Here’s an awesome ad I came across for Pearl Jam/ iTunes gift card.

Last Friday Colin and I headed up to tempt the Grouse Grind. I knew it would be a pretty steep hike, but I had no clue that it was going to be that steep of a climb. The mid section of the climb seem crazy steep! I think we ended up finishing in and around 45 minutes, but I can’t be for certain because Colin forgot to restart his watch from the 1/4 way mark to the 1/2 way mark. It was too foggy at the top to see any sort of view of Vancouver, but once on our way back down in the gondola, the skyline was pretty amazing.

Here’s a look at the elevation:

I think next time I’d like to get one of the Grouse Grind cards that you start just outside the trail and swipe once you are at the top.

Here are the photos I took with my iPhone:

For Father’s Day Noah and Chantelle bought me The Complete Joy of Homebrewing and The Home Brewer’s Companion. I’m almost done the first book and I already love it. It starts off with a short history and a quick intro to extract brewing. The Intermediate brewing section I found mostly useful since that’s about where I am with homebrewing. The info about different grains & hops and what results come from each are very helpful. The book has a bunch of recipes and information about creating your own recipes, which is where all the fun starts. The later sections of the book go into more ‘advanced techniques’ but I didn’t really get much out of that as I haven’t gotten into mashing and all that yet. I’m not sure if I will as it seems like quite the process.

The only thing that I started to get annoyed with is the amount of times the books says ‘relax, have a homebrew’. Ok, I get it.. just stop repeating yourself!

Take it for a read if you are thinking about brewing your own beer, or have at any time before. I highly recommend it.

I came across Adobe BrowserLab the other day and instantly fell in love with it. Currently they are offering the service for free, but mention that by April 2012 they may start to charge for it.. whether that be a monthly or yearly fee. I hope that they continue to offer it for free! Right now you can only view web urls, but I’d like a feature to test a file locally instead of just a live url.

Here are a list of all the features.

Landing page:

Browser Options:

Multiple Browser Onion Skinning:

Multiple Browser:

As a dad its a great show to have on for my son Noah to learn how to spell and pronounce words. As someone who loves typography it’s a great show to see how the designers turn the letters into the characters. The A in Shark becomes the shark fin!

It’s one of those things when you see it you go.. why didn’t I think of that. Such an amazing idea.

Anywho.. the show is on PBS, check it out.

The plan from the start was to have a large Bruce the Shark as the main focus and work from that. I kinda wanted a kids shark info site so I worked in a quick fact of the day and then some shark text at the bottom for some of the older kids. I don’t know how well the ‘Shark Bites’ text stuff works, but I felt like it needed some sort of text at the bottom. Maybe I’ll bump it up and shorten it up a little to aim for 1 age group?

Anyways, I’m happy with it. Until the next one..

Overall I wanted to design something with plenty of whitespace and super easy to read. The addition of photography elements helped to add some more weight to the page and liven things up a bit.

We stopped at a scenic viewpoint on the way home and I planned on taking a series of photos for maybe a triptych for above our couch.. but it turns out the settings on my camera changed to the shutter priority setting and all my photos were blown out and un useable. Oh well.. I guess it just means I’ll have to drive up there again for some more scenic photos.

The photo above is the only photo that I could salvage and looked way better in Black & White. Something about seeing mountain photos in Black & White makes it way better in my mind.