Postsecret
Postsecret
I think I wrote about this before, but it’s worth another look.
Scanners.
The 2005 Lockard Reunion is being held in North Carolina in a month or so, and I’d like to be prepared this time. The last reunion was a resounding success, bringing Jen’s father’s family together in Orlando for a fun weekend of swapping stories, photos, and history while staying in the Land of the Rat (and providing an opportunity to see Ms. Bonny Rose for the first time.) I was fortunate enough to meet many folks who I’d heard of but not met, including Jane, the matriarch of the family, who could have passed for a Dugan easily in personality and likeness.
One of the incredible things about the Lockards is the amount of historical information they have in their collective posession. We were handed boxes of old photographs, and a good portion of the visit was spent filling in the names of the proud-looking people who stared back at us from the yellowing prints. In an effort to make copies of the photos (many of which are the only ones in existence), I tried to shoot as many as I could in macro mode with my digital camera, but the effort was unscientific and ultimately dissapointing.
This time, I’m bringing the laptop and a flatbed scanner, so that we can continue archiving the pictures and make CD’s for people to distribute. Our current scanner is a third-hand UMAX with minimal support for the Mac and no software for OS X. The software is a buggy OS9 port from Windows that crashes more than it works.
I’m looking for a low-cost replacement that’s portable and native to OS X, but I can’t seem to find a decent recommendation online. (One of the Google search result links even bounced me to a porn site, which was a little disturbing, as I was sitting at my desk at work.) The supported scanners on the Apple site are all models I can’t find that currently ship, so I’m stuck with making educated guesses. When I find something and buy it, I’m going to post the results here so that somebody may be able to benefit from my experience. Right now it appears that I’m leaning towards the CanoScan LiDE 35, which has some form of Mac driver (I’d really, REALLY prefer a Photoshop plugin) and is small enough to carry, but unfortunately only has USB 2. FireWire seems to be a $200 add-on for any brand. Anyway, I’m heading to the Office Depot to see if they have one available, and I’ll report back on my findings.
Update: I just got an email reply from a fellow who had posted about a similar search on his weblog:
I bought a Canon LIDE 35, the cheapest Canon I could find at the time, and it works perfectly with OS X and Photoshop, works fine under both USB and USB2, doesn’t require it’s own power source, and is about the same size as a laptop, so I can tuck it away almost anywhere.
That seals it.
OS X supported scanners
Scanners supported under OS X
We need a better scanner by the middle of next month.
551 Confirmed.
Moto 551 Confirmed.
It’s official; I’m upgrading OSX and my phone as soon as I get paid.
Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Let’s just say that I’ve had better mornings. Don’t try to get in touch with me on my cellphone, because it’s sitting on the dining room table, shut off (I think.) My work computer, a PC, went on the fritz after I gave it a love tap. This was after all the open programs locked, I force rebooted it, and it locked again on startup. It turned out the video card was unseated. Other things blew up that I won’t go into here.
I’m going to go find something tasty to eat and try to force-restart this day after lunch.
Incidentally, is your information showing up in the Comments section when you have “Remember Me” checked, or do you have to keep entering it? Doesn’t seem to work for me in Safari.
Driving in Ireland
Driving in Ireland
We’re going to be on the left side of the road for ten days. God help us.
Convenience and Overload.
Two years ago, when we did the walkthrough on the house, we oohhed and aahhed over the obvious stuff, like the greenhouse and the fireplace, but one of the things that caught Jen’s eye was the garden outside the kitchen window. When we first visited, there was a birdbath, a feeder, and a garden ringed by brown modular ABS plastic on the west lawn. (I say “west lawn” only to provide a sense of direction. It sounds grand to say that in a sentence: “We’ll have tea on the West Lawn.” In actuality, it’s a narrow strip of grass, bounded by a weedy, overgrown privet hedge.) When we returned for the walkthrough on the day of the signing, we noticed that everything had disappeared from the yard save the lovely brown garden edging and a patch of dry, dusty soil covered in squirrel holes.
Steadily, over the last two years, Jen’s been making the yard look better in between life events. This spring she hatched a plan to rehab the entire flowerbed. Last night we set the wheels in motion by removing the platic edging and replacing it with pressure-treated 2×8′s (which will have to do until we can mix cement and build the rock wall.) Next, we dumped six cubic yards of garden soil and tilled the whole pile as the sun was setting. Then, we measured and drove two lengths of PVC piping into the middle of the bed, and set the headboard of a $15 antique bedframe into the pipes. (My wife is so damned smart.) Finally, by the light of the moon, we replaced the plants in their complicated arrangement so that she could put them in the ground this morning.
Note the variety of plants in the above picture. Around the bedframe are sedum and other hearty perennials. Along the edge in front are a variety of herbs and smaller flowering perennials. In back, Jen planted some morning glory, a ton of gladiola bulbs, and other tall flowers.
Meanwhile, the Peapod delivery guy was circling our street trying to find the house, and finally pulled in the driveway after I flagged him down. I’d have to say that the experience of spending $80 at the store and returning home with three small bags of food is no different than having somebody deliver it to the front door, but the convenience of having the staples (milk, bread, tonic water, creamer, etc) is pretty cool. If we can offset the high price of Peapod by shopping at the Asian market for produce, we’ll be coming out ahead in my book.
Jen was able to get all the plants in the ground this morning (I don’t think she even finished her coffee, she was out the back door so fast) as well as a pile of bulbs that we bought this spring. (We have a ridiculous amount of bulbs, actually—some are still good and left over from my old house, where I had dreams of planting gladiolas in the back yard.) Before I left, I asked Jen to meet me for lunch today so that we could hit a garden center up here by work. We’ve been living with the selections at Lowe’s and Home Depot only because of proximity and budget, and there’s a hideously overpriced garden center in the ‘Ville that Jen bought from out of necessity. I’ve been Valley View once or twice but never took the time to really explore, so it was a new experience for us both. Think of the garden center at your local Home Depot and expand it by about 400%. Add a whole section for live fish (featuring koi the size of a small child), wholesale stone, and a live herb section larger than a drugstore, and you have this place. We loaded up two boxes full of plants and got out of there before we did any serious damage, but still wound up dropping $50. I think we both agreed to regroup and think out a strategy for the future, bceause the possibilities have just been expanded tenfold, and we still need to make the mortgage payment.
Star Wars Tattoos
Star Wars Tattoos
More ink that you can shake a lightsaber at. I’ll take a Wookie backpiece, please…
Speechify
I have a request for humanity. PLEASE stop using the incorrect Engrish phrase “Your guys’”.
e.g. “I would think that, given your guys’ case, we’d be able to deliver the product by the end of calendar year ’05.”
Bonus points if you’re an employee of a Fortune 500 company and you use it during a conference call.
Goddamn, does that annoy the shit out of me, and I went to fucking art school for my undergraduate degree.
I’d also like to suggest public whippings for anybody with a four-year college degree who still doesn’t recognize the difference between Your and You’re. And let’s all please quit it with the excessive quotation marks around normal, everyday things.
e.g. a sign reading:
“FREE CAR WASH”
“BEST IN TOWN”
“NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY”
SUCCESS
I just got off the phone with Todd, who let me know that he is the proud papa of triplets, at approximately 10:20 this morning. Mother and children are doing well. Right on!
The Auld Sod and Peapod.
This morning, I made reservations for a trip to Ireland for our first anniversary. Originally, having fallen in love with the laid-back, Dolce Vita atmosphere of Italy, we talked about returning there, but plane fare and other considerations ruled out that idea. Other exotic locales beckoned: we talked about Barcelona, Tahiti (one of our honeymoon picks, sidelined due to the exorbitant cost and lengthy flight) and Paris. Gradually most of these fell aside and we seriously discussed Ireland. I’ve always wanted to see the country of my ancestry, and a self-guided tour seemed to be the way to go. We found a preplanned package online through AAA, including lodging and car rental, and signed up for it this morning. We will be driving a compact automatic over hill and dale on the wrong side of the road in search of blarney, real beer, and bland food for nine days in June.
Plane fare was shaping up to be the expensive part of the trip, but I found some dirt-cheap fares from American using Kayak.com, and got us a one-hop flight to Shannon thru Boston for less than the cost of the tour package. There are some more things to be ironed out (we need a place to stay in Dublin and Shannon for a night each and a lift across the country to our return flight, for example) but the major part is done. I’m absolutely thrilled to be going—it’s been a dream of mine for years. The fact that I get to go with my wife and best friend for our anniversary makes it that much better.
In other news, we broke down and ordered $80 worth of groceries from Peapod last night. I figure $6 is worth the hour it would take to go and pick all this stuff up ourselves, and we have better things to be doing with our time right now. Besides, we are lazy consumerist yuppies. Now, to arrange for Starbucks to deliver to our door…
Actually, this is the first time the conveniences of the dot-com days have reached our leafy door; while hipsters in San Francisco and Manhattan could call Webvan back in ’99 for a Penthouse, Coke and candy bar to be delivered to their door free of charge, we never got the option here in Mobtown. It’s (relatively) cheap, it’s available, and we’re taking advantage of it at least once.
Rockity.
I found, through circuitous channels, that Mike Doughty has a blog. Soul Coughing was always one of my favorite bands from back in the day, ad I had the good fortune to see them live twice—once at the old Bohager’s, which is now an empty lot (and being reclaimed as some kind of new building), and once in the old 8×10 as one of about fifty very lucky fans. That small club date remains one of the best live shows I’ve bever seen. (This weblog takes its name from one of my favorite S-C tracks.)
Anyway, he’s been kicking around playing small gigs for the past couple of years, and is in the middle of releasing a new solo album and going on tour to promote it. If you haven’t heard any of his newer work, it’s a departure from the old S-C sound, but still features ace songwriting and melodies. He’s an excellent writer, and comes off as an extremely down-to-earth kind of person.
If you haven’t heard it, I recommend Skittish. “Rising Sign” is one of my favorite tracks from last year.
Greenhouse…Check.
This weekend I took advantage of the lousy overcast weather to completely strip and re-cover our greenhouse.
As you can see, it was nasty with a capital “N”. Years of mold and dirt were stuck on the outside and in between the sheets of plastic.
Once the new plastic was up, the inside of the greenhouse was a completely different place.
I re-arranged the clutter and set up our tables so that there’s one whole dry side and one irrigated side. During the rain on Saturday, I cemented the piping together and drilled holes for the sprinkler. This afternoon we finally got to test it out—everything works great. I have to drill another length of pipe with a smaller bit and adjust the pattern for better coverage, but everything works as advertised. (there’s water dripping in this photo:)
Now I’m too tired to write anything else. Oh, yeah, we bought about $300 worth of plants. More on that later.
2004 Best Design Books
2004 Best Design books
According to Design Bookself. Some good selections in here.
Distribution of Wealth.
I pride myself on being a very DIY sort of fellow. It’s a perverse sort of pride sometimes. Most people, given the right set of five tools, a short, well-designed instruction sheet, and an afternoon free of interruption, can do stuff like replace a toilet tank valve or install a GFCI outlet in their kitchen. I tend to take this crap to extremes, though, like building and installing my own arbor (Try this sometime: lift a 13-foot 2×6″ pressure-treated beam on a ladder fourteen feet in the air by yourself. Now repeat that six more times. Watch out for that high-voltage electrical line), transporting four sheets of drywall on the roof of a Ford Taurus (transporting drywall is hard with two people and a pickup truck) or gutting and rehabbing the only functioning bathroom in my house (that was a smelly month.)
Most of this stuff wouldn’t be necessary if I could afford certain things, like, say, a Toyota Tacoma. Or the day rate of a local plumber. Or even some of the hourly charges at the local rent-a-center. Often times there’s a tradeoff between what it would cost to have somebody come in and do the stuff I need vs. eating, and sometimes it’s even more extreme than that (our kitchen rehab estimate comes to mind here.)
It was a no-brainer, though, to have a fellow come in yesterday and haul away the huge pile of brush we’ve been collecting between the greenhouse and the garage. I normally would have called a friend in and paid him happily to help me haul it away, but I decided that he probably wouldn’t appreciate the poison ivy either. Hopefully I won’t have to do any more radical pruning jobs like I did last fall—which is where the brushpile came from—although the holly tree needs a major haircut and the gnarled fruit tree in the side yard appears to have finally kicked off. (And I’d love to chop that nasty cedar tree right down, too.)
While he was stuffing the back of his truck with my skin-irritating brush, I replaced the first of four panels on the greenhouse with new UV plastic. The job went pretty quickly and easily, which was a relief. I also tested out a few different solutions for the water piping and settled on a row of small drilled holes instead of the misting nozzles; the amount of water released seemed to be steadier and covered more area. When he was ready to leave, I helped him toss one of the old rotten picnic tables on top of the load and waved goodbye. He had bagged up all the leaves and raked the area, so we are left with a patch of empty dirt, ready for grass seed where uneven weeds used to lay. I’d say that was $100 well spent.
dandelion
This morning I popped the macro lens on the Canon and went outside to shoot some of the local flowers before the forecasted rain beats them all up.
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