So I schemed and planned and crunched numbers and tried different models and venues…it just wasn’t going to happen the way I envisioned it.  So, I put it on the back burner for awhile.

Then it hit me: all I really want is a cool place to watch cool movies and drink good beer with my friends.  If Ignite has taught me anything, it’s that there is no cooler place to take in an event with a bunch of friends while enjoying a frosty beverage or two than the Egyptian Theatre.

So I figured that we’d need a certain number of people to attend in order to make the event work.  How to ensure enough people come? Make a group buying site where folks don’t have to pay for the tickets until the right number of people commit to attending.  If enough people commit, the movie is on; if not, no one’s out anything.  So, I started Boise Classic Movies.

The folks over at the Egyptian made it really simple to get this going; they love the idea and want to put it on every month.  We’re starting with the Godfather in June.  Next month, we’ll screen whatever people vote for on the vote page (I’m pulling for the Big Lebowski, of course).

I’m really excited!  This could really be a lot of fun and a good thing for Boise.

1. Valice is in great shape and doing great work; I highly recommend them for web, VPS, and cloud hosting.
2. I left on my own accord. We parted on very friendly terms. It was just time.

I’m REALLY proud of the work we’ve together, and I learned a ton from the crew up there. But after two and a half years, I’ve come to understand my strengths as a technology coordinator: I’m good at aligning clients with the right tech solutions, and making those solutions simple and elegant. That’s what I want to do full time, and I’m ready to do it on my own.

Clear as mud? Put plainly, I speak the language of business pros, creative types, and techies. I can get tech problems solved for agencies and their clients. I’m pretty good at it; I’ve done it lots.

If you’re interested in doing some work together, let’s grab coffee. Send me a note.

Tonight, I read a section in which Guy uses Garr Reynolds‘s list of ten Japanese principals to apply to design.  One of these that especially struck me is kanso.

Kanso.  Eliminating clutter and expressing things in plain and simple ways.

I sometimes think that my tendency to express things in boiled down terms is a weakness, that I can’t hold a complex thought in my head long enough to maintain it in its unabridged form.  Instead, I’m reminded that to employ kanso is to understand a complex idea well enough to express it simply.  That’s no insignificant tool.

This makes me think of times when clients come in the door and say things like, “What I want is really simple; I just want to push one button and have it do X.”  Well, “X” is complicated.  Boiling X down to one button is complicated-squared.  But if we’re able to do that, then we’re magicians.

And we’ve applied kanso; we’ve taken something complicated and made it simple.

The iPhone has two buttons, if you don’t count the volume buttons.  It only needs two buttons because a lot of work went into ensuring that it could only need two buttons.

With the original iPhone, I really wanted 3G, so I upgraded.  With the 3G, I really wanted a faster processor, and a better camera.  The 3GS was faster, but that’s all; I skipped it.  The iPhone 4 was a HUGE leap in performance and function between it and iOS4.  The A4 chip screams.  The camera is gorgeous.  The Retina display is one of those “how’d I ever live without it” features. I honestly can’t say what more I’d want.

Which brings us to iOS5.

Each time I’ve upgraded the OS without upgrading hardware, I’ve been disappointed.  The features are cool, but the performance lags, and lags across the board.  Having rapid response when I hit the home button is essential.  Not having that is a deal breaker.  I’ve come to believe that general UX is more important than having the latest bells-and-whistles.  If I have to wait a second or two (or three) to get to the home screen after hitting the home button, then I begin to hate my phone.  That being said, I don’t expect I’ll upgrade to iOS 5 until I upgrade hardware as well, and I don’t expect to want to do that any time soon.

Like I said: I love my iPhone 4; I am without want.  The buttons work like new, the extra hard glass is flawless, the battery life is very good (though not exactly like new), it performs as it did when I bought it, it’s not missing an apparent killer app.  This would all change if I updated to iOS5.  I’m sure the next iPhone will have the A5 chip, and iOS5 will make good use of it…and the A4 will struggle to keep up…and I’ll begin to hate my iPhone 4, which as of today (as we’ve established) I love.

This brings us to WWDC 2011.

I can’t think of any feature–any feature at all–that would adequately inspire my upgrading to iOS5.  There’d have to be some sort of beer-yielding feature to cause me to upgrade.  Not that I’m uninterested, by any means.  I’ll be glued to my screen and raving excited, I’m sure.  But I’m not going to upgrade my iOS without upgrading hardware ever again, and I don’t have a need to update my hardware.

Of course, this is Apple.  The company is made of Wow.  I’m writing this before WWDC for a reason.  I recognize I may eat my every word here because of some sort of wicked feature that, even on “inferior” hardware, is still a drop-dead must-have feature.  That’s just Apple.  The difference this time for me is that I don’t see that feature set coming.  They’re going to have to pull a full-fledged esquilax out of the hat to get me on board.

——-

Followup:

I updated to iOS5 on the first day it was released.  The notifications alone made the upgrade worth it.  Performance is great, so far.  No regrets.