Monthly Archives: July 2009

Vegetarian Pot Luck

Drinks over dinner

Thumbnail: Tofu, salad, and tourtière
Thumbnail: Salad
Thumbnail: Candlelight
Thumbnail: Dessert
Thumbnail: Dance

A chance to try new recipes and share them with oth­ers. Also, a chance to learn some dance moves so you may not feel so out-of-place the next time you’re at a Jewish wed­ding. I wish I had start­ed tak­ing pic­tures soon­er instead of get­ting dis­tract­ed by all the food, because there was so much of it. We sat around and ate and con­versed until the sun went down, then ate some more.

I love meet­ing inter­est­ing peo­ple. People with some­thing to say (in beau­ti­ful accents), and new per­spec­tives to offer. People who are as curi­ous about you, as you them.

Wu Wei WordPress Theme

I’m offi­cial­ly announc­ing Wu Wei, a free, open-source, GPL-licensed WordPress theme I designed over the course of a few months.

I real­ly enjoy web design. The only prob­lem is that I when I’m sat­is­fied with a lay­out like this, I don’t feel the need to change it (aside from small tweaks), which means I don’t get a chance to come up with some­thing new.

So I decid­ed to cre­ate a WordPress theme for the pub­lic. That way I can con­tin­ue to flex my design mus­cles, and oth­er peo­ple can have the ben­e­fit of using it.

Wu Wei has been a labour of love. This is the theme I always want­ed to cre­ate — bold fonts, a clean look, with lots of con­trast. The dev­il is in the details, like the way every­thing aligns neat­ly to the grid.

With almost 2000 down­loads so far, there’s been some nice buzz:

Someone also sent me this e‑mail:

Hey Jeff, I love the theme. I was casu­al­ly brows­ing around for some­thing very clean and mod­ern look­ing — I saw the name “Wu Wei” and I down­loaded it imme­di­ate­ly. It turned out to be per­fect!

As a prac­tic­ing young taoist I fig­ured the name was per­fect.

Take it easy,
Justin

I love see­ing how dif­fer­ent peo­ple are using the theme, whether they’re blog­gers, come­di­ans, pho­tog­ra­phers, review­ers, or design com­pa­nies. You can check out the demo page here.

This theme is only the first of a tril­o­gy of WordPress themes I have planned, based on Taoist ideas. Wu Wei is ded­i­cat­ed to my Tai Chi teacher, Michael Babin. And since the con­cept of wu wei or “effort­less action” is impor­tant in inter­nal mar­tial arts like Tai Chi Chuan as well, I thought it was only fit­ting that he should have the hon­our of the first ded­i­ca­tion.

I Could Be Dead Right Now

That’s what I keep think­ing when I look at these pic­tures.

Accident 1

Accident 2

Accident 3

A few week­ends ago, Aaron invit­ed me to ride with him dur­ing an out-of-town cruise with his auto club. I ini­tial­ly accept­ed, until I found out that was the same day and time Frédéric and Misun were leav­ing Canada. So I had to turn Aaron down, since I did­n’t know when I’d see them again.

That was also the day and time that it hailed for about an hour — in late spring. And on tak­ing a turn, the hail made Aaron lose his trac­tion. Both him, and the per­son dri­ving behind him, spun out of con­trol. The per­son behind hit a guard rail. Aaron went into a ditch.

The impact on the rocks was on the pas­sen­ger side. Where I was going to be sit­ting. And it was strong enough to shat­ter the back wind­shield.

Thankfully, Aaron is alright, with the x‑rays show­ing that he only has tis­sue dam­age. I may not have been so lucky.