What is your browser's default home page set to?
Submitted by Kelev T. Cat.
My Backpack page!
Here's a question for you. How many comments need to be in a blog or forum post before you start just thinking, "Ah, crap, that's too many comments"?
I'm curious about this, as I've had to deal with long comments on a lot of my own sites. And it's dawned on me that there isn't a really elegant way to kind of skim the cream off of those comments.
If I've got 87 comments on a thread, do I need to read all 87? Probably not. But maybe.
What books are on your nightstand?
I don't have a nightstand. There's no room for one in our current bedroom (Jeani has one.) Welp!
As for reading? Books? sigh...
When the year turned I decided to try something ambitious: I'd read a book a month for the entire year. And I started with Assassination Vacation.
I figured, "Well, I like Sarah Vowell when she's on NPR. How bad can it be?" So I went to the library - I had to do this "I'm a reader too!" thing right - and started reading it there. And I liked it.
Somewhere between chapters 2 and 3, though, I lost interest. The book sat on my desk and went unread. It just kept going unread until it was time to return it.
With that, my Great Reading Experiment of 2006 was canned. Sad, yes. But there is a glimmer of hope: when we move in October, I'll be back to taking the train to and from work. And sooner or later I'll run out of stuff to watch on the iPod, so books will most likely be in order.
Last month I wrote about my experiences with Mac FTP clients. I'm afraid time is of the essence right now and I can't provide another medium-shallow-depth analysis; instead I'll leave my opinion to my medium-shallow Photoshop skills.
The RSS feed link at the bottom of this article calls itself a "Digital RSS Feed".
Can you tell me what an Analog RSS Feed is?
The Daily Ping is currently down. Ryan and I are aware of the problem and will be working on it. No ETA yet.
What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?
Heavy Rotation... that sounds like a good name for a bimonthly music collection....
Anyway, the big surprise that has popped back into my lineup is Paul Simon's Surprise. It's an appropriate title. I've been starting to enjoy a little more of Simon's music - eccentric as he is - and took a gamble on this. It's solid. It's textured and mature, and has a lot of great, deep hooks that stick in my head for days. Plus, lyrics that are just fabulous ("Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?", "You can not walk with the holy if you're just a halfway decent man") The whole thing does indeed have Brian Eno written all over it, but that's good: it's a solid combination of Simon's pop sensibilities (and near-misses, of course) with Eno's layering and diverse instrumentation.
I guess the biggest surprise about it is that it's held up well for me over the past few months. I suspect I'll be able to return to it in a few years and still feel strongly about it. It's speaking more to my Adult-with-a-capital-A side, versus a lot of the pop music I enjoy that just speaks to the here and now.
How well do you know your next-door neighbors?
Not at all.
Our neighbors on the east side are college students and their leases follow the school year, so we already have some new students moved in this year. But the previous tenants had a number of loud parties that kind of bugged me. (I'm really big on that.)
On the west side, we don't know them either - although Jeani did meet one of them when our upstairs neighbors (who we also didn't know) moved out.
In our new place, we've already been introduced to the upstairs neighbors (the owners!) and the folks next door. That's not bad! And the owners said they'd introduce us around the neighborhood. Very nice.
Final post for now.
With all of the hullabaloo over Chicago's big box ordinance (summary: living wage if your store is over 90,000 square feet and you gross over $1B annually; all companies potentially affected are pissed) I've been wondering just how big 90,000 square feet is - it's hard to visualize. Here are some references.
- The average Target is 126,000 square feet. SuperTarget is 174,000.
- The average Wal-Mart is 101,000 square feet. Super Centers are 185,000.
- The average Lowe's is 116,000 square feet. (Note that this source is a little dated, and Lowe's was trying a "small store" format of 94,000 square feet.)
- The average Home Depot is 130,000 square feet.
Thus, 90,000 would be smaller. But I've maintained that the retailers should just build smaller stores (89,999 square feet, anyone? ... although, of course, that wouldn't exempt them from the ordinance. But still.)
