One might wonder what I’m doing with all the random firings of neurons when I’m not blogging. Which is, as Joaquin will remind me, all the funkin’ time.

Well, I twit. I tweet. I flitter and twitter. I’d like to offer a selection of recent tweets, in the style of Mr. Yeti.

• And I’ve officially given notice at NeonGecko. 05:08 PM August 13, 2008
• Makes sense that utilikilt guy on bus also has a Bic lighter on a retractable cord attached to belt loop = stylish. 08:42 AM August 14, 2008
• Home on bus with G. Love to keep me cool. Guess what? It’s not working. Ack, sweat. 04:20 PM August 15, 2008
• I don’t want to start a Bob Dylan cover band so much as I want to start a covered by Bob Dylan band. 10:01 PM August 17, 2008
• Totally in love with waitress at lunch. We’ll see how I feel when she delivers my BLT. 12:27 PM August 19, 2008
• This day is going to be a doozy. Doozie? Jacuzzi? Anyway, it’s going to be rough. 08:35 AM August 20, 2008
• Fingers smell like garlic from cooking dinner. Brain smells likes burning from cooking hate. THE FUTURE SMELLS LIKE WATERMELON. 11:15 PM August 20, 2008

1. Represented Liechtenstein at the Golden Garden Fauxlympics in matching red shorts, blue shirts and gold headbands (see flag). Our team—Alex, Sarah, Charlie and I—earned the silver medal, losing to Vatican City 71 – 72. I’m not sure I trust the judges’ math and objectivity. Just kidding, Lilli and Amanda—thanks for putting together this event!
2. Met up with a raucous crew of Seattle gentleman in Ballard to celebrate Sam Adams’ passing out of bachelorhood. Drinks were consumed and, at some point, I convinced some girls at the Matador to sing happy birthday to Mickey. The night ended a bit oddly with a progression of short trips: Ballard to Dick’s with Ladd and passengers, Dick’s to Mickey’s nonexistent car, Mickey’s nonexistent car to Krump and Prude’s via taxi, and, finally, K&P’s to home via taxi again.
3. Spent Saturday afternoon with Zak and his friend Max, in town from Boston, tossing and swimming at Magnuson and eating ice cream at Molly Moon’s. The lake water felt like heaven.
4. Ate dinner at Maneki with Zucker and his friends Anna and Rif, also in town from Boston. The food was fantastic and I particularly enjoyed the octopus doughnut holes and miso black collar cod.
5. Followed Maneki dinner with a trip into White Center to try Full Tilt Ice Cream. I’m not going to link to it BECAUSE I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD GO THERE. The ice cream was passable but not exceptional and their selection of pinball machines was very disappointing. Also, playing pinball while eating ice cream, how does that work? Did I mention that in the middle of our pinball game a (crappy) high school rock band started playing unbearably loudly? Right. Not going back.
6. Returned home with Zucker to find Sarah entertaining Faye’s bachelorette party—Schuyler, Neva, Claire, Kay and Sarah—drinking champagne, eating fine cheese and watching Olympics. Dave and I were happy to crash and gladly accepted the invitation to join them for dancing. The War Room had a line but Neighbors was great. This whole night, it was great.
7. Awoke late and a bit groggy Sunday morning to head to brunch with Matt, Liz, Darcy and Jacob at Pete’s Egg Nest, a family-owned Greek joint in Greenwood. The food was solid, and it was good to see friends. I like friends.
8. Walked home, up the hill from Matt and Liz’s apartment, with a stop at the farmers’ market to buy broccoli, corn and beets. I need to eat at home more frequently, and I need to eat more vegetables. I found Sarah at our place, relaxing and watching the Olympics. I happily joined, passing in and out of consciousness over the lazy afternoon.
9. Joined Sarah and Charlie at his place for gin and tonic, white wine, roast chicken with potatoes, salad, and peach tart. Delicious! I also supplied, as appetizer, crackers with cream cheese and pepper jelly, which is a good way for three people to eat a block of Philly in about 12 seconds. We amused ourselves with Sopranos and by singing songs in the style and voice of Bob Dylan.
10. Thought a bunch about if and, if so, how I might be screwing up my life. I’m probably not…
11. And then I went to bed.

So, yeah, I’m a bit tired this week.

I like to think I’m in fairly good touch with certain regions of the blogosphere—most notably, I’d say, the web design community. By “in touch” I mean reading far too much and not contributing anything significant. Anyway, I try to share some of the more interesting websites I encounter or frequent and I will do so today within the theme of music-focused sites. And, no, I’m not going to tell you about this AMAZING! NEW! SITE I FOUND! called Rake or Shovel or something.

First up is ISO50, the online home of DJ and artist Scott Hansen and his friends. His visual work is quite nice, I think, and he seems relatively knowledgeable in music. He and the other contributing authors offer regular selections of quality tunes under the Music category—good examples are a short list of the best indie hip hop producers or four favorite sensitive electronica tracks. Oh, and I enjoy their attention to the design of album covers.

My next offering is a much-lauded blog, Just Watch the Sky. The author—I’m not sure who he or she is—presents a song accompanied by beautifully rendered typography of a notable sequence of the song’s lyrics. The color palettes are spot on and the presentation always balances subtlety and power. I don’t like all of the songs but I cannot stop myself from clicking through all the posts and having a listen. I particularly like the presentation for Now I want to give away, I want to hurry home to you, and The empty movements that once were so inspired. Maybe this was not so much about music as it was typography. Shocking.

And lastly, I’d like to share OMG Posters, a website which is only tenuously having to do with music. The author posts daily updates on art prints, posters, toys and the like, including interviews with noted poster artists / designers. The aforementioned tenuous connection is that many of the posters featured are for musicians, bands and concerts. Regardless, I enjoy the site as a source of inspiration and artistic stimuli.

So there you go. Anything good to share with me?

Oh, bonus: you can check out my listening habits via carlosdavis on last.fm. Here’s a teaser: all I listen to are Girl Talk and Rilo Kiley.

I find grammar, punctuation, semantics, etc. to be quite interesting and tend to obsess over certain rules or peculiarities. In addition to my constant battle against incorrectly dangling prepositions, I am currently focused on each versus both, using ellipses (…) instead of three periods (…) and proper choice of hyphens and dashes.

I mention this interest because of a short but informative article on the capitalization of the word “I”:

i suggest that You try, as an experiment, to capitalize those whom You address while leaving yourselves in the lowercase. It may be a humbling experience. It was for me.

Incidentally, does anyone understand the header graphic for the article?

I actually took my camera out of its case on Sunday at Kleinman—not to take photographs of Ultimate, mind you, but rather to snap a bunch of portraits of our squad that weekend. I think I’ll be sticking to such shots for as long as I’m only packing my 50mm 1.8 portrait lens. In truth, I get a bit overwhelmed when I try to shoot with wider glass; I like the enforced composition limits with a 50mm.

Check out Shadrach at Kleinman Eruption 2008.

Dave and I headed to Portland Friday morning to meet Whit and Claire for a day of fun and then reunite with Shadrach for Kleinman Eruption, an annual mixed tournament.

Cheer: Lunch at Pok Pok offered distinctive and delicious Thai. I quite enjoyed my tamarind whiskey sour, the roasted game hen and the desserts—we sampled every single one on their menu. I recommend it highly.

Cheer: The Fisher have a beautiful home and offer fantastic hospitality. Add to this hospitality a brand new Wii, Francis and company’s cooking (the polenta, oh my god, the polenta), and Abby Armstrong’s birthday and we had a wonderful evening.

Cheer: Lilli and Krump came through in the pinch to increase our number of ladies from five to seven.

Jeer: I had quite a few execution errors and some uncharacteristic drops all day Saturday. All in all, I was feeling out of sorts and disconnected from the team—I blame our time off from practice in July and general discombobulation in my life.

Cheer: Despite any lack on my part, our team came away from with a three and one record on Saturday, only falling to the stacked Montana–Portland team who eventually won the tournament.

Jeer: I turned my left ankle quite badly during our last game on Saturday and sat out the remainder. Booo.

Cheer: The hot tub at our Best Western was the size of a normal pool shallow end. So good.

Cheer: Dessert and coffee at Pix Patisserie before the party. Krump and I shared the Queen of Sheba truffle cake, warmed up and with mocha ice cream, and the Shazam! concoction.

Jeer: On Deck, the sports bar hosting the tournament party, could not decide if it wanted to be in Los Angeles or Las Vegas. In other words, it did not belong in Portland and filled with Ultimate players.

Cheer: the looks on the faces of the excessively made-up women waiting in line as our Shadrach crew skipped said line. VIP, dude. Also, we still rocked the party.

Jeer: Shadrach came out sleepy and unmotivated Sunday morning to lose our quarterfinal against crosstown rivals Moonshine. This loss was perhaps our first ever to them? They played great and we did not. At least we have some angry motivation now.

Jeer: Our consolation opponents, Thompson High JV, left after they lost in the quarterfinals and we didn’t even have a second game on Sunday.

Cheer: Dave and I hit up King Burrito for lunch, per the recommendation of a nice bearded fellow from Breaker’s Mark. $5 for a fantastic burrito and horchata? Yes, very yes.

Cheer: I had a great weekend with old Claremont friends, our beautiful Shadrach crew, and all the Ultimate acquaintances I’ve collected over the years. Hooray for friends.

My next two stops are the work week and then the final two days of WUGC 2008 in Vancouver. I’ll let you know how each go.

As previously promised while discussing the seven-year birthday of drewd, I have been working on a present for my website (and for you). You should be looking at that present now—I designed a new WordPress theme for my site. Huzzah!

I am proud of this theme for a number of reasons. The first reason is that I think the site looks great. My typographic skill and intuition has been increasing for some time and I am quite pleased with the site’s readability. I am using nothing but Helvetica (or, ew, Arial) and color is minimal. The information organization does the majority of the work in directing the user, as it should.

I might still add a few typeface flourishes to certain elements. All-uppercase words look particularly nice in Georgia, though I suppose I lose that quality on Windows. Ew, again.

The next point of pride is of a more technical bent. My CSS file for the theme is particularly simple and bare. I feel WordPress themes have a tendency to be overly complex and I wanted to avoid this pitfall, especially in the context of producing with which I can easily work in the future. Furthermore, I do not feel I sacrificed design quality or site functionality at all by taking a simplified approach to the theme.

The final matter with which I am happy is that I completed the theme. Every bit of it is done; nothing is broken. (If something is broken, please leave a comment.) Despite the completed nature of the theme, I feel that I have built in the possibility for future customization and changes without the need for a complete overhaul.

Well, okay, I admit that there are few pieces I need to add but none of them are vital to the site’s function, to your reading my writing and generally stalking me.

I hope you enjoy the new look of drewd—please leave any comments you have so that I might improve my craft.

Cheers!