frederick, md, 8.24
Well, the plan to see the Wings of Freedom airshow in Frederick on saturday were dashed when it became clear that I had gotten the wrong dates from two different websites (the airshow I initially found the 8.24 dates for was in Lancaster, PA.) But we did find a lone B-25 sitting on the tarmac under canvas, and took pictures of it. The rest of the day was spent antiquing and looking for clothes at the outlet center.
I am attempting to make a barrel in 3D today. It is much, much harder than I thought it would be.
Looking through the Blue Book value guide for a trade-in price on my car, I find that the Tortoise is worth about $1,580 as a trade-in. Selling it on my own, it tells me I could expect as much as $2,810. Of course there are the things I need to fix on it, like gluing the rear bumper back on, and washing it once this year….
So I’m pricing out PC’s for the house, and I’m looking through the Dell offerings, trying to get a system with some stones for under $900, without all the crap Dell wants to add with their order- stuff like XP, all the extended warranty stuff (why do I need a 4-year limited warranty with on-site technical support? Do you expect the computer to crap out on me?) and junky inkjet printers. About three years ago, Greycube bought me a blazing-fast 466mhz Celeron clone, and it still runs reliably… but there’s no chance it will run 3D Studio Max, which is a priority these days. Funny to think I’m also considering a new car right now too. I think after the research I did today, I’ll stick with the computer and increase my job security, and return to thoughts of a new car next year.
- Pay off Visa bill.
- Pick up OSX, a larger hard drive, and the FireWire enclosure. Back up the Powerbook
- Buy an iPod and celebrate the return to normal paychecks also an iRock for the car and the house
- Futon for basement; possibly a larger TV
- Computer for 3D Studio learning-Keep looking at Dell.com
backyard flower combination, 8.10
This is a link to an extremely moving piece on a photojournalist at the site of the WTC attacks last fall; it is a record of the last photos he took on his journey downtown to the base of the towers. His 35-mm cameras were smashed in the collapse of the second tower, but the compact flash card in his digital was intact.
I downloaded PGP for the Mac on Friday, and I’m looking through the documentation this morning to see how and what it does. Helpfully, the publishers enclosed two PDF files: Intro to Crypto and the User’s Guide. Inside the Intro to Crypto manual, Phil Zimmerman wrote something in 2000 that was spookily forward-thinking, given the events of the past year:
“Once a communications infrastructure optimized for surveillance
becomes entrenched, a shift in political conditions may lead to abuse of this
new-found power. Political conditions may shift with the election of a new
government, or perhaps more abruptly from the bombing of a federal
building.”
I also found a newer, better disk catalog application, in the hopes that I can get a handle on exactly what is in my collection of assorted Mac and PC backups, archives and application discs. (numbering about 100 or so right now.)
dock, 7.30
We have a busy busy weekend planned. Jen is having her birthday on Saturday (no, I’m not telling you how old she is) and I’m taking her out on Friday night; on Saturday her family comes into town and we go out again for dinner. Tonight we’re getting together with some folks from work for a postponed dinner. What a social schedule!
Never really having used Excel before, I approached it with a lot of caution and loathing. I plugged in the information I wanted to capture (freelance billing data) and looked through the helpfiles for a few minutes. When i figured out how to add one column and total it out, I found myself clapping like a 5-year old.
ALGX is sucking totally these last weeks; their nameservers keep dropping in and out, so none of the entries in my logfiles have resolved names. Grrr! Who are you? Where are you coming from? Where are you in the world?
windshield, 7.26
Starting tonight, Jen and I are on a long-needed vacation up to my folks’ house, so I probably won’t be posting here too much in the next week. But I will come back with a ton of pictures, a relaxed demeanor, a killer tan, and hopefully some more freelance work. Stay tuned.
It’s pretty wet out there today, but it’s supposed to get up into the 90’s next week. I worked out all the kinks (hopefully) in my irrigation system in the backyard, so during our vacation the plants will be watered.
Song of the day: Mongrel, DJ Shadow.
Speaking of, I will offer an opinion on the ‘Bonus Track’ offered with the CD I wrote about yesterday: Big deal. I used my Windows machine, and went through all manner of steps just to bring up a Windows Media Player to play a streamed remix of ‘Giving up the Ghost’. So every time I might want to hear this ‘Bonus Track’, i have to insert the disc, jump through the hoops (enter my personal information) and then I have to use WMP to hear the song. WMP sucks. And from a marketing perspective, it seems pretty worthless to not advertise the ‘Bonus Track’, as well as make the customer go through all the hoops to hear the song, just so they can collect info on my marketing demographic.
I found this link via kottke.org today: True Porn Clerk Stories. apparently it’s had some exposure on NPR lately as well.
I went to the CompUSA nearby my office yesterday to find a PCMCIA adapter for my camera’s flashmedia, and while I was there, I played with the new iMac and iPod up close. I was very impressed with the engineering on both products- wow. I love the size, shape, feel, and interface of the iPod. I would love to buy one of these if I could hook it into my home stereo system and get high-quality sound from it. I do like the fact that it now can hold contacts and calendar information; I would actually have a reason to sell the Palm and buy an appliance that handled more than one task. eBay has a bunch of new Palm IIIxe’s for $75 or so. Unfortunately, the cheapest iPod is $299, and it’s only 5 GB.
Midnight in a Perfect World Department:
I found a link off kottke.org about Gracenote, better known as CDDB, the helpful folks that provide the track information when you pop your new CD in the drive. I poked around, and found this link to the DJ Shadow bonus content. Pleasantly surprised, I popped the disc in my player on the PowerBook and hit the site. I was greeted by this message.
grrrr
I know this is not Shadow’s fault for setting it up like this, but shit, man, is it too hard to take the extra half-hour to add the code in to make this stupid site compatible with Macs as well? Thanks a lot, guys. I would take a wild stab here and say that there’s a good chance a large percentage of his fans use a Mac as their primary machine, and that Macs were used to produce the album.
It seems that it is impossible to find the frickin’ batteries for my cellphone anywhere besides the AT+T store. I’d like to be able to walk in somewhere and buy them, instead of paying for the shipping as well, but it’s looking more and more like I have to bite the bullet.
We may be here at work tomorrow for the 4th, depending on how much we get done on the game today. Jen and I have destroyed our 4th plans because of this, and we are both unhappy about it.
At some point in the next month or so, when I get a few back due paychecks (hopefully), I’m going to buy a good-sized IDE hard drive for this Powerbook and set up a dual boot install of OSX. Jaguar, the new update, is apparently a month ahead of schedule, and Apple is submitting OSX to the government for security clearance. There are native versions of Dreamweaver MX and Photoshop 7 now available, and when money frees up somewhat, I’m going to make the jump. I’ve actually wanted to for some time now, but when the project is finished I should have some time to really devote to it. (now I also have to figure out what to do with the 7100 in the basement running MKLinux…) I’m hoping that Scout will be able to handle the new graphics rendering engine shipping with Jaguar, or I may be once again behind the curve…
I have to check and see if there are OSX drivers for the digital camera, the Palm, and the USB hard drive, or I’m going to spend a lot of time switching back and forth.
I’m doing some research into setting up a VPN for my house and for work, so I can share stuff off the home machine to myself and keep it in one place (and then I’ll have to get some kind of tape backup, and…ugh.)
Doing a basic search sent me to this site, where I found a basic overview and some directions to the Microsoft site, with a white paper on PTPP installation for Windows NT machines, and some other smaller links. Netgear, as usual, has a fantastic primer on their site, which doubles as a tie-in to sell one of their products. On the MacinTouch site, i found the Nortel link for a client being developed for the Mac, which led to some other interesting ideas and links. I looked through the documentation for my SMC router and found that it supports PTPP tunneling, so it’s a question of whether or not I can set up the protocol on SLANN.
tornado warnings in the Baltimore metro area. 6:30PM, 6.7.02
On the brighter side, my camera arrived today! I’ve spent the afternoon fooling with it and I’m really pretty happy with the whole thing so far. The pictures look really great, the camera is easy to use, and I like the card reader interface a lot. It came with a 16MB card, which gives me 25 large-format pictures and somewhere around 125 medium-resolution pictures. More pictures as they become available, and I will start adding stuff to the site immediately.
Still stumbling through a fog of down-ness. I’m not able to pick myself out of this gutter, and it’s really spiralling downward quickly. Attempts to get moving again are working in fits and starts, but it’s an up-and-down battle right now.
I quoted a price on a huge illustration job yesterday that came in out of the blue, and that made me feel good for a few days; I’m pretty sure I came in under the wire on my pricing, although my timeframe might have given him pause to think. I’m going to follow up with a call today to see what he says, and hopefully he’ll have some feedback for me either way.
I also used the Buy it Now feature on ebay to buy a Kodak DC-3400 digital camera yesterday, and I’m sending a check to the dude in California today to take delivery. Between the possibility of this freelance job, the months and months of pining after one, and the need to document the backyard progress, I decided that $150 was a good frickin’ deal on a 2-megapixel camera with an 8-MB card plus the card reader. Plus, I think that Jen’s need to get back into some photography could also be served by having an inexpensive digital camera. So that is a possible good thing.
I also installed Jen’s new laptop at her house the other day; I bought another Pismo from Nick with a bunch of goodies, so we have two 400mhz Pismos, one with 320MB/6 gig (Jen) and one with 576/12 gig/FireWire (Bill). Both have DVD-ROM drives and both are in fantastic shape. She has all our software, my 10-year collection of fonts, and the spare internal Zip drive to work on. Plus we now have four batteries and three power cords between us. I’m excited about the prospects for our future in freelance.
Well, the Sun stuff I have here is worth about as much as the empty coffee cup next to this monitor, so I’m going to chuck them both in the dumpster this afternoon. I can’t even get money for the Sun mouses. I would eventually like to buy a used SPARC at some point, but for now I’ll stick with MKLinux on the 7100. I did read that the official version of Apache 2 has been released though.
I’m trying to resist the impulse to buy a digital camera right now. I think the money will be better spent on the Scout- new brakes, a tune-up, etc. so that she can get back on the road. I have $200 from eBay that I’m going to combine with a check from O. to pay off the Powerbook, and when (and if) we ever get the payout from Greycube that will pay off the rest of the credit card bill.
I have a message for all you smokers that complain about non-smokers infringing upon your rights: Kiss my ass. Until you decide you can be adult enough to throw your butts in the garbage, or in the little accessory thing in your car they call the ashtray instead of out the window or onto the curb, I don’t give a crap about your infringed rights. Clean up your mess.
I’m looking through a pile of old used Sun equipment here at work: there are two 3/60’s, a pile of RAM, two keyboards and three-button mice, and five APS hard drives (500/500/500/2GB/4GB) that could be used as backups for the home network.