I’ve got a lot of the templates set up in my local copy of Movable Type, and now that I’ve been immersed in it for a week, it’s making a lot more sense. I guess it didn’t help me at first using a year-old book geared for the previous version, but between that and the internet I’ve figured out quite a bit of this on my own. Stay tuned…
In other geek news, I reformatted a spare drive, loaded OS9, put RAM, a battery, and the hard drive back in the busted iMac, plugged it in, and…watched as the screen went dim, the power shut off, and a wisp of ozone-laced smoke wafted out of the grillework. Looks like the flyback transformer finally barfed, rendering it useless. Not that I need it anyway, but I’m always up for a challenge.
There’s not much else to tell—between work and freelance, I haven’t had much time to sit still. Jen, however, cooked me a roast chicken in her dutch oven last night and got me to stay on the couch for almost the whole duration of CSI.
Funny to hear the correspondent on our local NPR affiliate’s technology show pronounce the word “stymied” as “stemmied” during a segment on older workers being afraid of newer technology. Perhaps we younger workers shouldn’t be afraid of dictionaries.
Inspiration. I’m in the middle of a creative funk. My plan was to have a new weblog (for the record, let me tell you that I hate that word) up and running on a new domain by the middle of the month. It’s turning out to be harder than I thought it would. Part of the problem is that I’m trying to design a new look for the site, and I want to build something beautiful, but I’m having a lot of problems making anything work. I was going to use a variation on one of the canned templates at first, but then I decided to make something new and clean. Most of my previous work has been very flat and one-dimensional, so I started playing with depth, which quickly looked gimmicky and trendy.
Then I played with a radical design, dropping a photo in the middle of the grid and running the columns around it. It was nice, but I want to get this thing live this year, and I know that wrestling the CSS/PHP to make it work the way I want would take too long—in between two freelance projects, this would be the bastard stepchild. So I went back to some of the photos I was taking last year to find a good unused subject to start from. I got depressed, because most of the photos I took last year were documentary (celebrations or home renovation) and not artistic like the ones I took in 2002-03, when I got my first camera and shot everything I saw. Yesterday I got an idea looking at the control panel on the elevator here at work to use it as navigation, but after an hour of Photoshop wrangling I decided to scrap it—I didn’t want white type on a black background anyway.
The other issue I have is what to keep and what to toss, and how to organize what stays in. Do I keep the month-based calendar for the archives, or toss it in favor of four year-based links? Do I make the music section a sideblog? (Yes.) Do I add a sideblog for links? (Probably.) Do I keep links to all the photos? (Not likely-it’ll be a separate page from now on.) Do I add a rotating photo somewhere? (possibly.)
Fortunately, some of the photos I was looking at that I took in 2003 started my brain working. As a sidenote, I have to underline what other people have said-it’s not the camera that takes good/bad pictures, it’s the photographer. Many of the shots I took with a crappy, second gen point-and-shoot are as good, if not better than the ones I shot with the G3.
Geek, Take Two. There’s a blue 400mhz iMac sitting in our basement without RAM, a hard drive, or a battery, because the screen is dead. A year ago I was in the middle of setting it up with OSX, and accidentally kicked out the power cord. After that, it ceased to work properly. I looked and looked for any kind of fixit advice online, and found nothing. Having stumbled across some new information this morning, I’m going to mount a rescue mission in the next couple of days to see if I can’t further my score in raising the dead.
Jen and I got about a months’ worth of social contact this weekend, something we really haven’t done in a long time. Friday night we had our friend Dave over for dinner and the resurrection of his main music drive, which had crashed catastrophically the previous week. He brought over his new Mini for us to drool over (my review: absolutely beautiful engineering. Fast, QUIET, and elegant. One drawback: only one FireWire port. However, we will own one) and we stuffed him full of lasagna and PBR while waiting for the progress bar on Disk Warrior to inch rightwards. Success was achieved early Saturday morning, and we sent him into the darkness knowing his music collection was safe. (Disk Warrior comes recommended.)
Saturday we knocked around town running errands and enjoying the sunshine; later that evening we stopped over to our neighbors’ house for pizza, beer, and caught up with the latest local news. Sunday we took up Dave’s offer to visit his church, and sat in on the 10:30 service. The service was very modern, very upbeat, and the sermon was a thoughtful reflection on child-rearing that had Jen and I talking over our coffee for an hour after we left. Later in the day I started on the trimwork and made my way up the stairs to the hallway, covering all the doorframes but one with a coat of fresh white paint. Oh. My. God. It’s like a brand new house up there.
We are the proud owners of a used 400mhz G3 tower, bought off Craigslist this morning for a very good price. This will make a good backup system for Jen to work on until we buy a faster Mini or other up-to-date machine, and it came with a full-size keyboard and optical mouse, as well as a Jaz drive and ½gig of RAM.
In the other good news column, the repairs to the Saturn were almost $50 cheaper than what they quoted, so we’re pretty happy with that.
Shit. Somebody’s got hold of my bankcard number and has been dropping incremental charges of $1 on me for the past couple of months; I caught it finally when I saw they had upped a charge to $25. Looking around the internet, I read about another fellow’s experience and the sobering news that it’s going to be a hard road to clean up this mess. From what one person writes in the comments, the companies billing me (Trilegant, Faces.com) are in bed with somebody else that I have purchased through and sold me and my information down the river. Great. The interesting thing is that they claim I went to netflip.com and signed up for the “service”—with my old mailing address. From what I’ve read, it’s some kind of opt-out direct mail scam where you are signed up if you don’t mail them back something, a la Columbia House. So, my advice is to carefully scrutinize your bank statements (I had gotten lazy in the last two months) and make sure you’re not getting scammed.
Oy, With The Howling. Jen called to let me know that Penn is in a bad way—yowling, farting, limping… the poor cat has been on so many medicines it’s a wonder he’s not on the street giving $5 favors away for a snort of Special K. Jen has an appointment this afternoon with another doctor to see if he can figure out what’s going on.
4:50pm update. Jen called to let me know that Penn’s bowels opened up all over the inside of his cage, and that it is like no other substance she has ever smelled in her life. I will bring my wife pretty, fragrant flowers tonight for dealing with this mess.
Read this and try not to laugh.
5:09pm. OSX 10.2 is running, albeit slowly, but successfully on Renie’s old beige G3. There are problems getting a DHCP address—smells like the router may have 10baseT support turned off.
Damn The Torpedoes Dept. Jen and I had a very impromptu discussion about our plans to travel to Europe for our first anniversary. Given that the list of stuff we need to get done is as long as my arm—and if I auctioned that arm off on Ebay I’d still not have enough money to pay for it all —we’ve been holding off on making any solid plans. This morning we talked about doing all the stuff we’ve been planning (floors sanded, new bed, etc.) and making reservations for Europe in spite of all that stuff. We’re probably going to just *gulp* charge it and pay it off as we go, because gathering the money together before May doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. (And, honestly, if we didn’t have both vehicles and all our credit cards paid off, there’s no way in hell we’d do this.)
Sigh. If this Scout wasn’t that hideous shade of yellow, I’d actually try to figure out a way to buy it. (Clean Scouts on the East Coast for less than $10k are hard to find.) | I purchased the ‘Texas’ T-shirt for my wife last week, and it showed up yesterday, but apparently ‘medium’-sized women’s shirts are made for three-year-old boys. I own socks that are larger than this shirt. So that gets put in the ‘exchange’ pile.
In the ‘positive’ column, there’s a fresh white coat of primer on 99% of the downstairs hallway, and it’s begun creeping up the walls to the second floor. There will be some creative ladderwork in my immediate future to clean up the rest of the wallpaper paste, some minor patching, and then we paint. After two and a half months of stumbling through clouds of fine white dust, the end is in sight!
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This evening, over a dinner of grilled steak, broccoli, and avocado with PBR in front of a new episode of Lost, I discovered my wife and I shared an adolescent love for Hong Kong Phooey. (One of my favorite memories of my grandma Dugan was sitting at her kitchen table in front of a pair of mini-Frosted Flakes boxes while she adjusted the rabbit ears on the TV so that we could watch cartoons through the snow.)
Gift. Looks like we have next Monday off, which should give me a bunch of time to finish off some projects at the house. At the top of the list: Finishing the hallway, which is creeping slowly toward its conclusion. There’s some finish sanding to be done, some caulking, and then I think we’re ready for paint. I’m also going to take advantage of the forecasted good weather to see if I can’t get the Scout into the garage.
I may have to give this application a try in the next couple of weeks. Apparently it’s a stand-alone app for iTunes which will metatag all of your untagged music, complete with album art. The only hangup I have is whether or not it would overwrite my current custom tags or ratings.
I’m also going to try to install OSX on Renie’s old beige G3 and see if I can make a FrankenComputer out of it, just for fun. (I have no idea what I could do with it right now, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.)
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?
What was a bleary, semi-conscious but cheerful mood has turned ugly and black, courtesy of my work computer. I’m getting really tired of working on four-year-old technology, both here and at home. I’ve recently considered the possibility of a new laptop to replace the five-year-old Powerbook I’m on right now, but with our priority list remaining full and unchanging, I’ll probably have to put it off a while longer. And a Mini, while inexpensive and fast, is still out of my current price range. (It’s sad that over the years my target price range has dropped at the same rate as the street pricing of technology.) As for the work computer, I don’t know if my bitching (and kicking) has changed anybody’s priority levels either. Go to your happy place…
Saturday: HTML-> PHP-> library -> Photoshop-> lunch -> HomeSite-> dinner-> HomeSite-> beer-> posting-> sleep (3am.)
Sunday: HTML-> HomeSite-> posting-> duck, potatoes, chocolate-> Photoshop-> beer-> Illustrator-> HTML-> posting-> Illustrator-> tea-> Photoshop-> posting-> sleep (3:30am.)
Yeah, not a good day for the home team. I want a beer.
Cranky McBitchyPants. Lemme get on a soapbox here and just rant about how fucking pathetic Windows XP is. I have a “new” machine at work which runs moderately well at best to begin with: XP is a resource pig. When I open Internet Explorer, the system grinds to a halt and I’m immediately beset with popup adware and my browser settings are hijacked. Scanning the drive for Malware reveals, on average, about 350 bad files, from actual running processes to cookies I don’t want. I quarantine everything, remove it, and my browser gets hijacked again. All ActiveX permissions are turned off; MS’s “security” settings are all on High, for whatever good it does me. I’ve spent about two hours playing the ‘remove the spyware’ game today, and it’s getting to the point where I want to stab myself in the eye with a pencil. I want to go back to 2000 Server. I never had problems like this on Server.
Before anybody helpfully suggests to “use Mozilla” or “use a Mac,” BEWARE: I already do. Running IE is not something I choose to do; it’s required in my alternate life as a web designer.
Goddamn waste-of-time POS.
Research on the cellphone thing has been coming along. Luckily, an issue of Consumer Reports just came across our doorstep with a comprehensive article on wireless carriers and phones. From what I understand, Cingular’s network (GSM) is well-suited towards phones with good technology like Bluetooth. However, the type of digital service and lack of analog backup means the coverage is a lot spottier, especially in rural areas. All the decent phone deals they offer (“Free cameraphone!”) are for a 2-year contract which is shit; I want a one-year deal with a good phone for cheap. The storefront sells that Sony Ericsson handset for $99/2-year deal or 199$/1-year deal while online it’s free/2-years; they have a Motorola handset with Bluetooth and a camera for $129/1-year deal. So, in essence:
- If I want a phone that syncs automatically with my computer, I have to use Cingular;
- If I want to use Cingular, I have to put up with spotty coverage in places like mid-Pennsylvannia, and;
- If I want a one-year contract, I’m going to have to pay at least $100 for a phone.
In other news, I’m mucking around with Apple Desktop Client right now-it’s essentially VNC for headless Macs. Very nice, although it’s a bit balky with a 4-year old pair of G3’s. I can share out a bunch of stuff (it’s weird to see the laptop’s screen on the iMac) but I’m having problems taking control of the iMac itself.
My Bad. Perhaps I should clarify my brief comment from yesterday regarding the textbook stickers:
“The schools placed the stickers after more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life.”
The stickers read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
I understand why these parents were upset, and I can see why the school board chose to put the stickers in the books. I can also see why other parents sued to have the stickers removed. Practice your faith. Teach your children. But please don’t teach them that one God is better than the other, or that somebody else’s faith/belief system is wrong. My personal knee-jerk mistrust colored my original post; My apologies to those I offended. Thanks for the smack upside the head, Dave.