I never, ever would have thought I would have a tooth extracted at age 41. For as long as I remember I have seen a dentist every six months, I have only had one tiny cavity in my life, and every checkup I have had the hygienist has commented on how healthy my teeth look. Certainly I owe a lot to my parents teaching me to brush and floss daily, giving me good genes and paying for braces.

As I mentioned previously, I have always loved bikes. The previous five years though I have ridden very little. I’m sure I rode my road bike less than 500 miles each year. However, this year has been a big cycling year for me…I have ridden over 2,000 miles! I even dusted off the neglected mountain bike and went for a night ride on it a few weeks ago. In addition, I was convinced by my fellow riders to try cyclocross.

This past Friday, almost 16 years to-the-day from our last time, we brought home a new puppy; a yellow English lab. We got her from Allison Hillius of Devonshire Labradors. After spending a couple of days with her we have named her Ellie (after a landslide vote from friends and family). She just turned seven weeks old today so the next couple of weeks will be quite tiring as she will need constant supervision and let out to go potty every two to three hours.

Today there is no shortage of content to read. Even though I read at least two hours every day I feel like I can’t keep up with my reading interests. Two hours is barely enough time to read my RSS feeds let alone any content I push off into Instapaper. Reading list (traditional books/ebooks): The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff Beautiful Architecture by Diomidis Spinellis Growing Software by Louis Testa Keeping it Straight by Patrick Rhone Do the Work by Steven Pressfield Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana Programming Ruby 1.

Instead of working on My Everyday Things project last night I spent over two hours captivated by slide decks from Note & Point. That small diversion led me to rethink the font I was using on this site…and once I started thinking about fonts it was all over. After hours and hours (and hours) of dinking around I decided to try Google’s web fonts versus me hosting them. We’ll see how that goes…it slightly goes against the simplicity that I am after with this site, but I still feel compelled to try.

The basic idea is this…at least once a week I will post a photo of something I interact with on an every day basis. Along with the photo I will include what that thing means to me and/or why it is important. I’m sure this isn’t a unique project but I think it will be a wonderful exercise to focus my photography and writing passions. It will also expose my life in new ways.

Surprisingly, I was in Aperture a bit tonight. I was migrating last month’s photos from my MacBook Pro to our iMac (probably time for another photo workflow post) when I randomly thought about a photo trip Denise and I took back in 2002. About 12-15 of us from the Intel Arizona Photography Club (or something like that) took a trip in Northern Arizona. In two days we shot at Painted Desert, Canyon de Chelly, Glen Canyon, Antelope Canyon, and Monument Valley.

I am like any other technologist (ok, geek) out there…I love tinkering with new stuff1. For the most part I wouldn’t change this about me; it generates intense passion in my daily life as well as serving me well in my career. However, there are certainly pitfalls I inevitably fall into time and time again. The most prevalent is my constant tinkering with my online presence. A Brief History of My Online Life Since 1995 I have had some sort of website.

We have lived in our house for over five years now and yet we still do not have a proper living room. Of course, we have a living room, but not one that entices people to sit down and relax. This is horribly unfortunate since the room has a huge picture window that has a fabulous view of the Coast Range; one of the two main selling points of the house (huge kitchen was another one).

We are still working on adding a bunch more features to our web site, but we accomplished enough over the last few days to release a set of changes to celebrate the new year! Yeah, while you were hooping it up last night we were working on the site, so if you feel sorry for us please send wine. Most of the work was behind-the-scenes so you, the reader, will never know why in the world so many hours was spent on these tasks.

For those that have not heard, this week we say good-bye to Arizona—our home of nine years! While we will greatly miss our friends here in Arizona and our many favorite destinations of the beautiful Southwest…we are extremely excite about our next chapter (or better yet, book) of the Northwest. To be honest, our decision to move out of state happened rather quickly (about two months) and is rather complex. Fortunately we work for Intel so our jobs will remain the same (there is a several Intel campuses within 30 minutes of our house in Forest Grove), but it was the need for personal changes that drove the decision.