Depending on how we feel this weekend (or at least, how I feel) I may be tackling this project upstairs this weekend. Mmmm. Shiny clean floors. I’m looking forward to making a real difference in the house, as I feel like I’ve gotten stalled in the last week or so.
About Damn Time. Here’s the good news. Congratulations!
Huh. This morning I got a bullshit email from somebody trying to get my Citibank PIN and access number. After getting past the idea that somebody knows my email address and the fact that I have a Citibank account, I went to the Citibank site and within two clicks found a page for reporting suspicious email. After getting past the idea that there’s so much abuse that they need to have a page for this, I was impressed that I was able to find it so quickly.
Return Of The King. OK, I know that Jen loves Aragorn, but after reading this article, I fear she will leave me for a man named Viggo. Hell, I’d marry him. I really enjoyed his candor and common sense. Viggo for President! (Salon will ask you to sit through a 30-second ad to see the whole article, but it’s worth it.)
Next time somebody offers you a few fudge-covered Oreos, stay away. I had two at lunch and at about 2:30 I crashed harder than a Sunday stock car. Yeesh! What’s in those things, cocaine?
breaktime bag of bulbs, 10/20
Busy. This weekend was a pretty busy one, beginning with a shopping whirlwind at the Arundel Mills Mall on Saturday. We’re trying to outfit her for work because she hasn’t been able to buy new work clothes for years (graduate school loans, y’know.) Sunday we combined all our bulbs and planted them, with the help of Sara, who contributed a whole pile of her own. The front and west sides of the house have a total of about 300 tulip, crocus, and mystery bulbs left over from the Doctor’s garden just begging to be dug up and gnawed on by our friendly neighborhood chipmunks.
The Pink room has a second coat of white paint throughout, except for the closet, which has painted wallpaper that will probably have to be steamed off. I also painted the trim in the Anxious room with Kilz, which destroyed another whole lobeful of brain cells.
the migration has begun...
Geek Update. The iMac is up and running with a dual OSX-OS9 install on the new 160GB drive—just as a sidebar, they lie; the actual formatted capacity is somewhere around 140GB. Why do they do that? Anyhow, there’s a bunch of checking and moving to be done to get all the separate collections of music in one place, and a pile of CD’s still to be ripped.
This weekend was a busy one. My sister Renie came down Friday night to stay with us and help work on the house, and we had a heck of a lot for her to do. Saturday morning we got up and fed her fresh muffins and coffee, and before she was done she had a paint roller in her hand. Between the three of us we got the Anxious room and the Pink room rolled with two coats of white paint, the closet in the Anxious room cleaned, mudded and ready to prime, and the closet in the Cream room painted. Renie also brought us a beautiful oak dresser she hasn’t had time to work on, which we’ll finish refinishing, and a huge red rug for in front of the fireplace.
breaktime lunch on the back lawn, 10/11
In other news, this is probably the most brilliant waste of time ever. Thanks, Nate!
home anthology, pre-opening, 10/11
We broke at four to take Renie over to Home Anthology, a favorite antique dealer of ours, and see their new space. Luckily they were there, and let us in a week before the grand opening of the new location. Todd and Heather were also there helping arrange furniture, and we walked the length of the space amazed at the collection. From there we took Renie to our favorite Thai restaurant to have dinner.
Sunday morning we got up and Renie decided that we needed to see what was under the carpet in the Pink room. We pulled it up to find newer padding (foam) and relatively virgin hardwood underneath that. It took about an hour to clean that room, and then Renie convinced us to pull up the hallway carpeting. Unfortunately, the Doctor had put linoleum down at some point (the same linoleum that’s down over the original hexagonal tile in the bathroom) in the hallway…over top of a sheet of mdf plywood. So pulling the linoleum up was relatively easy, after we got under the plywood. Luckily the plywood saved the floor underneath, so we continued…down the stairs. As of today there’s no more carpet upstairs, or on the stairs. They look pretty good—the risers are one-piece planks, and they’re beat up, but still in good shape. After spending hours pulling staples and nails from the floor, we washed it good and put Jen’s blue rug down in the upstairs hall. The pink room looks cleaner and larger, and the hallway looks brighter and warmer. I’ve posted a series of pictures here for you to look at.
Seems the prodigal Ford is repaired…well, it wasn’t even broke in the first place. The hose clamp on the radiator let go, and when that happened it vented coolant all over the engine. My mechanic says that this model Ford has an issue with adding coolant to the point where the engine is happy, and my continued overheating issues were due to that fact. Whatever it was, it’s hopefully fixed now.
Interesting. By chance, I checked out the Supon website today to see if they’ve updated it—they have. Looks like they must have been swallowed up by another firm, one with a craptacular website.
Not that I actually buy physical CD’s anymore, but if you happen to buy one published by the BMG Music Group, and you can’t seem to get past the copy protection to rip it to your hard drive, simply hold down the Shift key. Brilliant!
I Was Once Misinformed About Your Intentions. I may have let the cat out of the bag with Todd’s new blog, but I’m still happy to welcome him to the fold.
Today I’m reading with interest about Panther, the new upgrade to OSX. It looks like there’s a bunch of juicy new features throughout, and that will be great for future monkeying. I’m still waiting to get paid so’s I can buy a large drive for the iMac, and install Jaguar on that machine. I also need to find a cheap Firewire enclosure for Rob’s donated drive, which seems to have some issues with bad blocks at the beginning of the platter, making it unusable with OSX.
We didn’t get anything new done with the house last night, but I figure another quick hour with the cut-in brush, a good mop job, and a coat of white paint in the closet, and the cream room will be ready for Jen’s twin bed. Renie is coming down this weekend (we’re very excited about that), and we have a couple of jobs lined up for her to help us with:
- Painting the Anxious room white. I exchanged the
whitebrown paint for White Tint Base, which is actually white. Having two rooms painted will make a huge difference upstairs. - Painting three of the four walls in the Pink room. I may be able to pick up drywall today at the Home Despot and get that mudded in by Saturday. If so, that will be three rooms painted, which means we can tear up carpeting and make way for the floor sander.
- Planting bulbs. Since last year’s fall sales, Jen and I have bought about a zillion different bulbs of different colors, types, and sizes; starting with a box of 70 blue gladiolus bulbs I got at the Sam’s Club, we’ve added white tulips, pastel tulips, fuzzy white and red tulips, and crocuses. We’re going to have more bulbs in the ground than the country of Holland. That is, if the assorted chipmunks, squirrels, and other backyard creatures don’t dig them all up and have a kegger while we’re at work.
Depending on how productive I feel tonight, I may also try to build another fire for practice this evening. I’d love to be able to use that fireplace a lot this winter.
I reorganized the sidebar links over on the left to read a little better; I got rid of the ‘picks of the month’ column because I wasn’t updating it and replaced it with some blogging links. This is all basically a futile exercise, as I’m going to begin a redesign of the log this month anyway. Today we should also welcome Todd to the fold of bloggers online.
A rant, directed at the general IT director mindset in corporate America:
You are probably a forty-something middle manager who has a lot of money invested in a MCSE or other accredited certification, which was expensive and time-consuming to earn. Your livelihood depends on your ability to oversee, manage, upgrade, and plan a computer network around this certification. Because, after all, if your company goes to something other than Wintel, your job is in jeopardy, and you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay for. I understand that.
Where you piss me off is when you decide arbitrarily that creative professionals (defined as print designers and to some degree web designers) MUST use Wintel machines because you say so. That’s bullshit, and I’ll tell you why:
- Most designers have been trained on Macs. They know all the ins and outs of Quark (or now, InDesign) on the Mac, and they know the ins and outs of OS9 and what they have to do to get it to work with printers, removable media, outside vendors, and most importantly, their home machines, which they usually have a good deal of money invested in. This is called a specialty. It’s why your company hired them in the first place.
- They have legacy applications and fonts they’ve been using for years, often totalling thousands of dollars, which they most likely own and often will bring with them to the company. When was the last time you priced out a font family at ITC or Adobe? Didn’t think so, slappy.
- Font handling. Wintel fonts print and look like shit. End of fucking discussion.
- Have you ever heard of workflow? Designers have a workflow they are comfortable with. Windows machines are totally different in the way they lay out everything. That translates to hours of time wasted.
- Service bureaus, printers, and prepress shops hate PC’s. And will sometimes charge you more to service files created on them. How is that cost-effective?
Your job is to support your employees. If you don’t know how to support the machines, read a fucking book. Take a fucking class. Don’t outlaw a tool because you don’t know how to use it.
The argument that you are specifying PC’s for the creative department because you can rotate them out when the creative people leave is an argument that defeats itself. That’s a great way to piss off your designers and get them to leave. Happy now, jackass? You’re a genius.
This morning
Here you can see the difference between the old carpeting, and how it makes the whole world dark, and the sunny hardwood floor. Amazing!
I finished the ceiling, and put a coat of semi-gloss white on the trim in the sticky cream bedroom. Covering over the varnish/oil paint/nicotine/Kilz is slow going, but we can see progress already. Not satisfied with that, I cut the ancient all-weather carpeting into quarters and tore that out; underneath was some highly flammable fiber-based padding that was left over from the Civil War. After inhaling several centuries worth of the dust of the Pharoahs trying to get all this crap into a couple of Hefty bags, I pulled the carpeting strips out and we swept up the dirt. The floor is pretty beat up but still in decent shape. There are a few spots where the floor took a beating from the bedframes, and a square by the radiator where someone cut the flooring to repair the pipes. Overall, the room looks warmer and (to me) larger in the sunlight. I’ll post some pictures tomorrow.
My Mom has been reading my log for the past few weeks, and her main comment is that I complain a lot. My apologies, mom; I’ll try not to bitch about everything so much.
In the meantime, I took pictures of the heater, thermostat and irrigation systems in the greenhouse this morning so that I could research the builders and figure out of they’re still in business, but I forgot the PCMCIA carrier at home. So, no photos of the party until tonight. Sorry, everyone. I did bust out the white trim paint and put a first coat on about 30% of the south window in the sticky cream bedroom this morning, and it looks pretty good so far. I have to return the 5-gallon drum of ‘white’ paint I bought a month ago, because ‘white’ actually means ‘sort of beige’ to Glidden, apparently. I have to look for ‘super-ultra-bright-gleaming-ivory white’ or some such crap like that. And try to get my money back for an open drum of paint- ha ha.
Oops, sorry, I was complaining.
This weekend was a busy one. Friday we stopped over at our friend Rob’s house to have some beers, meet his wife Karen and their kids, and do some quick surgery on his Mac. Rob and Karen have the two most beautiful kids on the planet, and a bathtub that seems to sweat soap bubbles. Thanks for dinner, guys!
Saturday was a lot of moving and cleaning and running. I don’t remember much about it other than that I slept very well that night. Oh, and the car broke down with a trunk full of beer and barbecue. I got as far as the Rt. 70 exit on the beltway when I noticed the temp light was at the red line, so I pulled over and popped the hood to find the main coolant hose spitting steam at the radiator junction. I closed it up with the Leatherman and filled the reservoir with coolant, but she continued to overheat, so I took short 10-minute breaks between each half-mile and made it to the Edmonson exit without frying a piston. I’m getting tired of this, and it’s looking like we may have to buy a used car sooner than we planned.
Sunday we finished up the preparations and got the house ready for the moving celebration, which was a lot of fun. Selected observations:
- Both Saranac and Sam Adams are making a very tasty Oktoberfest brew this year.
- Andy Nelson’s is the bomb. If you’re in the Baltimore area, you can’t do better Bar-B-Q than them.
- Our friends rock the world. Thanks everybody!
- Jen made Ghirardelli brownies for dessert, and they are still calling for me out in the kitchen.
- The only thing better than Andy Nelson’s for dinner is Andy Nelson’s leftovers for lunch the next day.
- And the beer left in the cooler-can’t forget about that…
This is a quick report for Jen, cribbed from a report on the Macintouch site (quietly thanking myself for donating money to Ric- it just paid for itself) about justifying Macs in a creative development environment. Some of the data is skewed towards OS9, and some of it is skewed towards the computer lab environment, but it’s all pretty good information. Her employer has her designing for print on the PC, which is about as comfortable (to me) as repeatedly jamming a stick in my eye. Anybody else have suggestions?
I bought some overpriced firewood at the Safeway last night to build a fire: $4 for a bag of “kiln dried” logs, which is roughly a dollar a log. Years of building fires at places like Assateague, Cub Scout camp, and various keg parties should have taught me how to construct a satisfactory blaze, but I was stymied by a pair of logs that refused to do anything but smolder. We’ll try again tonight.
The house seems to heat up well with the furnace on; the piping works very well throughout with the exception of the kitchen radiator, which seems to be on vacation. I walked through and closed all the storm windows the other night and that seemed to make a big difference in cutting the chill back. At some point I’m going to have to pull some of the plaster off the outside walls to see how much insulation (if any) there is. We also put the first coat of finish paint on the walls of the Sticky room, and when we got done we realized that we hadn’t sanded enough of the wallpaper sizing off. This morning I took the random orbital and sanded about half the paint back off to knock the texture down. I think it looks pretty good (alright, it looks like crap, but I see the possibilities.)
Thanks to Kristen for sending the Virgin Suicides soundtrack in with Nate.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
*Whew.*
Take Two. I have OSX running on the iMac now, and along with about a gazillion other things I’d like to do with it (an iTunes server, internal/external file serving, scheduled backups, iPhoto libraries), I downloaded and installed a dyndns client (link) so that we can share files from the house. I tried this a year or so ago, and had no luck (OS9.2 on the 8500) so I’m hoping this will work more seamlessly on OSX. I currently have some issues with port mappings in the router and the firewall in OSX, but should be able to iron them out tonight.
Somebody scheduled some freezing weather for the first day of October, and I don’t appreciate it.
You Kids Get Off My Lawn! Dept. Memo to the guy who’s been parking his Volvo out in front of our house with the ‘For Sale’ signs on the window for the last two weeks: the house isn’t empty anymore, pal. Move it along or I’ll call somebody to tow it. Thanks. How about I park my Scout out in front of your house for a few weeks? Bet you’d love that.
??? Dept.: What the hell is this dick doing NFL commentary for? For the unenlightened, here’s some suggested reading.
NBC Sucks. Nice of the Leno folks to refer to Howard Dean as the ‘Presidential Wannabe’ in their promos last night, and helpfully booking him after the oh-so-important Catherine Zeta-Whatever. This morning Katie Couric, the poster girl for pink fluffy pom-poms, went after him like a pit bull in heat. I thought I was watching MSNBC for a minute. Interesting to see impartial journalism at work. (note: I don’t know anything about Dean or his politics, but it’s pretty obvious the suits at NBC have cast their ballots.)
Stumbling around the internet looking for some information about greenhouses, I found the International Greenhouse Company, whose website looks strangely like another website I’ve been at recently…
Anyway, we’re looking at our first frost tomorrow night, and we have a bunch of plants that need to come inside before then. Given all that’s been happening with the inside of the house, I haven’t done much with the greenhouse yet, and that includes figuring out what’s broken on the heater, how the irrigation system works, or if there’ s a working thermostat. I’d love to be able to use it during the winter, but we’re going to have to wait to see how much the house electricity bills are before we start heating the outbuildings.
The secret to installing OSX and OS9 on the same drive seems to be either partitioning the drive and putting one OS on each system (what I did on the Powerbook, here) or installing OS9 and updating it to 9.2.2, then installing OSX and updating that. Big fun, people!
In other geek news, Macintouch put me on to this new service provided by XLR8, who has some affiliation with the old Daystar Digital corporation (now defunct, I guess…?) and who are making a G4 upgrade for Pismo Powerbooks. Back in the day I bought a Daystar upgrade for my ancient Mac IIcx, and took the nervous step of boxing my motherboard up and shipping it to Georgia to have them pull the creaky 68030 chip and drop in a 40mhz 68040. All went off without a hitch, and Norman ran sturdily for another year and a half until I bought my 7100/80. I’m obviously going to wait to hear what experiences people have with this service, but $330 is a small amount to pay to keep this machine up to date and continue to boost the return on investment. Time will tell.
Some fun killtime reading: mugshots.com.
Jen would also like me to clarify that she tried to buy the table from Phyllis several times. Sorry for the confusion!
Make The Bad Man Stop. Each morning, as my brain begins its startup sequence, I wind up with a strange song stuck in my head. I’ve been telling Jen what some of these are, and today I remember this morning’s featured track: Turn Me Loose, by Loverboy. The songs usually are embarassing, schmaltzy, and repeat themselves until I can make it into work and get the headphones on.