I enjoy lemon in my water and saw someone post about this months ago. I finally got around to trying to make these and it’s incredibly easy.

You take a lemon, slice into slices roughly a 1/4-1/3 of an inch thick. Take a muffin tin and put the lemon slices in each spot. Fill with water and then place in the freezer. When they’re all frozen take it out and pop them out. I found using a hot sponge along the bottom of the pan loosened them up enough to fall out. Then I placed them in a freezer bag.

Building a designer / client relationship from Design Council on Vimeo.

The past few months have been quite hectic. We decided we’d had enough of living in the middle of the state and moved back to the western side. I’m able to have a highway free commute which I love. We’re now closer to the parks we like to hike and bike at. All in all it was a good decision. The implementation should have been smooth but it got crazy with stitches for Craig, a few car related incidents, 3 loaner cars and getting to know a collision repair center very well. At some point I’ll post pics of our new place, preferably after the snow has receded.

I’ve been sorely neglecting my design work in favor of sleep and brain candy. Which I might add, I love Dexter. I’ve been focused on being re-inspired and making a point to get out and visit with others in the field. I’ve been attending the Hartford Build Guild meet-ups, as well as attending Drupal Camp Western Massachusetts in January. Along with all of that fun, Stephanie and I have been meeting up for coffee to give support and share knowledge. Steph has been a great source of books. Borders and Amazon have been enjoying my ordering. I picked up copies of CSS Mastery, Head First PHP & MySQL, Drupal’s Building Blocks, and lastly Objective C for Dummies. Of course I need to find a few spare weeks of my life to read these and implement what I learned.

I also checked out Lullabot’s, Drupalize.me site with training videos. I highly recommend their tutorials if you’re new to Drupal. I should be pro at this point, but I have yet to truly focus on a Drupal project without being distracted onto another project. Currently my primary focus is building a Lemonstand App eCommerce site for a client. It’s taking a bit of wrapping my head around their API, but it is going well. I’m looking forward to posting the link to the site in a week or so.

I’m hoping with the return of warmer weather to exercise more as well as get back to shooting photos. Is anyone living this hectic of a life the past few months?

I came across this while searching for the documentation on my PowerBook G4 which we are selling. A flood of memories come back for me when I saw this packet. In August 2001, I made the investment in a PowerMac G4 Tower (QuickSilver Edition) and it came with OS X 10.0 preloaded in dual boot mode. I fell in love with OS X. I used it as much as I could with the few apps I had that would run under it.

In October 2001, I went job hunting in the Fairfax County area of Virginia and stayed with family while sending out resumés. While down in the area, we were next to only the second Apple Store in the country. The store in Alexandria was the only one to open after the one in San Francisco. Craig and I drove over to the mall where it was located and checked it out. When we walked in they were handing these out for free. I couldn’t wait to get back to my family’s place to install the upgrade.

I kept this trend going for a while. Craig and I attended the release of Tiger at the Apple SOHO store. My friend got down there early to snag a spot in line. We drove down after work and Craig won a door prize of an Apple iPod Shuffle. Later when Danbury got an Apple Store we lined up for the release of Leopard. That’s as far as we went, now we just wait for our Apple or Amazon order to arrive. They certainly were fun to attend.

Another fun night at the Build Guild Hartford meet up. Through twitter contact @kerusdotorg I found out about the Build Guild meet ups. He and I had shared a mutual interest to have a local CT meet up for those in the web design field without feeling pressured to have an agenda. The Build Guild seemed to be a perfect fit. It’s an evening for those in the field to chat, vent and share stories. So far I’ve been very impressed by the people attending, there’s some very talented people doing great work in the state.

Hopefully this will continue and attract others to come share in the fun.

In May, while on vacationing in Maine, we caught an episode of Jimmy Fallon with The Black Keys. I loved their sound, made a note in my notebook and proceeded to forget about it. That is of course until about 2 weeks ago and I decided I needed some new music to listen to. This may be one of my favorite albums of 2010, and the last few years. I love the soulful blues rock combination. I bought their current album Brothers and will be going back to buy previous albums.

I introduced my sister-in-law to their music over Thanksgiving, she too fell in love with it. Then shared with me their video for Tighten Up (above), it’s fun to watch, if you don’t laugh you might need to pinch yourself.

Amazing! Found this via kottke.org as Jason said the build up is a bit long and the blow your mind crazy maneuvers begin at 3:00.

It comes with a bottle of lubricant, 3 different sanding pads, a polishing cream, a sealant and microfiber towel.

The driver side headlight of the CR-V was quite foggy. The passenger not as bad. After one application I was able to get the passenger side restored quite nicely. The driver side required a second treatment. It does buff the plastic down to a very smooth surface again. I’m curious to see how long it lasts and if I’ll need to do this again after the winter season. The part I liked the most with the RainX kit was it didn’t require a Dremel or power drill to apply the companies buffers to. Although I am now curious to see if those would have worked better.

Before:

After:

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

I can’t remember where I found out about Henry Jun Wah Lee’s incredibly time lapse photography, but ever since I’ve been mesmerized viewing the videos. The video above of the Perseid meteor shower and the Milky Way as seen from Joshua Tree. When we were in New Hampshire we were able to see the Milky Way from the Kancamagus Highway like I hadn’t seen it in a very long time. Everyone should have the opportunity to see the Milky Way like that.

The other video/time lapse I fell in love with is the Time Lapse Tour of Yosemite National Park. A place I would love to visit and hopefully will someday with my camera.

We spent the weekend, courtesy of friends at a beach rental in East Lyme/Niantic. It was a nice break from life and great times with friends. Our friend’s kids kept Craig busy wanting to play games and go exploring. While at the beach Dunkin Donuts flew their banner over head several times.

It was really peaceful to be in a private community where you can walk around, leave the house unlocked, everyone waves and says Hi, and people follow the speed limit. There was also something rejuvenating being near the water and having the expectations lowered significantly for two days. More photos on Flickr.

Then last weekend my iPhone stopped waking up. I have it in a dock each night while I sleep on my night stand. In the morning I turned on the phone, but got the black screen and the silver/white apple logo. I figured ok strange, guess it had a hiccup. I waited and made the doc was indeed getting power. It stayed on that screen for a minute and then went black. I tried a full reset holding down the power and home button, still would not go past the Apple logo.

Into the office I went and opted to restore. Of course last weekend iOS 4.0.1 had been released and iTunes was giving me that as my only option. I’m sure I could have forced it to grab the 3.1.3 ipsw file, but I was very tired and just wanted my phone working again. I clicked ok and waited a good hour while it got reset and it copied everything back over to it.

The Positive

I cringed at the thought my iPhone would again be slow, crashing and not fun to use again. To my pleasant surprise that has not been the case. It’s a tiny bit slow on certain things, but the iOS 4.0.1 update actually improved the speed of other items, and everything I wrote about in my previous post is no longer an issue. I’d like to say that will teach me for being an early adopter but I’ll still do it.

My iPhone 3G now has a second life and my imperative need for an iPhone 4 has been delayed a while longer.

Bryan and his dog Anna

Val and Autumn

Fun with cameras

At first it seemed to be working well. Then as the days went on I noticed it got slower and buggier. Craig pointed me to a post that said to reset it 3 times in a row, so I tried that. Slight improvement but only temporarily. I even tried reinstalling iOS 4, and still the issues persisted. This was the first time in owning an iPhone that I wanted to throw it across the room or through a window. Below are the issues I ran into.

Typing
The keys would be severely delayed and act as if they were sticking, making it extremely frustrating to work on the phone.

Maps
This became also completely unusable. The locate feature which worked excellent before, would now take upwards of 2 minutes to find me, and was off several times. The redraw on the maps would hang and sometimes never load.

Mail
Also very slow, when it checked mail in the background it would bring the entire phone to a crawl.

Safari
This was a first ever on my phone. I was loading a website in Safari and the entire phone crashed and reset.

iTunes
Anytime any process was running in the background, especially Mail, iTunes would skip and stutter through songs. It would also hang while trying to move to the next song, it would take a second or two audibly but then the artwork would not change for another 10 seconds and if I pressed the next button again it would completely hang.

All of these were enough for me to say mercy, and downgrade to 3.1.3. I found the .ipsw file from my back up and followed the instructions on Lifehacker.

I have successfully downgraded and restored from a back up I did two weeks ago. My apps all load quickly, no crashing, typing works again and Maps finds me every time and updates very fast. At some point in the future, I’ll upgrade to the iPhone 4.

Brilliant. (Found on Richard’s Notes)

While I’m not a huge kei$ha fan, I love the mash up of all the old Star Trek episodes.

The MicroCell is $149.00 as a single cost. It uses you’re existing minutes and hooks up to your internet connection which does not have to be an AT&T specific connection. We have Comcast and it’s hooked up via the cable modem. The setup does take about an hour for it to register and set up the MicroCell to be a tower in your home. It’s secured and only available to the numbers you program into it via the website. You can add up to 10 lines to be authorized. Only 4 can be on it at the same time though.

The Pros:

• We now have 5 bars of service everywhere in our home, even in the basement two levels down and in the parking lot
• We were able to fully get rid of a land line and save $80.00 a month

The Cons:

• Recently I’ve had a call get dropped
• We have a slight echo/delay on some calls
• We’ve also recently had static / air noise on calls, the other user doesn’t hear it but we do

Unbeknownst to us the spare bedroom at our rental had a taxidermied bear under it. Craig and I had been in the room several times before my sister in law arrived and didn’t notice it. Then when she arrived and we went to make the bed, there was silence, a gasp and a scream. Of course this was all happening at night and thus making the “not what you expected” factor rise a lot more.

Before we left Craig and Kerry took some fun pics. Kerry has been vegan since the start of the year, so it seemed perfect to have her reading her book, “Simply Vegan”.

Of all the reasons to come to Maine this is by far my favorite; biking the carriage trails of Acadia. The hills are deceiving and I’m in awe of people who just fly by me. Today we did a 9 mile loop with a stop at Jordan Pond House for some pop overs.

Route: We parked at Bubble Pond, headed up to the Jordan Pond loop, went by Jordan Pond House, then around the mountain, down the backside of Eagle Lake and then back up to the Bubbles parking area.

Observations along the way:

• I bike up hills at 3-4 mph
• Stopping for longer than a minute after mile 5 garnered much longer start ups
• 65 degree weather and cloudy is perfect for me for biking
• Pack a small point and shoot camera
• Get an extra battery pack for the iPhone
• Listening to the Crystal Method for most of the trip seriously kept me moving?

Accomplishments:

• First ride of the season, 9 miles
• Did not have to stop on the hills, just went slow and steady
• Did not stress about hills, but accepted them and chose to conquer them

We managed to time our ride perfectly again to bump into the horse and carriage teams leaving the stables with their passengers. Each group waved to us and said Hi.

As always I loved the ride, had a great time and wish I could do it every weekend. A slightly easier version would be nice everyday to get to work.

We had fun later in the trip where we seemed to be the only ones on the trail and we shot some video. Craig is going to be compiling it into something fun to watch and I’ll post when he does.

Kerry and I decided to explore Great Wass Island today. The weather was perfect and we wanted to get out of the house, as well as get some exercise. My inlaws and Kerry had gone to this island last year but I never made it. It definitely ranks up as one of my favorite trails to hike.

The trail included several varieties of terrain, from roots and dirt, to boardwalks and several large boulders. I love the trees through these island landscapes, they’re small and scraggly growing in directions clearly blown by the Atlantic wind. In the woods the temperature was perfect, we worked up a good sweat. Along the trail I managed to scare a red squirrel and a spruce grouse.

At the terminus of the trail we got an incredible view of the Atlantic Ocean. We had the whole beach to ourselves for quite a while.

The rocks were wonderfully sun baked and kept us warm as the wind picked up and made for a chilly but sunny lunch. We were able to keep with our vegan eating packing left overs. It was a great way to spend the afternoon. According to the LoseIt app, our 2.5 hour hike totaled 1100 calories burned.  We spent a total of 3.5 hours out on the island.

Onto tomorrow and more adventures!

Unlike last year we’ve had incredible weather. Almost everyday has been sunny with a light breeze and as I said before, gorgeous views. I’m incredibly grateful for that. We’ve spent a lot of time reading and brainstorming projects and future plans. We’ve made some delicious healthy meals and working on sun tans. We both managed to get decent burns after sitting out for 5 hours on one day.

We made a trip into Bar Harbor and enjoyed town life and lots of lobster. I visited my favorite store, Cool As A Moose and picked up some new Life Is Good swag. Today begins the second week and we’re off to do some biking and enjoy the outdoors.

Sitting out on the deck with Craig enjoying this gorgeous weather. We’re reading books, catching up on email and having our great philosophical conversations.

One of my favorite recipes yet from The Kind Diet is the Edamame and Sugar Snap Peas. The recipe is so easy to make and uses only olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, shallots and ume boshi plum vinegar.

My mother in-law has a beautiful Azalea bush at their home. An idea of how much “warmer” it is this year, two years ago when I took photos of this in bloom it was Mother’s Day. This year it is mid-to-end of April.

I took this photo around 6pm with the sun setting behind the hill and backlighting the flowers. I shot it with the Canon 50mm 1.8/f lense which I love for it’s wonderful depth of field.

My 2002 Honda CR-V rolled over 170,000 miles two weeks ago. I’m happy to say it’s still running very smoothly and the engine is still pretty quiet. I’m still glad I made the switch to Honda back in 1998 and haven’t looked back. There will still be another SAAB in my future, but I doubt there will be a time when we don’t own a Honda.

Onto the next 30,000 miles.

In my efforts to lose weight and get my health back, I opted for an impromptu hike nearby last weekend. We’ve tried to hike at Black Rock twice before but our timing wasn’t the best (frigid winds in the winter). I came armed with my map found at the CT DEP‘s site. We headed up the blue trail on the western side of the park.

As usual with CT, it starts off gradual for about 50 feet and then up! This is a deceiving “short” hike. The funniest part was on the way back down we passed several people in their 20-30′s who said, “good grief I feel old”. I’m guessing too many of us sit behind our desks and computers too much. Then there was one guy who was pretty lean and limber and was doing the loop, up and over the mountain and back down, he passed us 3 times. Pretty damn impressive.

I’ve kept up with eating vegan and exercising minimally 3 times a week. My total weight loss is 12 lbs so far. My short term goal is another 8 lbs. The next goal is 45 lbs from that point. The final goal is another 25 from there. I’m sure there will be plateaus and I’m preparing already to mix things up.