A Rain of Frogs

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Who is Adrian Lebar?

Who am I really?

When I was younger, I spent my winters racing down snowy slopes on skis. In the summer I did my racing on bicycles instead, and also taught sailing on the tall ship T.S. PLAYFAIR. I don’t race any more, and the tall ship is in the hands of others, but I still cycle whenever I can and Canada’s weather permits.

I still ski too, and have recently branched into the seriously energetic cross-country version, an exercise (ha!) that certainly taught me to appreciate edges! And a recent foray into the graceful art of snowboarding has helped make the small hills of Southern Ontario fun again. I’ve not travelled much, but I’ve skied on two Olympic class mountains (Lake Placid and Whistler), and dozens of smaller ones.

I have owned a couple of sailing boats in my time, a beautiful Contessa 26 then an equally beautiful, but much larger Alberg 29. Both of these I sailed on Lake Ontario in the summer. Though boatless at the moment I have my eye on some very pretty options for the future. Some day I might make it past the horizon on the big water, but for now I am content to explore the Great Lakes.

I’m a father. I play, learn and grow with my three children. They are amazing people, and I have learned more about myself from watching them than ten lifetimes of navel-gazing could have taught me. I love them dearly, and count myself among the lucky to have them in my life.

I am equally lucky to have the most wonderful and supportive girlfriend a man could ever ask for. Sarah is my best friend, a patient shoulder to lean on in hard times, and an amazing cook. In addition to all her talents with a camera or frying pan, she is a brilliant writer and freelance editor and science writer, specializing in writing and editing Grant proposals.

I like to read and write, both fiction and otherwise, and to draw and take photographs. The cinematography and technical wizardry of movies like ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ fascinate and delight me. So do architecture and art galleries.

My combined love of things technical and artistic has led me down two parallel but distinct career paths:

Web design

I have always maintained that the design of a thing is far more than how it looks, it is how it works. I am a designer, specifically a web designer, and have been for many years. I have seen highs and lows in the Internet industry, and watched technologies that looked promising fade into obscurity while technologies that looked laughable took the world by storm. The things that endure all have one thing in common – they all work right.

I’ve always believed in hand-coded goodness. While WYSIWYG editors have come a long way since I first laid hands on one in 1996, they still produce code that is less efficient and meaningful than hand-coding does. I write my own CSS, I write my own HTML, and I’ve done so since I first started working in this industry 12 years ago.

The code I write works. The sites I build work. This is one of my core beliefs – that the Internet should be easy to use whether or not you can see or hear. Or even type.

Music

I’m a classically trained pianist, and an Associate of The Royal Conservatory of Music (ARCT). But in the last eight years I’ve picked up the electric bass, and now play on numerous stages with many different musicians. Sometimes it’s a cover band in bars full of drunken students in university towns, sometimes I’m playing original music in jaunty little bistros in downtown Toronto. Sometimes I’m just in my studio, with the door closed, and headphones and midi controller plugged into my Macbook.

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