Getting a bunch of stuff done this morning, and feeling like I’m on top of things, for once. Jen paid off her car today, so there will be celebrations! I was also very proud of her for speaking up for herself in her salary negotiations yesterday, even if it did take her bosses by surprise. She took a big step (and showed a lot of stones) for herself. Let’s cross our fingers for her.
Update: Not as good as we had hoped, but not disastrous. Stay tuned.

I got a nice email back from the Scout lady yesterday, and zipped up a set of pictures for her to post in her ad. I declined to put a price on her rig, but told her what I paid for Chewbacca and how complete he was at that time. Hopefully she can use that for her estimation. I also talked to another guy with a crazy-lifted ’72 that he did a ‘frame-off resto’ on. He has a blue-on-white paint job, a new wiring job, fiberglas inner fenders, new floorboards and he painted the frame aqua. I have seen the pictures, and yes, he did.

Props to Errol for bringing in the Spider-Man DVD today; no, it’s not the movie, but a compendium of the 80’s cartoon, I guess, and the real gem: the Origin of Spider-Man episode from the 1967 cartoon TV show. You know it- the theme song goes like this:

Spider-Man
Spider-Man
Does anything a spider can
Can he swing?

Listen bud
He’s got radioactive blood
Look out
Look out for Spider Man.

I have had the theme running through my head all day. It makes me smile.

→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.

Date posted: August 16, 2002 | Filed under music, Scout | Leave a Comment »

John paid me last night, so I have some money right now. We’re getting half-paychecks and supposedly when the next set of checks come in, we’ll get a full one. Right. I’m now 5.5 paychecks behind. But there is a bunch of freelance coming in right now- Katie needs some print work, John is hot to get a bunch of stuff from me, and there’s some illustration work coming in as well.

$104 later, both the Scout and the Tortoise have a clean emissions bill of health. And I have found that the city of Baltimore has placed its vehicle emissions testing stations in strategically impossible areas to find.

I found cockeyed.com again, after having read the How Much Is Inside? section about 2 years ago. This guy is a nut, but he’s funny as hell. Nate sends over this interesting link to Kick to the Groin Comics, a delightfully twisted series of humorous stories not unlike mnftiu.cc.

Date posted: August 15, 2002 | Filed under humor, money | Leave a Comment »

“The more I look at it, the more I don’t like it”, Erick said, when he described the Scout to me. I have to agree with him. I’ve seen much, much worse, but this is not the truck I want. The body mounts are bad, the second paint job is sloppy, all four quarters need replacement, and the rockers are totally shot. I didn’t get to talk directly to Erick about it, but I took a bunch of pictures and I’m going to send them to the lady today. We’re going to sit this one out.

Nate turned me on to a really good album, one that gives me a glimmer of hope for modern music: And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Source Codes and Tags. Rock and roll. I can’t remember the last time I heard some contemporary music that I actually gave a crap about.

Speaking of music, the Trouser Press is online, with a pile of reviews of bands that I actually give a shit about. Some I don’t agree with, and some I laugh at, and some make me remember days gone by, when I liked 70% of the music I heard out there.

→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.

Date posted: August 14, 2002 | Filed under music, Scout | Leave a Comment »

Mike is making me jealous- his fancy Nikon takes much, much better macro pictures than my Kodak- one of the reasons I was interested in a digital camera in the first place.

I helped my neighbor Matt troubleshoot his network connections last night. The network people wired the wallplate connectors correct to the T568b standard, but then flipped all the wires at the box. Good to see I wasn’t the only one to make this mistake (although I didn’t do it on all of my wires.)

Damn the torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead Dept.: Even though this Thursday will make five paychecks promised but not delivered, I found a Scout in Annapolis this morning that sounds like it’s in good shape. I put an email in to the seller and I’m going to follow up with a phonecall in an hour or so. What the hell am I doing?
Update: She wants $2700 for it. With engine issues. Erick says the body is rough, and would need to have all fenders and quarters pulled. Hmmph.

Well, the teaching gig I was looking into did not work out. There just wasn’t enough time to absorb the curriculum before start of classes, and the schedule could have been tricky as well. I’m disappointed but hopeful that something will come of it in the future.

Stumbling around today, I found this link back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, something I had looked at a while back but forgot about, from Doc Searls’ site. Which leads me to Corante, an interesting newsfeed for tech info.

→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.

Date posted: August 13, 2002 | Filed under money, photo, Scout | Leave a Comment »

backyard flower combination, 8.10

backyard flower combination, 8.10

This is a link to an extremely moving piece on a photojournalist at the site of the WTC attacks last fall; it is a record of the last photos he took on his journey downtown to the base of the towers. His 35-mm cameras were smashed in the collapse of the second tower, but the compact flash card in his digital was intact.

I downloaded PGP for the Mac on Friday, and I’m looking through the documentation this morning to see how and what it does. Helpfully, the publishers enclosed two PDF files: Intro to Crypto and the User’s Guide. Inside the Intro to Crypto manual, Phil Zimmerman wrote something in 2000 that was spookily forward-thinking, given the events of the past year:

“Once a communications infrastructure optimized for surveillance
becomes entrenched, a shift in political conditions may lead to abuse of this
new-found power. Political conditions may shift with the election of a new
government, or perhaps more abruptly from the bombing of a federal
building.”

I also found a newer, better disk catalog application, in the hopes that I can get a handle on exactly what is in my collection of assorted Mac and PC backups, archives and application discs. (numbering about 100 or so right now.)

Date posted: August 12, 2002 | Filed under geek, photo | Leave a Comment »

I was looking through some old drives last night in preparation to donate a couple of old Macs, and I found a bunch of Cidera-era pictures on a storage drive. With those I also found a real interesting picture of the backyard before I started on the work, and a nice shot of the lake back in 2000. Along with these I have a bunch of staff and event photos from that time, about 8 months before the company imploded.

Lesson 362 on how not to run a website: Long and Foster has listings for houses in Baltimore; you plug in your information and do a search. They return a page with a small picture, a basic description, and no other information. No address, no lot information, no size info. I sent an email to the listed agent and got a bounceback to another agent, referring me to a phone number. Sorry, you lose. Make me jump through hoops, and withhold basic purchasing information from me? No thanks.

On another front, the house across from me that was rehabbed last year and is still on the market is listed for $214K.

Date posted: August 9, 2002 | Filed under apple, Baltimore, house | Leave a Comment »

dock, 7.30

dock, 7.30

We have a busy busy weekend planned. Jen is having her birthday on Saturday (no, I’m not telling you how old she is) and I’m taking her out on Friday night; on Saturday her family comes into town and we go out again for dinner. Tonight we’re getting together with some folks from work for a postponed dinner. What a social schedule!

Never really having used Excel before, I approached it with a lot of caution and loathing. I plugged in the information I wanted to capture (freelance billing data) and looked through the helpfiles for a few minutes. When i figured out how to add one column and total it out, I found myself clapping like a 5-year old.

ALGX is sucking totally these last weeks; their nameservers keep dropping in and out, so none of the entries in my logfiles have resolved names. Grrr! Who are you? Where are you coming from? Where are you in the world?

Date posted: August 8, 2002 | Filed under geek, photo, photography | Leave a Comment »

Totally down on work yesterday, right at the very end. Thanks, Russell. I stayed at my studio class for an hour and a half, and then left, completely unable to focus. I came home and did a bunch of research into illustration listings online and some new materials.

The news is better today; apparently we have a big-ass contract coming in to sign, which means an end to the monetary woes and hopefully a return to timely paychecks (as well as catching up on those that are owed.) All praise the money gods. Until then, I am still leveraging savings to keep the wolves at bay.

So when all this comes down, I have to make the move to OSX on the Powerbook here. Roughly $300 will get me an expansion-bay CD-burner and a copy of OSX, which I need to back this thing up and then burn to the drive. OR, I could just buy a 40GB drive and an internal expansion bay case; there’s also a bus-powered FireWire enclosure from OWC for cheaper, and it looks sexier too. Overall, it should be about $300 to do what I need.

Date posted: August 7, 2002 | Filed under apple, life, money | Leave a Comment »

Here’s a list of the cameras I mentioned yesterday. Some of them are actually 120 cameras, and the Brownie Holiday is a 127. (I don’t care, I want to play with the 620 film.) The Duaflex is actually kind of complicated to load, but offers the best lens/viewfinder combination, and the Agfa comes in a close second.

  1. Kodak Bull’s Eye Six-20
  2. Kodak Brownie Hawkeye
  3. Kodak Duaflex II
  4. Kodak Brownie Holiday
  5. Agfa Ansco Pioneer
  6. Vagabond “120”
  7. Revere Eight Model 88
  8. Paillard (Bolex) C8

For the past two days I’ve been getting a refresher course on 3DMax, which is good, because there’s a ton of things I don’t know yet. It’s actually making a lot more sense now. I just have to start using it religiously like Photoshop, and I’ll get better.

The heatwave finally broke today. It’s a breezy, sunny 80 degrees outside, with little humidity. I opened the windows for the boys this morning and they crowded the screen like kids in front of a Christmas display window.

This is a blast from the past. Wow.
This was my favorite show of all time. My first Mac was called G-Force. This was also a fave.

Date posted: August 6, 2002 | Filed under list, photo | Leave a Comment »

It is so unbearably hot here in Baltimore, I want to kill myself. Tonight the heatwave will break, but I’m wondering why we ever left NY state and that beautiful, warm, clear lake. In the backyard, I got the support columns bought (decided not to deal with my other neighbor) and the anchors drilled, as well as the notches in the concrete caps cut, so all we have to do is cut some notches in the bottoms of the columns and install. Then we level each of them out and put the top plate on.

I had a very interesting chat this weekend about a possible part-time teaching position; even if it doesn’t happen, it was still a great meeting and could lead to exciting possibilities down the road. Plus, there’s a bunch of freelance work coming down the road in the next couple of weeks, and that should keep the money flowing into my bank accound and not out.

Todd said he saw Esther on the way to work this morning, so I know she isn’t a mirage.

I started doing a little research into some of the cameras I bought on my vacation; some of the super-8’s are pretty rare, and some of the Kodak Brownies I bought are common but beautiful examples of industrial design. I also have a really nice Agfa and a few lesser-known brands which all seem to take 620 or 120 variant film. Now to find a few 620 spools and order some film! I’m dying to try some of these cameras…! Luckily there’s a company in town that develops 120 film…

Date posted: August 5, 2002 | Filed under Baltimore, photography | Leave a Comment »