Busy day yesterday; hence the quiet around here. I came into a collection of about 10 gigs of music yesterday, none of it catalogued or tagged, so I’m running it all through a program to re-encode the ID3v2 metadata. which is tedious and annoying. Lots of little time-consuming jobs here at work, plus lots of stuff to do when we’re home. Jen’s Mom is holding steady in a state of suck right now, and her brother is flying in from Savannah to see her tonight. Jen’s with her today, he’ll have tomorrow, and I’m picking up the following day to spell everybody.
Meanwhile there’s lots of news in the world that I’ve peripherally noticed—the EFF won the Grokster case, which is good news; there’s an excellent article in the New Yorker on Bjork—accompanying photos (via kottke), as well as a story about a NYC cheese seller that’s not online; We’re currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a book club, and I happened upon this link to original pictures from Pirsig’s trip. Meanwhile, the Usual bullshit still applies..
In preparation for a CSS overhaul of this humble site, I waded through the HTML code and removed about 5kb of gunk from the style sheets, script includes, and other areas. Consolidating the style sheets has changed around the look a little bit, but overall it’s not much different. I’m heading to the B&N tonight to peek at a couple of books before I buy anything. I also updated the music links on the right with some new tasty stuff. I’ve been playing two tracks over and over: Xtal, by Aphex Twin, and Man Research by Spacemonkeyz vs. Gorillaz.
Baby News. Nate and Kristen had a 6 lb. 4oz. baby boy (name yet to be determined) yesterday at 2:45pm. Mother, baby, and stressed dad are doing well, from what we hear.
Thursday Fun Links. Fish! | Origins of the IMDB. Disclosure: I spend at least 5 minutes each day on that site. Genius! (via metafilter)
dry cleaners, catonsville, 7.28.04 (soon to be demolished)
Things with Jen’s Mom don’t look good. Given that she’s battled back against cancer for 10 years, we’ll wait to see what actually happens, but I’ve been told by all parties this is the worst it’s ever been. Then again, getting a straight answer out of any Lockard besides the one I married is sort of like trying to find water in the desert, so who knows what’s happening.
The List. (The wednesday edition.)
- A New Mattress. (Our current big-people mattress ties Jen’s back into knots. Somewhere around a grand, most likely.)
- A dishwasher. (Because it’s 2004, and contemplating a lifetime of dirty dishes requires gallons of vodka. $300, plus kitchen-wrangling)
- A dehumidifier. (Our basement is possibly the second largest swamp on the east coast besides Florida. $130, give or take.)
- Air Conditioning. (Summer in Maryland is ok. Until August, when it becomes the Ninth Circle Of Hell. $3,000+, depending on the size of the unit.)
- Floor refinishing in the living room. (It would be great to have this done before next summer.)
- Fixing Jen’s iPod. (Somewhere around $70, I think.)
As with everything else, this list is in a state of constant flux. I’ll just keep adding to and amending it as life keeps throwing curveballs at us.
No word on Jen’s Mom yet, but our friends Nate and Kristen are at the hospital right now, hopefully having success with the birth of their first child. So send some love out their way as well.
Check these three articles out sometime—good on-the-ground reporting from the opening days of the War in Iraq. Also, this hilarious dictionary of drinking slang. Favorites: Agent 21, Chimp In Space, Go-tard. Cheers! (via metafilter)
Colossal Waste Of Time. Cyrkam Airtos. (It’ll take a while to load, but it’s worth it.)
Last night I got Retrospect to back up the user directories on the tower at home, which means that roughly 1/10 of our personal data is archived. This successful test is a Good Thing, as I haven’t been very good lately at making sure things are stored in case of catastrophe. The next step is to copy the entire set of data folders, which will (gulp) include our combined music, pictures, and other portly media files. Time to go find a stack of DVD-R’s…
Huh. Interesting.
I’m in a funky mood today, and don’t feel much like writing. Have a good weekend.
Not that I’m that kind of person, but I took about four hours last night scanning and sharpening forty more wedding photos to post for our scattered family members. Because there are so many of them, ( 82 at last count, 5.8MB worth, and I ain’t done yet) I can’t post them here for fear of the server getting hammered, so if you’re dying to see some, leave me a comment below and I’ll email you the link offline.
New Music. I’ve recently become aware of, and addicted to, a number of audioblogs—sites dedicated to semi-obscure music not given lots of mainstream attention; there are a few favorites so far. I also found the audio secion of the Internet Archive, which has a pile of good live recordings by favorite bands such as Soul Coughing and Lake Trout. Check it out.
Random Car Junk. This morning there was a beautiful wine and gold colored Citro‘n 2CV parked in our neighborhood; I didn’t have my camera with me, unfortunately. There was also a blue MGB parked further down the road with a “For Sale” sign in the window—not that we could afford one, but it’s sure nice to dream. Also, our neighbor gave me his folder of records for the Jeep, and something even more valuable: the Haynes repair guide for the Cherokee. Where the Chilton’s books are Cliff’s Notes, the Haynes books are the Expanded Annotated Illustrated King James Bible of repair books (unless you shell out the big bucks for the Chilton’s shop manual.) I read through the first chapter of the Jeep book last night and learned more in five minutes than a week of puzzling over the alternative.
On the list for purchasing this payday: Web Standards Solutions. I’ve been looking for a good book to dive into for getting further into CSS page design (this site will be redesigned soon), and it looks like this might be the one. (via dominey)
Thanks again to Todd and Heather for a wonderful evening of tasty food, good folks, and a slideshow presentation on Rome—they offered to host a honeymoon show-and-tell at their place with drinks and dinner. It was great to get a cross-section of our friends together in one house and get them talking to each other; it’s funny how there’s so much overlap between each couple. I kept the DVD presentation under fifty slides and tried not to bore everybody too much, and it seemed to go over very well.
Progress. Ever since college, I’ve lived out of containers as varied as milk crates, cardboard boxes, laundry baskets, and tupperware. My laundry has been organized in free-standing piles for as long as I can remember. Currently, ¾ of it sits out in the doctor’s office, a sizeable percentage of which is laying on the exam table. It’s a drag to have all of your clothes on another floor from the bathroom, especially when it’s wintertime and the porch is about 40°. This weekend, Jen and I decided to follow one of the millions of tag sale signs around Catonsville, and it led us to a $50 mahogany dresser, with five big drawers and two small ones on top. I feel like an adult again.
Other developments: Jen reorganized the whole kitchen, which was a herculean undertaking: not only did she dispose of two garbage bags full of old/bad food from our shelves, but she was able to fit most of the crap spread throughout the room into the new pantry. There are shiny new recycling bins lined up under the shelves, the cat food is out from underfoot, and it’s now possible to see all the cans at one time (the rack on the back of the basement door is gone.) She also sorted and culled our varied collection of pots and pans without mercy—the Goodwill is gonna have a big delivery coming.
Meanwhile, I got a coat of primer on about 90% of the back of the house before the game got called on account of weather. I’ve got the formula for successful paint spraying down, and the job should go much quicker now.
Sunday night we were invited to a barbecue down the street at our neighbors’ house, where we met another! couple! under! the! age! of! thirty! After the introductions, we all stood around silently for fifteen minutes, marveling at the novelty of it all, and then got along famously. Good food, good company, and a late evening—we left at midnight and walked home, full and happy.
Monday Links. iPod resources. | Junkheap rocketship. | Morriseydance.
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?
For cold A/C that doesn’t overheat the engine. For working electrical components that don’t flake out randomly. For a tape deck that works. For two cupholders that don’t block the radio. For four working speakers. For comfortable bucket seats that don’t lean. For a hatchback. For a trailer hitch, and the wiring to support it. For a full-sized spare. For a center console. For a factory roof rack. For peace of mind.
At the risk of totally maxing out my bandwidth this month, I’m going to post a bunch of wedding pictures for everyone to look at. This is the first batch—I’m on the eighth envelope out of twenty-six, so there will be more to come.
Accessories. Now that I have a new vehicle with a working tape deck, I need to pick up a few things for the iPod: An auto adapter ($19.95), so that I don’t run the batteries down (and there’s two power jacks in the Jeep!) as well as a new protector ($20) and dock ($30) so that the iPod stays off the floor. Will I be buying any of this anytime soon? Not likely, but that’s why it’s called a wish list. (While I’m at it, let’s just add this to the list.)
You, my loyal readers, have suffered through four years of complaints about my cars—between the soggy love affair with the Scout and the love/hate relationship with the Taurus, you’ve glazed over during my tirades, love letters, repair bills and sob stories. Age and rust have caught up with the Scout, rendering her muffler-less last August during our move to the country. She sits in the driveway, waiting for the Big Bag Of Money to drop from the sky. Meanwhile I’ve sweated through two years of increasing unreliability from the Ford as the transmission slowly ground itself into a spinning nubbin, praying to the Sky Bully (new favorite phrase) to get me home without breaking down on the shoulder of I-83 or somewhere along North Avenue. Yesterday afternoon, I was treated to three unscheduled stops on the side of 695 after being forced to slow in traffic quickly; each time the transmission decided it had had enough and forgot where second gear was. Meanwhile, the heater must be run at full blast to keep the engine from starting a car-b-que.
So it is with great pleasure that I announce a new vessel in the Lockardugan Home Fleet: a 1998 Jeep Cherokee. It has about eight of the ten things I was looking for in a replacement vehicle:
| Wants | Gots |
| Cargo space (preferably a pickup) | Not a pickup, but more room than the Taurus |
| 4-wheel drive | check |
| 4 doors | 2 doors |
| V6 engine | check |
| good gas mileage | (shudder) 16 mpg |
| Toyota | (shudder) Jeep |
| dual airbags | check |
| stick | automatic (drat!) |
| working A/C | check! |
| Inexpensive | check |
It is also with great pleasure that I announce we have met our first neighbors aged under 70, who sold us the truck. M and S have two young boys, live in one of the houses I’ve lusted after from afar, and strike us as genuinely nice people. We’re looking forward to getting to know them over for dinner this summer.
At the risk of spitting in the eyeball of Providence, it kind of came together perfectly. S put signs in the windows and parked the Jeep on the street last Friday morning; I saw it while limping the Tortoise home that evening, and Monday night we were test-driving. Superstitious fool that I am, I hope the Jeep serves us as well as the Ford (say what I will, that car paid for itself, every penny) and that our new neighbors don’t run screaming into the hills when they get to know us.
Encapsulated Reviews. To the 5 Boroughs: Same as it ever was, like a new version of Hello Nasty. Velvet Revolver: Slash Temple Pilots. Modernized 80’s metal. Shuggie Otis: trippy 70’s funk. A soundtrack to your own personal selfsploitation movie. Big Star: The original. A blueprint for most garage bands that followed. The Killers: Retro-disco rock, not unlike your Franz Ferdinand.