Yesterday I was here at work rummaging through my messenger bag to find something at the bottom. My hand ran across all kinds of familiar shapes until it touched something fuzzy, and I stopped, surprised. I was baffled as to what it could be (and a little nervous), so i pulled it out carefully: A mouse-shaped cat toy. I think Teller likes to play ‘hide-the-mouse’ in my bag when I’m not around.
Hee hee. The new hard drive for the iMac is due in this morning. Hee hee hee!
I’m moving the webDAV stuff to a different page, as well as the dyndns stuff, so you won’t get monumentally bored with the stuff I write here if you don’t want to. (And let’s face it, I’m boring enough without the geek talk.)
I was able to get Apache started on the iMac after finding one typo and one bad directory link, and the permission issues were working fine, but I was unable to actually publish a calendar from the powerbook to the iMac. I have to try again tonight to find out what I did wrong. I also ordered the 160GB drive this morning, which will mean plenty of space for backups and music. Woo-hoo!
This site is just too damn funny. Wow.
Choices. Tonight is Art Spiegelman’s thing downtown; besides knowing almost nothing about the event, I’m excited to go and see him. Unfortunately, David Carson is at Villa Julie College tonight (the website sucks, and I can’t find any information on there), and we know nothing about that event other than that it’s open to the public (Spiegelman is tickets-only). That’s a tough choice, and I was leaning towards Carson until the tickets came—guaranteed seats are better than standing room only. I have my copy of Maus in my bag.
Some thoughts about Rock. This morning I drove into work and heard a song by Audioslave, the Rage Against the Soundgarden mess, and it made me kind of sad. At the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, my golden age of music was roughly the end of hair metal through the Seattle sound up until about 1995 or so. During that time there was about an 80% chance that the song on the radio was something I was into. Soundgarden was a band I was into back in the late 80’s, in the Louder Than Love era, when they were getting on the snake. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were coming off the death of their guitarist and had just hired a maniacal new 19-year old with chops of fire. Rage Against the Machine were the L.A. riot of FM radio, dropping the F-bomb in the chorus of their song. Take that, FCC! Alice in Chains released Dirt, which was the pool-hall soundtrack for 1993. (The opening bass riff to Would? still gives me chills.) Public Enemy was still (kind of) a going concern. These guys all played like it meant something, and the music made a connection with me.
These days, all my heroes are older and getting into their introspective phases: Soundgarden is gone, RATM is the house band for Chris Cornell’s moody rambling, RHCP strum and sing (barely) instead of shaking my booty, Layne Staley is dead (dumbass) and other once-mighty bands have dropped off the map.
What’s my point? Well, A) my tastes in music tend towards the pop-oriented stuff; B) I’m an old man who will complain about how nothing is as good as the “good old days”; C) I’ll be the guy who buys that copy of the Singles soundtrack at your tag sale; D) It’s time to dig out some of the old classics for another listen.
The moral of the story, courtesy of an anonymous poster on the Mobtown Shank: Love the music, not the musician.
Time was when my girl would email me from work each day. Not excessive amounts of email, mind you, but a quick hello, sometimes a question or concern, sometimes a funny story she was passing along. Nothing the ordinary modern-day employee doesn’t do each day while at work. Apparently there is some sort of ban on any kind of email at her job, where some dude is sitting in an office reading other folks’ email all day, ready to narc them out for talking about what to eat for dinner or who’s coming over next weekend. Don’t companies realize this makes their employees feel mistrusted and paranoid? Sounds like a fine way to improve productivity to me.
Small Dog Electronics has 15″ iMacs for $999 with a combo drive. Must….resist….. They also have refurbished 30GB ’03 iPods for $379. Resolve….growing…weaker…
Progress… So last night I took about 20 minutes during a period of insomnia to try to enable WebDAV services on the iMac (and let me just tell you how nice it is to have a development box to play with, as opposed to breaking the Powerbook here); this involved setting up a root acount, logging in through ssh, farting around in httpd.conf (ahh, I remember the days on MKLinux…) to enable the services and set up the passwords. Restarting Apache this morning was unsuccessful though; somewhere the password functions I wrote were wonky. More research to come on this front.
Do Not Call. This morning I got a call from somebody at “Atlantic Home Security” who wanted to try to sell me something. As soon as I mentioned the Do Not Call list, she hung up. Dammit. I wanted to get their information and have them fined.
My pop sent a picture of our old house in Jersey to my sister and I. I lived there from 1st to 5th grade, and I mostly remember this house as the one I grew up in. It looks a lot different—they cut down the weeping willow tree I fell out of and broke my arm under; they resided it with white clapboard (or a reasonable facsimile); they put a basketball hoop up in the driveway and got rid of my Dad’s circular flower bed in the side yard. Other than that, it looks really good, like the family who lives there takes care of it. I think every so often about that house, and whether the pool we dug is still in the backyard, if there are still matchbox cars buried in the driveway (it was dirt when we lived there) or Star Wars figures under the grass in the backyard. I wonder if anybody I know still lives there, and what ever became of the kids we played pickle and flashlight tag with.
Jen Rocks The World. That is all.
Grrr. I was able to figure out what the deal with dyndns was this morning, after spending about an hour laying in bed feeling like I was going to hurl. Internally at the house I can see the web server and mount the shared volumes but I’m still not able to see it from work. Perhaps I have to wait until the DNS is updated throughout the land. I watched a funny old-time movie on AMC while waiting for a killer headache to go away and enjoyed two cats sleeping on either side of my chest. Not a bad way to start the morning.
I’m moving all the Dyndns stuff to a different page, so that it stays off this log- you didn’t want to read about all that boring crap here anyway, right?
forget I died, remember I lived, 10/30
Roxio, the helpful people who make terrible CD-authoring software for the PC, have a mandatory registration for anybody wanting to update their stuff. I entered “joe@blow.com” in the email field and “joeblow” as a login, and of course, somebody already registered that name. So i put in “joeblow@zero.com” and “joebloeschmo”, and both of them were taken as well. Finally I just made up a random number and got through. How annoying for the DBA to chug through that mountain of worthless data for the five or six good addresses…
The HDR problem may be solved…. Stay tuned.
For Your Voting Enjoyment. Try this site on for size: Select Smart Presidential Candidate Selector. Your mileage may vary, and I don’t know how accurate the results are. Apparently I’m voting for Dennis Kucinich, D. OH.
Seems the prodigal Ford is repaired…well, it wasn’t even broke in the first place. The hose clamp on the radiator let go, and when that happened it vented coolant all over the engine. My mechanic says that this model Ford has an issue with adding coolant to the point where the engine is happy, and my continued overheating issues were due to that fact. Whatever it was, it’s hopefully fixed now.
Interesting. By chance, I checked out the Supon website today to see if they’ve updated it—they have. Looks like they must have been swallowed up by another firm, one with a craptacular website.
Not that I actually buy physical CD’s anymore, but if you happen to buy one published by the BMG Music Group, and you can’t seem to get past the copy protection to rip it to your hard drive, simply hold down the Shift key. Brilliant!
I Was Once Misinformed About Your Intentions. I may have let the cat out of the bag with Todd’s new blog, but I’m still happy to welcome him to the fold.
Today I’m reading with interest about Panther, the new upgrade to OSX. It looks like there’s a bunch of juicy new features throughout, and that will be great for future monkeying. I’m still waiting to get paid so’s I can buy a large drive for the iMac, and install Jaguar on that machine. I also need to find a cheap Firewire enclosure for Rob’s donated drive, which seems to have some issues with bad blocks at the beginning of the platter, making it unusable with OSX.
We didn’t get anything new done with the house last night, but I figure another quick hour with the cut-in brush, a good mop job, and a coat of white paint in the closet, and the cream room will be ready for Jen’s twin bed. Renie is coming down this weekend (we’re very excited about that), and we have a couple of jobs lined up for her to help us with:
- Painting the Anxious room white. I exchanged the
whitebrown paint for White Tint Base, which is actually white. Having two rooms painted will make a huge difference upstairs. - Painting three of the four walls in the Pink room. I may be able to pick up drywall today at the Home Despot and get that mudded in by Saturday. If so, that will be three rooms painted, which means we can tear up carpeting and make way for the floor sander.
- Planting bulbs. Since last year’s fall sales, Jen and I have bought about a zillion different bulbs of different colors, types, and sizes; starting with a box of 70 blue gladiolus bulbs I got at the Sam’s Club, we’ve added white tulips, pastel tulips, fuzzy white and red tulips, and crocuses. We’re going to have more bulbs in the ground than the country of Holland. That is, if the assorted chipmunks, squirrels, and other backyard creatures don’t dig them all up and have a kegger while we’re at work.
Depending on how productive I feel tonight, I may also try to build another fire for practice this evening. I’d love to be able to use that fireplace a lot this winter.
This is a quick report for Jen, cribbed from a report on the Macintouch site (quietly thanking myself for donating money to Ric- it just paid for itself) about justifying Macs in a creative development environment. Some of the data is skewed towards OS9, and some of it is skewed towards the computer lab environment, but it’s all pretty good information. Her employer has her designing for print on the PC, which is about as comfortable (to me) as repeatedly jamming a stick in my eye. Anybody else have suggestions?
I bought some overpriced firewood at the Safeway last night to build a fire: $4 for a bag of “kiln dried” logs, which is roughly a dollar a log. Years of building fires at places like Assateague, Cub Scout camp, and various keg parties should have taught me how to construct a satisfactory blaze, but I was stymied by a pair of logs that refused to do anything but smolder. We’ll try again tonight.
The house seems to heat up well with the furnace on; the piping works very well throughout with the exception of the kitchen radiator, which seems to be on vacation. I walked through and closed all the storm windows the other night and that seemed to make a big difference in cutting the chill back. At some point I’m going to have to pull some of the plaster off the outside walls to see how much insulation (if any) there is. We also put the first coat of finish paint on the walls of the Sticky room, and when we got done we realized that we hadn’t sanded enough of the wallpaper sizing off. This morning I took the random orbital and sanded about half the paint back off to knock the texture down. I think it looks pretty good (alright, it looks like crap, but I see the possibilities.)
Thanks to Kristen for sending the Virgin Suicides soundtrack in with Nate.
Looks like my old employer, Cidera, is finally turning off the pipes. Interesting to hear what people say on the Fuckedcompany boards; it looks like there are more than a few ex-employees posting comments there.
Still no luck with the dyndns stuff. Frustrating.
Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture. I heard one of the new Outkast songs this morning on the radio: Hey Ya! was the most interesting song I think I’ve heard all year. I went to iTunes immediately when I got to work and bought it for $.99. I can’t tell you how many other times I’ve wanted to do this and haven’t been able to, either because Apple is behind on adding them to the available list or the artist/label refuses to license them. Too bad.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
*Whew.*
Take Two. I have OSX running on the iMac now, and along with about a gazillion other things I’d like to do with it (an iTunes server, internal/external file serving, scheduled backups, iPhoto libraries), I downloaded and installed a dyndns client (link) so that we can share files from the house. I tried this a year or so ago, and had no luck (OS9.2 on the 8500) so I’m hoping this will work more seamlessly on OSX. I currently have some issues with port mappings in the router and the firewall in OSX, but should be able to iron them out tonight.
Somebody scheduled some freezing weather for the first day of October, and I don’t appreciate it.
You Kids Get Off My Lawn! Dept. Memo to the guy who’s been parking his Volvo out in front of our house with the ‘For Sale’ signs on the window for the last two weeks: the house isn’t empty anymore, pal. Move it along or I’ll call somebody to tow it. Thanks. How about I park my Scout out in front of your house for a few weeks? Bet you’d love that.
??? Dept.: What the hell is this dick doing NFL commentary for? For the unenlightened, here’s some suggested reading.
NBC Sucks. Nice of the Leno folks to refer to Howard Dean as the ‘Presidential Wannabe’ in their promos last night, and helpfully booking him after the oh-so-important Catherine Zeta-Whatever. This morning Katie Couric, the poster girl for pink fluffy pom-poms, went after him like a pit bull in heat. I thought I was watching MSNBC for a minute. Interesting to see impartial journalism at work. (note: I don’t know anything about Dean or his politics, but it’s pretty obvious the suits at NBC have cast their ballots.)
Stumbling around the internet looking for some information about greenhouses, I found the International Greenhouse Company, whose website looks strangely like another website I’ve been at recently…
Anyway, we’re looking at our first frost tomorrow night, and we have a bunch of plants that need to come inside before then. Given all that’s been happening with the inside of the house, I haven’t done much with the greenhouse yet, and that includes figuring out what’s broken on the heater, how the irrigation system works, or if there’ s a working thermostat. I’d love to be able to use it during the winter, but we’re going to have to wait to see how much the house electricity bills are before we start heating the outbuildings.
The secret to installing OSX and OS9 on the same drive seems to be either partitioning the drive and putting one OS on each system (what I did on the Powerbook, here) or installing OS9 and updating it to 9.2.2, then installing OSX and updating that. Big fun, people!
In other geek news, Macintouch put me on to this new service provided by XLR8, who has some affiliation with the old Daystar Digital corporation (now defunct, I guess…?) and who are making a G4 upgrade for Pismo Powerbooks. Back in the day I bought a Daystar upgrade for my ancient Mac IIcx, and took the nervous step of boxing my motherboard up and shipping it to Georgia to have them pull the creaky 68030 chip and drop in a 40mhz 68040. All went off without a hitch, and Norman ran sturdily for another year and a half until I bought my 7100/80. I’m obviously going to wait to hear what experiences people have with this service, but $330 is a small amount to pay to keep this machine up to date and continue to boost the return on investment. Time will tell.
Some fun killtime reading: mugshots.com.
Jen would also like me to clarify that she tried to buy the table from Phyllis several times. Sorry for the confusion!
Make The Bad Man Stop. Each morning, as my brain begins its startup sequence, I wind up with a strange song stuck in my head. I’ve been telling Jen what some of these are, and today I remember this morning’s featured track: Turn Me Loose, by Loverboy. The songs usually are embarassing, schmaltzy, and repeat themselves until I can make it into work and get the headphones on.