Well, I made it all the way to 47 before being called up for jury duty. Next month I’ve got to hump all the way up to Towson to (possibly) be part of a trial of some kind. The last time I was in a court was when I thought I was going to have to testify against a schizophrenic who stole an iPod out of my car; that was an enlightening but ultimately useless experience.
We are due to get our first snow of 2019 this weekend; weather forecasting is spotty due to the government shutdown (turns out lots of meteorologists are federal employees, go figure) but they think we’ll get 2-3″ of snow over Saturday into Sunday. I would have preferred it during the week, but hell, I’ll take it. And I need to be in Baltimore on Monday morning for my 1-year oncological checkup on time, so I’d rather we get the roads cleared Sunday so there’s no traffic.
Well, shit. It just occurred to me that I’ve had this Scout for 10 years. That’s longer than I had my first one.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
It’s been pretty quiet on Planet Idiot lately, due to demands at work, Jen being down with the flu, and various other issues. The weekend was a dull exercise in PowerPoint skills, with half a day on Sunday when I was able to get outside with Finn to rake leaves, ride bikes down to the library and then to pick up our car from the garage. Other than that, there’s been little progress in the way of housework, design, or photography. Now I’m home from work with a cough and congestion.
Standing in the middle of the sidewalk in D.C. this afternoon: a man holding a printed purple/orange sign that read, “I have forsaken drugs, masturbation, and alcohol for Jesus Christ.” Testimony or self-shaming?
Project Binky is back for episode 21, where two British guys in a shed rework an original Austin Mini with the running gear of a Celica GT4. I want a metal fabrication shop so bad… (previously, previously)
Billboard did an oral history of Nothing’s Shocking for the 30th anniversary of its release. HOLY SHIT I AM OLD. Previously, previously.
As a brand and marketing professional, I’m not sure if this is a failure or a success: The guys behind Anything Scout, an old-school Light Line dealer in Iowa, are also behind New Legend 4X4, an upscale restomod fabricator specializing in Scouts. I wouldn’t have know this if I hadn’t recognized some of the people behind the scenes on the NL website (I met a couple of them at the IH Nationals this summer). On further reflection, I think it’s probably more success than anything else; these trucks are priced firmly in ICON territory, catering to the kind of people who don’t build anything themselves and want a turnkey refurbished truck with a modern Chevrolet powertrain and a JK-based chassis. 9/10 of the guys at Nationals are like me; we’re average people with average incomes who are scraping and saving to keep our existing trucks on the road. So I guess it makes sense to separate the brands completely. I am glad a shop with a solid IH history is in the restomod business now, because they will do the rigs justice.
They do build pretty Scouts, that’s for sure.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
The Atlantic did a great pictorial of the 116th Congressional swearing-in. The difference between the Democratic side and the Republican side is stark and staggering.
It’s quiet here in D.C. with the government shutdown. The train station parking lot half full, the sidewalks are empty and Union Station is eerily quiet.
I’m currently squeaking through this week with about $7 in my pocket until my next paycheck, because of the previously mentioned refrigerator purchase and an unexpected pair of vet bills for Nox, who was throwing up his food constantly around New Year’s. We got him in to the vet and they gave him an exam and a shot of anti-nausea medication which made him pee all over the vet tech and scream as if he was being declawed with a power drill. He went back in a few days later for a sonogram, which cost more than the first visit but should rule out any foreign objects in his system (there was a cat ahead of him with a Christmas ribbon clogging his small intestine, due for a costly visit to the surgeon). In the meantime, he’s eating rabbit-based food, our supposition being he’s allergic to chicken. He’s been holding it down and mostly back to his normal self. I will admit I enjoyed his sudden shift into total lap-cat mode when he wasn’t feeling well; as he recovers he’ll go back to his semi-ambivalent healthy state.
Over the weekend, I set up Lightroom to export all of my 2018 photos as JPGs and uploaded them to our Prime Photo account, something I’ve done with most of the earlier photos in our library. Having that done is good, but my next project will be upgrading our basement server to handle more files. It’s currently only limping along with 2GB of RAM, a pitifully small amount, so someday soon I’ll throw another 8GB at it, as well as swapping out one of the smaller drives with a 6TB unit to increase internal storage. Ideally, I’d replace the boot drive with an SSD unit, and if money allows I may do that as well. Honestly, when I look at it and realize it’s a 12-year-old machine and still running dependably (unlike the G5 tower it replaced) I’m amazed–especially since I bought it for $50 as a decommissioned unit from work.
ERP. If I had a couple million dollars laying around…
This is part of a LEGO kit we got Finn for Christmas. It’s a technical set that includes a motor drive, motion sensor, and secondary motor element. We built a tracked robot that is programmable through a tablet app to move in 360˚, make sounds, shoot a shoulder-mounted projectile, move its head, and recognize sound and movement. The whole thing was accessed through the app, including the build process. She and I had a blast putting the whole thing together at the dinner table.
So I had a long list of stuff I wanted to tackle over the Christmas break. I thought, “I’ll have seven full days to get all of this done! No problem!” And suddenly it was day 6 and I was still in my pajamas from Christmas Day and there were still boxes and piles of wrapping paper on the floor and I hadn’t done a thing.
I did get to spend a ton of quality time with Finn and Jen, and for that I am grateful. It’s rare I get to be with them all day without involving some kind of errand or job around the house, so it was really nice to devote hours to building LEGO robots or playing on the XBOX.
That having been said, I have a list of shit I need to accomplish in the next couple of weeks:
Clone the hard drive on my work laptop and upgrade it to High Sierra. I was given a second-hand Mac a few years back with a tiny 128GB drive, and one of the first things I did was replace it with an off-brand drive. It turns out that the latest flavor of OSX doesn’t like some of these drives. This means I’ve got to repeat this process for three other laptops at work. It’s important because the latest versions of Creative Cloud won’t install on Mojave, which is what three of the four machines I’m responsible for are running. I did rebuild the intern’s laptop, which is a start. I have to put together a High Sierra install thumb drive and continue this project over next weekend. Done. Needed to be Mojave, though.
Get the Accord emissions checked, and then get the rear brakes fixed. The former is easy, but the latter may wait a little while, as the Oh-Shit fund evaporated when we had to replace the refrigerator, and Nox had to go in to the vet for some expensive tests this week. Done and done.
Shoot pictures of student work on the light table. I’m giving all of their work back but I need to have some record of what they did and how it looked. Luckily the table is still assembled in the basement so it should be a pretty simple workflow to build. I did this! It didn’t take that long and I got the most important pieces shot.
Clean the Scout seat belt tensioner. It’s getting harder to pull over my shoulder these days, which means the mechanism inside is dirty and needs to be opened and serviced. I did this! It took 15 minutes and made a HUGE difference.
Continue pulling toe moulding off the kickplates and caulking the gaps. I do notice a difference in the dining room wearing socks now, but the house is still drafty.
Rewrite my syllabus. Having a class under my belt after an absence of a year, I realize there’s a lot of stuff they need to know and a lot of stuff I need to overhaul. The syllabus I inherited is probably 10 years old and besides being boring it focuses on the wrong stuff. I’m going to narrow the parameters of the assignment so that I can expand what I’m covering (grids and guides, best practices, color, presentation, craft, production, etc.) because it sounds like they’re not getting half of this in their previous classes. I’m also going to add in an earlier grading point so that they’ve got an idea of how they’re doing earlier in the process.