable. Players at this level of the game can build military machines and attack other cities if they should choose to. Finally, the player’s creature creation will reach a point in technology where they can create a UFO. With the UFO, the player can cruise around their planet “abducting content” such as other creatures or plant life. The UFO can also zoom out into outer space. Initial impressions of the game indicate that this is where the real fun begins. With the UFO, players can literally visit millions of other planets full of other player’s creations. From the sounds of it, Spore is going to be a monumental game that empowers the average gamer with one heck of a creative tool.

Way cool.

My Top Performances: Keller Williams and Jake Shimabukuro (smokin’ Ukele player) Late Night at the House of Blues.

Amanda Shaw on the Fais Do Do stage Saturday afternoon. Fais Do-Do became the word of the weekend: It means Cajun Dance Party – well, that makes sense.

Nathan and the Chas Chas: Home to New Orleans – had to be one of the most powerful songs of the weekend. Nathan had many in the crowd in tears. I love it when music does that to people.

Last week, I mentioned writing this post, and then I got sidetracked, yet I have been ponderig the virtual world marketplace for sometime. Today, I came across Max Kiesler’s post Stylehive’s Virtual Showroom in Second Life, and I was reinspired to further continue this thought pattern.

To put it simply, there appears to be something brewing in virtual reality. I am envisioning a fusion of all the ‘Web 2.0’ technologies we have all become so sick of hearing about. As the web becomes saturated with social bookmarking, digital file sharing communities, virtual worlds like Second Life are becoming more and more interesting. Why? Complete immersion into the world, complete cusomization/personalization of oneself, and a natural extension of the real world marketpalce.

Who has time for a Second Life? I know I can barely keep up with my first one.

It is my guess that if more people had time to try a world like Second Life, or There.com, they would get hooked, or at least see some value in it. I personally don’t spend much time inside Second Life. I did try it for a month or two, but it began to take too much time away from my First Life.

So why am I so interested in a technology that I rarely use myself? Currently, the Second Life client is heavy, and one needs a decent graphics card. Not all users have these cards and the world gets a little choppy. In other words, it takes too long to fire the thing up, and then when I am there it takes too long to get anything done. Interestingly enough, an ajax world, Hive7 has been built. Obviously Hive7 is in no way comparable to the complexities of an evolved offering such as Second Life, but it may not be that far off until it is. So what is it that I find so interesting?

Stopping to Smell the Synthetic Roses: Why not take some time and explore these virtual worlds and see for yourself; There is something brewing in virtual worlds, and there has been for sometime. I know some of you are quite aware of the concept. Some of you may even make a common folk’s living selling Elvis–style lamb chops to synthetic representations of your cyber neighbors in the ocean side cantinas of your favorite virtual fantasy land, but others may have a difficult time understanding or even accepting this as a viable entrepreneurial pursuit. Here are a few more interesting links:

–A recent Business Week interview with economist Edward Castronova

–A radio show about Virtual Debt

Naysayers, Pessimists, and Neo-Luddites Bah! It is hard not to imagine armies of mole-like humanoids momentarily emerging from their one room studio apartments to walk to the nearest Starbucks equipped with mobile technologies enabling them to keep up with the latest trends in multiple virtual real estate markets.

I say…way cool, well except for the mole-like part. But think mobile. Think exist in there (there.com) and exist here at the same time. Think new and exciting markets. And even cooler…think virtual dollars that can be traded for authentic currency like the American dollar. After all currency is currency, and income is income.

So, I suggest extending the virtual presence. I suggest joining in on the development of the virtual browsers – you know the browser that exists on the virtual notebook – the avatar handheld. I suggest billboard space in high traffic areas within the virtual world, and sponsored events like contests, and parties. To some, this is old hat, and they have probably already moved on to the next blog, but to the others…have you considered the possibilities?

Complete Cusomization/Personalization of Oneself Once inside Second Life, you are given the controls to customize your appearance. This is closely related to the concept of personalization…again, nothing new. Many large businesses have understood the power of this for sometime. For expample,the recent Nike Bodi Miller site, Toyota, Dell, Wendy’s, the list goes on…what these companies have done is provide their customers with the opportunity to personalize their products– what they have yet to achieve is the opportunity for customers to personalize themselves.

In my opinion, the psychological attraction to the virtual worlds is the personalization of the avatar and the avatars experience. We are talking about the personalization of oneself, or in other words, the reinventing of oneself. An idea that may not be all together healthy if taken to the level of what some are calling ‘Toxic Immersion.’ Yet, in moderation our lives can be greatly enhanced by a healthy, escape from time to time.

What about the artist, the small business, the entrepreneur? Can value be created or enhanced for your customer by extending your online presence into virtual worlds?

Second Life is not your typical ‘one-man shooter’ online game. Second life is a virtual world for a more sophisticated virtual citizenry.

-An article related to this topic; High-Profile Authors visiting Second Life.

Some might argue that this is exactly what my database-driven online community already provides: a graphic interface that allows customers to experience my business and interact with the interface, and other customers. Well, this is different. I am describing a separate, yet connected reality.

I eventually have to ask myself – “where am I going with this?” It is cluetranian philosophy – so in virtual worlds like Second Life that I have no ultimate goal of conquering the 78th level Boss…what is there to do? Talk, Express, Vocalize, Chat, Gossip, Just hangout and build and buy cool stuff.

If a business can leverage their products and services by providing an online demo of the product, or tap into an additional network by meeting new people in an alternate reality, there may be some value in spending part of your 24 hours in a differnet world. Nevertheless, stop and smell the synthetic roses. If you don’t you won’t know what you are missing.

As I was saying…we need more natural representations in our modern designs. Ok, as usual, I may have taken it too far. Nevertheless, I thought this post at ecoGeek was pretty cool: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/62/1/

Here is a visual example of the fusion I spoke of yesterday. A true authentic mashup…Natural color scheme: borrowed from West Saloon, still rounded corners, a texture inspired by Trevor Dodd, the background image from here, and the tutorials for torn paper – a simple Google search.

The font is called Copyright Violations – no pun intended, its free.

Totally 80’s The renewed interest in the 80’s has me thinking Basquiat…the personification of the 80’s art scene, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not too fond of the 80s. Looking at pictures from those times is just painful. Not just pictures of me, but anyone from that time…including the attractive…one can’t help but wonder how much better Debbie Gibson would look without the awful hairstyle and guady garb.

But I am fond of Basquiat. Basquiat’s work was my first coherent introduction to mutlicultural, ‘’melting pot’ fusions of styles and influence. Of course, as Americans we are surrounded by so many multi-cultural representations that it might seem silly to even acknowledge the existence of various influences on one artistic representation…I mean for me, I have been eating Tex-Mex since I was born, but the point is I didn’t realize what I was eating until much later. So somewhere along the lines, I began to find it extremely interesting to engage in the deciphering of influences- whether it be cuisine, music, art, and now web design.

Deciphering Influences

So I’ll try to decipher my influences. In the larger scheme of things, I’m a newbie to designing for the web.

All this talk of web 2.0 design is beginning to wear on me. In lieu of rounded corners, pastels, and large fonts, I have been exploring some revolutionary alternatives. Yes, it is rather ambitious, but nothing worthwhile was ever unambitious, well I think. Shoot…what the heck do I know? I’m just searching for something different without going backwards.

I’m into simplicity…as is everyone nowadays. Well, not everyone.. There is something to be said for usabilty’s sake by stripping décor and busy-ness from an app’s design. Yes, more is less. We all know this.

But I am beginning to miss something: representation of the natural world. This whole web thing is becoming too simple, too zen minimalist, too pastey pastelly, too lacking of décor and naturalness.

This whole train of thought is taking me back to my time in the Rice Art department, and a project I began at that time: Multi Sensual Color Explosions. Sounds like an acid trip, but on the contrary it was indicative of a much more natural experience. It was more of an exploration of all of life’s treasures captured in artifacts such as food, music, sculpture, and paint. My mindscape hasn’t changed much since then except for one major transition: the acceptance, if not infatuation with digital artifacts and the world wide web. Those that I shunned previously, I now embrace. So, basically I’m into man and machine coexisting and the multi sensual representation of this existence captured in digital representations.

Instead of the large carved totem bear holding humanity upside down, nuevo-Southwestern roasted chipolte crab cakes, and funky bluegrass tunes about environmental terrorism, I now find solace in envisioning a community of do-gooders gaining grassroots, guerilla-type strength by embracing the phenomenon of the world wide web – and having that all look really aesthetically pleasing – including the code at work behind the scenes. As I have said before, that inspiration to me is truly bliss.

Kandinsky

I have always been into Kandinsky, particularly the work he did from 1934-1944. The history books call this period The Great Synthesis…and so does wikipedia:

Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist’s inner life. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic popular art, and which look like precious watermark works. He also used sand mixed with colour to give a granular texture to his paintings.

Lichtenstein’s House also really gets my attention….color, geometry: structure – and a little natural world on the side. Tasty.

Oh and by the way, I’ll be Deciphering Influences this weekend at the mecca of Music-Food-Art Celebrations: the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

See ya this weekend!

We have been having a little fun at Digett.com. Trevor conjoured up the klller flash/video/audio, and Mark volunteered for the Naked Cowboy role. This also marks are first Drupal launch: EnchantedBreakfast.com. We will be sponsoring an upcoming Boerne Chamber of Commerce Networking Breakfast on Tuesday, May 23rd at Enchanted Springs Ranch. Enjoy.

Follow the linked image to view the video.