fearsome snow leopard, 2.16
It’s 6:30 ond there’s somewhere around a foot of snow outside (probably more). The talking heads are claiming it won’t let up until tomorrow noon. We have plenty of booze, food and a broadband connection, so we’re looking good. Plus, the temps are supposed to climb up to the 50’s by Friday.
Happy shoveling!
On Mike’s advice, and knowing that I’m finally getting paid this weekend, I ordered a used Airport Base Station from Small Dog Electronics. With the purchase of another AirPort card for Jen’s laptop, we’ll be totally wireless, at least at my house. It will be very cool to lose the cat-5 cables laying around, and also to have the PC, laptop and printer on the network at the same time.
international, 2.13
city life building 2.11
I read last week that the old City Life building is being developed into a restaurant/nightclub venue. It was a crime to charge visitors $7 to see a thin display of local kitsch, but this will hopefully be a better use of a very beautiful space. Good luck, folks.
Jen and I have been working for the last few days on freelance work, and the stuff we have so far makes me very happy. I’m very excited to sink my teeth into this work, because I have a ton of ideas for the website and I think we can make really strong products for each client.
I will have to look into a product called Konfabulator, which is a sort of do-it-yourself widget maker for OSX, made by the guys who brought us Kaliedoscope (which I never used.) I have a few things I’d like to configure through AppleScript but I can’t seem to make the Script Editor record my actions anymore, either in Classic or in OSX. I used to have a series of scripts which would open the three main programs I use every day, and another to mount my remote web drive and publish my log page, and it made the day go by faster. I’d like to set that up again in OSX, but I don’t have the technology yet.
Ted Rall writes a very interesting (and very sobering) article about the cost of college, or more importantly, the cost of graduating, and the increasing gap between the folks who can afford it and those who can’t. Personally, I count myself lucky to have had parents who believed in me enough to send me to an art college. I don’t know exactly how much they paid to send me to school, but I know it wasn’t cheap, and I got off very lucky.
Wired has a very interesting and thought-provoking essay on the exploding world of digital archiving; the author brings up several points I hadn’t considered before. Jim Lewis reminds us that mechanical memory degrades, and this very process of aging gives items of importance value and worth, as well as a critical placeholder in the timeline of life.
Todd did a little digging around and found this link to an article about our friend Terry Tate. I coulda swore he was a pro, but it appears I am mistaken.
Investment in the Future. Jen and I signed up for a class last November at Bin 604 for a pair of wine-tasting classes as our anniversary present. Yesterday we had our first class, learning about the different regions of Europe and their specific varietals. There was so much to cover it basically illustrated how much more there is to learn instead of making things clearer. (From what I understood, you could make a graduate program out of some of the larger French regions.) After getting a little tipsy in class, we visited the Barnes & Noble downtown to spend some money on design publications, picking up the Print Regional Design Annual and some other magazines, as well as a book on design typography/color/mood and a beautiful leather-bound journal for Jen.
I was able to get a lot of work done for the 9-5 and re-hang the bathroom door, so I’m feeling pretty good. I have more lumber to buy as well as some new drill bits to replace the missing ones, but the woodwork is shaping up. I can’t wait to be done, because the whole house is filled with dust.
Found via Macintouch this morning: A reader replaced his LCD with a $200 replacement from eBay. Good to know- this might be one of those sites I cache permanently for archive’s sake.
Oh, and: Dude needs some serious psychiatric evaluation. What a freakshow. Here’s the simple facts: If he was not a bazillionaire, somebody would have taken those kids away from him a long time ago. I feel so bad for them.
creepy tree with gif downsampling, 2.4
Continuing the har-har trend from yesterday, Nate (my local North Dakotan expatriate) sent me this link to a shocking Onion story. Kind of frightening when you stop to consider just how much of the world this sleepy northern state could wipe out in one launch. And there’s also a funny contribution from Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, who makes the case for blockwide extermination of evil.
Today’s music selection is the seminal 1973 release from The Allman Brothers, Brothers and Sisters.
Looks like we are going to have a little snow tonight. This year has been a high-water mark in the duration of the cold snowy season, if not the amount (I think the blizzard of ’96 takes that prize.)
Pitchfork gave a less-than-stellar review to The 100th Window, the new release from Massive Attack. I’m still going to buy it, but that’s a real bummer. I hope it’s better than they say.
I read an article in the New Yorker about the American intelligence community last night, and the writer brought up an interesting phenomena in examining the different events leading up to the present day: “…both intelligence analysts and policymakers assumed that the Indians would not test their nuclear weapons because Americans would not, in similar circumstances, test nuclear weapons. In the world of intelligence, this is known as mirror-imaging: the projection of American values and behavior onto America’s enemies and rivals.” One wonders how much of this behavior influences current US foreign policy, and how many missteps have been made because of it.
On a much brighter, funnier note, this is the best commercial I have seen in the last year. I want to vote Terry for President. Thank Jen for this link—she needed it after the day she’s having. “You need a cover on your TPS report, Richard!“
Last night I found myself in front of the TV, trying to decide between a slew of bad programming choices, when my remote happened upon a Frontline report on the Gulf War. Now, I like PBS, but the Maryland equivalent of Public Broadcasting used to equate to a guy with an aluminum foil antenna powered by his car battery. Somewhere in the last six months they upped the juice on the transmitter and I can finally see the Antiques Roadshow, as opposed to listening to it through a squall of white fuzz.
What was interesting was that it had been produced sometime after the war and sometime before the current administration (the site says 1996), so the viewpoints were not skewed in any noticable way towards the current situation. At the time, I was still in college, and without cable TV, so most of the coverage was new to me. The timeline of events and behind-the-scenes information was fascinating. When the program was over at midnight, they left it off at the beginning of the ground war, with much still to cover. I’m definitely tuning in tonight for the next chapter.