Stopping in the Catonsville Post Office this morning to mail off my LL Bean watch for a new battery, I spied a plaque describing the WPA murals on the walls, painted in 1942 by a man named Avery Johnson. Google is flooded with entries for an NBA star of the same name, but I found another entry for this artist (3rd row from the right, 5th image down) on a Java-tacular site put together by the University of Central Arkansas. More information as I get it.
Spaceman Spiff, Where Are You?!? The Cleveland Scene ran a story about Bill Watterson, the reclusive man behind Calvin & Hobbes. The story has no real new information, mostly speculation, but raises the question Why quit? Having dreamed of being able to create some kind of marketable artistic story for years, I have to say I’d probably try to do what he did and go out on top, instead of beating a dead horse for cash. Why does anyone have to make T-shirts and coffee mugs if they’re already rich? My guess is that his books still do a brisk business on Amazon to this day; how much money is enough? Interestingly enough, Berke Breathed has just started running Opus in the weekend comics pages again, and in a Salon interview he pokes at comics-as-licensing juggernaut, saving most of his jabs for Tom Davis, better known as Mr. Garfield—who hasn’t drawn his own strips for years. For Breathed, though, you get the sense that he has something to say again, instead of trying to cash in one last time—recent world events bring to mind the dark days of the early 80’s, when he was just hitting his stride.
My personal connection to this story: Back in ’87 or so, I attended my cousin’s wedding in Ohio and was fortunate enough to meet a thin, kind man in a yellow coat and glasses, who sat down and talked to me about cartooning. (Unsurprisingly, he looks a lot like the father in the C&H strips.) As it turned out, Bill Watterson lived across the street from my aunt and uncle, and used to hang out with my cousin. That Christmas I was given a signed copy of Calvin And Hobbes, which I still treasure, as I was told that he didn’t like to sign books too much. I have a lot of respect for him, because he had a clear shot at millions in revenue, and took the high road to creative expression instead.
Technology Giving Me The Finger. Last night I formatted the iMac and loaded Panther on the drive; upon reboot the hard drive has dissappeared completely, so I have to crack the case to figure out what’s going on. The PCMCIA adapter card for my CompactFlash media seems to be corrupting data—I lost all the pictures I took of Jen’s family visit last weekend as well as some other shots. I was able to retrieve the other stuff after plugging in the SanDisk USB adapter. And Office X for the Mac refused to run on this machine. It got to the end of the “optimizing font menu performance” thing—yeah, right—and then crashed. When I upgraded the version and plugged in my serial, it refused to accept the old number.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Word still sucks ass.
Class went well again last night, although one guy didn’t show and another is sick; I also bumped into Whitney and she introduced me to Jose Villarrubia, whose name I recognized but couldn’t place until I Googled him. Nice guy.
Dangit. Turns out I missed A Charlie Brown Christmas Again this year. Thanks for promoting that so well, CBS.
Recap Busy weekend—in a nutshell: tasting at the Brass Elephant successful, polyurethane on upstairs floors completed (including hallway, whew), mission to Lockard family house for turkey day complete. Lots to do before the break, little time. Details to follow.
This link is one I’m going to keep because I’ve heard of people losing power in their iPods after very short periods of time. Being the tinkering type, though, I don’t have a problem cracking the case on anything.
A friend just sent me this link: It’s a compendium of great client horror stories from the dot-com days. It’s all text, pretty quick, but riotously funny. Reminds me of my days in the saltmine:
Asshole Marketing VP: We want to have a flashy movie on our homepage to showcase how fast the service is.
Me: (considering outside help) Well, OK, how much money do we have to…AMVP: We don’t have any money. Just do that voodoo thing you do.
Me: But I need stuff like music and video to drop in there…
AMVP: Steal something. Find a song you like and use that.
Me: Uh, that’s illegal.AMVP: Why are you being difficult? Just get it done.
Me: (pissed.) Alright. When do we need to have it done?
AMVP: Two weeks. And put lots of action in there. Make it edgy.
Me: …
AMVP: What’s the matter?
…I could go on…
CompUSA gave me a full-price refund for an open box return, so I turned around and ordered a FireWire enclosure for the 28GB drive our friend Rob gave me. Plan B is to dump the MP3 collection on that drive and point iTunes to it via the Powerbook. I’ll find a way to get my songs on the iPod somehow.
Fun for the Whole Family. Check this link. The fan-produced Pokemon video for this song is mind-numbingly funny.
Who’s Bad? Why is it the cops aren’t busting down doors and arresting Michael frickin’ Jackson? Why are they “negotiating” his surrender?
My Old School. So last night I was at MICA at 6:30 and the class actually happened. I met up with the two other teachers and we traded histories; turns out I graduated a couple of years after one and designed a company website for the other. We gave our pitches, and after having practiced mine at least five times, I forgot most of it. However, it seemed to go well, and I think I got the students interested in the project. My group told me I was their first choice (the teachers pitch their projects and the students vote for their choices), which made me feel pretty good. So I’ll post more updates to the class page as it unfolds; I’m going to take pictures of the work as it comes in and try to answer all the questions by adding information as it gets worked out.
One of the students was interested in contacting the government to see if we could propose the final comps as an alternative to the current design, which is something I had considered but ultimately had to shelve while trying to find the samples. I’m going to look back into that and see if there’s somebody who knows somebody who knows the person.
are my eyes. We’ve found that the coffee sold by the Metro (a local Maryland chain) is so crappy, you can’t smell the difference between decaf French roast and ‘southern pecan’. So Jen and I have been playing russian roulette with the coffee this past week, and I think I keep losing. Luckily the management at work brought two automatic coffee makers into work for us, and in a rare stroke of luck, there’s half & half in the fridge. So I’m now drinking my third cup of coffee and trying to keep my eyelids open.
…But No Cigar. The FireWire card I bought for the PC worked fine when I put it in the PC, but XPlay did not work the way I hoped it would. I wanted to use iTunes the way I do on the Mac, but XPlay has you managing your music manually, which is what I’m trying to get away from. So it’s back to the drawing board.
I have 10.3 running on Jen’s Powerbook; it got the original 12GB drive from my machine with a clean install. Jen’s going to be moving to OSX at some point at work and I want her to be familiar with it as soon as she can be so the IT idiots there don’t get involved. It looks and runs very well on a 400Mhz G3, which is a good sign.
A few things, found via one of my new favorite design sites: Interrobang Letterpress. Tasty and sweet. Also, a racy bit of non-worksafe fun: Motel Fetish.
Grumble Grumble. So last night I got home and the power was out. Again. This makes the third time since we’ve moved in—admittedly the first time was during the hurricane, but this is frickin’ high wind. Everybody else in Catonsville had power, for crying out loud.
So we drove to Kelsey’s Irish pub and had some warm food while the Maryland game played in the background; when the longhaired 40-year-old band began setting up in the corner, we beat feet back to the ice chest. Jen put seventy blankets on the bed while I stoked the fire; our sleep was interrupted repeatedly by the cats, who became punting targets as they jumped on the bed. (try sleeping with five blankets and four cats on one bed. It’s kind of like being covered in warm cement.) Around 4:30 the lights came back on, and the heat slowly returned, thank god.
I’ve learned a couple of new things about the house; apparently the front porch holds absolutely no heat, the chimney damper definitely needs to be fixed, and we are in the market for a generator. Also, there’s a radiator behind the inside front door.
I’ve been spending about an hour each night with the monotonous task of entering data into the MP3 tags in my music library. The obsessive-compulsive side of my brain is silently singing happy songs to itself because it has something else to do besides make my nose twitch or worry about the coffeepot; when I get done, I’ll be able to use the Smart Playlists feature of iTunes to update and organize the 25+GB of music into a comprehensive collection, weeding out the average of 50% filler on each album. Which means, of course, that I have to wade through each artist and categorize by genre, then drill down to the album category and categorize by year, and then finally wade through each individual song and rate fron zero to five. (Nevermind that I could theoretically erase the songs which rate, say 1 or below: this is about compulsive behavior, remember.)
Whew. I’m somewhere in the M’s, I think, and I have about 2,000 more to go. I keep telling myself it will be worth it when I’m done. It is nice to start making dinner, though, and start the ‘Early Jazz’ playlist: All songs in the Jazz, Big Band, and Swing category recorded between 1920 and 1929 with a rating above three gives me a pleasant mixture of early Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, and Fletcher Henderson.
Here’s a fantastic gallery of pictures from Iraq taken by a soldier there. It’s worth a look.
My Kingdom For A T8 Star Wrench. Dammit. I have Jen’s Powerbook here at work ready to install Panther and I forgot that the hard drive sled takes a star wrench—the size below the standard in every stupid wrench set sold. (I’m swapping her 6GB drive for a 12GB drive.) I have one, but I think it’s at home. Along with my wallet. Can you tell it’s one of those mornings?
sunset, frederick road, 11.03
I have the aformentioned items in my hot little hands; a helpful fellow at an undisclosed organization was kind enough to ship me two via FedEx yesterday. I’m asking the students to redesign the packaging of the Humanitarian Daily Ration, the standard foodstuff airdropped to refugees in places like Afghanistan and Iraq (and often confused with unexploded cluster bomb munitions). In my humble opinion the design leaves a lot to be desired, and I’d like to see what the students can come up with to make the package more self-explanatory and inviting.
Well, it looks like FireWire cards are super-cheap ($15+), so I may be picking one of them up sooner rather than later. That’s some good news. I also renewed my domain name for another two years with the Evil Empire.
Tonight I hope to have a package on the back porch from FedEx which will complete the research phase of my MICA class; I’m reserving any comment on it until I have it in my hands, because of the heightened paranoia security in place around governmental agencies. I’m sure my name is on a list somewhere because of my inquiries into this particular item.
Day two of life with the iPod, and I’m finding out that there’s yet another stumbling block with digital nirvana. I have limited space on the Powerbook here, and it is currently the only machine we own with a FireWire port and OSX. The iMac has 120GB (don’t believe the manufacturer’s ‘claimed’ drive space estimates) but only a USB port. The PC has 120GB but no FireWire port; I could buy an add-on card and then use a service such as ephpod to manage from that machine. But that’s not the answer I was hoping for. Sigh.
Other than that, I’m in love. It’s a beautiful, intuitive machine, and it handles all three of the functions I used to use my Palm for—contacts, calendars, and notes. Plus, it’s a backup hard drive (carrying a current version of my Library folder for a quick restore) and library. Nice job, Apple.
Notes on Popular Culture, The Short List.
- Memo to the Little Debbie People: In the real world, any child caught singing to his or her snack cake during lunch period at an American school would be totally destroyed.
- Memo to the Smart family, RE your daughter’s upcoming TV movie: You are media whores. You look pretty rich to me. You have enough money to own horses and live in Utah. Why do you need to exploit your daughter’s abduction on the Today show and Oprah?
- Memo to the Lynch family RE Your daughter’s upcoming TV movie: Why did you agree to this crap?
- Memo to CBS: You are so spineless, it makes me laugh.
Love, Bill.
Whoops. Turns out our appointment at the Brass Elephant last night was supposed to have been rescheduled, but we didn’t get the word. So they gave us cocktails and some hors d’oeuvres on the house, and we relaxed in their swank upstairs bar. Then we walked next door to Mughal Garden for a tasty Indian dinner.
Today seems to be dragging on and on, and I can’t seem to make this interface look like anything other than puke.
On the other side, looking through iPodlounge, I’ve found a few resources for running the iPod on both the Mac and the PC (which for me is good because getting music from the iMac to the iPod is a pain in the butt.) And the alarm I set for the Brass Elephant tasting tonight in iCal just rang off on the iPod. Sweet. And the included earbuds sound about 200% better than the Sony ‘sport’ headphones I bought before Bimini—there’s much more bass in these.
Yessir, That’s My Baby! Jen sent me an email with the subject line “The Utz Guy honked at me!”:
“On my way in to work there was this semi truck driver who was honking and I didn’t know why. It turns out that he was honking at me!! He was just a-waving and a-honking like a fool.”
As if any red-blooded American male driving isn’t going to a-wave and a-honk at a hot blonde in a blue sportscar!
D’oh. Yesterday I missed the third anniversary of our first date, when I made an admittedly poor dinner for Jen and then took her to the BSO; this also marks the second year in a row that I’ve missed that particular anniversary. So I had her lay in front of the TV and did a full-on Billatsu massage until my fingers started to cramp; hopefully that will make up for about a quarter of the dumb-osity of forgetting the date.
Presents for Me. Yesterday the iPod showed up on my desk (Todd called my cellphone during the meeting yesterday in a high-pitched voice and said: “This is your iPod. I’m on your desk at work! Come and get me!”) and I was somewhat dissapointed to find that Apple doesn’t pack it in the original square box. I got a brown old-school Apple box (“Reconditioned Product”) with all the gear in original packaging; the iPod itself is almost flawlessly clean. I updated my software and plugged it in to the Powerbook, and within about two minutes all my music was on the drive. Then I updated the calendar and address book with iSync. I have a lot to learn about using this, but I’m thrilled with it so far.
Missed. I also missed the FedEx guy by about ten minutes this morning (I was in the shower.) The helpful fellow I mentioned last week sent me two items for my class, which is a huge help. Now I have something to look forward to tomorrow.
I’m laying in bed with a pair of cats around my feet. I’m typing this on the Powerbook and posting it to the Web wirelessly (admittedly, not using Blogger) while streaming music from the iMac in the other room to my headphones, and IM’ing with John, who is configuring my IP phone remotely from his desk in Portland. Pretty sweet.
I figured out a few things tonight mucking around on the computers.
- iTunes was not showing up on the PC because I had the firewall blocking all incoming requests to port 3689 (iTunes’ prefered port.) Strangely, iTunes on the iMac told me this but the Powerbook didn’t. Hmmph. Once this was fixed, life was good.
- I started screwing with LDAP and the Directory Info Manager to see if I could set up services to share Address Book info between machines, but gave that up in favor of simply exporting -> importing the data manually. Someday I’ll figure that out, right after I figure out
- …iCal, whose calendars can be export -> imported across machines as well. I really want to set the thing up to simply publish/subscribe, but still have had no luck. Because it’s a pain in the ass to do all this manually.
- I have an HTML file that’s 873KB in size; it’s a table which lists the number/title/artist/size of every song in my master iTunes library. I used a script called iTunes2HTML 1.0, and it worked better than Apple’s Library Summary.
- Blur’s new album is really good. I’m digging it a lot.
This is the Internet Calling. Just when I was about to give up hope (and was avoiding making the call to ask about it), I got home yesterday evening to find a package on the table from my friend John. A few months ago he promised me a VoIP phone for payment of services rendered—a freelance job we worked on ran out of steam. I opened the box to find a pretty Cisco 7940 IP Phone. I plugged it into my router, waited for it to figure out its network settings, and then my name and the 10-20 logo appeared. I picked up the handset and dialed the house. A moment of silence, and then the house phone rang. Pretty sweet! I surprised my Mom by calling her at work; the call is not unlike talking to somebody in California, where there’s just enough of a delay to screw up your conversational timing.
Jen is feeling punky with the first bug of the season, unfortunately, so she was in bed when I got home. I chose a quiet task upstairs and continued painting trimwork in the Anxious room. I hope she’s feeling better tonight, because we have our first catering tasting downtown. Maybe the promise of good food will help her recover.
continuing to add stuff
Do You Like Good Music. More music added to the server last night; I found a bunch of stuff that didn’t make it over and ripped a few more CD’s. I also installed iTunes on the PC server and loaded the library over there. It’s funny—the PC shows up on the iMac like butter but I get time outs when I try to look at the iMac from the PC. Same behavior that happens here at work (I thought it might be an internal network thing.)