@Clydeicus
If it feels familiar it's because it was inspired by the Venice Beach bowl. The marseill Le Prado bowl is considered among the best skating places in Europe. Many context and X-Games happened there.

As an Helvetica aficionado, i find it disheartening that the average font is serifed and close to Times !

Damn ! it's like the last 60 years of modern-itude didn't happen.

The fun fact is that G. Lucas didn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, a 30's serial, and instead wrote an original story that became Star Wars.

The circle is closed at long last.

C3PO is quite a good interpretation of robot design in those days.

Yesterday afternoon the guys at my job made this video from scratch in one hour... Our trainee, Nouben is the willing bar in this Post It "Breakers" homage :
http://www.vimeo.com/27299008

anyone willing to up the antes ?

Same her, on sale in France 3,50€ (that's about $5) a bottle, makes it expensive. I didn't taste mine, it' unopened on a shelf.

If you have to drink beer, drink Guinness, it keeps the doctor away.

@Randi,
I agree with you, these were the pre-HFCS days, and if i may add, the pre-New Puritan Dark Age of today.

Well, here in France it's "pile ou face".

Pile gets it's origin in the tiny mark made by hammering the seal of the coin maker.
Face means head, as in face obviously.

Yo Fembot ! Show us some metal, yeehaaa !

Hi, scored 80%. Failed at the iPods and the Mona Simpson questions. Same as Larry.

@Juice : you are right, this is an unique example of creativity and craftsmanship.
I'm pleased to see such an un-electronic device in our days.

one readers answers to your questions:

* Do you guys use the Browse by Date and Browse by Tag features on the side bar? Should we keep those or get rid of 'em?
No, in fact i wasn't aware of these features. As a daily reader i tend to read the last posts and go down till i get to the already read posts and call that a day.

* What do you guys think about social media buttons? Are those used or are they just graphical flotsam that should be culled to make the design cleaner?
Blogs are getting more mainstream and i don't believe that many users are still in the initial sharing and rating through these buttons, i'm not. Getting rid of them on the other hand would be a denial of the genesis of all that blog media thing, we as the mass, created. A respectful way to solve this would be to create a share/rate icon that makes a lightbox appear on top of the page, it's there but not fulltime (à la new Google homepage).

* Should we expand or contract the long list of categories?
They should be contracted in a ready to expand div, actually i believe the tag cloud should be above the categories, as casual readers would see first what boiling and then could further their search by expanding the categories if they need.
* Should we make the pictures and text larger? Monitor sizes have increased over the years so it makes sense to make things larger on the blog, but that will probably make it harder to read the blog from your iPhones.
It's perfectly acceptable on a 13" MacBook, but more difficult on my wife's 10" netbook. On the iPhone i double tap and the size is just right. I'm 40 with 25 years of staring at screens and it's still readable, just keep it as it is. Big is ugly for body text.
Use Lightboxes for original sized images if you feel like it, it is much better than the actual galleries on the Gawker network.

What you could do is reduce the headers height, it's a bit of a waste of real estate considering you don't sport top banners. On a 13" you have to scroll almost immediately (1280X800) on a 10' it's bad (1024X600).

Good luck with your redesign, and try to give it personnality don't do design by committee it's to bland.

Hi, i'm a bit like Miss Cellania, an early bird of the night owl family.
I usually get up at 7:15, work all day, then take care of the kids from 5 to 9 and after they go to bed work again till 1am.
I haven't found time yet to squeeze a small afternoon nap, but i'm sure it would help refocus concentration in early afternoon.

Thank you for the video, a very fine and restrained work. The music is great and suits well the optimistic nostalgia of the sticky notes.

Very creative and elegant, i hope Oren Lavie gets a great success with this song. Stop motion is the stuff dreams or made of.

As Dave0179 says, being french makes this even funnier. It is so close to a cat's thinking.