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Dilbert's Ultimate House
angkor writes "Dilbert's Ultimate House (DUH) is the product of the combined wisdom of thousands of Dilbert readers, plus the help of real world experts, and it's online for viewing at dilbert.com/duh. Are you tired of tripping over the cat's litter box in your bathroom? Dilbert's house has its own bathroom just for the cat. Do you hate dragging a Christmas tree into the house every December just to throw it away in January? Dilbert's house has a huge closet off of the Great Room where he stores a fully decorated artificial tree on wheels..."
People keep their cat's litter box in the bathroom? Might as well keep it in the kitchen or your bedroom. Why keep it in a room where you spend a lot of time? Do people like smelling cat shit? I keep mine in the basement. If you don't have a basement keep it somewhere where no one goes.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
After reading through the stacks of Dilbert cartoon books in my college apartment's bathroom I was under the assumption that Dilbert's house looked something out of a third grader's art class.
Turns out I was completely wrong and it looks like something out of Art 453, The CGI of Star Wars and how it can be applied to comics.
I guess I preferred living in a world of Simpsons where I didn't have to mentally map out the entire episode based on a "fact" or look at Dilbert's house in anything except black and white pencil.
That's just me though.
Instead of a motif of elongated curvature, though, I was working with hexagons, and mine was a split-level, not a flat ranch. My movie theater was above the two-car garage.
The tower wasn't a plain observatory, but a hollow tower designed for evaporative cooling: a good way to cool the central patio in the summer is to have a high evaporative "swamp" cooler at the top of a hollow tower, and let the cooled air fall down and into the patio area.
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If you aren't organized, having a giant house won't help you. The closet for the Christmas tree will get filled up with other stuff and you won't be able to get at the tree when you need it. One of the first rules about labor saving devices is that labor saving devices don't. They mostly just occupy space.
I have spent some time on ships and have always been impressed by how neat and orderly they are. Everything aboard is necessary and gets used regularly because there is no room for unnecessary stuff. (Unfortunately, I am surrounded by 'stuff' because I didn't learn from the experience.)
Also, the patch panel for the netwrking is way too neat. In the true engineer-style, it should be at leaste somewhat messy. Also, that's way too few hook-ups. How can you plug in the interent-enabled fridge into such a small patch panel? Or what about the auto-heat toilet seat cover? Where is it going to plug in? I think that the wiring needs just a little more "geekness".
What's the point of a sig?
This might not be a popular opinion here, but this house looks so cold and engineered and artificial. There's something to be said for the aesthetics of a lawn that isn't astroturf and a house that hasn't been built entirely around the principle of energy (and everything else) efficiency. Of course I'm not currently living in a drafty two-hundred year old monstrosity with leaky plumbing, I might change my mind if I was, but I get the feeling that such a house would be infinitely more livable than this thing.
I'll have you know I regularly ride a bike over 100 miles each weekend. It's amazing how much you can totally geek out on GPS/HR monitor/Cadence/Altimeter, etc. Check out out he HAC4.
My ultimate apartment was next to the hardware store, within walking distance of grocery and many restaurants and across the street from a theater with stadium seating. Too bad it was about 40 miles from all the cool electronics shops in Silicon Valley.
Three most important points to consider when buying a house (or renting an apartment):
Location
Location
Location
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Methinks you're over-thinking that just a tad. I have two cats - their litterbox is under an open spiral staircase (fails two of your criteria, since they can't see the whole room from it, and the open staircase it rests under is prime for predatorial leaping), and it sits directly next to the food bowls (though it faces away from them, of course). The male tends to sleep directly above it on the stairway, because that's the best possible location for tripping the humans. I've never had an issue with out-of-the box cat poopage. And the 2.5 foot stairway? You'd like the poor kitty to have to jump with a full bladder? Bad enough they have to go to the loo in a box of dirt, now they have to perform gymnastics to get there? tsk tsk.