When I was in college, I had a creative writing class.  It was a small class, less than 20 of us, and we met in one of the cool nationality rooms at Pitt.  The professor’s last name was Hall, and I enjoyed her and the class tremendously.  I don’t claim to have had a special connection with her, but I can tell you that she made me feel special.  She always had not only good things to say about my writing, but she had encouraging things to say.

Sure, maybe that was just her style, and she told everyone that they should submit writing to contests.  Maybe she suggested everyone contact the local radio station, WYEP, to fill a spot reading their poetry.  All I know is that she gave me confidence in my work to do those things because she convinced me she believed in me, so why shouldn’t I believe in myself?  One thing stands out though.  When she opened up a Red Rose Tea box, and picked out the glazed ceramic animal figures, I doubt she thought of every student she had.  As she picked up a peregrine falcon piece, she remembered a short story I wrote that included the falcons.  She gave me that figurine at the end of the semester and I still have it and remember what it symbolizes.  It might have been something simple and small to her, but beyond the fact that I already enjoyed collecting the figures, I was filled with joy to be receiving something back.  She didn’t just read my short story, she remembered it enough to be inspired.  THAT is what I would live for as a writer.  Affecting people by simply expressing my thoughts would fill me with such life.

I attribute that class to a lot of my desire to write, or even blog at all.  I never won any of those contests.  WYEP said they wanted established poets who were published.  For some reason though, none of that felt like rejection.  It felt like satisfaction.  Sometimes, I yearn for that unique feeling.  To be so filled with joy, that rejection rings in a sense of completion rather than discouragement.

I stumbled on Austin Kleon’s list here.  I’ll break down his list, and add in my own advice and support for each of them.  After all, all advice is autobiographical and all I’m doing is stealing like an artist.  A lot of these are already similar to a Hall’s Rule of Social Order, and some others will be soon.

1. Steal like an artist.

   It’s kind of the art of progress.  You pay tribute to the original idea or author of the work, in the form of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, but then you also add your person style to it.  As in Ecclesiastes 1:9, there is nothing new, everything has already been done.  Maybe if theirs didn’t “take off” yours will.

2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to start making things.

   Sometimes, it’s the journey, not just the destination. Trying new things is how you get to learn about yourself. Look at Seuss’ green eggs and ham. He was so sure he knew himself, but really, he didn’t have a clue. Maybe a bad analogy, heck, all of these could be terrible interpretations of Austin’s list, but who cares? I’m doing something.

3. Write the book you want to read.

   I want to write books. At the moment, I don’t want to read any though, and I think that is what holds me back from making something.

4. Use your hands.

   Sometimes the digital world doesn’t cut it. Go meet people, shake some hands, feel mud, get dirty, experience life instead of just watching it on a screen.

5. Side projects and hobbies are important.

   TRUFE. projects and hobbies are so key to my mental health, it’s not even funny. I need to feel like I’m creating something, expressing myself, like I’m working towards something. Sometimes, it’s the waste of time that is the most important way to spend your time. It’s grounding to realize that you are in control of your time, and ultimately, you need to be happy, not just a to outside forces.

6. The Secret:  Do good work and put it where people can see it.

   Definitely a secret I’m guilty of exploiting. I’ll type up a good email, and send it off to someone to proof-read, just so they can see what I’m doing and how I take care of things. Part of it is ostentatious, but, really, it’s just giving people the opportunity to see truth and know you more.

7. Geography is no longer our master.

   I’ve worked on PHP code with friends from all over the world. I supported the computers of people in Europe from my phone in Pittsburgh. I know more people in Australia, a place I’ve never been, than people 1 block away from me.

8. Be nice.  The world is a small town.

   heh, alright, I’m not very good at this one. It’s still true though. Always be grateful for the things you learn and the people that teach you, because chances are, they still have something to teach you later on, or you’ll need to go back and ask them for a refresher course.

9. Be boring.  It’s the only way to get work done.

   Certainly easy to contradict #5 here. When all your friends go out every night, sure it’s fun, but at the end of the day, you haven’t done anything but hang out with your friends. Sometimes saving your money for investing in something tangible is the greater decision

10. Creativity is subtraction.

    Church. This is my biggest pet peeve with the advent of the youtube sensations. Adding in so many vocal effects, mastering, looping, video editing, all take away from the creativity put in creating the music. The sad thing is, people don’t care.

I realize that I won’t be able to blog frequently on my own LEGO creations, so I’ll showcase the works of other people as well. This one was displayed at Brickfest by Suzanne Rich

Check out this installation art that looks like a giant spider web but it’s made out of packing tape.  You can actually crawl inside it.  We need to get this to the Mattress Factory!!!

www.fastcompany.com/1656197/designers-create-spiderman-worthy-cave-from-packing-tape

This isn’t a How-To jailbreak your iphone.  It’s just some top reasons to jailbreak your iphone, based on my personal experience.  There are a lot of jailbr0ken apps that are used far more than any that I will list, but they’re the reasons why I’m jailbroken. 

Right now I’m on 3.1.2 on my iphone 3G.  Version 3.0 addressed a lot of what OS 2.x lacked, things like landscape keyboard, video recording (on the 3GS), MMS, and copy & paste, and a few others.  There are still a bunch of things that 3.x doesn’t do that the jailbreak community has enabled (reply to SMS messages without leaving your app, tethering, turn by turn directions, google voice, etc). You might even say that the jailbreak community (Shout out to Saurik) even did it first.  It’s hard not to think that Apple wants to offer the features that people are drawn to jailbreak.

There’s a huge library on Cydia of cool apps, like a gameboy and NES emulator, putting your icons in categories/folders, creating blank icons for organizing, or icons that "spring" you to a certain app page.  You can do things like add people to a black list, record your calls, save youtube videos, basically, anything you can think of, someone probably feels the same way, only they have the ability to write an app for it.  If you fancy customization, jailbreaking is worth it.

10.  Unlocking – Don’t wan’t to be on AT&T?  That’s fine.  You can still use your iphone on another provider without the full functionality. 

9.  SSH – This stands for Secure Shell, which can cross the line into geekiness, but basically, you can use your iphone as a big old memory stick.  You are able to copy and manipulate any and all files on the phone.

8.  5 docked items – Why not?  I use my calendar, phone, email, text, and safari all pretty regularly.  Why should I be limited to 4?

7.  Cyntact / ContactFlow – Cyntact takes your existing contact list, and puts the person’s photo (if you have it stored) as an icon next to their name.  ContactFlow takes that one step further, and your contacts are actually stored in a "flipbook" style app, just like you do with albums.  These two apps are certainly dependent on a respectable collection of photos for your contacts, but with googlesync and any of the apps that will sync your contacts with the photos of your facebook friends, it makes it a very pretty addition.

6.  Weathericon – If the calendar icon updates to display the real date…why doesn’t the weather icon update?  Well, now it does.  No more waiting for the weather app to load.

5.  Multiicon Mover -This is one that I’m sure will be implemented in a later Apple firmware.  hold down an icon to get the icons to wiggle like normal, then just tap on the icons that you want to move.  Each tapped icon will then show a little check box letting you know they are selected.  Scroll the page you want them on and press the home button and they’ll all move there.  EASY.  Just as it should be.  No more trying to drag across 4 pages 1 icon at a time.  It’s so simple, it’s genius.

4.  Cycorder - I’ve been able to capture video on my iphone long before Apple released the 3GS, and I can still capture it on my 3G.  Why not use the hardware to it’s full capabilities?

3.  StatusNotifier / Intelliscreen – When you have new mail or a new text message, StatusNotifier will put an icon on your lockscreen or up in your statusbar.  Heck, it’ll throw the weather up there for you too if you like.  Intelliscreen takes it even further and creates all kinds of gagdets / widgets for email, stocks, notes, alerts all displayed on your lockscreen for easy reference without having to unlock and go through all the apps.

2.  SB Settings – A quick swipe of the status bar, and you’ll bring up this cute little menu screen that you can customize to have icons to quickly change brightness, airplane mode, process kill, reboot, and a whole bunch more.  SB Settings is one of the most used apps for anyone who jailbreaks.  You can also hide any icons with this (like stocks.  WTF looks at stocks on their iphone?).  SB Settings has a lot of uses and it’s pretty and convenient to boot.

1. Themes / Lockscreens / Fonts - Here we are.  Numero uno.  CUSTOMIZATION, PLEASE.  I don’t want a black background and boring or ugly icons.  There are THOUSANDS of themes to pick from, and a lot of tools to create your own.  It’s so much more aesthetically pleasing to have icons that look like they go together.  I chose ones that match my case; a light blue.  I don’t want a boring old swipe to unlock, I want a pac-man character that chases a ghost, or mock fingerprint scanner that looks legit.  Change the fonts around, and now you got something classy and fun.  No more instutionalized experiences!  

I think that’s it.  If you have any questions, I’m glad to help.  Here are some cool links to check out:

http://cydia.saurik.com/

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailbreak_%28iPhone_OS%29

www.engadgetmobile.com/category/os-x/

Had a dream about a video game last night.  It was a free roam world, 3rd person, kind of like the game Black & White.  All the characters were animals and you had to interact with them to learn "concepts" like trading, communication, hiring, etc to get things done.  The point was just to create a community that worked together and you got to chose how they worked together, whether through strict government policies, violence, friendly favors, etc.  It was a very cartoonish and humorous game.  The animals were very personified.

So that was the extent of the dream, and then I started thinking about this more and fleshing it out.  As far as names for the game, the first thought was "Orgz" since it’s catchy and could be short for ‘organization" or "organisms".  My next thought was for a sub-title, which was something like "All animals are created equal.  some are just more equal than others."  Which is an obvious lending from the book Animal Farm  by George Orwell.  Then, you’d have to consider the legal ramifications, but it would be a great opportunity to base the game on the book and just call it Animal Farm.  You could use all kind of quotes from the book like "2 legs are better than 4".

You could pick from a few animals as your character, each with their own personalities and benefits:

Duck – Everyone’s friend since they are in the air, water, and on land.  They’re pretty emotionally unstable and irational though.  They also can’t do much hard labor.

Horse – Very stern and a strong laborer.  Things are the way they are because they should be that way.  Not cooperative or open to change or creative inovation.

Dog – Smart and analytical.  Able to organize (herd) everyone to action by motivation (not fear).  Sometimes distracted by leisure instead of work.

So the goal of the game would be to run a farm, but it’s really more of town exchanging goods and services.  Like, the pigs have bacon to trade, you don’t actually kill the pigs for their bacon, you talk with them and work out something in exchange, like X amount of mud for Y amount of bacon.  Keep the pigs happy, and they’ll give you more bacon.  you could even get a little more complex about designing the layout of the farm.  Keep the cats away from the muddy pigs so they’ll chase the mice out of the barn.  A sense of humor will determine the success of the game, so you have to put in a lot of witty things like being able to open a petting zoo for money, but none of the animals like being extorted like that (form of prostitution).  Or humans coming in and offering to outsource your cow production items like milking, meat packing, etc.  Cows would be really stupid in the game.  Really stupid.

So I activated a feature of the blog for smart phone browsing.  It’s an extremely limited version of the site that only has the last 10 or so posts, but it’s only text based so you can read it on mobile devices easily.  I’ll probably create a nifty URL like http://joshuadhall.com/mobile or /iphone in a few minutes to point to it, but you can access it from the ‘mobile browsing’ listing in the menu.

another addition along those same lines is an icon for the iphone.  if you add the link to your home on your iphone, you’ll get a nice icon.  The screen shot is below.

As we reach the end of 2007, I’m going to cross that line into the cliche "here are the highlights of 2007 and here’s what I’d like to see in 2008" post.  Last year, I called it the year of "new things".  If I were to create a label for this year, I’d consider it a year of traveling.  I went to philly at least twice, crossed the atlantic for the first time to italy with my family and then to london for work, I went to vegas, I went to florida, took trips to cleveland to see rachel, took a trip or two to DC, stopped taking daily drives to work and started walking to work,  and i took a few other road trips as well.  I definitely enjoy traveling, and i definitely consider myself blessed to have the means, time, and friends that make it all possible.

So, I’m graduated with my bachelor degree in professional communicated and information systems from robert morris university…finally.  at least i finished before Keren.  Serah officially made me an uncle by giving birth on the 20th.  and I don’t really have too much to complain about at all.   But, I’ll share with you my new years resolutions and we’ll see how well I do with them.

• Call each sister at least once a month just to talk.
• put at least 100 CDs in the hands of strangers
• Pick up 1 new hobby. (haven’t decided yet…)
• READ ALL THE BOOKS I HAVE BUT HAVE NOT READ
• Compete in an urbanathon or some sort of race.

That’s all i got so far.  Should keep me busy.  I forget if the idea is to make goals specific so you know you reach them or not, or to keep them vague so that you don’t get frustrated and quit…oh well.  I’ll be off to DC this weekend to meet my niece, then back to ring in the new year.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As of today, Pittsburgh is one of 14 cities to be featured in Google street view.  They missed my street, but went down a perpendicular street where you can see my truck parked on the right.   License plate security risk?  It’s a pretty neat function, being able to visualize where you want to go in a foreign city.  Really puts into perspective the depth of "Google Earth" beinga digital copy of the entire planet.  Maybe in a few years we’ll be able to create a 3D virtual world.

I can’t remember the last time i had a shamrock shake.  or anything from mcdonald’s for that fact.  call it nostalgia, call it curiousity, call it whatever, the fact remains, i want an effing shamrock shake, and i’m not getting satisfaction.  Every year when mcdonald’s offers the shake, i hear someone talk about it, and it gets me slowly thinking about going and getting one, but i never do, and i forget about it.  One of my friends started a group on facebook related to loving this time of year because of the shamrock shake, and this time it really struck a note in me to go friggin try one.  I was out with friends last wednesday and i had mentioned the idea of stopping by the drive thru for some, and they were half interested at least, but it didnt pan out.  So sunday, the day after St. Patrick’s day, I drive by a mcdonalds, get inspired, pull up to the drive thru, say, "can i have a medium shamrock please?" and i feel such a sense of exuberance, finally, i’m going to do it.  Then the voice behind the speaker retorts, "sorry, we’re all out of shamrock shake."  I was thrown for a second on his grammatical structuring of "shake" compared to "shakes", but I  was not deterred from my mission to acquire a shamrock shake.  Being the cartographer that I am, I know that there’s another mickey D’s about 2 miles down the road.  I engage in my second pursuit for this green delicacy.  I’m beginning to think i’m on to their marketing scheme, create a low supply, causing "buzz" publicity.  It’s no a new strategy; we’ve seen it before.  So I pull up to the second distributor of this irish themed delight, and inquire on the availabilty of said pleasure.  Again, i reach an impasse.  They are all out of shamrock shakes.  This time, i’m a little stunned.  I panic for a plan C.  I was not prepared for this disappointment.  There is yet another McDonald’s about 5 miles away…it’s out of my way…but maybe….maybe they have a bountiful supply of the verde substance that i crave.  I check the clock.  Time is of the essence, and if i make the trek, i’ll be late meeting my girlfriend.  And i think it goes without saying, she is worth more than a thousand shamrock shakes.  I shake my fist at the establishment and let out a "Next time! McDonald’s, NEXT TIME!" that even Doctor Claw would envy.  When I meet my girlfriend, i test the waters with hints of going on a shamrock shake expedition, but the interest seems nil.  I drop the issue…for now.

tonight, a surprise attack!  in a knee jerk reaction, almost late for work, i spot a mcdonald’s.  Sharp right into the drive thru lane (the RIGHT drive thru lane i might add, I paused a second to marvel at the existence of 2 lanes.  What innovation!)  I’ve got butterflies, but I don’t let the vixen on the other side of the communicator sense my anticipation.  I gather composure and coyly catechize on their shamrock shake inventory…DRAT!  She must have seen me coming!  surely they’ve had enough time to replenish the stock by now?!  I scoff and drive away in wrecklessness.  Shamrock shakeless wrecklessness…