Last night I discovered that my friend Mathew has a blog, and I mentioned that he should update it. So this morning I found that he posted about the 50-100-50 challenge, which I hadn’t heard of. The idea is that you post 50 entries with at least 100 words over 50 days.

Now, even though April has been a particularly good month for my blog, I am terrible at updating it. So maybe I should also take this challenge. And come to think of it, most of my friends should too – they all suck at updating (save one or two).

We went to the dog beach again yesterday. Leigh and Sammy (Joe’s girlfriend) joined us. Joe didn’t run around as much as he did last time, but I think we all still had fun. Steve buried Sammy in the sand – she just sat there and let him do it like a good little doggy. Here’s the entire photo set.

Browsing around on the web lately I’ve noticed what may possibly be an up and coming trend. I found several sites incorporating wood grain, and several others going after a real-world texture style.

Are we looking at the end of the soft, bulbous shapes and gradients of web2.0? Will the next generation of web sites go for the opposite approach, with textures that look so real you want to reach out and touch them?

Here are the sites I found with wood grain:

And here are the sites with other “real world” textures:

I was taking a new profile picture of myself and noticed that it reminded me a lot of Tina Fey. I called Steve over to confirm, and he agreed. My face resembles a cross between Tina Fey and Maggie Gyllenhaal. What do you think? Maybe it’s just the hair and glasses.

A few items of extraordinary cuteness. The yellow chick is for Nicci

I don’t know how long this site has been down, but I’m not going to keep checking back to find out. I was surfing the web when I came across it and I don’t know what the site is about, and I certainly can’t tell by this temporary page. And that’s one reason you shouldn’t take this approach.

How would I solve this problem? A simple sentence or paragraph telling the user what your site about would be much more helpful. You shouldn’t assume that they know. As is I can see they sell something, but who knows what. Ginger roots? Ginger candies? Ginger cookies? I’m not compelled to check back because I don’t know what they sell.

One other thing I might suggest is a temporary email list. “Sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re taking orders again!” I love ginger, I would have signed up because I’m curious about their goods. And it would have been a simple item to include, there are plenty of sites that offer mailing list management (to list a few Campaign Monitor, MailBuild, Breeze ).

Now if this page is only up for a day or two, then maybe it’s ok. But I don’t see the harm in including my suggestions above.

On the photo safari from April 5th we wandered through Chinatown and happened upon this kite store. I don’t know why, but I just love kites. Maybe because they’re so colorful and usually have neat tails. Anyway, this photo demonstrates how crazy the store was. You couldn’t walk through without hitting your head on a few kites here and there. It was so overwhelming it was hard to get a good picture (that’s my excuse anyway ). A wide angle lens would have worked really well.

Two weeks ago (April 5th) I went on a photo safari with two friends. We met up at Union Square, which just happened to be the location for the Human Rights Torch Relay protest. We walked around a bit and took some pictures, read the material, and signed our names in protest.

Saturday, well actually the last three days, were extremely and uncharacteristically warm here in San Francisco. We were going to ride the motorcycles with our friend, Jordy, but Steve’s bike wouldn’t start. After failing to get the bike running (I won’t go into details here), we decided that a trip to the park or beach would suffice.

I half expected it to still be a little chilly at the ocean, but it wasn’t. The day was truly a warm one. We went to Fort Funston, a beach that allows dogs. The parking lot was full and we had a long walk to the beach itself, which was probably about 100 feet down a sandy cliff.

As soon as we reached the bottom Joe took off running after all the dogs. It was like dog heaven, there were so many running around, splashing in the water, chasing each other. And Joe was running! Yes, actually running (this is also extremely rare)!

We settled down and hung out for a while. Surprisingly Joe just did whatever we did. If we were up and moving, he was running, if we sat on the blanket, he was laying next to it. After a while he made friends with a chocolate lab that kept him chasing after her. Joe is sitting in most of the pictures because I failed to take the camera out soon enough. But you can see how dirty he got while having tons of fun. (Here’s the photoset)

When we were all done we had to hike back up that cliff, which was not easy. You can kind of see it in the background of this picture (I added a note). Joe was so tired from it all that when he reached the top he laid down to rest for a while, but we kept moving. He went about 10 more feet then laid down again. He was so pooped! What a fun day