Some of you may know about our burgeoning Spanish House initiative. It's going to be awesome! Related to that I wanted to find traffic counts for a couple locations. Our Denver City Government provides the traffic counts they have done in the last few years. It's awesome.

Inspiration

I got an email a little while ago from an old friend Andy Skalet with the subject "Yeah, I called you fat" - an homage to the lyric from a Digital Underground song. Turns out he's traveling through South Asia with a friend and writing and taking photos the whole time. Great Stuff.

"The meat of the subject" so to speak

I got pretty tired while we were in the Netherlands hearing about how unhealthy Americans were all the while the speaker was spewing cigarette smoke in my face.

Now, turns out the French are having problems with weight as well.

The NCPA has a news summary about how more people are breaking from the traditional "left/right" pigeonhole that politics puts us into even if we don't recognize it and vote that way. The basic idea is that lots of people are Libertarians but don't know that they are.

So Take a political test and figure out where you stand already. And once you do figure it out, think about voting that way.

Dear Lazyweb,

When I get stressed I have a habit of jutting out my jaw.

I'd like to stop doing that.

I have the following solutions:

1. Duct tape my jaw to the back of my head
2. Dig out my head-gear from middle school and attach it to my bottom teeth this time
3. Get my mom to sit next to me all the time and say "ah, ah, ah" whenever I jut it out

Technique 3 was my solution last time I had this problem. Sadly, last time I was 4 years old and bringing her to work would just be weird and work (surprise) is where I get the stress that makes me jut the jaw. If I worked from home or something, that might work, but I'd have to work from her home.

Prefab and Modern Design

I've been reading Design Magazine "Dwell" for about 3 years now. It's generally full great and relatively practical information. It's a little more academic than, for example, the very practical and often cheap Ready Made Magazine, but I still like Dwell very much.

They've been preaching about the coming of "prefab" housing for a while. Not so much the "piece of crap trailers" kind of "prefab" more of the "this is really awesome design and it was at least partially built in a factory which makes it cheaper for the quality and makes assembly time shorter" kind of prefab.

Prefab books

There are two really good books on the subject that I recently read Prefab, by Alison Arieff and Prefab Modern by Jill Herbers. I had heard of the Arief book from Dwell Magazine and found the Herbers book when doing a library search for the Arief book. They are both good, but oddly enough much of the content is the same. Also, they seem to mostly follow in the "Dwell Magazine" format - that is looking at the houses from the Academic point of view with less focus on the every day practical concerns like cost and usability. The houses are almost all gorgeous, but some of them are just wicked expensive or funky useless layouts - or both.

The "big" time

Then, you can imagine my surprise the other day when Businessweek ran an article covering several of these same resources, people and homes Businessweek isn't the best of the business magazines I read, but it's a decent one and they are occasionally ahead of the curve in predicting trends. So hopefully this gets more popular.

Prefab benefits and drawbacks

All the same, I'm very glad personally to see growth in this area. It's something where almost everyone wins: housing can be higher quality, lower cost, more efficiently produced, better designed, etc. etc. The main drawback in my mind is that it could lead to more "cookie cutter" homes - but looking around suburbia and exurbia these days, I don't think we could have a housing trend that takes us any further in the wrong direction on that one. The other perceived drawback is that prefab makes a shift in the labor market. I say "shift" rather than "would force people out of jobs" because I view it as a movement from one area to another.

An entry by Neil Drumm caught my eye today.

His basic summary of how to be a good member/developer in an open source project. Sure you can sit around and read the Cathedral and the Bazaar if you have a few hours to get a good basis and understanding. However, the points Neil makes are short and if you grasp the ideas and their implications, you grasp how great Open Source can be.