really its not just the young ones that are geared up and ready for this trip – i am too! although i did get to go back home to visit mom and gord for a few days in april, i am seriously looking forward to turning off my phone and powering off my laptop and disconnecting from all the stress and urban fury of living in a ‘big city’.

there is something very humbling and comforting about returning home, and i look forward to it with great anticipation. strangely i’m even looking forward to the drive out, even though it’ll take us 3 days to get there.

i remember vividly the trip my grandparents took me on when i was a kid, thru the rockies. we went with a big camper motorhome thing, and i recall riding above the drivers seat in the bunk, waving out the front window at on coming traffic. we stopped at the radium hot springs and just about every road side attraction along the way. i was in awe of the mountains, so awesomely huge. they made me feel like a little speck of dust who just happened to be floating thru, on my way to the ocean.

i’m happy that i’ll be able to share that same type of experience with mandy and the kids, none of whom have ever been thru the great canadian rockies before. i’m pretty sure we’ll be stopping quite alot for roadside view and picture ops.

and if we can, hopefully stop in calgary to see my sister, alyssa. the last time i saw her she was just a kid, maybe like 7 or so and now she’s all grown up! lol can’t wait to see her again and introduce her to mandy and the kids

so if all goes well, we’ll be leaving bright and early on saturday morning. sure makes these last couple of days at work draaaag….

another bit of a pain in the ass that any designer can tell you about is dealing with photoshop brushes. because of such a grand proliferation of folks out there crafting and making accessible via the web all sorts of great, interesting and must-have brushes out there, its uber easy to throw away a couple hours finding brushes, unzipping, putting in your presets folder, testing them out – and perhaps only to find that they’re not what you want. or even maybe they are cool, but its not easy to always remember what brushes look like by name. enter the ABRviewer: for mac, win, linux. this software will ease the pain of previewing all your photoshop brushes – quick, easy and free. just the way i like things…

Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here

oh god no! they’ve taken away my scrabulous!!! so apparently the two indian guys who set up scrabulous knew what was coming. despite the many petitions online and huge daily active user base, they were forced to close-up shop (on facebook at least – the original scrabulous site still works)

and so the hasbro/ea folks have whipped up their own version of the the classic ‘scrabble’ game and posted it up on facebook too. however, its only in beta and still has all sorts of little problems. i signed up, started a game and returned later to find this:

We’re working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!

so not only did they kill off the most popular facebook app and try to replace it with their own, theirs doesn’t even work! either that or they’re flooded with ex-scrabulites in a mass triple word score exodus and their servers just can’t handle the refugee blitz.

either way, it blows. anyone wanna play tetris?