Day: July 12, 2005

Too many progress bars, too little time

Site maintenance: I added a dedicated houseblog page to my site, which allowed me to put up a list of shame projects in progress, and also hopefully made the houesblog more visible than it was previously.

I wanted to use the progress bars that Houseblogs.net provides (as seen on HouseInProgress), but didn’t want to allow use of <object> tags on my site. So I looked around and found a pure CSS solution, which seems a little lighter weight.

Man, it’s scary looking at that list just how much we have to do. And I’m probably forgetting some things, like bathroom remodels…

A date with IKEA

Pavement-influenced post title aside, this might be more aptly described as IKEA as Mail Order Bride. Lisa and I are practically on tenterhooks for the 2006 catalog, and frantic to get an updated Kitchen Planning Tool. I feel like I did back in 1982 when I was waiting for my exclusive mail order Admiral Ackbar action figure (sadly now gone along with all my other Star Wars toys).

We’ve all but decided to go with IKEA cabinets for the kitchen remodel, primarily because of the budget flexibility we’ll get, but also because anything is going to be nicer than the built ins we have now. We’re planning to remove part of the wall between kitchen and dining room, relocate the stove, and fix some craziness with the sink plumbing, as well as extend the cabinets along the wall where our busted radiator is living (until a few weeks from now, when it along with all our other radiators will be removed).

Speaking of deserving people making good

Back in 1996, when Eva Cassidy died, who would have predicted that she would be #5 on the list of Amazon’s top selling musicians in their first ten years in business? She beat out Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones; she also beat the Dave Matthews Band, Josh Groban, Celine Dion, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Sting (whose “Fields of Gold” she memorably covered on her best album, Live from Blues Alley).

Number five. Wow. Go, Eva. Not bad for a little white girl from the DC suburbs with the biggest voice you ever heard.

Incidentally, I think I first heard Eva’s music on a tribute show on the late great WDCU. Too bad that her fame came too late to lift that station.

Newspaper comics getting bigger

In other news, hell freezes over.

Seriously, the launch of the Globe’s tabloid sized pullout, Sidekick, mostly makes me unhappy. In design and content it feels like a Mini Pages for adults. But having the comics strips at a readable size almost makes up for it (though the Globe’s comics selection is nothing to write home about, as it features the likes of Mallard Fillmore). Interestingly, the Globe didn’t take advantage of this change to revamp its online comics page, which omits some of the better features from its paper offering (including For Better or For Worse).

I’ve pretty much moved my morning comics reading entirely online, thanks to MyComicsPage and various syndicate sites. In fact, I think that reading the comics online might be the reason that Mozilla invented opening a folder of bookmarks into a tabbed browser window. Of course, my online comics reading energy is pretty much entirely channeled toward webcomics like Questionable Content, Little Dee, and Scary Go Round, which are larger, better drawn, funnier, more imaginative, and more legible than their syndicated counterparts.

Another reaction at Anderkoo (who appears to have some interesting comics commentary in general).