January of 2003, I was sitting alone in Union Square in San Francisco, California after a long day's drive down the coast. I was just sitting, collecting my thoughts and watching the world go by. A girl came up to talk to me, she was taking a survey. She asked me who my personal heroes were. I really had to think about it. My first answer was Horatio Hornblower, a fictional character from the 17th Century English Navy who traveled the world on Tall Ships. My second was President Kennedy, as he was the last president we had at the time that was forward thinking. My final answer was Steve Jobs.

Back in 1990, I was starting my second year of University in the design program. I was taking a class on publishing and for half the semester we were in a print shop learning about the printing process, which seems archaic now, but the other half of the semester I was introduced to the Apple Macintosh Computer. We learned the desktop, the basic navigation, the command keys and the first two programs we learned in the class were Digital Darkroom and Adobe Photoshop. I instantly fell in love with the computer and what I was going to be able to do with it.

Ten years ago, I started playing with a program called Adobe Pagemill and made a simple little website on my3mb of web space provided by my dialup internet provider; earthlink. The title Absolut Wade came from a design project I was working on while in design school at the time where was learning about branding and did a series over Absolut Vodka. Eight years ago today, I was thinking it would be kind of cool to move my web site off of earthlink and get my own dedicated website. The website was mostly some web design experiments and some testing in the new thing called Macromedia Flash. It was really complicated to register a domain back then, the form was damn near rocket science and it cost $80 to register. Then my friend Vincent suggested I run my own webserver from my home computer since I had broadband (before most other people in the country did) and left the computer on all the time. He helped me set it up and from that day absolutwade.com came into existence.

Went out tonight and enjoyed a bit of tech talk with some people who know their stuff over some wine and light dinner. A conversation about the evolution of the industry that felt more like a brain storming session rather than the usual polite conversation. It's nice to get to do that with people who know all the ubber web geek terms that I do know and not look back at you with a "what the hell are you talking about?" kind of look.

So my Laptop died if you haven't heard me bitching about it. It has visited the Genius bar at two different Apple stores three times in two weeks with everything from power issues to hard drive dying issues. It's now on it's way to Houston, TX to get repaired. In the meantime something else has to happen since I need a computer I can travel with and I need it now. I was leaning on getting the Mac Book Pro but I just hate to lose the 2 inches of screen space from my current expectations of 17" screen. I decided in the end to just get a new 17" Powerbook (more Ram and HD, Better Resolution) for several different reasons. Most of them being

It's almost ready and I got real sick of the last episode (had broken links anyway). So, I decided to put a coming soon splash page up and a preview of the new journal. Pretty much all my friends helped me on the code with this one but thanks a lot to Paul Westgate and Charlie Fisher who couldn't find better excuses to get me to quit bugging them to make this work right.

Stay tuned, the new site is coming.

This is my first blog post. Hopefully soon I will get it automated. For now, we're going live hand coded. Welcome to Absolut Wade!