So I was watching ted.com and I stumbled onto a design talk titled: Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off.  The talk focused on how every seven years he closes his design studio and forces everyone to take a year-long sabbatical. The talk was very interesting (I won’t get into it, just go watch the video.  His other talk on what he’s learned is good too. :) 

Briefly, during the talk, Stefan mentions finally getting a chance to read Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert.  Stefan noted that this book was written while the author was on sabbatical.  So I googled the author and found that he too had two ted.com talks about why are we happy and our mistaken expectations. After watching the videos, I decided to pick it up.

If you haven’t already watch the videos above, this book’s look at "happiness" based on a scientific approach.  Its definitely not a touchy-feely book about finding some secret to happiness but rather a vast array of results and conclusions based on control groups and studies.  It’s pretty eye opening in many ways.  It amazing to see how humans poorly predict what will lead to happiness and how our psychological defenses deal with things we can not change.

 I think the best way to detect whether or not *you* would like the book would be to watch Daniel Gilbert’s ted talks.  However *I* personally enjoyed it enough to buy it, read it, and find all those links above so I could post about it.  :)

…and I plan on reading it again :)

enjoy,
~Danny

Great Grandma is no longer with us.  I made this comic over a year ago, but never posted it.  My sister said it best.

Maria Albani would have been 93 this month. I can’t imagine everything that she saw in her life, in America and in Sicily. She was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known and she loved her family more than anything else in the whole world. I’ll miss you Great Grandma, say Hi to Grandpa Mike for me. I love you.

I love you great grandma.
~Danny

I’ve been taking night classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. This week, some of my work will be on display in the Diego Rivera Gallery!! :)

Diego Rivera Gallery, December 14-December 18

San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
( map )

The work is slightly abstract, which is something I don’t normally like, but somehow I got wrapped up in it :) I’ll *try* to get pictures :)

There’s actually a lot of artists on display, so it should have something for everyone’s taste. And the campus is beautiful, so don’t hesitate to wander around the courtyard or go out to the open area that has a spectacular view of the city.

~Danny

This is a post made with the wordpress app on the iPhone. If you’re seeing this, that means I can now post (with pictures) from anywhere! :)

SF Sketchcrawl 21 was a bit of an experiment.  Rather than picking a starting and ending location, the start location was optional and the end location was the De Younge Museum in golden gate park.  Actually, at some point it was announced that one of the optional start locations was going to be the ferry building. (?!)  Here’s a map to show you what that would have been like.  4.4 miles.  it would have been a lot of ‘crawl’ and not so much ’sketch’.

So a few of us decided to just go to the De Younge Museum at the beginning of the day and spend all day sketching there, which worked out pretty well.  Here are a few of the more presentable sketches I did.

That last one is just me fooling around with the first sketch.  You should check out all the results from all the other sketchcrawlers on the sketchcrawl forums.  It was a big turnout, about 60 to 80 people. –oh There’s a photo of everyone here.

~Danny

We’re going to a cookie exchange party, so we baked lots of surgar and peanutbutter holiday cookies!

Our Favs are:

• #7: that G-Bread man got hit in the head by a peanut butter cup flining ninja!
• #8: just simple and classic
• #13: cute star!
• #14: She was going for height! be sure to check out #19 :)
• #15: Yeah Baby!
• #19: of course, this one is our top pick :)

I just got this quote at the top of my GMail:

Blaise Pascal – “Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.”

Shouldn’t that be two things that start with T and A?

~Danny

DeviantArt has something called pasties that let you display a few random images from your deviantart gallery.  I’m thinking about working them into the site.

Here’s an example:

Wait a minute! I can’t show 3 random images from *my* account? They are just 3 completely random images from all of deviant art?! On further inspection, you have to subscribe for $30/yr to get the functionality of creating pasties that only select images from your account.

For the record, I pay $60/yr for my website (+$8 for ‘dannyburbol.com’ domain name)… so paying deviant art $30 a year seems ridiculous.

Well, I guess I’ll be pulling all my images from devianart and merging them into the site. Now I need to find some good software for displaying images and allowing comments, and rss feeds, etc…

oh wait, wordpress does all that. :) so now I just have to find a quick way to import all my deviant art entries.

~Danny

Well, wordpress has a one button import for all my blogspot blogs… very cool.

I just tried on this librio, but it clips a lot of my images…

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/librio

I’ll have to look around for a nice quick theme since I don’t have a lot of time to make my own…

~Danny