The scene: the express (10 items or less!!!) line at the Hunt Valley Giant. The players: handsome early 60’s male patron, smartly dressed, no wedding ring. Attractive late 50’s female clerk, requisite Giant uniform, nice hair, no wedding ring. The exchange:

Man: Helloo there!

Woman: Hi. (Checking items.)

Man: So, how did your football teams do this weekend?

Woman: (Barely perceptible pause) Oh, I don’t follow football.

Man: (Who’s got nothing) Awww, what are you, some kind of… (panic setting in) non…sports…liking…person?

Woman: (Not looking up) …

Man: (Grabbing for anything at this point) …Well, college basketball is really my thing.

I could only stand behind this poor sap and shake my head quietly as his ass caught fire and plunged into the ground. I’m no playa like Engelbert Humperdink, but I understand that A. it’s not smart to include sports in your opening line. Unless you’re hitting on a woman you’re playing sports with, leave the football chatter at home. B. have a follow-up line to your line. Chances are you’ll get shot down, and sometimes it’s better to have a good comeback—women like the chase, and if you’re interesting, you may get a second chance. C. Don’t follow a brush-off with an insult. Duh. D. Enough about you. What does she like? Why don’t you ask her, genius? She doesn’t give a crap about whether or not you like college basketball.

All of these things I wanted to explain to this poor guy, who may or may not have been trying to git some, but I figured he was already shamed enough as it was.

Yesterday afternoon I continued the Blue room demolition and reached the point where I can start snaking wire. While I made noise and yanked plaster down, Jen bundled up on the bed and drank TheraFlu to try and ward off the evil nasties. Outside, the freezing rain made an icy shell on top of the snow we got Saturday night.

Movie Review. Underworld was an entertaining, if not derivative movie about vampires and werewolves; the chick from Pearl Harbor ran around shooting guns trying to save the singer dude from Creed. “Romance story” this movie ain’t, but I can see how people could get “sexy” from the sheer amount of leather pants worn in the film. Thankfully, kung-fu was kept to an absolute minimum in favor of gunplay. But yeah, you’ve seen this movie before.

Date posted: January 19, 2004 | Filed under entertainment, house, humor | Leave a Comment »

In addition to the wire work done last night, I got down below the pantry this morning, fighting the wind and a 5×5′ sheet of plastic (that was fun) to seal up the insulation I put in the other night. This project was prompted by the newscast last night where they said that New Hampshire got down to frickin’ 98 below zero.

Random Fun Links. Disney sells Celebration community. It’s a Small World! (via dominey) Get your Mars on. Right On. I only wish this guy had some better merchandise, ’cause I’d buy it. (via boing boing) iPod sound quality. I should be encoding in AAC at 160kb/s…

Date posted: January 16, 2004 | Filed under house, links | Leave a Comment »

The anticipated “1-3 inches of snow, with the possibility of 2-4 during Thursday” translated to a slight dusting. The state of Maryland continued its long tradition of freaking out and dumping millions of dollars worth of salt on clear roads, putting schools on 2-hour delays, and excercising “Snow Emergency Plans.” I remain unimpressed. So much for getting snowed in with my baby.

This evening I dropped $100—gulp—on cable at the Home Depot. $100 got me 1,000 feet of Cat 5e network cable and 500 feet of coax cable, enough wire to wrap around my house about a hundred times or start my own copper mine. I got the rest of the wire run from the Pink room to the basement and began to cut out the baseboards for the outlets. Hopefully by tomorrow night I can have the pink room finished and start on the blue room next.

Random Fun Links. Quicktime 3-D view of Mars, put together from NASA photgraphs. That’s compelling stuff.

Date posted: January 15, 2004 | Filed under house, links | Leave a Comment »

Actually, I misspoke yesterday. The mini-headphone-to-RCA plug does work, it’s just that the input level to the receiver is very low. So I have to crank the receiver up to high volume to hear the output from the iPod. The S-Video cable still doesn’t work, and the main issue there is that my TV is old and only has a coax input. At some point I will need to buy a TV with S or Component video inputs to get the whole enchilada.

This Old House, Part 2. So I got the insulation installed under the pantry last night. It was actually pretty easy to do—cutting down the stringers was easy with the compound miter saw, and actually putting the insulation in was a snap. Unfortunately, the kitchen is still pretty cold because the radiator is barely alive. So, no quick fix.

Legion of Boom by the Crystal Method is a disappointment. Not as melodic as Vegas (“Busy Child”, “Trip Like I Do”) or compelling as Tweekend (“Name of the Game”, “Roll It Up”), none of the tracks on this album stand out, make me want to do kung-fu, shoot people up, or drive cars fast. And that is the standard by which I judge all my big-beat electronica. “Weapons of Mass Distortion” and “Broken Glass” come close to the old-skool soundtrack for ass-whuppin’, but this is pretty uninspiring stuff.

Missing. Todd just reminded me that Spalding Gray is missing and presumed bumming; apparently he was in a bad car wreck back in ’01 and has not been right ever since. My friend Martha and I both went to see Gray’s Anatomy at Center Stage back in ’94 or so; it turns out that Todd could have been there the same night (and, based on our particular brand of shared coincidence, I would put money on it) and we all enjoyed the show. God bless, man, and I hope you’re OK.

Random Fun Links. Heavy rotation this morning: Pete Yorn’s Musicforthemorningafter, specifically “On Your Side”. Beautiful stuff. This could be very cool. Provided I can get it to work. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. This translates, in Industry-speak, as “Get out, you loser.” (this has direct bearing on a certain project I was working on last year.)

Date posted: January 14, 2004 | Filed under house, links, music | Leave a Comment »

The cover for the couch came yesterday, and while I waited for Jen to get home, I figured out how to put the thing on the couch. It fits really well, but $200 is pretty steep for the thin material it’s made of, but I guess that’s in line with the four hundred percent markup Pottery Barn charges.

This Old House. Our kitchen is small by contemporary standards, but it’s functional for us, largely in part because there’s a 5’x5′ pantry off the back of the house. It’s suspended off the ground about four feet by two concrete pillars, and the underside is finished off with tar paper. The kitchen is also the coldest room in the house, in part because the radiator there is the last one on the chain, and in part because the pantry is poorly insulated. I took a look under there this morning and found that the tar paper is holding in a layer of blown fiberglas insulation, but I can’t be sure how old, thick or even it is. I’m going to buy a couple of 2’x4’s and a roll of pink insulation today and see if I can’t seal it up a bit better before the temperatures plunge again.

Oh, and those two cables I bought at the Best Buy last week? Neither of them work.

Random Link Fun. 100 Mowst mispelled werds. Know it. Learn it. Live it. Clean your 1st gen iPod. Gonna try this one tonight. VoIP hiccup. Doesn’t apply to my IP phone though… Dead iPod? Follow those instructions. Also, Helpful iPod support.

4:55 PM. Apparently a whole swath of I-95 is on fire or something, not too far from Catonsville. A tanker truck did a header off an overpass onto two other tanker trucks. What are the chances of that? This should make the evening commute a pleasant one. I think I may wind up staying late at work this evening.

Date posted: January 13, 2004 | Filed under house, links | Leave a Comment »

duckpin bowling, hillendale lanes, 1.12.04

The wedding dress search has been sort of a Crusade for Jen over the last few months. Between pushy sales staff, incompatible schedules, stacks of bridal magazines, unpredictable sisters, and a mother with more conflicting opinions than a Sunday Fox News show, she has been laying awake each night dreading each attempt to buy something. This Friday we hosted her mother and sister, taking them out for Thai at our favorite local restaurant, in preparation for another skirmish on Saturday. The good news is that they found a dress. The bad news is that all joy, confidence, and self-esteem Jen had in the dress was smacked out of her on the car ride home by her mother, who is now banished from any further wedding planning.

Meanwhile, I forcibly removed all the skin from my knuckles while running wire through the Pink room. There are enough loops for seven outlets, which should be enough plugs to power an entire branch of Circuit City. Sunday, I got the wire down through the wall in the dining room and through the basement to the panel, a production about as complicated (and pleasant) as trying to ski blindfolded through a minefield. In addition, I put another electrical line in the wall for the future bathroom, and one of two planned data cables.

Saturday night Jen had plans, so I went duckpin bowling with Jason and his friends Heather, Sharon, and Dave at the Hillendale bowling center, a quaint facility north of the city that dates back to the Eisenhower administration. Duckpin bowling is an odd Baltimore tradition, where the ball and pins are about a quarter the normal size, and about five times as hard to knock over. The good thing is that you can really whip that little ball down the lane. The bad thing is that unless you hit the pins just so, you’ll take out two pins and leave the rest standing. I’m ashamed to admit that my old neighborhood featured a duckpin bowling center, the venerable Patterson Bowling Center, and in the six years I lived there I didn’t make it over for a game. I’m also ashamed to admit that I’m a poor duckpin bowler, and that I ranked dead last in the competition.

Hold On To Your Lunch.

No, really, Hold on to your lunch.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Date posted: January 12, 2004 | Filed under friends, house, photo | Leave a Comment »

Looking for some good work music? Go pick up Richard Ashcroft’s Alone With Everybody. Melodic, relaxed rock, great vocals, outstanding production. Looking for something to laugh at after you watch the news? (“Don’t look at that war over there that we’re not winning. Don’t pay attention to those body counts, or that spiralling deficit or the thrumming beat of inflation, or our weakening dollar. Look to the sky. Look to…a new space program! Yeah, that’s it!” I call bullshit.) Go Get Your War On.

modern technology

modern technology

Weapons Of Mass Confusion. The back panel of our new receiver scares me. It looks like the control room wall of a Russian nuclear power plant; it’s filled with ports and connectors and diagrams silk-screened onto the black metal that are supposed to “help” me figure out how to hook this thing up in audiophile-speak. There are whole 10-page chapters in the manual focused on subjects like “Plugging in Your Receiver” and “Attaching The FM Antenna.” I feel like I’m sitting down to an SAT again. Once I navigated through the dissertation on the six different types of cable it’s possible to use, (as far as I can tell, Optical > S-Video > Coax > RCA) and had a rudimentary understanding of where to put them (back in the bag with the receipt, because invariably I bought the wrong one), I turned to the chapters on “Using Your Tuner,” or “What Are All These Flashing Lights For?”, bypassing the volume on “Configuring Your Receiver” because I don’t have the required thirteen surround-sound speakers nor the patience to stab at the little buttons on the front panel.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love this thing, and I’m forever indebted to my sister for giving it to us for Christmas. It’s just that over the last ten years, in the absence of money and high-end audio equipment, I’m out of the loop on all this stuff. I’m thinking that the technology got a lot smarter and I got a lot dumber. I kind of feel like my parents when they are confronted with the blinking 12:00 display on the front of their VCR. Somewhere along the way this stuff got really complicated. There are seventeen different types of surround sound and a whole college-level course required to understand the differences. Not only do you have to drop a month’s salary on one component, you have to blow the Christmas bonus on the cabling to go with it. These days there’s interconnect wire thicker than my arm to connect your components; one foot of speaker wire is $3 and weighs heavier than anchor chain. After looking through the rows of boxes of gold-plated this and double-shielded that I found the normal section and picked up a regular S-video cable for the DVD player and a splitter to RCA-jack cable for the iPod. Grand total: $9.

Date posted: January 9, 2004 | Filed under appliances, music | Leave a Comment »

Dan, our underpaid and under appreciated IT god around here, just hooked up a new HP network printer that my Mac can see. Apparently the old one was networked but you had to open a port to it or some such bullshit, and it wasn’t PostScript, so it was worthless and invisible to Rendezvous.

In other news, I got the rest of the plaster and lathe down in the Pink room last night and began the process of drilling through the studs to start fishing wire. In some cases there are some roadblocks—the closet corner is framed in such a way that I don’t have clearance for a shovelhead drillbit, or even the drill, so I’m going to have to get jiggy with it. The area in the front corner behind the radiator is the main trouble spot though, because the kickplate still won’t come out. There’s not enough room to maneuver behind it, plus I can’t get at the nails that hold it in place. I am, however, in love with my loaner Sawzall. I’ve forgotten just how much fun a 12 amp motor connected to a 4″ metal blade can be. It reminds me of the remarkably un-PC Joe Piscopo line from Johnny Dangerously, the one where he holds up the 88 Magnum: “It shoots through schools.”

I should also give a shout-out to my pops (not to be confused with my peeps) for the super-science laser level he gave me for Christmas. I put some batteries in this thing and turned it on the other night, and it immediately pointed out the fact that the house is out of level in five dimensions, at which time it radioed Sears Central and called in backup from the Craftsman Emergency Response Team. I’m going to need a degree in geometry to square out my house, and this thing will make life much easier. Plus, the included red-lens glasses make me look like Devo when I wear them. Thanks, Dad.

Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Consumer Goods. Tuesday I broke down and bought a present for our 8-year-old IKEA Varnamo couch (the one they don’t sell anymore). Over the years this poor couch has been slept, dripped, stood, scratched, snoozed, fought, laughed, cried, played, drank, eaten, and jumped on; it’s really showing its age at this point. With $200 I don’t really have to spend, I got a Pottery Barn slipcover on clearance, which will be great news for our friends who are allergic to the five square feet of cat fur embedded in the upholstery.

Random Link Fun. Here’s an interesting site on the Curta hand calculator, sort of a mechanical adding machine. (via Slashdot). An Awesome illustration site. (via Boing Boing). And finally an Awesome poster site. Cheap, too. (via Coudal).

Date posted: January 8, 2004 | Filed under geek, house, links | Leave a Comment »

Jen was in the kitchen this morning cutting down a set of comps for the project she’s working on, when suddenly I heard her say, “FUCK. OK, Ow. That was not good.” Knowing she had done something Very Bad, I walked in to find her holding the two pieces of her left thumb together. Quickly my advanced Cub Scout training kicked into gear and we bundled it up in paper towels and made our way to St. Agnes Hospital, where we waited three hours to have a nice man cut her nail off and stitch up the finger. So officially, the count is now X-Actos 2, Lockardugans 0.

Wedding Monkeys. When Jen and I first started planning our wedding, it was fun; we talked about eloping and Vegas and spangled jumpsuits, then jetting somewhere international with the buckets of money we’d be saving. After the reality and obligations set in, we started researching the event locally, figuring that the house is big enough to hold the reception and that the backyard would fit everyone perfectly. It was still fun—food tastings were about eating hors d’oeuvres and getting shitty on free booze, and the cake was the first thing we put money down on.

Then, the wedding monkey started getting bigger. The tent guy told us that the backyard is too uneven for a reception, which is an understatement. (Our backyard is a sloping collection of tree roots and gopher holes waiting to capture ankles like tiger traps.) This means our tents will go on the front lawn next to Frederick Road, a situation not unlike having dinner next to a freeway overpass. The food estimate came back at roughly half our current budget, Which means that we will be poor but well-fed. Jen’s experiences with the Catholic Church resemble the movie Brazil—you have to wait three weeks for a paper to be sent to you by one diocese to prove to another diocese that you have all your shots, but it has to be a certain paper which the original diocese failed to send you. And so far dress shopping has resembled a night of WWF Smackdown Live.

We’ve been slacking for the last month while the Christmas rush sorted itself out, and now that January has arrived like a past-due gambling debt, we are scrambling to pick up where we left off. And that damn monkey has grown into a 500-lb. gorilla.

Looks like Apple released a mini iPod yesterday; 1,000 songs (4GB) for $250 is still kind of steep, but I suppose lots of people will buy one for the cool factor.

Date posted: January 7, 2004 | Filed under general | Leave a Comment »

I started doing some exploratory surgery in the Pink room last night to see how difficult it will be to put the electrical lines in upstairs. Starting with the bulge wall (the one it shares with the bathroom) I got around to the end of the front wall cleared and ready to drill. It’s pretty easy going so far, but I haven’t gotten to the drilling or cutting yet, so I’m reserving judgement. Of course, the hardest part is going to be getting the wiring down to the basement—and that part I haven’t figured out completely. I did get to see the movie Cast Away on ABC while I was working, and I thought it was a great flick. It puts my “Wilson” experience into perspective, too.

Date posted: January 6, 2004 | Filed under house | Leave a Comment »