Every year on January 1st, our little family sits around the kitchen table and talks about the highlights from the year that’s just passed. Then each of us takes a peice of paper, and writes down all of our favorite things from the previous year. After that, I type them up, upload them to Wordle.net, and create a tag cloud of the year. I keep saying I’m going to make t-shirts for us, but hey – we only want to look back a little. Onward and upward to a great 2012!

Check out the tag clouds from previous years…

• Just A Few of Our Favorite Things from 2010
• Just A Few of Our Favorite Things from 2009

Enjoy!

I got to shoot a ballet rehearsal during Nutcracker season this year, and caught the Sugar Plum Fairy (my better half) having a good time. Bunheads rule!

When you have a MacBook Pro delivered, the nice shiny white Apple box comes inside a less shiny brown shipping box. In fact, the Apple box is suspended inside that shipping box by paper corner pads. While I’m stoked that these packaging pieces are recyclable (Apple does pay attention to the impact of its products), turns out they’re reusable too!

I noticed the spacing between the edges was the same width as Thomas the Tank Engine tracks, which are everywhere in my house. When I put the two together, they fit perfectly…then I thought about how I could use them. Sure enough, they are nearly the perfect height to work with the standard Thomas riser tracks. Very cool, and something new for the little ones to be creative with!

Whew, that’s a mouthful!

Over the last 12 months, I’ve been writing a (long-titled) book with my extemed collegue, Melanie Mathos. We are thrilled that 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits: A Field Guide will be coming out in February 2012, and I’m sure I’ll write more about here on this blog.

in the mean time, if you’re into nonprofit social media and want to learn more about using it to engage, raise money, and measure your digital impact, pre-orders are available on Amazon.com.

We found another purple lego brick! In 2009, I blogged about how rare purple Lego bricks seem to be, so my boys were stoked when they found the single round piece above. We have always wondered why purple Lego bricks were so rare, considering they were one of the “main” colors.

When I did my original research on purple Lego bricks, I found many references to the Knight Bus from Harry Potter. I had always presumed my purple piece came from that set via a hand-me-down box we received from a friend. I recently saw the Knight Bus in a store (pic to the right), so purple bricks should be in circulation again soon.

Why am I blogging about this? I would like to see purple bricks included in basic Lego sets and elsewhere! I feel it’s grossly underrepresented in the Lego world. If you feel the same way, let Lego know!

Is it a surprise to anyone that the two-year-old is far more brave than the eight-year-old when faced with the dark, twisting tunnels of Fort Moultrie? What a great place to take the kids on a hot summer day – those bunkers are nice and cool!

I’m one of those social media geeks that never stops talking about how important listening is. So I often find myself presenting a session on the topic, as I did at the 2010 Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits. My good friend Danielle Brigida and I followed our session with a workshop where our students built a social media listening dashboard using RSS feeds and iGoogle.

I took the materials from that workshop and created the worksheet you see below. It can help you get a listening dashboard setup at your nonprofit. Feel free to download and use it to learn everything you can about your supporters!

I’ve blogged about this over at NetWitsThinkTank.com, but thought I should stick it here too. Enjoy!

Took some shots at the Truth & Salvage Co. show in January, and forgot to post them here. Great band, and I swear it’s not because I’ve know Timmy since I was a teenager. His a shot of most of the band. You can see the rest on Flickr.

Loved this old school Kentucky Fried Chicken…

We have a new tradition emerging here at the Norman house: on New Years Eve/Day we create our favorite things tag cloud! *here’s 2009′s* This year during dinner, we each wrote down some of the things we liked from 2010 (we help the little ones). Then I typed them up and sent them through Wordle.net, and whoop – there it is: a few of our favorite things from 2010!

Happy New Year everyone!

When my oldest son encountered his first snowfall in 2005, we naturally had to document the occasion with some photos. Later when I downloaded the pics, I realized that something felt familiar. After digging through my old photo box, I found what I was looking for: a shot of my dad and I in pretty much the exact same pose from 1975. Now, I’ve seen that blog were people recreate photos from their past, so the serendipity of stumbling into a near identical photo makes this all the sweeter. The more things change, the more they stay the same…

For weeks we’ve been finding dried-up dead millipedes here at our new home, so we were pumped to finally stumble upon a live one! This giant millipede, narceus americanus, was living under a leaf-covered plastic bag buried deep in the mulch. The boys loved touching it and watching it curl into a tight protective ball. My one-year-old, being the ever brave outdoor girl that she is, gladly touched it too – but once it started moving, she wanted nothing to do with it. Here are a couple shots next to a U.S. quarter for scale (they get up to 4 inches long!)

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This can’t be a good sign…

Yesterday, during one of our evening backyard games of kick-fly, we stumbled upon a monarch viceroy butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Needless to say, this stopped us in our tracks. We all watched as this minute-old insect slowly dried its beautiful wings and prepared to take flight. My mother-in-law taught me everything I know about monarchs, so I was surprised to see the chrysalis attached to a willow tree rather than some milkweed (now I know this is because it’s a viceroy), but this little guy must have found plenty to eat. I like how you can still see some of the caterpillar’s pattern on the empty chrysalis – so cool! About an hour later, it was gone…

Update: Thanks to reader Kelly for telling me this is a viceroy, not a monarch!

This wall really caught  my eye this morning, and this crop makes it look a bit like a flag.

That is what my kids always say when they see a plane fly by – like this one.

Playing front porch dodgeball with the kids delivered these sweet little prints across the beaded planks. I couldn’t resist a quick photo between rounds…

Seriously, how awesome is it to randomly find this in your girl’s notebook?

Back in late 1997, Gabo Mendoza single handedly changed the course of interactive communication forever when he unleashed Gabocorp.com (archive removed!) upon an unsuspecting design world. Flash had been around for a short time, but nobody had ever built an entire site with it. In fact, I’m not sure anyone had even thought to…except for Gabo Mendoza.

If you were designing back then, I’m sure you remember Gabocorp. TechRadar lists it as one of the 20 websites that changed the world – right up there with Wikipedia and YouTube. My team and I were working with Authorware, Director, and After Effects in those days, so Gabocorp’s super-smooth vector goodness blew our minds. I mean, it blew everyone’s mind. We wanted Flash. Badly.

By January of 1998, we finally convinced our manager to order a copy of Flash 2. When it arrived, my dear friend Tim Sisco and I huddled around my PC and began to play. We naturally tried to build something similar to Gabocorp, and spent about 30 minutes making what was basically a Flash doodle (turn your speakers on and see below). Don’t get me wrong, it’s horrible – but this new platform had set us free. Tweening from color to color, mixing multiple audio tracks on the fly, and running things full screen felt like magic. It was crazy. The world would soon grow tired of Flash sites, but you gotta give Gabocorp credit for propelling the Internet several giant steps forward.

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The snow came, and the snow went. It was that simple, but it helped to make what I’m sure will become one of the most memorable weekends in our family’s story. Charleston’s first snowfall in over 20 years crashed the party on Friday, blowing everyone’s mind in the process (look at that frozen marsh below!) Our kids hadn’t really ever seen snow before, and are still recovering from the madness. On Saturday, Jen performed Serenade with the Charleston Ballet Theatre, which was her first time on stage since 2002 (what a rock star!) Sunday was Valentine’s Day, and Monday was Presidents Day. Seriously, I need another weekend to recover! But hey, what did Ferris Bueller say, “Life moves pretty fast…”

The rest of this DJ kind of looked like Sammy Hagar.

Last weekend, we got to spend some family time together at the studio. The kids always seem right at home on the marley, and I wonder where their feet will take them. Here’s a shot of Zoe and her mom…

First off, a huge happy new year to you all!

Today at lunch, Jen, Cooper, Graham, Zoe and I sat around our kitchen table, writing down all of our favorite things from 2009. It was fun reading them out loud, hearing what we had in common, and telling stories from throughout the year. Being a huge geek, I naturally thought a word/tag cloud might be the perfect way to visualize the year’s goodness, so I went to Wordle.net – because  they rock.

Here’s the 2009 Norman Family Favorites Cloud:

Have you ever seen a purple Lego brick? Seriously, think about it. Have you ever seen one?

A couple of years ago, my friend Rachel gave us a big box of Duplos. We love Duplos, and this batch came with a few regular Lego bricks trapped in the nooks and crannies of the box. I happily integrated the entire lot into our family stash, and went about my business.

Over the next few months, this 8×1 purple brick kept turning up, and eventually it caught my eye. We have thousands upon thousands of Lego bricks, but only one of them is purple. How could this be? Lego bricks are some of the most creative, thoughtful, brain-growing toys out there. Had they simply neglected to make purple bricks? How rare are they?

Apparently, purple Lego bricks ARE very rare! As this Yahoo Answers thread indicates, the missing color has definitely been noticed by fans. I’ve learned that most of the purple bricks in existence probably came from a Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Bus Set. One observant brickhead noticed the purple cone lampshade in the Sunshine House Set. The color is noticeably absent from the Lego online store, so clearly there is some kind of concerted effort to keep purple bricks oppressed – right?

Hey Lego: Set the purple bricks free!!! People want purple Lego bricks, so why not make it happen? I mean, look how happy this woman was when she found some in a Chicago store.

Until Lego can make it happen, feel free to bask in the glory of my 8×1 purple Lego brick:

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I certainly collected my fair share of hilarious baseball card photos. All those mustaches, blue uniforms, weird hats, and funky locks are half the reason I’ve kept them around all these years.

The other day I found some of my old football cards, and they all seem to have less-than-ideal photos as well. Like the baseball cards, the photos all seem to be casual snapshots from games and practices.

Today’s cards all have perfect photos, and I imagine designers have quite a library to choose from. But not back in the day. Nope, they were just looking for a semi-decent photo that showed the player’s face and number. Whatever was found first, worked.

That’s how I imagine poor Arthur Whittington ended up huffing and puffing for his 1981 Topps Football Card. Instead of busting through the seam on a 3rd and 3, the Raider’s running back was featured sucking oxygen on a hot Oakland afternoon.

Do you think he cared? I mean, today’s players flip out if their Madden player rating dips below 90…can you imagine what would happen if their card hit the shelves with something like this? Publicists would get eaten for breakfast!