Clay Newton's quick bio: Clay Newton is an artist and designer, raised in the wine country's illustrious Napa proper. After spending three years as an apprentice of sorts at Richard Carter Studio, working at the French Laundry (pre- & post- Thomas Keller) and Trefethen Vineyards, he jumped the hills for Davis to attend the University, majoring in Art Studio with a minor in Sociology. His first kid, ZZ Anne Newton, was born in November 2005. Clay's technology career started in the bowels of the UC Davis IDEA Lab, where he studied under Randal Packer, Lynn Hershman, and Jon Winet. Jon later became one of Clay's close friends and collegues. In 1998, Clay started working for Eve.com which was really his indoctrination into the fast and furious dotcom mentality. When crumbled under the weight of idealab!, Clay was lucky enough to be able to cash into a house in yet another less-than-illustrious locale: Richmond (as of this writing in 2005, Richmond is the 11th most dangerous city in the US -- oooo scarey!) From Eve, Clay moved on to iEngineer which morphed into Assentive Solutions. When Assentive died a fiery death, Clay bounced over to Virage (2 hr commute hell.) After the third round of layoffs in 9 months, he shifted gears to Navis which tried to devour his soul but only took away a portion of his liver. In 2005, he joined Bank of America as a VP of Interaction Design. In the summer of 2006, Clay moved back to Napa and now telecommutes all the time.
White Screen of Death
Monday, March 26, 2007
  The best vacation listing evar.
OK, are you looking for a transformational experience? I am. And I found it. Herein lies god. From the vacation rental rant advertisement...

Butter is Optional at the Redwoods
Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings. DO YOU KNOW..the difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end...gets very interesting! Both have the same amount of calories. Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams. Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study. Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods. Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added! Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods. Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years. And now, for Margarine.. Very high in transfatty acids. Triple risk of coronary heart disease. Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol) Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold. Lowers quality of breast milk. Decreases immune response. Decreases insulin response. And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY *INTERESTING! Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC.. This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance). You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things: * no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something) * it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast? Share This With Your Friends.....(If you want to "butter them up")!



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  Awesome bizarreness

I have been watching this guy's photostream for some time now.

Flickr Photo Download: Sophie Calle's phone booth

His pictures in the Wee planets set are really fabulous. All a bit familiar, but all striking and beautiful. His other photos are worth purusing as well.

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Wednesday, March 07, 2007
  Like, outta NOWHERE

Ok, maybe I am slow and behind the times or something. I am just minding my own bidness, digging through my huge directory of Sage subscriptions, and I hit a kottke post about BLDGBLOG. I'd been there before; I recall thinking it was fairly interesting.

Hitting the homepage today was literally arresting. I was freakin' transfixed. The amount of content is staggering, the writing is interesting, novel and at times gives me that feeling that I have woken up and it is another planet.

Oh, just another daily read.

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Monday, March 05, 2007
  Get 'em
Thank goodness for Gates. This guy actually seems to be doing a good job. It is so refreshing after years of dealing with Rumsfeld and all his doublespeak.

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  90 seconds of world religion
This little video details in 90 seconds the spread of the world's major religions.

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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
  Patternerific!!
This is a great photoset that examines the security patterns of envelopes. I wonder who designs these things?

Are they specialists? What tools do they use? Do the scribble a lot?

I have a hard time imagining that there are people out there that spend 40 hour weeks contemplating the best way to destroy light in this fashion. Maybe there are. I am sure that it is an evolving field. Although, paper mail must be a comparatively insecure way to send things, given encryption and secure connections.

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Tuesday, January 30, 2007
  Snap! Annoying or hecka cool?



Oh, Snap! Not like this is the most amazing, rare conceptually mind-altering thing I have seen in a while, but I do think it prods out a good question: Is this really a good idea?

I like the idea of providing additional context. Frankly, I must admit that I don't know exactly how Snap works. I am curious as to whether it grabs a preview of the exact page to which you are linking, or if it just pulls the homepage, and if you can control what it pulls. From reading their FAQ, it looks like it uses a CSS class to bind the methods to, which is the right way to do stuff such as this, IMO.

Anyway, here is my bet: this type of popup is going to become extremely prevalent in the next 6 months. We are already deploying something of this nature at The Bank. There have been plugins for Firefox that added this functionality to Google for a while now. Yahoo uses similar kinds of functionality both in YM and on their news pages.

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Thursday, January 04, 2007
  Interview with Ben Schott
Here is an interesting interview with Ben Schott. This guy blows my mind. I first heard of Mr Schott via the Kottke link to his Five Years of Consequence, a graphic that is so data dense and fan-tab-u-licious it makes Edward Tufte whip out a laser pointer.

This guy is so great, and the interview is fab.

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  FINALLY. new Blogger.
Last I logged in, I was trying like hell to switch over to the new Blogger. I guess I am not enough on my game to get an early invite, so I had to wait with the hordes.

Now I am in, and looking forward to investigating the new features.

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006
  Very interesting interview with Ian Pearson, Futurologist
At the moment we're relying on encryption and firewalls and other security measures to stop people stealing your passwords. In the future, all I have to do is let some bacteria into your building; they float through the air conditioning system, land on your keyboard, you can't see them, you don't know they are there. They record every single keystroke and report it back to me. As if that's not enough, they could also be listening to what you're talking about, and even directly interface with your brain if necessary, and they can certainly float in through the vents on your PC and access the chips.

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the junk drawer since 1999.

 My Photo
Name: Clay Newton
Location: Napa, California, US
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Recent sour.patch pics. Get yours at bighugelabs.com/flickr
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