My brother, who owns a place in the West LA suburbs, redid the lawns with low-upkeep desert plants. It was well-planned and well-done, and the place looks gorgeous. What makes it even nicer is that it damned near takes care of itself.

Nothing gets by you people.

I'm (rik) on the Well, have been on since 1990. It's no longer the on-the-leading-edge phenomenon it once was, but remains a genuine multi-generational, community of polymaths, pedants, and people whose thoughts are worth reading. The level of political discourse is way above the usual blog level. And it's where I learned about a lot of the things that currently interest me, boing boing included.

But mostly, it's a device for organizing my social life, and when people ask me what it is, I say that it's the original social networking site, and that it predates the web.

It'll be interesting to see how this thing flies. There have been a number of voice-MIDI converters that have been tried and failed because most people have no idea how badly they sing. They thought the converter wasn't working when all that was wrong was that they were sharp, flat, or had too much vibrato.