The Pizzeria from Armistead Booker and Vimeo.

Not unlike my buddy Amit, I'm doing my best to add new clips to Vimeo more frequently. So, this past weekend some of my Haven friends here in the city met up at Lombardi's for yummy pizza and followed up by the incredible Rice to Riches in SoHo... and I brought my camera along for the ride. As is typically the case when you get folks like this in the same room together, hilarity, slurping sounds, newscasting, and subway dancing ensues. Music: "Autobahn Music Box" by Cut Copy.

For just over a year, I've enjoyed the company of this little black book that's second to none (thanks CP!). And I've kept a wide range of ideas, sketches, to-do lists, and mockups, including a few good ideas for this site. It's hard to believe that the Refresh logo is a mere 373 days old... time flies when you're having fun and making websites!

Pen and paper have been an integral part of my creative process ever since I was a kid: coming up with mystical lands where bizarre and dangerous monsters roamed across the construction paper; devising architectural marvels that I'm sure would be a real structural engineer's worst nightmare; and storyboarding the unlikely tales of a band of culinary utensils under the apt title of "The Kitchen Adventures."

The pen and paper tradition continued in college where I found a much-needed reprieve from the latest obsession: staring at a screen and contributing to this new internet, sure to not be just another passing trend, but a full-blown promise for the future. My 'offline' time became just as important as my 'online' time, whether that be planning a layout in the back of my notebook (instead of listening to the lecture), dreaming up crazy web services on the whiteboard that would leave the programmers shaking their heads, or doodling the next great graphic treatment for my homepage. In fact, this little guy, a robotic dog named AURi (automated robotic intelligence, donchaknow) became our mascot for the Student Information Network and leapt off the page to help host a flash-based presentation in 2000.

It's been a full year since this site relaunched, and my offline habits are more vital than ever. At home, I'll do my best thinking while I clean the kitchen, take a shower, or sit on the floor in my room... not necessarily in front of the glowing screen. With a full hour roundtrip commute to work, I fill that time writing, sketching, reading, or napping to good music. Even at the Museum, I have to escape to a good quiet exhibit like Reptiles or the Hall of Planet Earth to see my productivity go up.

I'm not the first to say this, and I definitely won't be the last. How do you spend your time offline?

This post has been four months in the making, but after a recent review of web apps with a friend, I realized it was high time I wrapped up the list with a glossy ajax bow. This is it. The best online services out there in my humble opinion. Working the web like it's my job... cause it is.

• Backpack: conveniently at the beginning of the alpha-list, this brilliant service from 37Signals is the archetypal web app. The sticky notes have gone out the window now that I can take my ta-da list and reminders anywhere. Life always seems more organized and clear when I discipline myself to use it everyday. Khoi Vinh said it best: "It's perhaps the most convincing Web answer yet to the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spiral-bound notebook."


• Blinksale: nothing wows clients like a beautiful email... especially when it's filled with relevant and timely invoices. It's a vital tool for freelance work, provides a professional front to my business side, and is a smart, no-hassle approach to getting the job done.


• Campaign Monitor: hands-down the finest part of my designer toolkit. CM (and their little brother MailBuild) make authoring and managing email newsletters blissfully fun and easy. It wouldn't be the first time I've waxed poetic about them. They're five star in every way.


• Feedburner: these days if you aren't aware of the importance of media distribution and syndicated content, then you've clearly missed the boat. Another Chicago venture (like the 37 kids), these guys are at the top of their game with the simple formula: Build + Burn = Boost.


• Flickr: in the past year, I've uploaded more than 1,600 photos with hundreds of tags, viewed almost 20,000 times, receiving 100+ comments, and organized into 66 photosets. And that's just me. Yahoo's service is a hit, and keeps getting better everyday.


• Google Analytics: stats probably seem like a fairly boring topic, but this is one of the few Web 2.0 projects that's getting them right (Crazy Egg makes things too slow, Mint isn't detailed enough, and your hosting provider just doesn't care). There's a reason it takes a giant to pull off a mammoth task like this.


• Harvest: for fast, efficient, widget-based time tracking, this lightweight is the ultimate way to manage your timesheet. Plus they play nice with the big guys at 37's Basecamp project management service (so does Blinksale).


• HopStop: this is not your father's Mapquest. It's a don't-circle-the-block-three-times to find the apartment lifesaver. I said so myself when I was lost in Philly. You can text yourself subway directions or now even call them for the door-to-door.


• JPG: so much more than a magazine, this is a full-out photography community. Thanks to the Flickr phenom, this tiny operation in San Francisco has gone from vroom to bloom, opening the publication to its members and finding themselves on newstands around the world!


• Last.fm: a powerful new idea called the "social music revolution" where the music you listen to get logged online, providing a wealth of recommendations, music tastes, custom radio streams, and data at your fingertips.


• Odeo: it's not the golden days from Evan and Biz at Pyra Labs where Blogger was born, but a complete audio studio online is nothing to sneeze at... and with podcasts on the rise and Twitter in the wings, Ev and Biz and their new company will be humming along for a good while.


• Shopify: the instant shopping experience, built by (gasp) non-programmers. Enough said.


• Vimeo: a video community of epic proportions. YouTube may have the name recognition, but you can't beat simple, tasteful design like this site. And with video clips like this inside, what's not to love?

Next time: a few good desktop apps. So good, they're killer...

At the Museum, I work with a team of rockstar educators who take the amazing science of the institution and present it to the world. Among them is the Science Bulletins team. Science Bulletins is a program featuring the latest science news and data visualizations and appears online, in classrooms, and at museums around the world. My crude one-line description is that Science Bulletins is the "CNN of science." But really, it's much more than that. And starting this week, you have the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how 3D animations (like this one about the ozone hole, or the feature below about glaciers) get put together.

The Apple Store in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tokyo is presenting a new Pro Session called Envisioning Global Change, starting Wednesday, February 7 at the SoHo store. It features my colleagues Ned Gardiner, a geologist and geographer, and Arlene Ducao, a talented 3D animator. What's amazing about their presentation (which I had the opportunity to review this past week) is how much you'll learn in an hour: both about the human impact on the Earth and how data visualizations are developed in our office every day.

Occasionally, I'll serve as a "substitute geologist" to inform the Science Bulletins team on current earthquake and volcano activity around the world. These earth events are published weekly in an animated or interactive format, but until now I didn't exactly know how all the pieces come together using raw satellite data and high-tech software. I definitely recommend you come check out this engaging and fascinating presentation that Ned and Arlene have put together!

Can't come to the Apple Store? Then go spend some time on the Science Bulletins site and see the way we look at the world!