Lite Brite!

Isn't light brite the coolest toy ever? I made the above image on the light brite widget on my mac at work. It's so much fun!!! My favorite part is doing the paper patterns that you would put over the light bright and then punch thru the paper kind of like color by number.

Good Idea? Bad Idea?

So, it's been about a week since the big announcement came that John Steffen of Pyramid Construction is purchasing the St. Louis Centre and the attached One City Centre office building and has the old Dillards building next door under contract. The plans for these buildings sound great in theory. Renovations to begin this summer and will include 120 luxury condos with a center open air atrium with swimming pool. The ground floor will hold 6-12 restaurants and stores, with Borders and Whole Foods as prospective tenants. The best part is that the building will look completely different. The ugly green and white skin on the exterior will be gone as well as that AWFUL skybridge over Washington Ave. Plans for the Dillards building have not yet been released but Steffen was quoted saying that it is best suited for "mixed use."

With all that said, the question is whether St. Louis can support additional loft spaces. I am very excited about the renovation of historic buildings in downtown St. Louis, however I don't think that St. Louis has the market to keep all of these loft spaces full. I'd rather them do something to it then let it sit and rot even more. What do you think...good idea to build lofts or bad idea to spend the money on a questionable market?

E-mail Forwards

So we've all sent them - e-mail forwards. There are several categories of forwarded emails:

• Nice thoughts we wish to pass on to friends to make them smile
• Jokes meant to make friends laugh
• Shocking stories and photos, warnings and those too-good-to-be-true offers

I got three forwards today, all three which turned out to be false. PLEASE if you are going to spend the time to forward a message to a friend, do a little research first to find out whether or not it's true. It only takes a couple minutes. There are many web sites out there that focus on urban legands, just type the subject matter of the email into google and you're bound to get several sites telling you whether it is true or false and why.

So here goes...three false email forwards that I received today:

1. The 90# Telephone Scam
2. Photographs of a Snake found inside a PC
   
3. 1954 Home Computer

Wedding Tuxes

Here is a sneak preview of the tuxes that we picked out for the wedding! They are from Jim's Formal Wear, rented through Bridal Connections in Florissant. Click on the image for a bigger view! The red vests match the bridesmaid dresses perfectly! The groom, fathers and usher will wear the same tux with different vest and tie colors.

Nohari Window

This one is basically the same idea as the last post, only this time you choose from a list of adjectives describing your failings. Kinda scary to think about isn't it...seeing what your friends think your failings are. Be honest and don't worry, I won't get mad at you!

http://kevan.org/nohari?name=froggie

Johari Window

Thanks Merkelet for this URL.

This is a very interesting little tool. Basically it has a list of words and you choose the 6 that describe me the most. I've also chosen 6 and so once you've chosen 6 and submitted them, it shows you which words we picked the same and which we chose differently.

http://kevan.org/johari?name=froggiegirl

Photographing the Centre

The sign above is displayed inside the St. Louis Centre Mall in downtown St. Louis. Actually it's displayed in multiple places, at least 5 or 6. And as most people know, the St. Louis Centre is a dead mall. Walgreens, Famous Barr, T Mobile, and Sbarro Pizza are the only recognizable store names left doing business, with a handful of other random shops attempting to sell their costume jewelry and hip clothing to lunchtime mall walkers and unsuspecting convention attendees. In the four floors of retail space, maybe 8 or so of these shops exist.

Those of you who read Gimlet's blog are aware of the photography situation at the downtown St. Louis Centre Mall. The situation being that it is against the centre's rules to photograph inside the mall without written permission from the management. Well, being ever up to a challenge, I had to go attempt to photograph the inside of the centre myself.

During lunch a couple days ago a co-worker and I ventured into the mall. We took quite a few pictures and did not get stopped or spoken to by anyone. Here is just a sampling of what the St. Louis centre has to offer (click to enlarge).


As you can see, the St. Louis Centre is really "Downtown Shopping at it's Best!"

You've Got To Check This Out!

You've got to check out this website: The Sith Sense

It's a campaign that Burger King launched whenever they were doing the whole dark vader thing a few months back. (a co-worker showed me this site at work today) You challenge vader by thinking of an object, animal, vegetable, mineral or unknown, and he asks you questions. By the end he's figured out what you were thinking of! It's crazy, so far he's guesssed "chinchilla" and "umbrella" pretty easily. "Christmas Lights" took him 26 questions to guess. Can you stump him?

And in case you're wondering what the heck the guy dressed as a chicken is that comes in sometimes at the end of the scene, check out the Subservient Chicken, a BK online promotion from a couple years ago.