Snopocalypse in Coeur d’Alene

Well, we’ve had a doozy. Just got done digging out of over 30″ of white stuff here in Coeur d’Alene. While most people aren’t surprised that it snows here in North Idaho, the fact is, it doesn’t usually snow this much. In fact, it never has snowed this much. At least as far back as they have been keeping weather records for the area, which is 1881. The old record of 15″ set in 1955 was trounced by almost double that amount (official Cd’A depth was pegged at 25″ but most places even within city limits got more than that).

I do have to say that the saving grace in this storm is that it was cold and the snow was light and fluffy. So, while shoveling light, fluffy snow can be a challenge in itself (think eating peas with a butter knife), it is not as hard as shoveling wet snow. And I have to give a big shout out to my neighbors who pitched in shovels, backs, snow-blowers and plow-equipped ATV’s to help everyone shovel out each other’s driveways. Even with all the help, I pretty much missed a whole day of work shoveling. And I work from home!

So, I’m enjoying the effects of Advil now and resting up for another storm supposed to hit on Sunday that they say will bring possibly another 4-6″ of snow. Bring it on. What’s 6″? Heck, I’ll take 12″! I just hope I don’t have to shovel 30″ of snow in my lifetime again!

MyFonts Beta is Looking Good

I got a pleasant surprise when I went to MyFonts.com a couple of days ago and saw the new sneak peak at the beta version redesign. What I once thought was my little secret will now be completely out of the bag. No longer will other designers be put off by the almost amateurish appearance of the old site this is replacing. MyFonts was one of those sites whose functionality more than made up for its lack of design sophistication. But I always felt if there was any site that deserved a better site design, MyFonts was it. And now it has one. And it is several orders of magnitude in both the design as well as the functionality.

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Temporary Blog Design Changes

I’m having to temporarily change the theme of my blog because my last theme was doing some funky wrapping in Firefox and IE when you have custom Widgets applied. Even with the latest fix, I was still having the wrapping issues. So, for now, I’m using Brian Gardner’s very practical Revolution Code Blue 3.0 theme while I work on a new customized theme. I love what Brian and Jason Schuller are doing with Revolution2 and will give them some free press for little while. I’m also working on a new blog for Whitestone Design Werks that I hope to have up before the year is out as well. So, needless to say, I will be immersed.

Virtual Water Cooler Talk

Last Friday morning I was at the Coeur d’Alene Online Marketer’s Group monthly meetup at Calypso’s Coffee in downtown Cd’A enjoying a remote presentation by Matthew Ray Scott on “Virtual Business” (did I get everything?), and during the presentation Matthew mentioned that while there are many benefits to being able to work from home, that he still needed a virtual water cooler environment (yes, I know that I am violating one of Matthew’s recommendations to get rid of the word “virtual”, but for this story it applies). I had just been thinking about that very thing yesterday and realized that my combination of IM (iChat) and Twitter (Twitterific) sort of filled that need but I was trying to put my finger on what was missing that you receive from a real water cooler environment (besides cooler water).
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