Q. In starting a Kitchen or Bathroom project, would I pick out my cabinets first, or my countertops and floor?
A. This is a personal choice of the homeowner, but really has everything to do with the remodel. It would make the most sense to pick out cabinetry first if you are making changes to the footprint of the kitchen layout. The flooring and countertop/backsplashes would be decided together, considering the style and personality of the client’s home.
Q. Will we see any “color trends” in 2008?
A. One of the most notable color trends for 2008 is the “graying” of the color palette. In fact, the color gray will be a strong contender in future color palettes as the new basic neutral, instead of brown. Browns will continue to maintain their popularity but they are warming up with some yellow or orange undertones to make way for the new neutrals which will be gray and silver. This, coming from the international color conferences held semi-annually around the globe.
Q. How important is having a project budget?
A. Having a budget helps the homeowner as well as the designer. Budgeting is key when starting any project. A professional can help you make decisions according to your budget, and you will find options out there that will fit any budget. Disappointment and discouragement will happen when the client wishes to do much more than their budget will allow.
Q. Should I pick out my hardware, knobs and pulls, when I make my cabinet selection?
A. It is recommended that you wait until the kitchen/bath is finished.
At this time you are able to see the whole palette, ie. cabinets, tops, floors, wall color and appliances. It is acceptable today to have different hardware finishes throughout the house. Think of it as having dressed yourself and finishing the look with a scarf, tie or jewelry.
Visit www.signaturekb.com/askdesigner.html to submit your question for more details and enter for your chance to "Choose a Kitchen or Bath" Sweepstakes.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.