Röyskopp’s Melody A.M. Good chillout music, or as Pitchfork says, music for the Jetta-driving 30-year-old set. Whatever.
4:05 PM. No more downtempo. Van Halen to rock out to. Must get work done.
Smoking Crack, Take 1.Tonight I’m taking apart the innards of a surplus Pelican case I got from an old employer and replacing the foam (fitted for an IBM laptop) with new stuff for my Powerbook. I spent a day or so chasing closed-cell foam down locally, after getting a quote from an Internet source for over $450 for a 4×8′ sheet. Who knew that foam was so expensive? Anyway, I was able to get a whole bagload for $36 from a local supplier in town (cheerfully named the “House of Foam”.) It’s lighter, more pliable, and easier to work with than the original stuff. Today I did a search for “Pelican case” for this post and found that they have an option to buy foam directly. I want to hit myself in the head repeatedly. But I did get to experience the House of Foam, so all was not lost.
Smoking Crack, Take 2. I went to the CompUSA a few days ago and found a copy of Retrospect Express for the low low price of $59. I got it home and excitedly tore the wrapper off to find that it’s mainly just an installed reminder service for one machine, not the centralized multiple backup utility I was hoping for. (Read the box, stupid.) Having ripped off the plastic, I voided the store’s return policy. (Read the receipt, stupid.) I called Dantz and found that I can upgrade to Desktop for another $59, but I was feeling pretty dumb about the whole thing today.
There’s a nice Scout on the Binder Bulletin Classifieds in DC going for $5,000 right now.
I’m working on the interface for a game project right now. The game is still very much in the planning/designing stages, and we’re trying to plot out the paths for the users from insertion of the CD to the click of the “quit” button. It’s challenging to be back in a high-level planning role, and help make decisions about how the game will work and feel, instead of dressing up a three-year-old flawed bitmap interface. I can’t wait to get into the building and testing of this thing.
Welcome to the Machine. When did this country become a fascist state? When did free speech become anti-American? Why is it wrong to speak your mind? What’s wrong with this country?
I hope some of those dudes at the ACLU rise up righteously and sue the crap out of that mall.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Last night, while toying with some more interesting navigation for the photo archives, I finally got around to submitting a photo to the Mirror Project. It was a shot I took in Ellicott City last year, actually by accident, in the windshield of a Model T Ford.
Album of the day: The eponymous first album by the B-52’s.
ThinkSecret has a bit of information which illustrates a very good point. In an article on the upcoming Illustrator 11, Adobe concedes that most owners of versions 9 and 10 still use version 8 because it’s faster. I agree, and I’m one of these owners. At the release of 9, the interface, upgrades, and modifications to the application began to drag down an otherwise powerful tool to the point where I ditched for 8 it two weeks after installing it. For the same reasons that I still use older versions of MS applications (I have a copy of Word 4 for the Mac that I use on a Powerbook 100, and it does fine), I avoid some newer versions of popular software, because the tradeoffs can be too great. I hope Adobe, and other vendors, learn this lesson. (PS. It’s about time they rolled the poor orphan Streamline into Illustrator. The path was clear six years ago. Let’s hope they’ve refined the recognition sensitivity.)
This weekend Jen and I drove south to St. Mary’s County, Maryland, for a local tradition: The spring dinner, featuring stuffed ham and fried oysters. Not unlike many of the fireman’s dinners you may have been to, there are a lot of old men selling tickets outside the firehouse, and you enter a large hall (in my experience, they’ve moved the trucks out of the garage, but down in the County they have a whole meeting hall above) where one of the ladies’ auxilliary seats you. Usually there’s some folks at your table, and you make your introductions while they start passing you plates heaped with food. This year the ham was spicy and the oysters had been cooked perfectly, so they were crisp and delicious. Unfortunately, we were seated next to some older women who kept to themselves and hoarded the oysters.
I find this article sad, not because people are possibly strapping their children into incorrectly fastened car seats, but because estimates place a quarter of this country’s population reading at or below a fifth-grade level. I think if you read that poorly and you’re over the age of twenty, you shouldn’t be allowed to have children. How are you gonna help them with their homework when they’re in the sixth grade?
Google Fun. Apparently there was an AA baseball catcher named Bill Dugan (not to be confused with the athletically-named Jumping Joe Dugan), who played two years of ball starting in 1884. At this point, his stats on Google place him directly behind me and above another Bill Dugan who lives in Cali and who’s been making video games for a number of years now.