Jen and I had a really good night together last night; we went out to the thrift store up the street, came back to the house and made dinner, and spent the evening together. That was needed by both of us. Jen bought a few dresses, one of which is beautiful, and I found a few books and an old Mac SE/30 for $7.
I went online today and in about five minutes found all manner of resources for getting an old Mac online- I’ll post the info a bit later, and hopefully get the time to upload some of the files to my machine.
Here at work looking at the Antietam screens for the fourth day. They are boring and annoying and ugly. I’m looking forward to being done with them for good. I’m getting pretty sick of the interface work as well; I need a better idea of what the game is supposed to do, which means I really need to get involved with the programmers and creators to figure out what it does. I can understand why nobody likes doing interfaces here.
Sierra Online is apparently gonna lay off 300 people- they make Tribes 2, Half-Life and a bunch of other really cool games. If they are in trouble, what does this company have in the wings? I’m afraid again. I’m talking to Jeff C about him teaching me C++ by doing Quake mods, which would be very cool. Apparently I need Visual Studio to really figure out what I’m doing and to compile quickly. C++ frightens me but I have to start somewhere. I also should really get back to Perl as well- I was doing some work with it but pretty much slacked off, and it’s time to increase my marketability fast. That’s also gonna take some serious work in 3D Studio Max.
On the Hopeless Consumer front, the Scout 2 will be in Ellicott City tonight, so I’m gonna go see that. Maybe it’ll be in great shape, maybe it’ll be a mess. We’ll see. I do know it has no rockers, passenger floor, and the quarters have been cut too. If it runs smooth, has a Dana 60 rear and 300 transfer case, and the body is straight, I’ll consider it, but that also means I need a place to put it- the big problem. I’d have to flat-tow or trailer it to Aurora and leave it somewhere- but where? Renie no longer has the barn. Brian might be able to store it for me, but I don’t know just yet. And it’s $1300, which cuts into the Emergency Fund by 1/2, and I’m STILL not paid yet, and I’m getting very thin. Bill didn’t transfer funds to his checking account, so now he’s overdrawn and charged $30. Dummy.
OK, I just found out that the Austerlitz stuff just got immensely worse. Infintessimally worse. Outrageously worse. Ugggghhh. That’s it- I’m learning Max immediately- I’m NOT getting stuck doing the interface stuff here any more. Meanwhile, I’m typing this out on a machine that’s not connected to the internet- Covad is down and ToadNet is telling us 4pm or so. Sure. Whatever.
Apple/ Motorola G3 333/167 1MB ZIF Card From Mac ResQ. Hmm. I wonder if the 8500 is even worth the $79 bucks?
OK, last night I figured out (through using EasyCD Creator5) that I can take all the burned copies of each of the CD’s that I got while at Supon and transfer them back to album-format CD; this means I don’t have to buy copies of stuff like UNKLE, Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Underworld. Very cool. I’ve also freed up a bunch of space on my drive at home- I should be able to get off an additional 1.5 gigs of worthless MP3 files and clear some space. That should save me a ton of time and money. I’m gonna spend another two days this weekend just burning CD’s and clearing off that drive; I also have a copy of the new Photoshop 6.0 to drop on there for work. That will be a relief- I haven’t had that or any of the Office products on there since I got the machine. I’m also going to work on getting the sound card to work, and then hopefully in a few weeks I can work on getting a video card- probably that Geforce card.
Found this article about Gr8. Says they’re going to reorganize as ‘Boldhaus.com.’
Today at work, I got the CD-ROM burner working on this Win98 box. I’m going to go home and try to redo it on the NT box- I think in my haste to install I forgot to install the drivers on the NT machine. Stupid me. I think I’ll be able to get all my crap off that machine finally and store some stuff. I need to talk with Dan the IT guy here about making a copy of CDWriter 5 so I can bring it home. Bye-Bye MP3’s, and I can back up the Mac stuff and get it off that drive. Hallelujah. I also picked up a spindle of 50 CD-R’s for $29- a splurge, but something that will come in handy- I have lots of CD’s to burn! Cross one (hopefully) off the list below…
Spent the weekend at Jen’s parents’ place- that was a good time, but I was glad to sleep in my own bed last night. I’m putting in some home time this week before I fly off to Texas this weekend. Cleaning, basement, laundry, and me. I’m stopping off to pick up some drywall this afternoon to start the wall work- hee hee!
11:20PM. Decided to leave the drywall until next week. I did get a call from Home Depot about the window- I have to go pick that up this week before we take off for Texas. However, i did get the CD Rom burner working on the NT box- Duh. What an idiot I am. I didn’t install the drivers for the parallel port, so the machine didn’t know to look there. One quick install from the HP site and i was up and running pretty easily. So I’m burning a bunch of MP3’s to a disk and getting them off this drive- woo hoo!
Let’s see. We went to see Final Fantasy this weekend in St. Mary’s; I was very impressed. It was pretty good- there were some obvious, notable lapses in the modelling of the characters’ teeth, lips and eyes, but i was blown away with the level of detail in the movie- the characters were very well drawn and the story wasn’t half-bad either.
I found these books at Barnes and Noble a few months ago- I want to buy them and learn PHP:
| ISBN 1-861003-145 | Beginning Perl |
| ISBN 1-861003-73-0 | Beginning PHP4 |
| ISBN 1-861002-96-3 | Professional PHP Programming |
| ISBN D-201-35463-2 | Javascript Visual Quickstart Guide |
I had a thought this morning. I want to cut off/pay off debts to free up more spending/saving cash these days; I’ve been trying to figure out ways to do this without losing the services I want and love. Right now I have three mortgages on the house (it sounds stupid, but hear me out: One mortgage was for about $5,000 on the down-payment; this was through the neighborhood improvement association in conjunction with Crestar, which guaranteed locking in the mortgages at 6%. The balance is with First Union. The third was an improvement loan to pay for the HVAC and basement wiring last year) and I pay three different banks each month.
What I thought was to see how much the balance on the Crestar (now SunTrust) loan is, and pay that mother off. That would free up $55/mo. Plus, I’m going to be shutting off the DSS service this month, which is an additional $33/mo.
I already shut off the second phone line to the house, which saves roughly $35/mo. and almost pays for the DSL line; my Verizon bill is dramatically smaller now. Unfortunately BGE hiked my payment plan to $99 for the increase in heating bills this winter, so I’m losing some cash there. Thank godI paid off the Scout loan last year and got the Visa bill back down to a reasonable amount. That will be the next plan of attack.
Note to self: Amazing Foods’ Cha-Cha-Chili may be tasty, but it gives me intolerable gas.
PowerMax has a Used Beige Power Mac G3/233 DT 32MB/4GB/CD for $549.
A Used Power Mac G3/350 64MB/6GB/DVD/56K/KB (Blue and White) is $949.
Lower end G4’s go for about $1K; a Used PowerBook G3 250MHz 48MB/5GB/CD/FD/12.1″ is $999.
Then again, hell, a new Power Mac G4/400 64MB/10GB/DVD-ROM/56k is $1199.
If I thought I had it bad the other day at the ER, here’s a funny story from another person about their experience.
Random memory:
Working in the doctor’s office at Cidera, the week after we moved into the new building, on the old side. I was in an old exam room, with linoleum-over-cement floors, white walls, and a big doctor’s door. Overhead flourescents which I turned off and replaced with Christmas lights, one main desk and two banquet tables stacked next to each other. I put my desk in the middle of the room facing the door and worked like that, with the door closed. It was a few weeks before they moved us into the cave, over on the far side of the new building, and the first office after moving in with Tina and Alison. I spent a month there, through Christmas and into the first week of January. The album of the month was Orbital’s In Sides.
Reading a good book about Interface design, published, interestingly enough, by Sun and Prentice Hall: Designing Visual Interfaces. Up to about page 65 so far; they go through the mid 90’s incarnations of Windows, NeXTStep and MacOS, and use examples like the old batch process window from DeBabelizer (you know the one I mean) and the original General Controls Panel for System 6.0.3. I find it very funny that almost every example they use of NeXTStep is treated with praise. Here’s a quote they include which caught my eye:
What is simple should be treated simply, what is difficult should be reduced to the simplest terms.
Josef Müller-Brockmann
The Graphic Designer and his Design Problems
I got most of the stuff on the Road Warrior (2nd partition removable drive) backed up onto the NT UAM volume last night; there’s something like 3.5 gigs of MP3’s that need to be burned to CD pretty quickly. (!!!) Tonight I need to get all the residual stuff off of Massachusetts (first partition removable drive) and backed up; Then I have to set up High Mass (internal drive) with all the settings and applications. That should be most of the evening right there. Then, flatten and wait out Andy to see if he wants it back. If Sean is with him, I’m sorta screwed. (Sean bought the drive and installed it for me.)
Cheap SCSI drives are about $70 at Other World Computing, but I’d also like to look into a FireWire enclosure for my USB drive- that thing is slow as dirt, but it works.
- Back up Massachusetts –> NT drive
- Back up LifeBuoy –> NT drive
- Empty Lifebuoy and copy Massachusetts
- Copy ALL settings for Massachusetts and document
- Set up High Mass and rename
- Wipe Mass and Road Warrior.
- Replace RAM in Jen’s laptop.
From what the man tells me, my Globe posters should have been shipped by now, but my check hasn’t cleared yet.
Much is being said about the Dot-Com survivor set. All the examples given are the ‘poor, shocked ex-employees’ in San Francisco, who miss their free Frappuccinos and roof parties and foosball tables in the break room. My girlfriend is a dot-com ‘survivor’; I know a few other folks who are too. She is worried because she doesn’t have a job right now, but she’s not bitching about the fact that she misses free sodas in the cafeteria, or First Fridays, or the ‘dot-com’ atmosphere.
Well, the spring air and pollen have conspired to give me one walloping headache. I took two Advil and it’s dulled back the pain, but it still feels like Hulk is running around inside busting up the joint.
A few things: They convicted that Blanton guy in Alabama for killing the four girls in 1963 church bombing. I have to say it’s heartening to see that civil rights are still being pursued and justice is still being meted out, albeit 40 years too late. It’s hard to look at the pictures of the little girls and think that it took that long to convict somebody-the whole case was a stain on the American legal system.
Last night, I got Jen’s 8100 loaded and running system 8.1; she has Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, and a suite of utilities to take care of the machine. I was also able to load Vistascan and hook up the scanner; apparently Vistascan doesn’t like OS 9, so I stayed up too late loading OS 8.1 on the 8500. One drawback: I have to reformat the internal drive as an HFS volume instead of HFS+; so I’ll be starting from scratch on that one again. I’m almost thinking it would be better to find a faster, larger drive for it- the OEM 2 gig Quantum it shipped with is a pig.
Got a look at the new iBook from Apple. I’d buy that thing with the CD/RW drive- it’s the perfect price point, size, shape, and suite of features. $1599. Sweet. If I didn’t already have an ahem loan on a Powerbook, I’d fork over some dough now. But it’s May, and they still haven’t called. Shhhh!
OK. Bob Kerrey, as a Navy SEAL in 1968, killed a bunch of people. Doing what he was trained to do: Kill people. Maybe they were killed wrongly, but I suspect they got shot doing what most casualties of war are usually doing: existing in a free-fire zone. Now some guy, most probably with an axe to grind, is claiming Kerrey killed them purposely. And we Americans have the freakin’ nerve to be outraged? This happened 30 years ago, in a war that’s been over for 25. Hundreds of other civilians died every day from US-ordered carpet-bomb strikes, napalm attacks, landmines, and random artillery barrages. Because he returned fire into a village which brought his men under fire, and hit these people, the entire US is currently in the middle of an epileptic seizure. he received a medal for later action, lost part of a leg, and served the country for 20 years. Let the guy alone, for Christ’s sake.
I’d love for Bob Kerrey to say what’s been on my mind ever since I heard about this story: Get over it. War sucks. Killing sucks. But we were there, we did it, and everybody who was involved came away with blood on their hands. And everybody who sits in judgement over Bob Kerrey should be forced to carry an M-16 into someplace like Rwanda or Somalia or Serbia and try to make some sense out of war while they try to stay alive.
Here’s some interesting blather from C|Net about the market I just got out of….
Macs in the cellar:
Mac IIcx | Norman
PowerBook 100 | Junior
PowerBook 520c | Max
Quadra 800
PowerMac 7100/80 | G-Force (MKLinux)
PowerMac 8500/180 | Alpha (now Speedy)
PowerBook G3/500 | Massachussetts (Wk)
Last entry for April. This log has been a good exercise so far, and I’m going to continue writing in it. We got back from Brian’s wedding last night at about 7:30; we both had a great time. My stomach decided it wasn’t happy on Saturday night and I was up with the Genny Screamers until 4am or so; that and sleeping on the couch so I wouldn’t wake everybody up really put a hurt on my body. My neck is still aching from Mom and Dad’s cratered guest bed, a night on the the couch, and my return to my own pillows. I do have to say, though, it’s great to have a solid 8 hours’ sleep behind me- I feel awake and alive. I think I’m going to put a moratorium on staying awake past 11:30 this week to see how well I perform at work on 7 hours’ sleep.
I’m out of vacation time and out of sick leave, I think. I probably have 4 hours’ sick time and maybe 4 of vacation with this new pay period. sigh. Mom was telling me everybody got some great porch time on Sunday after we left- that made me jealous and sad that I don’t live closer to them.
For some reason, I’m feeling a little nostalgic for playing Marathon. In 1996, I had just bought my first computer, a Mac IIcx, and I worked at Hopkins in a window office over the Harbor; they had e-mail but only internally; I bought an AOL account and used it on their 9600K modem. I got the demo on a CD from MacUser and installed it on the office 840av; the first day I played it it scared the shit out of me and hooked me completely. I played it constantly for the next 6 months. All I wanted was somebody to play with me- you could network it up and play on a LAN; I worked with a bunch of 40-year-old sociologists and lifer Hopkins drones. My cx would only play it at the lowest settings and with 256 colors; I had to devote all system resources to play it at anything near a decent speed. I had Hopkins buy me a Supra 28.8 modem and would spend hours in my office downloading maps for the game; then I’d stay at work for 2 hours or until dark playing each one.
In the early days of ’98, I had a job at an Internet design firm with a T1 and spent hours at a now-deceased site called the Marathon Hyper-Archive where this guy had collected all the maps people had created. I was able to get about 65% of the maps for all the different iterations of the games Bungie created, and archived them on CD. I figure it’s fun to go back and play the games every couple of years- sort of like busting out the Intellivision or the Atari 2600 for an afternoon of beers and Space Invaders.
Last night I set up the SMC router and got my 8500 and the laptop out to the internet; if I had known it would be that easy, I would have bought the damn router a year ago! What an easy setup. I mistakenly installed VirtualPC on the 8500 thinking I was going to have to install some PC software onto the machine, or at least a set of web pages with the information to connect to the router. After installing VPC 3.0/Win 98, and realizing it only worked with G3’s and above, I installed 2.1 and the updater, and then accessed the pages on the router- the machine itself has a series of pages you access by using the localhost DNS. What a snap! After plugging in the appropriate login and password, I was online in about 10 minutes.
Now I have to get the NT box up with DHCP and then the MKLinux box as well- that one should be the true test. i did find some great links though, that will hopefully make it easier- if I have to do the whole makefile runaround, I’m going to just bite the bullet and chance reinstalling the OS right over top of the old, and hope I can get the server running again. Or, I’ll figure out how to assign it a static IP in that internal range- I might do that for all the machines, if it’s easy enough.
One thing that might be cool is to set up the 8500 to automatically cycle on at about 7am and go right to the news page, or maybe bring up Outlook Express to check mail. Then it would shut itself down at 8, after I’ve gone for the train.
Now I’m wondering what will be better to do- set up the 8500 as a server or the NT box; the cool thing is it doesn’t really matter because any machine on the router can access and edit the config pages! The NT server will definitely need a static IP if I’m going to be using it as an AppleShare server; I think I could see it as a volume if I just put it on the router through DHCP, but I’m not sure about that.
Tonight:
- Press chinos and white dress shirt.
- Network/Continue loading/installing software on Jen’s 8100
- Check into static IPs with the SMC router & assign one to the NT box/Linux box…?
- Make sure the printing services (LaserWriter Bridge) still work on the 8500
- Get the scanner/zip hooked up and working on the 8500
- Look into printer services For Macintosh on the NT box when it’s configured.
- Laundry/packing for the weekend
1:44 PM. I just found out my old company, Cidera, just laid off an additional 50 people. I’m trying to get some more details from my friend Brad, who gave me the heads-up.
2:24 PM. Listening to Daft Punk/Homework. Who would have thought that a couple of Frogs could create some good electronica?
Ideas for the log pages:
- Set up the calendar control as a server-side include.
- Add Logan’s, Tims, Matt’s, and other friends’ sites.
I continued shopping with Jen last night for dresses for a weddin’ in Texas. We were able to find two very beautiful dresses in what I’m told is a sheath style, very inexpensively, with a sexy pair of shoes. I know how hard it is to find the right outfit, and we did it (with a backup) in about 2 hours last night. Plus, I found a groovy pair of nubuck saddle shoes and nice German-made steak knives. I like Marshall’s a LOT.
On the train ride home yesterday I was able to get the layout for the May log together; I cribbed form a design I saw yesterday, but altered it and made it work for me. I like it, and I’m excited to use a font style other than Verdana- I dislike serifed fonts in HTML (Times New Roman,) but I think this layout lends itself to Georgia well. Note: use Clarendon…
Quote of the Day: “There were too many of us, we had access to many-too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”
UNKLE, ‘Main Title Theme’
Tonight:
- Check out/press the green suit and white dress shirt.
- Install VirtualPC on the 8500 –> load the SMC software –> configure the router –> bring up the NT box and set it up for access –> get the laptop configured
- Continue loading/installing software on Jen’s 8100
- Laundry/packing for the weekend
I started playing with AvantGo, the Palm software, this afternoon, after reading about them on News.com. It’s pretty cool, and the software works really well. I have a Palm IIIxe, and I’ve been using about 0.0005 of the available 8MB of memory. What it does is load a fresh copy of channel info onto your Palm every time you HotSync- mostly webpages from places like CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Then you can take it with you and (providing your batteries are good) read the daily news while waiting on the train.
Unfortunately they just laid off 50 people in order to remain competitive. Sorry, folks. They should have charged for the service (shhh) and created a better business plan for themselves.