Hidden away in an odd corner of Baltimore City lies the Franklintown Inn, which at one time was probably a hopping place, and most likely was a waypoint for travelers on the west side of town. Now the entry to the bar is around back, which caters to a questionable-looking crowd (I’m sure they’re all fine, upstanding citizens) and the front parking lot holds an abandoned winnebago and a sad-looking boat. Today the front of the inn is closed up and dark, and a second-floor porch holds a heap of random bicycles, with no indication of use.
Remember those pizza boxes on the back porch? Here’s the result. This was the morning after a 1AM installation session, where we had to move all the furniture into the dining room and jockey the white couch (the 4-ton sleeper) around the tiles as we laid them down. The result is a warm, comfy floor that brings a new color into the neutral space, and lightens up the whole room
Now, to get rid of that hideous brass fireplace surround.
Yes, indeed, I may have to get tickets to this particular concert. I know a few people who would go with me, too, just to say we saw them live before Eddie strangled Dave.
Date posted: November 28, 2007
| Filed under music, shortlinks | Comments Off on Van Halen Reunion.
Writing from the Panera this morning, because Verizon DSL is slow as dirt and the tech support dude couldn’t fix the problem inside the tight confines of his script. We have limited connectivity at the house, which means slow upload is now no upload, and download speed is somewhere around a 28.8 baud modem. Meanwhile, I still can’t post pictures to Flickr because it’s banned at this location. Good times!
Date posted: November 28, 2007
| Filed under geek | Comments Off on Remote Entry.
I’d ordinarily have a picture here, a picture of the Scout on a flatbed truck at the end of my driveway, waiting to make a right turn into traffic and out of my life. I’d have a picture of that here, but it wouldn’t capture the ache in my heart at the sight of my girl being taken away, or the sick feeling that I let her down for the last three years because I couldn’t afford to keep her under a roof, someplace warm and dry, so that her cancer wouldn’t get exponentially worse to the point where both doors wouldn’t open. I had to crawl into the liftgate to make sure the transmission was in neutral for the tow truck guy, and that old familiar smell of rubber, vinyl, oil and dirt hit me, the one that made me feel good when I got in and she fired right up, choppy and unsure, until the 30-year-old engine warmed up and flattened to a smooth purr. No picture could capture the feeling of freedom and youth that I felt when coasting down the highway with the top down, barely able to hear myself think over the dull roar of the engine and the whistle of the wind. No picture I took could have described the pang of guilt I felt when I saw that the left rear tire was dragging, leaving a skidmark on the driveway as the guy winched her onto the flatbed, as if to say, I don’t want to leave. I’ve tried to post the last picture I have of her along with the first, but the fucking Internet is slow as dogshit today. I have many pictures of my Scout, and that’s all I have left. She’s on to a good home, where she’ll be restored and loved and treated well, and I have to console myself with that.
Date posted: November 27, 2007
| Filed under life | 1 Comment »
So, I didn’t buy the Vespa. Nor did I buy the Kustom bass amp (which, incidentally, sold for $401 with no reserve on eBay). Instead, I found a couple of deals on Craigslist that I’m rather happy about this morning:
For $35, a HP LaserJet 4000n: After adding a $98 toner cartridge, I upgraded our office printer to an EnergyStar-compliant 1200dpi workgroup printer that both Macs and PCs can use. Our previous printer, a 14-year-old Apple Laserwriter, was showing its age: printing any document, no matter how trivial, took at least three minutes to process and spool up before spitting out paper. It didn’t like expensive paper anymore (accordion jams look so good on invoices). It had no provision for PCs, and the only reason we hung on to it was because I found two OEM printer cartridges on Craigslist for $30 last spring.
For $200, I found a 22″ Apple Cinema Display to upgrade Jen’s 19″ LCD—almost doubling her viewing area. Now she can see two-page spreads on her monitor without scrolling. I may need to replace the backlight at some point, but for now, it looks pretty as hell.
Date posted: November 21, 2007
| Filed under geek | 4 Comments »
From our friend Jason, this morning: Maryland to Tax Computer Services. 6% on consulting and custom code, effective January 1. What does this mean for me? Less work, I suppose. I’m not happy about this.
Date posted: November 21, 2007
| Filed under politics, shortlinks | Comments Off on Sales Tax
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
