It seems almost every design position I’ve held sooner-or-later devolves into a daily routine of mere production. I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of working in a think tank — brainstorming, concepting, researching, designing, developing and directing all-the-live-long-day. In terms of my career, this mythic employ must be my Eden, my Elysian Fields, my Shangri-la, my Nirvana. I wonder: does the person find the think tank, or does the think tank find the person?

Sometimes the five star rating in iTunes doesn’t adequately describe the sheer musical majesty of a song. I propose a ‘Supergiant’ or ‘Supernova’ rating for such übertunes.

In my experience, the overt nature of the currently in-vogue, all-in-one social network sites (Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Tribe.net and on and on) leaves me cold. It feels unnatural to explicitly post an encompassing biography, list likes and dislikes, declare who is a friend (and by omission who is not), currently listening/watching/reading and so on. I prefer implicit tools such as Audioscrobbler, Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, All Consuming, Kinja, Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) and others which track and analyze their respective personal digital details. A site which could aggregate disparate feeds from such sites into a dynamic, amalgam personal media cloud would be (if only for me), “the way of the future… way of the future… the way of the future…“

I enjoyed seeing Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith last night. I’d say it’s by far the best of the recent ‘prequels’ trilogy. Some thoughts: Episodes I-III don’t stand-up on their own without the original Episodes IV-VI; so many of the ‘ah-ha!’ moments aren’t significant out of that context. I doubt much more than a rough outline of the ‘prequels’ trilogy was actually written back at the time of the original trilogy, despite what George Lucas claims. Revenge of the Sith felt like a series of short expository scenes connecting impressive fighting and battle scenes. As Steven Johnson might say, there were a lot of flashing arrows to go around. So much of the back story had to be packed into this movie, making it feel refreshingly dense. I found Sith to be an amazing visual spectacle with much of the acting stiff and perfuctory. Lucas doesn’t seem to mind sacrificing character development in favor of building his mythology through a parade of commanding images and awesome sound. I think people find the original trilogy endearing because of its likable characters, though. Surely, someone could have come-up with more than the few basic camera movements in Sith; each moving-crane-shot-of-a-majestic-CGI-panorama seemed the same. I was disappointed at how Padme’s original fighting spirit had faded into confused helplessness; she was just there to be fought-over and die-on-cue after having twins, it seems. Obi-Wan was still the most appealing character to me and he always seems to take care of himself (though his saying “younglings” made me snicker). Bothered by Yoda’s unfailingly backwards diction, I was — though he’s still my favorite. CGI character. Evahr. I found the rebuilt Darth Vader screaming “No!” near the end to be just plain anticlimactic. Over all, I’d say Revenge of the Sith was an enjoyable and worthwhile movie. The End.

What’s the term for things not recent enough to call ‘new-school’ but not long enough ago to qualify as ‘old-school’? Why, ‘middle-school’, of course!