In addition to the wire work done last night, I got down below the pantry this morning, fighting the wind and a 5×5′ sheet of plastic (that was fun) to seal up the insulation I put in the other night. This project was prompted by the newscast last night where they said that New Hampshire got down to frickin’ 98 below zero.
Random Fun Links. Disney sells Celebration community. It’s a Small World! (via dominey) Get your Mars on. Right On. I only wish this guy had some better merchandise, ’cause I’d buy it. (via boing boing) iPod sound quality. I should be encoding in AAC at 160kb/s…
The anticipated “1-3 inches of snow, with the possibility of 2-4 during Thursday” translated to a slight dusting. The state of Maryland continued its long tradition of freaking out and dumping millions of dollars worth of salt on clear roads, putting schools on 2-hour delays, and excercising “Snow Emergency Plans.” I remain unimpressed. So much for getting snowed in with my baby.
This evening I dropped $100—gulp—on cable at the Home Depot. $100 got me 1,000 feet of Cat 5e network cable and 500 feet of coax cable, enough wire to wrap around my house about a hundred times or start my own copper mine. I got the rest of the wire run from the Pink room to the basement and began to cut out the baseboards for the outlets. Hopefully by tomorrow night I can have the pink room finished and start on the blue room next.
Random Fun Links. Quicktime 3-D view of Mars, put together from NASA photgraphs. That’s compelling stuff.
Actually, I misspoke yesterday. The mini-headphone-to-RCA plug does work, it’s just that the input level to the receiver is very low. So I have to crank the receiver up to high volume to hear the output from the iPod. The S-Video cable still doesn’t work, and the main issue there is that my TV is old and only has a coax input. At some point I will need to buy a TV with S or Component video inputs to get the whole enchilada.
This Old House, Part 2. So I got the insulation installed under the pantry last night. It was actually pretty easy to do—cutting down the stringers was easy with the compound miter saw, and actually putting the insulation in was a snap. Unfortunately, the kitchen is still pretty cold because the radiator is barely alive. So, no quick fix.
Legion of Boom by the Crystal Method is a disappointment. Not as melodic as Vegas (“Busy Child”, “Trip Like I Do”) or compelling as Tweekend (“Name of the Game”, “Roll It Up”), none of the tracks on this album stand out, make me want to do kung-fu, shoot people up, or drive cars fast. And that is the standard by which I judge all my big-beat electronica. “Weapons of Mass Distortion” and “Broken Glass” come close to the old-skool soundtrack for ass-whuppin’, but this is pretty uninspiring stuff.
Missing. Todd just reminded me that Spalding Gray is missing and presumed bumming; apparently he was in a bad car wreck back in ’01 and has not been right ever since. My friend Martha and I both went to see Gray’s Anatomy at Center Stage back in ’94 or so; it turns out that Todd could have been there the same night (and, based on our particular brand of shared coincidence, I would put money on it) and we all enjoyed the show. God bless, man, and I hope you’re OK.
Random Fun Links. Heavy rotation this morning: Pete Yorn’s Musicforthemorningafter, specifically “On Your Side”. Beautiful stuff. This could be very cool. Provided I can get it to work. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. This translates, in Industry-speak, as “Get out, you loser.” (this has direct bearing on a certain project I was working on last year.)
The cover for the couch came yesterday, and while I waited for Jen to get home, I figured out how to put the thing on the couch. It fits really well, but $200 is pretty steep for the thin material it’s made of, but I guess that’s in line with the four hundred percent markup Pottery Barn charges.
This Old House. Our kitchen is small by contemporary standards, but it’s functional for us, largely in part because there’s a 5’x5′ pantry off the back of the house. It’s suspended off the ground about four feet by two concrete pillars, and the underside is finished off with tar paper. The kitchen is also the coldest room in the house, in part because the radiator there is the last one on the chain, and in part because the pantry is poorly insulated. I took a look under there this morning and found that the tar paper is holding in a layer of blown fiberglas insulation, but I can’t be sure how old, thick or even it is. I’m going to buy a couple of 2’x4’s and a roll of pink insulation today and see if I can’t seal it up a bit better before the temperatures plunge again.
Oh, and those two cables I bought at the Best Buy last week? Neither of them work.
Random Link Fun. 100 Mowst mispelled werds. Know it. Learn it. Live it. Clean your 1st gen iPod. Gonna try this one tonight. VoIP hiccup. Doesn’t apply to my IP phone though… Dead iPod? Follow those instructions. Also, Helpful iPod support.
4:55 PM. Apparently a whole swath of I-95 is on fire or something, not too far from Catonsville. A tanker truck did a header off an overpass onto two other tanker trucks. What are the chances of that? This should make the evening commute a pleasant one. I think I may wind up staying late at work this evening.
Dan, our underpaid and under appreciated IT god around here, just hooked up a new HP network printer that my Mac can see. Apparently the old one was networked but you had to open a port to it or some such bullshit, and it wasn’t PostScript, so it was worthless and invisible to Rendezvous.
In other news, I got the rest of the plaster and lathe down in the Pink room last night and began the process of drilling through the studs to start fishing wire. In some cases there are some roadblocks—the closet corner is framed in such a way that I don’t have clearance for a shovelhead drillbit, or even the drill, so I’m going to have to get jiggy with it. The area in the front corner behind the radiator is the main trouble spot though, because the kickplate still won’t come out. There’s not enough room to maneuver behind it, plus I can’t get at the nails that hold it in place. I am, however, in love with my loaner Sawzall. I’ve forgotten just how much fun a 12 amp motor connected to a 4″ metal blade can be. It reminds me of the remarkably un-PC Joe Piscopo line from Johnny Dangerously, the one where he holds up the 88 Magnum: “It shoots through schools.”
I should also give a shout-out to my pops (not to be confused with my peeps) for the super-science laser level he gave me for Christmas. I put some batteries in this thing and turned it on the other night, and it immediately pointed out the fact that the house is out of level in five dimensions, at which time it radioed Sears Central and called in backup from the Craftsman Emergency Response Team. I’m going to need a degree in geometry to square out my house, and this thing will make life much easier. Plus, the included red-lens glasses make me look like Devo when I wear them. Thanks, Dad.
Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Consumer Goods. Tuesday I broke down and bought a present for our 8-year-old IKEA Varnamo couch (the one they don’t sell anymore). Over the years this poor couch has been slept, dripped, stood, scratched, snoozed, fought, laughed, cried, played, drank, eaten, and jumped on; it’s really showing its age at this point. With $200 I don’t really have to spend, I got a Pottery Barn slipcover on clearance, which will be great news for our friends who are allergic to the five square feet of cat fur embedded in the upholstery.
Random Link Fun. Here’s an interesting site on the Curta hand calculator, sort of a mechanical adding machine. (via Slashdot). An Awesome illustration site. (via Boing Boing). And finally an Awesome poster site. Cheap, too. (via Coudal).
Or: How To Give Your Employees The Finger
And Make Them Thank You For It.
I’ve been in the corporate workplace for about eight years now. In that time I’ve been to a number of Christmas parties, ranging from the elaborate to the absent. I’ve been to lavish black-tie parties in DC where the dot-com I worked for blew at least twice the month’s VC money on top-shelf liquor and four-star food. I’ve been to parties that made me feel like I was at my high school prom, that incredible waste of $1,200, one night of my life, and two cases of good beer at the schmaltzy Rye Playhouse. I’ve been to a kegger where the christmas bonus was a black personalized M-65 field jacket. Each one of these was strange in its own way, but the unease was offset by a general desire to have a good time, or at least decent food and drink.
Jen has been coming home with frightening stories about her office, and I’ve found that the only true antidote for the situation is patient understanding and gallons of vodka tonic. So it was with great curiousity/trepidation that I put my suit on and drove us both to the glamorous Brooklyn Comfort Inn, in whose banquet hall her company party awaited us. Entering the building, passing the smoke-filled bar, we found the dining room, where someone had hung great gold dildoes from the ceiling and wrapped the pictures on the wall with green paper in some freakish parody of ‘festive spirit’. The employees gathered around in the center of the room by the bar like nervous antelope while the hotel staff arranged our food in stations around the room. The senior citizen DJ spun Christmas songs and contemplated suicide in the back corner.
After sampling some of our drinks from the bar, and realizing they had replaced the liquid in the bottle marked ‘Smirinoff’ with paint thinner, we plunged into the fray and met with some of Jen’s co-workers. They all seemed very nice, if not a little in shock, and I listened as they passed gossip about people who were and weren’t there. We sat over by the dance floor and contemplated the food selection: a table with a huge pile of baked potatoes, some limp, wet and alien-looking bacon, a huge lake of sickly Velveeta, and a bowl of cut butter the size of a child’s fist. Seriously, if I need that much butter for anything besides an entire Thanksgiving turkey, I’m going to be dead by age 40. There was a table near us with two kinds of store-bought pasta, three choices of sauce that smelled (and tasted) like burning, and a basket of small rolls with no butter in sight. Over on the other side of the room was a bowl of redneck Caesar salad—premixed iceberg lettuce, Stouffer’s croutons, and enough cheese to sink a battleship—some form of cat or dog meat in the role of asian chicken, and another huge tureen of stuff I couldn’t identify.
At this point, the antifreeze in the drink was making us dizzy, so Jen and I tried to choke some of the shit food down. She had about half a bite of the ‘pasta’ and looked at me with the “please hold out your hands so that I may vomit in them” face. Unfortunately I was also searching for a place to hurl, and so I could not help her in her time of need. I ditched our full plates and waited for them to start the ‘prize wheel’, which was run by a pair of hookers (seriously, when you’re wearing the kind of three-inch heels that are held on your legs by those ribbons that reach halfway up your thigh, you’re one of two things: a porno actress or a whore) and took about three years to finish. Prizes ranged from a $100 certificate to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse—not a bad haul—to a $10 coupon for McDonald’s. Now really, if you’re going to give me $10 to go to McDonald’s, you might as well just kick me in the nuts, because I’d rather feel that pain than try to act happy when you give me the fucking prize. Jen won $15 to a restaurant in Owings Mills that makes the worst sushi in Baltimore.
About the time Jen went to give her boss the department Christmas gift, I wandered back to the dessert table to find something to dilute the burbling pool of sick in my stomach, and found some cake with the wax paper still in between the machine-cut slices. At this point I was pretty shocked that they didn’t leave the box out on the table next to it, but I figured that processed chemicals would make a nice counterpoint to the splitting headache the liquor gave me, so I had a slice. Jen and I then decided it was time to leave to go find some real food, so we got our coats and scurried out the door before anyone else could walk over to bore the shit out of us. In the bar by the door we ran into a knot of partygoers furiously drinking and smoking and were held up by some bunny with bloodshot eyes and, like, the word ‘like’ between, like, every other, like, word in her, like, vocabulary. I grabbed Jen at the point when her hand was forming a fist to strike and we ran to the car to get home for leftover pizza and real alcohol.
What a fucking joke.
Fun links. We now return to seizure robots. Words can not describe. Ding! Fries are done. I’m going to hell. Badger! Mushroom! Snake! Don’t ask me why.
The Christmas cards are officially in the mail. Thank God. Also, BG&E stopped by this morning to finish the wiring in our basement. Since moving in the house we’ve had a huge live 220-volt line sticking out into the basement from the panel at the foot of the stairs. Now it’s gone and the meter is sitting outside on the back of the house. Whoopee!
Small World Dept. The couple I was playing pool with at Jason’s party on Saturday night left there to go visit a “friend who owned a restaurant”; it turns out they drove down to the Chameleon Cafe and ran into Todd and Heather. So that makes it only the second time in three weeks that we’ve shared a “this-town-is-too-damn-small” experience. (Apparently I resemble the guy from “Scrubs”. If I had a quarter…)
Interesting Random Stuff Dept. Linda sent along the link to Pink Five. Thanks! (you’ll need RealPlayer or WMP to watch.) There’s a little bit of anger over at Vent. And everybody should take a look at Pitchfork’s recap of the top albums of the 90’s. That is all.
I have 10.3 running on Jen’s Powerbook; it got the original 12GB drive from my machine with a clean install. Jen’s going to be moving to OSX at some point at work and I want her to be familiar with it as soon as she can be so the IT idiots there don’t get involved. It looks and runs very well on a 400Mhz G3, which is a good sign.
A few things, found via one of my new favorite design sites: Interrobang Letterpress. Tasty and sweet. Also, a racy bit of non-worksafe fun: Motel Fetish.
Grumble Grumble. So last night I got home and the power was out. Again. This makes the third time since we’ve moved in—admittedly the first time was during the hurricane, but this is frickin’ high wind. Everybody else in Catonsville had power, for crying out loud.
So we drove to Kelsey’s Irish pub and had some warm food while the Maryland game played in the background; when the longhaired 40-year-old band began setting up in the corner, we beat feet back to the ice chest. Jen put seventy blankets on the bed while I stoked the fire; our sleep was interrupted repeatedly by the cats, who became punting targets as they jumped on the bed. (try sleeping with five blankets and four cats on one bed. It’s kind of like being covered in warm cement.) Around 4:30 the lights came back on, and the heat slowly returned, thank god.
I’ve learned a couple of new things about the house; apparently the front porch holds absolutely no heat, the chimney damper definitely needs to be fixed, and we are in the market for a generator. Also, there’s a radiator behind the inside front door.
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.
john w. brown, canton waterfront, 3.4
Today Slashdot provided a link to an article by Robert L. Park, who wrote a book on voodoo science. The article discusses “seven warning signs of bogus science“, and it remarkably has many connotations outside its intended realm. (I have not read the book, but provide a link for your information.)
Also from Slashdot, this excellent summary of the Internet. I found this point interesting, until I read the explanation: 4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value. Stop and think about it for a minute, then read the explanation. It does make sense.
From the ever-knowledgable Macintouch, this article on printing from PCs to Apple printers contains a ton of good information.