Having spent nearly a decade in the San Antonio/Austin area, no. I'd say only recently have San Antonio and Austin even felt connected. But Dallas and Houston are completely different worlds in my mind. It's nearly 5 hours from San Antonio to Dallas, with not much interesting in between.
Yeah but it’s a 77 minute flight. That’s one thing that always catches me off guard when I’m in an airport in Texas: the number of intra-state flights is massive. With pre-check and valet parking, you really can make it from door to door in about 2hrs.
This is certainly an extreme example, but I feel that most designers believe (and their management expects) in these sorts of design decision justifications. Designers need to sell their designs, and a large majority of the time there isn't enough actual thought to justify anything; it's just preference, or at the end of the day, there are lots of good enough solutions.
There is a significant problem in the design of performative work that provides little to no value. So much time is spent on "process" and "workshops" that yield nothing, yet design management rewards it. I've informally polled peers of designers, and the common view is that, depending on the designer, only 20-60% of what they do is of any actual value. I think the state of the design market reflects this. Designers need to engage in serious introspection and figure out which parts of their work are valuable and which are not. The industry has been discussing "proving our value" and "getting a seat at the table" for years. If we've been working on this for 15+ years but haven't achieved it, I think that shows something about the actual value design provides.
Source: I've worked as a product designer for 10+ years.
2) "You know I'm terrible with names/logos but yeah whatever I really don't care very much"
3) <Pause from days to weeks>
4) "Lawyers tell us that there is a trademark dispute/some other sort of problem with the name/logo"
5) "Huh, ok"
6) <Pause from days to weeks>
7) Go to step 1.
Then every now and again instead of step 1 you have the a branding workshop/brainstorming session/pitch from an agency, which is just step 1 on steroids.
In my state resorts have the legal right to allow / deny uphill travel, regardless of whether it's public land or not. This is for several reasons that are mostly related to safety:
- There's a large amount of people that skin up and hike here, enough to present crowding issues if it's allowed
- Grooming being done in the early morning when people want to start hiking, and it's hard to see hikers regardless of if they use lights or not
- Areas that are roped off from above can be closed for unstable snow with high avalanche risk, or may be subject to bombing operations (hand placed explosives and artillery to induce avalanches before they are caused by skiers)
Check your areas rules, many allow it under certain conditions like time of day, routes, lights, etc. It's a good idea to make friends with someone on the patrol team so you know which areas are safe (and contain good snow ;) )
I'm fairly certain the point of this page isn't to worry about these events. Knowing the type of things Neal builds (you should definitely explore his other stuff), it's likely just for fun, and an interesting way to present this information.
Outdoor activities
It started with rock climbing, but these days it's trail running, skiing, and mountain biking. I've always loved being outside and being active, so they were natural hobbies to pick up. I've chosen where I live so I can do this 365 days a year.
Piano
I can't actually get outside 365 days a year, because I need rest days. I also wanted a non-physical hobby to exercise my brain. I played drums when I was a kid and missed making music. I bought a digital piano and dabbled for 4 or 5 months then started taking weekly lessons. If you have any interest in music related hobbies, I'd highly recommend learning piano.
Cooking
This is normally more of a winter hobby for me, but I'll try and cook through a whole (or most) of a cookbook. It's interesting to really get into one cuisine or style of cooking for a while, vs. hoping all over the place every couple of weeks.
EPRI is a big one that sits between industry and academia and hires plenty of both to act as an R&D hub for industry.
The large RTO/ISOs (CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, PJM, ISO-NE, NYISO) run large regions of the grid and work to maintain the reliable operation of the grid, optimize the use of hundreds of generators every 5 minutes in automatic competitive auctions, and plan certain upgrades like transmission.
Consulting firms (too many to count) like EPE typically run simulations for anyone who needs it done
Software Vendors (GE, Siemens, Hitachi, Energy Exemplar...etc)
Utilities that are members of the RTO/ISOs (or independent as in the South east)
Renewables developers (Nextera, EDF, ENEL...etc) that try to get renewables built and then participate in the RTO/ISO markets.
This is just a section of the power industry as well. Good paying jobs, but a fair amount of red tape too depending on where you go. From a software perspective there's a lot of IT Enterprise work, a lot of programming that engineers do typically involves calling the APIs of commercial software and trying to analyze the resulting data. R&D work typically involves building prototypes. Enterprise software is typically Java, SQL, C#, JavaScript, or C++ depending on what it is. The engineer stuff is mostly in Python. R&D work is typically Python or Matlab.
Can you be more specific as to your background and skills?
Thanks this is a good place for me to start digging into. I have BS/MS in CS/HCI, but I've been working as a product designer for nearly a decade now. I'm planning on moving back towards the engineering side of things though and energy is one industry I'm interested in.
High per-person consumption (wealthy inhabitants). Consuming luxury goods, vacations, big cars or whatever.
And: high carbon intensity - activities that require relatively high input (like fossil fuels) per produced unit(s). For example factory using not-very-efficient process powered by mostly fossil energy.
