BruceHartman.net

Since I’ve done just about nothing to the house since I finished the major effort on the bedroom, I’ve been pretty quiet here. Mostly I’ve been coasting through the holidays and getting back in the swing of things at work. I mean, come on, I haven’t even posted a doormat in, like, two whole weeks. What’s up with that, yo?

I have a few trips coming up in Q1 this year, so I’m not sure how much major work will get done on the casa between now and April or May. In February I’ll be driving up to Pittsburgh for a few days to spend some quality time with my grandmother and in March I’m flying to Las Vegas for a software conference and some R&R in the desert (with at least a visit to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon in the mix there somewhere).

With the lack of house work, I’ve been mulling over a couple of ideas for regular features to keep this site from becoming stagnant… stuff in the same vein as The Weekly Doormat (seriously, have I driven that joke into the ground or do you guys find it at least mildly amusing?). One of my favorite daily reads is Book of Joe. He finds some of the craziest and coolest stuff (some of which I’d even consider buying) and discusses them on his site with the periodic poem or other interesting bit of writing. Plus he’s a fellow Virginian so he gets 50 cool points for that alone. But that’s beside the point. Anyway, occasionally I run across cool things in my web travels and I usually IM them to my buddy in Virginia Beach preceded by the text: “Dude, this is the best thing EVAR.” So, look forward to a semi weekly feature guiding you to the best thing ever.

The other feature is something I can see turning into a pretty cool web meme. So if—or, rather, when—it takes the Interweb by storm, I’m claiming responsibility right now. Basically whenever I go to a new friend’s house for the first time, I spend a lot of time looking at the things they hang on their walls. It tells you a lot about the person. Sort of like the line from High Fidelity:

…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films — these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the damn truth…

So here’s the idea: once a week I’m going to post a picture of something that’s on the walls in my house and explain the story behind that thing. It’ll be called “What’s On Your Wall” or, for brevity’s sake, WOW. Hopefully my friends and other housebloggers will follow suit and show us the meaningful things with which they surround themselves and tell their stories.

Hopefully these new regular features will provide a good springboard for more dialog between you and me. Because, in the end, isn’t that what this is all about?