Does anyone remember the site "Leisure Town", in the episode Comedy Crises the main character takes all these Dilbert cartoons and adds his own text. he posted them all over his office and people just flipped out because the stuff was so raunchy and explicit. the Leisure town guy (in real life) was contacted by the Dilbert company's lawyers and he was forced to change the comics to stick figures or risk being sued. anyways, that was funny

There's a pet room in the house, check it out, assuming you'd realy call Dogbert a pet. Also in the pictures there IS a dogbert.

Are you tired of tripping over the cat's litter box in your bathroom?

People keep their cat's litter box in the bathroom? Might as well keep it in the kitchen or your bedroom. Why keep it in a room where you spend a lot of time? Do people like smelling cat shit? I keep mine in the basement. If you don't have a basement keep it somewhere where no one goes.

After reading through the stacks of Dilbert cartoon books in my college apartment's bathroom I was under the assumption that Dilbert's house looked something out of a third grader's art class.

Turns out I was completely wrong and it looks like something out of Art 453, The CGI of Star Wars and how it can be applied to comics.

I guess I preferred living in a world of Simpsons where I didn't have to mentally map out the entire episode based on a "fact" or look at Dilbert's house in anything except black and white pencil.

That's just me though.

I will have to drag out the pencil sketches of a house layout I drew as a teenager in the 1980s. It has a LOT of similarities to the DUH, including a tower and interior patio horseshoe floorplan.

Instead of a motif of elongated curvature, though, I was working with hexagons, and mine was a split-level, not a flat ranch. My movie theater was above the two-car garage.

The tower wasn't a plain observatory, but a hollow tower designed for evaporative cooling: a good way to cool the central patio in the summer is to have a high evaporative "swamp" cooler at the top of a hollow tower, and let the cooled air fall down and into the patio area.

If you aren't organized, having a giant house won't help you. The closet for the Christmas tree will get filled up with other stuff and you won't be able to get at the tree when you need it. One of the first rules about labor saving devices is that labor saving devices don't. They mostly just occupy space.

I have spent some time on ships and have always been impressed by how neat and orderly they are. Everything aboard is necessary and gets used regularly because there is no room for unnecessary stuff. (Unfortunately, I am surrounded by 'stuff' because I didn't learn from the experience.)

People's cat litter boxes smell? Use the correct litter box sand, please.

Also, the patch panel for the netwrking is way too neat. In the true engineer-style, it should be at leaste somewhat messy. Also, that's way too few hook-ups. How can you plug in the interent-enabled fridge into such a small patch panel? Or what about the auto-heat toilet seat cover? Where is it going to plug in? I think that the wiring needs just a little more "geekness".

Nice house that seems to reflect the owners tastes and desires without going overboard. Some might disagree due to the turret paying homage to the character that paid for it, but its nice to see a celebrity's home that doesn't try to match Aaron Spelling's mansion.

myke

It's called the Dilbert Hole [pied.nu]

Remembering the seventies energy crush, there was plenty of designs for underground houses (go to the library and peruse old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics back issues from that era).

Building underground makes sense; where I live, there is also an extensive downtown underground network (in light gray on this map [stm.info];interconnected city blocks are in pink) which everyone raves about (especially during winter), so it's not that silly an idea.

However, the most striking feature of the house is the master closet adjacent to the master bedroom which leads to two bathrooms. I've been reading an interesting series of books about the evolution of the architectural distribution of rooms as social customs evolved. A long time ago, in France, posh houses had precisely that, dressing rooms adjacent to the bedroom that led to bathrooms (the only difference was that the husband and wife had separate bedrooms). The setting makes a lot of sense.

And it proves that history repeats itself... There is a lot to learn from the past.

This might not be a popular opinion here, but this house looks so cold and engineered and artificial. There's something to be said for the aesthetics of a lawn that isn't astroturf and a house that hasn't been built entirely around the principle of energy (and everything else) efficiency. Of course I'm not currently living in a drafty two-hundred year old monstrosity with leaky plumbing, I might change my mind if I was, but I get the feeling that such a house would be infinitely more livable than this thing.

It has an excercise room. Sorry.

I'll have you know I regularly ride a bike over 100 miles each weekend. It's amazing how much you can totally geek out on GPS/HR monitor/Cadence/Altimeter, etc. Check out out he HAC4.

My ultimate apartment was next to the hardware store, within walking distance of grocery and many restaurants and across the street from a theater with stadium seating. Too bad it was about 40 miles from all the cool electronics shops in Silicon Valley.

Three most important points to consider when buying a house (or renting an apartment):

Location

Location

Location

Actually, that's the funny thing. Engineers, while not being datable AT ALL, seem to be the most _marryable_ types around. It's like women go out with cool guys into it gets boring, and then find engineers to settle down with. Either that, or engineers attract people who are more interested in marriage than the cool guys.

"Remembering the seventies energy crush, there was plenty of designs for underground houses (go to the library and peruse old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics back issues from that era)."

A nice feature is that they're very, very quiet. Especially if you live in a noisy part of town.

The only downside is that "living in a cave" feeling.

People still use litter boxes??

We keep one around for when we get kittens. First, they're house broken and taught to use the litter box. Then they're taught to go outside instead. Works like a charm. No litter box to smell/clean/change, and nothing to worry about tripping over in the yard either. One of the better things about cats: they look after themselves.

Even better, is to train them to use the can like everyone else does. We had one cat that just started crapping in the toilet -- didn't have to teach him or anything. I used to get in trouble all the time for not flushing (I was 8 or so) until my mom finally caught the cat in the act.

Methinks you're over-thinking that just a tad. I have two cats - their litterbox is under an open spiral staircase (fails two of your criteria, since they can't see the whole room from it, and the open staircase it rests under is prime for predatorial leaping), and it sits directly next to the food bowls (though it faces away from them, of course). The male tends to sleep directly above it on the stairway, because that's the best possible location for tripping the humans. I've never had an issue with out-of-the box cat poopage. And the 2.5 foot stairway? You'd like the poor kitty to have to jump with a full bladder? Bad enough they have to go to the loo in a box of dirt, now they have to perform gymnastics to get there? tsk tsk.

The litter box is really low tech. He should get a Litter-Robot [litter-robot.com] We put ours in a closet with a flap cat door and there's also room for his food and water. purrfect hideaway from the dog and baby

It's like women go out with cool guys into it gets boring, and then find engineers to settle down with.

Yep, I've seen this behavior all too often. The problem with it is, these stupid girls wait around until they're 30-something until they finally figure out that the loser mental case they're dating is never going to hold a steady job, and when they start looking for stable men with a good income who don't beat her, they've either become so disenfranchised and bitter that they've given up on looking for someone, or have developed mental problems that prevent them from being a good long-term partner, or they've thrown in the towel and married someone who wasn't all that desirable, and was just convenient.

Split them. Data to a RAID array and the media to boxes in the garage/basement/wherever.

Seriously, I know some people appreciate the CD covers and such, but if the media industry suits weren't such retards (in the literal sense: unwilling to move forward) and actually innovated on the possibilities of new technology instead of trying to fight it, we could already have a good standard and great commercial implementations for the entertainment system of the future.

What I'm talking about is a system where you can buy music, movies and books either directly as downloads or on physical disks which would be automatically ripped to a terabyte array and shared throughout the house. You could watch any movie on any TV/projector, you could stream any music to any sound systems in the house, including the kids' boomboxes, and you could read any book you wanted on any of your cheap 50 gram e-ink e-book readers, wirelessly.

Considering how much your average mid-to-high income Joe Anybody is willing to spend on a flat-screen or a HiFi set, the cost could be well in the affordable range if only SOMEBODY wasn't so bent up on making sure no-one ever copies bits off their shiny plastic discs.

I only meant to reply with the first line. I apologise. (Damn you RIAA for making me rant!)