I haven't written nearly as much on this site in the last year or two in part because I "blog" less and in part because I'm just doing it in more specialized places. I realized that by writing about all sorts of different things on knaddison.com I was creating 1 site with no focus when instead I could create 12 sites each with singular focus. The latter form is, of course, more useful to readers.

Here's an introduction for one site Nikki and I have been working on that we really enjoy: Ice Cream Denver.

Denver Ice Cream Review & Photo blog

Nikki loves Ice Cream. I don't mind it ;) And especially with our little daughter we were looking for a new project that would be a fun weekend errand. We started the site in September of 2010 and immediately posted a bunch of store locations. Shortly after we started posting photos of the various shops.

A few of my favorites:

Chalk Board Menus

Chalk board menus are common in the restaurant industry and definitely deliver a cutesy feeling at ice cream shops. For liks south it's painted on and cutesy, but not so practical (in spite of their hundreds of flavors). At sweet action it seems purely practical: they are often adding and removing items from their menu. Menus are a popular item on the site, so popular I created a listing page.

And not a day too soon. Holy cow, after literally years of waiting and begging the IKEA in South Denver is finally opening on July 27th. I predict massive traffic jams. I plan to go there and sell tiny meatballs with tiny swedish flags in them accompanied by iced-lingonberry-juice-like-beverage.

We moved to a new house about a year ago. In the process we left our TV in the old house for "staging" which meant it was there for 6 months (it's hard to sell a house now, apparently). In the mean time we watched a ton of Hulu and Netflix instant shows on our 15" computer. This has been relatively glorious.

Cutting the Cable TV cord

With the TV in the old house and our computers in the new we moved our high-speed-internet service (delivered by Comcast over cable) to the new house but shut off the TV service. Luckily Hulu and Netflix ably filled in the gap. We're watching weird and great shows, documentaries, and even adver-tainment like the Ford Focus Rally (although having to endure commercials in the middle of adver-tainment grated on our nerves enough that we stopped).

Hulu has a rolling schedule where they drop content. We can't see old episodes of the Chicago Code (our favorite new show). In a year or two, though, they should be on Netflix. It seems like every day Netflix gets more and more instant content. Amazon's got some instant offering, but we haven't run out of content on Netflix+Hulu enough to worry about what Amazon might have for us. I would love for the BBC's Junkyard Wars to be opened up on Hulu or Netflix. Right now it's making zero money from the American market - why not let it out? So it seems like our TV watching needs will be fulfilled by on-demand media delivered by Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and companies like them.

So long, physical media

We have several bookshelves and boxes full physical media: books, journals, magazines, CDs, DVDs. Our TV is currently used primarily to watch DVDs. But the transition is clear: even though high def TV with surround sound is fun, the immediacy of on-demand video media wins. If nothing else it means we can eliminate about one quarter of the furniture in our house since it is designed strictly for holding and showcasing our physical media!