Savannah and Startup?

Highlights in February:

Interaction Design Association conference in Savannah, Georgia. Nice conference, particularly a talk by Nathan Shedroff on, among other things, designing for meaning (PDF here). Savannah itself is really lovely. I'd seen lots of pictures of oak trees with hanging Spanish moss, and they were there in spades. The thing that really struck me, though, is how lovely it is to have a park every few blocks, and how nice it is that the parks are the same size and similar, but enough different to be able to tell them apart -- lovely variations on a lovely theme. I don't recall ever being in a city with so many parks so close together, but the parks themselves reminded me of my favorite in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Summer Garden.

I also started work on job hunting and thanks to the Boston Globe found the company I'd been hoping to find for years (Global Relief Technologies in Portsmouth, N.H.). As I read about what they were doing and thought about the problems they were trying to solve, I realized that there's another set of approaches to solving the problems of understanding the situation in an emergency, so I've started to work seriously on a start-up myself. I've been reading tons of FEMA documents (fortunately, a little less dry than I feared, but more filled with TLAs than I'd prepared for), and tracking down interesting research projects (like Photosynth) and patents. It's exciting!

Along with the startup work I've been going to a bunch of professional meetings and talks for interaction designers, entrepreneurs, etc. Good stuff -- and there's lots of it around Boston. I could probably go to events five nights a week if I could stomach it. One to three a week has been more like it, though.

With all this activity in the evenings, I'm disappointed I won't actually be able to sing with the chorus this concert series. It'll be good, though, even if I won't be on stage with them.

Also in February I got to achieve something I like to practice: having fewer keys. I returned the keys from my old place and picked up the last of my stuff, and now I just have three keys (house, car, bike) and a few loyalty cards (cut down to be smaller). I like having a lighter key ring.

I've also been enjoying the BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects. Art and history and economics and anthropology and lots of other stuff talked about in the context of objects in the British Museum's collection. I recommend it! (I don't recommend, and am exasperated by their 3D object explorer, though. Arg.)

Made it to a few shows and concerts (Mark Morris was the highlight), a friend's Non-Valentine Party (on the 13th, geared toward single folks to just hang out together), reading and the usual stuff.

This month I'm looking forward to making progress on (or, if I find a good reason, stopping work on) the startup, a bachelor party around Phoenix, a silent meditation retreat, Varla Jean Merman and the Phantom of the Oprah, and getting back to rowing on the water. Yay!

Be well.