international, 2.13
city life building 2.11
I read last week that the old City Life building is being developed into a restaurant/nightclub venue. It was a crime to charge visitors $7 to see a thin display of local kitsch, but this will hopefully be a better use of a very beautiful space. Good luck, folks.
Jen and I have been working for the last few days on freelance work, and the stuff we have so far makes me very happy. I’m very excited to sink my teeth into this work, because I have a ton of ideas for the website and I think we can make really strong products for each client.
I will have to look into a product called Konfabulator, which is a sort of do-it-yourself widget maker for OSX, made by the guys who brought us Kaliedoscope (which I never used.) I have a few things I’d like to configure through AppleScript but I can’t seem to make the Script Editor record my actions anymore, either in Classic or in OSX. I used to have a series of scripts which would open the three main programs I use every day, and another to mount my remote web drive and publish my log page, and it made the day go by faster. I’d like to set that up again in OSX, but I don’t have the technology yet.
Ted Rall writes a very interesting (and very sobering) article about the cost of college, or more importantly, the cost of graduating, and the increasing gap between the folks who can afford it and those who can’t. Personally, I count myself lucky to have had parents who believed in me enough to send me to an art college. I don’t know exactly how much they paid to send me to school, but I know it wasn’t cheap, and I got off very lucky.
building1, 3dmax, 1.28
Today I’m listening to an older album (1990) by an English band called the La’s. They were famous for about ten minutes that year for a song called “There She Goes”. (You have probably heard a butchered version covered by some other band a few years back.) I came into the album from my best friend Stas’s brother Chris, who had gotten it from somewhere and disliked it (he was deep in a Metallica phase, I think) and he gave it to me. I put it aside for the summer, being deep in a metal phase myself, and picked it up that fall—perfect timing for a melancholy season leading into winter in Baltimore. Think of good Sixties harmonies, catchy riffs, and acoustic guitars in a Beatles vibe, totally separate from the Manchester sound pouring out of Britain that same year.
I just read that Cannondale, the esteemed company that built my mountain bike, is filing for voluntary Chapter 11. While their bicycle business is making a profit (barely), the motorsports division took a 7mil loss last year. The bicycle division will continue as usual, but the motorsports division may get sold off.
I’m going to attempt to get Kung-Tunes working on this page. Stay tuned.
christmas party, 12.12
urban paralysis (a social experiment), 12.01
Indeed, I bought the milk, the bread, and the coffee, and lo, the heavens did unload. And yea, verily, we did sit and listen to the Prophets proclaim doom.
The salt truck, representing the taxes I pay to the city, rolled through at 6:20, after the sun went down and the temperature dropped below 20 degrees. Thanks guys.
backyard, 12.01
The Thanksgiving feasting is over; the fridge is stuffed with Tupperware and bursting at the seams. All was successful with the meal, and the Meeting Of The Two Families went off without a hitch, thankfully. Everybody had a great time together and we dined in Little Italy. (Rather fitting, given the motif, eh?)
We were also lent the first season of the Sopranos on DVD the day before Thanksgiving, and spent a good portion of the holiday loosening our belts and travelling to North Jersey to peek in on the lives of Tony and his family. I realize I’m about four years behind the curve here, but I have to say this is a fantastic show. Jen and I are totally hooked.
I finally got a sheet of UV glass cut for three gifts my house presented me when I began demolishing the basement: a collection of Tijuana bibles fell from the ceiling over the old bathroom as I tore the tongue and groove down. (Additionally, I was presented with a series of letters to Santa and a series of longshoreman’s pay stubs over the old kitchen sink, a very old and used tampon in the bathroom, and an envelope containing $50 in bills circa 1969 up front in the old closet.) In doing some research on the eight-pagers, I found a link to a book on the subject as well as some other sites. It’s nice to have them framed, finally.
backyard progress, lakewood avenue, 10.27
I burned a ton of CD’s last night in an attempt to get backed up files off all the various machines laying around the house. Let it not be said I am a careless person—I think I now have about four backups of the freelance work I did back in the Greycube days. Speaking of, I’ll be getting a final-final payout from Greycube this week from Dan; with that, the enterprise will officially be over.
I heard this on NPR a few weeks ago and was fascinated, now I’m finally linking to the story. NPR has done a fantastic job of programming, and it’s nice to see their site is not a bastard stepchild.
BMWFilms sent me a notice that Hostage, their first in the 2002 series of movies, has been released; It’s directed by John Woo and it’s very good. As much as I like the backstory beginning, I love the original car focus of the first series—I realize they are advertising their whole line of cars, but I don’t think the Driver would be tooling around in a Z4 convertible. The 7-series was a much better choice of vehicle. It’s also good to see they have lots of hidden features like last year.
chevrolet, eastern avenue, 10.14
I got a cryptic call from my ex-girlfriend last night, asking me to do a favor for her and our cat, whom she took when she moved out. I had just gotten back from scuba class, and my hair still stank of chlorine from the pool and cigarette smoke from the instructor’s ashtray after we took him to celebrate our final pool dive. I played the first message- the same jerk who keeps calling me about “Debt Consolidation” (but not as annoying—or as creepy—as the used car dealer who folded up a newspaper ad in a plain number ten envelope, with a cryptic Post-It attached that said, “Bill, this looks like a great bargain for you.”) and erased that; the second one I mistook for Jen’s boss at first, by the way she pronounced her name. I think she’s going to ask me to take the cat back, but I’m not sure. Only a call tonight will tell.
fell's point, 9.18
Credit Suisse First Boston, the scheduled underwriter for the IPO of a company I used to work for, is in big doo-doo for insider manipulation of stock ratings. D’oh! (I spent part of last night reading a copy of Fortune magazine from here at the office about white-collar crime.)
CNN just redesigned their site. Good or bad? Discuss.
Arrrrrrggghhh. I’m still trying to organize my drives with OSX, and it’s becoming a nightmare. Trying to organize all my files in one coherent place, and then having the paranoia that won’t let me throw anything away is a bad mixture. I’m attempting to burn copies of Stuffit archives onto PC discs (I don’t have a Mac burner currently) and then put them away. Meanwhile, juggling three different bootable drives is getting tedious, especially when fonts, programs, and files are all looking in certain places for things they need.
- I need a copy of Suitcase or ATM for OSX.
- I need a CD burner pronto.
- I need an OS how-to book badly.
Sunset over the Archie Bunker backyard, 9.10
Tonight Matt rolls into town from San Francisco. I probably won’t get to see him tonight, but tomorrow some other friends have organized a party and I’ll see some folks that have been AWOL for a year or so. I’m really happy to get together with some of the old crew and I’ll be sure to take a lot of pictures for everyone.
OS X looks real nice, but I can’t install it on a remote FireWire drive, and I don’t have the star-head screwdriver here to switch out my drives. So it will have to wait for sometime in the next couple of days.
I like when good things infiltrate mass media. This made me smile. It was a good episode, too.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.