Jingle Bells around the world

Brazil!




Paraguay!




France!




Russia!




Kenya!




India!




China!




Japan!




And finally, we come back to the US in what has to be the most curious of all of the Jingle Bells covers in existence:

Barbra!

Tonight is La Vigilia

Tonight is La Vigilia. Despite my complete lack of anything resembling an Italian heritage, I have claimed one anyhow. The way I see it, I'm Italian by intention not Italian by birth. That's a mere technicality.


La Vigilia is an Italian-American, traditional meal held on the evening of 24 December. So before I get ready to dive into some Baccalà and salt cured anchovies tonight, I need to set a mood for the day.

In 1744, a Neapolitan priest named Alfonso Maria de Liguori wrote a song that would come to be Italy's great and lasting contribution to the body of world Christmas music. The song is Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle and here it is performed by Luciano Pavarotti. This version makes the hair on my arms stand up, but that's just me.





Tu scendi dalle stelle,
O Re del Cielo,
e vieni in una grotta,
al freddo al gelo.

O Bambino mio Divino
Io ti vedo qui a tremar,
O Dio Beato
Ahi, quanto ti costò
l'averci amato!

A te, che sei del mondo
il Creatore,
mancano panni e fuoco;
O mio Signore!

Caro eletto Pargoletto,
Quanto questa povertà
più mi innamora!
Giacché ti fece amor
povero ancora!

Buon Natale!

OK, now this is serious

So yesterday I got nominated for an Apartment Therapy Homie Award and I thought it was more funny and strange than anything. As it got bandied around the blogosphere though, a bit of a competition started up. I still don't really care a whit or a fig for Apartment Therapy but damn it, there's a competition on.

At the risk of sounding like a complete sell-out (I'd use whore but Christian from Maison21 has the trademark on that word --hah!) Follow this link and vote for me. What better way to remain a fly in their ointment than to place well in one of their awards?

Christian's post on this topic is priceless, check it out and while you're voting vote for Maison21 too.

Riding Google's Wave

This is a kitchen layout.

Here's another view of it.

So far as kitchen designs go, it does what it needs to do at a price point someone's willing to pay. In addition to that it has a lot of function built into a relatively small space and it pulls off all that function while still looking orderly and clean. A design like this will last a family for years and barring any radical changes in popular taste, this kitchen renovation is a purchase they will never have to make again.

Obviously, it's one of mine and it's a Sketchup model. How it got to its current state though is a good story.

Around a month or so ago, two of my long time readers contacted me about designing a floor plan for a house they're renovating. That's not unusual, I get calls like that all the time. What was unusual was that they were 300 miles away and their budget wouldn't allow for any on-site time for me.

So they sent me a .pdf of their floor plan and a SketchUp model of the house the way it's configured now.

So I rebuilt their floor plan on top of the one they'd provided and I designed a kitchen in it. I specified a bunch of finishes and thought long and hard about all of the parts that were going to go into this project.

Ordinarily, when I have the basics of a floor plan and a budget put together, I call on the client and we have a sit down to review everything. Ordinarily, I print out everything on 11" x 17" paper and we talk through the whole plan. I take notes during that conversation and then make whatever changes are needed after the appointment. That's pretty much how kitchen design works and it's worked that way since the days of hand drawn renderings.

Well in this case, my clients were too far away to drive for an appointment, so we arranged for a virtual one.

The conversation was going to be about budgets, so I exported my SketchUp model as an AutoCad file and then imported it into 20/20. 20/20 is a CAD derived POS software I use to price kitchens. The clients in question are also users of Google Wave and the plan was to use Wave as a collaboration tool if we needed it.

At the appointed hour, they called me (on my Google Voice number, natch) and I e-mailed them a couple of perspective drawings. Now these files are huge and e-mailing them takes forever.

Eventually the files arrived and we started our conversation. There were some changes that needed to be made so I started making them as we spoke.

As I made changes, I would save them as .jpg files and pop them right into the Wave we'd started. Sort of like this.

Once I would set the .jpg files into Wave, they were visible immediately to my clients. They would click on them and see them in full size. It was amazing, there was no guess work or chance for miscommunication. What I couldn't get over was the speed at which I could make a change, make a .jpg and then get it in front of them to see what they thought.

In the course of an hour-and-a-half phone call we accomplished something that usually takes weeks.

The next day I had a hangover from drinking all that Google Kool-Aid the night before but I couldn't help but to think that I'd somehow touched the future of my profession. Doing design long-distance has always had the problem of not being immediate, but Google Wave just changed that.

Google Wave is where distance communication is headed. But it's not just for static communication, after all that's what e-mail does. But Wave is immediate and it happens in real time. It's not chat because it can have everything from calendars to maps inserted right into the stream without missing a beat. For now, Google Wave is in limited release. As cool as it is, it's not quite ready for prime time. With time, its functionality will increase and improve. For now though, it's an impressive tool and I can't get near it without thinking about how powerful it will be when it's fully up to speed.

So congrats Google Gang, you came up with another winner. If you'd like to learn more about Google Wave, here's a link to Google's Wave information page.

Isn't it ironic?

That's the nomination page from Apartment Therapy's 2009 Homie Awards. Check out who's the third blog listed under Hot Movers.

All hail reader Nim and her delicious blog Bitchlexia for nominating me. I can't think of anything more fun than ending up on a list on Apartment Therapy. Other than a black list that is.

***edited to add: I just realized that this is a competition. Get on there and vote!