Over the last few weeks we’ve been doing a minor remodel of our kitchen. Since kitchens can be an endless money pit, and we don’t have endless money to throw at it, we decided to keep things simple: Fresh paint and new appliances. What a difference! It’s looking great, but we still have more to go. The blinds we ordered haven’t arrived yet, and the original refrigerator we bought didn’t fit! It was too wide by about 1/2″. Of course the model that will fit is more expensive and had to be special-ordered. It’ll be about three more weeks before it arrives, but fortunately we have our old fridge out in the garage.

Overall we’re quite pleased. We really hated the old kitchen; the colors were blah and the appliances were old and nasty. This relatively minor upgrade on the crazy kitchen economic scale is well worth it.

Click on the image above for the full gallery.

Have I mentioned that Les Stroud, host of the Discovery Channel’s Survivorman, is my hero? If you’ve never seen the show, the premise is that Les spends seven days in the wilderness with only the clothes on his back, his cameras, a pocket knife, and a few very basic supplies. He has no film crew with him; he films and narrates the whole thing himself.

It’s a pretty amazing thing to survive for seven days in the extreme places he goes, but it’s even more extraordinary to do a wonderful job of filming the whole thing. He always manages to capture the beauty of his surroundings, as well as the difficulty presented by trying to survive them.

His program is about as real of a survival show as you can get. Sure, he has a safety team not too far behind him and a radio to contact them if things go wrong, but he (and the network) would have to be nuts not to. He gives the viewer real survival advice, not the typical eating gross things and secretly spending nights in a hotel like those other survival shows.

In fact, his show is so good that it has recently helped save some people’s lives. Here are a couple examples:

• Tips from TV show helped Manitoba snowmobiler survive for five days in wilderness
• Found: Couple Stranded In Snow For 12 Days

To a tip of the hat to you, Mr. Stroud, for a job well done! Here’s looking forward to Season 3 of Survivorman.

Amazing animations… rather entrancing. Found on Digg.

Number 1

Number 2

From our friends in Japan…

I found this on Vimeo. It’s a little long, but it’s worth watching. The HD version is even better.

Cinco De Mayo Carnival from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.

In a continued effort to give the recording industry the middle finger, Nine Inch Nails (NIN) are giving away their new album “The Slip” for free. It is an interesting wager; NIN are betting that that this will increase their standing with fans who will be more likely to support the band by going to concerts and buying snazzy NIN merchandise… business areas where the band sees a much larger share of the revenue than CD/MP3 sales.

The album seems to be an good effort, though it feels like Trent has grown past earnest angst and rage and moved on to just creating interesting music. To me, The Downward Spiral stands alone as his masterpiece.

Of note is that this album (like Ghosts I-IV) is licensed under creative commons. This means that audio and video hobbyists like yours truly can use the songs in any non-commercial creative work as long as credit is given to the artist, in this case Mr. Reznor. This is awesome, as I hate it when I want to use a particular song in a video but am afraid the MPAA will knock down my door as soon as I post it online.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out; I sincerely hope that the economics work so well for NIN that they inspire other bands to follow in their footsteps. Maybe I should buy a t-shirt…

Okay, just one more video. Found on Digg…

… So true, so true.

We just watched the movie Cashback. Despite a bit of gratuitous nudity, I thought it was excellent. Beautifully filmed with gorgeous effects, but also a charming and funny story with a variety of interesting characters. Netflix came though this time; it recommended this movie for us based on the ratings we gave to other movies. Gotta love it when technology works like it should.

Last week I turned 30. I’d think of something clever to say about this milestone, but now that I’m so old such extravagances are out of the question. I get tired just stirring my Metamucil. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging… You can look forward to such exciting posts as “All this progress — phooey!”, “By gum! 2nd BM this week!”, “An Open Letter To The Dog Who Shat On My Lawn”, and “Has Anyone Seen My Reading Glasses?”

Last week was also Melanie’s birthday, so to celebrate our mutual birthday week we headed out to Vegas. Figuring that it was a somewhat major birthday milestone, we decided to live it up and stay a night at the Bellagio and a night at Mandalay Bay. The Bellagio was awesome, great room, great service, nice atmosphere. The pools were great too. The Mandalay Bay had a great room but it was way too busy and crowded… We got to the pool at 9:30 AM and couldn’t find a single chair. Blah. But we got to see Penn & Teller, eat good food, and gawk at the ridiculousness that is Vegas. Good times.

Click on the image above to see the gallery.

Thanks for sending me this, Erik!