Hard to get excited about anything today. Crappy edits from the beta testers on trivial bullshit. I have a headache, none of this stuff is going smoothly, and I’m bored out of my mind. Wahhhh.

Album of the day: Morphine’s Bootleg Detroit, which Todd let me borrow. Mark Sandman sounds great, the mix is bass-heavy and beautiful, and the versions of all these songs are better than the album versions. God I miss this band.

10:44 pm – Well, it’s a little premature, but I have to salute and wave farewell to Greycube, the partnership. During its brief but rewarding existence, we designed, built, and hosted scores of sites, worked together (mostly) as a team, and had some fun doing it. As a partnership of three very different individuals, sometimes it was difficult, but always challenging. Tonight I got together with Dan and Jason and we took the second-to-last distribution of funds from the bank account, and Jason took the server home.

I’m sad to see it disappear, but as with everything else in life, the cycle of change goes on. And it was a great ride while it lasted.

Date posted: June 12, 2002 | Filed under art/design, music | Leave a Comment »

Some new pictures of the backyard, from 6.11.

On my way to work this morning, I had the windows down (it was about 60 degrees this morning, but due to rise into the 90’s by noon) and took my customary route out of Canton to get to I-83 north. On my drive, I had the pleasure of smelling, in sequence, the salty air blowing off the harbor, fresh bread from the H&H bakery in Fell’s Point, followed closely by bacon, waffles and syrup from a restaurant with its doors open. When I got to the onramp, I smelled freshly cut, damp grass from the wide median downtown. I got onto 83 and all the smells blended together as I got up to speed.

Found out that we’re getting paid ½ our paycheck this month. Yay.

I found a great utility called snapGallery for posting online pics; it’s a free VBS script (boo- no Mac support) but it works very well, and obviously was designed by somebody who posts pictures frequently. I think we will use this from now on.

Date posted: June 11, 2002 | Filed under Baltimore, house, photo | Leave a Comment »

St. Mary's crab festival, 6.9.02

St. Mary's crab festival, 6.9.02

So here is a living lesson in Internet Marketing Strategy. I work for a company that subcontracts from another company to produce a product which is eagerly awaited by a demographic which spends a lot of time online. This particular demographic spends time scouring the message boards and fan sites attempting to collect information about the product. We now run and maintain the ‘central’ site for the product, containing information about the design, pictures of the product, rules, changes, and explanations for how and why the product works.

The site went up in early May; it has not been updated since then.

The top-level company decided, months ago, that we were releasing too much information too quickly, and so they asked for a detailed list of what we would be publishing, when, and how much. This list was delayed for several weeks while E3 was happening, and then forwarded on to the company for review, comment, and approval. There has been no word since that time.

I am amazed that a modern marketing department, based in a company with such a strong online demographic, would choose to overlook/discredit/ignore such a powerful and focused medium. Especially considering that there is little or no overhead involved with online marketing. A focused, interactive article/talkback magazine format would be tailor-made for this project; somewhere that fans can go to read about different aspects of the product, then be allowed to comment in a moderated format directly following the article. Thus, potential buyers of the product would feel included in the release and be able to interact with the developers.

On other fronts, here are some pictures of the backyard, from 6.7.

Thinking more about the VPN research from last week, and I read now that A. I can get a 60GB FireWire external drive for somewhere around $300 these days, or if I choose, a FireWire CD burner for the same amount. So I think the idea of doing the VPN to the home machine is out; I’m just going to buy some kind of CD-burner for Scout here and possibly a copy of Retrospect Express or another catalog program, and just catalog the hell out of the entire collection via the Mac. One thing is sure, I need something to boot Scout off of so I can clean her up and get her running well again.

Date posted: June 10, 2002 | Filed under art/design, photo | Leave a Comment »

I’m doing some research into setting up a VPN for my house and for work, so I can share stuff off the home machine to myself and keep it in one place (and then I’ll have to get some kind of tape backup, and…ugh.)

Doing a basic search sent me to this site, where I found a basic overview and some directions to the Microsoft site, with a white paper on PTPP installation for Windows NT machines, and some other smaller links. Netgear, as usual, has a fantastic primer on their site, which doubles as a tie-in to sell one of their products. On the MacinTouch site, i found the Nortel link for a client being developed for the Mac, which led to some other interesting ideas and links. I looked through the documentation for my SMC router and found that it supports PTPP tunneling, so it’s a question of whether or not I can set up the protocol on SLANN.

tornado warnings in the Baltimore metro area. 6:30PM, 6.7.02

tornado warnings in the Baltimore metro area. 6:30PM, 6.7.02

On the brighter side, my camera arrived today! I’ve spent the afternoon fooling with it and I’m really pretty happy with the whole thing so far. The pictures look really great, the camera is easy to use, and I like the card reader interface a lot. It came with a 16MB card, which gives me 25 large-format pictures and somewhere around 125 medium-resolution pictures. More pictures as they become available, and I will start adding stuff to the site immediately.

Date posted: June 6, 2002 | Filed under geek, photo | Leave a Comment »

The past few days have been an attempt to remember 4 years of Quark Xpress that I thought I had forgotten. It’s actually pretty funny how much I do remember, considering I’ve learned and forgotten X number of programs before and since then. Nevertheless, I remember why I do not enjoy print work, and long for the days when I can work the web again.

No joy on the digital camera yet either. It supposedly shipped Priority Mail on Monday, so I’m hopeful the dang thing will be here tomorrow.

One bright spot in the last few weeks has been the backyard and its progress; unfortunately I can’t post pictures of it yet. The list looks like this:

  • The brick is down on the ground in a basketweave pattern; it stetches from the old garage wall lip to the back wall.
  • The south side planter is down and installed 4 bricks high.
  • The north side planter is installed except for the third level half-circle in the main area.
  • There is about 1/8 of a bag of sand in the front south corner between the bricks; i couldn’t help myself and brushed some of it in, and it looks great.

Still to do (concrete projects):

  • Finish off the half-cirle in the center and point in the outer walls of the planters that are sloppy.
  • Point the edges of the floor brick to seal in the sand
  • Drill drainage holes in both planters
  • Haul in some rock, mulch or other base and dump it in the planters
  • Haul in the soil and water
  • Haul in a few bags of sand and sweep into the brick
  • Buy some half-brick and finish off the area on the north wall by the gate (over the drainage pipe.)
Date posted: June 5, 2002 | Filed under art/design, house | Leave a Comment »