We visited Glacier National Park today… about 10 waterfalls and beautiful hiking. Above is a shot of Clements Mountain (from my cell phone) and the boardwalk hike from the visitor’s center at Logan Pass.

We’ve arrived in Montana! It is a little smoky, but at least it is cooler then Durham (which was 101 yesterday).

We leave for Montana waaaay too early in the morning tomorrow. Both Eric and I are very much looking forward to our upcoming trip out west, this will be out third and second trip, respectively. One of our favorite things about going to Montana (besides loads of quality time with my family, of course), is visiting Glacier National Park.

We’ll be where that red star is, on Lake Blaine, about 20 miles south of the entrance to Glacier. We have several waterfall hikes planned and hopefully the recent wildfires will burn out and not affect our trip.

Our internet and phone coverage will likely be spotty, but we’ll do our best to get some lovely photos up here before we return.

I’ve decided to move the majority of posts about my artwork over to my brand new art blog.

Please check it out if you have enjoyed seeing my artwork pop up from time to time in this space. I’ll be updating over there as frequently as we do here with recent paintings, interesting sites, links, and news.

I attended my very first un-conference today. The setup is as follows: a whole bunch of like-minded people show up (in this case, mostly programmers), and pitch ideas for sessions which then go up on a huge board, only to get constantly rearranged according to space constraints and interest. Fueled by free lattes and food, attendees contribute to every session by either leading it or helping in the discussions.

I got up at a crazy hour and drove to Raleigh to help with name tag creation and the handing out of t-shirts before the pitches and sessions started.

(sneaky photo by Wayne, our volunteer coordinator)

The first session I attended was on learning to juggle. No really, actual juggling! I got the hang of it (even after a cup of coffee and a vanilla latte! caffeine! whee!) just in time to move on to a session on GTD and then a discussion on setting up a start-up company, which turned out to be a little less useful for me. After lunch I attended two talks: the dangers of too much technology (a lesson from the Luddites) and a discussion of open source web tools.

Although (and perhaps, because) I was surrounded by folks who were way more technically inclined than I am, I certainly learned a few things about what’s current and what I need to learn to further my career in web design. And a few people even suggested I pitch a talk on working with designers… maybe next year. :)