I felt - what I thought initially was - an earthquake. The room briefly shuddered, and that was followed by a distant, but loud, groaning of metal against metal. With all of the high-rise construction going on around me, my second thought was a crane had collapsed.

In no hurry to see the carnage, I got ready for my day as I normally would. The metal against metal sound continued to reverberate i my head, and fears about what could have caused such an unnatural sound made me nauseous.

I plotted a path to our largest construction site in the neighborhood, and exited the South end of my building next to the Amtrak tracks - just what a woodchuck would… if he could. The exit was blocked by yellow tape with “Crime Scene” written on it - essentially blocking my hurried exit from the “crime scene.” I thought to myself: “Hmmm. Curious.” I chose another South-facing exit by the tracks, and captured the rest on video.

I met Peter at a web designer’s meetup. We struck up conversation about the merits of the new no-sleeping policy at the Austin public libraries, and debated whether the local Austin elevator workers’ union was, indeed, an evil empire.

I learned that he earned his BFA from Angelo State University (TX) in Studio Art with a painting and drawing emphasis. He has a good foundation in drawing (multiple styles and media), digital art, design, and animation. His preferred new media tools are Flash, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver.

New to the Austin market, he quickly picked up a gig designing Flash banner ads for a local company of a name I forget. Between the highlights, he works at the Austin Public Library, where he can be found doodling on his breaks. Sample doodles.

Time creeps at the ‘brary punctuated by an occasional patron flare up. Peter and a colleagues were summoned to 3rd floor non-fiction for a debriefing on a “special projects” assignment. The assignment: hazardous waste clean up localized to a single non-fiction aisle. A patron… a disenfranchised patron - angered at his disenfranchisement or possibly the new no-sleeping policy - doused the early 200s between Religion and Technology in a week’s worth of his own urine he had been saving in jars.

Peter one of the early arrivals on the scene was rewarded with rubber gloves and instructions to sort the good from the bad, the tainted from the spared. For its simple elegance his litmus test will carry forward to future library personnel. Like a practiced technician, he tells me that it’s all in the book’s stickiness.

We exchanged info. I thought his business card was clever. I have since made contact, and recruited him to help redesign the Yawp Media logo and mascot. We will soon be replacing the logo and mascot of my own ham-fisted design with Peter’s handy work.

Peter’s website: http://www.roamingground.com

The blog has passed its treadmill test. Now it’s ready for content. Incidentally, any blog posts prior to July 7th, 2008 are test posts, unrelated to the Yawp Blog’s theme. Linking to them from Google Reader will take you to the a “no posts matched” page on the Yawp Blog. From there just click the Home tab to see the latest blog posts.

Subscribers using readers other than Google’s will not encounter these test posts.

Next: an introduction to an up-and-coming Austin designer, Peter Kachtik (pronounced “caustic”). That is, once I corner him for an interview.