The Shants‘ tour was certainly the most fun, most profitable, most productive tour I’ve been on. For some reason, it seemed less like work this time around, and more like a vacation. Portland, Medford, LA and SF were the definite high points of the trip. I was even able to make some real headway in user research and requirements gathering for my thesis. One thing’s for sure – any app conceived for musicians should bear in mind how little sleep the user operates on. You can read all the updates we posted from the road here, but here’s a selection of photos:

You can view all the photos from the tour on this Flickr set.

Last month I moved in with my lovely lady, Sabrina, in a sleepy neighborhood of San Francisco known as Noe Valley. Tons of dogs & baby strollers, of course… but not much different from the nicest parts of Oakland. It is sad to bid farewell to my adopted home, but I have a feeling we’ll be back before the end of the decade. We’ve been spending a lot of time nesting, grocery shopping, storage-organizing and generally getting comfortable.

Otherwise, I’ve been swamped at work with building low fidelity prototypes for a large health care provider. At school I’ve got an Actionscript class on Thursday nights, which is proving to be quite manageable thanks to our excellent instructor, who is teaching us to code with efficiency and solve problems methodically. As for my thesis work, I’ll be presenting my thesis proposal for the midpoint review committee soon, and hopefully they’ll give me the green light to continue my work. For now, you can read updates on the new blog I’ve started for the project: Road Case.

In a few days, Sabrina and I are heading to France for 2 weeks to explore Paris and visit family in Nice. I’m beyond excited for my first Europe trip, and I’ve been trying to pick up some key French phrases here and there. I downloaded a highly suspect free French Phrasebook app… suspect in that the home screen features a photo of a “sexy French maid”, and the phrases include things like “Those drugs aren’t mine!”. Sacrebleu!

I’m in a rush to tie up some loose ends before I leave on a West Coast tour with Maggie Morris (which I’ll be documenting in a tour blog: Photograph That City)… so just a quick update for now. Life has thrown some welcome surprises at me lately, and I am so grateful.

My mother came to visit for a few days. I took her on a brief tour of my school, my office at work, as well as a handful of farmer’s markets.

We also made the trek to Alcatraz. I can’t believe I have waited so long to do that! People (including myself) often dismiss it as being too “touristy” an event, but it truly is a fascinating piece of SF/Bay history. Tons of pictures here and here. While she was here, I also picked up a new(ish) car… bidding farewell to my trusty old Saturn SL2. Meet Fizzy, my stately Nissan Altima!

I’ve been really getting back into video again these past few months, taking some joy in capturing brief little slices of my life in motion. I’ve been posting most of them on Vimeo, including this little video I made while volunteering at Camp Galileo, a science & art day camp for kids in the Bay Area.

Other than that, I’ve just been working a ton… and prepping for this tour. I’ve also found some time to continue working on my own songs, which can be found here.

Fall has come to the Bay Area finally. Its been fairly rainy since Halloween, which is kind of a welcome change from the usual “70s and nice”. I’ve been pretty swamped with school and work projects. I’ve also started a live video series of artists performing at the House Of Shields blog, which has been really cool so far.

I recently snapped a few pictures during my daily commute. Enjoy!