Funny to hear the correspondent on our local NPR affiliate’s technology show pronounce the word “stymied” as “stemmied” during a segment on older workers being afraid of newer technology. Perhaps we younger workers shouldn’t be afraid of dictionaries.
Inspiration. I’m in the middle of a creative funk. My plan was to have a new weblog (for the record, let me tell you that I hate that word) up and running on a new domain by the middle of the month. It’s turning out to be harder than I thought it would. Part of the problem is that I’m trying to design a new look for the site, and I want to build something beautiful, but I’m having a lot of problems making anything work. I was going to use a variation on one of the canned templates at first, but then I decided to make something new and clean. Most of my previous work has been very flat and one-dimensional, so I started playing with depth, which quickly looked gimmicky and trendy.
Then I played with a radical design, dropping a photo in the middle of the grid and running the columns around it. It was nice, but I want to get this thing live this year, and I know that wrestling the CSS/PHP to make it work the way I want would take too long—in between two freelance projects, this would be the bastard stepchild. So I went back to some of the photos I was taking last year to find a good unused subject to start from. I got depressed, because most of the photos I took last year were documentary (celebrations or home renovation) and not artistic like the ones I took in 2002-03, when I got my first camera and shot everything I saw. Yesterday I got an idea looking at the control panel on the elevator here at work to use it as navigation, but after an hour of Photoshop wrangling I decided to scrap it—I didn’t want white type on a black background anyway.
The other issue I have is what to keep and what to toss, and how to organize what stays in. Do I keep the month-based calendar for the archives, or toss it in favor of four year-based links? Do I make the music section a sideblog? (Yes.) Do I add a sideblog for links? (Probably.) Do I keep links to all the photos? (Not likely-it’ll be a separate page from now on.) Do I add a rotating photo somewhere? (possibly.)
Fortunately, some of the photos I was looking at that I took in 2003 started my brain working. As a sidenote, I have to underline what other people have said-it’s not the camera that takes good/bad pictures, it’s the photographer. Many of the shots I took with a crappy, second gen point-and-shoot are as good, if not better than the ones I shot with the G3.
Geek, Take Two. There’s a blue 400mhz iMac sitting in our basement without RAM, a hard drive, or a battery, because the screen is dead. A year ago I was in the middle of setting it up with OSX, and accidentally kicked out the power cord. After that, it ceased to work properly. I looked and looked for any kind of fixit advice online, and found nothing. Having stumbled across some new information this morning, I’m going to mount a rescue mission in the next couple of days to see if I can’t further my score in raising the dead.
Jen and I got about a months’ worth of social contact this weekend, something we really haven’t done in a long time. Friday night we had our friend Dave over for dinner and the resurrection of his main music drive, which had crashed catastrophically the previous week. He brought over his new Mini for us to drool over (my review: absolutely beautiful engineering. Fast, QUIET, and elegant. One drawback: only one FireWire port. However, we will own one) and we stuffed him full of lasagna and PBR while waiting for the progress bar on Disk Warrior to inch rightwards. Success was achieved early Saturday morning, and we sent him into the darkness knowing his music collection was safe. (Disk Warrior comes recommended.)
Saturday we knocked around town running errands and enjoying the sunshine; later that evening we stopped over to our neighbors’ house for pizza, beer, and caught up with the latest local news. Sunday we took up Dave’s offer to visit his church, and sat in on the 10:30 service. The service was very modern, very upbeat, and the sermon was a thoughtful reflection on child-rearing that had Jen and I talking over our coffee for an hour after we left. Later in the day I started on the trimwork and made my way up the stairs to the hallway, covering all the doorframes but one with a coat of fresh white paint. Oh. My. God. It’s like a brand new house up there.
In no particular order.
- Before it became a hipster drink of choice, supplanting that headache-inducing brew known as Yuengling (and, before that, Rolling Rock), my parents reintroduced Jen and I to the simple joy of Pabst Blue Ribbon on a can, based on its recommendation in Consumer Reports. Yes, I drink beer not because the Cool Kids tell me to, but because Consumer Reports gives it a little red dot. I understand now why my father kept a case of Black Label in the basement when I was growing up; it’s much better to always have a 12-pack of cheap cans in our fridge than a monthly six-pack of foo-foo microbrews. Not that I’d ever drink Black label again.
- The huge steel plate on the road outside our house can’t get filled soon enough. Having city buses thunk-thunk over that thing like a kettle drum every fifteen minutes during rush hour is damned annoying.
- Two coats of bright white paint on the trimwork in the hallway make the place look so much brighter. I’m sure the upstairs hallway will be a new room once it gets the same treatment. Now, unfortunately we have a houseful of drab, alligatored Phillip Morris White doors, all patiently awaiting a dip at the refinishers’.
- Yesterday, I was officially ready for spring. The wind was howling Chicago-style, the snow was looking gray and dirty, the trees all looked tired and saggy, and the air smelled like copper. It’s time for bulbs, shoots, sprouts, and seedlings. It’s time for mulch, loam, fertilizer, and compost. It’s time to have the windows open, and have the smell of fresh breezes and summer air throughout the house.
Penn is now off the Xanax and back on Prednizone. I have no idea what is wrong with this cat, and I’m not sure what to do next. I wish we could get a straight answer from somebody.
The GeoUrl link on the left there works again; after about six months of busted they updated the engine to re-index everybody.
We are the proud owners of a used 400mhz G3 tower, bought off Craigslist this morning for a very good price. This will make a good backup system for Jen to work on until we buy a faster Mini or other up-to-date machine, and it came with a full-size keyboard and optical mouse, as well as a Jaz drive and ½gig of RAM.
In the other good news column, the repairs to the Saturn were almost $50 cheaper than what they quoted, so we’re pretty happy with that.
Shit. Somebody’s got hold of my bankcard number and has been dropping incremental charges of $1 on me for the past couple of months; I caught it finally when I saw they had upped a charge to $25. Looking around the internet, I read about another fellow’s experience and the sobering news that it’s going to be a hard road to clean up this mess. From what one person writes in the comments, the companies billing me (Trilegant, Faces.com) are in bed with somebody else that I have purchased through and sold me and my information down the river. Great. The interesting thing is that they claim I went to netflip.com and signed up for the “service”—with my old mailing address. From what I’ve read, it’s some kind of opt-out direct mail scam where you are signed up if you don’t mail them back something, a la Columbia House. So, my advice is to carefully scrutinize your bank statements (I had gotten lazy in the last two months) and make sure you’re not getting scammed.
Oy, With The Howling. Jen called to let me know that Penn is in a bad way—yowling, farting, limping… the poor cat has been on so many medicines it’s a wonder he’s not on the street giving $5 favors away for a snort of Special K. Jen has an appointment this afternoon with another doctor to see if he can figure out what’s going on.
4:50pm update. Jen called to let me know that Penn’s bowels opened up all over the inside of his cage, and that it is like no other substance she has ever smelled in her life. I will bring my wife pretty, fragrant flowers tonight for dealing with this mess.
This morning Jen and I dropped the Saturn off at the shop down the street for to be looked at. I drove it to experience the problems she described, and found that turning the wheel was almost impossible. When I pulled into the lot and popped the hood, my suspicions were correct—the belt running to (what I think is) the alternator was not moving at all, meaning the power steering was kaput. I was amazed it even started, considering the temperature outside. I don’t know if this means Blue will need thousands of dollars of repairs, but I’m hoping the cost is low. The guy behind the counter was real nice, and we took that as a good omen, but the story remains to be told. Cross your fingers for us (and do not use the phrase “timing chain”.)
Update: It appears to be a “belt tensioner,” which means a couple of hours and $300. Strange.
When I drive Jen to work, I take Route 70 to pick her up. There’s a bridge across the Patapsco river out there that the DOT spent all of last year sanding and painting. Recently, it got tagged by some uninspired individual, who hung his ass 100 feet out over the valley to hit each empty span with his ugly name. Recently, somebody else came out and covered the center sections with a better message: “FEAR BREEDS FASCISM”. I’d like to tip my hat to you, my friend.
Has anybody else here noticed just how bad the Smoking Gun has been sucking this year?
We were hoping for blizzard-like conditions in Catonsville so that we’d get snowed in with warm tea, tasty food and cold beer, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Jen’s Saturn decided it would begin making funny noises and turn on the battery light, which was a little disturbing. We’re going to try out the repair shop down the street and see how they diagnose the issue instead of going with our usual mechanic, who unfortunately is a twenty-minute drive away.
This little gadget looks pretty neat; if I had some spending cash and there was actually something worth taping on TV, I might consider it.