Idiomatic Expression

For all of the complaining those of us living in the DC Metropolitan area do about housing prices none of our zip codes made the Forbes Magazine Top 25 Most Expensive Zip Code Slideshow.

The closest zip code to make it into the top 25 is good old 21056 Gibson Island, MD with a median house price of just over $1.6 million.

Forbes Magazine also compiled a list of the top 150 most expensive zip codes

Luckily, or unluckily depending on your point of view, there is an local entry in the top 150 list, Zip Code 22066 Great Falls, VA with a median home price of $922,500 made it into the top 150 list at #86. Strangely this is the only local zip code that makes the list. I was sure that a North Arlington Zip code like 22207 would make the list, or maybe Georgetown in the district.

The only other entry on the top 150 that is near the DC Metro is entry #26 with a median home price of $1.3 million Zip Code 21153 Stevenson, MD, which is just north of Baltimore.

The observation deck of Taipei 101 is finally open! It had not opened on my last trip to Taiwan, so I was interested to see that someone had posted pictures from the top of the building. Although the pictures were taken while the building was under construction, I am sure the view would be pretty similiar if I could actually get to Taipei this summer.

As this is my first official non site update post, I guess this is my new home! The old entries will be imported soon, until they can still be found at randy.amber.org.

The background photo is from an area in Seattle’s Pikes Place Market where bills and posters are hung.

I am also working on some comment plugins to force moderation of comments on posts with no activity for 7 days. Let me know if you see any strange behavior with this, or if posts less than 7 days old don’t immediatly display comments.

I am working on wrestling the FastTrack theme by Sadish Balasubramanian from WPThemes.Info into a theme that does what I want it to do.

I have made lots of progress in getting this template to do what I want. The stuff I have done so far:

• Put all of the items appearing in the sidebar in sidebar.php.
• Set up place holders for Archive, Links, Contact, and About pages
• Linked above mentioned pages in the sidebar.
• Removed some of the unneeded cruft (e.g. categories listing in the mainpage).
• Broke out links listing by links category in sidebar.
• Added creative commons info in the footer.

The big things I have left to do before I get to a good temporary status:

• Find an icon for my photo page to put in the header.
• Add link / icon for the photo page to header.
• Replace the default FastTrack photo.
• Import my MT entries from randy.amber.org.
• Add content to about and contact pages.

Hopefully this will be done by the end of the week.

I have the domain and I have the software, now there should be continual progress towards making this my full time home on the web. Until then some new stuff may continue to show up on the old page.

Next step is working out how to sort through those cluttered links with the built in WordPress tools.

Look ma, I got a web page!

I have become a member of the landed gentry with the purchase of the domain name ieblog.net. Not much to see at this time, but once I get WordPress installed things will start progressing nicely.

Many thanks go out to Mike for agreeing to provide the new home of Idiomatic Expression. If you haven’t noticed that is the title of the blog and what the IE in ieblog stands for, no not Internet Explorer. Of course I am only mostly sure that Microsoft has not patented that letter combination.

I am less than 24 hours into my love affair with the 1GB iPod Shuffle that Katherine surprised me with yesterday. I setup a playlist with around 2GB of my favorite music and told iTunes to load up a random mix. The morning commute into DC was a lot more enjoyable, and I found myself walking a bit slower than usual on the way up from Farragut West.

The picture above is only slightly smaller than the actual player.

Here is what has been served up so far.

• Jim Jennie and the Pine[barons,tops] (2)
• Elvis Costello(2)
• Supreme Beings of Leisure
• Beatles (2)
• Johnny Cash (4 one of which was a Beatles cover)
• Orbital(2)
• Depeche Mode
• Dead Kennedys
• The Clash
• Willie Nelson (3)
• Martyr Colony
• Prick
• Non-Agression Pact
• Blondie
• X-Ecutioners
• Röyksopp (2)
• The Legends

The auto-fill and shuffle functions are great ways to revisit neglected portions of my music collection.

As a total aside every time I listen to a Beatles tune the strange things they did with stereo always surprise me (even though I should know to expect the bass and drums in one ear, and everything else in the other).

When coming home from the breakfast yesterday morning, I noticed a small hand labeled sign for Fairfax Underground. I checked it out this morning, and it appears to be a small forum community. It looks to be in the early stages of development with no user profiles. Accounts can be created, but this only allows you to publish your email adress to the world. Check it out; hopefully the site will continue to develop as I think this is something that is needed for Northern Virginia.

Do you speak Dixie, Yankee, perhaps Midwestern? Apparently I speak 70% General American English. Woo Hoo I speak American! Although I am not quite sure how the quiz can be so positive of this through 20 questions. Of course the results may also be skewed because I wanted to answer either both, or none of the above for questions without those options.

For those interested in where my accent (or lack thereof) came from, I have lived most of my life in Virginia. Growing up in Tidewater, going to college in Blacksburg, and currently residing in Fairfax. I spent five or six years of summer and winter breaks in Torrington, CT. Most of the people in Connecticut thought I had an accent although I couldn’t really detect one on the people I met there.

This is via Chris.