I really like the BC Hydro website: it's simple to navigate and is noticeably better than other service sites like Telus or Fido. They make it easy to change to paperless billing, which is why I signed up, and they even give you the data for your daily electricity usage. Following is a graph of mine and I am really happy to see that for each of the past eight months my usage has been down:

What does your usage look like? My average usage for the past eight months in 2008 was 8.5 kWh/day and for the past year 11.58 kWh/day... how does this actually stack up to others? My feeling is that as long as I do better than the last year, every year, I should be ok!

I have always been able to do almost everything I want within Photoshop, but now that I'm playing around with vector graphics, I'm finding that Photoshop has limitations. So for the first time I'm getting a real taste of Adobe Illustrator.

Some of the main references I have touched are:

• A huge post from Noupe.com with tutorials, tips, and best practices — while the article is pretty fluffy, it points to some nice work and lots of tutorials.
• A large dose of inspiration from this post on Vectortuts.com
• An icon design tutorial from this post by QBrushes.com

With this information I have created some UI mockups annnd... the following icon. I am pretty happy with how the icon turned out and, for now, this kind of stuff will probably fuel my interest in Illustrator!

Anyone have some cool Illustrator resources? Send them my way!