Going to see the MGA , tonight, if I can swing it tomorrow morning. Note: The seller lives across the street. Boy, am I stupid.
Rant. I Hate Adobe Acrobat Distiller. I wish it would explode into flames and die. Followed by Quark Xpress.
E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N R-E-F-O-R-M. Four more years of shite. Thanks a bunch, middle America. I’m glad, at least, that I live in a state that didn’t carry him. And, what’s all this bullshit about “moral issues”? Who gives a crap about banning gay marriage when the economy is in the toilet and we’re occupying a foreign country? Come on, people!
Ch-ch-ch-Changes. I moved the home page of the namesake site over to a CSS-based design, meaning there’s not a table to be found in it. Now, that’s not that big a deal considering it’s two images and an image map, but for some reason I can’t get the CSS equivalent of the ol’ <body align=center> tag to work correctly in Mozilla. (Nor, for that matter, do the popups in the design section work in Mozilla. Dammit.) The eventual goal is to have the whole damned thing in CSS, but that’s a ways off. Baby steps here, baby steps.
This article, on surviving IKEA, is written just like a walkthrough to DOOM, circa 1998. It will make non-gamers laugh and gamers howl. I wish I had thought of it.
Progress. This morning Jen got up at 7 to shower, and I roused myself to find the TV remote for the bad news. It wasn’t as bad as I’d hoped, but not the surprise I was praying for. Jen tried some new paint on the wall in the guest bedroom, and I made coffee, anxious to get outside and take advantage of the warm sunshine. I should back up and give props to Dave, who brought Clifford by and hauled off the pile of brush in the driveway I’ve been collecting since June. He helped clear the way for the car cover I bought from Sam’s Club a few weeks ago, which I put up in about an hour. Unfortunately, the cover isn’t rated for snow (a fact I couldn’t find on the less-than-helpful website) but with some carefully made modifications, I think I can get around that. Also missing on the website: the fact that the tent does not come with tiedowns—although the instructions helpfully note, “Caution: Once you erect your tent, it WILL become a giant kite!” Lacking any tiedowns, I decided the next best thing would be attaching the cover to the closest 3200lb. weight I could find, so I jump-started the Scout off the Jeep, backed it under the cover, and tied off the center poles to the roof rack. The overall effect is very ghetto, but considering it’s the first time Chewbacca has been under cover since 1998, I’m certainly happy.
I don’t have any kind of snarky joke to play on you folks; let it be known that I would have a sense of humor if I had more time.
This is a very nice site for all my mid-century modern peeps out there: Meteor Lights features lamps and shades from the 50’s for the modern bohemian. (via Boing Boing)
Money. Jen and I have been in the middle of a bureaucratic nightmare with Baltimore Gas and Electric since we first opened the door to our new house. It involved the last vestigal traces of an operational doctor’s office after they hauled the desk, waiting room chairs, miniature skeleton, and filing cabinets out of the front rooms: two electrical meters bolted to the basement wall, clicking merrily away on commercial rates. The sellers graciously offered to have it converted to a single service, and footed the bill—a quiet man named Ben came and wrestled the rat’s nest of Eisenhower-era wiring into a single, beautiful panel with about fifteen empty slots, signed the work order, and disappeared into the warm October afternoon like Robert DeNiro in Brazil.
Since then, we’ve battled the faceless drones at BG&E to get two bills consolidated into one, which has involved repeated visits from representatives of the company, a three-month wait for somebody to hook up the outside service (while the HUGE main feed wire into the house hung loose at the bottom of the basement steps, promising swift death to anybody brushing up against it with a laundry basket), another wait for somebody to finish the job inside, then an inspection, then another inspection to make sure we aren’t using the house commercially to grow pot (that’s what the greenhouse is for), and then a call to a drone to actually consolidate the bills.
The sum of this lovely exercise came today: $675 in current and backdated charges for gas and electric. Kinda makes that check I just wrote for $1.43 for the water bill look that much better.
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.)
Update on the Appletalk over IP thread from yesterday: I set up my 8500 as a server, opened a port on the router and was able to connect up-from inside my house-over IP. I still can’t connect up from work however. I also found that you can’t leave your digital camera out in the sun- all the photos I took Saturday were corrupted.
Update on 3dsMax: I built my first model yesterday, and I was able to do a bunch of stuff that previously was impossible to figure out. And I actually had fun with it. Stay tuned… (today I’m working on promotional stuff for the rollout party of Emperor tonight. Also, inside sources tell us that as of yesterday, the demo has been downloaded over 20 thousand times since being posted last week.)
I found this article via camworld about an MIT professor who was ambushed on Donahue when invited to come and speak about violence in video games. It’s too bad he wasn’t able to explain his ideas in detail, but that’s modern media culture, baby.
I got an email from my friend Todd last week, who commented on my
half-formed August 30 post about personal freedoms:
“Adjusting Amendment 1 or abolishing it as we know it today is taking
a basic freedom guaranteed for so many generations away from me and
future generations….I refuse to be dictated to about what to think
is right or just cause for persecution of those who oppose the
mainstream.”
Right on. I couldn’t say it better myself.
Jen also had a comment, about the Cusack/Max article on Salon yesterday:
“People don’t like to see things in anything else but black and white because at heart it means that they might be forced to acknowledge their own failings and possible evils.”
Which is a very, very good point. I can understand Spielberg bailing on the project for obvious reasons- his commitment to the Shoah Foundation is not considered lightly, and the Holocaust is a very sensitive subject- but the folks who backed away should stop and consider what they failed to offer the public as a means of discourse and self-reflection.
In doing some work-related HTML cleanup, I took a long look at the CSS I’ve been hacking together for the past few years, and realizing it’s ass-backwards and ugly. I did some brush-up reading on it and have decided to implement new CSS in the next logpage (September) as it’s getting close to the end of this one and there’s a lot of text here. Maybe if I’m feeling bored one day soon I’ll go back and revise it.
I found this little blurb about a new app for the Palm to use it as a universal remote for your TV, DVD, etc. Interesting, and I’m tempted to download it, but I already have enough reasons to ditch the Palm once I buy an iPod.
Some thoughts on Bank of America’s billpay system:
- The list of cooperating companies is long and impressive. I was able to set up all my phone utilities last night in a matter of minutes.
- The signup process is easy and painless; it appears they have done some good thinking as far as finding out when the lead time is for payment of bills and made sure each partner specified this.
- One suggestion would be to have some kind of scheduling calendar set up, where visually-oriented people like me could see when the bills were due in a calendar table and step back a few days to schedule payment. Providing my paychecks arrive on time (a difficult proposition these days) I would like to schedule blocks of payments on one or two days a month after the deposit of funds in my account.
- Another suggestion is for BoA to have some kind of flag as a failsafe to send an email to you if your scheduled pay date arrives and there are insufficient funds to cover your payables; a trigger to advise you of deposits in your account, and a ‘successful’ message to advise you of your payments being made on time.
I know, it’s a lot to ask of a web app, but I see good things begun here and I’d like to see them get even better, so that the site becomes more of a smart appliance and less of a tool.
Today I’m actually doing something interesting- character modelling in 3D Max. We’ll see how far I get in this tutorial today- I’m hoping to do the whole thing if I can. I’m also burning CD’s to give to Jen. The new machine they gave me here has a burner, and it’s about 4 times as fast as mine.
This morning, I locked my house, looked down and found that some jerk had dug out 6 of the geraniums in the pot out in front of my house; these plants being the only reasonably attractive thing in the front of my house, I was very pissed. I replanted them, and they will most assuredly die, but it was annoying. Looked like somebody had pulled them, been caught and dropped them, because they were in a pile on the ground. Perhaps somebody is making a statement about the long-dead spruce in the whisky barrel next to the flowers.
My RAM shipped today- hopefully it’ll be here by Friday. pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…
4:35PM. [expletives deleted]
This stuff better start making some sense, or recession or not, I’m not staying here to mess with it for long.