I was recently included in a book called Cult of Lego. I am honored that my Lego camera continues to resonate with people six years after it made the rounds on the internet. Cult of Lego is a really impressive book, weighing in at almost 300 pages of fascinating photos, amazing projects, and colorful personalities. If you are a Lego fan, I encourage you to pick up the book.

Reading Cult of Lego has got me thinking about why people love Lego so much. What is it that has made Lego more than a kids toy and has elevated it to cult status? I think it boils down to a couple things that are happening in a child’s brain at the age when they discover Lego. Let me explain…

Most of us start building with Lego blocks at a critical point in our childhood development. It is at the age where our imagination is still alive and limitless. Our fantasies are real to us and we spend our days passing back and forth between the “real” world and the imaginary. And this doesn’t feel weird, yet. It is only later that adults convince us that our fantasies are silly, unimportant, or just a waste of time. That tragedy will happen soon enough, but for now, our toys still maintain our full attention. Toys consume our reality and we are happy.

The other thing that is happening in our childhood brain is a huge discovery. We learn that we have an amazing power. We can create things. Anything that we imagine we can build. Space ships, castles, trucks, ships, trains and anything we desire. Toys aren’t just something that we play with, they are something that we create worlds for. And since our imaginary worlds haven’t yet been severed from the physical world, our creations are as real to us as anything else. We really are creating bridges. The race car is real and it was created by you. This isn’t trivial. This is an achievement that will echo into our adulthood. You remember the sense of achievement from your childhood forever. And many of us spend our adult lives trying to recreate that feeling. Is it any wonder that so many engineers, designers, and professional builders still love Lego with the zeal of an 8 year old? I don’t think so.

I have a collection of toys on my desk at work. I am sure it causes some people to roll their eyes or maybe even take my work less seriously. I don’t know. But more than anything these toys are just a reminder to myself that I used to be 8 years old. I had the power to create planes that traveled at light speed. I could engineer a city beneath the ocean. I could create anything that my imagination could think of. I still can. And so can you.

I haven’t made a music post in a while and being that is is about the middle of 2008 I thought I would give you some tracks from my favorite albums of the year so far. Here is a 12 track mix tape that is pretty darn good, if I don’t say so myself…

1. Lose Big, by Eef Barzelay
Mp3: The Girls Don’t Care

2. Fleet Foxes, by Fleet Foxes
Mp3: White Winter Hymnal

3. Vampire Weekend, By Vampire Weekend
Mp3: M79

4. LP3, by Ratatat
Mp3: Schiller

5. In Ghost Colours, by Cut Copy
Mp3: Strangers In the Wind

6. Smilers, by Aimee Mann
Mp3: Freeway

7. Pork and Beans, By Weezer
Mp3: The Greatest man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)

8. Lucky, by Nada Surf
Mp3: Weightless

9. Narrow Doors, by Death Cab for Cutie
Mp3: I Will Possess Your Heart

10. Distortion, by The Magnetic Fields
Mp3: California Girls (Alternate Version)

Bonus Tracks:
Fate, by Dr. Dog
Mp3: The Old Days
(This is a track from their upcoming album that I am really looking forward to.)

Spoon’s Daytrotter Session
Mp3: Peace Like A River (Paul Simon cover)

First of all, I wanted to apologize to anyone who may have been on Adrian3.com yesterday (March 9, 2008). I have been playing with a new redesign and that always causes things to be broken and fixed here and there. I find it easier to just do a redesign and all the troubleshooting that goes with it on the live site. It may break things for a little while, but it saves time and gets my new design up before I tire of it. I still have some bugs and additions that I will implement in the coming days, but it is 90% there.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design. For this one I wanted to let things breathe. Web typography is always a challenge and I feel pretty good about how the type looks on the page. The other thing to notice about the redesign that you will notice is that I added links to the social networks I use. If you are on one of those sites add me as a contact.

A couple notes about content management:
I was seriously looking at alternatives to WordPress for this site’s content management but ultimately decided against it. In my book, WordPress is firmly in the lead in the battle for best blogging platform. Movable Type slipped into second with there latest version (although I still use it for all my other sites) and it is just slow and clunky. It would be nice to learn Drupal for use on more corporate sites and I may take another look at it in the future, but for now I can’t afford the rumored “learning curve” that comes with it. Textpattern looks good, too, and I will test that one eventually. I also looked at Radiant and Mephisto because they run on Ruby on Rails. I have been teaching myself the basics of Rails and it seemed like a blog would be a good place to start improving my skills. While I was right about it being a good way to learn, it wasn’t the best way for me to run a blog. I liked the simplicity of Radiant’s interface. Mephisto is maybe a little better for blogs. Unfortunately, it took too much work to setup a server with Rails and all the hassle of installing them was too much. Once you finally get them installed they are still a little underdeveloped and lacking the database of user contributed development. WordPress and MT have been hacked and tweaked by their community of users so much that you can pretty much do anything you want with them. Maybe Radiant or Mephisto will get to that same point, but in the meantime you need to be a Rails whiz to customize it. For use on corporate sites I don’t see the initial setup time being worth the hassle. You can have WordPress running in under half an hour without any heavy lifting. I don’t usually have the luxury of a development team so the simpler the better.

My computer at work crashed last week. Thankfully, other than half a day of work, I didn’t lose anything. I was able to do an “archive and install” to get my operating system back up and running and you can only imagine how glad I was to see my cluttered desktop appear on screen.

The worst part of the computer crash was that it really screwed up my Adobe products. Just when I thought I had recovered everything I opened up InDesign only to be greeted with a “Licensing for this product has catastrophically failed.” I love that “catastrophically” part. The other Adobe products just said “Failed” but InDesign has to be the drama queen. I figured that I could simply reinstall the Creative Suite and get back to work. I got the same error. After three calls to Adobe’s tech support I was able to clean all the licensing junk off my G5 so that I could get CS3 reinstalled. The support people were nice and spoke good English and they knew what they were doing. The problem is it never should have happened in the first place. Why was the licensing so deeply embedded in my machine that it couldn’t be easily removed or overwritten? The techs told me this happens all the time.

It seems that each year Adobe products get more and more overrated. Generally they are the best thing on the market, but I never get the warm fuzzy “the designer of this software really cares about making a beautiful application” feeling. Upgrades always seem so minor and unless you count acquiring Macromedia, there really hasn’t been a major innovation from the company in recent memory.

For anyone that doesn’t think that there is room for innovation in the Adobe product lineup I point you to a web editor called Coda. I have been using this beautiful application instead of Dreamweaver for about a month and I absolutely love it. If you try hard enough, you can do everything you need to in Dreamweaver, but in Coda things are where they need to be and everything makes sense. Read about it here and download a demo to try it for yourself. And at only $79 Coda makes the case for how inflated and overrated Dreamweaver at $400.

I guess it must be difficult for an innovative company like Adobe to maintain their edge. Rather than reinvent and improve their software there is a temptation to protect their lead. Instead of competing with their rivals, they absorb them. Rather than making their products more appealing they focus on making sure that everyone is paying full price. Why change a product when you can add a couple bells and whistles and promote it as a major upgrade. I am hoping for more applications like Coda that make it easier to not rely so heavily on Adobe.

For me the best thing in music right now is a few leaked tracks from Iron and Wine’s new album, The Shepherd’s Dog, which comes out in September. I don’t know how people find the entire leaked album, but hypemachine has delivered a few gems. Here are some of the other things I have been listening to lately:

We Can Create, by Maps
This is a pretty great album by a band called Maps. Check out the track I posted a copule months ago if you are curious.

The Mix-Up, by the Beastie Boys
The second instrumental album by the Beastie Boys, the first being The In Sounds from Way Out. If you liked In Sounds then you will like this one. Pretty decent, but can get monotonous.

Icky Thump, by the White Stripes
It seems like the same thing happens when I get a White Stripes album. For the first week it is the greatest thing. Then it starts getting annoying and except for a few tracks I don’t listen to it again. Hopefully this one will have some staying power.

Other recommendations:

New Moon, by Elliott Smith

Boxer, by The National

The Boy With No Name, by Travis

I have been meaning to make a post about each of these things, but I never seem to get around to it. So, here are five recommendations that have absolutely nothing to do with one another:

1. Peel
If you read my review of the “Best Things to Happen to Music in 2006” you may remember my praise for a program called Songbird. As an mp3 blog aggregator, Peel kicks Songbird’s butt. Basically you plug in the url of the mp3 blogs you listen to and then you can play the mp3′s through Peel. It begs the question: how long until iTunes has this built in functionality? Download Peel while it is still free!

2. TextWrangler
I recently found the need to make changes to the .htaccess files on my server. To the 0.001% of you who may need to do this, I recommend TextWrangler because it allows you to open and save .htaccess files on a Mac. Since files with a “.” at the beginning of their name are invisible on a Mac, this is the best way I have found to work with them. It also lets you open and save files directly to your server.

3. Midlake
Midlake’s “Trials of Van Occupanther” is the cd that I have had on constant rotation for several weeks now. Rather than try to describe their sound, listen to this mp3 called Roscoe. Great stuff. I also saw the band in concert in Denver, but wasn’t as impressed. They got caught in a snow storm so they were playing without a sound check. It also seemed like they might have had a little too much alcohol or other substances before they got on stage. Still a decent live show, but the cd is what really knocked my socks off.

4. MediaTemple
I have left 1and1 and their cheap prices in search of a more reliable hosting company. So far so good, and I recommend MediaTemple for anyone looking for a web hosting company. The grid server strategy is an unique approach to the limitations that come with traditional shared hosting packages.

5. Audio Hijack
If you are on a Mac there is a great application called Audio Hijack that allows you to record any sound from any program on your computer. This comes in handy when you want to rip an mp3 from a streaming internet source or if you want to rip music off a dvd or video file. It isn’t free, but $16 is pretty cheap for what it does.

You may know that I write for a graphic design blog called Be A Design Group. One of the dying features of that site is the “Recommended Music” section in the sidebar. It started out as full music reviews and then when I lost the ambition to write entire articles it became a link to the reviews on Amazon. In anticipation of the next version of Be A Design Group where music will no longer be a part of the site, I have moved all my posts onto Adrian3. You can view the entire “I Like This Music” archive here. Hopefully I can get back into writing some music reviews and sharing the music I am listening too.

As I look back at the reviews I wrote, most of the albums are still in my regular rotation. If you haven’t checked out the following, I recommend the highly:

In the Reins, by Calexico and Iron and Wine
Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, by The Eels
Songs For Silverman, By Ben Folds
Woman King, by Iron and Wine
Out of the Shadow, by Rogue Wave
Chutes Too Narrow, by The Shins
Rubber Factory, by The Black Keys