Wow, it's real

by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2005 11:16 AM EST
Yesterday Vinney and I went down to our lot to see, for the first time in person, the progress on our first house together. I was completely blown away. It was so much more than I ever expected it to be and it was so much more exciting than when I built my first place, mostly because this one was designed by the two of us from scratch so there's so much more of us in every square foot of that place. I was truly blown away and it usually takes a lot to do that to me :)

We met with a designer yesterday as well, so hopefully we'll be able to enlist her services in actually making sure the whole house looks right on the inside. I don't think it's any surprise that I'm not the most decorative of the two of us and it'd be helpful to have someone to help us make all of the little decisions that we need to. Last night we mapped out where all of the light switches needed to be in the house; you just don't think about this stuff until you are forced to make a decision - needless to say, I'm at least confident that all of the light switches will be in the right places...I hope :)

The Xbox 360/PS3 piece is up, and despite its length it's actually not totally complete. I'm running a bit late so I'm going to cut this one short, I'll post more later.
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  • Carlos - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link

    Light switches? Light switches in your 21st century home??? What about home automation? :)

    Well, light switches are not so hard to place.
    They have to stay near every door (either on the inside or outside - depending on the type of "room": inside on the living rooms, sleeping rooms; outside on bathrooms and such)

    As a rule of thumb, also place a power outlet at the same vertical alignment (You'll have that axis used by the light switch anyway). That is something many people don't do, and regret later.

    Power outlets are the hard part, placing them correctly is sort of "black magic art". :)
  • kilkennycat - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Both of the extremely informative Xbox360/PS3 articles were indeed pulled yesterday (June 29). What happened ??? Did Bill Gates and/or Howard Stringer get upset ?

    And I did not make any local copies :-( :-(

    I do hope that both articles will be re-posted, even if appropriately sanitized to make any offended third-parties happy. They contain a great deal of very useful information. Thanks for writing them.

    Anand, you were perfectly correct in saying that the actual CPU performance of either console will nowhere approach the theoretical performance, at least for a very long time. Writing efficient compilers for new architectures takes time and effort. The DSP world is littered with architectures for which writing efficient compilers have proved impossible. However, hand-coding a few key algorithms on a DSP to maximize its performance is quite a different task from coding a complete application to run efficiently on either of these new console CPU-architectures.
  • AtaStrumf - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Jp, both PS3/XBOX360 articles have been removed!!!
  • schowtyme - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    was thinking that same thing Marcelo
  • Marcelo - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Has the article been pulled offline?
  • David Smith - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Have you read "The Design of Everyday Things", by Donald Norman? Fascinating book, and it covers stuff like you were talking about with the light switches. His solution to that problem is particularly interesting.
  • OzzFan - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    "Vinney, where's the light switch for the Master Bathroom?"

    "I thought you told him to put it on the right."

    "No, I told him to put in the new 400W circuit for my Study."

    "Well, I didn't tell them either!"

    "..."

    :)
  • Aquila76 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    I second the pics for the house OR BAN!!!!
    Sorry, forum posting has tainted me. ;)
  • blckgrffn - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Tim! Wow, to be on a first name basis with that guy ;) The best I could ever be at Epic is an IT guy, as that is my forte and my coding skills aren't godlike as I am sure they would need to be, but how cool would it be to work there? I can only imagine how great it would be sometimes...
  • cu - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link

    Can you post pics of your house being built, if don't mind that is.

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