umami has a flavor

Winter Sports 2009-10 has begun.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:59:27 -0800

Winter Sports 2009-10 has begun.

"I’m going to make a film about a guy who goes around murdering people for grammatical errors...."

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:44:00 -0700

“I’m going to make a film about a guy who goes around murdering people for grammatical errors. I’ll call it ‘Your Welcome’.”

- Elliott Kember (@elliottkember)

Photo

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:36:00 -0700

Is it just me?

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:17:00 -0700

Gizmodo has a great review of the new Palm Pre. Without having one in-hand, this is as close a look as I’ll likely get for another month.

The OS is nice. Clean, appropriately flashy for the new kid, though I’d argue that from what I can see it lacks the consistency that makes OS X such a pleasure both to look at and to use. The Pre feels like it’s trying a little too hard to be new, rather than just good. Round-end buttons turn to rounded-corner rectangles in some instances for no apparent reason. There are screens with mysterious green backgrounds, and others with blue. I’d probably prefer something more neutral that doesn’t visually interfere with the content as much. That wiggly app launch bar doesn’t strike me as any more useful than the iPhone launch bar, just flashier. Doubtless, there will be bells and whistles that trump the now dated feeling iPhone, including a smoother feel thanks to a faster processor.

But this comment from Gizmodo sums up the issue pretty well:

“If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.”

I haven’t held one, but the video of the Pre slicing cheese isn’t exactly encouraging. Oddly, this is about where Gizmodo stops complaining. But hardware matters. It isn’t enough to build a great airplane and bolt on some crappy landing gear. If the hardware doesn’t look and work as great as the software it runs, the user experience is only half complete. And the Pre, it’s not an icon. It’s not sexy. It’s a lump.

Maybe Palm is hoping you’ll be so awed by their obviously great OS that you’ll forget what you’re holding. I can’t explain away that sad-looking lumpy thing any other way. It doesn’t have a shape so much as it just kind of falls inelegantly away from the screen hoping to hide itself in your hand. The mini-USB port planted smack-dab in the middle of the side of the phone is painful to look at. That’s where your data cable is going to live, which should make using it while charging absolutely miserable. I don’t have to read the article to get that it’s plasticky—it looks plasticky. It looks like a…phone. These days, that’s not a compliment.

I’m no great fan of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard for serious typing. It’s passable for texting, and ok for a short email, but it’s probably the one weakness that makes the iPhone marginal for business travel. Make it compatible with Apple’s bluetooth keyboard and I’d consider the problem solved. So Gizmodo’s comment that the Pre’s hardware keys are 30% smaller than the iPhone’s virtual keys is jaw dropping. Here’s the one hardware issue that left open territory for real competition pitting one ideology against another, and Palm pulls up in a clown car.

I have no doubt that the Pre will do ok for a while—it’s new, it’s flashy, and Palm has invested a ton of work to make itself relevant again. But they’re taking on a hell of a Juggernaut with two years of ground to make up as fast as they can, and Apple is poised to play its next card on Monday. From the bleachers, it looks like Palm blew their budget on software and is hoping people won’t notice the hardware flaws until they can tidy up with the next model. Or at least I hope so. As much as I love my iPhone, the whole market benefits from serious competition. I wish the Pre had hit it out of the park instead of just bunting.

Scribblenauts

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:06:00 -0700

I wouldn’t have given this game a second glance if it wasn’t for this review, which can be summed up by the following passage: ” I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES. This game is unbelievable. Impossible. There’s nothing you can’t do.”

I must have this.

Thanks to dotrob for the heads up.

How to be happy in business

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:44:00 -0700

Bud Caddell elegantly describes the challenge of finding happiness in work with his brilliant Venn diagram. To really appreciate the graphic, you need to read the body text. I’ll come back to this mroe than once, I’m sure.

Things that make you lose your vision if you live in them too long

Thu, 07 May 2009 22:32:00 -0700

Things that make you lose your vision if you live in them too long:

Sometimes, you don’t get to make the choice yourself. The competing theory is that the universe delivers what you need. Disguise or no, I’m taking the blessing.

Thank you, Frank Sparrow.

"…These Books Are the Most Approachable of the Three (Apologies for the Caps on the Rest of..."

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:20:45 -0700

“…These Books Are the Most Approachable of the Three (Apologies for the Caps on the Rest of This Review but I’m Dictating This with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Which Sucks, and It Won’t Stop Doing This).”

- Massive technology meltdown, from a book review on Amazon.com

My first three minutes with Omegle

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:43:00 -0700

I just read about Omegle on Metafilter and popped over to check it out. My first contact had already chatted with hundreds of people. I bid him/her well and moved on. My second contact dropped me after a quick a/s/l query. My third was a gem. Apologies for the offensive language—it’s not mine. (Gah-I can’t even repost it. Just bothers me to have it on my blog. Shit-talk redacted.)

Stranger: talk to me

Stranger: im lonely

Stranger: chris hanson?

You: no

You: sorry

You: you?

Stranger: k good

Stranger: no

Stranger: lets se

Stranger: x

Stranger: i wanna role play

Stranger: i’ll be a rhino

You: it turns out that without identity attached to this, people feel no obligation to be polite

Stranger: shut the fuck up nXXXer

You: ok im a cane spider

Stranger: no, you’re fucking stupid

You: lol

You: see?

Stranger: this conversation is now about me hating you

Stranger: nXXXer lover

You: well i’m a cane spider and you

Stranger: i bet you voted for obama

You: ‘re probably bitten

Stranger: get the fuck off the topic of cane-spiders

You: sigh.

Stranger: i’ve been wanting tohate somebody all day

Stranger: thank you

You: anytime

Where are all the designers?

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:49:00 -0700

After reading this brilliant and insightful piece from a visual designer from Google, I am wondering again where the voice of industrial designers is. Though the web is primarily the playground of those who design for it, I haven’t yet found a single industrial design blog online. The closest I can find is the forum-based community on Core77. Who are the thought leaders of the profession, and what in the hell are they talking about? Is ID so inaccessible that it defies common understanding? Given how much insight and similarity I can extrapolate from ANY design blog and apply to my own profession at a general level, I rather doubt it.

I’m beginning to think the thought leaders are, in fact, web and software designers. They’re the ones who have their finger on the pulse of technology far ahead of product designers. So, they are the first ones to have to adapt their thinking to cope with it. ID comes second, maybe third.

Comments Enabled

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:49:29 -0700

Via Disqus. We’ll see how long this lasts-maybe someone has something interesting to say.

I actually don’t like comments for the most part since the internet is seldom the place for stimulating debate, but having just availed myself of someone else’s comment field, I thought I’d give it a go. If you really need to get in touch, say, if you had a big pile of money to give me, you can always send an email…

The Fidget Toy

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:13:46 -0800

Via Daringfireball: Cooper’s One Free Interaction

In school, we used to talk about designing the perfect fidgeter’s gadget. It was basically a product with no specific function except to be fun to play with, like a paper weight, except with even less utility. Various designs included ball-pen clickers, ratchets, pushbuttons and sound effects. The Free Interaction goes one better by appending something otherwise functional with a little extra humanness, i.e. a reason to love it beyond its inherent purpose. On men these are called “biceps” and on women they’re “boobs.”

"2012: Michael Phelps wins 13 gold medals, celebrates with bong hit of salvia. The apology reads..."

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:47:22 -0800

““2012: Michael Phelps wins 13 gold medals, celebrates with bong hit of salvia. The apology reads ‘Rrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhh (falls down)’””

- drewtoothpaste, with the funniest comment I have ever read on Twitter.

"Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of..."

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:39:08 -0800

“Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.”

- Derek Powazek

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the..."

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:34:10 -0800

“There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”

- Norman Mailer

One-week update: iPhone FTW/FAIL

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:11:00 -0800

After one week, here’s how things are shaking out:

The obvious omissions have been commented on so many times I’ll only give them a brief nod: No copy/paste, no MMS, no tethering—major WTFs. App store dictatorship, mildly annoying, but frankly I’m glad not to have to sort through thousands of mediocre, buggy apps to find a few real gems. Open source is great, but I still don’t have Linux installed on my home computer for a reason.

There are a couple of major failures that are worth mentioning. The camera is just shy of atrocious, with crappy image quality, significant lag and the worst “jellyvision” I’ve seen in a camera, ever. The otherwise-craptacular LG Dare kills the iPhone with a 3.2mpxl camera that’s faster, brighter and shoots video. Mind you, I don’t expect my phone to serve as a substitute for a “real” camera, but it’s so bad that I can hardly use it for the one thing I really care about: capturing whiteboard meeting notes.

As expected, the iPhone is not, primarily, a phone. And so, it’s phone features are very limited, though I don’t really care. Of particular note is the lack of voice dial, though there are apps that handle this reasonably well (I do wish they integrated better with the default phone app). There vibrator is strong enough to count as its own ringtone, though it’s suitably quiet when in a pocket. Disappointingly, there’s no “vibrate, then ring” setting, so when you get a call, everyone knows right when you do.

While it appears that the phone gets good reception, the number of dropped calls I’ve had suggest that the signal meter is slow to update, but this is the kind of behavior you learn as you continue to use a new phone. The bluetooth signal appears to be unfortunately and disappointingly worse than my Motorlola Razr—though still usable. Forget talking on a headset in a separate room, however. The signal is so full of crackles and pops that it’s not worth the effort.

The biggest iPhone failure of all has nothing to do with Apple. AT&T’s presence on the phone feels like a cancer, not a service. To view your minutes, rate plan or any other provider feature, you are relegated to SMS messaging. There is—no kidding—NO AT&T iPhone webpage, application or interface other than some menu prompts to receive your information via SMS whatsoever. AT&T, like most corporate juggernauts, is so blinded by maximizing profits that they see customers as overhead, not their business. They provide you a service in the way that best serves them, making concessions only when necessary to stay competitive. Unfortunately, the competition isn’t any better, so they don’t have to bend very far to stay in the game. My suspicion is that Apple got into bed with AT&T because they needed a partner, they got a reasonably good deal, and they’ll drop them like dead weight the instant they get the opportunity. Did I mention their 3G service sucks?

So this is the part of the interview where I make a 90-degree turn and leave you wondering if I’m off my meds, because thus far I make it sound like the iPhone is kind of a mediocre product. But the fact is, it’s brilliant. C’mon now, it’s not like you didn’t see that coming.

First of all, I hate cell phones. They’re garbage—all of them. Overpriced junk designed to hammer on your gadget lust until you succumb and sign up for 2 years of extortionary business practices from your least-disliked service provider. If you’re a real chump, you’ll shell out several hundred dollars for one, and keep doing so after the hinges break on your flip phone every two years. We’ve had telephone technology for a century and the culmination of all our worldly efforts boils down to a little plastic candybar that has worse sound quality and reception than anything made since before switchboards had human operators. (A quote from a Bell ad in the December 1947 issue of Fortune magazine comes to mind: “Connecting most out-of-town calls in less than 2 minutes!”) My cell phone connects in seconds, when it connects, drops out in minutes (but hey—it reconnects seconds later, wash rinse repeat). Rather than invest in better reception or improved call quality, they give us cameras, voice recording, address books and games, when all I want is a decent phone call.

But the iPhone isn’t a phone. It’s a handheld computer with, among other things, a handy phone application. If you take out the SIM card, you can use your iPhone just like its sibling, the iPod Touch. Heck—leave the SIM card in, turn on Airplane Mode and turn your wireless back on and you have the same result. I suspect Apple doesn’t care about a phone as much as they realize that if you’re going to carry around a Tricorder, it might as well have a phone and since that’s the technology paradigm that everyone understands, it’s the easiest point of entry.

Fast forward to a future where cell phone service providers don’t rule the world of interpersonal long distance communication and imagine a device that gives you a portal to information, provides a conduit for communication, and allows you to access your personal data over Skynet. That’s what the iPhone does now, it just uses conventional channels because Apple can’t (or won’t) afford to be their own service provider on year one. Nor do they need to.

But on year five, after you begin to understand that the technology behind how you communicate is irrelevant compared to the interface, suddenly having a phone seems way less important than having a portal. Sure, you can make a “phone call”, though now you call it something else because phones are something you had back in the dark days of proprietary communications media. You just make contact, and you choose between video, audio, or text. I’m inclined to speculate on the future of mobileMe—could this be Apple’s quiet introduction of providing these kinds of services? The Apple store rep pushed it, but given my current needs, I declined.

But the LG Dare does all this too, doesn’t it? Sort of. What sets Apple apart, as usual, is the quality of their experience. The iPhone feels like a computer. It’s slick. The interface is fluid, intuitive and even though it has hiccups, it comes off as extremely sophisticated without being overly technical. The LG Dare, as an example, feels blocky, heavy-handed and…a lot like a cell phone. Because it is. It’s a cell phone with a computer in it. The iPhone reverses the hierarchy and thus changes the conversation.

Which brings me to a feature of distinction: I placed an order on Amazon.com last night at 2am through their iPhone app. It was sublime. While I love having full web access via Mobile Safari, loading and viewing web pages on a tiny screen is slow and cumbersome, though nice to have at times. Because once again, the Internet is the current paradigm, and it’s optimized for roughly 800 x 600 pixels on a large desktop monitor. But the Amazon app (among others) opens the door on a new path.

The interface is largely search-based, not browsing-based, so if you’re just poking around for shopping ideas, you’re better off going to the website. But for finding the thing you’re looking for and buying it, I’d sooner buy it on the iPhone than my computer. For one, it’s incredibly simple. No banners, extra links, or any other chaff. Just product pictures, a description, pricing, reviews, and buttons to add the product to your cart. Click through and purchasing is as simple as adding your credit card number into a field, choosing your desired shipping address, and off you go. I used to think interfaces that offered a dumbed-down version of the web were annoyingly limited. Now I think this is the future of online commerce.

The same could be said for interfaces for flickr (currently just a mobile webpage), wikipedia, and at least one iPhone porn site. The idea that these need to be viewed through a generic browser interface feels curiously outdated compared to using the iPhone. I could easily envision these spaces existing as “apps” on a desktop computer as well. The option to customize the interface adds much more benefit than having a catchall browser window. It makes me wonder if there’s really any necessity for a browser application at all—one could simply open the Google search app, dig for their information which is presented as a list of apps, click on their selection and up pops a mini-app of the “page” they chose. Each site becomes its own discreet process, rather than a tab hanging in a browser window.

But I digress. I realize it’s obvious, but the genius of the iPhone is the applications. And not just that they’re on there, but that they’re well-designed (for the most part), that they work and look like Apple products, and that the possbilities have just begun to emerge. We found three new restaraunts over the weekend using Urbanspoon (briefly: There are three tumblers for location, cuisine and price which can be locked. By shaking the device, the unlocked tumblers roll randomly, resulting in a restaraunt recommendation complete with a map and reviews from users and local papers). We avoided traffic with Google Maps. I found a color palette generator that works with colourlovers.org to access their palette library. They’re not indispensable, but I’m finding value for more than just my own entertainment.

And I’ve managed to keep from checking my email in every meeting.

So far.

The thing about iPhones is that you never knew how much you needed to chat before

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:30:00 -0800

After months of pretending not to care, I finally took the plunge and joined the ranks of dumb looking men staring at their hands while standing in lines, sitting in bars, on trains, in taxis, bathrooms, and next to their significant others (unless those SOs have iphones themselves, then it’s two dumb looking people standing next to each other not interacting whatsoever). I could write a whole blog entirely about justifying the purchase, but this would give way more attention to the infernal device than anything deserves. I’d even go so far as to say that because I bought one, I ought to invest some time focusing on whatever constitutes a counterpoint to the iPhone experience, thus ensuring that my existence doesn’t become a life support system for some stupid device.

But the fact is that it’s a great device, brilliantly designed and far more entertaining than anything that small has a right to be. Which is exactly the problem with it. You want to fiddle with it constantly, when you could be staying present in the moment and enjoying reality as it happens around you. I don’t need every second of my idle time to be filled with blinking lights and games, the internet, email or text messaging. Sometimes, I just need idle time to be…idle.

I thought about returning it. I am still thinking about returning it—I have another 27 days to deliberate over whether I’d really be better off with an iPod Touch, or no iPod at all. So far it hasn’t made my any better looking, wealthier or healthier. I could argue that it’s made my life experience a little more interesting, perhaps even more enjoyable (notably, having a direct link to icanhazcheezburger.com provides some good laughs now and then. I love cats). But the real selling point of the iPhone is convenience.

I can check the internet in places I never knew I needed to check the internet. While I’m pooping, for instance—a moment when my hands are entirely idle (well, most of the time) and I want to be anywhere but where I actually am—or while waiting at a train crossing. I can look up directions while I’m in my car, find out traffic conditions, or best of all (and I’m not kidding) I can look up movie times while out with my girlfriend. I actually do these things, and I find the iPhone to be a hell of a lot better than a google maps printout or scrounging around for a newspaper in downtown Seattle after 9pm.

As a device that brings people together, it has potential. Photos, music, entertainment—these things you can share with the people around you, usually for your mutual benefit. As a device that creates isolation, it’s unfortuantely and perhaps inevitably better. The sheepishness I feel when I pull it out in public probably isn’t entirely bad—I wish more people felt a similar sense of shame about some of their behavior. Take talking on your bluetooth headset in the grocery store, for instance. I’ve done it, I’m not proud, but it’s awkward for you and everyone else. I see that as both a hardware problem and user error. The right device would allow you to not look as though you were a crazy person talking to yourself, and the right manners would empower you to use good judgment about when it’s appropriate to have a high-decibel conversation in public and when it’s not.

So, the experience for me is both a gadget investigation as well as an exercise in moderation. Can I enjoy the benefits of a pocket computer without succumbing to every bad habit it enables? I’d like to see the iPhone and its ilk as something not inherently evil. I could have made all the same arguments about cell phones ten years ago and I would have been just as right. And now a decade or two later we see that some of the downsides are valid, as are many of the benefits. In the era of infinite data and always-on technology, I want to stay as acutely aware of what we stand to lose as what we stand to gain.

Customer Service

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:03:00 -0800

Three years ago, after fielding months of frustrated phone calls from my mother to help troubleshoot her ailing PC, my persistent lobbying for her to purchase a Macintosh finally paid off. Within a week, our phone conversations resumed their normal peaceful tone and we only talked computers to discuss how great her new iMac was working out.

But as users and computers tend toward entropy, eventually the phone calls started again—less frequently than before, and I could usually solve the problems more quickly. Nevertheless, we were ramping up toward a Tech Support Crisis in short order and upon my last visit I discovered that despite Apple’s best attempts to make OS X easy to use, it’s only just this side of impossible for a menopausal woman in her 50s to navigate without leaving me with cold sweats and trembling.

Much of this isn’t exactly Apple’s fault. I’d like to thank the developers at Western Digital personally for implementing a notification window that pops up every single time a file is backed up to the external drive. One of the great things about a reliable backup system is that you don’t have to worry about it, so I can only assume that by knowing about the status of each and every file as it gets transferred, blinding irritation is not the user experience they were aiming for. Oh, you can turn it off, sure, but if you’re not a computer-savvy type, you might be worried that you’re turning off your whole backup system, not just the WD equivalent of Clippy, the World’s Most Annoying UI Feature of All Time.

My attitude toward data backups has been embarrassingly cavalier throughout my tenure as a computer user. The fact that I’ve lost very, very little data over so many years is a blessing of luck. Time Machine was my first honest backup system, and Leopard came out, what—a year ago? So it was to my absolute (and admittedly naive) shock that no more than four weeks after leaving my mom’s house, (and two months after her Applecare expired) I received a call on the red phone that her internal hard drive had in fact failed catastrophically, and she was taking her iMac into the Apple store that afternoon.

No problem, I thought, because she has been backing up her crucial files for as long as I’ve known her to own a computer. Since her Applecare expired, it’s going to cost some money, but all will be well thanks to Apple’s great wealth of Geniuses and customer service.

It’s worth mentioning that I received this call while on a road trip to visit my dad, so my availability to actually help was very limited. This becomes important later, in the chapter where I spend $100 on roaming fees while driving from Montana to Seattle talking my mom through the file restoration process. If you know the road then you know that cell phone reception is limited to line of sight signal paths along straight sections of road, of which there are approximately four between Helena and Coeur d’Alene. I expect my phone bill is 40 or 50 pages thick with a profusion of 1-3 minute calls all within a couple of hours.

The next call I got went something like this. “Well, I don’t know what happened but the guy at the store replaced our hard drive, but he wouldn’t give us the old one back. He told us that if we didn’t like it we could go someplace else he didn’t help us restore any of our backed up files and now I’m home and I have files everywhere and I don’t know what to do.”

It turns out that, as part of the service agreement, Apple does in fact not return your original failed parts. These are presumably whisked off to a team of engineers deep within the bowels of Cupertino who take the item apart and study how and why they failed. If this is your video card, no big deal. But if this is a hard drive with the last fifteen years of your financial data on it, you might be concerned that the guy at the Apple store with the bad attitude and the short temper doesn’t have your best interests in mind. Or your mom’s, since she didn’t seem to immediately connect with my fears. (Further research would turn up information that, while it is not Apple’s policy to return your bad parts, you can purchase them back for a small fee. Weird enough, but now a moot point since Mom and computer were at home while the hard drive was no longer in her possession.) But in either case, this was a far cry from the kind of service I expected from Apple—a company whose sole existence is about delivering great customer experience. To say I was unhappy was an understatement. My mom is not a doddering old lady who can’t find the Any Key or who puts her coffee cup on the CD tray. She’s a sweet, patient woman who has been a dental hygenist, Xerox technician and was at one point pursuing a career in GIS. I pushed hard to have both my parents buy Apple computers specifically because of their quality and service, and now one asshat at a mall in Denver was undermining not only my faith in Apple, but my mom’s faith in me. We had a problem, Houston.

With a little encouragement, I talked my mom into giving Apple customer service a call to describe her experience at the store. Her first call went to tech support and instead of getting much sympathy she got most of her data restored which, though helpful, didn’t make her feel a lot better about Apple. I sent her back to the phone, this time directly to customer service.

Within minutes the service rep had my mom booked for an extended appointment at the Apple store, gratis, complete with an apology and a concerted investigation into the identity of the employee who “helped” her previously. At the store, she was greeted by both a friendly Genius as well as the store manager and was taken to a back room where the gentleman sat with her for hours, helping her recover her data. He installed the 2GB of RAM that she bought, a complimentary upgrade of iLife and, because they had run out of time for the day, he asked her to come back in the morning. At that point, I got a phone call wherein my mom not only extolled the virtues of Apple, but thanked me for encouraging her to call them in the first place.

The next day—today—she met with the same Genius and he installed a fresh copy of Leopard, set up her external drive to work with Time Machine, and installed a free upgrade for Quicken. My mom called me this afternoon to, again, thank me and say that she was trying to figure out how to send the folks at the Apple store a thank you gift.

The moral of this story is self-evident, but I’ll say it anyway: Customer service wins, and Apple knows how to do it right. Had I expected anything less, we wouldn’t have gotten past the conversation about her poor treatment in the first place, and I’m delighted to know that Apple delivers on their promises. The fact that they made us both look like heroes just hits it out of the park. Thanks, Apple.

The Genuine Expression of any Intention is Beauty

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:57:13 -0700

A few photography links I’ve been enjoying lately:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/acksonjay/

http://flickr.com/photos/sjrohde/

http://flickr.com/photos/tannerv/

"Through the Mirror" out now!

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:21:49 -0700

adcBicycle’s “Through the Mirror” remix album, on which I contributed the opening track, is now available as a free download! A tremendous amount of work went into this album by a roster of impressive talent, and it was well worth the wait. Check this one out ASAP!