In the last thirty days I found out that I am an art director, a soon-to-be uncle, and a frequent flyer. Two of these things have me a bit terrified while another was a nice surprise. Meanwhile Airbag is in full swing with expansion plans, tinkering with Amazon's new toy, and trying to get the Airbag Grand Prix out of the garage. And then there's Austin.

For the curious, Airbag remains a sovereign company and from time-to-time I work with HappyCog when it makes sense for Jeffrey to bring in the big guns from the West coast arsenal. Personally I think they made a grievous mistake giving two red heads the same job position—wonder twin powers activate! I'll take the form of Irish-American-LA-freeway rage, while Rob will go North Sea Berserker, circa 913 A.D. Read: Unstoppable! If you are a creative director with ear rings, facial hair that doubles as a Chia Pet, and last name used on boats to the New World, watch your back.

On the matter of becoming a relative to a newborn: Whoa. I still don't know what that really means but my brother and sister-in-law are really excited and I am happy for them. I think I'm more excited by the prospects of being the black sheep uncle. For starters, I'm going to need to find some prime cigars for use in about seven months. If you happen to live outside the United States and know of a good place where said items can be found perhaps I trade you a "letter" in exchange for a "FedEx package".

We're running into a small problem with the execution of the Airbag Grand Prix (we're a couple months late). Currently Nintendo DS doesn't let you choose online opponents from your friends list, it will auto-assign you to join whomever is online. Our plans include having race participants select the day and time of their race from a pre-determined timezone-friendly schedule now we just need to find an easy way to ensure that all four racers get in the same race. That sounds clumsy at best but surely there has to be another way that we just haven't thought of. Any suggestions are welcome.

Ray keeps asking politely for a list of suggested books on the topic or relating to the topic of web design. The Airbag library currently holds two-hundred and sixty-two books on subjects pertaining to publishing, design, writing, color, composition, programming, and the use of applications. Someday I'll have all of this information online but Amazon's new tool made it easy to get a quick sample of core titles to those who have been asking for this information. The A-Store was very easy to setup but it really needs some customization options. For instance, I would have made it so that the categories navigation didn't blend in so well with the rest of the page. And I don't think it's apparent that there are more than just nine products "available". Steve Krug to isle A9, please.

Apparently enough people voted for the Writing, Better that it's now on the schedule for SXSW. Out of the ten sessions on content, eight are related to video. I love Max Headroom and all but that just feels wrong. Boy how the white man loves to see himself in the talky box on the Intertruck. Writing still matters, dammit, and I assure you that we'll do our best to outshine the YouBubes in March.