I feel so car sick from a long ride in the hot car. The whole way here I kept thinking I can't wait to get in the air conditioned mall and walk around. Then I looked at the other people doing the same thing and realized I am getting old fast. Somehow heat makes me sick now. I never used to feel that way.

Either these are bigger ants than the ones from the cheesy puffs or just fat ones from all the granola goodness.

I was a my parents house for (e:Mike)'s birthday and he brought out his first Nokia cell phone from 1999. This thing was huge and did just about nothing. What a world of difference. What will 10 more years bring.

I hope now that your birthday has arrived, our allergies can depart.

No seriously, have a great year in your new apartment in the city!

So, in relation to my last entry. Petra Ecclestone also recently picked up the Candy Spelling Mansion for $85 million. It was one of the most expensive real estate transactions in the US but it was almost half off as it originally had a $150,000,000 asking price. She is clearly a bargain shopper as I already pointed out.

According to the LA times, Petra wasn't into all the antiques in the 120+ room mansion, so some antique dealers came in to bid on the stuff. Discussing a chandlier one dealer said:

"It's a $10,000 investment just in order to get it ready for sale," Boltiansky said. Anticipating a price in "the low six-figure range," the antiques dealer will not discuss exact figures until after the sales and then only with buyer permission.

Boltiansky is the president of Jan & Company in LA. And the LA times article links to their website: On the site it says, "Our 24,000 square foot showrooms in Los Angeles, California is filled with furnishings acquired from some of Europe's most prestigious residences."

But does this seem like the website for a place selling six figure chandeliers? Maybe they are just 100% committed to antiques of all genres, after all I would argue that the site qualifies for status as an antique web site.

Its so old it still has the inline dreamweaver javascript detecting netscape navigator 4 which was released in June 1997

function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
  if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
    document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
  else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);

Poking around on the site I found this page which had the dates for the aquisition html templates:

Which brought me to the spelling mansion one.


Wow, that is one seriously impressive residence. Imagine greeting people at the front door.

Back to the site. Clearly managing the site involves a lo of copying and pasting template html pages and FTPing them back to the server. It seems like they could really benefit from something a little more automated. Something more 2011. Something with 3d views of the antiques. Maybe its time to re-invest some of that money in an upgrade of the web presence.

Clearly, those people are experts in antiques but web design - not so much. Maybe its a case of reaching out to student grandkid who didn't follow through with that career path.

On the upside they do have a very interesting glossary you budding antique enthusiasts