I took the PowerBook (currently called ‘Black Beauty’) home and began to move stuff around; between the CDs I have burned, the USB hard drive crammed with data left over from Cidera and Supon, and the UAM volume on SLANN with a hurried dump from the USB drive through Dave C’s PowerBook, there’s a ton of crap I forgot all about. Unfortunately I forgot the power cable to the USB drive (it was $200 and this was before powered USB drives) so I couldn’t move the bulk of the info around where I needed to, but I got the UAM volume cleaned up on SLANN and took some more useless data off him to clear the room. I need to take the timne to de/reinstall some of the larger program files onto the larger D: drive, but that’s in the future.
I have 9.2.2 installed on her now, and just installed iTunes- it’s nice to have MP3’s in my headphones again. 9.2 blew up DAVE though, so I have to either re-install or figure out what broke.
I have taken delivery of a used FireWire PowerBook, S/N #QT0140BSHKE, with a DVD Player, 12gig drive, 64MB of RAM, and 14.1″ screen. It is glorious. I opened the box and found the yo-yo and power cord, then opened the bubble wrap to find an absolutely pristine unit, with no scratches on the case or screen, no dead pixels, and all the components working (so far.) There is a fresh install of OS9 and 10+ gigs of free space on the drive.
Jen and I drove up into Hunt Valley in Sunday to look at a part-time job at a nursery, and while the job prospect did not work out, the area is beautiful. I was very impressed and excited to be up there- I could very easily see myself buying a house up there-one of the older ones, surrounded by about 3 acres of field, to be sure. Jen and I will be heading back up there to check it out in the near future.
Here’s the rundown on the plan for this evening:
VST USB Drive
Photos –> NT Box
Portfolio work –> NT Box
Web Tools –> NT Box/Laptop
Beta backup –> NT box –> to CD
Laptop/Renie’s G3
All Application Installers –> VST Drive
All Updaters/Utilities –> VST Drive
All Serial Numbers –> into one simpletext file –> VST Drive
All Font files –> back up to VST Drive
Seen today on a car driving up to work: a bumper sticker reading, “I was born OK the first time.” Ha-ha. This article is pretty funny about Miss Cleo. Call me now for your free readin’.
I missed the second PowerBook auction yesterday, but there’s one for a newer 400mhz Pismo ending tomorrow at about 3pm. I’m going to try for this one to see if I can win it, and I think I might go as high as about $650 or so. There’s also an iMac going for about $170 right now that ends at 3; it’s a first-generation, but it could be decent. I think I’m going to go as high as $250 and we’ll see if we win that one.
We had the Greycube meeting the other night and talked out what we’re doing/where stuff is right now; it looks like we might have a payout of $1-2K apiece, which would be fantastic at this time. If I could put that into the bank and then save on top of it, I would be a lot more comfortable right now instead of worrying so much about money. It’s been tough to save money the past two months after a run of spending cash since the Cidera days; wanting toys or stuff for the house and not being able to afford it has been difficult, but tolerable. I’m actually, while thinking about it right now, veering towards buying that iMac outright off eBay for $200 or so just to have an inexpensive Mac to use, and deal with buying an iBook later on.
| Stuff to take care of | Price | Time Frame |
|---|---|---|
| Paint for living room Brake work for the Scout Buying the Scout Shelves for living room |
$50-60 $500+ $3000 $120 |
end of february Early March April/May March? Possible Birthday present? |
For reasons somebody at Marlin Perkins’ Wild Kingdom would be happy to explain to me, my body has gone into a hibernation cycle approximating that of a large North American Brown Bear. I find it extremely difficult to get out of the bed when the alarm rings, even when there is a Staind song playing for the one millionth time on my clock radio, the cats are doing a flamenco high-step on my chest attempting to wake me up, and the sun is shining brightly on my face.
Last night I moved the DSL router and mounted it to the board below the wiring panel downstairs; for the time being I put the Barricade on top of two stacked speakers and hooked all the wiring up; then I found out that wiring the jacks to the ‘A’ code was not working, so I switched them all to the ‘B’ standard and got link lights and connectivity throughout the house. I need to figure out how to mount the Barricade to the wall in a somewhat appealing manner, then tighten up the cabling. Then I re-route the coax feed from the satellite dish and clean it up, and I can close the whole panel.
Remember Pearl Harbor. Don’t see the movie, which I’m told sucked; read this book by Gordon W. Prange. From what I understand, nobody that produced the movie did; maybe you’ll learn something.
Some little jerk walked past the Scout this morning and sprayed a red line down the side with spray-paint. I hate this city so much. I can’t wait to move out of it.
An interesting quote from Richard Parsons, the (now) CEO of AOL Time Warner:
Q. Do you think the Web can remain free?
A. No. No, I don’t think so. Not if it’s to achieve or realize its ultimate destiny as the global interactive marketplace that it can be.
Go to hell, Richard. And take TIME magazine and all your spamming AOL subscribers with you. Do you understand anything about the Web? The best part about it is that it’s free, you ignorant fool. The best thing about it is that I don’t need to pay narrow-minded greedheads like you to publish whatever I think or feel; I own this site and you don’t. Mouthbreather. Keep the ‘interactive marketplace’ on your pretty AOL sites and leave my web alone.
2:46 PM – </vent mode off> OK, I’m feeling better. Life is good. Please process the above vitriol through the “had a crappy morning” filter. Running was good, and I had a good time with Jeff and Dwight.
Leftover count: 5 meals and counting. >burp<
The phone company has to come in to fix my line this Thursday. I hooked in the new lines and now it’s down. There’s a dial tone out in the interface box but none at the two terminals next to the RJ-11 jack next to it; I think the little unit outside is busted. So I have to cough up $80 for the guy to come out and replace a $5 part.
Sun redesigned their site into an ugly piece of junk. For a company I always looked up to as far as having a strong, well developed design identity, they sure messed it up. What an ugly site they made.
This morning I read that the Mr. Showbiz site is defunct- Disney pulled the plug on it and redirected it to the ABC site, which now pops up two ads. F–king mouse. Not that I looked at it a lot anyway, but every once in awhile I wound up there, linked off another site. On a related not, some of the first links in Google for the search term anti-disney come up with some disturbing sites. The first guy-and I’m not linking to his site-seems to have a problem with the “Gay Issue” (his capitalization) but he doesn’t want to cover it for fear of losing sight of Disney’s “other sins”. Some of the others are just silly.
Mapquest has this service where they show you satellite photos of the address you plug in when you come to the map view. So here’s my house, somewhere in the center of that last shot.
I’m just looking back and realizing this is the first time I’ve been able to keep up with a daily journal of sorts; with the exception of June, I was able to make an average of about 5 entries a week since the end of march. I’m thinking what I might do is take a snapshot of my Palm Pilot, where I kept track of what I was doing then, and post it on the June page, so I at least have a reference as to what I was doing.
Brushing up on some of the home networking sites now that I’m going to attempt this thing; I also found a few sites that support DNS services for dynamic IP’s, i.e. DSL or cable services. Going to buy the box for the wiring tonight and put it in while the paint dries on the stair risers. I can’t wait to get a good night in on the basement- I’m excited to make some progress.
12:31am – Anybody else notice that our Commander-In-Chief, the guy we barely voted in office (and who didn’t have a clue where Afghanistan was on a map until last November), while giving a teleconferenced speech to assembled international heads of state in a UN council meeting yesterday, pronounced the word nuclear “nu-cu-lur”?
So many people are crying about how phony they feel to see people waving flags and putting up signs that say “God Bless America”, etc. Know what? I think it’s great. I don’t think this completely fractured, divided, schizophrenic culture we call America has felt like a greater part of something in a long time- since probably around the early 60’s. I like to see that people have pride in something. Not their Mustang 5.0, not their nails, but something greater than the sum of their parts. What I do have a problem with is the new idea that we can’t criticize or question our government now that we are ‘at war’. I think, given this new feeling of patriotism sweeping the country, that now is the ideal time to question our actions in the far east, starting with how we got involved there back in the 70’s, and actually learn something about them. And I think we should start by questioning the guys who put the wheels in motion back then, namely Messrs. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush Sr.
I just printed out a test page from a Laserwriter 4/600 Jen and I found at a thrift store in Laurel for the kingly sum of $6.90. It is absolutely flawless- there’s no marks on the case, the test page looks clean and crisp, the count on the engine is 12,486. It has 2MB of RAM and prints at 600dpi; the connection is a DIN-9 Mac serial cable, which is the only drawback. I’ll put it in over at Jen’s house so she can print with it and chuck her inherited DeskWriter from Henry, the Amazing Freaky Upstairs Neighbor. I am psyched.
We had a really great weekend together; Saturday we woke and went to get breakfast, then busied ourselves cleaning up the backyard and taking a load of old building debris to the dump. After that we rolled to Sam’s Club and stocked up on food and supplies for the next few weeks, so we both have enough pierogies to feed the Chinese army for a week. Saturday night we met Dave and Joan in Elicott City for dinner (actually, we met Joan; Dave was about 45 minutes late.) Jen read the travelogue Dave wrote about their travels to Europe and I made conversation with Joan. It was great to see him again, although he was in a sort of subdued mode. I kind of wish it had been just the three of us- Dave, Jen and myself again.
I’m working from home today so that the carpet guys can come in (sometime) and measure/eyeball the floor in the basement. I actually need to run downstairs and clean up the floor before they get here, but overall it’s in good shape. I also have this video card sitting here but I’m afraid to bust it out just for fear of blowing up this computer and not being able to work all day.
I have to admit, I’m stressing out about work and money issues. Work is going OK but I’m afraid that after this project I’m going to get canned for some reason. My boss is great but I’m feeling out on the ledge, and I can’t shake the feeling. I think my work has been good up until now, and I don’t think they’re mad at me, but I’m just really down on the economy and afraid that I’m going to lose my job soon. I’m going to head into Home Depot or Lowe’s this week and take some extra hours a few nights a week just to get the bank account padded and back up to fighting size, or pay off the credit card/second mortgage and free up some cash. I’ve been great with the credit card up until this past week, when we didn’t get paid on time. I haven’t put anything on it in about 2 months, and I’d like to keep it that way (although i bought the USB card for the Mac on it.) After this carpeting gets installed, I’m going on a budget of $100 a week or something like that so that I can really save some cash for the next few months. I have to find out what they pay hourly and do some math to see what I could make for 3 nights a week or so.
5:40 pm – Hmm. I found, after several abortive attempts at trying to start programming my own log program, a program called Greymatter, a free Perl script for starting a weblog. I do believe I’m going to try it tonight and see what results I get. I also got some good feedback from my boss about the interface, so I’m feeling better about that as well. All that having been said, I didn’t get a whole hell of a lot done today- lots of configuration, copying, uploading, etc. I did quickly get the USB drive up and running to get some stuff off the drive for Matt, and found a few things I should have archived a while back.
Damn. Damn damn. At least these guys and Salon are still up and running. And, this is really funny. Like anybody should be surprised? The funny thing is that they quote the capital management guy as saying that they won’t go after anybody who has a $1,000 laptop because it costs too much in legal fees. Enjoy the equipment, guys!
I have scientifically determined this morning that any 24-32 year old male driving a late-model black Honda Prelude is a jerk. And should have his license revoked. And my nose is running nonstop this morning. Blah.
Another note on the Blackhawk Down thread from yesterday- I was not aware that there was a movie being produced on the subject. Ridley Scott is directing, which means at least it will look good. They’re saying March 2002 for a release date- we’ll see how recent events shape that decision.
I downloaded the Real player yesterday to see some of the video that the Philly Enquirer had made available for the Blackhawk story. Let me just say that I’ve never had to deal with a more intrusive, annoying and deliberately misleading install sequence just to use a media player in my life. I wish I had counted the number of screens I had to go through to simply install the player, or the number of hidden checkboxes I had to hunt down and find just so that I could avoid hidden “channels” and “subscriptions” for “alerts” that I don’t want and don’t need. What are they thinking? Don’t they realize that after they bombard their unknowing users with daily email updates about Britney Spears’ hair color that they’re going to alienate and ultimately drive away their users? This wouldn’t be so bad if the software actually worked, but when I played the video, it loaded, buffered, and ran, and 1/2 to 3/4 of the video was obscured by artifacts or just plain dropped out. Why don’t people just use Quicktime? Plus, 3/4 of the application acreage was taken up by all manner of stupid banners, flashing geegaws or useless text that I don’t want to see.