tweeting from my new windows mobile! yee yee!

#SeattleD2ig – meeting was great, food after was really great, and the blog posted before we even left the meeting room – priceless

In the last 2 months, I’ve had a few people question my desire towards tutorials.  There is confusion in the air when mentioning it, and its understandable – most of the time when asked to do something, I know exactly how to do what is being requested and a few ideas will pop into my mind – but I continue to go through tutorials – I wonder: perhaps a stereotype needs to be changed.

When you think of someone going through a tutorial, what do you think?  I’ve posed this question once and… the response was to be expected.  Often, the thought of someone going through a tutorial means that they’re new to something, inexperienced, and/or just getting their feet wet.  But there’s more to it than that.  Even if you’re highly advanced in a set field and the tutorial is well within those boundries, there is much that can be gained from continually going through tutorials.

Sometimes I find that though my methods of doing something are useful and work for what I’m doing, there are easier ways to do something.  I fear that at times I’ll see the more complicated ways of going about doing something before ever even noticing the obvious methods that would get something done more swiftly and efficiently.

In today’s market and especially in the “world of design” its paramount that things are accomplished quickly, efficiently, and with a spark of shine to what is being done (pull out your jazz hands!).  Going through tutorials also can familiarize others on how different people – designers – go about doing the same thing.  Often, I’ll have something that I’m working on that looks quite similar to something else that I’ve done in the past – however, the way that I go about accomplishing that “sameness” might vary depending on the purpose of the item.  By knowing different ways to accomplish similar ends, it gives more diverse skillsets so you can tackle more challenges put in front of you with efficiency and finesse.

And finally – the #1 reason why I continue to push myself through great, good, and horrid tutorials: One can never know everything.  There is SO much out there that even if someone’s been in their specific field for 15 years, it is not possible to know everything.

Perhaps the question should be changed to “Why not a tutorial?”

sitting in the car with the kid asleep in back while daddy gets groceries.

The last 2 weeks have consisted of working on this project and now its at the stage where its basically done and the last few lose ends are being tied up – documentation for release, DNS configurations for external use, etc.

… Its been my all-consuming drive for the past 2 weeks, I’ve had a few tiny things on the side that I worked on as a “break” which really just consisted of doing something else to shift my thought patterns temporarily so I can come back to the project “refreshed”.

But now that its nearly done – I don’t know what to do with myself.  I definitely don’t want to go back to the lack in projects that I had before, but the goals that I have for myself personally are so monumental that I don’t know if I want to get neck-deep in them at this point either.

I guess its kind of a nice thing, but at the same time, I love having my entire being sucked into a project.

I need a shift + F5 on my brain