Yesterday Jen and I took a drive down to the Jessup area, past the prison(s) and stopped at a nondescript warehouse in the middle of nowhere. The State of Maryland takes all their old stuff there and sells it off to folks that might have use for it. What use someone would have for thirty identical 14.4K modems I have no idea; It’s entirely up to the buyer. They did have some cool stuff—16MM projectors (about six of them), a quartet of barber’s chairs, office furniture circa 1970, ancient sewing machines, and fields of file cabinets.
Todd and I have been down there a couple of times, and sometimes there’s interesting stuff to be had, but yesterday nothing really caught our eye. I guess it’s sort of like a flea market—some days it’s hot, and some days it’s not.
On today’s to-do list: I’m going to head over to the local library and see iff I can dig up anything about our house, the families that lived here, or the neighborhood I live in. I’d love to find some pictures of the house in earlier days to compare it with.
This morning, I got the first look at a site I designed eight months ago. A third party took the design and implemented it, and it looks absolutely hideous. I’m not going to link to it (obviously), or mention the third party here, because that would be unprofessional, but I am going to admit to how disappointed and angry this makes me.
On my way out the door to clean off Jen’s car, a fellow across Frederick Road hailed me, so I waved him over. It turns out he’s the son of the doctor who used to own the house—the man everybody else seems to have met except me. We chatted for about ten minutes in the cold, and I have to admit the description I’d been given is pretty accurate. I don’t know for sure, but I think he was pretty well fucked up at 11AM. It was too cold and windy to smell his breath. He seemed very happy to know my last name was Irish. We parted ways after I invited him to stop by sometime (it was the neighborly thing to do, even if I’m not looking forward to it) but I think I’d have to have him chaperoned by his sisters if he was to actually set foot in the house. (There’s no way he’s crossing the doorstep if my wife is here alone.)
Finally, one of my clients—actually the end-user of one of my clients, who I work pretty closely with these days—sent me a box of molasses clove cookies for the holidays. I hope they’re good.
UPDATE: These cookies are CRACK! They are so good, I’m fighting the urge to run downstairs and eat the whole pile. AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH!
Well, after three weeks of an exceptionally busy schedule, tons of freelance work, and several well-timed checks coming in the door, there’s been some exciting stuff going on around here. Last night I had the second of two unusual and unorthodox interviews over two pints of Bass, and it looks like I might be joining a new company—doing web development again. More on all this later, but keep yer fingers crossed.
Well, isn’t that interesting. The game I helped build at the company I used to work for got written up in Wired magazine a couple of days ago. Pretty cool. If you click the second image link, you can see part of the interface I designed and some of XLT’s buildings.
This weekend, Jen and I went out and seriously looked at large-format printers. She’s been working on identities for a client, and our aging, 13-year-old Laserwriter 630 has started being balky after four years of faithful service.
Faithful readers may remember my research from the old weblog, and the same basic problems applied here as well: Give me reliable tabloid-sized color printing from OS X, out of the box, for under $500—without any PostScript or other driver hassles. We revisited the same two contenders, a Canon and an Epson, and found a new entry, built by HP.
The Canon apparently doesn’t like non-Canon brand paper, and the HP looked nice (network card, lots of slots on the front for memory cards), but I’m hesitant these days to buy anything HP after my last experiences with their hardware. We settled on the Epson 1280 and brought it home. Today, trying to distract ourselves from the noise downstairs, we hooked it up and got it printing. Boy, it’s nice. Clean, crisp prints with little or no hassle, directly from Illustrator, Quark, and Safari.
Now that my wife is working from the house, she’s going to need a color printer for proofing files. Instead of running ot the stupid Kinko’s every five minues, I found a review of the Minolta/Magicolor 2450 online, which apparently has PostScript support, an Ethernet jack, and also supports PictureBridge connectivity, which means we could theoretically just hook our cameras straight to the printer and make prints. Drawbacks: it’s only 8.5×14″, which makes tabloid-sized printing, or letter-size with bleeds impossible. It’s also $700, which is pricey, but the alternative is a $500 11×17″ inkjet and a $300 software RIP to emulate PostScript (blech). I’ll have to keep an eye on this.
Whoa-wait a minute, what’s this? An external, 160GB hard drive with three FireWire ports and four USB ports on the back? (Brand name: MicroNet MiniMate) All in the same form factor and ready to roll, for $138? Here’s a larger sibling, the 250GB version, for $190. I may be looking at a $700 Mini instead of a $2K iMac after all…
This weekend Jen and I ventured up to the Towson mall to get replacements for our glasses, which were responsible for seven of the last ten Richter-scale headaches recorded in the greater Baltimore area this summer. Jen has an inner ear more sensitive than a baby’s bottom, and she’s been fighting the urge to puke for about the last three weeks now. Repeated adjustments to her frames have left them bent and her eyes completely fucked up.
My own glasses have been a travesty for longer than I care to admit. Two years ago, I paid top dollar for Ray-Ban frames, and the plastic on them has been delaminating and flaking off for the last year. The expensive lenses have gotten increasingly cloudy and hazed over; when I put on the new glasses, I felt like I’d just had sucessful cataract surgery. The new frames are much the same as the old ones, although they’re a different manufacturer and not tortoise-shell. Jen found a pair of frames that have highlights of gold and blue which accent her eyes and skin tone perfectly. She’s still on the fence about the prescription, but she sure does look durn pretty.
While we waited for the lenses to be cut, we ventured over to the Apple store to lay hands on a Nano, which is about the most beautiful little piece of hardware I’ve ever seen. Apparently there are some issues about scratching screens, but overall it’s very sexy. I also looked at the larger hardware, and realized that I’m better off waiting to pick up a 17″ or 20″ iMac than spending money on a Mini and another monitor—I wasn’t aware that iMacs had full-size harddrives, which is crucial to our home upgrading plans. So I’ll have to wait out a few more checks for that to happen. (a 20″ model with a gig of RAM is roughly $2K.)
How cool is it that the new version of iPhoto handles movies? I always wondered why it didn’t recognize them as viable media, and I was always worried I’d erase movies that it didn’t copy over. Nice. (It’s also about 300% faster on this machine.)
Widgets: Sweet.
Apple; THANK YOU for getting rid of those dropped off the network. And THANK YOU for fixing/modifying Windows logins to recognize my Keychain. Not having to enter a password every time I mount a shared drive: Priceless.
Built-in Superdrive (CD/DVD-writer combination): Sweet.
The screen on this machine is easily twice as bright as the screen on my Pismo. That could be from age, or damage, or the fact that the technology is just better. And the keyboard feel is wonderful.
I’m happy to bid adieu to the old hockey-puck power adapter.
Improve OS X (Tiger) Security.
Good info in here, stuff I’ve not heard before.
I don’t like gambling all that much. I always thought it was kind of stupid to go to someplace like Vegas and actually spend money to lose—especially because everybody realizes it’s rigged. It’s kind of like expecting a politician to be honest. I spend too much of my life trying to make money to be stupid enough to give it to people I don’t like. That having been said, I don’t get the new poker craze that seems to be sweeping the nation. Card games are fun. Poker is fun for about fifteen minutes, until the assholes show up and ask to play “Texas Two-Card Flipside Straight Holdem”. Um, What? I’ve just finished my fourth beer, and you’re asking me to learn a game more complicated than my SAT’s? Sure, you can play nickel and dime leagues, and that’s cool, I guess, but I just never got into the whole thing. I think it’s because I’d rather be doing something active with my free time, like sleeping.
When I was twelve, our camper broke down on the way to our summer vacation spot, and we limped to a repair shop on a Friday night. Having nothing else to do for two days, my parents taught us Canasta, a particularly complicated card game involving multiple decks of cards. I think this was probably to keep from having to kill us. If you asked me to play it now, I’d be hard pressed to remember the first thing about it other than the cramps in my hands from holding all those cards, but I’d probably enjoy it. Plus, my Gramma Dugan was a Canasta genius, and she was fun to play cards with.
I think the only thing worse than losing money playing poker could be the people that go to watch other people play poker. It’s kind of like watching people play pool. If I’m watching somebody play pool, it’s because I’m waiting to play after them. Pool is ancillary to being with friends and drinking beer; it’s an activity that makes the evening more exciting than sitting on somebody’s couch and watching reruns of “Desperate Housewives”.
I suppose it’s fitting, then, that all the comment spam I’m getting here at Idiot Central comes from “party poker” sites and online casinos. Here’s an industry built around the need to play poker against a computer. Nevermind the fact that it’s a computer in Costa Rica, it’s programmed to keep you playing long enough to lose lots of money, and it’s tied in directly to your credit card. I guess I just want to know: What occupation pays well enough to be able to afford to lose so much money gambling? Because I need that job. Maybe it’s got something to do with moving to Costa Rica and opening an online casino…