Looks like my old employer, Cidera, is finally turning off the pipes. Interesting to hear what people say on the Fuckedcompany boards; it looks like there are more than a few ex-employees posting comments there.
Still no luck with the dyndns stuff. Frustrating.
Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture. I heard one of the new Outkast songs this morning on the radio: Hey Ya! was the most interesting song I think I’ve heard all year. I went to iTunes immediately when I got to work and bought it for $.99. I can’t tell you how many other times I’ve wanted to do this and haven’t been able to, either because Apple is behind on adding them to the available list or the artist/label refuses to license them. Too bad.
RIP Robert Palmer.
Greasy Kid Stuff. When I was a kid, I spent about half my life from age 10 to about age 15 in the woods. Not because I wanted to; If we had lived in an area that was near someone else my own age, I might have done other things like played ball, rode my bike, or lit fires. But we were up on the side of a mountain, in a strange house, and the neighborhood kids were all maladjusted pricks. So I hung in the woods. I built forts, played army (defined as wearing a green T-shirt that said M*A*S*H and shooting an imaginary gun at imaginary Bad Guys) and, well, explored. During these five years or so, I crawled through brush, cut down trees, moved earth, and generally got dirty. I remember having poison ivy a few times, to the point where I had to get the pills (and let’s all thank God for the pills) to rid my blistered skin of the infection. I would usually get it while helping my Dad cut some kind of weed back from around the house—can you taste the irony there? it’s a bitter, bitter flavor—and it would be a small patch, somewhere on my arm or hand. By the next morning I would be a quivering mass of ooze not unlike a skinny Jabba the Hut (or even Pizza the Hut, if you prefer) and pleading for the pill. Ahh, the magical pill. Within a few days the itch was cut back to a dull roar, and the blisters would dissapear inside of a week. But I lived in fear of the Ivy. It was out there, waiting for me. Biding its time.
The doctor yesterday prescribed me the Corti-whatever cream instead of the pill. I have this crap slathered on me like tanning butter and it’s not doing diddly; the poison ivy is spreading like Kudzu and mocking me in a quiet, but persistent manner: “…itchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchy…”
I want to claw off my own skin.
Last night I answered an ad in the local Pennysaver (bless her, Jen knows I’m addicted to the Pennysaver, and always leaves it out where I can find it) for a grape iMac for the low low price of $100. We drove to beautiful Glen Burnie, I paid the man cash, and we have a new fileserver waiting to be built. Not too shabby— a first gen 333mhz, 160MB RAM, 6Gig hard drive.
clock, Baltimore County Incident Command Center, 9.17.03
Quick! Everybody! Run for your lives! Run for your lives!
I took a tour of the Baltimore Incident Command Center this afternoon for a new project I’m working on. It’s curious installation—given my jaded view of Maryland civil government, I was expecting a broom closet with a rotary phone, mop and bucket, and stack of 1950’s era civil defense manuals. Instead we were hosted by quiet, serious staff in a facility that hums with activity and purpose—they are planning for the hurricane and making preparations to deal with the results.
About the only planned attack on America that happened yesterday was the concentrated programming of 9/11 retrospective, first-person, documentary, and “very special episodes” on TV last night. Thank God, at least I can turn the TV off.
BG&E came out to estimate installation of new electrical wiring this morning; they quoted $900 for the ground floor and $2700 for the upstairs. Yeesh. The ground floor would be doable if I didn’t have a lot of irons in the fire, but the upstairs is a different matter. That’s going to have to wait until spring, unless money starts falling from the sky.
In other news, Mr. Johnny Cash is dead at 71. I think that just about every contemporary recording artist should start a fund to build some kind of temple for him in the desert like they did for the ancient kings of Egypt, and inter him in a sarcophagus of black gold. Or build for him a Viking warship, place him on the deck, and send it off to Valhalla under a full moon. Because they owe him big. Rest in Peace, man.
For about the thirtieth day in a row, it’s been raining here in Baltimore. Since we’ve been in the new house, I think there’s been about a half-day of sunshine—and that was with about 80% humidity. Ugh. It kind of sucks going from central air to open windows and rain; you wind up sleeping in a bed that more closely resembles warm pea soup. Yeah, you say, boo-hoo, Bill; you could be a Marine in Afghanistan walking around in full combat gear, but the fact is, I’m not. My new house is about to float away down the Patapsco.
Last night I was finally able to get some work done in the house; I ran three new phone lines to the kitchen, living room, and dining room so that we don’t have to use the basement stairwell anymore. Halleleujah, amen. Next up is a quick upgrade to the dining room wiring; I’d like to run a grounded circuit to the plug where we have our printer, hub, and power strip so that we don’t fry the 1950’s era wire job.
In other geek news, it looks like Eudora has upgraded their client to version 6. I have mixed emotions about 5.1 (I basically have to use it because my email server requires a client that supports APOP) and the basic usability of the program, but the new spam filtering in the paid version is tempting. I’m going to wait for a few weeks and then see what the feedback sounds like.
Holy crap. I just found out that my high school orchestra teacher, the guy who taught me how to play bass violin, was arrested on charges of child abuse for molesting 6-year-old girls. For the love of God, that is screwed up.
NPR has an audio commentary by Jean Shepherd, the author and narrator of A Christmas Story, on his experience at the March on Washington forty years ago.
Yesterday Jen spent the entire day at the house unpacking boxes, washing dishes (yes, we have no dishwasher, one of the things besides CAC that I’ll miss about 620) and making the kitchen liveable. Luckily, the kitchen has a relatively fresh coat of white paint, so it’s sunny and bright in there. The fridge is a smaller apartment-type version, but it holds a remarkable amount of stuff, and it’s pretty new. Plus, it has an icemaker—something we didn’t have in either of our previous houses. It looks great in there so far.
Meanwhile, BG&E was at the house all day ripping out two fuse panels (one for the house and one for the doctor’s office) and consolidating them into one brand-new 220 panel, which makes me feel about a million times better. We had a wonderful fellow named Ben knee-deep in old wiring and 60’s-era Stab-Lok fuses (a competitor to the modern fuse system, long since defunct, and notoriously tempermental) until 8:30 last night. They’re coming back tonight to finish consolidating the meters and mark the panel (and they’ll need some serious help with that, let me tell you.)
As for the phone, the good doctor had four lines coming in to the house; we know that one was the house line, one was the fax, and the other two were business. There’s a mixture of four-prong Bell Systems era boxes, some new RJ-11 jacks, and other mystery equipment scattered around the house, as well as a couple of narrow steel telecom boxes for splitting off the lines in front and back. We had no dialtone in the house until I found the two most modern interface boxes and tried the fax line—naturally, the phone company activated the line used least in the house. So there’s phone service… in the basement. Verizon wants $90 for installation of the first jack and $50 for each additional; I’m going to visit the Home Depot and spend that $50 on some new jacks, 100′ of wire, and an analog phone, and try to get a dialtone in the kitchen tonight. DSL is due to be installed next week, so I have to make some arrangements to get a wire and plug to the dining room, where we’re temporarily setting up the office.
As for me, I’m feeling better about this thing than I was yesterday; there are still moments of outright panic (last night, on my way to the bathroom, the first conscious thought I had was, What the hell have I done?) but I find that when I think of each individual problem separately and not as a whole thundering herd of pain bearing down on us, it feels better. The house hasn’t fallen down yet, it’s in relatively good shape, and it was made well. It will wait for us to get to each issue, one at a time.
And I have to think of all the good things that have happened so far, all the omens pointing to a happy future, and all the bits of luck we’ve had so far—they are many, and appreciated. Great friends, lucky breaks, good neighbors, fantastic help, and small miracles.
In the three and a half years I’ve known Jen, I thought I knew a lot about her. This evening I found out that when she was eight, her mother bought her a copy of KISS’ Double Platinum—this is the same mother who sent her to Catholic school from fifth grade through High School. Go figure…
Basically every piece of furniture I own is broken down into its component parts and stacked in the living room; the boxes are marked and labeled, and the fragile stuff is (hopefully) organized so that it won’t get busted. Suddenly, the idea of moving has become a reality instead of an abstraction.
This weekend, I’m driving north to the old homestead, deep in the Land Of Classic Rock, to attend the wedding of my best friend from High School. There’s a reason I live down here in Baltimore, five hours, $6 and three bridges away from the town I graduated High School in; my experience in that town was sort of a grab-bag of good and bad. It wasn’t until I was about 25 that I figured out the art of re-inventing myself, so my entrance into that town at eighth grade was a rocky one. One of the things that got me through was the group of friends I made my sophomore year, including the guy who’s getting married. It should be a bittersweet experience, and one I’m only partially looking forward to—I’m not sure who’s going to be there, how they’re doing, or what they’ll say. I missed my 10-year reunion (no great loss—I doubt I would have gone anyway) so I’m not up to date on what’s been happening, but I’m wondering if some people have grown up. I’m also wondering if I should take Jen up to my old house to take a look; it’s not often you get to see an impound lot in the middle of the woods. (My dad bought a repossession business in 1984, prompting our move to New York. To answer your questions, no, it’s nothing like the movie, yes, I got pretty handy at picking locks, and yes, Harry Dean Stanton is the mack daddy.)
Queer Eye For The Straight Guy could convince me to hook up basic cable again when we move. Todd taped an episode for me, and it is hilarious. And holy Mother of God, did I want to smash this dude’s girlfriend in the head with a brick.
Salon has an interesting writeup on the SCO-Linux-IBM legal wrangling (ad-sponsored); from my relatively uninformed position, it sounds like a version of those “get legal” software-piracy scams, on a larger scale, or the old Unisys .GIF debate. I remember this not so fondly, as I was in the middle of developing a site when the client requested we switch out all the .GIF files with .JPG’s after watching a report on CNN. That was loads of fun. And the site looked like shite.
Album of the Day: The magnificent Learning to Crawl, by The Pretenders. Time The Avenger has been on repeat all afternoon. Also: The New Pornographers. Rockin’ good stuff.
3:55 pm. Oh, god, I’m crashing. I was up at 6 to pick up Jen to take to the airport, and I had a cup of coffee at the house and then (stupidly) another from Starbuck’s. Plus a cheese danish. Now I’m sliding off the edge of the desk into unconsciousness. Something only…MORE SUGAR will be able to stop! Time for a Three Musketeers bar. Which was made, by the way, across the highway (NJ 517) from my old house in Hackettstown, NJ.
I’ve been wanting to move out of the city for some time now. I’ve been here for twelve years, since the first Bush administration, and I’m ready for a change of scenery.
I’ve been increasingly unhappy with the city experience over the last couple of years; minor gripes with the amount of space in my house have grown to include things like an intense hatred for the police helicopters hovering over the bedroom each night; the endlessly repeating song coming from the ice cream truck (yeah, it’s cute the first time, but just wait until the frickin thing crawls down your street at 2 mph), and the kids walking down the street who FEEL THE NEED TO YELL ALL THE TIME. I’d like to actually have a lawn, some trees, a garage, and a house with windows on all four sides. And now that life is getting serious, I’d like us to live in a place where the schools are public and good.
That being said, I drove out to Finksburg to look at a house listed online. On paper, it sounded good: Built in 1900, four bedrooms and three and a half baths, an acre of land, fireplaces, central air. I drove, and I drove, and I drove. I wound up out in farm country, following single-lane roads through rolling countryside, until I found the house.
The house wasn’t what we were hoping for, at least in my opinion—the neighboring house is stuck right up on one side of this place, and it’s a plumber’s office, with the attendant vans parked outside. The area is surrounded by farmland, and the distance to any main highway is far. The first live being I saw after getting out of the car was a Holstein cow. But that’s not what spooked me.
I got scared when I began thinking about the changes about to take place in our lives—both Jen and I have lived in the same place for years. We’re used to our routines, we’re used to our habits; we have a relationship with our surroundings and our neighborhoods that’s easy and comfortable. Need a good cup of coffee? I’ve got you covered. Need a valve job? We know the guy. Looking for a great dinner? Jen can point you to several within a ten minute drive of her house.
I’m not scared to join households with my fiancee. (I’m not afraid to use the word fiancee, either.) I’m not scared to start an adult life with her, to arrange joint accounts and save for retirement and think about marriage plans and buy stuff for babies. I’m looking forward to it, in fact.
I’m concerned about all the unknowns that go along with buying a house. I’m afraid of redneck neighbors, termites, radon, tornados, decreasing property value, indian burial sites, eminent domain, locust infestation…
We are at the edge of a wide chasm, Jen and I, and we’re about to jump together. Knowing that makes me feel better, but I’m still worried about the unknowns.
I posted pictures from the NY trip this afternoon. Tractors, type, barns and boats. Big fun, people.
My (incomplete) artist suggestions for Apple to include in the iTunes Store:
- The Pogues
- Dismemberment Plan
- The New Pornographers
- The White Stripes
- Sigur Ros (was up there, but is now gone)
- The Rolling Stones
Song of the Day: Go With The Flow, Queens of the Stone Age. Rawwwwk!