My MasterCard is 100% paid off. (Breathes sigh of relief.) Now to pay off the San Francisco trip on Jen’s card…
I seem to have a burgeoning business doing some IT consulting—really, I’m just filling in for a friend—but it’s interesting to see how many people are in need of good Mac help. Last night I resurrected a dying drive from an iMac and got it ready to burn to DVD, which will make the clients very happy. They bought an Airport Express for use as a wireless base station—I wasn’t aware you could use it as a stand-alone base station; I thought it was just a remote extender for an existing wireless network. Stupid Bill!
Jen: They had better say they like this, those bastards.
Me: Perhaps you shouldn’t refer to your clients as “bastards”, baby.
Jen: …Well, they’re not clients, they’re friends, so I can call them bastards.
Wow. After something like five years of refusing to do any kind of print work in Quark, it’s frightening how many of the key commands I still remember.
I put up a very basic page early this morning attempting to outline some of the projects I have in mind for this endless money pit house of ours; it’s extremely incomplete and basic, but is a step above the seventeen dogeared, smeared slips of notepaper I have floating around my messenger bag, which don’t make any sense a week after I’ve measured, sketched, and noted on them.
Am I really this boring, or did you guys forget how to comment?
I’m mucking about further with the HTML behind this page; it’s slowly crawling towards 100% XHTML compliance (don’t even bother trying to validate this page- it’ll explode.) bits and pieces here and there are getting rewritten, then rewritten again—the calendar over there on the left is a good example, and it’s still not done. Originally I had intended to build around a new redesign, but I’m going to stick with the layout I have for the time being and get it to where I want it to be.
Cash. My mother gave me a subscription to Vanity Fair a few Christmases ago, because she’d see me bogarting her copies when Jen and I were heading down on to the dock to swim. Truthfully, I was looking for reading material besides Better Homes, which I’d never read, and The New Yorker, which I already get, because I never bring reading material when I visit. I find the magazine a strange hybrid of fawning starlust and lurid true-crime stories of the Rich and Famous (seriously, how many people have been murdered suspiciously in the Hamptons? And do I really care? I’ll never vacation there, and sure wouldn’t consider it now, given the apparent homicide rate.) Still, between the profiles of über-rich asshole society figures and glossy Bruce Weber photos of young rich Hollywood stars, there’s the occasional nugget of goodness. This month, there’s a profile of the strange, fruitful collaboration between Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin, which is worth the price of the magazine—I was a latecomer to the music of the Man in Black, but have grown to enjoy his early work, which makes the last five albums of his career stand out in greater relief, and highlight the genius of the work they did together. I’d link you to the article, but Condé Nast has a dumbheaded anti-Web policy where they don’t post anything online that I can find.
Wax On, Wax Off. Today we have a fellow meeting us at the house; he’s going to give us an estimate for sanding and finishing the first floor and stairwell. We decided, because it’s mainly oak with a decorative inlay, that having a pro do the first floor was the best course of action—that, and the fact that it’ll be done in a weekend as opposed to a month. Hopefully the quote will be low, the timeframe will be soon, and the job will get done quickly.
Huh. International has gotten back into the business of building pickup trucks… sort of.
I made a monkey for Jen yesterday—more specifically, I made a monkey for Jen’s friend Jean-Paul and his wife Sharon, who are having a baby very, very soon. This is but one of the ideas she’s working on for an announcement, and I liked it so much I thought I might share it with you here. Because monkeys are cool, and monkeys with bows in their hair are that much cooler.
The weekend’s activities were productive, in direct opposition to last weekend. Saturday I did some onsite consulting for a friend of a friend, rebuilding an eMac and getting it ready for a migration. Sunday I got the rest of the front windows scraped and primed, then worked my way around the side to the doctor’s office and atrium windows. Sunday evening I put a bunch of hours in on the other consulting gig I’m working on, while watching the Star Wars special (AKA a 2-hour infomercial: Buy the DVD!) that was on cable last night.
praying mantis on the porch light, 9.11.04
This brutha was about as long as my hand. Photogenic, too. He just sat there and watched me take his picture, not scared of anything. What a badass.
Plans have been made for a trip to San Francisco to see my two best friends from college tie the knot. Oh, lordy, this is gonna be crazy. (the link works now.)
Album Of the Day. The Killers, Hot Fuss. This album gets better the more I hear it.
The sun is bright and warm outside, and the sky is a deep blue. The last vestiges of Hurricane Whatever blew off last night, bringing cool, dry air with it. I intend to make the most of the weekend by slapping a coat of paint on whatever is in front of me. Look out, cats.
Today I hijacked Nate and drove down to Timonium to look at a 19″ LCD monitor being sold off Craigslist. I should back up and describe our current office setup: We have a four-year-old G4 Mac tower and a 9-year-old Apple 17″ display as our main design system at the house. The monitor is so old that fuses blow when I power it up. It’s bigger than the Jeep and its highest resolution is 1024×768—big stuff for 1995 but unacceptable for today’s work. Plus, the refresh rate is about 4mhz, so it sends Jen into fits of seizure when she has to look at it for more than five minutes. I know I’ve been bellyaching for months about money, but this seemed like a no-brainer for $450. I have it plugged in to the Powerbook, and it’s absolutely beautiful.
Everybody welcome Stellan Heazlett online when you get a chance.
Eulogy. I drove out north yesterday to pick up Jen at Henry’s funeral yesterday, and was able to pay my graveside respects. He was, we agreed, a ‘peculiar’ fellow (I won’t go into the hotpants thing right now) but someone with a huge heart. During his eulogy, the rabbi mentioned that when Henry knew you had a problem, he offered his help without fail, and I’d have to agree with that. While talking about it last night, Jen and I realized that it’s been over a year since we saw him last: moving Jen out of her apartment, we had no way to get two old easy chairs and a couch to the dump. Henry drove up in his pickup and within five minutes had helped us wrestle two of the chairs on his truck, and by the next day had made all three disappear. Shalom, and thanks for the vanishing of the furniture, Hotpants Henry.
Clearing Out the Link Cache. Canon PowerShot strobe information. E-TTL info, or: does my frickin’ flash work? | Digital camera primer. SLR vs. point and shoot. | Replacement APC battery. My APC is dead as a doornail. | IHC lineset ticket codes. Deciphering my Scout’s lineset ticket, made easy. | Single-axle and enclosed trailers. Unfortunately, they are very expensive. | Card sorting for application/site design. Handy, but impractical for my 9-5 gig. | Upgrading an eMac. I have a freelance tech job this weekend. | Cheap iPod replacement battery. Jen’s iPod is still busted. | Finally, an interesting book on productivity, as well as a productivity application. I need all the help I can get.
After an abortive final attempt to set up my own WebDAV server at the house for publishing calendars from iCal, I broke down and gave up. Instead, I’m using iCal Exchange, a free WebDAV service set up to help normal folks like me. Sweet.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Do we really need to hear any more bullshit? Kerry’s people had better wake up and start hitting back, or this election is already over. (fake Onion humor via metafilter) And I’m embarrassed to say that this dude is from Maryland. I hope Obama stomps him.
After an abortive final attempt to set up my own WebDAV server at the house for publishing calendars from iCal, I broke down and gave up. Instead, I’m using iCal Exchange, a free WebDAV service set up to help normal folks like me. Sweet.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Do we really need to hear any more bullshit? Kerry’s people had better wake up and start hitting back, or this election is already over. (fake Onion humor via metafilter) And I’m embarrassed to say that this dude is from Maryland. I hope Obama stomps him.
We rented Mystic River and Kill Bill Volume 2 this weekend, and while both were good, about 20 minutes of a third movie on cable almost stole the show. (More on that in a minute.) Mystic River was a well-acted, well-directed movie that I don’t believe I’d watch again. I was expecting, well… more. It was the movie equivalent of a Chalupa: it filled me up but I felt empty afterwards. KB2 was just long. Too much talking, not enough ass-whuppin’. Sure, the situations were interesting, but it could have been handled as one long movie minus a pile of the filler in between. Watching a showing of Reservoir Dogs on cable Sunday night put into contrast how overblown Tarantino got with KB2. Jackie Brown was an excellent, funny, adult movie, well written and directed, which got overlooked because it wasn’t Pulp Fiction 2. The momentum in KB2 sort of tuckered out weakly into lots of half-interesting dialogue, none of which had the snap and crackle of Jackie Brown or Pulp Fiction. I guess I’d recommend renting both in the series and watching them back to back, if at all.
The movie that stole the show was the Royal Tennenbaums, which we caught about 15min. of on Monday. All the best off-kilter ideas in another movie by the folks that brought you Rushmore, a personal top-10 favorite. We’re going to have to catch this on DVD at some point real soon.