Ladewig.com

The Milwaukee Business Journal reported in its May 27, 2005 print edition that Ikea has retained a real estate broker in Milwaukee to find a location for a store. The store would be 215,000 square feet, as compared to the 300,000 square foot store in Schaumburg, Illinois, the closest Ikea store to Milwaukee (and our closest too!). Joan Hocke with Ikea Property says the site could be developed over the next several years.

Sigh. I’m originally from Wisconsin so I know Milwaukee is a great city, but I can’t believe they’re probably going to get an Ikea store before we will.

No more dust bunnies in my computer room!

The computer room at work was cleaned on Saturday, for the first time as far as I can determine. Cleaned professionally that is. We used Michael C. Kearney and Associates, and they did a fantastic job. I’ve wanted to bring someone in to clean the room for a few years now and finally had money in the budget to move forward.

We had them do a triple cleaning which involves vacuuming the floor and sub-floor, scrubbing the floor tiles, and wiping down the equipment. They also provide a floor layout with notes about anything they identified ranging from disconnected cables, unused outlets, problems, etc.

They also did an encapsulation, applying a coating to the concrete sub-floor. Doing so prevents concrete dust from coming off the floor surface. It also provides a good contrasting background so that your cables and are more visible.

After they finished, I felt like one of the straight guys on Queer Eye who sees his made-over home for the first time. My computer rooms looks like a whole new space. If your computer room is in need of cleaning, you should give Kearney & Associates a call. You’ll be glad you did.

It has been a few weeks, so it is time yet again for a new IKEA in St. Louis rumor. A blurb in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch claims that Westfield is showing prospective tenants plans for Northwest Plaza which show IKEA located at the corner of Lindbergh and St. Charles Rock Road. No comment yet from IKEA .

If this were true, I would get down on my knees and thank the retailing gods, since it would mean IKEA would be 3.2 miles from my house. I’m not too optimistic though. On the plus side, Westfield has been involved with IKEA at other locations, and demolishing a portion of the mall as they describe would open up a large space for the store. However, IKEA rumors hit the area so often, and Ikea has been adamant that there are no plans to come to St. Louis yet, that I don’t want to get my hopes up.

Construction started on our backyard deck last week. I’ve posted some photos of the progress so far. Here’s a sneak peek:

!http://images10.fotki.com/v193/photos/2/247084/914007/IMG_1379-vi.jpg alt=”Deck Construction Progress!

On an unrelated note, I haven’t posted any photos of Collen for a while, so here’s one:

!http://images9.fotki.com/v178/photos/2/247084/914007/IMG_1373-vi.jpg alt=”Collen”!

I finally upgraded to Movable Type 3.17 from 2.63 last week. So far I’m very happy with the move. I’m not using any of the dynamic publishing features, but will work on that in upcoming weeks. It definitely looks better than the old version, and the performance seems to be better, much snappier response.

I also disabled MT-Blacklist and started using SpamLookup and MT-Moderate. Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist, endorsed SpamLookup over his own tool and uses it himself. I figured that was as good an endorsement as you can get, so I tried it out. Well, Brad Choate has another winner here. Rather than just rely on blocking of URLs and keywords, SpamLookup checks for things like mismatched IPs, proxies, and blacklists, and has been very effective at stopping new sources of comment and Trackback spam.

As far as MT-Moderate, well, it moderates Trackbacks, something which you would expect MT to do by itself. But it doesn’t, so this plug-in is definitely a must-have!

Hopefully this will help stem the tide of this junk.