What is this obsession modern designers have with turning rooms white? I can understand the desire to bring more light into a room. Some of these old homes have dark cave like rooms and could stand a bit more light. But by the time a designer 8s done with a space there isn’t a single nice dark set of shelves or rich dark colored wall. Instead ( Read more... )

Even if you don't like a basket ingredient ignoring it or just putting it on the side is never a good option. Just watched an excellent chef get cut because of how he didn't handle a basket ingredient. Look Jeffery Zacharian said up front that yes the basket ingredient didn't fit with the offered plate. The thing is ... The contests challenge ( Read more... )

So I've been living with my new computer for the last 4 months since my old preferred computer died. [Yeah I finally got it fixed and running again but ..] So one of the things driving me nuts is that I can never find the mouse pointer. For whatever reason the screen seems highly washed out no matter what I did ( Read more... )

So I was a bit amused to be watching "Building off the grid: Blue Sky". The person building the ranch talked about how Living and building off the grid is really just a throwback to how people used to live. My immediate thought was and there is a reason they went on the grid as soon as they could ( Read more... )

Janet Kagan was a fantastic science fiction and fantasy author who three fantastic novels in her life and a miscellaneous collection of short stories scattered here and there. The novels are Mirabile the story of a colony's struggle to survive after arriving at its destination with the added aggrivation that the extra help provided the voyage from ( Read more... )

I really miss the chopped judges discussion about the round.

So Amazon has broken their recommendations page.  Clearly they are chasing the mobile app idea but clicking on recommendations went from being sort of useful to utterly sucking.    Mind you if you drill down on recommendations you can make it work but still it frankly sucks big time.  ::sigh::

I'm not really all that happy with the new board layout.  Though I did find that I could see my friends pages in the old layout fairly well it still is taking some adjustment.

So I of course got "offered" the new itunes and I went ahead and downloaded it.   Generally it seems to be improved over the previous vesion but when I synced my iPad 1 with it about 1800 of the books i had in my libary decided they didn't want to sync so after fighting with it for 2 hours I am now 737 books out of 1810 restored maybe.  I'll have ( Read more... )

Once upon a time Firefox was a good efficient browser.  Now it has become bloated and slow.  I was looking at it today with flash suppressed and it is taking 450K of RAM to run.   Chrome on the other claw with the same addins running only takes 60K.   WTF!