Yesterday I was here at work rummaging through my messenger bag to find something at the bottom. My hand ran across all kinds of familiar shapes until it touched something fuzzy, and I stopped, surprised. I was baffled as to what it could be (and a little nervous), so i pulled it out carefully: A mouse-shaped cat toy. I think Teller likes to play ‘hide-the-mouse’ in my bag when I’m not around.
Hee hee. The new hard drive for the iMac is due in this morning. Hee hee hee!
I’m moving the webDAV stuff to a different page, as well as the dyndns stuff, so you won’t get monumentally bored with the stuff I write here if you don’t want to. (And let’s face it, I’m boring enough without the geek talk.)
I’m jamming on some crap that needs to be done by tomorrow at 10, which was assigned to me yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, the iTunes release for Windows is out this afternoon. I was able to snag a copy and I’m currently streaming some Mogwai from my PC to the Mac. (there seems to be some issue with the PC loading the Mac’s library, although I can see the Mac library in the iTunes window.) Right the hell on.
Art History. The Art Speigelman lecture last night was fantastic; after waiting through two boring introductions by the UB folks, he lit up a Camel Light and began talking about everything from comics history to the Jewish experience in America to his personal experience at Groud Zero on September 11 (his daughter’s school was at the base of the WTC). He showed slides from an iBook and stepped through his current work, explaining his reasons for leaving The New Yorker and embarking on a new series of work dealing with his post September 11 experiences. Unfortunately they weren’t allowing autographs, so I couldn’t get Maus signed, but he talked for two hours and answered numerous questions with a quick wit and passion for his craft. Jen and I left feeling energized, inspired, and educated.
Angry. To the nice lady who tried to pull the Baltimore Merge (when somebody drives up the median past all the folks waiting patiently in line and then tries to bull in at the front) on me yesterday in the middle of Catonsville: honking the horn of your Rendezvous and flipping me the bird for two solid minutes doesn’t faze me. Take a Lithium or something before you have a coronary, dumbass.
I was able to get Apache started on the iMac after finding one typo and one bad directory link, and the permission issues were working fine, but I was unable to actually publish a calendar from the powerbook to the iMac. I have to try again tonight to find out what I did wrong. I also ordered the 160GB drive this morning, which will mean plenty of space for backups and music. Woo-hoo!
This site is just too damn funny. Wow.
Choices. Tonight is Art Spiegelman’s thing downtown; besides knowing almost nothing about the event, I’m excited to go and see him. Unfortunately, David Carson is at Villa Julie College tonight (the website sucks, and I can’t find any information on there), and we know nothing about that event other than that it’s open to the public (Spiegelman is tickets-only). That’s a tough choice, and I was leaning towards Carson until the tickets came—guaranteed seats are better than standing room only. I have my copy of Maus in my bag.
Some thoughts about Rock. This morning I drove into work and heard a song by Audioslave, the Rage Against the Soundgarden mess, and it made me kind of sad. At the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, my golden age of music was roughly the end of hair metal through the Seattle sound up until about 1995 or so. During that time there was about an 80% chance that the song on the radio was something I was into. Soundgarden was a band I was into back in the late 80’s, in the Louder Than Love era, when they were getting on the snake. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were coming off the death of their guitarist and had just hired a maniacal new 19-year old with chops of fire. Rage Against the Machine were the L.A. riot of FM radio, dropping the F-bomb in the chorus of their song. Take that, FCC! Alice in Chains released Dirt, which was the pool-hall soundtrack for 1993. (The opening bass riff to Would? still gives me chills.) Public Enemy was still (kind of) a going concern. These guys all played like it meant something, and the music made a connection with me.
These days, all my heroes are older and getting into their introspective phases: Soundgarden is gone, RATM is the house band for Chris Cornell’s moody rambling, RHCP strum and sing (barely) instead of shaking my booty, Layne Staley is dead (dumbass) and other once-mighty bands have dropped off the map.
What’s my point? Well, A) my tastes in music tend towards the pop-oriented stuff; B) I’m an old man who will complain about how nothing is as good as the “good old days”; C) I’ll be the guy who buys that copy of the Singles soundtrack at your tag sale; D) It’s time to dig out some of the old classics for another listen.
The moral of the story, courtesy of an anonymous poster on the Mobtown Shank: Love the music, not the musician.
Time was when my girl would email me from work each day. Not excessive amounts of email, mind you, but a quick hello, sometimes a question or concern, sometimes a funny story she was passing along. Nothing the ordinary modern-day employee doesn’t do each day while at work. Apparently there is some sort of ban on any kind of email at her job, where some dude is sitting in an office reading other folks’ email all day, ready to narc them out for talking about what to eat for dinner or who’s coming over next weekend. Don’t companies realize this makes their employees feel mistrusted and paranoid? Sounds like a fine way to improve productivity to me.
Small Dog Electronics has 15″ iMacs for $999 with a combo drive. Must….resist….. They also have refurbished 30GB ’03 iPods for $379. Resolve….growing…weaker…
Progress… So last night I took about 20 minutes during a period of insomnia to try to enable WebDAV services on the iMac (and let me just tell you how nice it is to have a development box to play with, as opposed to breaking the Powerbook here); this involved setting up a root acount, logging in through ssh, farting around in httpd.conf (ahh, I remember the days on MKLinux…) to enable the services and set up the passwords. Restarting Apache this morning was unsuccessful though; somewhere the password functions I wrote were wonky. More research to come on this front.
Do Not Call. This morning I got a call from somebody at “Atlantic Home Security” who wanted to try to sell me something. As soon as I mentioned the Do Not Call list, she hung up. Dammit. I wanted to get their information and have them fined.
This weekend was a busy one. My sister Renie came down Friday night to stay with us and help work on the house, and we had a heck of a lot for her to do. Saturday morning we got up and fed her fresh muffins and coffee, and before she was done she had a paint roller in her hand. Between the three of us we got the Anxious room and the Pink room rolled with two coats of white paint, the closet in the Anxious room cleaned, mudded and ready to prime, and the closet in the Cream room painted. Renie also brought us a beautiful oak dresser she hasn’t had time to work on, which we’ll finish refinishing, and a huge red rug for in front of the fireplace.
breaktime lunch on the back lawn, 10/11
In other news, this is probably the most brilliant waste of time ever. Thanks, Nate!
home anthology, pre-opening, 10/11
We broke at four to take Renie over to Home Anthology, a favorite antique dealer of ours, and see their new space. Luckily they were there, and let us in a week before the grand opening of the new location. Todd and Heather were also there helping arrange furniture, and we walked the length of the space amazed at the collection. From there we took Renie to our favorite Thai restaurant to have dinner.
Sunday morning we got up and Renie decided that we needed to see what was under the carpet in the Pink room. We pulled it up to find newer padding (foam) and relatively virgin hardwood underneath that. It took about an hour to clean that room, and then Renie convinced us to pull up the hallway carpeting. Unfortunately, the Doctor had put linoleum down at some point (the same linoleum that’s down over the original hexagonal tile in the bathroom) in the hallway…over top of a sheet of mdf plywood. So pulling the linoleum up was relatively easy, after we got under the plywood. Luckily the plywood saved the floor underneath, so we continued…down the stairs. As of today there’s no more carpet upstairs, or on the stairs. They look pretty good—the risers are one-piece planks, and they’re beat up, but still in good shape. After spending hours pulling staples and nails from the floor, we washed it good and put Jen’s blue rug down in the upstairs hall. The pink room looks cleaner and larger, and the hallway looks brighter and warmer. I’ve posted a series of pictures here for you to look at.
My pop sent a picture of our old house in Jersey to my sister and I. I lived there from 1st to 5th grade, and I mostly remember this house as the one I grew up in. It looks a lot different—they cut down the weeping willow tree I fell out of and broke my arm under; they resided it with white clapboard (or a reasonable facsimile); they put a basketball hoop up in the driveway and got rid of my Dad’s circular flower bed in the side yard. Other than that, it looks really good, like the family who lives there takes care of it. I think every so often about that house, and whether the pool we dug is still in the backyard, if there are still matchbox cars buried in the driveway (it was dirt when we lived there) or Star Wars figures under the grass in the backyard. I wonder if anybody I know still lives there, and what ever became of the kids we played pickle and flashlight tag with.
Jen Rocks The World. That is all.
Grrr. I was able to figure out what the deal with dyndns was this morning, after spending about an hour laying in bed feeling like I was going to hurl. Internally at the house I can see the web server and mount the shared volumes but I’m still not able to see it from work. Perhaps I have to wait until the DNS is updated throughout the land. I watched a funny old-time movie on AMC while waiting for a killer headache to go away and enjoyed two cats sleeping on either side of my chest. Not a bad way to start the morning.
I’m moving all the Dyndns stuff to a different page, so that it stays off this log- you didn’t want to read about all that boring crap here anyway, right?
forget I died, remember I lived, 10/30
Roxio, the helpful people who make terrible CD-authoring software for the PC, have a mandatory registration for anybody wanting to update their stuff. I entered “joe@blow.com” in the email field and “joeblow” as a login, and of course, somebody already registered that name. So i put in “joeblow@zero.com” and “joebloeschmo”, and both of them were taken as well. Finally I just made up a random number and got through. How annoying for the DBA to chug through that mountain of worthless data for the five or six good addresses…
The HDR problem may be solved…. Stay tuned.
For Your Voting Enjoyment. Try this site on for size: Select Smart Presidential Candidate Selector. Your mileage may vary, and I don’t know how accurate the results are. Apparently I’m voting for Dennis Kucinich, D. OH.
There’s news that Apple will be releasing a version of iTunes for Windows, which might mean we can postpone a hard drive upgrade for the iMac. I hope the functionality is as robust as the Mac version…if it means we can host the music on the server and stream the library to the Powerbooks, that would be fantastic.
Mash-up. Pitchfork Media did a review of a recompiled track called Sly Beyonce Walks Like A Nerd, which is a remix of a Sly Stone, Beyonce, Bangles and NERD track on top of each other. Todd had turned me on to mash-ups last year when he played an MP3 of an Eminem rap over Zeppelin’s The Wanton Wanted Song. There’s a guy in the UK who works under the name Go Home Productions who has a whole catalog of stuff that I’d love to get my hands on. This stuff is brilliant—there’s Madonna singing Ray Of Light over the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant (it sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it really does), and Morcheeba’s World Looking In over a remixed drum track of Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. (which goes to prove that you can take any Zeppelin track, mix out the vocals, drop something completely different on top, and have yourself another hit record. Try that, Creed.) I wish there were more MP3’s available but he obviously had to take most of them down for copyright reasons. Right on.
I started looking into some way I can get two separate calendars linked up in one place so that Jen and I can keep our schedules together. I’d love to do it through iCal, as Jen will hopefully have a Mac on her work desk sometime next year. I’ve been trying to figure out how to sync two calendars up without spending $99 on Apple’s .Mac service, especially since I’m running a webserver at home. After looking around at a bunch of dead links, I was able to find a good primer on enabling WebDAV service built in to OSX. Of course, I’m putting the cart in front of the horse because I still haven’t worked out the issues with dyndns and tunneling through my router. Arrggh.
I’m also starting to look at updating the design on my weblog/website; I’d like to move over to a CSS-based layout (at least for the log pages) and modify the other pages, as the design is now about two years old. Some of the things I’d like to keep on the main site are:
- The update and photo on the home page.
- The basic page layout, but move to a stepped-page portfolio listing.
- The white background/gray highlights/Univers typeface.
Some things I don’t like are the leftover Garamond from my circa-1993 identity (let’s just get that out behind the barn and shoot it), the green/gray horizontal lines (they’re falling apart, and they don’t transfer to my print collateral at all), the dead space on the right of the Design section, and the fact that the Scout and Log sections don’t live well with the other sections.
Seems the prodigal Ford is repaired…well, it wasn’t even broke in the first place. The hose clamp on the radiator let go, and when that happened it vented coolant all over the engine. My mechanic says that this model Ford has an issue with adding coolant to the point where the engine is happy, and my continued overheating issues were due to that fact. Whatever it was, it’s hopefully fixed now.
Interesting. By chance, I checked out the Supon website today to see if they’ve updated it—they have. Looks like they must have been swallowed up by another firm, one with a craptacular website.
Not that I actually buy physical CD’s anymore, but if you happen to buy one published by the BMG Music Group, and you can’t seem to get past the copy protection to rip it to your hard drive, simply hold down the Shift key. Brilliant!
I Was Once Misinformed About Your Intentions. I may have let the cat out of the bag with Todd’s new blog, but I’m still happy to welcome him to the fold.
Today I’m reading with interest about Panther, the new upgrade to OSX. It looks like there’s a bunch of juicy new features throughout, and that will be great for future monkeying. I’m still waiting to get paid so’s I can buy a large drive for the iMac, and install Jaguar on that machine. I also need to find a cheap Firewire enclosure for Rob’s donated drive, which seems to have some issues with bad blocks at the beginning of the platter, making it unusable with OSX.
We didn’t get anything new done with the house last night, but I figure another quick hour with the cut-in brush, a good mop job, and a coat of white paint in the closet, and the cream room will be ready for Jen’s twin bed. Renie is coming down this weekend (we’re very excited about that), and we have a couple of jobs lined up for her to help us with:
- Painting the Anxious room white. I exchanged the
whitebrown paint for White Tint Base, which is actually white. Having two rooms painted will make a huge difference upstairs. - Painting three of the four walls in the Pink room. I may be able to pick up drywall today at the Home Despot and get that mudded in by Saturday. If so, that will be three rooms painted, which means we can tear up carpeting and make way for the floor sander.
- Planting bulbs. Since last year’s fall sales, Jen and I have bought about a zillion different bulbs of different colors, types, and sizes; starting with a box of 70 blue gladiolus bulbs I got at the Sam’s Club, we’ve added white tulips, pastel tulips, fuzzy white and red tulips, and crocuses. We’re going to have more bulbs in the ground than the country of Holland. That is, if the assorted chipmunks, squirrels, and other backyard creatures don’t dig them all up and have a kegger while we’re at work.
Depending on how productive I feel tonight, I may also try to build another fire for practice this evening. I’d love to be able to use that fireplace a lot this winter.
I reorganized the sidebar links over on the left to read a little better; I got rid of the ‘picks of the month’ column because I wasn’t updating it and replaced it with some blogging links. This is all basically a futile exercise, as I’m going to begin a redesign of the log this month anyway. Today we should also welcome Todd to the fold of bloggers online.
A rant, directed at the general IT director mindset in corporate America:
You are probably a forty-something middle manager who has a lot of money invested in a MCSE or other accredited certification, which was expensive and time-consuming to earn. Your livelihood depends on your ability to oversee, manage, upgrade, and plan a computer network around this certification. Because, after all, if your company goes to something other than Wintel, your job is in jeopardy, and you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay for. I understand that.
Where you piss me off is when you decide arbitrarily that creative professionals (defined as print designers and to some degree web designers) MUST use Wintel machines because you say so. That’s bullshit, and I’ll tell you why:
- Most designers have been trained on Macs. They know all the ins and outs of Quark (or now, InDesign) on the Mac, and they know the ins and outs of OS9 and what they have to do to get it to work with printers, removable media, outside vendors, and most importantly, their home machines, which they usually have a good deal of money invested in. This is called a specialty. It’s why your company hired them in the first place.
- They have legacy applications and fonts they’ve been using for years, often totalling thousands of dollars, which they most likely own and often will bring with them to the company. When was the last time you priced out a font family at ITC or Adobe? Didn’t think so, slappy.
- Font handling. Wintel fonts print and look like shit. End of fucking discussion.
- Have you ever heard of workflow? Designers have a workflow they are comfortable with. Windows machines are totally different in the way they lay out everything. That translates to hours of time wasted.
- Service bureaus, printers, and prepress shops hate PC’s. And will sometimes charge you more to service files created on them. How is that cost-effective?
Your job is to support your employees. If you don’t know how to support the machines, read a fucking book. Take a fucking class. Don’t outlaw a tool because you don’t know how to use it.
The argument that you are specifying PC’s for the creative department because you can rotate them out when the creative people leave is an argument that defeats itself. That’s a great way to piss off your designers and get them to leave. Happy now, jackass? You’re a genius.
This morning
Here you can see the difference between the old carpeting, and how it makes the whole world dark, and the sunny hardwood floor. Amazing!