Today, I decided, it’s time to turn you all into runners.

So here we go: a collection of eight shots that I’ve taken on my runs around the neighborhood.

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Check out the plugin page for more information! I hope you enjoy Donation Can and find it useful in your online ventures.

Take a look at the right sidebar of this blog for how the plugin looks in action.

Good night!

At last, it’s getting time to announce the release of my first full featured free WordPress plugin: Donation Can will be released in one week from today, on Monday, August 24th, 2009.

In this post, I want to tell you a bit about the plugin and show one of the most interesting features, and hopefully get you at least a bit excited about what is coming up.

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It’s 2:30 and I can’t sleep. That’s why after an hour and half of trying to fake sleeping, I decided to just get up and write a blog post instead. All the things I wanted to say where already filling my head anyway.

This feeling is new to me. Usually, I’m the first one in any group of people to fall asleep. And until today, I’ve believed that even running wouldn’t change that fact. I was wrong — I just hadn’t experienced a tough enough exercise. Now, in the past two and a half hours since finishing my run, I’ve experienced everything from exhaustion to feeling shivery, to feeling so sweaty that I thought I was melting, and now, this feeling of extreme alertness that makes it impossible to fall asleep. Just like trying to sleep in the middle of the day.

So what happened?

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How you see the world defines what it is like for you.

On one of my longer runs (21 kilometers, I think) this summer, I was listening to podcasts by Steve Pavlina. I’m not sure how I ended up uploading them to my iPod, as I haven’t been an active reader of Steve’s blog for quite a while, and I think his stuff often goes to extremes that I find hard to agree with. But here I was, listening to Steve talk about fear. It was an interesting talk about how you can learn to control and overcome your fears, first by practicing, and then, ultimately, by changing how you see the world.

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During my summer vacation, I rediscovered a passion that I had been ignoring for more than half a year: bread.

I thought I had written a lot about bread before, but when I started digging, all I could find was this old sourdough recipe from two years ago. That’s going to change soon: I am working on resurrecting this blog from its on and off hiatus that started pretty much a year ago, and one of the key ingredients in this blog renaissance will be bread.

Stay tuned for my first experimental baking reports, and while at it, check out this baking video of my two years old son Oiva making his first batch of Fougasse (following Richard Bertinet’s dough making principles).

Also, if you are on Facebook and enjoy making real bread, check out the Artisan Bread Bakers group and share your experiments.

Finally, as today is my birthday once again, I thought I’d point you to this old post I wrote on my 27th birthday: 27 Years and Counting. Dad, you still rock!