I’ve not been using my camera these days for anything besides some random shots of the hallway which never seems to progress; it’s a real shame because there are things out there to photograph, but I’ve just not been seeing them. Today, through one place to another, I visited heather’s site (she’s also responsible for the mirror project) and through hers another good photography site. I started thinking about pictures again. I remember when I first got my digital camera and was shooting everything I saw—living in a photogenic area of the city made finding subjects easy. Nowadays, I commute blindly by highway, rarely stopping to search for interesting shots. Instead of just carrying my camera around with me, I need to start using it again. Additionally: How to rig an old digital to take a picture a minute for the old Kodak sitting on the shelf.
Continuing on another thread, I’m rooting for Jay to win tonight, but thinking that Kara will probably take the whole thing.
Helpful Design Link: Fontleech, a site chronicling free fonts for poor designers.
painted hallway, 2.23.04
This morning my neck is a solid chunk of concrete, thanks to the hibernation-mode sleep I got last night. The good news is that the hallway is primed upstairs and 95% ready for a final coat of bright white paint; the bad news is that the entire house is covered in white dust again. Meanwhile Penn has suddenly developed that wierd eye swelling thing where the inside of the eyelid blows up like a balloon and makes him look like a post-match Rocky. This means I’ll have to squirt medicine into his mouth (twice) and his eye once every 12 hours for the next week or so—I think the poor cat is ready to run away from home by now.
I think that’s my old guitar…but I don’t know the girl.
In the winter of 1986, my Dad drove me out to Mt. Kisco to look at a bass guitar listed in the classifieds. I’d just picked up electric bass after playing upright for three years, and it was time to find a beginner’s instrument. We walked up a flight of stairs to a dark apartment building and met with a longhaired, half-stoned dude who took us into his practice room. He had several guitars lined up and handed us the largest of them all, a survivor from the late 1970’s: an Ibanez Blazer, woodgrain with a black pickguard. It had the longest neck of any guitar I’ve ever seen (21 frets), it weighed more than a car, and it had deeper sound than a foghorn. I tried it out with a rudimentary blues line, feeling sheepish and embarrassed, and it sounded good. I don’t know what my Dad paid for it, but we lugged it back to the Rabbit and took it home. On this bass I learned to play, finding it was easier learn jazz than keep up with Geddy Lee (not that I didn’t try.) Later, I bought a Steinberger from my friend, finding its portability and size easier for college, and the Ibanez became second fiddle (pun intended.) Eventually, in the post-graduate purge, I “sold” it to a friend so that his wacky girlfriend could join an all-grrl punk band, and it passed out of my hands. I think the bass in this Microsoft ad could be mine, only because the pickups are white—we had the original pickups pulled and replaced by the music store in town, and for some dumb reason they gave us white—we never bothered to have them switched out. I heard that girl moved to Philadelphia and took it with her years ago, so imagine my surprise when I saw it again. It’s nice to think that maybe one of us got famous. (And thanks, Dad.)
Christmas in July was great, and I think it lived up to expectations. We were even lucky enough to have snow falling on Saturday morning. I have to shout out to my sister for the new Porter & Cable router (we have two windows just itching to be refurbished with that) and to my pop for the camera tripod. Jen now has an entire library of gardening and cook books to choose from, Renie finally has a digital camera, Mom has a pile of wedding photos, and my Dad has a wireless hub to tinker with. It was great to see everybody, and we even got a visit with Grampy and Vince, who stopped by for bloody marys after church.
While we were there I updated Mom’s iMac—OS9 gave way to OSX, crashing Eudora gave way to Mail.app, and the lousy Director-based Kodak photo software was replaced with iPhoto. The only hitch was finding that her beige Epson inkjet won’t work with OSX (Epson didn’t bother to write drivers for it.) I will say that I was relieved when Mail.app easily imported her old Eudora mailboxes and iPhoto immediately recognized her camera. She’s going to have much better luck with her computer now.
Continued Geekery. On the way home, Jen and I played the Dream Casting game, coming up with our list of actors to play in the new Watchmen movie. (Jen hasn’t read the book, so I had to attempt to distill the characters down as best I could for her to understand. I have to bust it out for her tonight to look at.) Apparently somebody found a way to adapt the book (although Terry Gilliam tried to do it and couldn’t—now that would have been a movie). There’s no word on official casting yet, but here’s our list:
| Rorschach: | William H. Macy | Think about it. You need somebody short, sort of average (if not ugly) and able to play a resigned insanity. |
| John C Reilly | This guy is good at the loveable loser (think Magnolia) or frightening maniac. He might be too tall though. | |
| Nite Owl: | Skip Sudduth | I think he’d be perfect for this role. Paunchy, approachable, believable. |
| Daniel Baldwin | I think it’d be a stretch, but he could pull it off. He’d have to get rid of that annoying Baldwin “I’m too cool for school” thing. (Thanks Todd) | |
| Silk Spectre: | Jennifer Connelly | I forgot about this one. Perfect. Thanks, Jen. |
| Mariska Hargitay | This was Jen’s first idea, but I’m not entirely sold. | |
| The Comedian: | Robert Forster | Again, Jen picked this one, and I think she nailed it perfectly. |
| Burt Reynolds | Todd’s immediate choice. I think if he could be reigned in a bit (again, think what Paul Thomas Anderson did for him in Boogie Nights) he’d be perfect. | |
| Ozymandias: | Jeff Goldblum | Jen sold me on this one-he’s intelligent, he (used to) be built, and he’s taller than you think. |
| Dr. Manhattan: | Matthew McConaughey | Just consider it. He’d have to be tall, bald, blue, and nekkid. This guy looks pretty good bald, and we all know he likes to be nekkid and play the bongos… |
Extra reading: Wikipedia entry (excellent primer) | The Watchmen annotated guide. Your suggestions?
Jen and I met a friend for drinks last night down the street at Bar, where the atmosphere was basketball, the PBR was $2, and the cigarette smoke was thicker than week-old fudge. It was good to get out and visit after our voluntary two-month timeout. We met at 9pm and wound up getting home at 2am (?!!?!) which is something I’ve not done in years on a school night. Topics of discussion included Work, People We Know From The Scene, Smalltimore (thanx Todd) and Embarassing Ex Stories. This morning it took a little longer than usual to crack open my eyelids, and I got to relive the joy of scrubbing a carton’s worth of nicotine off my skin. Good times.
I need to bring in a parka or some kind of electric ass warmer, because it’s freezing in here today.
Guilty Pleasure Dept.: Project Runway. Watch this show and marvel at its stupid, vapid brilliance. Where else can you make fun of supermodels, mincing clothing designers, “fashion”, and normal people all in one place? Besides, it’s funny to realize just how average (and annoying) professional models can be before the stylists perform their studio magic and turn them into sexless, plastic robots. Girl, you skin nasty. We may have to make a party night out of this…
Birthing Babies. Congratulations to our friends the Mat-uh-YOW-skees, who just gave birth to their second child, Fletcher Owen. (The spelling is mine; I had to phoneticize it the first time I wrote it down so that I wouldn’t muff it when I shook hands.)
Suggestions. My 4-year-old Motorola phone, an ancient V-series handset, is falling apart. The battery lasts about 20 minutes, the headset jack is busted, and the interface is about as unusable as a Korean karaoke menu. I’m looking for a new-generation phone, something that will work with my computer, something that is easy to use, and best of all, cheap. I may have found my phone. Does anybody have a Sony/Ericsson phone, and what do you think of it? (My experience with Sony has been lackluster. I don’t need a phone camera, but I want Bluetooth. I could give a rat’s ass about ringtones and instant messaging—give me an interface I can work with.) I’m going to find a Cingular store and see if I can’t lay hands on one this evening.
A Small Slice of Sanity. Thank god somebody still has a brain.
Mrs. Lockard is worsening. The nurse administering the meds gives her a couple of days at most. Jen is exhausted from dealing with both the family and her mother, and fighting off a cold.
All By Myself. Whenever Jen is away, I seem to revert back to my bachelor ways, which means I eat whatever is left around the house. Last night my feast consisted of a PB&J sandwich, the rest of the Doritos from Thanksgiving (our house is so dry, they were not even close to stale) and a glass of grapefruit juice. Now, before anybody gets upset, this is not a cry for help: usually when I’m alone, I try to fill up my time with projects that wouldn’t normally fly while Jen is around. (Would you want your husband sanding drywall outside your bedroom door at 11:30pm?) Thus, there’s not a whole lot of time to fuss with food. Unfortunately, the hallway repair project is drawing out longer than hoped—the walls have been abused so much that it’s taking longer than expected to smooth out the craters. By the end of this week, though, we should have new outlets on both sides of the hall and on the stair landing, as well as primer on most of the walls.
Because of an inexplicable lapse in New Yorker deliveries, I started reading The Lovely Bones last night before going to sleep—it looks to be good so far. I was joined by three very lonely cats, who proceeded to hootch up on me so tightly that I was effectively stapled to the bed. We all miss Jen.
OK, and now for some humor. This blog is one I’ve been following for about a year now, and it never ceases to make me laugh. Check the archives, too- you’ll snort your Quik through your nose, I promise.
Quick links. Protect your privacy. | Tsunami | Bye, Jerry. | Finally, another creative use for the iPod.
Up until 1:30 freelancing last night, and back at work at 8:30am. I feel swell.
We rented Mystic River and Kill Bill Volume 2 this weekend, and while both were good, about 20 minutes of a third movie on cable almost stole the show. (More on that in a minute.) Mystic River was a well-acted, well-directed movie that I don’t believe I’d watch again. I was expecting, well… more. It was the movie equivalent of a Chalupa: it filled me up but I felt empty afterwards. KB2 was just long. Too much talking, not enough ass-whuppin’. Sure, the situations were interesting, but it could have been handled as one long movie minus a pile of the filler in between. Watching a showing of Reservoir Dogs on cable Sunday night put into contrast how overblown Tarantino got with KB2. Jackie Brown was an excellent, funny, adult movie, well written and directed, which got overlooked because it wasn’t Pulp Fiction 2. The momentum in KB2 sort of tuckered out weakly into lots of half-interesting dialogue, none of which had the snap and crackle of Jackie Brown or Pulp Fiction. I guess I’d recommend renting both in the series and watching them back to back, if at all.
The movie that stole the show was the Royal Tennenbaums, which we caught about 15min. of on Monday. All the best off-kilter ideas in another movie by the folks that brought you Rushmore, a personal top-10 favorite. We’re going to have to catch this on DVD at some point real soon.
Jen and I happened to catch a few episodes of “Scrubs” last weekend on TV, and were reminded of how funny that show can be when it’s working. Today on Salon I found a quick interview with one of the stars, who made a movie in the off-season called Garden State. I looked at the trailer and movie site, and found that it’s playing at the Charles on the 20th. I also liked the song playing in the trailer, and found it on the ITMS: it’s called “Let Go”, by a band called Frou Frou. (the other one on the main trailer is “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service.)
Update 5 pm. This tower is running smoothly, and the Powerbook has a new lease on life. To my peeps who have Pismos (*cough* Rob and Dave *cough*), you gotta upgrade. It’s like having a whole new Powerbook.
Update 3:34 pm. Looks like (knock, knock) everything went smoothly and well. All my stuff is where it should be; I enabled journaling on my existing partition seamlessly, chose the “Archive and Install” option, and crossed my fingers as it started. 30 minutes later, I’m checking email, loading the updates, and it looks almost exactly the same.
One drawback about Panther is that it looks like ATM under Classic, the benchmark font utility, does not pass open font info along to Panther, so I have to use the OSX version of Suitcase. Sigh.
I’m offline for a few hours while I upgrade the Pismo to OSX 10.3. Wish me luck.
Great News. Looks like Hellboy is getting good reviews around the net this morning, which makes me very happy. I think the books are some of the most expressive, beautiful comics I’ve ever seen, and the stories only make them better. I think Jen and I may go see it this weekend (she doesn’t know that yet.)
Not So Great News. Unfortunately, we may have to walk: the transmission in the Taurus was giving me fits this morning. I merged on to the Beltway, and while I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the rain, traffic, and radio, my Spidey-sense noticed that the engine was rumbling in a different way—I was still in first gear doing 55mph. I pulled over, shut it down, and re-started the engine, and that seemed to help, but the wonderful clunk of shifting into gear is getting more and more noticable each day.
There’s a great quote on the second track of Psyence Fiction by UNKLE: the beat slows, and you hear someone say “There were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” I found out last night reading an article on Lawrence Fishburne in last week’s New Yorker that the speaker was Francis Ford Coppola, describing US involvement in Vietnam. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but….
So, in case the wedding invitations were still a little oblique for some of you, here’s some more information about the bug on the cover.
Salon has a great article on the train wreck that is CSI: Miami, AKA Melodramatic Line Readings With David Caruso. News to me: Gary Sinise, one of my more favored actors, makes yet another wrongheaded career move to star in CSI: New York. Stop the madness!
House Progress. I’ve been able to run wire throughout the office, which sets us up with enough plugs to run an entire Home Depot lighting department. Still to come are the runs for cable, phone, and ethernet, but for the time being I’m fitting the baseboards back in place and beginning to button up the far side. This morning I made the top hole in the sill plate to start dropping wire down to the basement, so hopefully that will happen towards the end of the week.
Album Of The Day: Dinosaur Jr., Where You Been. Taking me back to 1992.
Speaking of music, I’ve found a reasonable solution to my WMA -> MP3 problem: convert at a higher bit rate. If I go up to 192kbps, the sound improves dramatically—no more hollow, compressed singing-into-a-pint-glass sound. It’s not great (I’d hate to see the second-gen wave compression) but it does the job.