I downloaded a PHP script to run on my Powerbook here which promised to convert my iTunes XML database into an html file. After some sleuthing (and finding out that the 10.2.4 update disabled PHP in Apache) and fixing, I got PHP running on this machine again and tried the script. I guess it’s too much for the parser to handle, because I get timeouts with every attempt to run it. Oh, well.
We also hopefully have a few appointments to see some houses tomorrow; our realtor is getting the legwork taken care of to show us some places west of the city. The market is tough right now, as there’s not a lot of stock out there to buy. Meanwhile I am praying to god that my credit is good and that someone will give me money to buy a house, so that if by some miracle we find the perfect house, we can offer money for it immediately.
So I’m doing about seventeen things at once this month, including learning (again) about selling and buying houses, learning more 3Dsmax, putting fence up in the backyard of my house, freelancing, and living life. As if that isn’t enough, I’ve been considering a redesign of my site using CSS and XML. To that end, I’m looking for the best book to use as a guide on this quest (My site is as simple as I can make it, but I’m a holdover from the days of hand-coding with nested tables and invisible pixels.) My two finalists are
Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman, and
Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design, by Eric Meyer.
From what I’ve read, the Meyer book is better at acually getting you through the guts of the project, while the Zeldman book makes a strong argument to take to your clients before it’s started. I think in my case I’d rather pick up the Meyer book and try the thing out myself, but I’m soliciting opinions: Who has both books, what did you think about them, and what are your opinions? (additionally, did you use them to create a CSS-based site?) I’d like to hear about your experience.
I spent a good portion of my time last night in the basement, where it was cool and dry, waiting for the thunderstorm to blow through town and cool things off. I have a call through to my HVAC guy to come replace the compressor in the backyard (finally) now that I have some cash. Did I mention how much Baltimore sucks without A/C? Bored, I spent some more time learning about my camera, especially the aperture and shutter settings, as well as the time-delay feature (gotta try that out on a sunset in the backyard.)
Somebody is selling the URL www.marthastewartinjail.com on eBay, starting at $500. That’s funny.
I found this informative link on OSX fonts via dominey this afternoon. Actually, I like this whole site—I’m putting it on my links page for daily reading.
I’ve given iBlog a shot this afternoon, attempting to see if it works well at publishing to a mounted volume (i.e., my webserver.) It does, but it writes ugly filenames and does a few things halfway well. I’m underimpressed.
Please god don’t let my Mac barf on OSX 10.2.6.
OK, so anybody who might be reading this: Jen is looking for part or full-time print design work in the DC/Baltimore area, starting immediately. She’s had five years’ experience in the field, has a Master’s degree from the University of Baltimore publication design department, and she does excellent work (I may be biased, but I tell the truth here.) If you have any leads or suggestions, please let her know at jenllockard@excite.com.
You may or may not have noticed, but the style sheet problem with Safari got fixed today. I spent an evening banging my head against the wall trying to fix it, then ran the page through Dreamweaver, cleaned up the HTML, and fixed it. Something must have gotten bollixed up about last December or so and just got recopied since then. The pages looked fine in all browsers save the latest build of Safari, where they became craptacular. Whew. It’s nice to have that cleaned up.
arabber, formstone, 5.15.03
I stopped on my way home this afternoon to take a picture of a vanishing Baltimore icon: an Araber stopped by the side of the road, selling produce from the back of a cart. Jen and I have heard them wheeling slowly through the neighborhood over the last few months, and it occurred to me that I haven’t bought produce from one in a long time. This gentleman gave me two bags of seedless grapes for $4 and let me take his picture. I consider that a pretty good bargain. I hope I see him again in the neighborhood. note: (I would have linked to a good info site on arabers, but there don’t seem to be any.)
Huh. People are all freaked out about the journalist who got fired by the New York Times for making stuff up, which comes right on the heels of the announcement by the journalist who previously got fired for making stuff up writing a novel…about a journalist who makes stuff up. Ain’t America sweet?
Jen is in the middle of talking to my alma mater about teaching a flex class there in the fall, and wanted to know if i was interested in teaching a web design class as well. I’m intrigued and hopeful that they will call me back, as I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the last time I did it, and would like to try it again.
This morning I loaded Miramar’s PC MacLAN on my PC at home, looking for a way to get around the ._ hassles that OSX comes with; I was also hoping I could use the Mac volume as a storage facility for music files with iTunes as well. We’ll see how it works over the network tonight—I’m still working out some of the bugs in the system. It would also be nice to have the printer shared throughout the network.
- An Applescript or basic widget smart enough to open a local directory at a predetermined time, mount a remote mirror, check both file creation dates and update/backup files in both places.
- Another widget that runs in the background on my Powerbook. When it senses that I’ve mounted a predetermined volume (my backup volume), it backs up the volume based on file creation date.
Yes, I have Retrospect, and No, I don’t like it. I’d like to not have the massive overhead and all that crud floating around my system- I just want a simple daemon quietly humming in the background which is smart enough to back my stuff up without hosing my machine or costing $200. Is that too much to ask?
I read on Pitchfork
this morning that UNKLE is set to release a new album sometime
this year; while it won’t be a dual DJ Shadow/James Lavelle
project, Lavelle is getting some awesome people to guest on
the disc, so it should be challenging, if nothing else. The
Flaming Lips also released a companion disc to Yoshimi,
which could be good for a listen or three, if Apple adds it
to the iTunes library.
This Could Be Very Dangerous. Signing up for, and using the iTunes music service, is remarkably simple, hideously easy, and could be bad for my bank account. A few days ago there weren’t a whole lot of tunes I was interested in buying, but they’ve added a lot of stuff into the database since then. I’m impressed by the process, the seamless integration of the service into the iTunes interface, and the satisfaction level I have upon completion. This is a great way to buy music.
Now, the big problem is to try to resist the urge to fill out the catalog—the entire Rush back catalog is there, for the High School still left in me; there’s a ton of electronica to fill out; don’t even get me started on the jazz selections… this is a baaaaaaaaaad thing for me. I only bought one track from the new Massive Attack remix EP, but there’s a Jelly Roll Morton ’26-’35 compilation of about 25 songs for $10, which is a fantastic deal. Must resist….
On the PC front, Dan has helped me resurrect my old 466 Celeron back from the brink of extinction to a condition of relevance; we swapped out an old CD-ROM for a burner I had laying around, and he gave me a bunch of old components laying around the office- RAM, a 10/100 NIC card, and some other small goodies. We wiped NT4 off the drive and replaced it with Win2000, so the list of available hardware and software I can use has greatly expanded. It was sad to see old SLANN go, but it’s a much happier machine now.
Last night I went through my four-drawer file cabinet in the basement. Exciting, right? Well, if you’re anything like me, you keep the most bizarre epherma for the most inane reasons imaginable. And that tendency seems to get worse if it has anything to do with art or technology. You can learn a lot about me by what I threw away this morning:
- Two spare Mac disk drives
- A copy of Adobe Illustrator 5.5 on floppy disk
- The original 700 MB disk from my 7100
- Roughly 200 blank and filled 3.5MB floppy disks
- ATM reciepts from 1995, 1996, and 1997 (separated by year in envelopes)
- 15 issues of MacWorld from 1999-2001
- An LP of Donny Osmond’s Disco Train
- An LP of XTC’s Skylarking
- 50+ assorted B/W prints from college (embarassing, mostly)
- Five linoleum cuts dating back to college
- Three years of collected illustration clippings (other folks’, as reference)
- Four 500MB external SCSI hard drives (going to Goodwill)
- One SCSI scanner (also going to Goodwill)
- 20+ RAM chips, totaling about 10MB, dating back to my Mac IIcx
- Assorted illustration, design, and web client files from 1997-2000
- 20+ Print sample books from three years ago
- A copy of WordPerfect for the Mac, version 2.0, from 1994 (four floppies)
- Two boxes filled with business cards from jobs I had in 1996 and 1999
Naturally, because I am a geek, I backed up all the floppies that had good stuff on them to CD before I pitched them. I found copies of the promos I built in 1996 to get illustration work, funny sound samples from my sister, old writing from a class I took at Hopkins in 1997, and about a billion different extentions, updaters, and utilities.
There is a fantastic article on the state of the OSX Finder at Ars Technica today; John Siracusa takes Apple to task for the bastardization of the original Finder into its current incarnation (which he argues is not even a finder at all, making good the point that the Finder is the computer.) He outlines a number of good points about the way things work, why they do not follow the original model (and break most of the fundamental principles of the Interface Guidelines) and offers suggestions as to how they could be better. For anyone who works with interfaces and UX models, this is good juicy readin’.
Also via Slashdot, an article about a photographer who was fired from the LA Times for digitally altering a photo which ran on the front page. This isn’t the first time, but it raises serious questions about ethics and the art and science of journalism.
I wrote a potential client back and provided my address, then went to check the Design section and realized the JavaScript for the Case Studies section was broken. A quick two-minute fix, but who knows how long it’s been busted?
The Home Depot in Glen Burnie has used brick in stock, so I’m stopping by tonight with the Scout to pick up a load. Whoopee!
Additionally, I did update the Scout page last night, for the first time in four years. Good grief! I have a bunch of other stuff I’d like to post there, including the lineset ticket and an updated list of links from the past four years. Hard to believe it’s been almost five years I’ve owned it.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.