After seven whole months, Friday was my last day working at Nissan Design America, and on Monday I start a new job in downtown San Diego. The new position should be a lot more challenging and engaging, but since the company is a lot smaller and less hulkingly corporate it looks like I’ll have to do with fewer perks like free soda/juice/bottled water, luxury office furniture, screamingly fast computers and the like. On the plus side, I’ll be working with web technology less than ten years old and will be part of an agile, competent team instead of having to single-handedly fight clueless bureaucrats day in and day out. I’ll also be a salaried employee (as opposed to contract), and the money is a bit better too. As with Nissan, I’ll refrain from saying anything specific about my work unless I happen to leave the company at some point in the future.

Now that I’m no longer working at NDA I can finally share this little tidbit: only a couple months into the job, my uncle spotted me in the LA Times next to our 2006 concept car, the Urge. The story is here (you’ll need to use BugMeNot), and I’m on the very right in the first photo. Hopefully my pitiful little appearances in the NY Times and LA Times thus far won’t count against the fifteen minutes of fame Warhol says we all get.

The kind folks of SXSW have thoughtfully provided MP3 recordings (I detest the word “podcast”) of several panels and keynote speeches from this year’s conference; you can find them over yonder. I particularly enjoy Bruce Sterling’s speech and listened to it more than once while spinning my hamster wheel at work. I once had the chance to chat with him while Adriene and I drove he and Natalie Jeremijenko to the US/Mexico border (before I even knew of his massive body of work or realized how important he is to many of my peers), and so I know from personal experience that he is a charismatic and capable intellectual.

Anyway, as I listen to his keynote speech, I find myself acting like a four-year-old: constantly and hungrily asking “why?” as I grapple with new ideas and fermenting knowledge. Things click with tangible force. Maturing thoughts in my own head find purchase in the words of precious few authors, and I happily nod along with many an exploratory sentence Sterling utters. He discusses the accelerating pace of technology, its rapidly increasing influence on culture, and the anxiety we feel in keeping track of it all: “…we haven’t invented the words for them yet. We’ve got smoke building in the crowded theater, but the exit sign is just a mysterious tangle of glowing red letters.” These things resonate with me, but I want to explore more thoroughly why I agree with him and why my jumbled, subconscious musings latch on to his words which are more elegant than those I can produce. I need that kind of objective dissection to feel confident in my own thoughts. Like any math teacher worth their salt might say, you should always double-check your work.

So give it a listen. Perhaps we can compare notes.