How I Spent My Summer Vacation

When I saw the gorgeously dreadful October 2006 edition of Stan’s site on Sunday, I remembered that I had intended to dust off my site’s costume from last year and put it back on. I dug around in my files, and was somewhat horrified to discover that the costume had vanished. Then I realized that if I was looking for that costume, summer must have ended. And boy oh boy, was there a lot of exciting stuff from the summer that I hadn’t gotten around to writing about.

To properly catch up, I would indeed have a lot of writing to do. Luckily, much of it has been done for me already. That business trip to Dublin and Stockholm, for example. Stan already covered that one pretty well (although I have since posted a handful of photos from the trip). He also did a great job of documenting the letterpress class we took. My bi-annual trip to the Ottawa International Animation Festival? Drawn went over the bulk of the highlights (I’ve got photos from that trip, too).

There was, however, one adventure I had this summer that was all mine (even if Cameron documented a remarkably similar experience earlier this year). That would be the summons I received from the mother ship at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California. The kind folks at Apple Computer thought they might like to have me work for them, so they flew me out for a full day’s worth of interviews. To say I was overwhelmed might understate the emotion just a tad.

Over the course of the day, I met a great many people of extraordinary vision, intelligence, and talent. I had a tasty meal at Caffé Macs. I met up with a few friends and spent the evening in San Francisco with the lovely Eris Stassi and her Drinktrain compatriots. It was a fantastic day.

Out of respect for Apple’s well-guarded privacy, I won’t go into detail about the job I was interviewing for, but I got the impression that if I wanted it, there was a good chance I could have it. It would pay well, give me an excuse to relocate to San Francisco, and allow me to absorb and contribute to a collective design acumen that sits among (perhaps atop) the finest on the planet.

And I decided against it.

Why in the world would I pass up a chance to work at Apple? Well, there was something else in the works that was just as exciting, and thanks to Jeffrey’s announcement earlier today, I don’t need to write too much about that either. I will say that Happy Cog Philadelphia promises to be a great thing, and I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of it.