As I was beginning to fall into a creative rut, I stumbled on this article… Design Slumpbusting by Phil Renaud over at Fadtistic.net. I found the article  and tips for “Better Designing Through Effective Time Wasting” inspiring this morning. It gave me a swift kick in the rear, made me remember I’m not the only one who struggles at times. I’m going to give a few of these tips a try, see how they work for me. Close Dreamweaver for a bit (*gulp*), stop using Lorem Ipsum, install the Rendered Source Chart FireFox extension, and maybe finish some of the projects scattered around my desk.
I especially connected with the lack of sleep issue.

“Learn to know when to quit - you can’t design when you’re too tired. This isn’t sleepbusting. Some guys can work on four hours of sleep and still get a full day of work in, but those guys are not you…”

Lately I find when I work on a project past midnight, I spend more time dozing during the next day, not really gaining anything in the process. And I’ve been doing a lot of dozing lately. Right now, I need to get some more caffeine.

This BenQ shiny concept phone has me drooling, not exactly for a phone like that, but at the potentially cool things Apple could do with the iPod. I know Apple has filed for touch-screen patents… more than once, but I could see myself enjoying an iPod putting to use some of these features. Imagine your iPod having the ability to change its interface on the fly, essentially making the entire surface the screen for viewing video. That would be much easier on the eyes. There’s the Apple phone that has been headlining rumor sites for some time now. I could even see Widgets extended to the phone… giving you a nice interface for a calendar, weather, address book, notes, etc. I may actually start to use Dashboard then.

Of course, an iPod like that would probably cost the same as a MacBook, but it’s nice to dream anyway.