Wide screen -- very wide screen

So we went down to San Jose to see Harry Potter and the The Prisoner of Azkaban at the IMAX at the Tech Museum. We'd managed to miss it first time round, so it sounded like fun, since we'd never seen anything but Fantasia in IMAX (on that occasion, Andy bought the entire showing for his friends and members of the square dance club, and made a touching speech on behalf of his friend Joe-the-barber.)

Well, there is such a thing as too wide a screen and too much resolution. You could see pores in Harry's nose, and when conversations happened across the width of the screen, you had to pingpong your head back and forth to watch the faces in turn. Something bigger than regular theaters but smaller than IMAX would be great....

Retrofitting windows

Back when I owned the house at 77-79 College Avenue in Somerville, many of my projects were intended to save heating costs. We had converted the boiler to gas from oil, installed new storm windows, and insulated a few places; then I made custom covers for the leaded windows using Lexan, a wonderful GE polycarbonate that is much stronger and lasts longer than plexiglass -- it's used in most lenses for glasses, for example. That was 25 years ago, and when I visited the place again last year, the Lexan looked pretty much unworn.

We're replacing most of the windows and sliding glass doors in our Eichler starting Dec. 1st. The giant sliding glass door in the third bathroom (floor to ceiling, wall to wall) would have cost about $2800 to replace; but since it's made with translucent glass and isn't often used, I tried to figure out a way of retrofitting it instead of replacing. I hit on a solution of putting new panes of Thermoclear, which is a dual-wall cellular Lexan, directly on the old glass on the outside, silicone caulking the edges. The Thermoclear (actually the knockoff I could get at TAP Plastics) cost about $200, but the result looks good and will be almost as efficient as the new door would have been. Here's a picture of the stuff: