Becca with Imogen Adare Brady, January 2, 2010

It’s a new year and I want to try to take a photo a day. Basically just something that can reflect what happened that day.

We’ll see how long this lasts, but there are a couple photos on our Flickr page already.

I had some Christmas money and I was trying to decide between getting a new apron or comic books. This may not seem like a big deal to most, but for me it was an excruciatingly difficult decision.

So I decided to make the decision easier by making my own apron with some IKEA fabric I bought awhile ago.

I used the vintage apron pattern from Amy Karol’s book Bend-the-Rules Sewing. The pattern was really easy to follow but I did run into a few technical snafus, but it turned out alright. I am going to make another one with the fabric I was too scared to use the first time around.

Everyone knows that when you start commuting to work in a new city you make a web app to assist in planning travel your travel to and from said city, so when I began commuting to Chicago last Thursday I put my nose to the grindstone and produced this little beauty.

I know what you’re thinking: so what? A little website that helps a very small handful of people who take the BNSF Metra between Naperville and Chicago, all of whom will probably never know it exists? And you’re right: it really is just only for me but what makes it interesting in my eyes is how it works. Using some fancy techniques from this excerpt by Jonathan Stark I was able to assemble a little page that caches itself to your iPhone and will load from the cache without the need for cellular, 3G or WiFi connectivity and persists after reboots or resets. This is perfect because my building, despite having a large AT&T office within its walls, gets very poor AT&T network connectivity.

Oh and in the future if I ever need to change things or add features a little javascript is in place to check for any changes on the network and download anything that needs to be updated. So if you take the train between Naperville and Chicago, go ahead and add this little site to your home screen. I even made an icon from the train symbol in Google Maps!

BNSF Naperville Train Schedule (Optimized for an iPhone, but should work in any browser.)

Update: It looks like I neglected a couple of details. Under the “Day” tab you’ll find the Naperville to Chicago train schedule and under the “Night” tab is the reverse trip. The times are also ranked according to travel time with green representing 30-40 minutes, yellow representing 40-50 minutes and red representing over 50 minutes. In other words, greens are express trains and the others aren’t. I’d like to ultimately turn this into a less specific tool and accommodate additional data and maybe even turn it into a free little app but I need to do a little more research first.

October 1st was my mother-in-law Kathie’s birthday. Having a few cross stitches under my belt, I felt this was a good opportunity to make a cross stitch as a gift. Besides, everything I’ve done up until now has been entirely for me.

After a little deliberation, Josh and I decided on making a cupcake—because really, who doesn’t want a cross stitch of a cupcake?

You can take a look at some more photos of the design on our Flickr photostream!

UPDATE: You can now snag the pattern from our Etsy store!

I’ve been noodling around with some new designs for the site and in doing so I became increasingly annoyed that the cycloptopus (as he exists now) isn’t the most anatomically correct—as far as cephalopods are concerned anyway. I’m going to continue to obsess over it, as I am prone to do, but I decided to share up a desktop picture for those who might be inclined to adorn their computer with this cryptozoological wonder.

The desktop image comes in three sizes: 1920 x 1200, 1280 x 800 and 1024 x 768 and can be downloaded here.