I got my CD-burner in the mail today via FedEx, and so far I’ve made a backup of my freelance directory; I’m in the middle of burning all the stuff off my old internal hard drive so I can use it for music storage. It’s a bus-powered FireWire 8x8x24, it’s small, and it does a pretty good job. I’m happy.
They got the asshole responsible for the sniper attacks last night; turns out he was sleeping in his car in a gas station around the corner from where Jen works. (That was where he was ticketed by the cops on October 8.) Thank god that area didn’t fit his MO, and that Jen doesn’t loiter long outside in that area.
It’s another dreary, wet day in Baltimore. It’s also freezing as hell outside- there’s some kind of front in over us right now that is bringing frigid air all the way from the steppes of Russia; I woke up this morning with two cats glued to my body, drowsy from the heat of the wool blanket.
I suppose I should be thankful though, because along with my CD-burner (classified as a business expense) I’ve also made a long-awaited upgrade to my kitchen; I threw out the 1980’s era microwave (lined with solid steel, finished in that lovely fake wood vinyl stuff they pasted on all appliances during the Reagan era) which had been, over time, cooking my reproductive organs from across the room. I threw it in the back of the Scout and heaved it into the Dumpster behind our office building, on top of a pile of old office chair boxes, never to smoke up my kitchen again. I then went and picked out a lovely new white microwave from the Sam’s Club.
backyard progress, lakewood avenue, 10.24
For the last few days, I’ve been setting up an outdoor work area in the backyard while I build the stairs. This includes plugging in the 13-year-old black-and-white TV my parents bought me when I first came to college and tuning in to The West Wing while I run the circular saw. (My neighbors love me.) In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been this idiotic nut running around shooting random people in the southern DC suburbs, which is far enough away that I’m not afraid to visit the Home Depot after work every day, but close enough that every dumbass local newscaster is having a brain hemorrhage attempting to channel Dan Rather.
Baltimore is a quiet, relatively peaceful blue-collar city where housing is cheap and the commute isn’t too bad. So we get the third-rate newscasters, who attempt to put a serious spin on the spiraling murder rate between cheerful program shills for “Crossing Jordan”.
Which is why I wince when the talking heads come on and fill up a half an hour of my time with in-studio and remote broadcasts dissecting what little information the PG County sheriff is releasing, injecting the most banal pop-psychology drivel imaginable into news items the size of walnut shells. Imagine Anna Nicole Smith giving a stream-of-consciousness dissertation on the socio-economic impact of the Gulf War and you understand my pain.
So it was with interest that I read the Baltimore City Paper’s interview with Michael Moore, who coined the phrase “Sniper Porn”:
“You have to ask yourself…after the first 15 minutes of sniper coverage on the 6 o’clock news, ‘Am I learning anything here? Does this help me or my family? And if not, why I am still watching it?’ Because at a certain point it becomes pornography—sniper porn.”
I found a really good website, run by the EFF and a consortium of law schools: chillingeffects.org. Very good information about interent copyright law. Metafilter had this interesting link to some demographic information based on census data and purchase records: You are Where You Live. For the record, I don’t use call answering, I hate Face The Nation, and I certainly do not have a subscription to Elle.
change of the seasons, lakewood ave, 10.11
I thought I had lost my birth certificate this Monday. For work, we’re getting passports in case of travel, and I had been a good Boy Scout and gathered my birth certificate, carefully filed away in the archives at home, as well as passport photos and the application. I put them in a white manila envelope and tucked them away at work until we got a caravan of people together to go to the post office.
Fast forward to this monday, when we got a group of people ready to go. I can’t find my envelope anywhere; it’s not in the hastily organized shelf that acts as my desk (we work at folding banquet tables here- no desks to be seen) or in my laptop bag, or my sketchbook. I’m screwed.
Fast forward to last night. I open my file cabinet to organize my invoices, and what is sitting in the invoice folder? the envelope with my passport info. I had tucked it into my laptop bag for safekeeping and it got stuck in the invoices folder. Too bad I already put that $30 check in the mail to the Massachussetts clerk’s office to get another certified copy…
…It’s amazing how much darker the photo below is on my PC’s CRT than it is on my Powerbook.
Todd sent me a link today where I can see just how many crimes were committed within a variable distance from my house. There’s also a website devoted to my little corner of the world; now I can pull up important information like recycling dates.
Apparently there’s some crazed asshole running around with a sniper rifle shooting random people in parking lots. What would make somebody do this? I just can’t figure it out. My theory: another ex-Marine with an axe to grind.
Now that I’m 31 years old, I look back on what I sneered at as a punk 17-year-old and marvel at the power of early R.E.M. Boy, was I stupid.
Huh. Somehow, Amazon must have gotten some data on me from somewhere. Fully 60% of my Gold Box offers (6 out of 10) were in the ‘Tools and Hardware” category. Does anybody know how they tailor their offerings in that category? I would be the first to suggest that it’s based on past purchases, but I’ve never bought tools or hardware from Amazon before (that’s what Home Depot is for, baby.)
The Annual Lakewood Ave. Halloween Window Display was erected yesterday and lit up last night; I will be in scuba class tonight but attempt to take pictures for posterity’s sake tomorrow night for your enlightenment.
Here’s an old link that I dug up from my dot-boom days: Pornolize. There’s nothing funnier, after wading through days of re-reading and formatting the same new-economy doublespeak, than filtering it all through the pornolizer. It made all that marketing talk of synergistic cross-platform vertical tier-to tier value-chain plays so much more interesting.
The weather has definitely turned. I opened up all the windows and turned off the CAC last night. Woodsmoke drifted in through the windows and the cats were glued to the screens, sniffing the air. This morning the weatherman forecasted 70 degree weather for the whole week.
I got my official copy of Emperor today, courtesy of Sierra. Nice to have a game I can put up on my shelf and claim some ownership of.
I got an email inviting me to submit an application to meet and marry Beautiful Women of the Phillippines this afternoon. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to take advantage of this outstanding opportunity. (Not that I am dissing the Beautiful Women of the Phillippines, it’s just that I’m already involved. Sorry, Beautiful Women.)
korean grocery, 9.22
I’m back in the admittedly flat and boring OS9 right now, for reasons I can’t quite explain to myself. Maybe it’s the comfort of the application menu in the upper right corner, where I can hide any window I want immediately. Maybe it’s the speed of the interface—I’m on a 400Mhz G3, and I notice a slight lag while it figures out what to do. Maybe it’s the way OSX writes three files for every one it works on (iPhoto comes to mind here).
Maybe I’m just getting old; I don’t know. I’ve made almost a ten-year investment in the interface I use every day, and it’s not going to be easy to switch.
Jen and I went to the Korean grocery store this weekend and bought an entire meal’s worth of vegetables, about a pound of sliced rib-eye steak, and assorted other items, and walked out $13 lighter. There is a certain sense of culture shock walking through that store—from the mingled conversations in several different languages to the mind-boggling assortment of exotic fruit, vegetables, and spices, to the old-world butcher and fish market in back—you feel as if you might be strolling through a market in Seoul or even Tokyo.
What happens when you spend all the money you make on opening new stores so that you can make even more money to open more stores? You start knocking down the old ones to make newer ones. Suggestion: Make decent food, train your employees to treat customers better, pay them more than minimum wage, and rebuild the expectations of your client base.
Nate sent this thought along in response to an email I sent about a cartoon that has some people upset:
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a political fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
Julius Caesar, 101 – 44 BC
I got a bunch of info from some friends via e-mail last night on OSX; Mike sent along some good links for reference on OSX, including this site: macoshints.com, which has a wealth of good information listed in a blog-style newsletter format. Thanks Mike. I’m going to print out the hint booklet today! (Plus, via his blog, I found this link to the ipodlounge, where I will read about them until I can afford one myself.)
My PowerBook wakes up from sleep under OSX in about 1/2 a second. Contrast this with the minute or so it took to wake under OS9, an empty screen, and the wait for anything to happen. iPhoto is real nice, and I know there are a million things I need to learn with it. I also know that my old method of organizing files is not going to fly in the OSX world, so we’re going to attempt to go with Apple’s UNIX/user method and see how good it is.
New lexicon Dept.:
The City Paper did their Best Of issue this week, and they named the annoying habit Baltimore drivers have of sitting in their car out in front of a house on your street and blowing the horn: The Baltimore Doorbell.
I watched a good article tonight on domain name squabbles, but it gives me heartburn: Nissan Vs. Nissan. One is a computer dealer, the other is the company that makes the Altima. Apparently the computer company lost a court battle and may lose the domain name- the auto company claimed it diluted their brand. I sure hope it doesn’t lose the fight- they registered in 1994, and in my opinion they should be allowed to keep it.
montgomery park, 8.23
Todd and I took a trip down to the Montgomery Park office complex yesterday afternoon to check out the building. It is a huge (1.3M square feet) ex-warehouse on a B&O spur, built in 1923 for Montgomery Ward. As you travel north from Washington DC and rise over the hill to Baltimore, it sits off to the left, alone in a blighted landscape of industrial parks and run-down neighborhoods. It’s been empty for years, but sometime last year they started lighting it up at night, and everybody soon realized where it was and just how big it was.
The sheer size of the place overwhelms you—each floor is a cavernous forest of high ceilings and thick, fat pillars lined up in rows. Some of the floors are totally renovated, and others are barely cleared. There is a courtyard with a building in the center, sporting a living roof, and the whole building catches runoff to be recycled into the wastewater system.
We were both very impressed with the space, and sort of overwhelmed with it all. There’s too much size to be comprehended there. But we were glad that the developers decided to retain a lot of the original details- the windows, the pillars, the cielings-instead of plastering over them.
I was looking through some old drives last night in preparation to donate a couple of old Macs, and I found a bunch of Cidera-era pictures on a storage drive. With those I also found a real interesting picture of the backyard before I started on the work, and a nice shot of the lake back in 2000. Along with these I have a bunch of staff and event photos from that time, about 8 months before the company imploded.
Lesson 362 on how not to run a website: Long and Foster has listings for houses in Baltimore; you plug in your information and do a search. They return a page with a small picture, a basic description, and no other information. No address, no lot information, no size info. I sent an email to the listed agent and got a bounceback to another agent, referring me to a phone number. Sorry, you lose. Make me jump through hoops, and withhold basic purchasing information from me? No thanks.
On another front, the house across from me that was rehabbed last year and is still on the market is listed for $214K.
It is so unbearably hot here in Baltimore, I want to kill myself. Tonight the heatwave will break, but I’m wondering why we ever left NY state and that beautiful, warm, clear lake. In the backyard, I got the support columns bought (decided not to deal with my other neighbor) and the anchors drilled, as well as the notches in the concrete caps cut, so all we have to do is cut some notches in the bottoms of the columns and install. Then we level each of them out and put the top plate on.
I had a very interesting chat this weekend about a possible part-time teaching position; even if it doesn’t happen, it was still a great meeting and could lead to exciting possibilities down the road. Plus, there’s a bunch of freelance work coming down the road in the next couple of weeks, and that should keep the money flowing into my bank accound and not out.
Todd said he saw Esther on the way to work this morning, so I know she isn’t a mirage.
I started doing a little research into some of the cameras I bought on my vacation; some of the super-8’s are pretty rare, and some of the Kodak Brownies I bought are common but beautiful examples of industrial design. I also have a really nice Agfa and a few lesser-known brands which all seem to take 620 or 120 variant film. Now to find a few 620 spools and order some film! I’m dying to try some of these cameras…! Luckily there’s a company in town that develops 120 film…