arkitrave log

arkitrave :: log

9/29/2004

gratuitous baby post

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We can see the baby moving and kicking now on Her belly. This is lots of fun, and has led to the following interactive scenario (i’ll mark it up as a list to not be a total deadbeat):

  1. poke
  2. POKE
  3. pause
  4. BIG POKE
  5. pause
  6. little teeny kick

Of course, this scenario can be repeated with good results several times in a row. We feel only the slightest bit guilty about doing this.

Perform for us.

Now.

9/17/2004

for shame.

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[UPDATE] Pano, the owner of the property, has stated that whether or not he is granted the demolition permit, he will have the house destroyed himself. The fine for demolishing without a permit is only $1500 in Buffalo, and he said he would simply take down the house and gladly pay the fine. In the face of close to 3500 signatures on a petition, no less.

Pano’s, an established (and I add, always packed with people) 24-hour restaurant on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, has just filed a request for a demolition permit on this house next door to their restaurant:

atwater house

They do own the house. They have evicted the current tenants. No, this demolition isn’t for a fabulous new building by an internationally acclaimed architect. It isn’t because the building has been empty for years. They evicted tenants. No, they want to replace this architectural gem with a parking lot. Yes. A parking lot.

Buffalo’s downtown is 27% parking. Now Elmwood, the healthiest commercial district in the city, mainly because it isn’t all surface parking, has the opportunity for another surface lot.

I am not going to say anything more about this. It could get ugly, and this is a professional website. If you live in Buffalo, and haven’t seen this yet, sign the petition. As of this writing, they’re at 2000 signatures. They’re asking for a boycott of Pano’s, but you can sign the petition without agreeing to boycott the restaurant, if boycotts aren’t your thing.

Even if you don’t live in Buffalo, add your name to the list if you’re inclined. The petition will be delivered at the hearing on the permit in a week or so.

We don’t need another parking lot in Buffalo. And we don’t need to lose another significant building.

9/15/2004

presenting nepo strategies

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There’s a new site in town. Nepo Strategies Group is the web services division of Noein, and is a venture involving IT professionals in marketing, writing, graphic design and web design. My portfolio has been updated here.

The site is, of course, all CSS and XHTML, with a little Javascript thrown in to make the menu system work. Currently, only users of advanced browsers will have enhanced nav functionality; I will be adding the script to make it work in IE soon, but it was deemed not important enough to delay launch.

The photography is a mix of stock and my own images; the masthead images are all stock, and the page images are mostly mine, though a few were client-supplied. I don’t always think they work together very well, but deadlines are deadlines.

I wanted to keep the navigation all on top, to free up the screen real estate on each side of the content for images and extra content. I think this is quite successful on many pages, with one side being used for portfolio-style shots and the other side being used for a pullquote-style advertising blurb.

It doesn’t work quite right in Safari. There is a positioning problem that pushes the main content down, and I think it is a bug in Safari that refuses to allow the scrolling to get down far enough to see the footer. Other than that, I think it works in all modern browsers (I didn’t even try on Mac IE5). It could be because I hacked the positioning so much to get it to work cross-browser. Still, I think that there’s no reason Safari shouldn’t display my footer.

In case you’re wondering, the logotype uses Gill Sans and Warnock Pro Display Italic. I’m going to play with the new sIFR Flash replacement technique to get the headers to display in Gill Sans eventually, and I hope to do a small Flash movie within the Nepo logo area on the front page.

Comments? I’d love to hear what you think of the site, and how it could be improved. Of course, there hasn’t been any user testing.

9/8/2004

thesis time

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I am officially beginning the end.

With any luck, and quite a lot of hard work, I will be done with school this winter. My thesis is entitled “The Space Between: Silence and Light as Parallel Compositional Materials in Music and Architecture,” and will likely put most of you to sleep…I’m proposing that since we’ve discovered silence to be an element of presence rather than absence (John Cage), that we bring that idea into architecture somehow. This directly confronts Louis Kahn’s idea that silence is the nonexistent, light is present, and architecture exists between the two. Kahn is poetic, but I’d like to look at it a different way.

My thesis blog is at www.arkitrave.com/thesis, and will chronicle my work throughout the semester. I think best when I’m writing, so hopefully this will help me as I write a book and do a design project.

It’s also my first WordPress install, and so far I’m thrilled with it. Caution: I will modify the default template sometime soon, so it’s still not really up to my usual standards visually. This will change. Send me hate mail if it doesn’t.

I’ll try to stay off the thesis on this log and keep it relegated to the thesis log. Look for a new launch in the next couple days!

9/6/2004

A Buttload, Eh?

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This just in, from my referrer log.

Reffy is a Windows-based mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics. Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. Reffy operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!

So, if you need it in clearer English, someone who owns the domain, for example, isuck.com, buys the software and programs it to visit my and, well, your site, faking that the traffic is coming from isuck.com. This puts their domain out there, giving isuck.com ill-gotten publicity on my site. Pretty fishy.

Only $50, and all this can be yours. I appreciate the page’s honesty; it’s nice to know exactly what they’re up to and why they are spamming my referrer log. Now, in addition to comment spam, I’ll have to go into my SQL database and take out their domain. Anyone have any ideas on how to damage control once this software really gets off the ground?

Bastards.

9/2/2004

German=Cars, Swedish=Laundry

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AKA “Hello, this is Laundry”, for any MadTV fans out there.

don't they just say Swedish Quality?

My last project of the summer was an impulse one. We found out a few weeks ago that our washing machine was carefully adding drops of oil to select items of clothing. We eventually decided that enough clothes had been destroyed, and stopped doing laundry. <public service announcement>GE washers eventually start leaking oil from the transmission and it gets on your clothes</public service announcement>

We went into the store to look at standard, middle-of-the-road washer/dryer pairs (the dryer has been stopping every 10 minutes in a cycle, and is about 25 years old, so there’s no love lost there). We went out of the store with a contract for delivery of an Asko washer and dryer. 50% off. The dryer was a floor model, the washer was priced as a floor model but still in the box.

OK. I must be getting old. I’m really excited about new appliances.

But the thing that really made this project exciting is the dimensions of the washer and dryer. I started thinking (at the store, in the heat of impulse-buying, with no tape measure) that they looked like they would fit in a small closet. I thought some more. Baby on the way, basement smelly, would be so nice to not have to go downstairs to do laundry, one closet in hallway…

The long and short of it is: I decided, at the store, on impulse, to buy the machines and prepare my clothes closet (in my hallway, not in a bedroom) for a laundry facility. Of course, since the units were priced to sell, they had to deliver within a few days. I had the weekend to prepare the closet to be a mini-laundry room.

It was really not that difficult. The washing machine is designed to heat its own water (up to 205, or 95 for you Brits the rest of the world), so it requires only a cold water supply. I had a cold water pipe closeby in the basement, so I hacked the end off and ran PVC and a shutoff valve for the water supply, drilled a huge hole in the floor for the drain pipe (sump-pump flex hose into the old laundry tub), ran a new 240V circuit (only one, as the washer plugs into the dryer with a special plug), and ran a vent through my wife’s closet and out the side of the house.

The delivery people weren’t too excited. They are used to installing machines in the basement with lots of room around them. They had to install two 2×2x2 foot machines in a 27″ wide closet with a 2-foot wide door opening.

I have no buyer’s remorse. The machines are amazing (I have pants cuffs that have been dirty for years, even with stain-stick and numerous washes, that came clean in one cycle). The washer spins at 1600RPM, which is fast, and has water temperatures from cold to 205F. The washer senses the amount of water it needs, and the dryer senses when the clothes are dry. They are extremely energy-efficient, using about 1/4 the water and 1/8 the total energy of conventional machines. And did I say the clothes are CLEAN? And they don’t smell like detergent because of the five standard rinses (and two optional additional rinses).

It is insanely convenient to have the laundry on the first floor as well. Already we don’t dread doing the laundry like we used to. And they fit. Barely. I had to re-hang the door on the other side so it would open 180 degrees and not block the opening, and I had to remove one of the pieces of stop molding on the door trim so that the washer door could fold down through the opening. We have a total of about 1/16″ of clearance.

And my clothes are all hanging on a metal rack in my office. Someday, when I get my upstairs finished (which is becoming code for “when hell freezes over” in my house) I will have a closet again. But the trade-off is worth it.

The Swedes know how to make a washer and dryer. I won’t be buying anything else in the future.

small washer, small dryer, small closet

the LCD screen shows all the options and lets you change everything

the front panel folds down to expose the glass door, which hopefully will hold its seal for a good long time