With that said here are some links and mini-reviews of products I love, but don’t own… yet.

Bike Valet

I freaking love the Bike Valet, it is sleek, modern and practical. I love the simplicity of the design and the way in which it presents your bike on the wall. I’m trying to talk the partners at welikesmall into purchasing a few for the new offices in downtown Salt Lake City. They are very bike centric and love design, so I’m hoping it will be an easy sell.

Bike Valet got started with a Kickstar campaign last year. It was fully funded and now the Bike Valet can be — PURCHASED HERE.

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TigrLock

I love the idea of the TigrLock, but don’t know if I’d like the look of it strapped to my bike when I’m not using it. It’s one of those products that, unfortunately, is necessary in urban environments, as peeps just can’t be trusted. So, if I had to lock my bike up everyday… this is a product I would be looking to invest in.

TigrLock was also funded from a successful Kickstarter campaign, and can now be PURCHASED HERE.

VX Small Rucksack // AP Series

Mission Workshop does it right. They develop bags and apparel for the biking commuter. The AP series VX Small Rucksack, is sweetness with shoulder straps. If I was regularly commuting to work in an urban environment and needed a backpack that was sturdy, weatherproof and could carry my MacBook Air. I would order just ordered The Sanction rucksack (a step down from the VX AP series) from — HERE.

Bike Junkies — What would you add?

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So. With these things in mind, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be starting at welikesmall on Tuesday of this week as one of their Interactive Producers. I’m completely bananas about joining a team that is leading the field in interactive development — from consulting, to design, to development, to construction and installation — welikesmall does it all, with a small nimble team talented enough to deliver large international projects in short order.

To some of you this may seem out of left field… I’m truly sorry for that. Life is a whirlwind, and sometimes the plans we make don’t seem to travel as we hoped, but we must take what we’ve been given and move with expectation into the plans set before us.

Go chase your dreams and don’t ever settle for something less.

Sidenote: The next couple of weeks will be literally packed, as we are planning on being completely settled in Salt Lake City by May 15th. So, if you want to know the schedule of how all of the pieces are going to fit together to get everything moved… email or call me at your convenience.

Pics of Salt Lake City: taken on my interview trip

welikesmall Company Bio:

Welikesmall is an interactive design consultancy committed to sticking up for the little things. Things like small egos, small solutions to giant problems, and small movements for great change. We’re about fewer, shorter, better meetings. It’s death to bureaucracy and the eradication of “that’s not possible.” We believe that small and nimble is far superior to big and lumbering. Small, you have a new champion. We’re here to make compelling creative work based on strategy that actually has a point. We’re here because the big way is the old way. And you’re here, friends, because you know we’re right.

Welikesmall is the brainchild of 3 award winning interactive industry veterans who were, quite frankly, fed up with the inefficiencies and bureaucracy of large interactive companies. We knew that our clients were growing tired of it too. So we created a new model. We feel that by remaining small and hand-picking the best people, allows us to stay nimble, offer the absolute best client service, and ultimately, work faster and more effectively than our larger sized competition.

In light of the ridiculousness of parenthood, one of our favorite ways to get Haddie to smile has been to re-enact the Mah-Na’ Mah-Na’ video from The Muppets. Dear gawd almighty… this one will stick in your head for days and most likely weeks (thanks goes to the Brehmer’s for introducing us to this sadistic little video).

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On that note… have a blessed Easter weekend, and hug your significant others, because life is really, really fun when the inhibitions are gone and you can be your true ridiculous self.

… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring. But that must not mislead you. What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end, — that is what you must be able to attain. To be alone, as you were alone in childhood, when the grown-ups were going about, involved with things which seemed important and great, because the great ones looked so busy and because you grasped nothing of their business.

When did we lose the ability to write with such elegance? Now, I realize Rilke is no ordinary writer, but still there is a movement to his letters.

There is space and rest.

Emails, texts, IM’s, and Tweets, seem to be built in avoidance of leisure. Are we a culture too obsessed with getting to the next thing that we’ve forgotten how to make correspondence a delightful experience. What Rilke does so flawlessly is this, He tells stories with ebb and flow, culminating in a morsal of wisdom or in the least, a humorous antidote. In this case Rilke pushes his young friend to find a place outside of the busy-ness, to be like a child, finding fascination in the quiet. It makes me wonder about my current “adult life” and whether or not I am like the one Rilke speaks against.

Digital Production.

Maybe the difference is digital. Maybe we have created, in our digital habits, an aversion to quiet solitude. In this digital world where everything is pressing, everything is so urgent. To be honest, some days I get so overwhelmed with my inbox, I have to take a stroll. The endless response, the reactive nature of notifications and inbox badges, that proliferate our online work life… I’m sure this is where TentLife came out of, a physical response to the stress of technology. Yet, I am a dichotomous being, as I love what I do. I want to be working in and on bleeding edge products which require a certain aptitude, namely, the ability to sit in front of a computer and react.

So. The challenge (to myself) over this Lenten season is to find the rest… find the space. And like Rilke, begin to weave intricate and beautiful stories with words tied together in eloquent phrases. Expressions of color brought to life within the stark contrast of black letters on a white page, and maybe find out what my blood has already been telling me.

Photos by Tammy Brice Photography

Hadassah stats:

Full Name: Hadassah Marie DuRegger
Born: 7:35am, January 25, 2012
Weight: 7lbs 8.3oz
Length: 20.5″
Head: 14″

Hair like her daddy, feet like her momma.

At the meetup, we are going to give away a 20-30 Dwolla t-shirts to the first arrivals and showoff the features of the app at 6pm. If you’re in OKC and want to learn about an app that is killing credit cards… you should come, I’ll even give you a dollar if you do.

Here are the details: Facebook Event — RSVP

Dwolla Meetup at Elemental Coffee Roasters.

5:30-7:30pm
815 N. Hudson
Oklahoma City

http://dwolla.com/

It’s been a year since going national, and what better way to celebrate than holding a meetup in another Oklahoma City! Come by Elemental Coffee and try out Dwolla by purchasing a latte or espresso. And learn more about the up and coming start-up that is building the ideal payment network… or as Forbes calls it “Cashflow for the NetGen”

Full Forbes article: http://onforb.es/u7OoNq

It has been a whirlwind of a year, with Baby D on the way and Candace stepping down from her Executive Director position at Pella Teen Challenge Women’s Home, and a new Charming Beard office on the town square in Pella, one would assume we’d be digging in for a long winter. But life has a way of opening doors when you least expect it. Such is the case with Dwolla.

Ever since I moved back to Iowa, I’ve been acutely aware of this small start-up with a big vision. I met Ben Milne at Ted-X Des Moines, in May of 2010, back then Dwolla was a scrappy start-up only licensed to operate in Iowa and California, but still garnishing a lot of regional attention. Over the next few months Ben and Shane Neuerburg successfully led the company through a series A funding of $1MM and partnership with Veridian Credit Union and TMG, a subsidiary of the Iowa Credit Union League. A couple weeks later the two-man team launched a mobile “cash-sharing” integration and announced it’s entrance into the National market at Mars Cafe in Des Moines. I was at this event, and was stunned at the attendance… as all of us were smashed into the tiny Mars Cafe space, with beers in our hands and a free Dwolla t-shirt draped around our shoulders. It was an electric event, one that vaulted Dwolla into the national spotlight.

Fast forward a year. Dwolla is fast approaching another big announcement and the team has expanded from it’s initial founders to a rabble-rouse of smart and scrappy techies. Without going into the details, I was brought on just shy of the big announcement to handle a variety of things from Business Development to Site Integration and Customer Support. It is a move that Candace and I are ecstatic about, and probably one of the only jobs that could have taken me away from Charming Beard Productions, as it combines my love of all things tech with a real entrepreneurial spirit (read: market disruption).

I couldn’t be more happy, last Thursday night, standing on this stage… As I join a team of exceptional talent, each of which are helping to build “the ideal payment network” for the next generation.

Don’t have a Dwolla account? Text 515.650.4583 and I’ll give you a dollar for your thoughts.

What is Dwolla?

Dwolla was created to help eliminate credit card fees, and make it quicker and easier for businesses to get paid. With free micro-transactions, and a flat 25 cents for everything else, Dwolla is the nation’s cheapest payment network.

No mystery fees, no sign up costs
Free online and mobile tools to make mobile payments work
Socially and locally connected for maximum exposure

Since I’m the new Business Development guy… I thought I’d better end this blog post with my first true pitch.

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“Short Film Friday” focuses on films & music videos that are 1 – 5 minutes in duration.

Sidenote: My favorite baseball team (of all time) is the Oakland Athletics… stemming back to my childhood and the fact that I was raised in Hayward, CA (a suburb of Oakland) and got to walk around The Colosseum with my Little League team on my 8th birthday… plus the fact that it is my Grandpa’s favorite team, so it’s kinda in the genes.

Anyway, I was ecstatic to see the film, mainly because it chronicled the 2002 season, in which the Oakland Athletics lost their top three producers from the previous year (Jason Giambi, Matt Damon, and closer Jason Isringhausen) and had to completely re-haul the team. Utilizing free agents and their own young farmed talent (notably, Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder three aces that were completely left out of the movie even though they combined to go 57-21 for the A’s in 2002). A team that managed a 20 game regular season winning streak finishing atop the AL West, and ultimately losing in 5 games to the Minnesota Twins in the AL Divisional Series, of which Jason Jackson and I traveled 900 miles to see game 3 and 4 at the Metrodome in St. Paul (See below):

Rabbit Trail: Any baseball fan with a brain knows, inherently, that the writers of MONEYBALL took some liberties with the facts in creating this adaptation. MONEYBALL is not a documentary, as they created characters, squashed timelines, and amalgamated actual events to shape a compelling story. So, don’t go to it thinking this was exactly how it happened… there were a lot more factors at play then the mathematics that made this team dominate in the stretch.

Back to the actual movie… All I can say is, I’m glad Brad Pitt stuck with the film as it went through three directos finally landing Bennett Miller. His vision of how the book/screenplay should be executed (based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball along with writers Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin‘s work on the screenplay) was the right way to go as he used masterful dialogue and pacing to help the slow moving film (comparative to the genre of baseball/sports films) go from a yawnfest to a film with actual tension and grit. I think one of the many things I loved about the film was how it was really a throwback film to the 70′s era when characters didn’t necessarily change, but the environment/backdrop of the money made a slight transformation. This was done masterfully as we follow Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), fictional character Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) move throughout the film with generally no transformative character arcs in the script. It’s not a movie about redemption, nor is it a underdog story in the classic sense where the team wins the World Series, rather it is an underdog story that let’s us in on the underdog’s mentality and the lengths to which they innovate to succeed, while failing all the while.

The three main actors in this film do a masterful job of subtlety and wit to portray these characters, Pitt’s nuance as Beane is spot on, while Jonah Hill shows a side of himself that is untapped and beautiful. Hoffman is brilliant as the brooding Manager Art Howe, showing that truly great actors don’t need a lead role to steal the scene.

Oh, and this film is made even more epic by the addition of THIS WILL DESTROY YOU‘s song “The Mighty Rio Grande” as the golden thread of music that carries the viewer in pivotal scenes.

I’d encourage you to go see this film and let it speak to your inner underdog… What are you passionately fighting for in your life and is money the end goal or something else less tangible?