Doug's Sounding Board

The paths look pretty much the same as they did yesterday though they continued to work on them. The big change today is the paving stones that were added. I was also wondering where the old stepping stones were dug up from since i never encountered them in the back yard. I do know where used to be a path from the back door to the shed since the dogs uncovered the path edging, but no stepping stones.

They aren’t bonded yet, but they are there.

Pictures of the progress after 6 days are now available. If you somehow missed the others, you can click up to the parent album from there, or just go here.

Yesterday we also picked out our kitchen and bathroom fixtures, sorry, but no pictures of those. Also we finally lined someone up to remove the tree in front of the house.

When I go to Bookshop Santa Cruz I make sure to check if there are any new issues of Found Magazine, usually to be met with disappointment. It isn’t the most regular of publications. I was happy to find that they publish a “Dirty Found” magazine filled with all the things that people sent in that couldn’t published normally. Some of it is indeed pretty dirty, while a lot of it is pretty tame though not stuff the average person is comfortable reading.

If you like Found, check it out.

I uploaded the progress pictures for work done after 5 days. It’s good to see shape coming to the fields of dirt.

I like the new take on the old Coca Cola jingle, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” which now starts “I’d like to teach the world to chill” performed by G. Love. It’s an ad for Coca-Cola Zero rather than regular Coke but without the visual you’d never know that.

In addition to that, the visual ad has a www.worldchill.com url that takes you to not the greatest Flash site, but I really like the idea behind it. You can select your own “chill” level and make a thumbtack where you are with your chill level. That in turn gets averaged by localities and regions up to the world level so you get a “chill level” for the entire world. The screen saver cycles through areas showing the chill level of that area.

The makers had the idea that you could have a map like weather maps that showed changes in “chill” over time and perhaps watch trends. It’s definitely not wide-spread or well implemented enough for that. The Flash that lets you place your rating is tricky to use and doesn’t let you easily update your info. It should just be a simple applet, maybe a part of everyone’s instant messenger program. Just a slider that when changed sends the update. It has to be easy and always there.

The more minor problem is the screen saver. It starts at the top level and then steps down to a region and then to parts of the region. When a part is done it has to go back to the region level before going to another part so you end up seeing regions a lot. I understand that it is following it’s internal tree representation of the data but it can skip those things it has been to before pretty easily.

I have a better structure for the landscaping pictures now. I’ll update them fairly often. Right now there are the before pictures and after 2 days pictures. I’ll put up some after 4 days pictures tonight or tomorrow and maybe just do once a week highlights.

Last night I had a dream where I realized National Novel Writing Month was coming again and I was wondering if I would actually get around to writing this year. When I woke up there was e-mail from NaNoWriMo saying it was time to register for this year, so I did. I still don’t know if I’ll get around to writing, but I’m thinking that was my brain saying it’s ready.

Happy New Year! I hope it’s the start of a great year for everyone.

Mine didn’t start out that well with it being taken up by the end of a 17-hour work day, but that just means I have a lot of room for improvement! Are there any other industries besides software that can get so far with so little planning?

Starting this morning large chunks of our driveway are being removed to make way for a major overhaul of the front and back yards. Here are some before pictures and maybe I’ll post daily pictures showing progress. I haven’t decided yet.