Contrabass's Profile

Some very good tips and ideas in the comments. My wife and I love being hosts to visitors, and happily, I see we offer our guests virtually everything that people asked for above.

Though I find hosts offering to let us "sleep in the master bedroom" downright creepy, even though I understand it's intended to be generous. Basically, I was brought up with the idea that the master bedroom is one of the most private places in the house. So the idea that someone would willingly clear out and let me sleep there, or that I'd want to, strikes me as weird.

We love playing host, but I'll be sleeping in my own bed while folks visit, thanks. And as a guest, if the choice is the MBR or sleeping on the fold-out sleeper sofa, I'll take the sleeper sofa, no complaints. (If you're the kind of host that offers your MBR to visitors, better to offer it in advance and allow them to decline...)

Fantastic. Beautiful work!

I too like the idea of putting an Android touch screen of some sort where the chalk board is, though the resulting cabinet wouldn't be much of a mini-bar at that point.

Radiant heat is great. When we renovated our kitchen, we looked into radiant there, as it's above our uninsulated garage space. And then we found out how much it costs to install, in an existing structure.

Oh, well! Sure would have been nice.

1) The website *is* called "Apartment Therapy"
2) An awful lot of people *do* own a car
3) This describes a great deal of the US, and much of Europe.

I don't know how much to worry about this, ultimately. What, did you think the cargo area of the UPS truck your laptop was delivered by was climate controlled? :-)

Interesting break-down of all those items, thanks for posting this.

It's as I suspected: the standby power usage is annoying, but ultimately not a ton of money in terms of my household's greater scheme. (This annual total is only enough to pay for two days of daycare... and we have a very reasonably priced daycare at that!) No DVR in our house apparently helps us a lot here.

I have to admit, it looks good. MSFT might be onto something with the way the home screen works, for mobile devices.

This is pretty much a make-or-break product for Nokia. Will be interesting to see what happens.

My neighbors just bought the Toro model. I was skeptical, but it works really well. The leaf vacuum/mulching function is best left to relatively small areas, more because it's a bit slow to pick up all the leaves in a pile, than anything else. Remarkably light-weight, too.

For the price, it's worth it.

Sure wish I could keep my camera, computer and audio stuff that minimistic. Looks great!

The G4 Cube Tissue Dispenser is utter genius! (The hardware is finally old enough that I can't imagine getting much use out of one, to feel bad about it.)

My dad made one of those iMac lamps just the other week. The real challenge will be, where will my mom let him put it? :-)

I really do like the look, but I fear it would get very greasy very quickly. A nice fabric shade would get particularly gross pretty readily.

This is probably best for a counter top that's nowhere near the stove or food prep.