Many thanks to the Cauzzis, who invited me over last night for yummy pot roast and trivia. An evening with friends was exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
10:41am. No word on Jen’s Mom this morning. The phone rings and rings, which means somebody’s on the other line and not picking up.
3:39pm. Holding steady, no changes. Jen is tired, and fighting off a cold of some kind. We’re spending New Year’s down there.
I’ll have to look into this a little further when I get the iMac music server back online: the free ShoutCast music server works with unlimited clients. How it works with clients I have no idea-if it’s a central playlist-oriented setup, I’m not interested, but if it’s a library-oriented setup, like iTunes, I’m very interested. The site is pretty vague about, well, everything, so I’ll have to set it up to try everything out. More on that later.
(I think his technique is a little aggro, however—throwing those elbows around in some of the pits I’ve been in would have earned St. Nick a punch in the back of the neck.) Substitute a little S.O.D. for the supplied soundtrack, and you’ve got yourself a whole bootful of Christmas cheer!
As you may have read elsewhere, Jen’s Mom is fading pretty quickly—the feeling in her legs is gone and she’s now on heavier meds (the stuff Rush Limbaugh was addicted to), which means Christmas is definitely not at our house, and we’re most likely going to have a very subdued holiday.
Kick Myself Dept. Two points down in the karma category this morning, and it’s not even eleven o’clock. Sorry, friends.
Printer Update. After some consultation with the generous Kristen last night, I’ve decided against the Epson printer for a couple of reasons:
- The printer is $400, and the prepress RIP for CMYK files is another $500. Booting into OS9 to print an EPS file from Quark every five minutes does not appeal to either of us.
- The printer model is now discontinued by Epson, and probably due to be replaced with something new.
- Consumables are expensive, don’t last very long, and aren’t UV-safe.
Jen and I tried an offering of sweet & spicy chicken from the new asian cafeteria on Rolling Road last night as an experiment. Usually I stay away from most Chinese food, especially the fast-food variety, because it has detrimental effects on my gastrointestinal system. Let me just say for the record that this experiment was a failure.
Crap. It’s still boggling my mind how much Windows XP sucks. In the month I’ve used it, the computer has been brought to its knees twice by malware clogging up the whole system. After I switched to Mozilla, the problem went away. Now, programs that used to work fine are crashing and burning repeatedly—Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and random bullshit processes in the background. It’s a miracle I can get through a day without clicking through a bug report window at least once.
I should clarify something: I’m using this computer at work, which means the nastiest site I visit is Slashdot. Simply opening Explorer on this machine means the floodgates of crap are open.
Emailing a bunch of designer friends for advice yesterday brought back an interesting (and unexpected) result: Looks like I’m steering towards the Epson instead of the Canon printer. This is a surprise to me, as my last experience with Epson printers had me at the teetering brink of suicide. However, the 1280 looks to be discontinued, and the 2200 is a bit pricey.
A nice man came to the house and crawled all over the roof at 7am yesterday morning; he claims to have fixed our current roof leak problems and to have replaced about 30 slates; he also mentioned that the roof is getting old, that there’s no easy repair for our ice guards, and that the fascia board along the back of the house is coming off, slowly taking the gutter with it. (Cue sound: buckets of money hurled out the window.)
As if the malware, pagefile, and general lousy computer issues I’m having weren’t enough, the breaker on my side of this building is tripping because there are too many computers on at one time. So until further notice, I’m taking my iTunes server offline and going home. Nyah, nyah.
I’m sitting here at work, silently thankful for forgetting my leftovers at home, because if I eat any more stuffing, gravy, or yams, I will explode in a cloud of turkey-scented goo. Our weekend was fun, exhausting, comfortable, and relaxing at the same time. After inhaling the feast (and killing the last four bottles of white wine left from the wedding), we laid around and watched football. Friday we split off into three groups—my Mom and sister headed out to Ellicott City to shop, my father and I went to check out the B&O Railroad Museum, and Jen crashed out upstairs, trying to recover from a chest cold.
The B&O Museum has come a long way since my Dad and I saw it last. We crawled around the engines in the parking lot about five years ago one Sunday when the museum was closed, but the closest I’ve been to the exhibits inside have been drunken paper shows held by the AIGA where I was more concerned with remembering names than looking at locomotives. Last year, the dome over the roundhouse collapsed under the weight of a heavy snowfall, and I think it may have been one of the best things to happen for the museum (damage to some of the priceless exhibits notwithstanding.) They’ve taken the opportunity to expand the whole facility, redesign the interior layout, and add staff. We were surprised to find a long line outside the front doors, packed with young children waiting to see Santa and the model trains. There’s a food concession stand, new model exhibits on extended loan from the Smithsonian, and several newly refurbished engines sitting outside the work shed (which will be open in 2005.) I’ve not seen my father’s eyes that wide in a long time. Saturday we made the Annual Pilgrimage To The Shrine Of Inexpensive Swedish Furniture, and later hit Home Anthology to wade through the midcentury modern goodness. All in all, it was a very good visit.
Plug. We had the good fortune to catch The Shipping News on AMC last night—if you get a chance, check it out. It’s a quiet, slower-paced movie, but rewarding and entertaining. From the director who brought you Chocolat.
Advice.I’m thinking about taking some current freelance cash and finally getting a large-format color printer for the office; I’m leaning towards a Canon but put off by the $500 price for an inkjet. Anybody have one they can recommend?
Holy Fucking God, does Windows XP “Professional” suck donkey balls. I’ve had it running for three weeks and it’s the buggiest, crashingest, most spyware-infected, slowest piece of shit I’ve used since Windows 3.1.
I want this BAD. It’s way too much money, and it’s so perfect for my everyday life, but I can’t justify it (I’d rather have a year-old refurbished TiBook instead.) More info over at Gizmodo.
Tireder Than I Used To Be. Our linen closet is moving closer towards completion, and small things around the house are getting done. The cabinet still needs shelves, the access door needs to be cut down and hung, and the kickplates need to be painted. That’s all fine, and I can accomplish that. Last night, though, I had a bit of a meltdown at 11pm trying to patch part of the dining room wall. During the upstairs renovation I had to pull the kickplate in order to run cable, and as with any plaster and lathe house (especially one as poorly plastered as ours) some of the wall comes out as well. While trying to pull out some of the ring shank nails left over from the crappy paneling job, I yanked six inches of plaster off the wall. By that point, my knees and legs were sore, my patience was gone, and I was running on determination. After sending the hammer on a little trip and banging the paint cans closed, I sat on the couch and shut my brain off in front of The Family Guy. It was the first time since we moved into the house where I felt defeated by it, like it had actually called me out in the playground at lunchtime and kicked the snot out of me in front of the whole third grade.
Of course, being the stubborn Mick that I am, I’m ready to go back at it this evening, but last night was the first time the sheer size of the house got to me. We have about ten open projects right now, all in various states of completion (or not, as the case may be) which await things beyond our control: warm weather, completion of another project, the Bag of Money, etc. and the disarray is getting to both of us a lot more than I thought it was.
I went to a clients’ house last night to install an AirPort card in both an eMac and a slot-loading iMac, thinking the whole thing would be cut and dry. I was supposed to be there Tuesday, but the negative battery terminal in the Jeep decided it was time to rot itself into oblivion that evening in the parking lot of the Panera, stranding me in front of my dinner and the Classified section of the Sun. More on that later.
As it turns out, the iMac is AirPort-ready but needs an additional $29 adapter to use the wireless card. Strike one. The eMac has a handy door on the front where you remove a bezel with two screws and slide the card in. Easy, right? Well, no, not really. For some reason the card just wouldn’t fit in all the way, and no amount of pushing and prodding would help. Normally breaking down the case to guide it in would be easy, but Apple built it with allen-head bolts to keep schoolkids from taking it apart, and I didn’t have my set with me. Strike two.
Song Of The Day: Don’t Get Your Hopes Up, Dntel. Fitting, perhaps, because I’m looking at a VW Thing for sale tonight in Pasadena, which I found in the aforementioned paper. For some reason, I’m in look-at-used-cars-mode right now. I think it’s partially because the Scout is on life-support mode and I’d like to have a running convertible before springtime next year, and partially because I’m a stupid dumbass who feels the need to spend money he doesn’t have. One bright spot: whereas a new fiberglas door on the Scout would cost somewhere around $850, a new steel door for a Thing lists for $40. (Hell, a new VW engine lists for $1300.)
Heh, heh. Sorry, Yankees fans.
Belgian Dark Chocolate. Type junkies, peep this site: Mark Simonson and his font studio MS Studio. Lots of good information on typography, examples, and fonts for buying.
This morning I got an email from a student at SCAD about using some of the photos I posted of the signs in Perry, OK for a class project, which means I’ve got to go into the archives and find the negatives so that I can re-scan them at a higher resolution. (what this really means is that sometime tonight I have to dig through six or seven Tupperware containers, my “file cabinet”, and several boxes of unlabeled stuff, then go through about eighty sleeves of unmarked negatives to find them.) It’ll be worth the effort—hopefully he’ll be able to use what I have, and I’m curious to see the results.
Vanilla. Jen and I watched the debate last night, curious to see the outcome. In my opinion, Kerry clearly came out on top. Every time he hit Bush with a good point (Healthcare, the deficit, religion, the draft, Homeland security), Bush went back to “education.” At one point, when asked about creating new jobs, Bush went off about community college and No Child Left Behind, dodging the question entirely. While I wanted Kerry to simply ask him how going to college and incurring even more personal debt is going to help people get jobs today, it clearly showed how out of his depth the President is, and how he has absolutely no plan for the U.S. economy besides going to war. It also was good to hear Kerry appeal to women voters directly and state his opinion on Roe V. Wade clearly. I also felt that Bush did a hamhanded job of attempting to tag Kerry as a Liberal, and I hope that some of the swing voters saw through that. While the claims thrown around by both men were misleading, I got a much better read off Kerry than Bush.
Rocky Road. After taking the cover off the Base Station, I have an hour of connectivity before it goes feet-up. The capacitors are hot to the touch and the WaveLAN card is cooking hot. I’d have to hack some kind of heatsink or fan onto the thing to get it to stay cool—something I might do later on but don’t have the time for right now.
Friday morning we woke early to get packed and ready for our California trip. I had an appointment with an alarm company to estimate the house after a second break-in at our neighbor’s house; for considerably less than I thought, we’re having the place wired next Tuesday, with the option of adding smoke alarms later. We hopped an American flight to Dallas and made it out to San Francisco by dinnertime, pulling up to the curb out front of the hotel just in time to meet Rob and Karean, who were getting back from a long day in the city. Opting for room service instead of fighting for a reservation outside, we hit the rack early in preparation for drinking with the professionals over the weekend.
Saturday we met up with the other two Baltimore couples and got breakfast across the street, then roamed out in the direction of Chinatown. On our own, Jen and I stumbled across a neighborhood parade complete with dragons, band, and politicians, and not long after that, a funeral procession led by a brass band, New Orleans-style. Walking the length of the area brought us to the famous City Lights bookstore, where we picked up two good design books, and then walked back to meet up with Rob and Karean. Stopping in to the Paul Frank store, we got our monkey on, and then at a Ghirardelli store we got our chocolate on. Then it was back to the hotel to get gussied up for the party.
After a hilly ride out to the Log Cabin, we found a tuxedoed Matt greeting guests and an open bar, making this the first time I’ve sipped wine during the ceremony, which was not a bad way to start. Vows were exchanged, songs were sung, and two of my oldest friends from college were married. Then, there was drinking, dancing, eating, drinking, drinking, and suddenly we were waiting for cabs to the after-party. And waiting, and waiting… My intelligent wife suggested waiting close to the road to be the first foursome picked up, and her intellect paid off—but by then it was too late to party further, and we decided to retire to our hotel bar for a quiet nightcap of cucumber martinis.
Sunday began with breakfast at the hotel restaurant, and continued with a trip to the Exploratorium, a huge science center devoted to hands-on learning for kids and adults. What started out as a fantastic time slowly became overload as the sheer number of exhibits overwhelmed our pickled brains. I left with a headache, and we all decided some hair of the dog was in order, so we got some drinks at the swanky bar across from the hotel and recuperated. Then it was off to the after-wedding barbecue, where Matt and Soph get the award for Thing I’d Never Do The Day After My Wedding: cooking a pile of food for their out-of-town friends. We hung out at their house in the Castro, caught up with everybody, and had a mellow evening before catching a cab back to the hotel to grab some sleep—our shuttle to the airport pulled up at 5:15am.
Leaving San Francisco was hard—not only are a bunch of good people out there, but the city left us feeling energized, cosmopolitan, creative, and recharged. There are a number of differences between S-F and D.C. (I’m not going to mention Baltimore, because it just doesn’t compare) with the greatest one being the respect for history. San Francisco is dripping with old signage, restored houses, and design, while much of the East coast is homogenized. It was hard to leave that funky mixture to come back to McBaltimore.
Hey, I should elaborate a little, lest you think I’m another hater: One of my first loves is the goofy, off-the-wall history of Baltimore, its blue-collar roots, and the hometown vibe it still has. Most people don’t notice these things, or would rather drink a Coors Light at the bar in an Applebee’s rather than brave the smoke at Mrs. Bonnie’s Elvis Shrine, but I love Baltimore for its quirky treasures. There’s just such an international, electric feel to San Francisco that it’s hard to come home.
Success. After buying capacitors locally that were much too big, I ordered some different ones online and got them in yesterday. A little practice with the soldering iron, some delicate work, and…nothing. The Base Station would not wake up. I brought it to work this morning, followed some better directions, and got it to reset, then uploaded new software. It’s now working like a charm next to my desk. Update: The Base Station dropped out after 45 minutes—same problem as before—the case was hot to the touch and the network died. I have more research and testing to do.
Been spending the morning watching the live feed from SpaceShipOne as they attempt to win the Ansari X-Prize. Absolutely thrilling stuff. We thought he was going to wrap it, but from what they said, the wild rolling at the very end was expected.