Apologies all around for letting this blog rot in oblivion. I had this little thing of getting married to take care of over the winter break. Hopefully, things shall be rosy again.

The CN Tower in Toronto has been replaced by Burj Dubai as the world’s tallest free-standing structure. It stands at 555 meters right now but the final planned height is currently a closely guarded secret.

The Chicago Mag compiles “The List” and says, “Call them the best of the 21st century if you’d like. These innovative new buildings illustrate Chicago’s enduring power to attract great design” [via Architecture Lab]

Incidentally, the Pritzker House, one of the ten in the list featured in a Chicago Tribune rant on mega mansions.

A rendering of the mobile pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid. It almost looks like a Chanel bag but I love its fluid design [via Zaha Hadid's Blog].

Yup, I’ve done it again. I just hope I can keep my hands off tweaking the look and focus more on the writing & linking. But I promise this will stay (until the next itch) for a longer time. After realizing that this blog is more about linking and sharing media, I wanted to focus more on those aspects. Of course, I’ll occasionally write the long rave/rant/op-ed.

Also, after reading Archidose’s rant on advertising-heavy blogs, I decided to cut back on the ads. But I still have to pay the bills to keep the lights on so right now, this blog is only monetized using the Google ads at the top, Text Link Ads at the bottom, and the Amazon Book Store. I hope those are as un-intrusive as ads can get. Feed readers need not worry; nothing is changed for you guys.

Of course, thoughts and opinions are always welcome. If you place your cursor over a particular post, three options pop up on the right. The top one will take you to comments. Otherwise my inbox is always open.

I have tinkered around with the design of this blog a little. Ok well, a lot! I’ve brought back the Sandbox design theme that allows for inline asides. Asides are tidbits that don’t necessarily warrant an entire post and can serve as quick links to interesting news or information. The reason for bringing this back is to keep me posting more often on this blog although the next few months are the most hectic of my academic life.

Of course, I have customized the theme quite a bit and have reduced the number of ads. If you surf this blog through the feed or the front page, you won’t see many ads. But if you found this blog through a search engine, you might see a fair amount of them. But the ads are the reason, this blog is still alive. I am rejecting most of the paid reviews and am only posting on book reviews that I find interesting. There are still some unresolved issues in the design but I will eventually get around to fixing them. The header images are from Flickr and randomly rotate with each page refresh.

Let me know either in comments or email if you like this design or have any suggestions.

Update: The K2 design change lasted for far less time than I anticipated. This ‘Sandbox’ design theme I feel styles asides better. K2 code is far more difficult to modify. If you have problems with the dark background, I suggest reading it from your RSS feed reader by subscribing to the blog feed.

By offering your blog content in just English, you may be missing out on a large percentage of Internet traffic. Non-English languages account for a majority of Internet users. English speaking Internet users account for less than 30% with the rest of the top ten languages that include Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Portuguese, Korean, Italian, and Arabic accounting for another 50%; rest of the world languages accounting for the remaining. Although many non-English speakers read and write English fluently (e.g. Indians), the majority prefer their native language. Many of my Chinese colleagues prefer to surf the Net or even have their OS in Chinese, likewise for Brazilians who prefer Portuguese. I am disappointed that none of the Indian languages make up a significant percentage.

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