I’m really, really excited to announce that I am looking for a designer intern to work with me at Perch, the startup I’m working with in Vancouver, British Columbia. Applicants must be here in the city or able to relocate. For more details, fire an email to pat@perch.co and I’ll take you out for coffee.

My friend Thomas Brand is running for my other friend Stephen’s son, Josiah. Josiah was diagnosed with a form of brain cancer when he was just 6 months old. Over the past three years, St. Jude’s Hospital has been treating Josiah. Josiah’s hospital bills alone have topped $2,000,000. Through the generous policies of St. Jude’s, Stephen’s family hasn’t had to pay a cent.

Thomas is heading down to Memphis in December to run a marathon for Josiah, for St. Jude’s, and for the many children who are fighting for their lives. If you have the means, I would strongly encourage you to step up and support this cause. I think you’ll be really glad you did.

Ben Brooks:

I can see a future where the readers of the web find the writers that they love to read and decide that it is worth supporting those writers so that they may continue their craft. It’s not utopia, it’s not impractical — it’s just hard to see through the dust cloud that has been formed by a stampede rush to the free content — a model that was created by the very companies that are now on the verge of bankruptcy because of it.

A couple people have asked me about how they can support this site now that I’ve left the Fusion Ad Network. I don’t really have a good answer for them. Unlike guys like Ben or Shawn, I have no intention of making this site my full-time gig. I write here because I enjoy it.

Besides, there are much more important causes that could use your support.

The new redesign of the Rdio homepage by a team led by Ryan Sims is incredible. The typography and layout are spot on, but it’s the photography that creates a really strong emotional connection for me.

A fantastic post by Noah Stokes about how his company, Bold, finds and develops relationships with their clients. His approach almost directly matches how I develop client relationships, though my questionnaire is a .rtf file and has about 20 questions. It says a lot about a potential client if they spend time to provide quality information, and even more if they don’t take the time to fill it out at all.

Risking life and limb for the sake of a smile. That’s what I’m all about, people.

Zooey Deschanel, Spanish Bingo, and my disagreement with a popular podcaster about Instacast on this week’s Bro Show.

I don’t do a lot of podcasting, but when I do, I try to make it fun.

In case you were curious how I pulled off my video this afternoon.

An afternoon in the sun.

My pal Avery was just featured on The Setup. I’ve been doing my best to avoid this site (because I love it so much but need to get work done), but I was excited to see a familiar face featured.

The site I designed for Cocoatech’s release of Path Finder 6 just went live, and I am really proud of the result. I’m especially proud of the interaction I came up with for users browsing the site on their iOS devices who want to download the app. Try it out when you get a chance!

Aaron Draplin shares his incredible collection of memo books. I love the pure joy you hear in his voice as he notices something new about these very old books.

(via Nick Wynja)

I know you’ve seen it, but fuck if it didn’t bring a tear to my eye.

(via everyone and their mother)

My friend Jonathan Christopher has written his first book, Client Oriented WordPress Development. Jonathan has helped me tremendously with my career and work in WordPress development. I’m super excited he now has the chance to impact your work as he has mine.

It’s like I’ve been saying all along, men need beards:

The results were overwhelming, out of the 50 soldiers with beards, zero were wounded or killed and they had a significantly higher accuracy of fire than the soldiers without beards. The soldiers lacking beards had a higher rate of weapons malfunctions and basically, shit went wrong most of the time.

While beards may have a positive effect in combat, the same simply cannot be true about the dating world.

(via David Robinson)

Elliot Jay Stocks’s article about what he calls his “cloud-centric Mac set-up” was a big part of what got me starting to think about my next Mac set-up. Like Elliot, I do a lot of design work, development, and photography on the side.

Elliot opted to go with the highest-end iMac and the lowest-end 11” Macbook Air. When he first started using this set-up, he had this to say about the two computers’ performance:

The Air is blazingly fast; even faster than my old MBP — which had an SSD in it —  and seems about as fast as the iMac in every task I’ve thrown at it. And yes, I’ve been using Photoshop on both.

8 months on, and it appears Elliot is happy as a clam. I think I may have found the solution to my problem.

Designed by Weightshift, this Rdio tee from United Pixelworkers is absolutely perfect. I only wish I wasn’t fasting from purchasing t-shirts until I reach my goal weight.

Sure, all the cool kids were doing it years ago, but I’ve never claimed to be a cool kid. Just a busy one.

Anywho, if RSS is dead to you, or reading your news through toots is more up your alley, then I highly recommend the best damn toot stream on the block: @patdcom.

The iPad app (iTunes link) I had a hand in creating for Ongo is starting to get some really great press as of late. I will write more about it soon, but the gist is that Ongo is a service that allows you to read the news from a number of sources in a completely ad-free environment. Ongo partners with publishers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and more to provide awesome, professionally-curated news on the desktop, mobile devices, and in our new iPad app. You can sign up today for just $1.99 a month.

Sorry to get you all voting so much this week. My band, Burn Like Fabulous, has been nominated for a London Music Award in the Pop Artist or Group category. If you would be so kind, please take a minute and vote (no registration required).

While you’re at it, be sure to vote for my friend Stacey Zegers in the best Country / Bluegrass Artist or Group category too!

I’ve been wanting to write about my experience meeting John Gruber at this year’s Macworld. I don’t want to take away from Thomas’s telling of the story, but I do want to add that he and Stephen were the ones that John recognized. Evidently, John is not a fan of ridiculous internet videos.

I almost never post links to this site that I’ve already posted to PoshCSS, but this one was too good to pass up.

This brilliant script by Visual Idiot (I’ve emailed him and still have no idea what his real name is) lets you write your CSS in proper British English. Even those of us in Canada can now finally write our CSS with proper spelling and etiquette.

I fully expect that by linking to this video, some hipster band will release an EP featuring this song within the next few weeks. And I will buy that EP.

(via way too much time spent browsing Kottke’s archives)

Keep scrolling…

Remember last week when I gave one beautiful reason for iPhone users to be envious of Android? Well, here’s one less reason for Android users to be envious of the iPhone.

Spurred on by a friendly challenge from Instapaper creator Marco Arment, developer Ryan Bateman and designer Matt Legaspi (both from Canada) teamed up to bring Instapaper to the Android platform. Papermill, an Instapaper client for Android, is a gorgeous looking app for Android users wanting to save articles to read later.

I know a few of my friends who will love this.

(via Beautiful Pixels)

I know, I know; too much self-promotion for one week, let alone one day. But, I thought a quick update was in order.

This past week I re-purposed my Tumblr blog to function solely as a place for me to publish photos taken with my iPhone. To this day I’m still blown away by the quality of the little camera inside my phone. This will hopefully encourage you to pull your phone out more often as well.

My friend Carly and I recorded a cover version of one of our favourite songs—Gimme Sympathy by Metric—for a contest to win $4000 in studio time. To help us out, all you have to do is:

1. Watch us perform!
2. Vote for us! (We’re near the bottom of the list.)

A special thanks to my friend Rogie, whose Fine Goods Tee made me look extra sexy for the video.

Edit: I just went through this process myself to vote, and my god… their website is terrible. It’s going to be a headache to vote, I know. But, it would still mean a lot to us if you would. $4000 of studio time would go a long way towards us producing a really great EP. Thanks!

I’ve been playing with this app by FiftyThree for a few days now, and I’ve been having a blast. I’ve said before that I can’t draw, but after playing with this app for just a few days, I’m wondering if I could develop my skills beyond simple stick-figures.

The Verge has a great interview with Georg Petschnigg who led the team behind Paper. They also have an in-depth look at the app itself.

The app is free, with additional tools available through in-app purchases. Very clever business model, if you ask me. Playing with the first tool for a day or two led me to buy the rest today. My only complaint was that the undo feature wasn’t discoverable at all, and even when I heard the feature described I couldn’t get it to work. Fortunately, there’s a scene in the interview where they show how it works. A little more help from the app in this regard would go a long way.

I’ve been using the Cosmonaut stylus with the app, and it works great.