I didn’t make this poster, but I love it.

Coming to Adobe was a dream come true for me. Someone first showed me Photoshop on a Mac SE after hours at the Center for Art and Technology at Carnegie Mellon back in 1989 or 1990. It was captivating to a computer science student with a deep interest in imaging and graphics. I knew that someday I would work there. It wasn’t a direct path, but I did get there eventually.

In my nine years at the company, I have been able to work on some intensely cool projects: Adobe Image Foundation, Pixel Bender, and Revel. Each have been technically challenging, but each have also had an impact for Adobe customers. Solving cool technical problems is fun, but doing it in a way that millions of users can benefit from is massively rewarding. I am grateful that being at Adobe has allowed me to work on such personally and professionally gratifying projects. I am also grateful that I have been able to work with some absolutely stellar teams.

Adobe is the best company that I have ever worked for, but it is time for me to make a change. This will be my last week there.

To all of Adobe’s customers: I hope that my work has helped make the tools you use a little bit better, faster, and more stable. It has been a joy to build stuff for you. Thank you.

Now, I’m looking forward to my next adventure. I will be joining Spotify in Stockholm as Director of Engineering in a few weeks.

This is my new dream, and I am incredibly excited about it. The people that I have met at Spotify are intelligent, creative and passionate. They are working to change the world; making available all the music in the world to anyone, while making sure that the people who create the music that we love can do it as a profession. This has been my mission multiple times in the past, in the days before I came to Adobe. I’m excited to pick up that banner once again and do my best to help it become a reality.

Things are gonna get interesting, stay tuned.

Filet of Feedback at the Birmingham Lofts, August 1991 from Kevin Goldsmith on Vimeo.

Filet of Feedback at the Beehive, March 13, 1992 from Kevin Goldsmith on Vimeo.

Filet of Feedback performing at the Beehive in Pittsburgh, PA on March 13th of 1992. FoF was opening for Illusion of Safety with Grae Com. For this performance, FoF was joined by the Guitar Army.

The biggest part of paying technical debt is letting the dev team know that they are empowered to fix things and that they can take the time to do things right. Good developers hate looking at crappy code, their first response is always to fix it. If they don’t believe that they can (and are expected to), they will just hack around bad code with more bad code.

7:1 from Kevin Goldsmith on Vimeo.

A seven-mile, 60-second journey through early the early 1990s industrial wasteland areas of Pittsburgh with an original soundtrack blatantly ripped off from Shadowy Men From a Shadowy Planet. A student film for a class at Carnegie-Mellon University. Digitized from a 2nd generation VHS copy. Pardon (or embrace) the Lo-fi.

Intonarumori Performing Constant Bit Select of a Vector Net Live – 1991 from Kevin Goldsmith on Vimeo.

This was the performance of the track "Constant Bit Select of a Vector Net" whose recording was later released on the Intonarumori album Sound Collages 1991-1994 (Unit Circle Rekkids). This was recorded as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Electronic and Computer Music Concert Series. Regrettably, the video recording starts mid-way through the piece. For more information on the album see: http://unitcircle.com/rekkids/releases/tUC018/ for more information on Intonarumori see: http://www.intonarumori.com/

Cupcake Ipsum generates much better Lorem Ipsum text that your run-of-the-mill tools, like:
Cupcake ipsum dolor sit amet. Toffee I love cake I love gummi bears cotton candy I love cookie. Wafer dragée lemon drops jelly-o jelly I love lollipop.
Fruitcake lollipop sweet roll muffin caramels. Cake I love macaroon biscuit candy canes dessert pie. Sweet apple pie lollipop jelly beans cheesecake gummies biscuit. Wypas I love croissant macaroon halvah.
Sweet roll tart toffee lemon drops candy canes soufflé bonbon. Ice cream tart cupcake I love icing tootsie roll jelly. Soufflé biscuit topping topping caramels pudding sugar plum cheesecake.
Halvah ice cream macaroon lollipop donut. Dessert gingerbread toffee gummies I love gingerbread applicake. Icing marshmallow cupcake.
Topping jelly beans fruitcake tootsie roll. Faworki soufflé chocolate cake. Dessert sesame snaps biscuit tiramisu cookie I love sesame snaps.

Placehold.it is where placekitten.com got their idea, it is also useful, but not quite as fun

(via Chuck Rose)

[Update 2/29/12]
Adding also PLACESHEEN.COM, yow!

(via Bob Archer)

We were there relatively early, on a Saturday night. The bar was already pretty full, though the dining area was empty. The space is pretty cavernous and as it continued to fill, the noise levels increased accordingly. The atmosphere is semi-train station inspired including an old style rotating board listing the most recent wine purchases. That sign is a feature that they are proud of, but it is mostly annoying. It is loud and they like to feature very expensive bottles that have been purchased. Sort of the equivalent of being allowed to drive your Maserati to your table, too ostentatious for my taste. Similarly, the seating is arranged to make sure the diners can see and be seen. Sitting at a table in the center of the room, I felt much too much on display. It was not comfortable.

The servers and wait staff were excellent: friendly, helpful, and courteous.

The menu is small, not tiny, but you may want to make sure there are options for everyone in your party. I had a couple tough decisions to make since there were multiple things I wanted, but my wife ended up ordering multiple appetizers and sides to make her meal.

I ordered their take on an Old Fashioned for my pre-dinner libation. Not my usual cocktail. This was easily the best version I’ve had. I would definitely order that again.

I ended up doing their pre fixe menu since everything I wanted from the main menu was represented there. Our first course: cauliflower velouté for me and beet salad for my wife were both very good. For my main, I had the Lamb Shank cassoulet which was also very good. My wife had the goat cheese toasts and french fries. The goat cheese toast was ok, if not anything special. The fries were inedible, drowning in salt. We ended up sending back the fries, basically uneaten. Here was one break in their staffing. When the person clearing the table (not the waitress) asked if we were enjoying the fries, as they were the only think uneaten on the table, we replied “no.” That never made it back to our waitress, so we were not offered an alternative.

For desert, my wife opted for the Petit Fours, while I got the Sticky Toffee Pudding. The Petit Fours were horrible. Really bad. We sent them back completely uneaten. The Sticky Toffee Pudding was middling at best, mediocre.

To the wait staff and restaurant’s credit, they didn’t charge us for the things we did not eat, but even so, this was a fairly pricey meal.

All-in-all, RN74 was an uneven experience. The highs were high and the lows were low, but the highs were not transcendent enough to justify their price tag or outweigh the lows. Will we return? Unlikely. Maybe for a drink in the bar. There are enough good options in the neighborhood in and below the price range of RN74 with better atmosphere. So, we will probably not get around to returning.

If you want to check it out yourself: get a booth, not a table; stay off the sides of the menu; and have desert somewhere else.

The answer is, of course, to stop buying new books until I make up some lost ground in my to read pile and just get over my fetishizing of
the books I’ve already read. Like any pack rat will tell you, that is pretty tough to do.

A more modern answer is to switch to buying e-books. This won’t fix my deepening pile of To-Read things (in fact it might make it worse because I won’t be able to see my physical pile of books to read), but it would address the clutter.

I love the concept of e-books. There are a lot of books that I buy that I won’t buy as e-books, like art monographs, but mostly I read non-fiction. For the majority of the books I read, the physical object really isn’t doing anything special for conveying the ideas. Most of the stuff I read would come across just fine on an electronic reader. To this end, I did get one a couple years ago. However, when I started to look into buying e-books, I was pretty disappointed.

I have a rule about DRM. I won’t buy any digital item with DRM. I’ve been burned several times over the years with vendors sunsetting their DRM schemes leaving their customers with a lot of bits they paid for but cannot access. DRM-free versions of e-books absolutely exist, but with such a high premium that they are often much more expensive than their physical counterparts. Even the DRM’d e-books are often as or more expensive than their physical versions, especially if they have already been out for a few years. So with the exception of a few O’Reilly titles, I basically haven’t purchased any e-books and have mostly just used my e-reader to read academic papers or other PDFs.

Last year, I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner to help me address the piles of papers cluttering my desk, file cabinet and boxes in the garage. This was the answer to my pack-rat ways. It allowed me to have digital, searchable, copies of every piece of paper I ever wanted without having to actually keep the physical piece of paper. As I said, it also meant that I have a searchable archive, thanks to DRM. I’ve slowly been working my way through all my clutter, one file folder and one box at a time and it feels liberating. I’m finally clearing out magazines I’ve saved for 10 years to read one article and ridiculous crap like that. My recycle bin is always full.

Today, I finished reading Daniel Pink’s Drive. I read most of it a while ago, but it was sitting on my nightstand for a year or so while I read other books until I got around finishing it. I won’t review it here, other than to say that it was a pretty good book, but if you watch this video and understand the concept, you really have no need to buy it. This was a book that I thought was pretty good, but it didn’t say anything to me that I didn’t already know. What I should have immediately done was put it in a box to donate to a library, or given it to a friend, or a clueless boss, or something. Instead, I went to find a place for it on one of my overwhelmed shelves.

Then I spied my scanner.

I realized that this physical book didn’t have anything special about it. It came from a computer file, was printed on cheap paper and was actually the worst manifestation of the ideas from a standpoint of me being able to reference it again. If there was something I remembered from this book that I wanted to look up: I’d need to remember that it came from this book instead of from another one, then I’d need to remember where I put the book (home, work, a box in the garage), and then I’d need to actually find the section of the book that I was looking for. These days, I probably wouldn’t get past step one. I’d google for my answer and then never go to step two.

I decided to see how hard it would be to turn my physical book into an e-book for future reference. It was actually really easy. The whole process took less than twenty minutes.

First I got the tools…

Tools of (Creative) Destruction

Here we go

faster progress than I expected

almost done

<

Ready for scanning

The scansnap does its job

scanning...

into the recycling bin

in Acrobat

Live in iBooks

reading in iBooks

The nice thing is that I could also read it on pretty much any e-reader, computer, or mobile device with a screen. That is the genius of open standards and DRM-free files. Even if some day the PDF format dies, I know that I’ll be able to take my book to whatever the next format or reading device is. Just like a real book.