I’m currently listening to Metric, Fantasies (iTunes link). I’m a sucker for indie electro-pop with female vocals (no, not Britney; think Ladytron) and this fills the bill perfectly.
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman.
“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.”
Jen and I joke that every year we make a list to do a certain number of specific things to make ready for the parade, and every year we wind up doing something completely unrelated to that list, and then scramble at the last minute to complete everything we originally intended to do. (Sometimes this is entirely my doing, but sometimes we are co-conspirators), This year, we decided to re-arrange the office around a new shelving unit, which meant moving a heavy three-drawer file cabinet and two bulky flat files to the other side of the office.
Preceding any completion of housework, I filled up the Scout Saturday morning with a final load of yard waste and construction debris and narrowly skirted self-immolation courtesy of a leaky gas tank (more on that here). Once that drama was over, we continued cleaning around the house until the girl awoke from her nap, and then it was time to run to the IKEA in White Marsh to purchase a shelving unit. Finn was content to bounce around in the backpack for one half of the trip, and then she rode in the cart through the Marketplace, flirting with the other customers and making friends while we browsed the as-is section and wrestled 150 lbs. of shelf onto a dolly.
Once home, we put her to bed and grilled some kabobs before doing battle with the allen wrench. We (well, I) failed to properly read the assembly directions for the shelves and made an hour’s worth of work into three. Sorry, Jen.
Sunday morning, after making some adjustments and leveling off the unit, we filled the shelves with three tons of printed material previously stored in various areas around the house, thus consolidating 90% of our design resources in one place.
I then cut a leftover piece of sanded birch plywood down and made a custom tabletop for the flat files with a beveled edge.
Sunday afternoon we were invited to a family crab feast (thanks, guys!), and Finn played happily on the floor while we got elbow-deep in Old Bay and Harpoon Summer Ale. I would share pictures here, but they came out all blurry.
HOLY SHIT. Michael Jackson is DEAD?
This morning I screwed up my courage and drove the Scout into work because the forecast is 90° and sunny. I haven’t had time to change the fluids or replace plugs and wires, so she still runs rich and stinky, but she runs and that’s good enough for me. I had a brief moment of fear when I drove up to the “maximum height” sign at the entrance to the garage and realized I could touch it with my fingers, but the windshield cleared it with about six inches to spare.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Somehow I’d forgotten all about this: CHDK is open-source add-on firmware for Canon cameras which extends the capabilities of most point-and-shoot models. The website is somewhat cryptic, but here are several howto links. It looks like I will need a larger SD card and a USB card reader.
Nonprofit reverses plan to give injured veteran a home. Friends of ours spearheaded the effort to build and donate a house to an amputee veteran. But it turns out he and his family own two other houses and had a third built for them by volunteers in Georgia. What a sad, demoralizing story.
Here’s a handy chart from Apple detailing what iPhone 3.0 software features work with which phone.