Did you feel the earth swivel on its axis last night at about 11:30 EST? Did plates fly out of the cupboards and crash on the ground? Did you feel a sense of unease at any time last night while you laid in bed watching Leno?

Well, that was me, sorry. See, I failed math in the 11th grade. Miserably. I never paid attention in class, so any math concepts I picked up on were purely by chance, not due to the shining success of the American public school system. I thought I was safe when I went off to an art school for my undergraduate degree, but I should have known better than to try an escape. In a career that’s seen a few shifts in direction, eventually settling into web design, I’ve found that my lack of math skills is an anchor preventing me from doing a lot of things that might make me more money.

At the library yesterday, I found a book called Algebra Demystified which had a good mixture of explanation to examples, and cracked it open last night before going to bed. Starting out with fractions, I made it through to page 15 or so before turning the light off, remembering some things and relearning some others. The goal is to get through most of the book before I have to return it (a total of about four weeks). It’s 422 pages, which means I’ve got to crank through fifteen pages a night—last night that took about half an hour, which sounds just about right.

I went ahead and did it, even though a chorus of voices in my head told me not to spend the money. The Apple Store was a zoo last night at 5:30, and I had to wait around a while for a concierge to see me standing in line behind a flock of interesting people:

Hipster Dude and Friend, who sat idly at the otherwise empty workshop desk playing with Photoshop, checking out the chicks across the store,

Obsessive Compulsive iMac Man, who unpacked and packed and unpacked and packed an iMac about six times in front of the Genius Bar, standing directly in the way of any tech who tried to come out to the showroom floor,

Tiny iPhone Girl, who walked in expecting to talk to someone immediately about something, and when faced with the idea of making an appointment, blinked no less than seventeen times while the shiny perfumed gears in her head crashed together in an attempt to make a decision,

Screamy iPod Return It NOW Woman, who kept throwing an old Shuffle on the iPod Bar and yelling at the tech, who calmly repeated the store policy about reservations five times while she huffed and wheezed and screamed and interrupted someone else’s reservation, causing all of us other people to roll our eyes and stare plainly.

Once I caught the young concierge’s eye, and told her quietly that I’d like an iPhone, we did a dance around the screamy woman and all the other people sitting at the Bar to complete the transaction, and I got the hell out of there.

Setup was a breeze, and it took minutes to sync up with my calendars and address book, as well as my Safari bookmarks. It’s a beautiful piece of gadgetry, really—the first time the phone, iPod and Palm have come together in one package to be useful. I think I’m going to be very happy with it.

Looks like I’m cleared for takeoff on a new iPhone…no new updates to the hardware, just software additions for the time being. I kind of figured they’d wait until fall to refresh it, but I wanted to be sure.

A few weeks before Christmas, I was given a Leopard install disc to play with. A few days later I found a fantastic deal on an iMac through Craigslist, and finally upgraded my desktop workstation from an ancient G3 built in 1999 to a maxed out 17″ G5. Good grief, what a difference. Apart from a loud fan and a tendency to spit CDs out the side slot like a pissed-off llama, the iMac has been perfect. And playing around with Leopard has been educational; there’s lots of new features and upgrades to the system that I love.

One of the things I got excited about was Automator 2.0. I’d like to be able to use Automator in Leopard to make my life easier, now that I’ve got a faster workstation. I have a laundry list of specialized workflows I’d love to be able to script, not only for me but for my consulting clients, for example: A folder action that wakes up, scrubs newly added fonts through Font Doctor and adds them to Font Agent Pro in a new set when they are dropped into a specific folder. (In my experience, Font Doctor’s Automator action does not recognize single fonts and instead runs a check of all fonts on the hard drive. Annoying.)

I’ve already created one with the built-in actions that ship with Transmit to back up all files on this site on a recurring date in iCal and then email me upon completion. This is how it should work: easy, intuitive, functional.

However, I’m finding that simple tasks that should be easy are not easy at all—like connecting to a server on a local network. Now that I’ve got two machines again, I’d like to set up an action that keeps specific files on both machines synchronized. Sounds simple, right? Nope. Using the “Connect to Servers” action presents me with an action that has no inputs: I can’t specify what server I want to connect to, or figure out how to do so. From the looks of things, I need to have a server pre-chosen somehow. Where? How?

Why is this so hard? And where is the documentation? Lazyweb has no helpful links yet.

Writing from the Panera this morning, because Verizon DSL is slow as dirt and the tech support dude couldn’t fix the problem inside the tight confines of his script. We have limited connectivity at the house, which means slow upload is now no upload, and download speed is somewhere around a 28.8 baud modem. Meanwhile, I still can’t post pictures to Flickr because it’s banned at this location. Good times!

So, I didn’t buy the Vespa. Nor did I buy the Kustom bass amp (which, incidentally, sold for $401 with no reserve on eBay). Instead, I found a couple of deals on Craigslist that I’m rather happy about this morning:

For $35, a HP LaserJet 4000n: After adding a $98 toner cartridge, I upgraded our office printer to an EnergyStar-compliant 1200dpi workgroup printer that both Macs and PCs can use. Our previous printer, a 14-year-old Apple Laserwriter, was showing its age: printing any document, no matter how trivial, took at least three minutes to process and spool up before spitting out paper. It didn’t like expensive paper anymore (accordion jams look so good on invoices). It had no provision for PCs, and the only reason we hung on to it was because I found two OEM printer cartridges on Craigslist for $30 last spring.

For $200, I found a 22″ Apple Cinema Display to upgrade Jen’s 19″ LCD—almost doubling her viewing area. Now she can see two-page spreads on her monitor without scrolling. I may need to replace the backlight at some point, but for now, it looks pretty as hell.

When I was a freshman in college, I decided to build a pair of stereo speakers from scratch. With help from a book I bought, I learned the basic theory behind acoustics and drew up a checklist of parts required. While they were all available at the Radio Shack, I knew I wanted something made with more quality.

Looking through some audio magazines at the bookstore, I copied the addresses of the most local showrooms I could find, and then took the train down to New York City to visit every car audio shop on Canal Street to find a pair of 12″ bass speakers. With the spec sheet in hand, I did all the required calculations (yes, the guy who failed math in his junior year figured out algebra, proof that if one is motivated enough, miracles can happen) to get the correct dimensions for a speaker enclosure, and I cut the particle board by hand in my parents’ garage. Finding the correct tweeters was difficult, but not as difficult as finding the crossovers, little electrical capacitors that send the right frequency to the right speaker: this was before the internets, when we had to do shit like go to the library to look stuff up.

With a $8 soldering iron, several feet of dampening foam, and a cordless drill, I assembled the cabinets, sealed them up and plugged them into my amplifier. And to my surprise, they sounded good. Really good. It got so that I could crank them up to half my amp’s volume and they’d shake the windows without distorting—but, then, the speakers were built to lift the wheels of a car off the road. They came in handy for parties that way.

The only downside was that they are butt-ugly; unfinished particleboard is as aesthetically pleasing as wet cement. My hand-held circular sawing job now just looks like I hired a drunk to build them. So they sit in the basement, where Geneva has been using them as a scratching post (thankfully I have guards over the speaker cones). During the Great Flood, they got their toes wet and a permanent stain set in.

I saw this article on Toolmonger today about DIY speaker cabinets, and it made me think about my project again. I’ve wanted to buy some quality poplar and put my carpentry skills to use rebuilding the cabinets for some time now, but I’ve put it on the back burner. Perhaps after Thanksgiving, when I get the cabinet finished, I’ll take a weekend or two and show my speakers some love.

This afternoon, I decided to check out the Vespa I was threatening to buy a couple of weeks ago. In the time since I first saw it, it had been listed on eBay and failed to meet the reserve—which should have been the first hint.

The sales guy was helping some other folks outside, so I got some quality time alone with the scooter. It was quickly apparent that the photos on Craigslist did not really describe the condition that well. The chrome is all there, but the deck is bent on either side from several accidents. The “paint job” looks even worse in person than in the photos, and the previous owner decided to slap some dumb stickers over top of that. The seat only had a few rips, but there was a lot of rust evident in the bodylines and underneath the deck, and I’m not interested in battling rust again.

It was a nice dream, but I’m passing on this particular scooter. I’ll have to spend more money for a fixer-upper that’s got fewer fundamental problems, which is a lesson I’ve learned the hard way.

I had to stop into the Apple Store to have them look at my MBP— it recently started shutting itself off after one or two minutes’ battery usage. The Genius looked it over, verified I had the correct firmware (apparently there was an update that fixed random shutdowns), and then pulled the battery out…to find a good-sized bulge along the bottom. WHOA. Without another word, he said, “OK, we’ll get you a new one,” and when he couldn’t find one in the back (internally identified as a “part”) he walked out to the store, pulled one off the shelf (identified as “stock”), opened the box, slapped it in, and bid me farewell with a smile.

God, I love proper customer service.

I’m sitting in a Panera (thank GOD for you, Panera) with all the other laptop warriors wishing I had a pair of headphones to drown out the sound of a bleached blonde selling a Ponzi pitch to a frumpy middle-aged couple. Seriously, when anybody shows you the pyramid diagram and gives you the subscription shpiel, big fireworks should explode over your head spelling out the word SCAM. Or, maybe SUCKER.

So far, it’s Big Monopoly Carriers 2, Bill 0. Our DSL modem, a Westel unit stamped with a Bell Atlantic logo that dates back to the early days of DSL service at my old house circa 1998, finally crapped out yesterday at 3PM. A half-hour of dropped calls, one conversation with a perky CSR in Bangalore, and $39.99 later, we’ll have a new modem in 6-8 business days. I think one of the reasons they shipped customer service overseas is that it becomes painfully evident the person on the phone can’t do anything to speed up the process, even when threatened with cancellation of service. I’m tempted to call the cable company to see how long it would take to get someone out to install a cable modem, but I’d bet it would be about the same.

Speaking of Comcast, they sent a tech guy out to a consulting client of mine to hook up a new cable modem with digital voice. When faced with an Airport Express, he balked, loaded some kind of proprietary Comcast setting on her laptop to get it online, then cleared out. My client’s Airport Express won’t pick up a DHCP address from the modem, nor will my laptop, and I’m stumped. All efforts to renew the address from the command line met with the same result. Even sharing the connection wirelessly from her laptop did not work, which tells me something’s funky with Comcast. But, then, is that really a surprise?

The bottom line is that my email connectivity will be spotty for the next week or so while the new modem gets shipped by donkey from Tasmania.