Georgia Tech’s Team Icarus is competing in this year’s Department of Energy sponsored Solar Decathalon.  Jodi has been working tirelessly for the past year on the house as part of her Architecture Master’s degree, or what I like to call her “early retirement” (only kidding honey).  Her impeccable design talents really show through.  She’s way too modest to blog about it, but, I, on the other hand, have to do some shameless promotion to give this blog its namesake.  Plus, I’m killing two birds with one stone by blogging about this awesome environmental cause as part of Blog Action Day 2007.

Just some insider facts about the Georgia Tech’s Solar Home:

• The solar panels covering the roof power the full home and home office, and an electric car.
• It has a sexy Bulthaup kitchen with a full glass window where a sink floats over it.  German, modern, industrial, clean lines with a Bisaza glass tile backsplash make this kitchen hott.
• It has a “transparent” roof — this is cool because all around the top of the roof there’s sunlight streaming in, and with the solar panels able to move on levers, this house lets in a serious amount of light.  This could mean lots of extra heat, but the aerogel insulation and clever shading do a good job of just letting light in and keeping heat out.
• The shower has a full floor to ceiling window for “showing off your assets” to your neighbors.  Actually, I can see this house on the side of a mountain or on the beach….

I’m going up to Washington DC to visit the competition, and Jodi this Wednesday through Saturday.  I’ll be tumbloging the event.  As it stands now, Georgia Tech is in 2nd place!

Thanks to Rez and Omar for their sheer l33tness in having a mythtv-recorded, transcoded, ipod video ready format movie of the entire episode including all 15 minutes of Jodi, Jameson, and my fame ready for bittorrent downloading.

All that nonsense above means that you can watch it here. Thanks guys!

As you might recall, I posted a while back about HGTV filming our place for their show, “What You Get For the Money.”

Well, we just got a call last week, and our segment will air on the newest episode — Wednesday, July 12, 2006 at 10:30 pm on HGTV.

Fire up your Tivos (and mythTV boxen)!

We’re renovating our new place — a sweet little loft condo in Atlanta (near lil’5). It’s done really well, even won some awards for the concrete pours. It is really a great space — not like one of those “let’s expose the duct work and call it a loft!” lofts…. It’s quite fabulous, but as usual, we’re going to be taking it up about 10 notches to make it uber-fabulous.

Jodi’s pulling out all the tricks: a new Poliform kitchen with ovengold wood, a sub-zero fridge, coffee system, dishwasher, cooktop, hood, oven, etc. — all the works. We’re putting in a massive shower upstairs–dual head, all-new faucets, new closets, refinishing the floors, knocking down a lot of walls and re-doing everything, as usual!

So naturally, while these walls are down, I’m trying to cram as many wires as I can in them. Here’s my plan so far:

(more…)

Jodi and I have been asked to feature our home on HGTV’s What You Get For The Money! We are super excited, and quite a bit nervous. The film crew arrives Tuesday and are filming all day — to be completely honest, we were literally just notified on Friday evening that we “made the cut” and will be in an upcoming episode!

This is just huge news for us — Jodi’s natural talent shines through: her hard work, design, and attention to detail is evident in everything she does. Our condo is just simply amazing. To be completely honest, our place couldn’t be any more fabulous (see my previous blog entries for more raving about our place)….

The show itself is actually very cool — each episode is a themed around a certain ball-park dollar amount, for example, $500,000. They then feature a few homes (usually 3) in a 30 minute episode, each one in a different city in the U.S. So that $500,000 space in New York is a studio, just shy of 600 square feet, while the $500,000 space in Dallas suburbs is a 3000 square feet, 4 Bedroom 3 Bath house on a 2 acres near a golf course, and maybe the $500,000 Los Angeles space is a swanky little modern pad on the hillside.

The show also focuses a lot more on the people and lifestyles, as well as the homes and spaces they live — so there is a lot more for us to be nervous about!

Here’s to our upcoming 15 minutes! Set your Tivos, MythTV boxes, and PVRs to record (I’ll post when the episode airs) — super-stardom here we come!

Me, Jodi, and a friend of ours went to the “official” opening of Piebar tonight. I’m a huge fan of another of Bob Amick’s ventures, the aptly named successor to One: Midtown Kitchen, called Two: Urban Licks (mmm lambchop popsicles and that killer skyline view).

What a great space, and yes, it does have some funky space-ship style lighting, and if you are a true design snob, you will sneer at the interior decor, but dang, what a cool building and outdoor space (it would have been hard to mess it up). As far as the food, well the pizzas…errr…pies were definitely out there. Our shrimp, grits, pineapple, coffee pizza was actually not that bad, but the duck, mole, chili, queso fresco pizza was better.

Here’s a good writeup from the AJC. Consider this my restaraunt review. Now back to the regularly scheduled geekiness.