Theo has been kicking along without a hitch since he arrived. Eats, sleeps and poops as he’s supposed to, and he’s even started lifting his head up for a look around and has the strength to roll himself over. Dane is stoked to be a big brother, despite being a bit bored with Theo sleeping all the time. When he’s not sleeping, Theo tends to have a bemused look on his face as if he’s trying to work out how he ended up here.

The procession of family visitors continued this weekend with Grandma and Sharad making it down despite an epic trip involving broken-down cars and hospital visits on the way…

After the first attempt at taking Dane’s training wheels off his bike (resulting in him throwing his helmet in the bushes and kicking his “stupid bike”), we had success when he wanted to impress my mum and dad who were down to visit. Once he got the hang of it he was off and away, and spent the entire weekend zooming around the roads at the caravan park mum and dad were staying in at Bawley. My first advice to Dane was along the lines of “go too fast and you’ll have a big, nasty crash”, which he completely ignored at the first opportunity to zoom down a hill on our gravel driveway. He absolutely smashed himself, jack-knifing the front wheel and going over the handlebars, face-planting straight into the dirt. I was ready to call the ambulance when I saw it happen, but after a few brief tears he brushed himself off and rode his bike about 500m back to the house. I told him chicks dig scars, so he was pretty proud of the graze on his knee after that…

It’s not often you get to be part of a historic moment when designing a website, but an ABC doco crew has been on the ship searching for the HMAS Sydney (Which sunk in Australia’s worst ever naval disaster). They’ve just found the German raider that sunk her (The Kormoran), so the likelihood of also finding the Sydney is quite high.

We luckily got the site live just in time! http://www.abc.net.au/tv/hmassydney/

Full story in the SMH.

… and 24 hours later they’ve found the HMAS Sydney itself.

I stumbled across this description of a panel discussion at the South by South West conference:

“Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts
The core dilemma for talented designers in any field is this: If you strive for greatness in your design, you will meet resistance; if you strive to avoid resistance, you can’t do great design. Different is scary. Great design has to fight with the idea that many see “better” as meaning “more of the same”. The better your work and the higher your standards, the more you’ll have to fight against the urge to stay within the warm, safe confines of mediocrity.”

Sometimes it seems I have every second client say “We want to be like Apple”, to which my standard response is “Do you have the a) the budget, and b) the guts?”.

A good friend of mine is a very senior designer at Apple and it sounds like he has a mini nervous breakdown on every project he works on - and that’s before he has to deal with Steve Jobs in person. Here’s a glimpse inside Apple’s design process from BusinessWeek.

Nice overview of how Apple’s design has developed over 30 years…

View Full Size