It's funny because it's true

While I am an industrial designer and dabble in graphic design and other such creative endevours, long before that I used to be a big lab geek (in applied biochemistry -- it's a weird mix of backgrounds, I agree).

I found Ph.D. comics through a friend of mine (hi Shona!) who's a grad student. This one strikes me as funny because it's true (click to see the larger original):



(I particularly like the little floating fume skulls). My hat's off to Jorge Cham for capturing this and many other academia life moments in his comic.

Font-loving

I get regular updates from Veer about their various product offerings. (While I like their design-geek merchandise, unfortunately their shipping costs to Canada are rather prohibitive to me actually ordering anything).

In any event, I get updated about their fonts, and each and every time I see their font selection, I'm always instantly in love with anything by Alejandro Paul. I think it has to do with the beautiful ligatures in his script fonts -- exampled by the "lf" of "Hybrid golf nights" and the double-ff in "My Affair" below.



I'm trying to justify the need to purchase these beautiful fonts ($395 for 5 typefaces), but have yet to find a project that needs them...

Bike riding with the wee one

We plan on spending our day today doing a bit of biking, since in Ottawa, the National Capital Commission has Sunday Bike Days, where the area's parkways are closed to motorized traffic.

As a means of introducing our son to the joys of biking, we bought a WeeRide bike seat (retails for about $80-$90 CAD).



We specifically sought out one of these seats since it means that Jack can ride where Eric can mostly keep an eye on him (as opposed to the regular kid's bike seat where he'd have the lovely view of Eric's back the whole time).




Interesting bit about the WeeRide seat is that it won the Canadian Manning Award for Innovation back in 2002 and was invented by an Ottawa-native.

The downside to the WeeRide is that it doesn't fit on a small-framed bike like I ride (but I have an exceptionally small bike for my 5' tall self). However, even on Eric's mountain-bike it's a tight fit. It also requires a slight alteration to the pedal stroke and cycling position since you have to widen your legs out to accommodate your passenger. Overall though, it's been a really great summer purchase since we can all enjoy a bike ride together! (And it makes for some nice father-son photo ops.)



Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there!

Alphabet soup

I bookmarked this video a while back (found originally via drawn.ca).

I have a love for beautiful scripty fonts and I love how effortlessly the elder Wouters seems to write his letters. Of course, the younger Wouters' lettering is oozing with charm and appeal :)

Summer sale

We're having a summer sale on our paper-inlay necklaces and pendants, and this includes the Brazilian marbled paper and Nepalese paper pendants that were just added to the store:






If you've subscribed to our newsletter, then this is old news -- newsletter subscribers are always the first ones to find out about our sales. We send out a newsletter about once a month and each one has a coupon code that you can use for extra savings (even during sales like this one). It's pretty painless really :)

Cheap Eats Ottawa, revisited

A few months ago, I wrote about Cheap Eats Ottawa. Since then, we did manage to try all the three restaurants that I had mentioned.



The Culinary Conspiracy was a little disappointing. To be fair, we did order take-out that required re-heating once we got home. I had a salmon dish and Eric had a stuffed chicken dish. For the price, I think we would have been better off ordering something that was heated for us, rather than have something mediocre. (I think they were something like $13 a dish, plus sides). On the up side though, their desserts were very good -- we sampled the brownie and a piece of baklava. Thumbs up to those.

The Blackburn Arms is a pub in Blackburn Hamlet; a 5-10 minute drive from our place. It's become our new favorite pub and we've been there three times in the last three months. I highly recommend the fish and chips and their burger is excellent. It's a nice local pub that has that homey sort of feel. We brought Jack with us once and he was quite happy to be in a pub with all its exciting attractions, like chairs! and lights! and beer signs! ;)

As for Oh Basil, (we went to their location in Orleans), that was again an "okay" experience, but probably not good enough for us to go again. For pho, I would rather make the trek to Chinatown. The prices were reasonable at least.

We've also used the Cheap Eats book to find Rangoli. Now that is a good, plentiful and tasty cheap eat. I believe they may serve the best butter chicken we've ever tasted. We went there for the first time with our good friends Peter and Julie and it was excellent -- especially when you get a lot of different curries and dishes to share and try. Yesterday, we got take-out from Rangoli, and for $4.99 you can get a big chicken curry. I splurged the extra $1.49 for naan. Eric went for the chicken korma ($7.99) -- it came with the korma, an extra curry, and naan.

So good. So yeah, if you're in the East end of Ottawa, I so highly recommend it. And, if you're in Ottawa, or visiting, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Cheap Eats, for some, duh.. cheap eating.

Cool DIY pinhole cameras

I *think* I originally saw this on drawn.ca. (?)
Corbis (a source for images of all sorts) has a fun little site where you can download .pdfs of readymech pinhole cameras that you can make yourself. FOR FREE! Readymechs are *free* flatpack toys that you can download, print and build using a standard letter-sized page.



The downloads give you a full list of required materials (which includes an empty film canister and how to open one), and then you too can make your own pinhole camera.

Check out the site to see some of the images taken with a pinhole camera. I've always loved these simple cameras and how you can take an ordinary scene and produce these wonderfully surreal images with a box, a small hole and some film.

I'm looking forward to the day when our son is old enough to try out this sort of fun stuff with him.