Joshua Knowlton Berry

One of my favorite inventor-types.

NY Magazine featured a couple of my photos from the recent Jonathan Toubin Benefit show at Brooklyn Bowl. Here’s a link to that article: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/12/this-weekends-concerts-from-atlas-sound-to-wu-tang-clan.html

The rest of the photos are here and here.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs played a short but intense early Saturday morning at the Jonathan Toubin benefit concert at Brooklyn Bowl. Here are a few pictures of Karen O. Here are the rest: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshbg2k/sets/72157628457313289/

My old theme was awful. Black, blue and gray, it looked like a bruise. I always wanted to do a theme based on the cover of Exile on Main St., but never found the time to develop it. As it turns out, the new default WordPress theme TwentyTen is really nice and clean. I’ll use this one for the near future.

From an epic Q&A on Reddit today:

The problem with specialization is that cultural literacy is starting to disappear…there are fewer facts and references that you know everyone will know. Even something like TV–there are 175 channels instead of 3. This means it’s harder to communicate. It’s harder to get to know people.

I get where he’s coming from. I used to play the guitar a lot more than I do today. I picked it up at a young age, learning basic rock & blues songs, scales, etc, and I ended up being pretty adept with a pick. Everything changed when I went to Spain to study flamenco. All of a sudden I had five picks as my fingers and the possibilities were limitless. After I became skilled at flamenco I was able to start fingerpicking the blues, Reverend Gary Davis type stuff, classical, jazz, and composing became a lot easier.

Had I not dropped the pick none of that would happened. I would have blissfully, albeit naively, carried on mimicking Richards, Knopfler, etc. I didn’t realize until years after I got back from Spain the value of variety. Learning a variety of styles introduced me to a variety of people. The same is true of my career now. I consider myself to be a blend of interaction designer and software engineer, and while there aren’t any job descriptions out there calling for both skillsets, I get to work with many different types of people. I like it this way.

my 1954 Martin

Bill Verplank perfectly explains interaction design.

I’ve recently been doing some collaborative storyboarding for an upcoming documentary. I created this template that can be printed, cut with scissors, and distributed to the members of your group. The frames can be rearranged until you figure out how to best tell the story. You can get the full-sized PDF here.