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Our Beautiful Book

/ Shane / Leave a comment

As some of you saw on Facebook, we recently made the most amazing souvenir of our family trip to Paris: a beautiful book.

You can see a preview of the entire book here.

We had found this website Blurb.com that is a self-publishing website (it allows you to make your own books) that a couple of people we know use to automatically make books out of their blog.

I thought this would be simple, since I already have a pretty specific breakdown of our Paris trip here on my blog. All I would have to do is suck this text in, add a bunch of images, and ship it off to the printer. So easy, in fact, that I figured I’d just do it on the sly and give it to Sara for mother’s day.

I downloaded the software from Blurb and put it all together. I took quite a bit more work than I was expecting, but I thought it would be well worth it. However, I was a little too nervous to actually order it without Sara seeing it, so I decided to show it to her before submitting it.

Boy am I glad that I did.

My original version was very text heavy, with only a few small pictures on each page. When all was said and done, we had put countless more hours in, and ended up around version 4 or so. The big difference from version to version was a much bigger focus on the pictures. I think my first version was around 40 pages, and I think we ended around 70 pages or so. I had originally used only the best of the best pictures, but I think we ended up using almost every picture we took. This makes for a much nicer memento obviously. And perhaps we were a little obsessive, going through it over and over, switching pictures, tweaking layouts, etc., but it was sooo worth it.

It turned out perfectly. It is absolutely gorgeous! It is without a doubt the best souvenir one could ever have from a trip like that.

Of course, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right, so we sprang for all the extras: premium paper, printed on cover, etc. So it ended up being about $100, minus about $20 from a coupon code we found. So that is pretty pricey, but the book we got in return is absolutely priceless. Each day of our trip is a chapter, full of anecdotes, descriptions and beautiful, full-page pictures.

So, in summary, feel free to use Blurb for all your book making needs (their BookSmart software is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it, although I should caution that their software has it’s own little…quirks now and again). If you want something to turn out nice, be prepared to put some time in.

And if you come to my house, I’m definitely going to be shoving this book in your face!

Canvas on Demand

/ Shane / 3 Comments

We recently bought a Groupon for half off a “wrapped canvas” picture from Canvas on Demand. Basically, this is where the picture is wrapped around a frame, so the sides are thick, but you don’t need a frame. We wanted to get a large version of the “train tracks” picture that I’m using as the header of the blog. In fact, we ended up upgrading to 20×30, which cost a little extra on top of what we paid for the Groupon.

It turned out fantastic! But that is not why I’m recommending the company, per say.

We had a lot of difficulty sizing the picture. First off, the canvas wasn’t exactly the same dimensions as the picture. Second off, because the picture is wrapped around the frame, it was difficult to determine exactly how much space to leave to account for the wrapping. This was especially difficult because my outstretched hand comes very close to the picture on one side, so we didn’t want that to get wrapped around the edge.

After fumbling around for hours trying to get it right, we eventually just sort of threw our hands up. It said on their website there was a special technique they could do to stretch the edges of the picture for the wrapped sides, and that they would do the cropping if you left explicit instructions. So we just submitted it to them, gave them instructions on what we wanted to see, and crossed our fingers.

This is the sort of thing that makes me very nervous. I like to see a preview. I like to know that everything is exactly right before committing anything. This was especially true in this case, since it is a *huge* picture, so any minor error was going to be magnified, and it was a significant expense. And you know how these things usually go: some clock-puncher who’s just grinding out his 40 chops off the hand and prints it, not caring how it looks. Or maybe some glitchy computer program decides on the best configuration, without anybody looking it over.

We never heard back from them or saw any kind of preview. So when the picture arrived, I practically tore open the box to see how it came out. They did it perfectly! A human being obviously looked at it, understood what we wanted, and made it so. Sadly, this is noteworthy in this day and age.

So we are very pleased with our picture. It is decently pricey, but if you consider how much it would have cost to have the picture blown up and then custom framed, it is actually very cost effective (custom framing is expensive!).

If anybody is looking to get something like this, I’d recommend these guys (though you already missed out on the groupon…sorry!)

Flynano

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Hold on to your socks kids! It’s time for personal flight.

There’s a company I would like to bring to your attention by the name of Flynano. What do they make, you ask? Flying jet skis:

Basically, it’s a one seater plane that is just light enough that it doesn’t legally qualify as an aircraft, which means you don’t need a pilot’s license. So anybody could climb into one of these and reach heights around 2 miles and topping out at around 93 mph.

Prices start around $36k, which some people might say is a lot of cash, but I have to disagree. Personal flight for slightly more than a car? This is basically the flying car we’ve been waiting for! Seriously, is this so much different than a jet-pack? A little bulkier, I’ll grant you, but not so different. And even though I couldn’t pay $36k for one, I could probably pay to rent one for an hour at a resort or something.

Flying jet skis my friend, the future is now!

Brutal Knitting

/ Shane / 2 Comments

SOME people might consider knitting to be sort of a, shall we say, “soft” hobby. Not something you would find a tough guy or girl doing. However, those people have obviously never seen some of the things they’re making over at Brutal Knitting.

Check out some of the ski masks they have going on over there, each which would set you back around $150 or so.

They also make other collectable type things, besides ski masks, such as a knitted Skeletor, or some sort of surreal hamburger/jellyfish hybrid:

Way cool. Sara, take some notes and get knitting!

Bacon Alarm Clock

/ Shane / 2 Comments

You know how you’re always saying, “Someone should totally make a…” and then someone totally makes it? I know that I’ve asked for this item before, but I couldn’t find it on the blog anywhere.

I give you the Wake’n Bacon, the real bacon alarm clock:

Before you go to bed, you put a frozen piece of bacon in the tray. 10 minutes before you want to wake up, the alarm switches on a heat lamp, so you wake up to the smell and sound of frying bacon. What could possibly be better than that?

And how cute is it that it looks like a pig? Some sort of cannibal-monster pig that fries up pieces of itself for your consumption. Yes sir, it would be hard to improve on this product.

Link via Brian Belloli.