“I See Snow”

That’s what PJ said while we were on a photo safari around the Salt River in central Phoenix today. I thought she was just seeing clouds, but after looking through binoculars, I saw she was right.

A couple of days after some nasty winter storms blew through Arizona, Four Peaks east of Phoenix do indeed have snow on them. Despite living in the warm desert, we’ve got snow on the mountains within eyesight of downtown Phoenix.

Also just a couple of days after the storms, as you might notice from this photo, we’ve got our crappy air back.

Can’t have everything, I suppose.

New year, new site

I made one resolution for this year, and one resolution only. I will take at least one photo a day and post it on the web.

To that end, I now have a new blog called Steve’s Daily Pics. Three days in to the new year, and I haven’t missed a day yet. Just 362 to go.

Why am I doing this? Mostly, it’s an exercise for me to get used to my camera and get used to taking a more critical look at the world. There’s always something interesting going on. Time I actually took the time to see it.

As Neil Innes once said, “Ladies and gentleman, I’ve suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”

Goodbye 2009. Goodbye Sherwood Web Design.

A few years ago, I fancied myself a freelance web designer. After all, I’ve been designing websites since 1996 or so, back in the days before the Mosaic browser could even support graphics.

Remember Mosaic? Pre-graphical internet? Lynx?

No?

Get off my lawn.

Then along came Flash and CMS and all kinds of other things that I simply didn’t keep up with.

I still do web design work. In fact, that’s one of my main duties at the job that pays the bills. But, I don’t freelance so much anymore. I do take care of websites for friends, but that’s about it.

Many years ago, I worked under the name Simplicity Web Design because I kept my designs simple. Simple to navigate. Simple to maintain. Someone else registered the name, so I decided to find another. The inspiration came during a visit to my hometown of Plainville, Connecticut.

Years before I was born (I’m not that old, but you still need to get off my lawn), THE phone company used lettered prefixes for phone numbers. For instance, if your prefix (that’s the first 3 digits after the area code, kids) starts with 7-4 like Plainville’s did, they’d choose letters that were on the telephone’s rotary dial (lawn – off!) for the prefix. In Plainville’s case, they choose S-H.

Maybe you’ve heard actors in old movies who would pick up a phone and connect directly to the operator. They’d ask for “Klondike-5″ followed by the last 4 digits of the number. It was “Klondike” because the prefix was actually “5-5-5″ and they chose “K-L” for the letter designation. “K-L” lead to “KLondike”. Get it?

Well, in Plainville’s case, “S-H” lead to “SHerwood”. As a result, we had places like Sherwood Cleaners (which still exists) and Sherwood Pharmacy (which closed decades ago).

And that’s how Simplicity Web Design became Sherwood Web Design.

Since I no longer do a lot of freelance work and I decided to let the company go, I stopped identifying myself as “Sherwood Web Design” in 2009.

Today, my domain registration for SherwoodWebDesign.com expired. I can no longer renew it. It will soon be released to the public for anyone to register. Even though I hold the trademark on the name both in Arizona and in the United States, if someone decides to pick up the name and use it for an actual web design business, I won’t fight it. Use it for porn or some other non web design related use, and I just might.

Anyway, Sherwood Web Design is history now, just like 2009. While I bid good riddance to the latter, I bid a fond farewell to the former.

Onward to other dreams.