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January 31, 2006

Side Benefits Of Strong Cold Medicine.

Well, I'm thinking I should probably lay in a year's supply of Sudafed Cold & Cough Liquigels and just start popping them like M&M's. The amount of business development stuff I've actually accomplished this afternoon has been amazing—in between sneezing, blowing my nose, and hunting for clean tissues, I've emailed a whole slew of people on freelance leads, switched over my old pre-2001 Quark-based identity to the spiffy new InDesign version Jen designed for me (with rollout on the website to come), done two hour's research for a consulting client, invoiced another job, and cleaned off the to-do list in front of me. All without succumbing to the siren call of NetNewsWire or Craigslist or the internets in general. It must be the pseudoephedrine or something. Unfortunately, the pills I took at 9AM wore off at about 4PM, because that's when my nose-faucet started running again, so I'm back to a cycle of blow nose, sneeze, blow nose, sniffle, blow nose, sneeze, repeat.

It was because of this mucousy hell last night that I took two tablespoons of off-brand NyQuil at 9PM, and it felled me like an elephant gun—one minute I was talking coherently, and the next I was grunting at Jen as I passed out on the bed. I can't say it does anything for sleep, though; I was half-awake at 3 AM having spacey, rambling dreams about aliens and my old neighborhood in New Jersey, and I suddenly woke up with a crystal-clear solution for a UI project I'm working on. It's funny what cold medicine will do to the subconscious.

An entry Jason wrote reminded me to post a few of the pictures from our trip to the salvage warehouse a few weeks ago. I've been remiss on my Flickr duties lately, so I'll have to get back on the job. Sorry, folks.

Posted on January 31, 2006 4:16 PM | link to this entry

January 30, 2006

That Hit The Spot.

We went down the street to the Rite Aid for some cough medicine. My throat was feeling more and more gravelly, and my voice was getting lower and lower. We bought the off-brand NyQuil knockoff, and I took two tablespoons when we got home.

At this point, I'm feeling less and less able to function cohesively. It's getting lighter and spacier in here, and I feel pretty groovy. I think I'm signing off now.

Posted on January 30, 2006 9:31 PM | link to this entry

January 29, 2006

Weekend Wrap-Up, or: Mulch, Food, Shopping, and Phlegm.

Jen took Friday afternoon to rearrange the living room to where four people can sit comfortably and chat with each other, which is a huge difference; it's really refreshing to have some feng in our shui, at least where that room is concerned. It would be great to make major structural changes in there, but just about everything we want to do will cost major cash, which we don't have on hand right now.

Saturday we hit the Home Despot and spent a little cash on supplies for the house. The yard here at the Lockardugan estate has been the bastard stepchild since autumn of last year; after the elm in the backyard was felled and all the rest of the trees dropped their leaves, I've ignored it completely. Meanwhile, the neighbors in back have a little senior citizen dude they hire in who shambles around with a rake and a broom, and over a few weeks' time he got their yard cleaned up to where it made us look like trailer trash. (He mowed their lawn in January. They're fucking with us deliberately, I know it.)

The first order of business was to rake the leaves, which were slowly oozing into (and killing off) our already anemic back lawn. In about fifteen minutes I put a mulch enclosure in, and got the majority of the leaves off the lawn. Next, Jen and I started pulling up some of the English ivy that's overtaking the southwest corner of the lawn. English ivy is sort of how I imagine kudzu would be—pulling armfuls of it off the lawn only reveals more armfuls underneath. Apparently the Doctor was all kinds of hot for English ivy, because that shit is all up this be-yatch—there's ivy hanging twenty feet off our trees. We cleared a section measuring 15'x30' out (five bagfuls, total) and moved the existing logpile to the back corner. Next, we got the debris from the felled tree that was still spread across the lawn up, and stacked it in line with the rest of the wood, leaving the huge crosswise cuts that can't be lifted for a date with a chainsaw. I'd imagine we have at least two cords stacked right now and another two cords in unmoveable wood to go. Then, I stopped over at the Cauzzis' to help push the Galaxie back into the garage. That car is too damn fine (and rare on the east coast) to wind up looking like my Scout. Despite a low front tire, little battery power, and a soggy trunk, we were able to push, pull, wiggle, and coax it into the garage, where it should stay dry. When little Callie decided her Uncle Bill was just too scary to deal with, I packed up the Saturn and headed west for dinner: Potato-leek soup, which was mouth-wateringly good the first time Jen made it and better this time. I even sprung for a six-pack of Harp, which went down very well after the day's activity.

I also picked up a pair of cheap Hi-8 cassettes for the Thrift Store Camera and within five minutes had tape rolling of our cats wandering aimlessly around the living room. Sears carries a no-name battery for $17 that I have to go back for this week that the engrish website claims will work on this camera. If I had a video card with RCA-out, I could rip it digitally, or use the camera as a webcam (hot geek webcam action!) but for now, I'll keep it plugged into the wall.

Sunday we took a fistful of gift certificates to various home-decor stores in the mall and browsed through all kinds of expensive stuff we can't afford. Who pays $350 for a set of bedsheets besides Liberace? I mean, really, what's so different from a $40 set Martha Stewart hawks at the K-Mart? It ain't the thread count. Maybe the Restoration Hardware kind is woven with golden silk or some other bourgeoisie thing that sounds good on the little cards they use to rationalize the 700% markup. "Handmade by a blind Nepalese monk with genuine free-range mountain yak assfur—as everybody knows, mountain yak is the smoothest, gentlest assfur known to Man, and worth more than its weight in gold." In the evening we decided to make a dish Jen found called Scallops Charleston, which cost us all of about $10 and tasted wonderful, even though I didn't broil it as well as I should have. Feeling pious after our day's work in the yard, we busted into our remaining bottle of red wine—Mmmmm, red wine—and ate like grownups at our dining room table. Then, we enjoyed a glass of port on our couch in front of a blazing fire.

Meanwhile, the sore throat I woke up with on Saturday morphed into post-nasal drip and a rocking good head cold for Monday morning. Swell. I felt awful about infecting my consulting clients this morning (and considered rescheduling), but as it turned out, the wife of the pair has the same cold. They watched me do battle with Verizon and Quicken 2006 for a few hours, and fed me homemade chicken soup for lunch. Verizon won (their DSL modem is hosed) so I'll return Thursday to fight the good fight. Also, Quicken 2006 for the Mac seems to be a big bag of shit, so I'd recommend staying with the 2005 version until Intuit gets they' head out they' ass.

Posted on January 29, 2006 4:19 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

January 26, 2006

Uh-Oh.

I'm going to look at a Scout in the city this afternoon. From what I hear, it's pretty rusty—but it's a 1980, which means it was galvanized at the factory and (most likely) Ziebarted. It's also a diesel with A/C. I don't know where I'd put it, how I'd afford it (them checks still aren't rolling in) or how I'd even get it to the house, but I'm going to look at it.

update: If there ever was a Scout in worse shape than mine, this was it. Basically, I could salvage the axles (Dana 44's) and the transfer case (Dana 300), the transmission (possibly a B/W T-19), the rollbar, possibly the engine, the A/C unit and ductwork, and the tailgate. If I had a garage to part it out, which I don't. Other than that, it's a basket case.

Posted on January 26, 2006 11:50 AM | link to this entry

January 25, 2006

Font Explorer X Follow-up.

Imagine if Suitcase loaded all your fonts and didn't crash? Imagine if it didn't take fifteen minutes to preview one single font face? Imagine if it was able not to crash when loading a corrupted font (or if it featured smart enough logic to prevent loading a corrupted font in the first place?) You'd have Font Explorer X.

Add in a vastly better UI, an ability to buy fonts a la the Apple Music Store (if you can use iTunes, this will be very familiar to you, but the available selection for sale is currently very slim), and stability, simple basic stability, and you have a killer font app. This software is beta, so caveat emptor. I have a library of 5600+ fonts, and Font Explorer X handles them all like a charm.

Goodbye, Suitcase. It's been great knowing you, but it's time to move on. Don't call me-I'll call you.

Posted on January 25, 2006 1:39 PM | link to this entry

January 24, 2006

Small Victories.

So I'm up last night (Monday? Tuesday? What day is this?) at about 1AM working on my design portfolio in hopes of getting some new work. My initial idea was to lay the whole thing out in CSS and be all propeller-head, but my brain has been very soggy lately. After a few hours I switched to a table-based layout, and I was still having issues up until midnight. (I started in the early afternoon.) By 12:30 I was feeling very discouraged and blocked, so I turned to the internet to do some reading for a break. One of the first things I saw discouraged me to the point of crushing depression. I'm not going into the specifics here, but it made me look back and my own work and feel very worthless. At that point, I tried to rally but I just didn't have it in me—it was like watching either of those two playoff games last weekend as a Denver or Carolina fan: nothing was working like it was supposed to, and by the end it was just embarassing.

I dragged ass to bed and laid awake for another hour and a half, attempting to convince myself that I was still a valuable commodity (actually, staving off panic is a better description) and finally drifted off to a troubled sleep. Every year or so, I get into a funk where I start measuring my life by all kinds of evil yardsticks—where I thought I'd be by now when I was 21, my life compared to other people I know, my career compared to other people's careers, etc. Usually the results are the same: I'm upset and depressed and scared, and it takes many beers or some good news to get me out of the rut. It looks like this year is no different, and I got caught up in the self-flagellation thing again.

However, there are bright spots. Jen made chocolate cake two days ago, and it's made sitting in the office for twelve hours at a clip much easier.

Today I woke up (at 10:30, ugh) and had a new idea on how to approach the structure of the site; by 4pm I had it mapped out and most of the bugs de-bugged. I uploaded everything at 12:30 this evening, and hopefully it's working correctly in most browsers.

Behold: the new design portfolio, four (five?) years in the making. Still to do:
Check in older browsers. This is a CSS-based layout, so I'm hoping it doesn't puke all over itself in Netscape 4.X or whatever old shite browsers are still out there.
Fix the timeline. there's one page out of order with the rest.
Fix the footer. I wanted the footer to head all the way to the bottom of the page, but CSS footers are a big pain in the ass without using tables.
Link up all the damn pictures. eventually, the thumbnails are supposed to switch out with the main picture; I don't have the energy to size down all the damn pictures right now. I'd also like to have the bottom of the tan area stay at a fixed position—but that's for another day.

This also marks the unveiling of my new design identity, the first one in five or so years. Jen did a wonderful job distilling my identity down to the basics, and developing a cohesive design for the "brand"—design will have a separate identity from illustration, which will make both distinctive and different. I'm waiting for some checks to roll in so that I might be able to get the business cards printed, after about four years of having none.

* * *

We decided to hit the Gooch this afternoon at lunch to get out of the house. The Gooch is the local thrift store, right inside the city line, and sometimes the pickings are good. I poked around the books, looked through the clothes (nothing) and then found the "Electronics" section—usually a shelf or two of computer monitors and old inkjet printers. Today, though, I found a Sony CCD FX510 video-8 handycam sitting on the shelf, with an attached DC battery pack (meaning it plugs directly into the wall.) I futzed around with it for a few minutes, plugged it in, and fooled with the controls until I got a picture in the eyepiece; the tag said $9.95 as-is. I figured that if it powered on and made signal to the eyepiece, it was worth $10, so I snagged it. Miracle of miracles, Sony still has it listed on their site even though it's analog tape—but they do have a scanned PDF of the owner's manual. So all I need now is one Video-8 tape to test the record function. Update:I can get tape for $4 and a battery (providing the tape mechanism works) for as low as $20.

I also found three books in the circa-1954 "Made Simple Self-Teaching Encyclopedia" series: Astronomy, Physics, and Mathematics. They're sort of the "For Dummies" books from the Eisenhower era, and they have a cool vibe to them. Obviously some of the information is dated, but I figure the basics of astronomy and physics haven't changed at all, and they'll make for some fun reading.

Posted on January 24, 2006 11:30 PM | link to this entry | Comments (3)

January 23, 2006

Busy...

...working on a whole new design for the design section of my portfolio site. It's going to take some time, but I'm excited about the sketches. Special thanks go to my lovely wife, who helped whip an idea into an actual design—no small feat, given what I started with.

Posted on January 23, 2006 3:56 PM | link to this entry

January 18, 2006

Schooled, Part 2.

I updated the first H illustration with a better one. Pretend the first one did not exist. Another lesson learned:

The importance of scale in the size of the illustration. Depending on the density of detail, making something interesting out of large areas of nothing generally is not going to work. I've run into this problem many times before, but every once in a while I make the mistake again.

Posted on January 18, 2006 11:51 PM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

Live, Local, Latebreaking.

Apparently the big auto warehouse out behind everybody's favorite Korean produce superstore, Hanh Ah Reum, is on fire. Our neighbor called to let us know that Rt. 40 is blocked off and nobody's getting past. Hopefully the grocery itself will be OK, because the Giant just charges too damn much for broccoli these days.

Posted on January 18, 2006 5:14 PM | link to this entry

Schooled.

I've been working on a new illustration for the past few days (seriously, I have) and it's not coming easy. I decided to switch up and do a woman for my next piece. This is harder than the men I've been doing so far because generally women have smoother features, and the small details that make up a portrait/caricature are harder to capture with less detail. Especially when my particular style lends itself to insane detail.

Last week, in going through the basement in preparation to paint and clean, I moved my four-drawer file cabinet out of the back corner. It's held the majority of my output from college to the present day in neatly-filed hanging folders, tagged with client names. I weeded out a lot of stuff (reference photos, old corespondence, duplicate working files) and kept the guts of the folders: hundreds of drawings, scratchboard panels, cutouts, and other debris from the creative process. In reviewing a lot of my previous work, I noticed a few things that may (or may not) help guide me in the near future.

The importance of solid reference. For example, I did a bunch of work for Sylvan Learning Systems years ago (52 illustrations in total), and I'd say that 95% of them are shite. The other 5% are keepers—and one is still in my book. I'd say that 50% of that bad batch are due to bad reference.

The need for a solid pre-sketch. As much as I like the detail and texture of linework, I look at other artists and enjoy their use of black as much as a glass of expensive red wine—smooth, silky, intoxicating black, which often can provide more detail than actual detail can.

Taking more chances. Simply put: More risk, more reward. some of the best stuff I've done I never would have figured out if I hadn't taken a chance.

Subtlety has been the hardest things to master so far—with some pieces I think I nailed the subject, and others I'm left unsatisfied. The subject of the current piece is well-photographed but almost sphinxlike in her range of facial expression. (Warning! egregious use of sound!) I decided to use reference that wasn't her standard pose, and now I'm left with a piece that's not working for me. I'll post version one and re-group to work harder on version two today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the latest issue of the New Yorker hit our mailbox yesterday, and there's a fantastic portrait of Rakim tucked away in the Events section by Coop, which totally humbled me over my baloney and cheese sandwich this afternoon.

I have much work to do.

Posted on January 18, 2006 2:46 PM | link to this entry

January 16, 2006

Restoring The Rule Of Law.

Check out this speech by Al Gore delivered this afternoon. Jen and I happened to catch the last 2/3 on C-Span before switching to the Golden Globes (a useless bit of pap if there ever was one). Gore stopped me in my tracks:

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

"It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has."

"We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens’ right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President’s apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law."

Here's a link to the C-Span Realplayer version of the speech. If you have a few minutes, check it out—even if you don't like Al Gore. He makes a lot of very, very good points.

Posted on January 16, 2006 9:33 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

Big Pimpin'.

Oh, man, what a mackin' car. I could be the biggest pimp on my block in this thing.

Posted on January 16, 2006 5:55 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

Wherin Nothing Really Happened.

I could write here about viewing the Pianist on Saturday evening, and spending most of Sunday in an existential funk—watch the scene where Adrien Brody walks crying through the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, amid broken furniture and blowing feathers, and then try to look at the Crate & Barrel catalog without slitting your wrists.

I could mention how I spent my Sunday in the basement painting the last of the walls Kilz white, but that would be boring. I could take pictures and post them, too, but that would be incredibly dull, and you really don't give a shit about my basement. I could proudly mention that the basement is now somewhat organized, is about seven shades brighter, and has a pair of tables set up next to the only south-facing window under a grow lamp for our vegetable seed. I suppose that's a good thing.

Honestly, it was a pretty quiet weekend, and now it's Monday.

P.S. Lis- I get the Adrien Brody thing now. You're on your own with Buscemi, but I get the Brody thing.

Posted on January 16, 2006 11:47 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

January 13, 2006

Ha Ha, Motherfucker.

Maryland OKs Wal-Mart Health Care Bill.

Lately (read: the last two weeks) our Republican governor has been announcing all kinds of new money for education programs here in Maryland. Most people who know the Idiot King know that I don't care much for our current Governor; those people should also understand that I held the last Governor, a Democrat who probably broke records for graft and mismanagement, somewhere below contempt. You could probably say I hate the player and the game. It's not lost on me that the previous administration left a mess in their wake, and the current Gov had to clean it up before he could start spending money again.

However, the current Gov vetoed the so-called "Wal-Mart Bill" last year, a bit of legislation designed to force companies with more than 10,000 employees to take on at least 8% of healthcare costs for those people they employ. Predictably, Wal-Mart is upset about this; predictably the other large companies in Maryland are upset about this too. And, predictably, our Governor is upset, because he got the shit lobbied out of him, and put himself firmly in the corner of Big Business. (I'll pause here to link to this page, which shows Wal-mart's profit sheet for the last year. Those are billions with a capital "B", by the way.) So pardon me if I don't give a shit about Wal-Mart crying in its coffee this morning. Am I going to be upset if the cost of cat litter at the Sam's Club goes up by a penny? No. Economies of scale for a company as large as Wal-Mart mean that I'll probably never see more than a 5 or 10-cent increase in the cost of my goods, even if most other states follow Maryland's lead and implement a similar bill—which, I'd guess, is going to happen in blue states but not red ones. (Full disclosure: We shop at Sam's Club but not Wal-Mart; if there was a Costco or BJ's closer to us, I'd switch.)

"We also find that 7% of the children of employees of large retailers are uninsured, compared to 19% reported by Wal-Mart. While 46% of the children of Wal-Mart workers are either uninsured or on Medicaid/SCHIP, the comparable figure for children of all large retail workers is 29%. Wal-Mart workers are less likely than workers in all large retail to have job based coverage (48% compared to 54%). Wal-Mart workers' enrollment in Medicaid nationally is similar to large retail as a whole." Source

As a self-employed individual who is shopping for health insurance to prepare for (hopefully) a family in the near future, I can testify here and to Congress just how fucking expensive it is to insure oneself. I can only imagine how hard it must be for a Wal-Mart employee, most of whom aren't making much above the Federal poverty level (FYI, in 2004 it's $18,850 for a family of four). Am I sad that large companies in this state are being forced to offer the minimum in health care benefits? No. I'd wager that most of these companies offer plans that are fair and comprehensive anyway. I have a problem with the huge ones, who are muscling their way into every community across the land and closing down smaller stores who most likely offered better benefits.

I am happy, though, that somebody realizes how difficult it is to keep up with the rising costs of living here in the middle class. And I'm happy my state is making a stand.

Posted on January 13, 2006 10:13 AM | link to this entry

January 11, 2006

For Better or Worse.

My first eight illustrations are live over on the portfolio site. I have to complete "H" this week, but from the look of things that might not happen too soon. Let me know what you think of the series so far.

Posted on January 11, 2006 3:27 PM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

Five More Of Those, And The Mortgage Is Paid.

Yesterday I went on my second network consulting gig in a week (word must get around or something) in which I undid the evil wrought upon a design firm by a 'professional' consulting firm. I use the term professional in the loosest sense, because I don't actually advertise my services, and the job the 'professionals' did was so abyssmal that I wonder how they stay in business. (Setting up two routers on the same network to provide DHCP addresses? Bad move. Assigning both routers the same IP address? Idiotic. I thought they taught the kids better at ITT tech.) Four hours later, I had the whole thing sorted out and left the studio running smoothly, for a fraction of the professional rate.

Not that I want to drive around in one of those stupid Volkswagens with a sticker on the side, but I could he happy doing Mac tech support as a side gig...

Posted on January 11, 2006 9:59 AM | link to this entry

January 9, 2006

Kulchur.

This weekend, my wife and I made an escape to the Big City and took in some art at the National Gallery in DC. There's a lot of stuff at the National we've both seen before, so some of their collection is (sadly) old hat; however, there were some exhibits that were fresh and exciting. In the West building, the Brown Sisters photography exhibit is a moving and incisive look at the history and relationships between four sisters over the course of 25 years. The Winslow Homer exhibit in the East building is a wonderful review of the artist's career, through his early years as an illustrator to his final years in Maine. It was wonderful to see Breezing Up in person, but it was also wonderful to see something other than the default example of his work used in most art history books. Finally, the Small French paintings collection is a quiet treat.

Posted on January 9, 2006 11:03 AM | link to this entry

January 6, 2006

Small Change.

Because money is tighter than a drumhead right now, I've not been buying any new music lately. I decided to forego even the idea of buying new music and list my favorite MP3blogs over on the sidebar to the right, where you can enjoy the music they're writing about as much as I do.

Musicblogs are kind of the equivalent of freshman year in college, when everybody you meet has new and exciting music you've never heard of, and you're trading around cassettes and albums like crazy. I've found a lot of excellent music through them, and I hope to buy a bunch of albums from my list of favorites in 2006.

Posted on January 6, 2006 3:24 PM | link to this entry

Shiny.

I spent the better part of six hours doing some computer consulting yesterday, for some folks who bought a new iMac and wanted to transfer all their stuff from the old machine. The process was lengthened by the fact that the old machine was running OS 9.2, and I had to remember where all the various crap used to live in the old OS (importing email from Outlook Express is a painful chore, like doing home dental surgery). The best part? I got to drag them from the horror of dial-up to the majesty of wireless broadband. When my client went to check his email on the old machine, and I heard the first shriek of the modem, I felt like I'd been transported back into 1998. The new iMacs are beautiful—the built-in camera on the bezel and the Front Row Media Center thingy is slick. (A remote for my iMac? Cool.)

His house is one block down from my old college apartment, so I walked up the street and tried to take some pictures of the place without looking like a pervert.

It's changed considerably since I lived there (I called it "the Swamp", and the backyard featured all kinds of broken TV's, weird sculpture, and castoff art projects) but the front of the house still looks the same.

The current tenants have plastic over the leaded-glass front windows just as I did in 1992. The empty lot around the corner has been rehabilitated into "F Scott Fitzgerald Square", with gaslamp-style lights, benches, and plantings. I'm going to dig through my archives and see if I can find a good picture of the place back in the day and compare it with yesterday's photos.

Posted on January 6, 2006 10:56 AM | link to this entry

January 3, 2006

Peas In My Guacamole, or: Bob And The Bat.

Yesterday, I worked all day on a project that won't actually pay us any money. I'm putting together a custom coloring book for our neighbors' kids, starring two very unlikely characters: Bob the Builder and Batman. Each of the boys has his favorite, the younger loving all things construction, and the older all things Dark Knight. The original plan was to have the two doing something cool, like saving a city from destruction by fixing stuff, but it was kind of hard to get the action right without a super-power (Batman can't really fly a bulldozer to the site of a dam leak like, say, Superman can, and if he could, it's not the kind of thing that makes for a good coloring book page.)

So I settled on having Bob help Batman build a wing off the Batcave to house the new Batcopter. My plan was to have this done before Christmas, but the way the holiday went down there was no time to complete it. Yesterday I busted out the pencils and wore the tip of my right index finger to the bone to finish the book. I made the signatures and stapled them at Kinko's this afternoon, and the project is put to bed.

Meanwhile, there's a hellish health insurance bill to be paid, the car insurance is due, the mortgage is due, and my driver's license is up for renewal. Did I forget anything? Oh, yeah—the invoices I sent out before Christmas still haven't arrived.

In boring and (sadly) unphotogenic house update news, I've worked my way around the edge of the basement with hydraulic cement and Drylok; tomorrow (hopefully) I'll bust out the sprayer and put a coat of fresh white Kilz over the gray, dingy cinderblock. Hopefully this will brighten the place up, seal out water, and rid us of those damned crickets that invade the basement every summer.

Jen and I have not been sleeping normally the past few nights. New Year's Eve got our systems all out of whack, so we've been up late and sleeping later. The other night, we saw one of those stupid commercials for phone chat lines the other night and I'd swear Kate from Lost is the chick trying to get me to call hot singles in my area. Is this old news? Probably.

Finally, in the Let's-Get-Fucked-Up-At-Christmas Department, Jen's sister and her boyfriend were kind enough to bring some beers with them for the Unbirthday party; naturally, not all of them got consumed, so we have three Blue Moon Belgian Ales sitting in the fridge. I have to belatedly thank them both for bringing it, because every two or three years I have to remind myself why I don't like it. Well, I don't like any beer that tastes like celery. Dear Sirs: Your beer tastes like a week-old vegan shake. THAT'S NOT BEER. Also, does anyone have a decent sangria recipe? The one Jen had on hand talked about adding something like a whole pound of sugar; I added maybe one-fourth that amount and it still tasted like shit. She used to have a recipe for guacamole clipped from a Texas newspaper; it called for split peas and sour cream. As any normal human who likes Mexican food will tell you, PEAS DON'T BELONG IN GUACAMOLE. I could almost make a case for the sour cream, if you had to extend the mix in a jam, but that's still pretty gnarly. She kept this recipe for posterity's sake—quite obviously the author was insane.

So now we have two Blue Moons and a half-pitcher of sangria that melts the plaque from your teeth sitting in the fridge. If you want it, bring me some avacados and I'll make you some real guacamole.

Posted on January 3, 2006 1:54 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

January 2, 2006

iPod Repair Links.

I bought Jen a 4th-gen iPod for Christmas-the color version, not the video, to replace her 1st-gen model, which is broken. The battery is pretty much toast and the FireWire jack appears to be broken-a common ailment of this model. Now that she's got a viable replacement, I'm looking into fixing the broken one.

Therefore, these links are for me than you (and I make no claims as to the quality of services provided; CAVEAT EMPTOR):

iPodresq, Ist gen firewire jack repair ($55), case opening tools ($5), new battery with opening tools ($59), iPodmods repair testing, open the case on your 1st gen iPod, Cnet's video for opening the case, another step-by-step review.

At this point, I'm thinking that a new battery and fixed Firewire port are a no-brainer; I was toying with the idea of finding a 15-gig drive and upgrading that too, but they all appear to be $150 or more.

More info as I find it.

Posted on January 2, 2006 2:42 PM | link to this entry