One problem I have with OSX: Lack of a UDF format reader. I spend half my time on my Windows machine, and because it has a burner with Roxio’s DirectCD, I burn a lot or stuff onto data CD’s with their software. OS9 has a reader extension, but Roxio hasn’t made one for OSX. Bad move, guys. What’s even worse is the fact that the CD gets swallowed when I insert it and I have to reboot to pull it out. Grrr.
Busy Busy Busy.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been struggling/migrating from OS9 to OSX in the last few days, and attempting to document the problems/solutions I’ve found so far. As it turns out, I’m on a new project at work and they have given me a new PC to use; it’s a dual 1gHz P3, and it runs Win2000. So I’ve gone from WinNT>Win98>Win2000 in the last year. My head is spinning. I’m also sketching out cityscapes and beginning on some fiction for the backstory of the project.
Meanwhile, we still haven’t been paid.
Here’s a memo to insurance companies and the medical industry: make a simple barcode system for insurance cards. You issue me a card with all my stupid insurance/contact information on a magnetic stripe. I enter your office, and instead of making a copy of it, asking me to fill out the form (15 minutes of my time) and then paying somebody to enter in the information (20 minutes of your time @ $12/hr.), you have a simple stripe scanner which grabs the info off the card in some tab-delimited format which you can import into your data package. How hard is that? And don’t give me static about refusing to provide my Soc number, either. You don’t need that.
Good News Dept.: Dooce is back online. Rock on!
windshield, 7.26
Starting tonight, Jen and I are on a long-needed vacation up to my folks’ house, so I probably won’t be posting here too much in the next week. But I will come back with a ton of pictures, a relaxed demeanor, a killer tan, and hopefully some more freelance work. Stay tuned.
It’s pretty wet out there today, but it’s supposed to get up into the 90’s next week. I worked out all the kinks (hopefully) in my irrigation system in the backyard, so during our vacation the plants will be watered.
Song of the day: Mongrel, DJ Shadow.
Speaking of, I will offer an opinion on the ‘Bonus Track’ offered with the CD I wrote about yesterday: Big deal. I used my Windows machine, and went through all manner of steps just to bring up a Windows Media Player to play a streamed remix of ‘Giving up the Ghost’. So every time I might want to hear this ‘Bonus Track’, i have to insert the disc, jump through the hoops (enter my personal information) and then I have to use WMP to hear the song. WMP sucks. And from a marketing perspective, it seems pretty worthless to not advertise the ‘Bonus Track’, as well as make the customer go through all the hoops to hear the song, just so they can collect info on my marketing demographic.
I found this link via kottke.org today: True Porn Clerk Stories. apparently it’s had some exposure on NPR lately as well.
Here’s a selection of sites from my Favorites list over the past year, now that I’m cleaning up the computer following completion of the game: Urban Archaeology.
Interesting subject, horrible execution: Ghost Towns. Somebody, anybody, please tell the good people of the world that dropping white text on a textured, picture background is about the most illegible design choice possible. I can’t even select the text to read the knockout—it’s a block of white. Forgotten Stations is a site which does it right: easy, intuitive organization, a ton of links, clean grammar, and intense documentation. Another good urban archaeology site, while not being a great example of design, is Forgotten NY, which is broken down into convenient sections. The wealth of this site is the sheer number of links; the site itself breaks the rule of having blocks of text over dark photos. I am a fan of painted outdoor advertising signs, and the section here is fantastic. Friends of the High Line is a site dedicated to the preservation of the old West Side elevated rail in NYC; it’s beautiful, contains an extensive gallery, and works very well as an informational site. Dinercity is an documentary site about classic aluminum diners; unfortunately it overlooks the one closest to my folks’ house in Auburn, NY. (pictures coming soon.) Roadside America has a day’s worth of reading about all manner of American oddities, including the ubiquitous Muffler Men.
Here’s a new set of sketches from last night’s studio. It was a good night, but by 9:30 I was losing focus, so I packed up early. Sketch one | Sketch two
This is a real nice set of fonts by Susan Kare, the original designer of icons for the Macintosh. At some point, I will have to pick some of these up.
I set up online bill paying via Bank of America today; we’re going to see if I can pay a few of my non-essential bills (mostly phone and utility bills) with it for a month or two, and then if that is smooth I’ll switch the mortgage and insurance bills over as well. It’s good to see they finally made the service free (since May 1); seems to me they will save even more money in transaction costs if they make it free.
Jen called me today to giggle at the new Cidera site; somebody over there got hired on to make some kind of a Frankenstein monster out of the original 2000 design, some of the 1999 graphics I developed, and some of the old advertising materials. Wow.
I’d like to buy a laptop now, and it would be a great thing to have, but it didn’t work out last week. I should have set eBay to proxy up to $450 or so on that laptop, but I didn’t, and in the final 3 minutes or so some guy outbid me and then somebody outbid him. I figure a real nice new 12.1″ iBook would be good; I’d keep it simple with the CD-ROM and drop the extra money into 256MB or RAM and a 20 gig hard drive. Later on, I’d either buy a CD-burner or some other peripheral, but right now I’m good with this setup.
I found this site via pop culture junk mail. Also, scrubbles.net.
From there, I found this site, which had this link, which makes it one of my new favorite sites.
I found a few links that I had lost from the December log. Here’s the definitive G-Force/Gatchaman fan site, and a link to Rhino home video, where you can buy the first 8 episodes on DVD.
Here’s a link to a site dedicated to the 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT and the Mad Max movies.
Tomorrow I go out with Jason to take Dan to his bachelor dinner at the Prime Rib; that should be interesting. Jason got a bunch of old ex-System Source employees together for a surprise dinner at Akbar in town last Saturday- that was very interesting and fun and bittersweet all at the same time. I was just thinking about Mike H. last week, and there he is across the table from me. The good thing was that Jason and Shelly showed up as well as Joy on our end of the table, so we had good conversation. That with the lunch I had with Melissa last week just makes my heart heavy sometimes; I miss those guys terribly, and that time period (work-wise, at least). Plus the fact that Greycube is for all purposes ending and I’m kind of blue about all that. I’d like to get some kind of organization together to do some other off-site freelance work.
I found this site today: Steinbergerworld. There’s a list of a lot of fantastic info about these instruments, and considering I have an XP2, I have some reading to do tonight. I also found an Ebay auction with a black XP2 currently at about $400.
Well, who would have thought that the Patriots would win last night? Not me. And this guy is such a wussy it makes my head ache. Here’s an anonymous e-mail remailer.
Heh. Cidera finally made it to the FuckedCompany site. Some of the comments are really funny- now that I see a company I was a member of and read some of the comments written by “ex-employees”, it’s interesting to see how wierd/biased/silly some of them are.
Holy nasty. (via redcricket)
In a very ambivalent mood today. Been reading a lot of navel-gazing about blog people and what they ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be writing about. I’m gonna write about what I want to write about—this section of my site is for me; if folks want to read it, they can. If not, well, there are a bunch of other sites to read written by funnier, more interesting people than me.
Nate got me listening to Digable Planets’ Cool Like That today. That song brings me back, man.
And this link is just frickin’ hysterical, man.
What the hell is wrong with people? Raping a baby doesn’t cure AIDS, but execution of a baby-rapist sure thins the herd of the monumentally stupid and ignorant….
Huh. Metafilter had this link and this link about some kind of a legal ‘exact definition of pornography’- sounds like a slippery slope to me. And this is funny too— I think these idiots should be escorted into Congress to answer all the questions by a squad of huge ass-kicking federal marshals. What a bunch of Texas yahoos. To think they were Bush’s major backers…makes the mind just reel, doesn’t it?
Sitting here at home waiting for the carpet guys to show up. pleasepleasepleaseplease!
I read up on the Epson printer this morning and found that it won’t print if the black or color cartridges are empty, which is the case. So i have to see how much a black ink cartridge is and drop one in, then see if she’ll print. Hopefully it will be under $20 or so, otherwise I’ll look to see if there’s a good aftermarket ink supply place around. I don’t want to drop $40 on a printer that might not work. promising though, is that the printer powers up and I get a reaction when the test is triggered.
Here’s an interesting link about blocking ads in your browser. The only thing i can’t get to is blocking the proxy settings (step 2). Here also is what is billed as the true story of L.Ron Hubbard.