Springtime!

It’s springtime again. Yay! Finally! At long last!

This is the 4th spring at our “new” house, but it still surprises us every year how quickly the forrest turns from dull winter gray to a lush green. Every year I’ve promised my self that I would take some pictures during the transformation, just to remember how fast things change, and every year I’ve forgotten, or died halfway through. That is, every year untill this year!

Here is a “video” consisting of 13 images taken from our living room on various days in April.

As you can see, things happens really fast, almost within a week.

And the best part. This is our view from the living room, every day! And this video doesn’t even include the birds singing, or the smell of wet grass and earth on a cold spring morning. We are really fortunate to be living where we are.

New Design on piskeris.dk

Being the modern, hip and edgy 21st century family that we are, we of course have our own homepage! It’s located at piskeris.dk and is really nothing more than a collection of our photos and a seasonal wishlist now and then.

Over the last half year or so I’ve had an itch to do something about the layout of piskeris.dk. The last major overhaul was done in mid 2009 and I was never that pleased with the colour scheme of the page. However lack of *the* divine design idea combined with work, family-life, sanity hacking sessions and trying to stay fit just meant that the redesign never happened.

Untill now!
Continue reading New Design on piskeris.dk

Books Read in 2011

You know the drill. A list of the books I’ve read in 2011. Here we go:

  • Mark Pilgrim : HTML5: Up and Running
  • Dave Thomas (with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt) : Programming Ruby 1.9
  • Ken Follet : Giganternes Fald
  • Russ Olsen : Eloquent Ruby
  • Kasper Syhler : Patterson – Sort ko, hvid mælk
  • Henrik Marstal & Henriette Moos : Filtreringer
  • Someone at Apple : iOS Human Interface Guidelines
  • Bits and pieces of “Sam Ruby : Agile Web Development with Rails”
  • David Millar : Racing Through the Dark
  • Joe Conway & Aaron Hillegass : iOS Programming
  • Bits and pieces of “Erik M. Buck & Donald A. Yacktman : Cocoa Design Patterns”
  • Bill Bryson : At Home
  • Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris : The Fundamentals of Typography
  • Ben Elton : Meltdown

Ruby Ruby Ruby

I’ve started poking around with Ruby. Why?

  • Because I always like to learn something new
  • Because Ruby has been on my list for some time now
  • Because there was a book on sale (20$ for e-book and book…that’s a bargain!)
  • Because it’s the only programming language I know of, that has its own song (sorry!)

At work I spend most of my time burried in Java code and I’d like to try something else. I think it’s healthy to see if this really is the best, or if perhaps the grass is greener somewhere else. I mean, Java is a nice language but it feels heavy sometimes, or perhaps it’s the environment surrounding it that feels heavy. The fact that I’m mostly doing JEE related stuff probably doesn’t reduce the heaviness. JSR this and JSR that, loads of dependencies, build tools, deployment descriptors, web.xml, MANIFEST.MF and so on and so forth, not something I’d like to tinker with at home.
Continue reading Ruby Ruby Ruby

What I’m looking forward to in 2010 revisited

About a year ago I wrote a post called What I’m looking forward to in 2010 about – as you might’ve guessed – the things I was looking forward to in 2010.

As 2010 is now no more, I thought it would be fun to visit that post again to see how things turned out. So, walk with me on this short tour of 2010
Continue reading What I’m looking forward to in 2010 revisited

See The Stars They’re Shining Bright

Funny that. About a fortnight after I changed my theme I came across this fine article at webdesign.tutsplus.com on how to create a single page theme.

Granted. Their final result is much much prettier than mine, but the basic idea is the same, a page that starts at outer space and ends at the earth.

I’ve taken the liberty of using some of their ideas for tweaking my theme. Using the Photoshop brushes found here I’ve updated my stars. Furthermore the ending color for the gradient from space to heaven has been changed to a tad lighter blue (#b6f3fa if you’re interested). Finally I’ve thrown in a gradient on the grass as well.

Minor tweaks, but I think they make the page look better. The changes has been commited to github as well.