All too often I don’t get the chance to get out and really enjoy a holiday weekend, but this past weekend I seized each and everyday and there was no stopping it from flying by.

I started the weekend bright and early Saturday morning with a day trip with my wife, Shannon and a good friend, Sam to Pittsburgh to visit the National Aviary, stroll around downtown and to stop for a bite to eat at the world famous Primanti Brothers.  This was a great trip despite the heavy winds, grey skies and sporadic rain-fall.

Following the trip to the Aviary was a full afternoon picnic with Shannon at Voinovich Park on the Cleveland waterfront to enjoy what we could of the Cleveland National Air Show. A well packed lunch, a nice spot for a blanket, fantastic weather and good company made this day one for the books.  Let’s not forget, this was a three day weekend – so there was Monday to also account for.  Monday we met back up with Sam, who had just purchase a new camera and was eager to put it to the test so we went for another round of the Air Show. This time, for the whole day and through to the finale, something we opted to skip out on the day before.

All in all this was a great weekend spent in great places with great people.  Beyond the two cropped photos above, you can click the following links to view photos from the Aviary and National Air Show.

And Finally, an Update on the Site

I have slowly, but surely been putting effort towards finishing out the workings of this site over the past few weeks of its existence in this iteration.  However, it’s going to take some more time before I get a functioning copy of the ‘Work’ section up, and I’ve received a handful of requests asking to see some work samples and I wanted to let everyone know that my old portfolio site still exists here.  I will leave this old showcase up until the new one’s in working order, which, I promise, will be very soon!  Other upgrades will be lightbox views to all thumbnailed post imagery, lightboxed integration for the flickr feed on the right, and a few more social networking additions.

What many of these designers don’t realize is that they are doing their client a disservice. Users don’t come to the site or open the application to stare at a UI. They come with needs to find certain content or to complete a task. They have other things they’d rather be doing like walking their dog. They aren’t designers and into the details of every pixel. They could care less if the text has the letterpress effect, unless it hinders their experience.

http://www.getfinch.com/finch/entry/avoiding_the_uncanny_valley_of_interface_design/

I’ve been sitting on this for more than a month and finally got the chance to hang it in the home office this weekend. This is a close-up of a pencilling drawn by co-worker Dave Mottram that came about as a gift idea of my good friend Sam.  Made for one excellent and unpredictable birthday gift.

I’ve posted two shots of this in my flickr photostream if you’d like to see the rest of the image and more detail.

• Permanency.org (with help from colleague Sam Sherwood)
• CustomFresheners.com
• TradeShow2Go

So, here’s the offer to discount their already great pricing:

• If you choose Dreamhost’s one-year plan, you’ll get $15 off!
• If you choose Dreamhost’s two-year plan, you’ll get $100 off!

And here are the codes required to get these deals, they’re one time use, so once they’re used they’re gone. I’ll try and update the list as they expire.

• 280797155388
• 291575117978
• 427187952378
• 718464212255
• 837470091391

Just enter one of the 12-digit codes in the “Promo Code” field when you sign up at:

https://signup.dreamhost.com/