A blog by Cameron and Shannon

Where do I even start? I can’t. We’ve done many things, seen many people, and gone many places.

It’s funny. I originally stopped writing regularly in this blog in preparation to devote my attentions to creation of our other more focused and compelling blog project, as well as a new camerondaigle.com (which continues to languish, alone and unloved).

However, right around that time, life exploded. We had traveled out to South Carolina to visit friends and family, and when we got back, things just started rolling. The two don’t actually correlate, but they seem to in my mind, for lack of any other explanation or reasoning. An assortment of things just started happening.

So I guess this post will be about those things.

First of all, my life at Griffin expanded just a bit further. Our software guys were building an iTalk, an iPhone recording app that needed a face and feel. I volunteered to revamp the whole cannoli. The result was an entirely new logo and UI, as well as an accompanying website..

I’ll go into greater depth whenever I post it on the aforementioned mythical camerondaigle dot com, but suffice to say that iTalk was a huge success and peaked at number 6 on the top 25 iPhone apps. Pretty sweet. So now I’m occasionally software-UI-guy too. It’s nice how, just when things might be feeling a little samey, some new opportunity comes along to try something fresh.

Next item of interest: Twitter. Are you using it? I recommend doing so. It’s a pleasant and friendly experience, although the pleasantness and ease of twittering is a major part of why Marverous is so lame these days. At the very least, if you feel bored, annoyed, and/or murderously unsatisfied when you visit Marverous, you could follow my oft-updated Twitter or TwitPic

Next item of interest: Travel. It still seems like we’re on the road every two weekends, which may or may not be true. The last trip was to South Carolina slash Georgia and was beautiful. Pictures on Flickr soon; when was the last time I posted anything on Flickr? Segue to the following item of interest.

Next item of interest: Various XBox games. Fable 2 and Fallout 3, mainly. They each deserve their separate posts on an even-more-entirely-mythical gaming review blog that I would write if I had infinite time and more efficient writing skills. The crux, however, is not the games themselves, but the giant gear-shift in my life that has taken place recently.

Ever since college, I’ve been quite susceptible to phases; one month I’ll be buying a film negative scanner and planning to scan in all my old Kodak, the next month I’ll be buying darkroom equipment and planning to shoot only Tri-X, and the next month I won’t shoot any photos at all but will be designing a photography site. The month after? Using our little pocket-camera and setting up Shannon with iPhoto because after all, it’s about memories, not postprocessing, or something. All of the aforementioned phases have taken place; I decided I’ll start shooting (and scanning, and developing) when I feel compelled to, and not a moment sooner.

Maybe it’s the stability of a loving wife and steady income that’s allowed the rest of my life to kind of go bonkers. For example, all that photography stuff? Pushed aside for video games. Seriously. I finally own some game consoles (you don’t understand, that’s kind of a big deal for me - I grew up drooling over the NES and Genesis owned by the 2 other kids in the cul-de-sac) and have since discovered that I adore the medium, and also while I was gone (stopped playing my last PC game sometime in ‘04), the industry has matured and become downright fascinating.

So what do I do these days? I listen to a lot of the 1up podcasts when I do the dishes every night, and pretend I’m a game journalist (ahem, “enthusiast press”) with a pathologically encyclopedic knowledge of video games. I spend a fair to middling amount of time on said games, and enjoy talking about them with my friends from Pensacola that play a heck of a lot more than I do. I don’t take that many pictures or design random art pieces. I am watching football again for the first time in a few years. I enjoy being immersed in other pursuits, for a while. (Full disclosure: my Daytum reveals that I haven’t been doing much reading either, something else new that I’m doing (or not doing), I suppose, for a while. And my Daytum also reveals that I need to exercise.)

Maybe all this talk of my new life or whatever sounds straightforward, or melodramatic, but this represents a fair shift from how I usually do things, and it’s enjoyable. For now. I still have a few rolls of undeveloped Tri-X on my bedside table, and my film scanner isn’t going to gather dust forever.

But for now, that’s what’s been going on with me. Hanging up the obsessive-graphic-designer hat for a bit, since it’s been on since mid-college, and wearing the artistically-relaxed-for-now propeller beanie instead. Relaxing and enjoying life with my wife and our leggy pointy hairpile of a cat. Remembering to be thankful for all of it.