It’s been an incredibly busy week of travel and work and I apologize for not posting as much.

First came the wonderful GEL (Good Experience Live) conference in nyc, which made me ask “why” every time I experienced something bad in this world, rather than just letting it happen. Why do voice mail avatars talk for sooo long before I can leave a message, why do the same avatars talk for so long when I want to hear my voice mails, Why does technology direct 2 people calling each other at the same time to each others voice mail rather than connecting them, why is the nyc train system so confusing for a newbie… this world is full of bad experiences, and as a designer, discovering, revealing, and disrupting the norm is needed…especially when it comes to sustainability and health care experiences. I’ll post about GEL later on, but here is a great recap collection.

Anyhow, this week I venture off to the “Art Center: Serious Play” Conference in LA. It’ll touch base on user experience, design, and bits of everything. I’ll bring my laptop, but no promises on live blogging.

After that, I’ll be experiencing the incredible Pangea Day on May 10th at the Sony Pictures Studio in LA. If you didn’t catch my last post, this is MUST do…invite a bunch of friends, family, or even strangers over…gather around, watch this global event for 4+ hours, get inspired, and make change! There will be 24 films, live music, and several fantastic speakers very much like TED.

I’ll be twittering most of my journey on the sidebar..feel free to follow me on twitter, or just on this blog… I’ll post when I can, but for now, a few late weekend links below:

Use Whatever Clock: Pretty cool, sell the function, let customer create looks.
Wearable Chair: I had this idea sometime ago, but executed a bit differently.
Twistori: Following Twitter by emotions.
Scrapile: Using wasted wood to make cool wood composites! Very sustainable!
Sunlight Poem Projector: Public Poem based on sun location. Pretty neat!
Soba Machine: Make you own soba at home. I’m in soba mode after going to Soba Koh nyc.
A billion Pennies: What does 1 billion pennies stack up to be.
Momofuku Ko restaurant: reservations only online! Brings the experience beyond the restaurant.

Filmmaker and 2006 TED prize winner Jehane Noujaim made a wish to “Create a day in which the world came together through film.”

That exciting day is this May 10th, gathering a global audience to watch a series of films made by the world for the world, which will broadcast around the globe live at the same time.

Gather a community of your family and friends and watch this amazing inspirational film together. Host an event in your home, backyard, office, or any other location to share this extremely rare experience with all.

Watch Jehane’s wish during TED here, host an event, check out the Pangea Day webpage, or watch a few more videos on their Youtube site.

I’ll be in LA during this event… this is a must do, watch, spread event.

Cozy Seats: Diagonal seats allowing individuals to finally rest their bobbing sleepy heads somewhere on airplanes!It’s about time an airline tried these out, though a sliding wall would have done the trick. I’m not too sold on this idea for spacial reasons, but it’ll be interesting to see even though meeting cool strangers sitting next to you will be tricky. Laptop peepers, yeah..I’ll be asking for aisles seats. Delta planes to install theses in some economy class seats by 2010.

Some pics after the jump via newlaunches.
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- an awesome Wii Guitar Hero shirt above.
- DIY sawed off USB stick..seriously nerdy awesome!
- A great intellectual interview(mp3) to Bruce Schneier on Security and Beyond Fear.
- Paparazzi for the rest of us: the service in getting photographed secretly!
- Visualization of our current space debris!
- Hilarious iphone review! (video).

In a period where bikes are just as congesting as cars comes the invention field in storage. Watch the above video for an automated bicycle parking facility in Japan which is pretty cool! It reminds me of the VW car storage system.

Either way, very cool, though for the biking system, I’d prefer it to be a tower like the VW rather than a big tunnel underground. I’m also not sure what would prevent someone from sitting on their bike while the robo machine jolted ya down to the lower levels…love the camera work in the video!

via gizmodo

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now and must admit it rocks! This micro-blogging craze feeds and broadcast mini moments in your fun life via IM, web, or txt messaging …and best yet it updates lots of other things, like your facebook status, and my now twitter feed I’ve added to the side of Designverb. Basically, you send a shout-out to Twitter and it broadcasts out to all of your friends in digestible messages 140 letters or less. Sometimes you just want to share something, that doesn’t need to be discussed but makes for a good conversation later on.

Some may think it’s just another social network, which it is to some extent, but what it actually does is enhance your already existing communications. I signed up for Twitter, and almost never go back to the Twitter site since I use IM and txt messaging to do the rest.

Anyhow, instead of rambling on and on for hours about Twitter, I just found this awesome video above to explain it all in animation format!!! So, sign up for Twitter, and follow me if you want to hear my random daily shoutouts, trips, complaints, adventures, etc.. or here, for a feed of this blog (it’ll message you whenever I post something new and some random messages/links)

Also, lots of great Twitter 3rd party application like TwitterVision! ( a live mp of random messages being yelled out across the world) Also for you iphone lovers, Twinkle.

It’s been an awfully busy month with projects, some ping-pong action, lots of lectures, and a few great conferences coming up (GEL, Art Center). Sorry for the lack in posting, but please keep sending in goods.

Thought of the week: You never know what your good at unless you try doing it.
- What the world eats by culture.
- Is Wholefoods becoming the Hybrid SUV, and victims in their own success?
- Very eerie…virtual face follows your cursor.
- A hilarious Blog on photoshop disasters!
- Pop-up alphabet book!
- Solar Film reaches 19.9% efficiency/transfer! Awesome!
- www.ffffound.com , a visual dig of creative images.
- Ping Pong flopping skill madness!
- A pretty nifty label made to remember what wine you liked!

Craig Venter the human genome pioneer, oceanographic microorganism voyager, and now engineering new life forms through his new company Synthetic Genomics!

Watch his incredibly scary, questionable, perhaps world-changing glimpse into his new adventure in creating synthetic microorganisms or bio robots that eat up waste(perhaps carbon) and in return spawn out useful chemicals such as bio fuels! Seriously dangerous yet mind blowing!

Watch the video above or directly here.

I gave Hulu.com a quick test run this weekend and I must admit, it’s pretty awesome and addictive! (the hilarious SNL Natalie Portman rapping video above) Sure there’s Joost, Veoh, Miro, Youtube, DailyMotion, and direct online streams from ABC, NBC, FOX, and several other networks, but hey, besides appearing like a lowercase web2.0 Hulk logo at first, it’s pretty clean, simple, and fun. They even have HD streams! One nice Hulu feature is embedding videos or even sections in a video, though you can’t embed a playlist of videos yet.

Hulu does have a few short commercials throughout their streams, but thus far it hasn’t distracted me much. I’ve only had one brief pause in a video unlike my horrible Joost experience, but maybe that’ll change once Hulu gets out of Beta in late March.

Anywy, I’ve embedded a few videos from Chef Gordon Ramsey’s feisty reality show “Kitchen Nightmares” which I’ve found very entertaining and a nice kick in the butt to fix your business and get rid of the lazy ones. He really shouts the crap outta you to be successful and make change!

Also, I’ll add a few movies! (Sideways, October Sky, Weekend at Bernie’s)

Videos after the jump (meaning, after you click “read the rest of the story”)

Hulu.com(I’ll have a more in depth review down the road)

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Neatorama’s got a great historical collection of tech company logos transforming, evolving, and even name changing over the years. It’s amazing to think about how some giant companies started, and how they adapted to nice design! Makes me wonder when it’s time to make a name change over a logo transformation…(there are many brands that I think suffer based on their crappy names)

A bunch of pics after the jump. (more…)