Apparently, the Great Email God is mad at me, or my Dad sent another one of his 400-MB picture-laden files, because my server has shut itself down like a bank on a holiday. So if I’m not getting back in touch with you today, it’s not because I don’t love you.
Finally, after one abortive attempt, I got a copy of Retrospect for the Mac (a backup/archival utility) and loaded it on the server at home. Tonight I’m going to back up the entire work volume and then set up a script to do the same every week. I can’t tell you how many copies of file upon file I have, in a frantic attempt to never throw anything away (this includes freelance work from eight years ago, written on software I probably can’t run anymore), or how many times I’ve backed up the same file only to have lost all copies of it in some brainless mixup. Onward, men, to the twenty-first century!
Currently on heavy rotation: The Postal Service. 45 minutes of pure electro-pop bliss. I love this album more each time I listen. (Nothing Better is about as close to bittersweet breakup perfection in a song as I have ever heard.)
Random Links. Atlanta Time Machine. (via kottke) | Wonder what her husband thinks?
You may have read over on my dear fiancee’s blog about her mother reminding Jen that it’s not too late to back out of this little wedding thing we’re planning. While I’m thankful that she’s so concerned for her daughter’s well-being, I’m still trying to recall the reasons we decided against eloping. Jesus Fucking Christ. Maybe we can get on the plane to Italy tonight…?
Last night I copied some code from somebody else’s site and added the Google search down there on the left, so if you’re so inclined, you can plug in funny words and see if they show up on bill dugan dot com. (Much handier than leafing through months of log entries to look for that one link…)
Random Fun Links. For all those folks who are too scared to actually live in the city. (via the morning news) Fix your Pismo. (via slashdot)
I went to have some bloodwork done this morning for a diagnosis (as well as a checkup—what is my cholesterol level, anyhow?) after, uh, avoiding it for a few days. I have what phlebotomists call a “dream arm”: thin and full of juicy veins close to the surface. I also have an inordinate fear of needles. Spiders, rats, bugs, gunk, blood (other people’s, mostly)—no problem. Show me a needle, and I get squirrelly. Heights above three stories and anything to do with the eye round out my trio of personal fears, but anything involving cold steel poking into my veins completely freaks me out. (Which is kind of funny, because I’ll work the whole day with a splinter sticking out of my hand, or a bloody gash, but I don’t get with the needles.) Which begs the question: What’s your worst fear? Add a comment below.
Anyhow, I left a warm caffeinated cup of pee and got blood drawn for the docs to run their tests on without passing out (about three years ago an older doctor took about a gallon of blood out of me, and I went down like a drunken prizefighter) and ran out of the building clutching my arm, happy to have it over with. We’ll see what the results say in a few days.
This is interesting news from California. Guess what other state currently uses Deibold voting machines? That’s right. Think it’s going to have any effect on voting in Maryland? I doubt it.
Housekeeping. Last night I added a list of links to the upper right there for the iTunes music store with a bunch of stuff I keep meaning to buy but don’t have the money for. I figure I’ll leave them there where they can’t get away.
Today I looked at a free comment service called HaloScan and signed up for a membership. It seems to be pretty easy to use; the code is clean and doesn’t muck anything up on the page, so I’m going to test it out over the next few weeks to see how I like it. So let me hear what you think, people! If I write something stupid on here, tell me about it. If I write something good, let me know. You’ll see a small ‘Comment’ link at the end of a post if I’m interested in hearing feedback—but I probably won’t be adding one for each.
Fambly. This Christmas my Mom asked me if I could scan and retouch a picture for her; in a story involving a Coach purse, some guilt, a picture frame, and an anniversary, she’s hoping I can take a beat-up Polaroid of my late grandfather and clean it up to the point where we get some new prints made. I scanned the picture in at 400dpi, cleaned and sharpened it, and looked at the results. The resolution was not up to snuff, so I rescanned at 800dpi and enlarged by 200%, hoping the extra information would be enough to extrapolate good pixels from bad. This time I got better results, and I’m almost done cleaning to the point of cropping. (Mom, I’m going with the one you don’t favor, because your father is actually smiling in this one.) Once I’m done, I’m going to import it into iPhoto and send out for prints, probably tonight.
I don’t have a whole lot of information about my biological grandfather, only short anecdotal stories; I know that he was a stonemason his whole life, supporting his family at a very early age, and he built his own house. He had big hands, and played the piano. He didn’t like having his picture taken, which is why this is a big deal. He died a month before I was born. Maybe my Mom will write me with some more information about him that I can share here.
Oh, Well. The ice storm that was supposed to shut the mid-atlantic area down never materialized; it’s raining outside but of course they shut every school system down within a 100-mile radius. I’m considering home schooling for our future children, because it seems that the local public school systems will cancel classes for a strong breeze. Jen and I were hunkered down last night rubbing our rabbits’ feet, hoping we could make some inclement weather happen; she was hoping for a day to catch up on sleep and I was looking forward to a solid day to concentrate upstairs. As it was, she was asleep by 10:15 and I got a bunch of drywall installed in the Blue room. It’s going to be a long slog to repair the plaster, because it’s been beaten on enough that it’s brittle, but I think the Pink room will go a lot quicker—the plaster in there came off a lot cleaner.
I have not seen one bottle of Pepsi in this area featuring this promotion. I’d drink yer damn Pepsi if I could just find a bottle.
There’s news that Apple will be releasing a version of iTunes for Windows, which might mean we can postpone a hard drive upgrade for the iMac. I hope the functionality is as robust as the Mac version…if it means we can host the music on the server and stream the library to the Powerbooks, that would be fantastic.
Mash-up. Pitchfork Media did a review of a recompiled track called Sly Beyonce Walks Like A Nerd, which is a remix of a Sly Stone, Beyonce, Bangles and NERD track on top of each other. Todd had turned me on to mash-ups last year when he played an MP3 of an Eminem rap over Zeppelin’s The Wanton Wanted Song. There’s a guy in the UK who works under the name Go Home Productions who has a whole catalog of stuff that I’d love to get my hands on. This stuff is brilliant—there’s Madonna singing Ray Of Light over the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant (it sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it really does), and Morcheeba’s World Looking In over a remixed drum track of Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. (which goes to prove that you can take any Zeppelin track, mix out the vocals, drop something completely different on top, and have yourself another hit record. Try that, Creed.) I wish there were more MP3’s available but he obviously had to take most of them down for copyright reasons. Right on.
I started looking into some way I can get two separate calendars linked up in one place so that Jen and I can keep our schedules together. I’d love to do it through iCal, as Jen will hopefully have a Mac on her work desk sometime next year. I’ve been trying to figure out how to sync two calendars up without spending $99 on Apple’s .Mac service, especially since I’m running a webserver at home. After looking around at a bunch of dead links, I was able to find a good primer on enabling WebDAV service built in to OSX. Of course, I’m putting the cart in front of the horse because I still haven’t worked out the issues with dyndns and tunneling through my router. Arrggh.
I’m also starting to look at updating the design on my weblog/website; I’d like to move over to a CSS-based layout (at least for the log pages) and modify the other pages, as the design is now about two years old. Some of the things I’d like to keep on the main site are:
- The update and photo on the home page.
- The basic page layout, but move to a stepped-page portfolio listing.
- The white background/gray highlights/Univers typeface.
Some things I don’t like are the leftover Garamond from my circa-1993 identity (let’s just get that out behind the barn and shoot it), the green/gray horizontal lines (they’re falling apart, and they don’t transfer to my print collateral at all), the dead space on the right of the Design section, and the fact that the Scout and Log sections don’t live well with the other sections.
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!
Mike Lee writes a pretty good roundup of the reasons he’s going to sign up for TypePad’s new service. I too have been longing for some updates and enhancements to my log, which currently is powered by nothing other than BBedit and Samba. I’d like to add some basic functionality to the site, like a search feature, an automatic calendar, RSS feed, etc; in the long-term, I’d love to be able to simply edit from a browser and not be dependent on my Powerbook here to update. Plus, the new templates feature will essentially kick me into learning standards compliance and moving away from nested tables.
Additionally, Jen and I are slowly getting our wedding plans together, and instead of having all our stuff in two places, I’d love to be able to have multiple weblogs- one for the wedding stuff, and one for the house stuff. It would also be great to have guests (e.g. Jen, my sister) drop by and add stuff to my log, or just simply add comments. Jeez, the photo album feature alone would sell me on the service.
I guess the most daunting task is going to be how to get three years of archives into the new format.
This weekend was a little bit of good and a little bit of bad. We went to the company Christmas party this Saturday, which was a very good time, finishing it at Todd and Heather’s house, which was even better. Sunday we spent most of the day attempting to finish our Christmas cards. Jen did an amazing job with the artwork I gave her, and she produced a beautiful card that we’re both really proud to send out. What began as a three-day project though stretched out into a week-long project when it turned out that the copier I used for the prints had offset the artwork randomly. I also found the limitations on my printer’s resolution, so an upgrade in RAM is definitely in order. We did get the resolution and printing problems ironed out and finished them by hand last night, where it became evident that I cannot color in between the lines. Unfortunately, I wound up losing my wallet in a shoe store yesterday afternoon, which means that my Palm Pilot is now gone. Dammit.
A quick lesson in public service and damage control: This is a bad idea. This is a good idea. This is an even better idea, way too late.
I just finished cleaning up some very offensive JavaScript on all the main pages of my site. How embarassing. I apologize, everyone.
History repeating. One of the illustration jobs I worked on a few months back has been printed and is out to the end-users. Recently two international companies have launched advertising campaigns with remarkably similar concepts, almost down to the individual elements. I know for a fact that the AD for the job I worked on had proposed the idea long before the other campaigns went public, so it’s not a matter of copyright infringement or simple copying. I do have a theory however that most of the ideas our industry creates get re-used in cycles, and sometimes those cycles do coincide with each other. I’ve seen editorial illustration go through this cycle, and usually the style of the illustrator is different enough to make the end product fresh. Commercials, design—any creative professional has to deal with this possibility. My question is this: How do we explain this to our clients?
Last night I broke down and put plastic up over the opening on the stairwell skylight. I’ve used plastic before, most notably in the sieve-like windows in my bedroom at 1709 Bolton St., so I know it works pretty well. I installed it, hung the plants from the curtain rods in the front room, and within five minutes it was stretched taut towards the skylight. When I was up there working on it, I could feel the difference in cold air inside the well, so I figure I’ve just closed off a major chimney vent in the house. This is problematic though; I’m wondering what i can do to insulate the well to keep it warm/cold in the summer/winter. Perhaps a plexi panel cut to fit the opening?
I got all the photos, portfolio, the beta backup, and the web tools moved off the USB drive last night; the applications/installers are rearranged between their respective states, and the fonts minus the font CD are still intact. I have to strip the Mac-centric stuff off the Beta backup and burn it to disk as the final copy; what I really need to do is to find some way to archive all my data so that it’s not redundant/lost/overwritten and then keep one copy of each ‘live’. How to do this is still a mystery. I think it will involve buying a low-cost Mac FireWire CD burner sometime towards the end of the year.
Still to do:
1. Compare the final Beta backup to other copies, de-Mac and then burn to CD. Remove from SLANN.
2. Compile serial numbers for all Mac software, consolidate, and store with programs on the USB drive.
3. Compile all PC software and S/N’s, consolidate, and store on a new CD.
4. Figure out some way of storing current backups and archiving old data. Clean up the CD shelf.
The USB Drive will be used for Mac backup duty for things like fonts, programs, and a working System Folder copy.
Slann will hold all the archived client data, pictures, and other ‘working’ files. SLANN will also recieve all personal email and be the ‘sweep’, i.e. clean email off the server.
The PowerBook will hold all current client data, working files, and simply ‘read’ email.
I also need to redesign the billdugan site and update links. Yikes.
I’m thinking the /funny /flashmovie and /application directories will come down altogether.
/basement
/bathroom
/house
/kittens
/posters and
/vistas will all go inside a new directory, maybe titled ‘projects’.
/contact
/design
/downloads
/illustration
/images
/log
/resume and
/scout will remain their own directories. /training will probably live inside /design.
I just lost my entire logfile for January. Thank you, Homesite, for barfing it on the last day of the month. it’s gone.
Here’s a text dump from the 30th.
This morning at 7AM a guy with a handheld masonry saw started cutting the wall in my backyard; by 7:30 a backhoe had pulled the ‘T’ section off and laid it flat in the alley. Sigh. Apparently the people doing the original ‘repair’ on the sewer line fucked it up, so the city is going to bring in the bulkheads, rip up the dirt, and replace the whole sewer line. It’s all fine and good, though, because since they replaced the wall and dug up the concrete in the alley (two months ago), the alley portion of the ‘T’ section was separating from the divider wall.
The developers working on the old Superfresh have started breaking up the concrete in the parking lot too. Hopefully when they put the new condos in, the parking won’t get absolutely insane around my neighborhood.
Mike Tyson has been denied his application for a license to box in Nevada. Will wonders never cease. I figured the upstanding officials in that state were going to roll right over and take it for a cut of the Showtime rights. And the dumb-shit wife of Ken Lay got on the Today show and wept that her family was financially ruined as a result of the Enron disaster. How transparent can you possibly be? She is an idiot and Ken Lay should be stoned in public for being so slimy.