Well, that’s it. All of the old hand-coded log is now here in WordPress. After I-don’t-know-how-many-years, I finished migrating it the other night, so everything from 2001 is included here.
Meanwhile, poking around my other site, I came across a bunch of stuff I’d forgotten about. From 2002-2005 (pre-Flickr) I used to use a small script to generate galleries of photos and then post them to my website, but there’s never been any real good list of links to the whole cache. Here’s a master list, in date-correct order:
6/7/02 – Backyard pictures from my old house in Canton
6/11/02 – More backyard progress shots
6/22/02 – Assorted pictures, Jen’s apartment kitchen
7/6/02 – Fourth of July weekend and some more backyard pictures
7/15/02 – Model T Club meetup in Ellicot City
7/30/02 – July vacation in Aurora
9/1/02 – Labor Day in Aurora
9/14/02 – Matt comes in from San Francisco, and our group of friends meets at Rob & Karean’s house in Canton
3/18/03 – Snowfall in Canton
3/17/03 – St. Patrick’s Day weekend
3/29/03 – Checking out a old building on River Road in Ellicott City
bimini_photos – Bimini pictures
divelog – Bimini trip writeup with pictures
5/27/2003 – Engagement trip to Savannah, GA
5/10/03 wedding – Tim & Betty’s wedding in DC
5/24/03 – Engagement trip to Aurora
6/7/03 – Lockard reunion in Orlando
7/4/03 – Fourth of July 2003, up in Aurora
7/25/03 Stas & Vicki’s wedding in NY
9/8/03 – New Catonsville house pictures
12/21/03 – Christmas dinner on Tyndale Ave.
4/4/20 – Spring flowers
Wedding – Wedding pictures
Rome – Honeymoon trip to Rome with writeup
4/10/9 – Matt & Sophie’s wedding in San Francisco
4/11/26 – B&O Railroad Museum
Baby – Finn’s progression in Jen’s belly
House – Shots from the first day we looked at the house
House_photos – A few pictures from the house inspection
House_progress – Semi-updated gallery of house renovation pictures
Oklahoma – Pictures of the crazy roadside signs in Oklahoma, 1992
Panoramics – Test panoramics (needs a Java applet, which I don’t have a link for)
At some point, I’d like to upload all of these to Flickr, but I don’t know of a way to backdate them so that they list in sequence. I’ll have to look into that some more.
Our weekend was full and fun. Saturday we started out with a soccer game under bright blue skies. Finn claimed she was nervous on the ride over, but as she got onto the field and comfortable, she guarded the goal well.
On one play toward the second half of the game, she collected the ball in front of her own goal and drove it all the way down the field to the other side–and past the opposing team’s goal. She’s come so far in a couple of weeks!
In the afternoon she hung out with me while I got a bunch of boring house chores done:
- Hauled brush to the dump
- Brought in the AC units
- Closed the storm windows
- Cleaned off the front porch
- Cleaned up and closed up the attic
- Closed up the cracks in our foundation with hydraulic cement
Then we walked over to the neighbors’ and grilled on their deck. As the sun set we built a fire in the firepit, enjoyed adult conversation, and let the kids play until long after bedtime.
I’m wrapping up a lot of small projects here today:
- I’ve got a sick iMac on my desk waiting for a fresh install of Snow Leopard. The hard drive died on it last week so I had R&K drop it off to let me do a little surgery. I put a new 1TB drive in it and got it back up and running. Now I have to find out what OS it tops out at and attempt a rebuild from their backup.
- I’ve had another sick MacBook Pro come in and out of the office, the victim of an overstuffed email database and general malaise.
- I’ve got a web project for Finn’s old pre-K school that’s going pretty well. It’s a church site I built in WordPress with some nice calendar functionality and some other custom features, and I’m waiting for them to start adding content so that I can style it and fill out the pages.
- I’ve got another client who’s going through a move and needed two MailChimp templates for a pair of email blasts, as well as an updated address to all the pages on their site.
- We’ve got a friend who’s been looking to get a personal WordPress site off the ground for a while, and has a renewed focus on making that happen.
I was able to wrap up a lot of small things this afternoon, which feels good and should open my weeknights back up. Last week I was bouncing from one thing to the next but not making a lot of headway, so an afternoon’s full attention made all the difference. I like having paying work, and I’d like to solicit some more, just as long as it’s not overwhelming–as it has in the past.
A wholly original multimedia supernova like Lost isn’t easily replicated. But what’s most disheartening today is to see how little the big four seem inclined to try.
via The Lessons of ‘Lost’: Understanding the Most Important Network Show of the Past 10 Years «.
I got a hair up my behind the other day and started adding old content from 2001 into the site, the only months left from my original weblog. I got May in last night, which leaves about two months to go. It’s funny how much I used to post about random stuff and how similar the stuff I was posting about is to the modern day: tech stuff, news, repairs to the house, friends. The big difference is the lack of photos.
The weekend was great. We started out with a showing of Frozen at the neighbors’ house on Friday night. Saturday morning I took Finn to her soccer game. She was nervous at first, like she normally is, but the coach coaxed her out into one of the defensive positions, and there she did great. By the end of the first half she was going after the ball when it came to her side of the field, and actually chasing it back downfield to help her teammates! I think, much like her old man, she likes to get comfortable with things first before she dives in all the way.
After the game we came home and geared up for her birthday party. This year’s theme was apples, and our approach was one of simplicity. A homemade cake, some drinks, pizza delivery, and simple games with friends. As the sun set, I built a fire in the firepit and we sat outside enjoying it until everyone went home and it was time for her to go to bed.
One of her big requests this year were more chapter books, which warms my heart more than I can explain. Finn and I have had a ritual since she was a toddler: Daddy is in charge of bathtime. After we get PJs on and teeth brushed, we jump on the bed and crack open a book. For the last couple of months we’ve been reading from two series–Ivy & Bean and the Never Girls. We started by reading alternate pages aloud. Finn would take time to sound out certain words and I helped her with the phonetics, and she’s been getting better and faster every day. It’s to the point now where we burn through a 15-page chapter in about ten minutes, and it’s my favorite time of the day. I tuck her into bed and hootch up next to her to get the bed warm, and we pass the book back and forth.
The new album by Royal Blood got panned by Pitchfork, but I have to say I’m enjoying it. It’s amazing what you can do with a drumkit, a bass, and a shitload of effects pedals.
After many years of lusting after these, I pulled the trigger and bought the 2013 Feltron Annual Report. Data visualization is more and more what my job is about, and this is a leading example of the discipline.
Huh, I didn’t realize I’d checked the “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” setting in WordPress, which may have stopped commenting on the site cold. It’s now open for business, which means commenting should be a lot easier again. I hadn’t noticed it until I checked the site in Chrome, where I wasn’t logged in.
I’m casually looking at Micro 4/3 cameras as an alternative to carrying a huge DSLR to and from work every day. Even though I see exactly the same things every day in my commute, I’d like to get back in the habit of shooting something regularly. As my recent Flickr feed indicates, I haven’t been shooting anything at all during the week other than the odd Instagram picture, which is sad. I’d like to keep things light and simple if possible. The hipsters are all about the smaller format mirrorless cameras right now, and I’m intrigued by the combination of small size and lens interchangability.
The biggest question is which brand I would start with. Olympus and Panasonic were the originators of the M4/3 format, and from all I’ve read their cameras are very good (Leica digitals are just rebadged Panasonic units, after all). I’ve also heard that Fuji’s cameras are very good from a first-hand source, so I started looking into their product offerings. However, they don’t use the M4/3 lens format–so they’re out. Most of the reviews I’ve read say Sony is making the best mirrorless cameras right now, but they’re not M4/3, and I’ve been on a Sony boycott for 20 years due to repetitive burns with expensive A/V equipment and some substandard video gear in the early 2000s.
So, back to Olympus and Panasonic. The Olympus E-P5 is a beautiful camera with a lot of the features I want, and a nice retro look I appreciate. The E-PL7 is a variant of the same basic model. Panasonic has the DMC-GX7 which tracks almost exactly to the specifications of the Olympus, plus or minus a few features.
Then, there are the lenses. The Wirecutter did a great writeup on M4/3 lenses that explains a lot of the details between price, performance, and flexibility. Lenses are the expensive and important part of photography, because a good lens can make a bad camera better. I’ve been using Nikon DX lenses with my first DSLR, and I’ve been happy with their performance, but having used pro-level Canon lenses at work I’m seeing the benefits of better glass. If I was to buy a M4/3 rig, I’d probably buy an adapter to use my DX lenses with the new camera and slowly invest in M4/3 glass. But I’m also seriously considering the purchase of a full-frame Canon DSLR to take advantage of the excellent lenses I have access to at work.
All of this is pipe dreaming right now. I don’t have the cash to drop on a new M4/3 camera or even a mid-level Canon DSLR. I’d have to line up some kind of photography job to help pay for that. I think what I’ll do is take a weekend to rent a M4/3 camera–Lensrentals has the Panasonic GX7 and an Olympus 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 for $60; a test drive is in order before I make any kind of major purchase.
Ars Technica does a good writeup of upgrading iOS 8 on an iPhone 4S, my current cell. The takeaways: they’re refactoring the design to take advantage of larger screens, which means things are getting squished. And because the processor is 3 generations behind, things move slower.
One of the dreams I’ve had for the Lockardugan estates since the day we moved in has been to level and replace upgrade the garage to make it easier to use. Since moving in, I’ve put doors back on the front and carved a hole out of the floor for the Scout to sit inside, but it’s still very ghetto in there. When we first looked at the house, there were three insulated knob and tube wires running from the back porch to ceramic insulators on the side of the garage, which fed it power from an already overtaxed interior circuit. The inspector told us the jimmy-rigged electrical wiring would have to be disconnected before the house could be sold, so out went the lights. I’ve had an extension cord running from the greenhouse through a hole in the back of the garage since 2007, which has slowly been covered over by grass and has missed whirring lawnmower blades by the grace of God.
My neighbor, an electrician, recently suggested running a subpanel from the circuit in the greenhouse, which is fat enough to support a 220 industrial heater, and I jumped on the idea. (The greenhouse was installed with proper wiring, but nobody thought to make a left turn and upgrade the garage while they were doing so). This weekend I finally pinned him down, and we ran conduit in a trench I’d dug weeks ago from inside the greenhouse to the back of the garage wall. Then we covered that over, fed 8-3 wire inside, and connected the panels up. Five minutes later, we had an outlet installed, and I pulled the extension cord up off the lawn forever. Progress!
Now I’m going to pick up a few more breakers and set up a real, functioning light switch and about eight outlets around the perimeter. Then I can start looking for a full-size air compressor and a decent stick welder. It’s not my dream garage, but it’s better than it was!
Sunday we disassembled our IKEA bookshelf in Phase One of Project: Living Room Overhaul. I bought four cans of white plastic spraypaint and we set up an assembly line on the back lawn to cover every square inch of faux birch with white. Later in the day Mr. Scout stopped by to discuss plans to replace our janky front steps. The plan is to extend the landing at the top of the stairs outward so there’s more room to work at the front door, widen them so that they cover 6″ of un-stuccoed foundation that was formerly hidden by huge shrubs, and add architecturally pleasing railings to soften the front of the house. While he’s in there we’re going to replace the front door with a brighter 8/1 security door, which will bring light into the front porch and make the place a little less severe-looking. It’s going to be a month or so before he can get started, but we’re VERY excited to get moving.