Kelly Smith | Made in Seattle

Live in Seattle with rain and snow but still want killer performance AND space? The new S8 (see bottom of page) must be one of the meanest, prettiest cars to roll down the street. Amazing.

Most people know that Seattle is near the San Juan Islands. For those who don’t know, the San Juan Islands are located in the northern reaches of Puget Sound, some 80 miles north of Seattle in the northwesternmost corner of the state of Washington. There are approximately 172 islands in the group, depending on how you count them. One of the very small ones goes by the name Crane Island and is the vacation home of Tom Hughes. Each year, a big group of friends descend on the island for a weekend of fun, drink and relaxation. Tom’s newest addition is the Tiki Bar. The photos tell it all. Thanks to Tom and Jessica for hosting and to the crew for being a blast to hang out with.

The pics on my site are here.

You can view slightly larger sizes on Flickr here.

The whole group photo is here.

Want to view the REALLY BIG (5MB) high resolution group image separately? You can do that here.

Learn what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. The US government has put together some handy illustrations for that time when the terror alert status gets elevated to red.

This is a great list of marketing lies that is worth reading. In fact, the original “lie series” over at guy kawasaki is a good read too.

I love lists like this.

Each year, a group of friends heads to little Crane Island in the San Juans to hang out. Crane is one of those many little tiny islands out there and has but a few homes. We’ll take lots of pictures though I suspect most of them will show us with a cocktail in our [...]

When I first started out in tech, I was basically in sales. Then I moved to business development. Then product marketing. These days, I’ve gotten a bit closer to design and product management/development. Over the years, I’ve worked directly with many large media and infrastructure companies in a direct selling mode. This is the [...]

Everyone once in awhile you trip over a site that you think is really inspired. The guys who do this work over at Semplice Lab are pretty special. Great stuff.

I don’t generally give stock advice because I don’t believe anyone can predict the stock market. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a few predictions which I’m backing by buying the two stocks I mention here. The first is RealNetworks. Yep, my former employer. Now, this isn’t the good ole days when the stock was in the hundreds but the company has a war chest full of cash and the advertising market for products like Rhapsody is very strong. Also, Rob Glaser was always smart but now he’s battle tested. He’s older and wiser. The market has acted a bit flaky over the last week but RNWK has looked steady. I’m thinking RNWK will announce good financial results and will be using all that money for something interesting. Around $10 it’s a buy. Heck, I even told my mother-in-law to buy some. Now that’s going out on a limb!

The other one is Adobe. When Adobe bought Macromedia I told anyone who would listen that they should buy the stock for one simple reason: monopoly. Adobe owns desktop publishing and the stock has only gone (way) up since the Macromedia purchase. In the last few days, the stock has taken a bit of a hit because they announced that quarterly results were on the low end of expectations. But, the company still owns desktop publishing. And, flash video is getting more pervasive. This company is here to stay. Buy it while its down.

I was browsing Chad Edge’s site and read that the fine Coudal folks released an iteration of their JewelBox line. The JewelBoxing Studio really is one of those simple, but brilliant ideas. My guess is that they are going to sell a lot of these. As an aside, I’ve got the original Jewelboxing case system and have used it on various work projects. Also very handy if you don’t think you’re ready to step up to the full enchilada.

A good part of each day has me working on a little project called ImageKind that intends to provide a community for converting digital imagery into actual wall art. Doing this project has revealed a lesson that I won’t repeat again. It’s the necessity for wireframing.
Most projects I’ve been involved in had written [...]