Getting Out of Ruts

We rented out our house when we went on sabbatical for the school year 2003-2004. We stuck all the extra stuff (including what the kids left when they moved out) into a downstairs room that was not rented out. After we got back, the room stayed a storage room and at one point looked like this.



While I have seen most of the floor since then, the room has basically been a big closet. Things have flowed to various recycling options, but the room is still a mess. So I decided to look on the web for ideas of what to do with the room. I tried out "Designing a Japanese style workspace." So far I haven't found what I was looking for, but I realized that not only have we gotten into a rut in terms of our house decor, but I've gotten into a internet rut trying to keep up with the blogs I track. There's all this other incredible stuff out there. Here are just a few interesting things from a couple of sites I visited.

This comes from stashpocket





And this:



From Stashpocket I took a link turn to Flight405 And from there to his Vimeo page where I found this:



Tendrils continued from flight404 on Vimeo.

How did he do that? Well I had to go to Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Processing is free to download and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Please help to release the next version!

Keeping up with Alaskan politics is something I guess all Alaskans should do, but there are all sorts of people out there doing neat things and they are just a couple of google searches away. So, while I design a new place to work downstairs, I'm going to have to go exploring to the edges of the internet universe regularly too. Getting out of ruts is good to do.