I’d previously written about my uncommon collaboration with Enda O’Donoghue, an Irish artist living in Germany who used a photo I’d taken as the basis for a pretty cool painting.

He just sent me an email letting me know his Thanksgiving painting based on my photo is on display in a Leipzig exhibition called Gedanken zur Revolution (Thoughts on Revolution). Rad!

Two days ago I got an email from Mi Ae Lipe who told me she’d included my Roasted Garlic Hummus recipe in an “organic fruit-and-vegetable cookbook” called Tastes from Valley to Bluff: The Featherstone Farm Cookbook. She self-published it to “provide flood relief for some of the hard-hit southeastern Minnesota farms:”

A portion of the cookbook’s proceeds will go toward the Sow the Seeds Fund. In August 2007 many farms in southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin, including Featherstone, were in ruins after storms and heavy flooding devastated the area.

Featherstone turns out to be a cooperative CSA, just like Capay Organic’s Farm Fresh to You that I’ve been writing about lately.

Anyway today I got my copy, and holy cow, it’s thick! Nearly 400 pages long. For a collaborative, self-published cookbook, I found the recipes contained within—organized by both season and produce, with lots of supplementary sidebars—to be quite professional. I’m looking forward to flipping through it for culinary inspiration.

Here’s how it looks:

And here’s how my recipe looks in print:

Thanks Mi Ae!

Last August, as in August of 2006, I got an email out of the blue from a freelance graphic designer in North Carolina named Tony Burden. He was searching for some photos to use in a brochure for a green building development called Greenbridge and stumbled upon some pictures I’d taken in and around Chapel Hill (Fall, Winter, and Spring). He was writing to let me know how much he appreciated my images (and my having released them into the public domain), and that he’d chosen five to include in his design.

This is probably my favorite thing about the internet.

I held off on posting anything until after the project was formally announced—but I never got around to it because I’d just moved to San Francisco at the time. Fast forward to two days ago, and I got a surprise package in the mail. On top was a letter, part of which read:

Congratulations on the new camera! Your 10/29 post about the new Canon A570 IS was the kick-in-the-ass it finally took to get these out to you. And with the brochures, please find a check in nominal “appreciation” (although my appreciation is great) for use of your Chapel Hill images in the Greenbridge brochure.

Damn, that post struck a nerve! People are passionate about photography. Enclosed was a generous check, as well as several copies of his brochure featuring my photos. Thank you Tony.

Naoko McCracken, a web developer up in Michigan recently wrote a book on WordPress in Japanese entitled WordPress 標準ガイドブック (Standard Guidebook). She contacted me back in September to say that she’d included my popular (and very first) WordPress plugin, Monthchunks, in the book and its accompanying CD.

Two months later, she sent out another email to let folks know that she’d gotten a few advance copies. Since she didn’t have enough for everyone whose code she referenced, we had a challenge: guess how many screenshots she used in the book. Those who came the closest would get a book. I guessed 270—Amazon.co.jp said there were 343 pages, so I figured slightly more than 75% had screenshots. The correct answer: 295.

A few days ago I got a package in the mail.

It’s really cool, the cover’s very fancy (shiny) and the book is entirely Japanese except for occasional English words used in paths/URLs and proper nouns which I guess are not easily translatable.

Here’s a peek inside (of the part describing monthchunks):

Thanks Naoko, it looks great!