My neighbor's house is and has been for sale for months now. When they first told me they were selling, they asked if we were going to cause them problems in doing so. I thought that was really strange. Apparently, somehow the information on the property line I'd received from the previous owners had me mowing 2-3 lawn mower swipes too far. Somehow this was seen an omen of my evil as a neighbor.

I made it abundantly clear that I had no problems and settled in to watch them prepare for the sale. I say "prepare" because there's no way I would have put my house up on the market if it looked like theirs does. Yet, very little happened outside until suddenly there was a sign outside. Curious about the asking price, I looked it up and ended up just shaking my head. Condition aside, they were asking $209,000 (what ours had been listed at when we bought) for a house that had a tuckunder garage where my office and our guest bedroom are in our house. Same asking price, smaller house. Then the way it looks from the street . . .

I took pictures a couple of weeks ago of this house and have looked at them several times, wondering if I should write this up. I'm refraining from doing much more than stating the facts and not describing what I see. But, then, I think the photos will speak for themselves.

They've since lowered the price to $189,000, which to me is an example of how not preparing for the sale can easily cost you $20,000+ as I doubt this will be the last price drop.
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I wasn't planning to write any sort of end of the year post. I had no intention of getting all "navel gazer" on you all. There was going to be no "2005 in Review", no "Top NN Things to Do in 2006". Then, I cleaned my aquarium.
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I'm not sure how I missed it when he wrote it, but a few weeks ago, when I put up my article on dogearing pages and writing in books, Bruce Sterling, a writer I have immense respect for, wrote up a great commentary on it.

Just so you know, Bruce, my copy of Holy Fire bears many an unholy mark and modification and will likely fall victim to my book origami and inscription as the boomer generation retires and that book looks more like documentary than science fiction.

Choice quotes include:

…this is the gateway drug to postliterate, paper-chewing info-intoxication…

(((Dante must have created a special circle in hell for former English majors and turncoat librarians with this cheery postliterate attitude; probably, while they're forced to do endless comparative-lit studies, demons flay off their skins , and then fling them into the hellish gloom like discarded book-jackets.)))

I've mentioned companies in the past that let you design metal parts to be manufactured. This lets you get metal parts that fit your project exactly. However, all of them require CAD drawings and most require their own software to handle things. Big Blue Saw, however, announced that they now will take PNG's and make your parts from that. This lowers the barrier of entry for DIY hackers and builders looking for stuff you can't just pick up at Home Depot.

At the moment it's just for "flat" objects, but that makes sense if you think about it and is a good start anyway. So, anything you want made this way needs to be essentially something you could cut out of a flat piece of material.

I'm looking around here to see if there's a project I can use as an excuse to order something using this.

With Microsoft caving in and adopting the quickly standardizing RSS orange icon, it was just a matter of time before a pretty site that helps people out by giving the icon out in a variety of formats appeared.

I think it's great. I read 300+ feeds myself and its dramatically increased the amount of really good content I can read in the amount of time I have available. However, I think it's hilarious in a non-Alanis ironic kind of way that the way you "stay in the loop" is . . . to give them your email address. They even comment on how much they hate spam as much as you do. Yet, no RSS or Atom feed in the metadata for autodiscovery, and the pinnacle of this ironic mountain is that none of the 10 feed icons (including the big one and the favicon.ico) actually links to a feed.

It just goes to show my oft-repeated point that the first thing people try to do with new technology is do things the old way. "Look at this new feed stuff. It's great. You can keep up with sites easily and subscribe to them. You want to keep up with this site? Email of course." Would you like a buggy whip with your new Model T?