There’s nothing quite like seeing a perfectly respectable mid-sixties woman in her evening wear on a hot sunny summer San Francisco day with a lime green vinyl lunch box atop her head. That was the scene at my favorite lunch spot today, Yerba Buena Gardens, where the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra put on a one-hour free concert. With a full belly and the sun beating down on your face, the heavy metal timpani makes your chest swell with drama and life. Ahhh. Oh yes, they gave out free vinyl insulated lunch boxes, and someone told the audience to use them as hats. At least 25% of the crowd believed them, the most proper of the audience being surprisingly the most willing.

Here’s a blurry cellphone photo from my crappy Sprint. All the little green flecks you see are lunchboxes, giving new meaning to the seldom-used derogatory term “lunchboxhead”.

But enough about my day.

Website Upgrades

I am pleased to inform that we’ve made some upgrades to the site after reviewing some of the initial feedback from the contest entry. We haven’t gotten to everything, and I won’t go into all the gory details here - some are available on the contest page - but probably the most significant fix has been a quickening of site load time. Apparently there was some extraneous JavaScript weighing things down, as well as some improperly organized CSS. In seems we were unwittingly loading every single image on the site…every time you loaded a page. Nice one, us. A big thanks to Stefan Klocek and Media Temple’s customer service for helping out.

If anyone has had similar troubles figuring out site loading issues, the following are great resources:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20070326
http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20070326

We’re going to continue working on addressing your suggestions, so please keep them coming.

Upcoming

And just to wet your palette, here is a quick list of some things we’re working on:

1. Finalizing the Book of CLAV for printing.
2. Building OLOGY 18 - I’m waiting on the very last student story from the 826 Workshop and that will be added.
3. Creating a prototype for a digital player, code name ‘Muphon’. Senecal is hunting down a gaggle of skinning experts from the former Breed.org site to help out.
4. The God’s Acre soundtrack is nearing completion.
5. Some very early experimentation with ‘Story Experience Packets’ by Zach Nelson.

Mmmm…yum.

Lastly, since I can’t give each of you a lime-green lunchbox for your head, here’s a bit of robot love to kick off the weekend, courtesy of Banjo Drill.