I was able to get a lot of work done for the 9-5 and re-hang the bathroom door, so I’m feeling pretty good. I have more lumber to buy as well as some new drill bits to replace the missing ones, but the woodwork is shaping up. I can’t wait to be done, because the whole house is filled with dust.
Found via Macintouch this morning: A reader replaced his LCD with a $200 replacement from eBay. Good to know- this might be one of those sites I cache permanently for archive’s sake.
Oh, and: Dude needs some serious psychiatric evaluation. What a freakshow. Here’s the simple facts: If he was not a bazillionaire, somebody would have taken those kids away from him a long time ago. I feel so bad for them.
I heard on the radio about The Smoking Gun exposing some pictures of a contestant on the Joe Millionaire show. Apparently she had done some light bondage movies a few years ago “to put herself through law school”, but forgot to mention this to the show’s producers. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little kink, but you have to ask yourself, in this day and age, when nothing is secret anymore, why would she not mention this before she was on the show? I’m willing to accept the answer “She went on the show knowing somebody would find out, and this would catapult her acting/modeling career,” or maybe “She never expected to get as far on the show as she did (the final three),” or even “She told the producers and they kept it quiet, hoping somebody would find out to boost ratings for the show,” but could anybody possibly be that stupid?
In doing a little more searching, I found an even better option for keeping our two Pismos in service longer: PowerLogix has a service where they will replace your 400 or 500MHz G3 with an 800MHz G3. From what the benchmarks say, the performance is better by far (in some cases double that) of a 500MHz G4. (this does not take into account the Altivec optimized applications that are slowly being rolled out by software companies.) It seems to get good reviews as well; some of the reviews I’ve read about the Newer offerings are less than stellar—problems with return times and unit malfunctions are nothing to take lightly.
Finally, in the last of the geek news, the EtherPrint arrived today, and I found to my dismay it did not include an RJ-45 connector, just BNC and AUI connectors. I tracked down an AUI to RJ-45 transciever for the low price of $15 on Amazon, so that should come next week. Still, we’re at a total of $47 total for the printer, which I still think is a great deal.
I bought a Dayna EtherPrint off eBay this morning, in the hopes that I can get the amazing $7 printer working at Jen’s house this week. I also got the second half of the RAM for the LaserWriter 630, so that will be installed tonight.
We caught up with our friends Rob and Karean this weekend, inviting them over for a SuperBowl dinner and drinks. It was good to catch up with them both, because we’ve been playing phone tag since Christmas. They are bitten by the same bug we are right now—the pull to move out of the city is strong, and the recent tax hike is an even stronger incentive. With its dwindling population and shrinking tax base, the city government is putting the squeeze on folks like me—my assessment just doubled.
I spent the first part of this evening milling and installing new doorjambs in the kitchen/dining room with the new compound miter saw. Let me just say again, it is so much nicer to work with the right tools.
Tomorrow I’m meeting with my accountant/financial planner at the early morning hour of 9:00 to discuss how I’m going to be able to do all the things I want to do this year: Buy a house in the county, buy a ring for Jen, put more money into savings/IRA and afford a used car. Perhaps it’s serendipity then, that we’re getting paid for the first time in January tonight. My homework is to gather all my tax information, make a list of goals over the next five years, and tally my invoices to see what kind of a hit I’m taking on taxes this year. Pray for me, friends.
Hmm. Doing my daily weblog scan, I found a link, via Dominey, to a blog on AirPort, and from there a link testing the new 802.11G wireless standard (“AirPort Extreme” falls in this category.) Good info for the day when I get an iMac in the office and set it up as the base station/server for the house, so that Jen and I can work from any room without tripping over the cables. (I wired the whole house for Cat-5 two years ago, right before wireless took off.) With the promise of some incoming freelance money, this will become reality soon.
I also found a link to this service, offered thorugh OWC by Newer, to upgrade Pismo PowerBooks to a 500mhz G4. At some point this year, I think we will take advantage of the offer, as we own two Pismos and probably won’t be buying any new hardware this year.
Guilty Pleasure Dept.: Fametracker. Grab a beer, pull up a chair, and sink your teeth into this one. Great writing, and everything you want from a publication about celebrities but never get. *cough* InStyle *cough* *cough* People *cough*
Well, leave it to the morons at C|Net to get the story wrong. In a huge headline titled “Apple Snub Stings Mozilla”, Some hack took a quote way out of context and claimed it was Apple bad-mouthing Mozilla. Read some history, Scooter. Zawinski hasn’t worked for Mozilla in years and called the code a “bloated mess.” Every ironic word in his post condoned Apple’s choice of KHTML over Mozilla; there’s a reason he quit the project. Shit, the guys running the project admit it’s huge and overwritten. Apple wanted a small, agile browser, and they chose elegance and size over the blunt-force approach. Go figure…
Blue Screen of Death. That’s the second time. I thought Win2000 was better than this?
When it rains…. We have a go on two major freelance jobs, as of about an hour of each other on the same day. It will be good to sink my teeth into some work again… I’m looking forward to a challenge.
I drove the Scout in to work today. I had a big smile on my face.
Leave it to the smarter folks in the world to show me how shortsighted I can be. Scanning over Kottke this morning I found he had posted a very good question: Why not have Sherlock, the Help Guide, and all the other HTML-based applications integrated into Safari? A very good point, and as someone who hates multiple open windows clogging the screen all the time, I wish I had thought of the question myself.
Obsessive-Compulsive dept. With each break that I take, I’m going through iTunes and cleaning up all the metadata for each song file in the catalog. Amazon’s computers must think I’m the cheapest, most schizophrenic surfer imaginable, because I query their database to fill in the blanks I don’t know for each song. I do know this: when that iPod comes, I’m going to be ready for it.
The dash light is telling me something. There are a total of four gauges on the Scout besides the speedometer. Two of them spend a total of about ten minutes a month actually lit and working— the other 432,190 minutes they remain dark, hiding just how rapidly the engine is inhaling gasoline. Which is probably a good thing. Now, I don’t drive the Scout all the time, mostly because of the mileage issues, but when I do turn the key on the mornings I drive her to work, she fires up reliably each time. I have noticed a phenomena in the last few months which lead me to believe she’s telling me something. This evening I pulled out of the parking lot at work and leaned off to the left to see how much gas I had by the weak light from the streetlamps. Somewhere between gassing up and merging onto the beltway, I looked down and noticed that the lights were back on. This is not the first time it’s happened, and I think it’s my truck’s way of asking me to not give up on her.
The ‘Joe Millionaire’ guy from TV so needs to get punched in the face. Repeatedly.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
How do you explain to a client how much your services are worth? How do you explain this to someone who is used to bargaining with vendors over the price of their commodities? How do you explain to this person that your services are not the same as fluctuating commodity pricing? How do you explain that when they tell you they have checked with someone else who is willing to do something for half what you’ve quoted, you want to hang up on them? How do you keep a straight face and explain your methods, service and approach after being told that it’s too expensive (and you’re already taking a loss on the job?)
I downloaded and am using Safari, the new Apple web browser, and I have a few comments so far. The first is that it’s fast. Much faster than IE on OSX, Mozilla, or even Chimera. The second is that I love the integrated Google search field. For a person who spends as much time on Google as I do, this is invaluable. I also love the approach to bookmarks- just like iTunes, and very well designed. For a UI design department that in recent years has gotten a bit fluffy and unfocused (the original iTunes UI comes to mind—remember the annoying volume spinner?) their use of space is much more refined. There are no huge useless buttons with redundant text, the bookmarks are small and the layout is intuitive. Nice job, Apple.
Last night I signed up for Apple’s .Mac free trial period, having made the decision to migrate completely over to OSX this year. I’ve been interested in iCal and iDisk for a while, wondering how they worked—I like the idea of being able to publish a calendar online to keep track of scheduling between Jen and myself, and also having a secure external file server for client work. My first impressions are a lot like my impressions of OSX—powerful, but not friendly. The metaphor for .Mac’s home is poor at best; I signed up with my own email address but I haven’t gotten a confirmation or any other instructions; I don’t know if I have a ‘home page’ or not, and I don’t know how to find my published calendar.
I know that I haven’t delved deeply enough into the service yet, but usually I can spend about a half hour in front of an application and figure out at least how it works, if not how to use it. Last night I spent about an hour trying to make sense of the .Mac site and metaphor and it still doesn’t make sense. I’ll report on my experience more in the future.
With misgivings and deap-seated fears, Jen and I set out for Hell—I mean, the mall, on Friday night. We didn’t actually buy anything, as I had to medicate her after a particularly long day (i.e. cellphone calls in the parking lot at 9pm) but after a delicious meal, all was good. We returned on Saturday to walk among the teeming millions, finding the majority of our gifts at the Target. Love that store. Sunday was spent finishing up a lot of last-minute ideas and following up on the few people we hadn’t chased down to that point. With the exception of Jen and a few other small gifts, we look to be about 90% done with the shopping. We also found that Williams-Sonoma is the centerpoint of the universe- in 15 minutes we met up with four different friends there.
We also got our first look at the new Apple Store up in Towson; it’s very well-designed and was full of people playing with iMacs and iPods. We were both very impressed with the hardware (Jen made an appreciative “ooooooohhh” sound when we looked at the 17′ iMac) and with the store in general.
Jen lives in Catonsville, a commuter suburb of Baltimore, and as a resident, she gets the Pennysaver. She has actually made a habit of grabbing it on her way in and saving it for me, bless her heart, because I am one of those guys who loves to peer through the tag sale and Cragar van rim ads for that single gem, that nugget, that super deal. Browsing through this last week’s issue, I found an ad for a Laserwriter Pro 630, the printer I’ve been nosing through eBay for these past six months. I drove down to Crofton last night in the rain and traffic and looked at the printer, which occupied the corner of a neat upstairs office in a trim suburban house. The guy was real nice, obviously didn’t know what he had, but seemed interested in buying a Mac for himself; we talked for a bit, and I left $125 lighter, taking a chance on the unit because I hadn’t seen a test print (I forgot to bring an AAUI connector) but knowing I’d probably be able to fix anything that was broken. I got it home, connected it to my hub, and ran a test print. The engine has a total of 2,764 prints on it—this on a machine rated for 450,000 prints on one engine.
This last week’s New Yorker had a great book review article which made me stop and think, and bookmark a certain paragraph. David Owen reviews Measuring America, by Andro Linklater, which reviews how the shaping of the New Frontier, among other things, shaped our current measuring system, and illustrates why we are the only country not to adopt the metric system:
“The units in which American building materials are measured are idiosyncratic in the extreme—they include gauges, penny sizes, nominal dimensions, and a host of other anachronistic absurdities—but the over-all system works well, in part because it arose organically from human activity instead of being imposed from above by theoreticians. The standard metric measuring tape was clearly not designed by anyone who regularly worked with wood: a millimetre is smaller than the tip of a builder’s pencil and narrower than the blade of a saw, and the closely packed, uniform gradations on the tape are hard to make out at a glance except in bundles of five. In contrast, a customary American tape—with its easily distinguishable divisions of sixteenths, eighths, quarters, halves, inches, feet, and sixteen-inch framing intervals—is harmoniously suited to the way in which it is used.”
What struck me was the point that the system arose from human activity and not from theory. Many times I’ve had an design idea that I would like to incorporate into a site, only to test it and find that it was annoying or unusable. Simple things in my house, such as placement of appliances, have evolved over time to coalesce into usable patterns and methods (especially for me, someone who remembers visually.)