According to the Internet Wayback Machine, the MARTINI SHAKER was born on March 26, 2004 at 12:15 am. The post was not your typical, throwaway “Hello World” affair, but instead was a blurb on light-transmitting concrete:

LiTraCon is a new form of concrete that allows light to pass through it via a fiber optic matrix embedded in it. I can think of some incredible design possibilities for this stuff…

This site began six years ago as one of those “weblogs” that people were talking so much about. But, after discovering Delicious a couple of months later, I took the site down. It seemed rather ridiculous to me to curate my links in this fashion when Delicious was so much easier and had bookmarklets to automate the process.

Then, in February 2005, I realized that I could use a blog to actually write about things that were on my mind, and the MARTINI SHAKER was relaunched. As many of you well know, it started out as a blog about Flash and After Effects and very quickly devolved into the mish-mash of hand-waving rants and raves about the state of creativity that we all know today.

Over the last couple of months I’ve done a lot of thinking about who I’ve become and who I want to be in the future. My online properties play a central role in all of that, and last night I made the definitive decision to put the MARTINI SHAKER to pasture.

One of the biggest issues that I saw in my current online persona was the fragmentation of how I present myself to different audiences, and this site has represented that the most over the years. When I originally shifted my focus away from Flash to general theories about creativity, I caught a lot of flak from the Macromedia developer community that I “wasn’t maintaining focus” and that I needed to be providing “relevant programming tips.” At first, this made me reluctant to post what I really wanted to on a regular basis until some good friends reminded me that this was my site and that I could post whatever I damn well pleased.

However, I think in the back of my mind, the MARTINI SHAKER has always represented a certain facet of what I think I need to be for people while my Tumblr site¹, the ROCKS GLASS has become a better representation of who I really am and who I really want to be now and in the future.

So. That’s why this site must end. I need to simplify as much as I need to shed mental baggage.

I will not be taking this site down. There are 552 posts that represent the last five years of growth, thought and change. They helped me to write, and they might still be of use to others, so I want them to remain.

RSS subscribers to this site should see no interruption of service. I will be automatically switching this site’s RSS feed to the one on the ROCKS GLASS. You’ll continue to get all my thoughts, but in a slightly less filtered fashion. I realize that it means that I’ll probably lose some of you. That’s OK. This is what I need to do to make me happy. I hope you understand.

This is all in the name of becoming better. Better at what I offer. Better in how I offer it. Better at who I am and want to be. Hopefully this will signify your opportunity to make yourself better as well.

See you on the Tumblr.

“How do we make people smarter?”

I have a couple of ideas.

With that figured out, I realized that I’d better get to making my recap video before:

a) I started to forget the details of my experience, and
b) It became too late to publish as a piece of relevant content.

I decided to take a slightly different angle to summarizing my time in Austin. Most people will focus on the technologies and innovations that they heard about and discussed. And, while that’s a vital part of SXSW and I am also interested in those aspects of the conference, I wanted to focus on something different.

Every technology, application, social service or other shiny widget is useless without engaging people to use them. In order to engage those people, you’ve got to have a big idea and a story to tell that helps people to see why they should jump onto your particular interactive bandwagon. So, I decided to focus on how creative people can better convey their interactive ideas in an environment where the time and attention to process those ideas is ridiculously scarce. Hilarity ensues.

Panels/Official Parties I attended:

• Battledecks 2010 (Podcast)
• How To Create A Viral Video
• Shameless Self-Promotion Without Looking Like an Asshole
• Ze Frank Conversation: The Creative Lifestyle
• Happy Cog’aoke
• A Conversation with Michel Gondry
• DSLR Filmmaking: Understanding Strengths and Weaknesses
• Slow Twitter: Users Who Take Their Time Tweeting
• Evan Williams Keynote Interview
• Visual Note-Taking 101
• Gowalla Presents: The Tiki Room with Diplo

In this episode: SXSWi 2010, ideas in an environment of scarcity, Ze Frank, viral videos, slow Twitter, Battledecks, name dropping.

If you see someone who works toward making Twitter a better place, use the “favorite” feature in your Twitter tool of choice. By clicking that star, you give those tweets (and those tweeters) exposure on sites like tweeteorites.com and favstar.fm. More exposure for them means more people get to enjoy their hard work. And that just might also mean a few less inane tweets about lunch plans in your Twitter stream.

This is my first trip to SXSWi, and I couldn’t be any more excited. In fact, my focus has been totally lost all afternoon because I keep thinking of things I want to try to accomplish while I’m there for the next five days.

As with many people that attend, I’m taking this as an opportunity to meet with some of the people I admire in the industry. I’m going to take it a little farther than pure fanboyism, though, and have some meaningful discussions with a purpose if possible.

For those who aren’t too busy to give me a minute, I’m going to be working on a short video about creative failure. We are always defined by our creative successes, our ADDY/One Show/Webby/FWA/etc. awards, but our failures are just as an important part of who we are and the things we make. I want to talk to successful creatives about their embrace of failure.

So far, I’ve gotten Hugh MacLeod to agree to spend a couple of minutes with me, but I’d love to get two or three more people. I’m going to be around a lot of Happy Cog people (see next paragraph), so maybe a couple of minutes with Greg Storey or Jeffrey Zeldman wouldn’t be out of the question. Three minutes on camera with Merlin Mann would make my year.

Of course, it’s not all going to be panels and seminars. I’m going to be competing for all manners of nerd karaoke glory at the second annual OK! Happy Cog’aoke 2 at the Scoot Inn on Saturday night. There will be video later on.

If you are planning to be in Austin for the event and would love to talk about creative failure, or anything really, come find me. You can find out where I am on Twitter, Gowalla and Foursquare.

“Well, son, we have to go to the drug store.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to pick up my medicine.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to take it tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me feel better.”
“Why?”
“Because daddy has a bad heart.”
“Me too.”
“Yes, son. Probably.”

Nathan turned two in January. At his two-year checkup, the doctor decided that, given my heart history, we should check his cholesterol so we’d have a baseline reading for him.

He has a total cholesterol level of 202. A two year-old with cholesterol of over two fucking hundred.

And, of course, it’s not because we feed him over-processed shit like Kid Cuisine. I don’t think he’s ever had one of those (at least not in our house). He eats what we eat, and what we eat is mindful of my cholesterol levels. He’s not a fat kid. He gets plenty of active play. He’s just like me… screwed by his own genetics.

I told my doctor about Nathan yesterday. He was understandably shocked.

“So, what do they say that you do for a kid that young with high cholesterol?” He asked.

At this point, we don’t know. We’re taking him to an endocrinologist at Children’s Mercy in March.

Poor kid. Ever since we found out about his cholesterol I’ve been a little depressed. That conversation was just a bit too much for me last night.

At any rate, I discovered a new browser bookmarklet early last week that completely changed the way I use my browsers. That bookmarklet is called Quix, and it is nothing short of a Swiss Army knife of geekery.

Here is a shot of it working on my iPhone. Like I said, it works on most any browser. As you see it’s nothing more than a command line interface. But, that’s it’s power. Type “help” and you’ll see a command list a mile long.

Want to find a photo of a horse on flickr that is Creative Commons licensed? Type “fc horse.” How about sharing a link on tumblr? Type “tumblr.” Wikipedia entry for dysphoria? You guessed it, “w dysphoria.”

I think you see where I’m going with this. If you don’t, I’ll tell you. A cosmic sea of awesome is where I’m going with this.

Quix is especially nice in Safari because I’ve got it mapped to a keyboard shortcut. Command-2 pops Quix’s dialog window up any time. The only reason I don’t have it mapped to Command-1 is because that’s where my Instapaper bookmarklet is, and that’s the only bookmarklet I use that is not supported in Quix at this time. However, I have seen tweets between Joost de Valk, Quix’s developer and Marco Arment trying to get Instapaper fully supported.

Even if you’re not a hardcore geek, I invite you to give Quix a try. It has enough everyday tools and searches built in that it’s bound to change the way you use your browser too.

I’ve seen a lot of lukewarm reception to the announcement today from my friends online as well as some disappointment. I’ll admit that I wasn’t as completely blown away as I thought that I would be, but that’s the thing with the hype machine. Even if Steve Jobs had walked out with a tablet computer that made turkey sandwiches for you while giving pretty serviceable fellatio, there’d be a group of people who would be disappointed that the sandwiches weren’t ham and the suction hole didn’t accommodate the complainer’s unusually small penis.

Let’s run down a few of the niggles that I saw the most on my Twitter stream today and see if you agree or disagree with these things.

The number one complaint/disappointment that I saw was that there was no Flash Player on the iPad. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. The rumor mill was always very certain that what has come to be the iPad would more likely be based on the iPhone OS than OS X. No Flash Player on the iPhone means no Flash on the iPad. Easy assumption.

The gripe is that sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Pandora and the like aren’t useable on the iPad. YouTube, just like on the iPhone, is an included app. Vimeo has a mobile site that works fine on the iPhone, and Pandora has a native iPhone application, which will run perfectly on the iPad. Most sites that serve audio or video via Flash are already working on or have recently released HTML5-based beta versions. Mobile Safari on the iPad will support these.

Would it be easier if the iPad/iPhone OS included Flash Player? Sure. But, it doesn’t. And, it’s going to be a long time (if ever) before it shows up on either device.

Another grumble that I saw was that the new Apple A4 processor is underpowered at 1GHz. It’s a 1GHz chip in a one pound device that gets 10 hours of battery life! How can you not be just a little amazed by that? And besides, how do we know that it’s underpowered? Have we used the device yet?

Which brings me to the part about it being “magical.” I do think Jobs and company threw that word around a bit too much. At first glance the iPad doesn’t seem as magical as it could have been¹, however, have any of us actually used the iPad for a decent amount of time? No. And until we can, I don’t think any of us have room to judge how “magical” this thing actually is or isn’t.

Finally, there were the grab bag of problems people saw with the device. There’s no camera built in. There’s no SD card reader built in. There’s no OLED display on the iPad. Put your favorite hardware shortcoming here.

Would a lot of these features have been a good idea to include? Absolutely. The omission of the camera is personally the biggest head scratcher out of the lot, but the rationale for all this is very simple. You could have had all these things but there’d be no way that you’d be paying anywhere near $499 for the 16GB WiFi model. Apple wanted to make a device that would be affordable from the get go. That’s a little bit unlike them, but then again, the iPad is a little bit unlike anything they’ve done, even with the feature parity to the iPhone.

A friend wondered why he would need an iPad if he already had a smartphone and a laptop. He says that for him the iPad replaces absolutely nothing.

He’s right. If your needs are met in the devices you have and the workflow you employ between those devices, you’re probably not going to want an iPad.

But, for others, the iPad makes perfect sense. Robin’s Macbook is getting long in the tooth. It needs another new battery² and it has served her well for over three years. Based on her usage patterns, the iPad would be a perfect next device for her computing needs because it does very well all the things that she enjoys doing:

• Web surfing (primarily news sites)
• Facebook
• iPhoto
• Blogging on WordPress
• Occasionally email (she uses her Blackberry 90% of the time for that)
• Occasionally writing Word documents (Pages for iPad will save .doc files)

Why get another $999 laptop for those tasks when a $499 iPad will do just as good a job?

For me, the iPad would make a fantastic companion device. When I work with new business teams on presentations, I lose the use of my laptop for whole days at time. This is because we’ll use my laptop to run the Keynote presentation. If I had an iPad, I could keep up with email a little more easily than I do on my iPhone. I could take better notes while the teams practice. And, with Keynote for iPad, I could actually be making changes to a copy of the deck while they work on the one that’s running on my laptop. The prospect of all this leaves me feeling emotionally erect.

Is the iPad perfect? Far from it. The iPad is pretty cool but has lots of room to grow. The first iPhone was the exact same way. An OS upgrade or two coupled with a second generation of hardware will certainly put it closer to earning its “magical” moniker. But, I will reserve true judgment one way or another until I have a chance to actually use one.

The Leno show is pulling weak ratings, which in turn isn’t leading enough people into local affiliates’ nightly news program. This is bad for the afilliates because it makes it harder for them to bring lucrative local advertising dollars in during that time slot. The affiliates are rightly upset by Leno’s poor performance in the lead-in slot.

Conan’s ratings haven’t been too great either, but in my opinion not because his show sucks. Far from it. He’s just caught in the wake of poor retention that the Leno show is causing when viewers abandon that slot come 10 p.m.

So, if Leno is the big, rotted carcass in the equation, why give him his old, coveted time slot back?

On the drive in to work this morning, Robin suggested that it’s because Leno is perceived to be a much stronger brand association with NBC and late night programming. Sure, I can buy that, but this whole failed exercise in primetime programming should only serve to prove that Leno has become an irrelevant part of the NBC late night brand and should just be phased out.

We never watched the 11:30 p.m. time slot when Leno was on. We always watch it now that Conan is on. In fact, we even watch the 10:00 p.m. Leno show most nights (although we rarely enjoy all of it), which is something I never expected to happen.

Jay made a joke to Kevin last night about the Fox Network being rather lovely this time of year. I’m not saying Leno needs to leave TV entirely. I’m just saying maybe there’s something to the idea he threw out there. It’s time to move on and not skunk up the already weirdly cluttered NBC late night line-up.

Click the play button to hear the podcast or download the file here.

I’ve been working on a little project with my friend Trip. He and I used to collaborate on short films a few years ago, but that’s been pretty hard to do since he moved to Portland, OR six years ago.

Nevertheless, we’ve been wanting to do something creative together again, and we figured, “Podcast. Why the hell not.” So, on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, Trip and I sat down for an hour long Skype session. The result is what you hear today. We call it The Yet To Be Named Podcast.

Think of this as a pilot for a series that’s looking to get picked up. The production is a little rough. The “characters” aren’t fully realized. The show has yet to find its voice.

Please let us know what you think of this pilot episode.