It’s strange to think my iPhone, with it’s mul­ti­ple alerts and chimes, may be inhibit­ing my abil­ity to con­cen­trate, think deeply and be cre­ative. At least, that’s what the New York Times recently reported.

In route to Ten­nessee we stopped at a Star­bucks. No sur­prise. What was sur­pris­ing was the New York Time’s front page arti­cle enti­tled, “Hooked on Gad­gets and Pay­ing a Men­tal Price: Con­stant Use Takes Toll on Con­cen­tra­tion and Fam­ily Life.” The photo showed this cou­ple, both on their iPads at the kitchen table enthralled in their own activ­i­ties. Of course, I added this to the bill and while Liz drove, I read aloud.

While this may bore some of you, hang on. It get’s inter­est­ing. Accord­ing to sev­eral stud­ies from respected aca­d­e­mic and medial insti­tu­tions, our gad­gets are frac­tur­ing our minds abil­ity to pri­or­i­tize infor­ma­tion, con­cen­trate and be cre­ative. The var­ied, infor­ma­tion bar­rage gives your brain a dose of dopamine, the stim­u­la­tion that pro­vokes excite­ment, which encour­ages impul­sive­ness. In this case, impul­sive­ness leads to drop­ping the cur­rent item for the imme­di­ate. As such, you never stay on one thing for very long. The New York Times explains it more in depth here.

So what does this look like? You’re play­ing catch with your kids and your iPhone chimes. Now, you have this thought in your head, “I won­der who that was. Was that work? Did he answer my ques­tions from this morn­ing?” And you tell your kids to hold on while you check your phone. What may start as a sim­ple glance turns into a “quick response” leav­ing your kids stand­ing there. Sev­eral more emails to check and your kids have started pass­ing the ball among themselves.

While I don’t have kids ( yet ), the con­stant dis­trac­tions do com­mand frac­tured atten­tion away from my work. I’ve even dubbed some Friday’s as “cre­ative day”, which is really a time for me to leave my dis­trac­tions and try to think and cre­ate in a dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment. But for all my efforts, I can tell my once-​​a-​​month excur­sion isn’t enough. I need more delib­er­ate separation.

Recently, my the­ory was put into prac­tice. Dur­ing a strong thun­der­storm, we lost power in the stu­dio. I made my way to the com­puter back-​​ups, saved every­thing and shut down the com­put­ers /​ server. The storm thun­dered and I had enough day­light to work at the con­fer­ence table in another part of the stu­dio. Time for cre­ative devel­op­ment. For the next two hours I came up with sev­eral design ideas for music projects, thought through type solu­tions and font choices and made head­way into a sec­ond job before the power flipped back on.

What if the power didn’t go off? Would I have had the time to sit and think? Would I have been dis­tracted by email, Twit­ter, Face­book or iPhone noti­fi­ca­tions? Prob­a­bly. I doubt I would have made as much progress, but like any exper­i­ment, I’ll have to try it again and again to see the results. We’ll see…

Today was an inter­est­ing day. While I made progress with work, I took not of sev­eral things that caught my eye. Once I had the chance to write it down, I’d pass it along. Well, here we are. It’s post-​​dinner and before I begin the nights design work, let me tell you about some things.

New Desk­top Design

As tra­di­tion, I devel­oped a new desk­top image as a result of two things: desk­top image bore­dom and serendip­i­tous inspi­ra­tion. I was work­ing on a project with tex­tures and scenery try­ing to achieve a cer­tain look. While this was not my orig­i­nal intent, I really liked the over­print effect and took it as far as the evening per­mit­ted. (Late night inspi­ra­tion) If you want a copy your­self, you can get it here or here with­out the type. For the typophiles out there, Claren­don Con­densed and Claren­don Bold were the type faces of choice — but you already knew that didn’t you?

Retro Desk­tops

The other day I came across these retro desk­top images from smash​ing​magazine​.com. I didn’t cre­ate them but for any­one who wants to, feel free to down­load them as I did before. When I went back to find the post, I couldn’t find it so I hope the artists won’t mind. Enjoy! Apple Retro, All Things in Posi­tion, and Hel­vetica.

Milk Desk

This may not appeal to any­one out there in the read­er­ship, but the Milk desk is a beau­ti­ful piece of work. Built by Søren Rose Stu­dio, it is a per­fect min­i­mal­ist desk com­plete with fish tank. For us graphic design­ers who use tow­ers, it doesn’t seem like a great desk to have espe­cially since it would stand out like a sore thumb. And next to this desk, the Mac Pro tower would look like a sore thumb. But whether or not it would fit every­one, it’s very cool. Check it out.

Spe­cial thanks to my lov­ing wife, I have a 1/​4 inch to 1/​8 inch cable to con­nect my elec­tric gui­tar to my lap­top. I haven’t really had much of a desire to mess with it until recently. You see, Mar­sha and Tiffany came up from Florida to visit and TIffany was look­ing for a gui­tar case. Once we got into Gui­tar Cen­ter, I was look­ing at the loop ped­als, delays, tuners and… and… and… Yeah, there was a lot there. The last thing I remem­ber before leav­ing was, “Wait, I have Garage­Band, right?“

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Indeed I do. Here’s Sunday’s cre­ation. In lieu of a looper, I’m going to cre­ate lit­tle seg­ments to prac­tice lead, scales and other musi­cal exper­i­ments. I don’t really know what I am doing, from an edu­cated per­spec­tive, but I’ll exper­i­ment. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe Joel can help with the music theory…

I saw this online the other day when we were headed out to have some fun down in Knob Nos­ter state park this week­end. Appar­ently, there is spec­u­la­tion to how toxic an iPhone is to its users. I think it’s a lot of fuss for noth­ing. If you ingest your iPhone, it con­tains poi­sons that will harm you. But, isn’t that nor­mal? Isn’t that expected? Who would think that you can throw your iPhone in the blender, grind it to pow­der and mix it in with your flax-​​seed shake for the day? I think it’s crazy, jealous-​​driven, tech-​​envy that has no real rel­e­vance to nor­mal iPhone users. Hog­wash I say. Hog­wash. See for your­self. 

other news­wor­thy tidbits

Twin broth­ers share their inven­tion, the ‘Rip Away 1000,’ with CNN’s Betty Nguyen and T.J. Holmes. It’s the anti-​​wedgie. You never know what kids will do or say on tele­vi­sion. It’s so funny to see these guys scram­ble to keep these kids in “inter­view posture.”

This past week­end I went to the Apple store like any other Apple enthu­si­ast to test drive the new oper­at­ing sys­tem, Leop­ard. Ordi­nar­ily, you have three types of peo­ple in the store. The first come in and know they are buy­ing the soft­ware and are look­ing for com­pli­men­tary com­po­nents for their upgrade. Another type enters the store to test drive the OS (oper­at­ing sys­tem) and check out the new fea­tures first-​​hand. “Keynote-​​shmee-​​note. If I’m not impressed in the store, I’m cer­tainly not going to be impressed with it at home.” The last group knows Apple has come out with cool stuff and with that, they want to be where the cool peo­ple are. Oh, there’s a fourth. It’s the PC users who are brought into the store against their will by their so-​​called MAC bud­dies to see their oper­at­ing sys­tem run­ning on a MAC; like some crazy tech bait to get them in the door while the store employ­ees seduce them into a new Mac Book Pro. I’v eseen it work on more ethan one occa­sion. This time, I was in the first cat­e­gory. I bought what I needed and picked up some addi­tional stuff to enhance my invest­ment. Noth­ing pre­pared me for what was going to hap­pen next.

Every­thing Started out so well…

I opened the sleek pack­ag­ing and popped the DVD into the Mac Book Pro. Update com­plete. Restart­ing com­puter. Per­mis­sions set. Ah, that’s nice. I move to my G5 tower and it’s a “whole nother” story. 10% into the update and I get a win­dow that states the instal­la­tion failed. I attempt to retry but the com­puter flashed it’s code for “No Oper­at­ing Sys­tem.” This hap­pened before. So I restart the com­puter with the DVD and ven­ture to the Disk Util­ity, what do I see? The pri­mary drive that held my OS was unmounted and unavail­able for repair. Each time I tried to repair it, I received a mes­sage that said the repair failed due to a error on exit­ing. I had over­lap­ping sec­tors and all kinds of stuff. Well, one and a half hours with Apple Care brought me to the Apple store down­town Kansas City. Twenty min­utes of diag­nos­tics in the Apple store and I was lug­ging my G5 home with a dys­func­tional hard drive. Noth­ing could be done unless the hard drive mounted prop­erly. I hooked every­thing back up and I held my breath. Noth­ing. Liz and I prayed and even “laid hands on the sick so they’d recover.” Noth­ing. I clicked the “Mount” but­ton a gazil­lion times. Noth­ing. I text mes­saged Randy Bohlen­der in a last-​​minute Hail-​​Mary chance he had some bril­liant idea that the trained pro­fes­sion­als in Cuper­tino, CA or the Genius Bar spe­cial­ists didn’t have. Noth­ing. It seemed my only way for­ward was to erase and start over.

So I “called it” and marked the time of death 10:13pm on the 29^th of Octo­ber 2007. I selected the “erase and install” path for­ward with dis­may. The update I was look­ing for crashed my pho­tos, music, video and mem­o­ries. Once the dust set­tles and my “7-​​Pass Secure Erase” fin­ishes, I can attempt to go through my dig­i­tal rub­ble for sur­vivors, rein­state the pro­grams nec­es­sary and mourn the loss of many mem­o­ries and good times. It’s a down day for Dave. : (

Over the past two weeks, my machines all of a sud­den crashed and cre­ated all kinds of headaches for me at DCD. First, my G5 tower was in the mid­dle of updates and it froze. I admit, I was push­ing the machine quite a bit to get every­thing accom­plished. I only have so much time to squeeze every­thing into the day. So as things were pro­gress­ing, it was in the mid­dle of the Mac OX 10.4.9 update when it stopped work­ing. It just hung there. I waited for awhile and decided to reboot. When the com­puter spun back up, it came to Dar­win, the pro­gram sim­i­lar to Microsoft’s DOS inter­face. I knew I was in trou­ble then. What I didn’t know is that it was unfix­able. I called Apple Care (I’m so glad I bought it when I made my pur­chase) and they stepped me through dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios. The final out­come was that I would have to “zero-​​out” all my data and wipe it clean. This means that all the per­sonal files I did not back up on the machine would be lost. I don’t know about the next guy, but I have a lot of pho­tos, music and movies that were pre­cious mem­o­ries. I just can’t toss them away! Thank­fully, Josh had a hard drive with tons and tons of stor­age and I was able to find a way to make my com­puter a hard drive and use Liz’s lap­top to bridge the gap between both dri­ves to trans­fer infor­ma­tion. (See photo above.) 16 hours later, I had my infor­ma­tion over to Josh’s hard drive and I had begun installing soft­ware back into the com­puter. The major soft­ware was pretty easy but the lit­tle pro­grams along the way that made life a bit eas­ier have been more dif­fi­cult to find or install. It’s when I run into some­thing that I see what I need and have to go out and rein­stall it or search for the soft­ware. Not too bad but before I could exhale, some­thing else caught my attention.

My lap­top is shaped like most any other Apple lap­top with a slim, sliver exte­rior and a glow­ing latch but­ton ready for action. When I turned to get my lap­top it wob­bled from the desk. Wob­bled? Yes, the bat­tery cas­ing had been, in my opin­ion, loos­ened from its edges from the extreme heat caus­ing a bulging below. My track pad and mouse but­ton (for lack of bet­ter terms) barely worked. The track pad would move but the mouse but­ton was always depressed caus­ing the com­puter to cre­ate bound­ing boxes all over the desk­top. Two days later, the bat­tery had swelled so much that I had to take it out of the com­puter for fear of it dam­ag­ing any­thing else. My sec­ond call to Apple Care gave me more hope. While the phone was dial­ing, I read that other users have had the same issue with their 17” Mac­Book Pro lap­tops. Appar­ently, this is a cou­ple cases short of a recall. The Apple Care agent was very polite on the phone and said that a new bat­tery would be com­ing my way. The next day it arrived and was it’s nor­mal shape. Now with the new one in place, I can proudly say that I have my lap­top back. { Sigh }