I shot some CD cover and website photos for local musician Kae Darko. I haven’t heard his music yet, but I’m looking forward to the CD that these photos will be used in. Apparently his style is “alternative hip hop,” which uses a live band for backing. He also sings and plays guitar too.

Kae requested a spotlight style of lighting. That’s right down my alley, so I was happy to oblige. I tried to recreate a kind of smokey blues bar atmosphere in these shots. I’m very happy with how they turned out. These are some of my favorites from the shoot.

I got a couple copies of this book in the mail yesterday:

The book looks great. Dealing with the College of Midwives was a pleasure too. They’re a classy organization, and were very professional in all aspects of our discussions regarding this book cover. I wish them all the best with the book sales.

Edit: I just noticed the book cover matches my new blog color scheme exactly. It was meant to be!

I found this great tool for web designers whilst on my CSS learning binge. It’s a color scheme designer. Just punch in a hexadecimal color figure and it will tell you the complimentary and contrasting colors. It will even let you preview what the scheme will look like to people with various types of colorblindness. The only problem is that I can’t get it to suggest the colors I chose for my own website.

I’ll just link it here so I can find it easily in the future.

Color Scheme Generator

Riding bikes is fun. I bought a bike rack from Canadian Tire, and brought my bike home from Dad’s place. It was very dusty, and there was no air at all in the tires. I don’t think I’ve ridden it in at least 2 years. The last time I went riding seriously, I nearly killed myself because the clutch in the bottom bracket, which allows the pedals to freewheel backwards and the bike to roll forwards without turning the pedals, seized up and the pedals were no longer connected to the wheel that turns the chain. So, when I put a lot of force into trying to go up a hill, they just spun with no resistance. That was a nasty surprise that resulted in some severe bruising and a lot of humiliation.

After that, I pumped a ton of oil into the bottom bracket to free it up. Last night I put some air into the tires and tried it out. It seems to be fine. I didn’t put a ton of force on it, but so far it seems safe. I went for a longer than expected ride last night. I rode through Gage Park, then back along Cumberland. It was so beautiful out last night that I didn’t want to come home. Plus, the exercise makes my lungs open up and my allergy symptoms disappear. I’m going to try to ride more often now, as long as the weather is good.

As a side note, the neighbour dude cleared away the pile of crap after a few of us confronted him in the parking lot. He was on the phone to the contractor who moved the pile within an hour. There’s still a 1cm cake of dirt over everything. Hopefully we can get him to powerwash the lot too.

Our neighbour has seen fit to dump a huge pile of crap on our parking lot. It basically comes from underneath his giant, code-violating balcony that is doing a dangerous-looking lean over our parking lot already. He didn’t ask permission, didn’t get a permit to excavate, he just had a bobcat driver dig up all this dirt and garbage and dump it in our lot. It’s been there for a week already, and there’s no sign of it moving. The composition of this pile seems to be largely mud, but there is a high percentage of hazardous materials in there too. There’s broken shards of wood, metal and glass, not to mention rusty nails and food waste. I’m worried about some kids playing in our lot getting cut or injured.

We’ve made some calls to the city about the problem, as well as to the contractor who dumped the stuff there, but there hasn’t been any improvement. If it’s not gone by tomorrow we’ll be calling the police I guess. Right now we’re not feeling too charitable. We might just report his dangerous looking balcony and have it torn down too.