Thalasar Ventures

I had two projects this weekend. The first was a big outdoor planter/xeriscape project. The other was a complete re-mashing of Best Buys Zone UK. Somehow I managed to nearly complete both of them. Our house here in New Mexico is on a hill and when people put this house up, they couldn’t be bothered to build terraces to minimize erosion. So I have been building rock xeriscape terraces around the house.

The purpose here is to minimize erosion and conserve water around the property. The terraces are being filled with topsoil purchased at the local timber management company ($20/cubic yard, what a huge deal!). I am nearly done with phase one which is the first terrace on the southern part of the house. My terrace is a little different than most. I have been using fairly large rocks for this project. The largest is about 1200 lbs. This gives me a dry stack rock wall that far stronger than the typical dry stack (as well as being pretty cool looking). The terrace is then back filled with top soil from Barella Timber Management. New Mexico soil isn’t typically rich in organic but this topsoil black and rick. We will be planting native drought resistant plants in the terraces. This weekend I moved two cubic yard of top soil by wheelbarrow into the terrace.. We have about 10% more to go on the terrace but I ran out of soil!
Because the original owners didn’t think to do this, the hill required significant re-construction. This weekend saw the lion’s share of that work done. In fact what used to be a fairly steep slope is now a flat flower bed. We had a rainstorm on Saturday and the terrace worked well!
Sunday I then decided a complete re-vamp of Best Buys Zone UK was in order. I have no idea what bug got into me but I completely re-did it. I finished it this morning. Currently it pulls shopping results from shopping.com and Amazon, search results from MSN Live and tonight I will add blogs and coupons to the site. The goal is too give a complete snapshot of information about a product in addition to what people are saying about a product. I integrated Auction Ads briefly but I will be removing them. They don’t have UK version so it’s of dubious utility to my UK site. Additionally the service fails down quite a bit and doesn’t do so gracefully. They simply stop responding. They also recover quickly but the service simply isn’t mature enough yet to rely on it. I will be adding RSS feeds back into Best Buys Zone United Kingdom this week as well. By the time I am done, it will hit nearly as many services as Early Miser.
Update: I have added blogs. Coupons will take a little longer since I don’t really have code I can re-use for it. So it’s going to require all new code. It’s pretty cool adding blogs, especially for long tail items (such as books for example) I am find all sorts of interesting resources for users. Consumer electronics has got deep blogging coverage, no doubt because of the success of Engadget.com and various other consumer electronics blogs.