Photoshop article at SitePoint

I’ve been MIA through the holidays so expect a ridiculously long book post when I get back into things next week. In the meantime, an article I submitted to SitePoint has just been published (part 1 of 2)! Creating Web 2.0 Effects with Photoshop, Part 1, covers basic gradients, striped backgrounds, transparent layers, and glassy [...]

Farm meets web

“Community Supported Agriculture” (CSA) connect farmers with communities, enabling non-farmers to subscribe to boxes of produce and other farm products. After doing a few searches online for CSA farms, I came across Eatwell Farm, located in Dixon, CA (a few miles down the freeway from where I live). I was surprised and delighted to find [...]

Reading: To Buy or Not to Buy Organic

To Buy or Not to Buy Organic by Cindy Burke was a delight to read. She is very concise and tells you what you need to know; while providing some similar information as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, this book reads more like a friendly textbook and less like a memoir. I would read [...]

Reading: Vanilla, Hamish Macbeth, Organic, Alexander McCall Smith

Finished reading: Vanilla by Patricia Rain – All you ever wanted to know about the history and production of vanilla. While I typically like “food” books, this one was a little boring to me, honestly. I found it hard to follow the strange-sounding names and locations (a map of Mexico for context would have been [...]

The cost and benefits of homemade vs. store-bought chicken broth

While writing up yesterday’s post about eating out vs. making meals at home, I realized that I’d been making a lot of soup lately. For some of the recipes, I used store-bought chicken broth; for others, I made homemade chicken broth using chicken backs and necks that I had in the freezer from past chickens [...]

The cost of eating out vs. making meals

The Simple Dollar did a couple cost-comparison (and time-comparison, too!) studies a little while ago about making hamburgers at home vs. purchasing them at a fast-food place. While I’ve always generally “known” that making my own food is cheaper than eating out, I’ve never really bothered to break down the numbers. One of my friends, [...]

The Story of Stuff

Lots of people are blogging about this, but if you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend taking 20 minutes out of your day to watch The Story of Stuff. Updated 12/13 – Apparently I had the wrong link pasted in! Thanks for pointing it out, Aaron, the link’s been fixed!

December Review for Groundhog Day Resolutions

Hooray! It’s been a full “year” of Groundhog Day Resolutions. December is the month to wrap up and review the year-of-goals, then to relax and enjoy the holiday season while giving oneself nearly two months to mull over new goals for the next year’s Groundhog Day. In this post, I’ll talk not only about how [...]

Christmas traditions

I find it interesting to hear about other people’s holiday traditions. Maybe you do, too, so the rest of the post is about what Steve and I do when Christmas approaches! Annual Christmas Ornament One thing we’ve done every year (albeit unintentionally at first) is to pick out an ornament that represents the past year. [...]

Print Design: FBC Brochure

This is a project I completed several months ago, but it’s taken me a while to actually take pictures of the completed product! A couple years ago, I had created a simple tri-fold, two-color brochure for my church. This year, they asked me to put together a full-color, updated brochure based on a shorter, wider [...]