It's been a crazy month (or so) of work and nothing will snap you in the ass like a strong latte and and an awesome metal album. My best, most productive days are when I can squeeze in a latte (or 2) from my über favorite coffee joint, Blue Bottle Coffee, and blast this album in the earbuds 3+ times a day. Yesss. This is indeed one of those albums that will scare Phil or any other innocent, faint-hearted passerby, but it rocks my pants off. Lots of incredible musicianship, screaming, growling, high-pitched singing—everything a boy could ask for in this one.

I heard about this band a while back with their release Kezia from my old buddy Ryan but I didn't get into them at the time. But, yet again, Colby comes through in keeping me hip with the kids and got me hooked on this one. Thanks again Colby, high 5. Rock on folks...

I'm not doing much for work on the side these days because of this strange desire to "maintain sanity"— whatever that means right? But I do make an exception for very special people. One such project was fairly recently launched called Exposaroonie. It is a really awesome photo community/challenge site created by my wife and her pal Emily.

Don't let the caption give you any dirty ideas with my wife's site, capiche?

They are a couple of talented photographers and decided to collaborate and create this site on the premise of helping aspiring and experienced photographers alike with articles and interviews and with their weekly Exposaroonie Challenge, where you submit your photography based on a different theme every week and then the winner is voted on the following week. I did the design and back end of the site including the logo (which I think is pretty sweet) and the templates were a bit of a challenge because half of the site is run in Google Blogger and half of it on my own server. I personally think my design could be much better, but my limited knowledge of the Blogger template system made it tough, but the ladies love it and I'm sure it will evolve over time.

So go check the site out! Let me know what you think! And if you are into photography, get started with this week's challenge, 'Bad Habits'. Could be fun/gross/awesome! Fungrossawesome!

You might have noticed I rebooted, woohoo! I hear you asking, "Wait Chris, now your site looks exactly the same, what the dillio?" First of all, I don't think we're supposed to use the word 'dillio' anymore, and, as I mentioned, It's been busy! I added a few minor tweaks a couple of days ago, including the new fancy, 'Subscribe' button up on the left, I added pagination to the top of the page (it used to only be at the bottom, now you can actually see it!), and I added a few nice buttons to the bottom of each post. I recently re-designed the site just within the window of reboot-eligibility, so there! Voting is open through Thursday I believe (I know, great timing) so head on over and vote for me! Look for Ascend Visual at the bottom of the list somewhere...

Things are still a bit crazy 'round these parts and I thought things were letting up just a tad until last Friday...

Yep, that's our car. Me, the wife, and the kids made our way to Los Angeles last Friday and ran into a little hickup. Ashley had to go down for a business trip so we decided to make a weekend of it and visit with my mom down there. Everyone is OK except the Rav4—she's a little pissed. Other than that we had a pretty good time. We went bowling with my parents, hung out, etc.

Bowling!

Now we're back home, back to business, and after a rough weekend, decided to spoil myself by picking up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV so just as a warning, my language might be getting a little dirtier here in the coming weeks.

This year, for the first time ever, I'm participating in the May 1st Reboot. Basically the premise is that you take your site offline for a week (starting later today!) with a nice pink placeholder along the lines of this...

... and then the whole community 'reboots' simultaneously on May 1st with brand new sites. I might be sort of cheating as I just recently redesigned my site, so when I come back, not much will have changed. I'd like to say there might be some nice new tidbits here and there that I've been thinking of implementing, but I think I'm just too busy for it at the moment.

Either way, I'm excited! Some of the coolest web nerds in the world are involved in the project and I found out about it while I was in school a few years ago through a very talented designer/developer by the name of Paul Szypula, whom I believe is responsible for the Flash radness that is the site. It was founded (in part) by another designer whom I really admire, James Widegren, and my very own web-nerd-cool boss has an incredibly inspiring quote floating around on the May 1st site. Are you participating in the reboot? Show me some before and after baby! Don't miss me too much while I'm away...

So I've been a little quiet lately because things have been crazy insane at work and we just went on a week-long trip to Costa Rica.

This is what vacation looks like.

We had an awesome time! We did loads of fun stuff like hiking through the rain forest, hanging out at volcanoes, horse back riding, river rafting, hangin at the hot springs, etc., etc. My lady took some lovely photos—check out the Flickr set so see all of the shenanigans.

Things are still going to be crazy at work for a bit, but I'm going to start building up a fun snippet library on this site and I want to get it started in one of my next few posts. I've got a few cool MooTools Javascript classes that I've had in my pocket for a while and found some good repeat use for. So keep your eyes peeled nerds, and I will not let you down...