I’ve been thinking about getting more friends together with less work - especially given my lack of kitchen. I could wait until *everything* is finished but any handy person out there knows that state is actually never achieved. Fortunately, "DIY Life has a good suggestion" …

5 Ideas for Reviving the Potluck Dinner Party

1. You supply the meat for the grill. Have everyone else bring a side dish, salad, or dessert. Don’t forget about drinks. I always like to ask people to bring a six-pack of their favorite beer or a bottle of wine to share.
2. Have everyone bring a different main dish to share. You supply the salad, bread, and drinks.
3. Pick a theme for potluck. A theme could be the ethnicity of the food, foods from a different color of the rainbow, comfort foods, finger foods, 1970’s favorites. The list of themes is bound only by your imagination and the culinary prowess of your friends.
4. It is perfectly acceptable to assign your friends different types of dishes — salad, main dish, dessert, appetizer, etc. No need for them to tell you exactly what they are making.
5. Request that your friends bring a copy of their recipe to share. This also helps people with allergies navigate the buffet table without having to track down the cook of each dish.

source: 5 Ideas for Reviving the Potluck Dinner Party - DIY Life

I really like #3 and once my kitchen is up and running  #5 will be fun too !

The living room has 4 in-ceiling speakers and I discovered a single Sonos ZonePlayer can safely drive all four speakers. Here is what Sonos Support says on the topic …

The Sonos ZonePlayers can support any speaker impedance between 4 and 16 Ohms so it is possible to wire two 8 Ohm speakers in parallel (resulting in a total impedance of 4 Ohm’s). Sonos does not recommend wiring speakers in series as it will result in poor sound quality. *This applies to the amplified ZP120 and ZP100 only. DO NOT attempt to wire 4 Ohm speakers in parallel to the ZonePlayer

The sound is quite good. I have a mix of the new ZonePlayer 120 amplified modules as well as the older ZonePlayer 100 modules. Given the improved amplifier technology and slightly greater power, I am using the ZP120 for the living room.

In case you were curious what’s currently playing, it’s last.fm streaming "Michael Buble’ Similar Artists" …

It took me a little while to pick eleven pictures. Mostly, the challenge is that I am still living out of boxes so I had to choose pictures that were already on my blog and I could not go back more than 2 years to some of my better photographs of people, places, and things, that represented the ideas I hoped to convey. In the end, I did the best I could with what I had and added captions to fill in the blanks. I also tried a few different ways of showing the images. I eventually settled on putting them directly on my blog (although I went through a phase of trying to use flickr so there are out there as well.)

The farmhouse is coming alive with music. The Sonos system is expanding one room at a time. The livingroom is live as is the bedroom and the shop. Currently it’s all wireless but once the networking switch is installed all of the units will be wired in.

The real surprise is the sound from the in-ceiling speakers. It is far beyond my hope and expectations. My acoustic engineering guru buddy in Pheonix said “it will all depend”. Well, it seems I got lucky. The 5/8″ Sheetrock material is enough mass to give music - like “my stations” from last.fm - an amazing rich sound.

(BTW - this was written completely from the iPod including the screen shot)

I was shopping for a new point-and-shoot camera for my mother this morning when I arrived at the Samsung camera website. I was introduced to an interesting marketing angle which I would like to see as the next viral blog challenge. Here is how the website tells it …

My story in 11 photographs

In London, a stranger leaves behind a camera containing 11 photographs. Four girls - Lisa, Tiffany, Chantal, and Lindsay - find this camera and so begins a project to tell their own stores through 11 pictures.

source: samsung.com

I’ll be working on my 11 photos and will blog them in the next week.

If you are up to the challenge, I encourage you to do the same. You can post the individual photos or turn them into a flash slideshow or other means of sharing the images. In keeping with the original medium, short captions are permitted.

Specifically, I challenge Roy, Mary, and Carl (Jessie can help).