Seeing through new eyes

With every piece of new information I receive, I see the world in a slightly different light, as if through new eyes. I assume we're all the same. When we read a review, hear a new piece of music, or figure out how to make something better, then our interaction with the world changes—even if only slightly. Which is no doubt why every time I go into Music Room Two and listen to the same tracks of music off my favorite playlist, I am hearing those tracks differently enough that they feel kind a' new. For me, new inputs are my elixir. It's why I sit in long meetings, read engineering reports, talk with our designers, find out what others are thinking and experiencing in their lives. Each interaction has the potential for new input in ways I rarely anticipate. Just recently, I was chatting it up with one of our senior programmers, Jim "Murph" Murphy, a veteran of both Microsoft and Apple, and noticed the new Mac Mini on his desktop (Jim uses the Mini as a slave for the Jenkins Server he's building for Octave). What caught my eye was the Mini's color: a beautiful new dark gray—a fresh departure from traditional silver and much nicer than tired old black aluminum. Two minutes later I marched over to industrial designer Chet Roe's desk to chat about his sketches for the upcoming TSS DAC. Chet told me he was looking for something a bit special, a new direction in color choices than perhaps traditional silver and black aluminum. Bingo. I had a suggestion for him—one I wouldn't have had a half-hour earlier. Seeing the world through new eyes every day is what gets me up in the morning.