This summer, I am interning at Stamen, a small design studio in San Francisco. You may remember Stamen from awesome projects such as Cabspotting, Mappr, or In The News, which was featured in the first issue of Vectors. Anyhow, now seems like a good time to talk a little bit about how its all going.

Its going pretty awesome. Last night, we attended the Digg v3 launch party where it was announced that Stamen has been working on creating some real-time data visualizations for the new version of Digg. One of these visualizations is something that I made and it was shown at the party last night. Today, there is a picture of it up on flickr that has already been viewed more than 7000 times! So that's pretty thrilling.

Also, over at Geek Entertainment TV, there is an episode posted with interviews from last night with Mike and Eric from Stamen and Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, who refers to my visualization as "digg spy on crack".

So yea... digg spy on crack is going to be released sometime later this summer so I'm pretty excited to have something I'm working on get that kind of exposure (Digg gets around 800,000 unique visitors every day). Its really been an amazing experience getting to work on something like closely with the guys at Stamen who are really just the raddest.

Its been a very Flash-intensive summer so far and I've learned a whole lot of stuff already. I'm writing proper Actionscript 2.0 classes and I'm using Eclipse as my IDE. Yes, Eclipse, the free open source Java IDE. But some industrious folks have gone and made a plugin that colors and hints your actionscript! I will never write a line of actionscript in the abominable Flash development environment again. Of course, I still have to build the .swf there, but not for long. MTASC is an open source compiler you can use to build .swf's without ever touching Macromedia product! Shawn here has already got it working on his Mac and I'm gonna make sure and sort that out for my computer before the summer is over.

Oh... I also have a flickr set from the party last night

Damn Aaron - that sounds hottt! You're this productive, and it's only June?

Are you working on any Torrent Raiding amidst all this Eclipse madness? Sounds like overlapping skills.

yea i'm pretty busy here. that's just one of the two projects i'm working on this summer. haven't had much time for torrent raiding, but yea... both of my projects here have some overlap with TR that will certainly have a measurable impact on its development.