I was up last night writing, so I’m kind of tired today. Jen says she’s exhausted from her job as well, and it sounds like she’s having fun, too. Let’s see- I loaded up the MacPPP software on the SE/30 at home; I think the only thing I need to pick up now is a network card from someplace like MacResQ or Shreve.
Here it is, straight from Appalachia to us: The Dancing Outlaw. Lorie and Ty showed Jen and I this video when we were in Houston, and it’s sort of stuck with us since then. Here is Jesco in all his dancin’ glory. I think the blowup of this picture is poetic in an unintended, purely coincidental way, which transcends the filth of the surroundings; it has a certain beauty in its bleakness.
“If you wanna get to Heaven, you gotta raise a little Hell.”
Curiously, the Blockbuster page linked above lists these two titles as “related movies”: Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, and Kudzu [no description available].
Had a very productive night last night. I went shopping for a new video card, but found the cost to be prohibitively expensive right now. So I bought a sound card for the home NT box and got it installed with minimum fuss-thank god. I also got the drywall in the basement sanded and second-coat mudded; it’s coming along pretty well so far, but I need a few items to continue properly:
- more mud
- another good sanding sponge- those things are cool
- a pack of 150 grit sandpaper discs for the orbital
- a length of coax cable- 50 feet should do it
- more steel edging for the corners
- a tube of liquid nails
- probably five more sheets of drywall
- and I need to pick up the window- Home Depot called about it Monday.
Have I mentioned that Toadnet sucks big moose butt? They’re down again. Major big smoking, feces-covered moose butt.
A couple of weeks ago, I did a search on Google for Gamma World, a role-playing game TSR came out with in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I spent one summer completely immersed in this game, in between 7th and 8th grade, when a few guys from my new school got me into D&D and other RPG’s. I got a copy of Gamma World and D&D for my birthday, I think, and Mike P and I played these games constantly. He went on a two-week vacation that summer, and I obsessed over the game and creating new maps and worlds based on what I knew (which was, pitifully, nothing.) Being trapped on the side of a hill in Ridgefield with nothing to do but swim, eat and play Gamma World that summer, naturally all three blurred into each other. I dug out my Gamma World books that night (yep, still got ’em) and read through each one; it took me back to a two-month period where I was completely lost in my imagination.
That fall, I went to the Ridgefield Middle School, where once again, the gods of bitter irony prevailed and I wound up in none of the same classes as anybody I had become friends with that previous school year. I went through 4 months of total isolation there, and then we moved to Mahopac, where I went through another year of isolation before I made friends with anybody.
Jesse is going to sell me his old Voodoo3 card fr $20, so I’ll have something better than an Apple 8/24 in my PC at home; This Is Good. Now I can concentrate on saving up for and finding a good 19-inch monitor, or a reasonable 17-inch LCD display for the NT machine. (side note: new Voodoo3’s are going for about $40 online- bonus.) Additionally, I may be heading to his place for 3D Max lessons on Sunday- a BIG opportunity to get some knowledge for cheap- a 12-pack of Guinness might do it.
Last night I had drawing class, and it went rather poorly. For some reason I couldn’t concentrate well, and I got a bad start- nothing came together. I was able to pull about two drawings back from the dumpster, but the rest were pretty crappy. I had to resort to erasing last night- the first time in a long time. On the plus side, I found out that we have an extra day of drawing added for one day where the models didn’t show up.
Downloading a driver for the UMAX scanner at work they gave me- a 2200. I’m going to see how well it works. I’m going to scan a few drawings and see what happens with them.
OK, here are a pair of sketches scanned in with the software. This is a pretty nice scanner- fast, quiet and small.
I was looking at other log sites last night, and went to an old favorite, kottke.org, and through him found another that I really like, dooce.com. People with amazing design talents, heaps of free time, and a lot of the same interests I do. I obviously need to start popping PCP or some crystal meth so that i may stay up four days straight at a clip and learn how to design as well as these people do. Or write as wittily as they do. Or even feel as young as they do. There just ain’t enough time in the day.
I was talking to Jen about getting in and out of the zone in context of drawing class last night. My buddy Tim and I were talking about this a few monts ago, and he brought a parable into play that I thought was very fitting for the subject. He said that when he was pitching in Little League, the trick to pitching a whole game well was not to get into the zone, but managing the chaos that ensued when you fell out of the zone- and then getting back into the zone from there. I was thinking about this last night as I scribbled in my sketchbook and kept fucking up stuff I knew I could draw; the more I thought about falling out of the zone the worse it got. Sometimes I am able to work through it, other times I am not.
Ha-ha. This is really funny.
Jen and I had a really good night together last night; we went out to the thrift store up the street, came back to the house and made dinner, and spent the evening together. That was needed by both of us. Jen bought a few dresses, one of which is beautiful, and I found a few books and an old Mac SE/30 for $7.
I went online today and in about five minutes found all manner of resources for getting an old Mac online- I’ll post the info a bit later, and hopefully get the time to upload some of the files to my machine.
Back at work on Monday. Jen and I did a real nice dinner for her birthday on Friday night; we worked out what was going on with us and really came together for a good weekend. Saturday I cleaned the house and straightened up everything so that Kate and Dan could come into town and have dinner; we took them to Henninger’s and had a real good time. Sunday we drove in the Lockard bus up to Longwood Gardens to meet Rob and his girlfriend, and her whole family; Jen and I had to keep our shit together to survive going into the giant sucking maw of the Pennsylvania Clemson booster family. Both her parents had matching Explorers with Clemson tiger paw stickers on the fenders. Can I vomit here and now? Would you mind?
Today is a bit brighter, even though I’m tired; I’m two days away from being paid, and I can’t wait to be able to pay bills and not get behind, or take money out of the savings account. I looked at the Visa bill this morning- ouch. It’s going to be a while before I do any silly frivolous spending, I guess. I want to get that paid back down and start saving some cash reserves back up, and quick. No computer for me, and probably no Scout unless I find a sweetheart deal somewhere close that I can’t pass up.
OK, this is messed up. If this was one of my daughters, I’d flip out in a major Mike Brady sort of way. Yikes.
Very hard to concentrate on work today. I’m running through all the things I want to do in my head and it seems overwhelming. I really want to start working in Perl again, and I haven’t even started looking at the stuff I need to yet. I’d really like to get this log online as a perl script and pull all of this stuff out of a text file as a script as well; the page format would be an HTML file the script would read, a flow in the template info, and then do a foreach loop through the text file until it reached the end of the content and then write the footer information.
12:29 am – I found a new typeface to use online- Tahoma, which i just set this whole page in, from one of the sites mentioned in the Salon article above. Very nice. We dig.
Internet is still down. Stupid Toadnet.
[expletives deleted]
…I looked at the two Scouts last night, an ’80 Scout II and a ’78 Traveller. They were right over in Ellicott City, and being sold by the brother of Mark, the dude who works at the IH dealership there. I should have known they would be rocky just because of that fact. The Traveller was lifted about 4 inches, on a set of Super Swampers, and had a light bar, bumper, and fiberglas fenders and quarters. On the minus side: The rockers were absolutely shot. The rear floor was rusted but covered over with sheet steel, and the underside of the tub was like the surface of the the moon. It ran, after sitting for a year, and sounded rocky but steady. The ’80 was in a much worse state of decay; the rockers were gone, the passenger floor had been cut out completely from A to B pillar. The rear floor was OK but both tailgates were rusted through at the bottoms; the passenger door was clean but the drivers’ was chewed through on the outside. The motor was is a 345 and sounds pretty clean; it has a 727 and (from as far as I can tell) a 300 transfer case; the diffs are 44’s. The body was just so far gone I wasn’t interested. I told him that I’d be interested in parts if he was parting it out; the engine, seats and passenger door would be cool to have; the fenders were OK, and I’d also take the front clip (radiator, hood, etc.) but the rest of the truck is a basket case.
I drove Chewbacca into work today because I wanted to feel good about something.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Here at work looking at the Antietam screens for the fourth day. They are boring and annoying and ugly. I’m looking forward to being done with them for good. I’m getting pretty sick of the interface work as well; I need a better idea of what the game is supposed to do, which means I really need to get involved with the programmers and creators to figure out what it does. I can understand why nobody likes doing interfaces here.
Sierra Online is apparently gonna lay off 300 people- they make Tribes 2, Half-Life and a bunch of other really cool games. If they are in trouble, what does this company have in the wings? I’m afraid again. I’m talking to Jeff C about him teaching me C++ by doing Quake mods, which would be very cool. Apparently I need Visual Studio to really figure out what I’m doing and to compile quickly. C++ frightens me but I have to start somewhere. I also should really get back to Perl as well- I was doing some work with it but pretty much slacked off, and it’s time to increase my marketability fast. That’s also gonna take some serious work in 3D Studio Max.
On the Hopeless Consumer front, the Scout 2 will be in Ellicott City tonight, so I’m gonna go see that. Maybe it’ll be in great shape, maybe it’ll be a mess. We’ll see. I do know it has no rockers, passenger floor, and the quarters have been cut too. If it runs smooth, has a Dana 60 rear and 300 transfer case, and the body is straight, I’ll consider it, but that also means I need a place to put it- the big problem. I’d have to flat-tow or trailer it to Aurora and leave it somewhere- but where? Renie no longer has the barn. Brian might be able to store it for me, but I don’t know just yet. And it’s $1300, which cuts into the Emergency Fund by 1/2, and I’m STILL not paid yet, and I’m getting very thin. Bill didn’t transfer funds to his checking account, so now he’s overdrawn and charged $30. Dummy.
OK, I just found out that the Austerlitz stuff just got immensely worse. Infintessimally worse. Outrageously worse. Ugggghhh. That’s it- I’m learning Max immediately- I’m NOT getting stuck doing the interface stuff here any more. Meanwhile, I’m typing this out on a machine that’s not connected to the internet- Covad is down and ToadNet is telling us 4pm or so. Sure. Whatever.
Suge Knight is being released from prison. Oh, boy. What else is happening? The entire US is butt-hot. Thank god again, for my AC unit. I’m going to call the dude about the Scout 2 tonight; it’s in OK condition from what he says but the floors and rockers have been cut out. Hmmmm. I’m going to post to the Binder Bulletin tonight to see how I can identify a Dana 60 and a 300 transfer case by sight.
Saw an ad for an ’80 Scout on the Binder Bulletin site for $1300. 345, 31’s, 2″ lift, automatic. I’m gonna call and see if this guy still has it, and go out to take a look. I wonder if it’s the ’80 I saw about 5 years ago up in Ellicott City with that guy Mark- that thing was a beast but very rough.
Let’s see. I got 5 sheets of drywall for the basement and began installing- there’s sheetrock on the walls up each side, on the east wall of the closet, and on the right side of the closet door. I also got sheetrock up on the framework above the stairs and began to spackle it. I need to straighten out the bottom panel but otherwise it’s looking good, and more importantly there will be no more dust down through the stairs onto the basement floor. I’m still waiting on the window for the basement, and that will be coming it at just the right time- this weekend coming up I’m spending a day installing that, and then I have to figure out some fucked-up way of finishing off that front wall. That should be entertaining.
Unfortunately I’m thinking that the basement will be at least another month in finishing, but my ultimate goal is to have it complete by the time the fambly comes down for Thanksgiving- should be plenty of time between now and then. Really, the next steps are pretty easy, with the exception of the window and that front wall. The only other major issues outstanding are:
- creating (or buying) access panels for the water and gas meters
- painting all the uncovered or unpainted drywall/wallspace/ceiling
- building and installing the shelf under the window
- installing the closet rack
- and installing the carpeting.
- I also need to run and clean up the cabling for the network, and run cable down from the back bedroom.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Apple/ Motorola G3 333/167 1MB ZIF Card From Mac ResQ. Hmm. I wonder if the 8500 is even worth the $79 bucks?
OK, last night I figured out (through using EasyCD Creator5) that I can take all the burned copies of each of the CD’s that I got while at Supon and transfer them back to album-format CD; this means I don’t have to buy copies of stuff like UNKLE, Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Underworld. Very cool. I’ve also freed up a bunch of space on my drive at home- I should be able to get off an additional 1.5 gigs of worthless MP3 files and clear some space. That should save me a ton of time and money. I’m gonna spend another two days this weekend just burning CD’s and clearing off that drive; I also have a copy of the new Photoshop 6.0 to drop on there for work. That will be a relief- I haven’t had that or any of the Office products on there since I got the machine. I’m also going to work on getting the sound card to work, and then hopefully in a few weeks I can work on getting a video card- probably that Geforce card.
Found this article about Gr8. Says they’re going to reorganize as ‘Boldhaus.com.’