building, 3dmax, 1.15
…is currently spinning in the ol’ headphones. I’m creating a mixed-use building facade in Max, and it’s very, very cold in this corner of the office. It’s actually hard to type because the tips of my fingers are cold.
I’ve been trying to figure out what the best low-cost solution for a home server is. I think, for the peace-of-mind, I’m going to ditch all the old SCSI-era Macs in the basement and find a used iMac to serve from. I need to have something that can tunnel through the firewall, serve AFS volumes and also be available inside the house for MP3 consolidation, backup, and mail services. I’ve been scouring Ebay and other sites, but the common pricepoint is usually around $500. I’ll have to just keep looking.
Ona related note, people, make damn sure you zero-format those drives before you pull them.
Behind the Curve. OK, so it’s been out for a while, but A Rush Of Blood To The Head by Coldplay is a beautiful album.
I’ve been thinking that there hasn’t been a whole lot of photography on this site since, well… last fall, really. I still have the camera, and I still take snapshots, but right now, in Baltimore, there’s not a whole lot to take pictures of between my office and house that I haven’t already shot. I realize I have to get out and explore more, but lately there’s been this cold front sweeping through the area and I just don’t want to get out of the damn car.
3:45 3DSmax is a buggy piece of crap that crashes as much as Quark used to back in the day.
Jen’s bosses were kind enough to give her an iRock for Christmas. I have wanted an iPod forever, and she beat me to the technology! (Truthfully, I can’t think of anybody more deserving than her, so these are not sour grapes. Honestly!)
I may not be at my computer for much of the next few days, with the holidays upon us, so if I haven’t already said so, have a safe and wonderful time with your families, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.
I spent a good portion of last night printing Christmas envelopes from Quark; in the eight years that I’ve owned a Mac I still don’t know any better way to organize a mailing list better than exporting a contact manager’s database (then: Now Up-To-Date; now: Palm Desktop) and manually entering it into a linked series of text boxes in Quark. It brought back the days when I had several hundred illustration contacts and made a custom Quark template for Avery labels (instead of wasting the precious paper with merging Word files, something beyond my technical expertise) and hand-edited them based on the returned cards I got in the mail.
The Lantana update: Jen and I pulled all the lantana from the backyard a few weeks before the real frost hit and slammed them into some clay pots. I lugged all five of them into work and set them on the sill for sunlight, where they all proceeded to drop 90% of their leaves in protest. The two yellow plants are making a strong comeback, shooting healthy big new leaves towards the light. The purple plant is a little slower, but there are a bunch of small green shoots poking from the branches. The orange-yellow plant, the largest of the five, dropped all its leaves and sits like a stick in dirt. The white plant is a little better, but there is no green visible.
Will you Bring me one of these for Christmas? P.S. I really want the 10gb model. *sigh.*
Apple did a pair of ‘Switch‘ ads starring Will Ferrell that are funny as hell.
Last night I had the football game on while I was running around cleaning the house. Philadelphia was pasting San Francisco and a big deal was made out of the backup quarterback, who looked remarkably poised and confident. He and his team made a series of plays that most first-string squads would have a hard time completing. He went down hard in the fourth quarter with a dislocated elbow, and his whole team surrounded him on the field as the team medics worked on him. As they carted him off the field, something happened that made me feel really good—both teams walked out and came up to salute him, offering words of support and congratulations on his game.
I used a real nice utility to clean up and reformat a pair of DivX-encoded .AVI files today: DivX Doctor II. Now I can view a bunch of files on the Mac as well as my PC; it’s too bad DivX isn’t supported by Quicktime (or that there’s that niggling .AVI-sound issue as well.)
4:30 PM The rain has started; we shall see if it morphs into snow as promised this evening. I pulled the last herbs from the back garden this morning, but I need a larger pot for the rosemary, which went from a small plant to a ravenous bush over the summer. I have to pick up a turkey at Sam’s Club tonight and do some last minute Home Depot shopping, but all other Thanksgiving stuff is under control.
Clue for you: Explain to me why the Democrats are opposing the Homeland Security Bill. Don’t just list what the Republicans say it does. Tell me why McCain has decided to oppose it. Educate me. Don’t patronize me, or merely spit back what the Republican party line is. Show that you have some brains. Meanwhile, I’ll go somewhere else for my news.
So the fax thing isn’t working. Nice of the website, box, and instruction manual to tell us up front that the unit won’t work if you have a modem on the same line. My DSL apparently interferes with the incoming signal, so it’s a waste of time. In the meantime, I’ve signed up for an account with eFax, which at first has worked well for me. unfortunately now, their site is bollixed up so that even if I wanted to upgrade to the pay service (which I’d like to try) I can’t, because paths like www.efax.com/help/inetpub/wwwroot/default.asp just don’t work for some strange reason. May I suggest…?
Take a look at this article: the 100 best albums of the 80’s. Right the hell on. This is music, not the dreck you hear these days. I would go a little less Pixies and Sonic Youth-heavy, but otherwise they get a lot of it right.
Jen’s mom called yesterday to let us both know that the Leonid meteor shower was last night, and won’t be around again until 2098. Luckily, Jen, my mother, sister and I woke at 4am one morning last year, drove up the hill out of Aurora and sat shivering in a field to watch the display. After a brisk 10 minutes or so outside, we returned to the Subaru, sipped hot chocolate, and steamed up the windows. The shower was beautiful. I only hope I can share that experience with my children.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop up in Guilford reading an announcement about a free wireless network inside the store. It gives me the net id but tells me to call a number to set everything up…unfortunately my cellphone doesn’t have coverage in here. Grrr.
All attempts to get Win98/WinNT to see or use the Laserwriter have failed; I think the final solution is simply to buy a centronics to parallel connector, hook it directly into the SMC hub and use the built-in printer server.
I bit the bullet and ordered a FireWire CDR/W from SmartDisk yesterday; it’s an 8/8/24, but it’s bus-powered and has a much greater transfer rate than USB. This will be the final step in my upgrade of the home network system, and allow me to once again back up native Mac files to a Mac disk, clear a ton of crap off the NT server, and generally clean things up. And, it was $99.
Here’s a real nice website with a bunch of good info: WebmasterBase.com.
grand theater, eastern avenue, 10.14
We had a busy and fun weekend. Saturday we went to get supplies at the Home Depot, and I started on the deck. That night we had dinner with some friends and slept like babies. I was able to get a good portion of the framework in place Sunday, and I think in another two weeks or so we should have a pretty workable deck in place.
While I was doing that, Jen was filling the house with the warm yummy smells of cinnamon and rosemary. She’s practicing with my sucktastic oven in preparation for Thanksgiving, when the two of us will be making the feast for my fambly, which has been Dugan tradition for the last six years or so. As usual, my oven refused to cook evenly or keep a constant temperature, so the cinnamon rolls were cooked longer than she would have liked, but they were still very tasty. She also made rosemary-garlic roasted potatoes with herbs from the garden, and we feasted on those while waching Amélie on DVD.
Windows Media Player sucks ass. I have an MP3 of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist and about every 20 seconds it drops out a full second or so of the file. At first I thought it was bad mixing, but now that I’m listening to it with Quicktime, it’s complete and sounds worlds better. I so can’t stand that WMP shit.
Wired did a great article this month on Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer responsible for bringing the copyright battle to the Supreme Court on behalf of you and me.
I stopped over Jason’s house last night to have an OSX intervention; he sat me down and went over all the things he’s learned in a few months of driving around with OSX. I think that was what I needed. He had much the same exerience I did—he hated it for the first month, then began to like it, and then found he couldn’t go back to OS9. Anyway, mad gangsta props to Jason. (PS. if you’re looking to hire a very talented web designer/scripter/man-of-all-trades, call Jason. He’s good and he’s funny, too.)
So Todd has a great idea for a website that would rank entries based on user input. If there’s anybody out there who could contribute some time into some scripting and database work, I’ll front the design and domain costs. I think it would be funny and interesting to see what the different opinions would be. (I’m keeping mum on the details so that other folks don’t steal the idea. let us just say it’s targeted at 28-35 year olds with an appreciation for pop culture.)
Rock the Hell On Dept.:
Soundbitten. Run by a freelance journalist out of S-F, it contains some great articles on a variety of topics, and makes for good reading.
I work, work work. I listen to this and this and this. Not in that particular order. Isn’t that just thrilling?
A Thousand Monkeys Dept.: Last night while freelancing, I was finally able to figure out how to configure Adobe Distiller to work through the OS9 Chooser and print out a pretty PDF from Quark. Nick then helpfully suggested that OSX prints out PDFs natively. I resisted the urge to scream. Yes, it’s boring, but it gave me great satisfaction. As a matter of fact, it’s still giving me satisfaction. So there.
The internet is boring today. But they tell us that we “should be getting paid” real soon. For the previous pay period. Yippee.
I spent a good portion of last night alternately getting a backup Mac server up and running, and listing the CD’s I own so that I can A. figure out how many I have, and B. start trading stuff with my friend Rob to augment our individual collections. I now need to figure out how to share the Mac out through my DSL line– I’m going to give this a whirl again tonight.
Work is going steadily on the freelance project, and we have business cards, letterhead, advertising, a sellsheet, and a ton of other materials. I’m thinking that the official rollout will be sometime in the next few months, and for that I’m happy. There’s other stuff in the works that I need to jump on tonight, as well as some possible stuff down the road.
The trellis is up and secured in place, so now I get to the part I’ve been dreading- drilling a plate into the sill of the house under the back door for the stair platform. I’m trying to decide whether I should do that or just build a support and anchor it to the ground. Either way, I’m going to have to cut off the vinyl siding under the door, and I will be able to see what color the brick is behind my house for the first time in 5 years.
I’ll Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It Dept.: John Cusack and two other producers have spent the last year or two scraping funding together for a movie about the young Hitler in Munich, exploring who he was as a man before the Third Reich. One quote from the article really was interesting: “Walter Benjamin said when you fuse aesthetics with politics, you get fascism.”
The three producers interviewed all share a strong interest in the subject and have researched the subject extensively. Also interesting was the reaction Cusack got from Maureen Dowd of the Times— she had never seen the movie but came out against it. Personally, I’m interested in seeing it.
I found a link to the work of Adrian Tomine, who writes some very good comics. I’m going to look into finding this one up at Atomic Books sometime.