Design vs. Develop

The New York Times is running a piece on pre-built homes, mentioning Alchemy Architects. They have several models to choose from, which you can then outfit with your choice of tiles, siding, flooring, walls, and appliances. Looks like a promising start. It would be nice if you could add and remove the options interactively to see the estimated cost of the home.

I am going to give lacto-ovo vegetarianism a shot during the weekdays. For breakfast, I’ve been eating oatmeal with eggs for a while, so I’m covered there. For dinners, I’m going to have to do some planning, so I may give it a few weeks before I fully convert over. Lunch is going to be a challenge, but that’s were it’s needed most: the places that serve meat near where I work are on the sketchy side. I feel my body get very slow after I eat the stuff. I can get a plate of beans and a Naked for what I usually spend on lunch there ($6-7).

My main motivations are health and energy. I also want to see what it’s like for the many vegetarians and vegans I’ve met to get a decent meal. I really don’t have any reservations about eating meat in general, but on the weekends my choices are much better.

So, we’ll see.

Catch the latest episode of Joomla Jabber to hear Tom interview me about Joomla 1.5.

From an article in the Post:

The Houston janitors are demanding more — $8.50 an hour plus health insurance. They also are demanding full-time work instead of four-hour shifts. Their proposed package, equivalent to a 60 percent pay increase, would still fall short of what SEIU janitors make in other cities, including the District.

Of course, they fail to mention that housing in the District (and far into surrounding states) costs at least 3 times as much as housing in Houston does. This writing is typical of Washington bubble thinking.

The Post released a good series on Clarendon, complete with article, chat, interactive map, and nominal story about lifestyle centers. The Ri Ra Irish Pub & Restaurant replacing a hardware store is mentioned several times. (However, I believe that people are more upset that it’s something like the 37th “Irish pub” in the neighborhood than the fact that it replaced a hardware store.) They continue on to talk about local businesses being priced out and the county’s struggle to keep it all balanced. To me, it doesn’t appear that the residents really do all that much to keep their neighborhood local and original (aside from complaining). The county could probably give some large tax breaks to local businesses providing goods or services not already available, but there has to be citizen support behind this. Of course, the irony is that Clarendon began as a suburban outpost with large national retailers before Tyson’s Corner took off.

Thanks to Brandon for sending along the links.

• My polling place has a bunch of windows looking out onto someone’s fence. This someone plastered it with signs for a certain candidate. Since they aren’t inside the polling place, this isn’t illegal. Not that it was really going to influence anyone at that point.
• My county uses Orwellian electronic voting machines, which 9 out of 10 computer scientists agree is a bad thing. Of course, the voting rolls were dot-matrix printed and highlighted by hand.
• The socially-conscious, environmentally-aware residents of Cherrydale drove to the polls. Ok, so I live a block away, but still, a lot of these people weren’t much farther away.