This morning I made myself late to work. I threw my stuff in the Jeep, kissed my wife goodbye, and walked around the back of the house to water our fledgling vegetable garden. Along the way, I had to replant several gladiola bulbs in their pots, due to our local squirrels digging for treasure, and carry the pots into the greenhouse for safekeeping. The vegetables all look healthy and good so far. Two eggplants have recovered from their move—I thought I was going to lose one for a day or so, but it perked right back up yesterday. The tomatoes all look healthy and happy. (Strangely, one variety recommends “damp soil” and the other asks for “daily watering”.) The red and green peppers are both looking strong.
Oddly enough, though, the thing that makes me happiest is that the cucumbers, which I planted from seed, are germinating well. I use a watering can to reach the back of the greenhouse, and the first slug of water washed the soil off the top of one of the hills I made. Tucked in together were five or six seeds, all sprouting sucessfully. I covered them back up and watered the rest of the plot, thinking about home-grown tomato and cucumber salad for dinner in August.
Next up is to get another plastic tub like the one I have (I’m using one of those under-the-bed storage containers drilled with drainage holes) and plant my pole beans.
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In other geek news, I converted one of the interior pages on my main site to a mixture of about 75% CSS and 25% old-skool table-based layout. This has been something that’s brewing for a long time, and I’m pretty happy with the results. When all is said and done, the page size will have decreased by about half, the style sheets will be consolidated, and the information will be updated (I only go up to 2003 on the design page—har har) Unfortunately it blows up in IE6. There’s also an issue with Mozilla and my popup script that I haven’t deciphered yet, and some other niggling issues to be addressed. But the heavy lifting has been done, thank God.
The 2005 Lockard Reunion is being held in North Carolina in a month or so, and I’d like to be prepared this time. The last reunion was a resounding success, bringing Jen’s father’s family together in Orlando for a fun weekend of swapping stories, photos, and history while staying in the Land of the Rat (and providing an opportunity to see Ms. Bonny Rose for the first time.) I was fortunate enough to meet many folks who I’d heard of but not met, including Jane, the matriarch of the family, who could have passed for a Dugan easily in personality and likeness.
One of the incredible things about the Lockards is the amount of historical information they have in their collective posession. We were handed boxes of old photographs, and a good portion of the visit was spent filling in the names of the proud-looking people who stared back at us from the yellowing prints. In an effort to make copies of the photos (many of which are the only ones in existence), I tried to shoot as many as I could in macro mode with my digital camera, but the effort was unscientific and ultimately dissapointing.
This time, I’m bringing the laptop and a flatbed scanner, so that we can continue archiving the pictures and make CD’s for people to distribute. Our current scanner is a third-hand UMAX with minimal support for the Mac and no software for OS X. The software is a buggy OS9 port from Windows that crashes more than it works.
I’m looking for a low-cost replacement that’s portable and native to OS X, but I can’t seem to find a decent recommendation online. (One of the Google search result links even bounced me to a porn site, which was a little disturbing, as I was sitting at my desk at work.) The supported scanners on the Apple site are all models I can’t find that currently ship, so I’m stuck with making educated guesses. When I find something and buy it, I’m going to post the results here so that somebody may be able to benefit from my experience. Right now it appears that I’m leaning towards the CanoScan LiDE 35, which has some form of Mac driver (I’d really, REALLY prefer a Photoshop plugin) and is small enough to carry, but unfortunately only has USB 2. FireWire seems to be a $200 add-on for any brand. Anyway, I’m heading to the Office Depot to see if they have one available, and I’ll report back on my findings.
Update: I just got an email reply from a fellow who had posted about a similar search on his weblog:
That seals it.
I have a request for humanity. PLEASE stop using the incorrect Engrish phrase “Your guys'”.
e.g. “I would think that, given your guys’ case, we’d be able to deliver the product by the end of calendar year ’05.”
Bonus points if you’re an employee of a Fortune 500 company and you use it during a conference call.
Goddamn, does that annoy the shit out of me, and I went to fucking art school for my undergraduate degree.
I’d also like to suggest public whippings for anybody with a four-year college degree who still doesn’t recognize the difference between Your and You’re. And let’s all please quit it with the excessive quotation marks around normal, everyday things.
e.g. a sign reading:
“FREE CAR WASH”
“BEST IN TOWN”
“NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY”
Last night I finally got to talk with Jen’s sister Cath and her boyfriend Jason, who have been doing some research on cell providers and phones, and leaving messages on our machine. Jason just picked up the phone I’ve been looking at, and he has nothing but good things to report. I’ve been holding off because of the lack of Bluetooth support in 10.3.X, and I’m hoping that Tiger will support full iSync functionality. (The word seems to be that you can sync the phone with your Mac, but you need the optional Motorola phone-to-USB cable. Thanks, but no.) So I’ll wait it out another couple weeks until the early adopters iron out the bugs in Tiger and I hear that the phone is supported officially.
I got an email out of the blue from our friends Matt and Sophie, who were kind enough to send us a sizable iTunes gift certificate as a wedding present (which was awesome but totally unexpected—they flew all the way out here, and I didn’t want them worrying about a wedding gift as well), which I’ve been sitting on for a week or two. Last night I finally sat down to redeem some music, and started out with a recommendation from Jen: an album by Kasabian, which we decided is a mixture of the Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and Lo-Fidelity Allstars. Next, I hit the record store disease list and picked up the latest from Thievery Corporation, an oldie from Tosca, another oldie from Zero 7, and the latest releases from UNKLE and RJD2. I’m halfway into Since We Last Spoke, and I’m enjoying it completely. (I also take issue with most of the reviews for this record and The Private Press; everybody seems to want another hip-hop turntable jam, but these guys are reaching for something here. I don’t find either album disappointing in the least.) I’m jazzed to hear the UNKLE album (hoping it will be as mind-blowing as the first one) although it seems a lot of folks have been less than impressed. (This critic needs to tone down the personal dissing and actually review the record, in my opinion.)
Finally, the time has come to replace the head unit in my Jeep. Now the radio stations cut out and the casette adapter for my iPod refuses to load. There’s nothing like being stuck on the Baltimore Beltway in the summer with no radio, next to a worthless iPod jammed to the gills with music. Good times!
Update: The RJD2 album is solid. Excellent stuff for any of you DJ Shadow heads out there. The UNKLE album is spotty and not all that exciting—the clips I heard online sounded…better than the real thing, if that’s possible. Zero 7 is good mellow chillout got-work-to-do kind of music. Or for sipping coffee and reading the paper on Saturday morning.
Update Update: The Kasabian album is a pretty groovy mixture of genres-I’m enjoying it tremendously. It’s kind of funny that the singer has a slight Ian Brown vibe going on, because I’ve had Reign by UNKLE going through my head all weekend.
I took some time last night to update a bunch of stuff here at Idiot King Central; Search results will actually resemble the rest of the site and are listed in a format more pleasing to the eye. Most (if not all) of the links on the left are now correctly pointing at their destinations, especially in the Archive sections. I re-arranged the main archive page to fit the output from MT, and tweaked the search bar design a bit for aesthetic purposes. I’m still playing around with the comments design, so that may change a bit over time as I work it out. Overall, you should notice better gas mileage, hear a dialtone every time, and enjoy a 12% decrease on your electric bill.
Upon looking closer at my hosting package, and doing some followup name searches for an as yet unnamed project, I realized that I could have purchased the domain “ofhammers.com”, and then pointed my address to http://bag.ofhammers.com.
Sigh.
But in hindsight, that would have been a pain in the ass to describe the link to somebody—not as bad as del.icio.us, but almost.
“So, it’s h-t-t-p colon forward-slash forward-slash bag dot ofhammers—that’s one word—dot com.”
“what about the double-u double-u double-u?”
“no, bag dot ofhammers dot com.”
“don’t you need the W-W-W? Everybody else has that in their address.”
“no, it’s just bag dot ofhammers dot com.”
“I think you need the W-W-W, dude. That’s not gonna work.”
You get my drift. (I’ve had that conversation several times. I also had a conversation with the know-it-all bizdev douche at the dot com I worked for who grilled me on why our company name didn’t resolve without the W-W-W. I finally had to tell him to complain to IT, and resisted the urge to punch him in the face.)
In other news, I busted out the ink and brushes for another hush-hush project last night and made about fifteen illustrations in an hour, and it felt damn good. There’s something liberating and free about brush and ink; even though the illustration market is already flooded with it, I’m considering doing some more.
Tonight I think I’m going to sit on the couch next to my wife in the same room as our crackledy mattress and sketch some more for the untitled project, and then maybe clean up the rest of this here site; specifically, the archive section currently blows up all to hell. I’m also fighting the urge to redesign the entire damned thing. When I first started, blue was liberating and different from my old site, but now I’m over it, I think.
After about five aborted tries, I finally got the image and caption on my home page to float correctly across all browsers and use the javascript correctly. It seemed that when I got it to work correctly in IE/Win, it would blow up any Mozilla/Safari-based browsers, and vice versa. This evening I applied some of my new learnin’ to crack the code, as it were. Anybody looking at the site through Opera, Camino, et.al., and seeing something funky, please let me know.
This is a baby step in the direction of revamping this whole site into solid CSS, but a good start.
Todd already wrote about this today, but I figure with the combined power of two mighty weblogs, we’ll googlebomb this mutha. A publication cheerfully titled National Defense wrote an article about the game we’re developing. There’s even a little picture there! Of course, the game UI looks completely different now, but no matter. We’re famous!
Having seen the results on Todd’s site and elsewhere on the web, I decided to give Flickr a try. I’m impressed so far with its ease of use and flexibility. I also like the idea of hosting most of my photos offsite from here on out, as bandwith will become an issue at some point.
One thing I’m gonna have to do is compress my photos down from 4MP to something more reasonable to conserve space, so expect the ones I’ve posted so far to get a lot smaller.
Oh, and they were bought by Yahoo this morning. No word on what this means yet.
After some SQL database wrassling, an initial install, unexplained 505 errors and subsequent re-install, I got Movable Type running on the new domain last night. All my templates are moved over, I’ve got the sideblog running (courtesy of MultiBlog by David Rayners), and it looks like the minor bugs are worked out. I still have to design and build the category and archive sections, hook up my empty Flickr account, and do some minor tweaking around the edges, but it’s looking good.
The next step after all that is to update the old logsite and add links from here to there, and add MT-Blacklist so that I don’t get comment spammed.
Overall, the install went easily and well. My only complaint was with my hosting provider’s SQL setup and the MT install directions, which didn’t really go into detail about exactly how to point to the database. I wasn’t even sure I’d created one until I manually re-installed the executable files this morning.