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I love birthdays. I think everyone should celebrate them and I like to go above and beyond to make the birthday person feel special. So as my partner Andy's birthday approached, I asked him what he wanted his party theme to be. Now my husband is not over excitable or enthusiastic like I am. We are opposites in this way.

So he indulged me when he told me what he really wanted: to have his friends over to watch a movie with prepared jokes in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Hi, Homies! I'm glad to see you today. I picked out these photos from the Offbeat Home Flickr pool, and I thought maybe we could sit down and look them over together, mmkay? I have SO MANY Clicky Links for you in here: water-measuring shower gadgets, wind-powered lanterns, and why old buildings matter.

In our previous blog post we identified 27 cars based on a list of features, and then narrowed our list down to 3 based on Internet data and test drives. Now, it is time for more data!

DEEP DIVE

With a list of cars this small, we can do more in-depth research. We found out the cost of car insurance, average maintenance costs, vehicle crash ratings, accident data, and insurance data. We also tried to estimate how much each model would cost to own over 5 and 10 years.

However, the most interesting data was about crash test ratings and accident statistics. Vehicle crash-test ratings are designed to be predictive, which means they try to imitate real-world conditions. Accident data is far more interesting, because it shows what actually happened.

My wife, Kate, and I were perfectly content to drive her car, a 1995 Honda Civic. It never gave us trouble…until it died last December. Then we needed a replacement.

After mourning the passing of our reliable steed, we decided we did not care about specific car brands or models. We cared about features. Our goal was to buy a car with features we care about, for the best price. Our first step: decide what functionality we wanted most.

In this set of blog posts, I will cover my experience in buying a car using data. I'll go over some of the advantages, like ignoring all of the ~~lies~~ marketing.

My husband Sean and I recently celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary (yay!). I was totally intimidated by the idea of a Fifth Anniversary, so I very politely ~~asked him to plan~~ informed him that he was in charge of making plans for the day. Since we're parents of a three-year-old and don't go out as much, the idea that we'd spend a night together, just the two of us, for many hours on end, was awesome.

I wanted our evening to be a surprise, especially since Sean and I both suck at surprising one another. After arranging childcare (yay, house mates!), we headed out.

There seems to be a bit of a Polyhedra craze going on at the moment. It seems to me that mathematics has never been so cool. I have put together some templates for a "platonic solids" garland. Perfect for cheering the place up now all the festive decorations have been taken down. Simply chop, score and glue together.

Offbeat Bride has a post up today that made my heart pitter patter: itty bitty dioramas of nerdy scenes.

I am so in love with open source solutions, but I'm used to free, group-edited projects being relegated to the tech world: Gooogle plugins for my Gmail and Chrome, Wikipedia…the number of ways humans have found to work together to improve our world is astounding and effing impressive. Could you imagine what Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, would think of the accumulation of information that is Wikipedia?!

It seems that the trend is breaking into the real world. Enter The Ekinoid Project: an open-source plan for housing based in the UK.