FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. FUCKITY FUCK. God dammit, now there’s a Flip MinoHD. Son of a BITCH.
CopyPaste Character – a handy reference for web design.
Change.gov, a website put up by the Obama campaign. If they use this to its fullest potential, this could be a game-changing tool for his presidency.
Now that it’s a reality and not just a possibility, I can finally share some exciting news: I started work yesterday as the Design Director at IDfive, a web design and communications firm in Baltimore. I am stepping into some very large and very talented shoes, and now I will try to run in them as fast as I can without falling on my face. All of this actually got decided over two months ago, and I’ve been keeping the secret as quietly as I can ever since.
To date, 2008 has been a fantastic year for my business, and I’ve had tremendous luck and success working as a sole proprietor since being laid off three years ago. Given the uncertainties of the market toward the second half of this year, our new family addition, and a growing feeling of isolation within my discipline, though, I started quietly looking around for a full-time position in the middle of the summer. Several opportunities arose and were considered, but did not feel right. In July, out of the blue, we got an email from some friends who were looking to fill a position, and did we know anyone who might be interested? Three interviews and two months later, after a very careful selection process, they offered me an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
I spent some time onsite the week before Finley was born, trying to feel my way into things and get acclimated. Everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming, and I immediately had a good feeling, like this was supposed to happen. Since then, I’ve done a little freelancing for them while we’ve all been patiently waiting for the baby to get on a regular sleeping schedule. During that time, they let me post some articles on their weblog, and they kept sending me friendly email, which meant they hadn’t changed their minds. Yesterday I spent my first full day onsite learning as much as I could as quickly as possible, getting to know everyone, and trying to stay out of their way. Most importantly, leaving the office Monday evening, I still had that good feeling.
Finn says, “Don’t forget to vote, and then toast to the end of political ads for three more years!”
(thanks to Linda for the shirt!)
I spent all the free time I had this weekend kneeling in the ice room beneath the office building kneewalls for insulation. The idea is to add R-14 along the exposed sections of outside wall in an attempt to retain as much heat as possible, while keeping costs as low as possible.
Firstly, I had to seal up the lousy masonry with hydraulic cement, making sure everything is air and water-tight. Hydraulic cement is interesting stuff; it hardens in minutes, so it’s best to apply with nothing more than gloves. Imagine mixing small batches of oatmeal and then smearing it all over the wall before it turns to stone.
Once that was done, I started constructing the frames. For a grand total of around $60, I got two 12′ lengths of wall completed this afternoon, with two more left to do.
Additionally, because it seems to be the only window in the whole house with a correctly sized, in-stock premade replacement, I ripped the ancient, original hopper window out and installed a new one. I’ve been paranoid about this particular window since we moved in, because it’s semi-visible from the road and looked about as secure as a convertible with the top down. For $120, we got a vinyl dual-pane slider with a low U rating that fit almost perfectly. I find that these projects get easier and quicker as I do them; this one took about two hours minus a trip for pressure-treated lumber. Eventually, I’ll order three more for the rear and replace them as well.
After the basement section is done, I’m most likely going to have to crawl up into the attic above the porch ceiling and add another layer there as well. I’m really looking forward to that.
Slashdot ran an article this week about CodeWeavers, a company whose main product has been porting windows apps to the Linux environment. Their primary application is CrossOver, a tool which allows an OS X user like myself to run a Windows app without emulation on an Intel Mac, and they were giving it away, free, for one day.
I was very interested whem I read the description. Instead of having to boot up an entire virtual environment (in this case, an entire install of Windows XP) just to run one program, CrossOver builds a version of the PC app that runs on its own, saving CPU resources and memory. For anyone running a 1st-gen MacBook Pro like me, which caps out at 2GB of RAM, this is important, because my typical workday involves running Photoshop, two web browsers, a mail client, an FTP client, iTunes, several smaller utilities, and XP under emulation with several Windows applications; RAM gets scarce and the machine bogs down.
I downloaded and installed the app, and followed a helpful wizard to install a fresh copy of HomeSite (my authoring environment), which wasn’t actually on their list of supported software. Everything ran smoothly, and within minutes I had it working. After installing a copy of Explorer 6 inside the “bottle” (their term for a virtual partition), I had everything I needed to work with, minus the hassle of booting up XP.
Comparing the footprint of the two approaches, Parallels/XP (at rest) uses 209 MB of RAM, plus 12.86 for HomeSite. CrossOver uses a mere 69MB, plus an equal amount for HomeSite, which should make things zippier in theory.
So: on the surface, it looks great; I’ll try it out for a week and see if it supplants Parallels as my Windows alternative and report back here.