June 29, 2006

Please Stand By.

Looks like my business server is down a couple days ahead of schedule—it's getting an overhaul this weekend. Until further notice, use the idiot address if you need to get in touch with me.

Posted on June 29, 2006 12:17 PM | link to this entry

June 27, 2006

Rain Barrel Project.

This is the first weekend I've had the rain barrel set up on the southeast corner of the house (where the majority of the runoff from the main roof empties out to the driveway.) I set it up and we left on a weekend where Maryland and D.C. saw some of the worst flooding in five years. When we got back on Monday night, the barrel was full and the overflow was shooting out of the side where I hadn't plugged one of the threaded valve openings.

Tuesday I returned to the barrel with a handful of 3/4 PVC fittings and pipe length, and rigged up an overflow valve that empties into the driveway. The next project is to install the second rain barrel underneath the first to catch the overflow, and then rig up an overflow drain on that second barrel. That's going to be trickier, because the second barrel is cheaper and lacks a threaded outlet at the top like the first barrel does, so I'm going to have to get creative.

Plus, the gravity platform I put in is not sturdy enough (it needs cross bracing) and needs a stronger platform to carry the weight of a full barrel.

Posted on June 27, 2006 5:18 PM | link to this entry

Virginia Travels

Jen and I are back from a quiet trip through the Virginia countryside to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We stayed at a quiet cabin in the woods called Montfair, which was better than any Motel 6 could have been. The cabins are owned by a family who are reviving an older campsite, and I'd recommend the cabins to anyone, including families with children. Every detail is thought of, from extra towels and fresh organic coffee to corkscrews and air conditioning. (By chance we met one of the owners of the campground, who turned out to be a fellow MICA graduate.)

Monticello is a beautiful, inspiring place set high on a hill overlooking the rolling mountains. There's a ton of things to do and see, and now that the second mountain is open, tours are available to learn about the history of the area as well. I learned more about the Founding Fathers on this trip than during twelve years of public school. Luckily, we missed most of the rain that plagued northern Virginia and Maryland, and by the end of our day we were strolling the grounds in sunshine.

Monday's journey back home took us north and through sleepy one-lane backcountry until we hit Montpelier, purely by accident. We stopped and took the tour of James Madison's country estate, which was also worth every penny. The house is currently under a massive restoration, so we were able to walk through stripped plaster and lathe and see the generations of changes made to the house since its beginnings in 1760.

What was meant as a relaxing, inexpensive getaway turned out to be more than we could have hoped for—we returned back to Baltimore happy, relaxed, and invigorated.

Posted on June 27, 2006 2:26 PM | link to this entry

June 21, 2006

Garden Progress, 6.21.06

Here's a shot of one of our four tomato plants, with only a few of the fruit visible. The leaves are very dark, which could be some kind of tomato blight, or simply the way this particular variety grows—whatever the case, they're getting much bigger. We have cukes coming in too, but the pictures I snapped of them didn't come out so well. Maybe tomorrow.

Posted on June 21, 2006 4:29 PM | link to this entry

June 20, 2006

Microbusinesses Uninsured.

Most microbusiness owners lack health insurance at some point. No shit, Sherlock. You had to do a study to find that out?

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association has endorsed a proposal requiring individuals who make at least $49,000 a year to purchase a minimum level of health insurance.

Which only goes to show just how far up their ass the AMA has their heads. We have a "minimum" of health insurance, which translates to a sky-high deductible and no prescription coverage, in case we get hit by a bus or actually are crazy enough to try and procreate. I'd guess somebody at the AMA is being lobbied heavily by the insurance industry, who seem to think that the lower middle class/small business owners of American don't have enough bullshit to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Hopefully, whatever stupid small business association lobbying group is supposedly representing my interests in Washington gets this particular "proposal" shot down, and quick.

How about the AMA decides to bite the hand who's obviously handing them Milk-Bones and start going after the insurance industry for jacking up malpractice insurance rates? (That's right, I live in one of the more doctor-unfriendly states, which is why our G.P. recently decamped to Delaware for "Family Reasons".)

nearly a third of those who responded to the poll said they couldn't find simple, easy-to-read information about their health care options.

Amen, brother. Doing the preliminary research for our little family unit was like reading a Yugoslavian owner's manual at the bottom of a dark well. And I'd have to add that the "options" are pretty spare. There was one plan that looked fantastic until we got to the part about pregnancy, and realized it was written for sterile people.

I'll be thinking about that particular article the next time we fork out $120 on three months' worth of birth control pills.

Posted on June 20, 2006 6:56 PM | link to this entry

June 19, 2006

Skip "V".

I added Wim Wenders to the Alphabet Project today, after a three-week absence brought on by activity and paying work. There is a "V" in the works, but I decided that adding something was better than nothing.

Posted on June 19, 2006 4:57 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

June 18, 2006

Heat's Back.

Yeah, the indian summer here in Baltymore is over. We're now back to the low 90's with typical Maryland humidity, which is to say, wet like a sponge. The beginning of June was idyllic, and I only wish I'd gotten out and taken more advantage of it. This weekend saw the long-awaited continuation of 2004's outdoor projects—I finished reglazing the living room windows and replaced the storms. I cut in the rest of the siding on the South and West sides of the house, as well as scraped and painted a ton of exposed wood on the porch. By the time 5:30 rolled around, I was hot, tired, and ready for November.

I intended to get the first rain barrel installed in the southeast corner of the house today, but gave up on that pretty quickly after 5PM. The trick is to elevate the barrel so that gravity will do the work of irrigation for us, which means building a platform to put it on, diverting the gutter around a corner and into the top of the barrel (literally, a square peg in a round hole) and fitting an overflow valve. The hardest part will be the gutter portion, based on what I've found at the various Home Superstores around town, because there isn't anything made for this particular application—which means I'm going to have to get creative with PVC and flexible tubing. Then again, I could just buy this peculiar-looking contraption, or perhaps this even stranger-looking thing.I think I'm going to look some more at Lowe's first, because neither of these things allow for getting around a corner.

Posted on June 18, 2006 10:36 PM | link to this entry | Comments (5)

June 16, 2006

So Dangerous. So Very Fucking Dangerous.

I found this comparison of 14 flux core MIG welders via the MAKE: blog this afternoon, and it's like an answer to my prayers. I've always wanted to weld some more—my experience was limited to some very basic lessons taught by my roommate Pat after hours in the sculpture lab at MICA—and there are many things I'd like to be able to do/build/fabricate given the time, money and equipment. Besides, I think real men should know how to weld. Meanwhile, the site is now in my permanent RSS feed. Any site that recommends a pocket knife as a Father's Day gift is OK with me.

Posted on June 16, 2006 5:09 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

June 15, 2006

Are You Looking At My Bum?

Repair work completed. Looks pretty good, compared to this:

Posted on June 15, 2006 6:29 PM | link to this entry

June 14, 2006

And That's Why I Love Her.

The setup: Waiting for our bread to warm, in front of the kitchen TV, watching a promo for the earth-shattering Matt Lauer/Britney Spears interview (a high water mark for modern journalism), my beautiful wife says:

"Cover up your boobs, you dumb slut."

Later, she turned to me and said,

"Seriously, Matt had to see that shit. Do you think he told her to take the gum out of her mouth before the interview?"

Posted on June 14, 2006 11:32 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

June 13, 2006

Now With Less Harrumph.

This morning, laying in bed clearing the sleep from my eyes, I decided to begin a daily bike ride I've been planning since August of 2004. Last weekend, I pulled both my bikes out of the basement and inflated the tires, checked the chains, and tested the brakes. They're now hanging out in the garage on hooks, where they should get more use and will be easier to access.

This morning's ride took me southward to the edge of the Patapsco Valley State park, which is walking distance from the house here. The weather has been unseasonably cool and dry for June in Maryland, cool enough that I'm kicking myself for not taking advantage of it two weeks ago. Come August, I'm going to be getting up at 5:30 to get in a half-hour's ride before I melt into a puddle of slag in the bike lane.

I used to be a pretty avid rider when I lived in the city and worked for Johns Hopkins—not a spandex peacock riding a $3,000 carbon-fiber spaceship, but an avid rider who biked to work every day and got in at least two mountain-bike rides a week at my peak. I haunted the local bike shops for used parts to upgrade my rides. I had a set of city wheels for my beater bike, and got to where I was pulling as much crap off the frame to lighten the bike as I could. I used to have rider's legs and a decent cardiovascular system, which meant I could climb the hill from the Harbor to Eutaw Place without feeling winded, and I could hold my own on the hilly singletrack of Avalon. When I quit Hopkins and started working outside the city, my riding dropped off dramatically, and in the last two years I've been on my bikes a total of five times.

Today it felt like coming home, even though I was on my mountain bike for what is really a road bike's ride. The air was crisp and fresh, the birds were out, and I explored a section of the park I've not seen yet. Along the way, I stopped to read a park map and spied a whitetailed deer and her foal creeping through the woods not 50 feet away. We stopped and looked at each other, and in the blink of an eye both were gone as quietly as they'd come. The ride back home is just right for someone as out-of-shape as me; lots of climbing with landings in between to catch one's breath.

Along the way, I happened upon the only other running Scout I've seen in the area, a tan '78 not unlike ours, parked in a driveway nearer the park, chocked with a 2x4'. If the time comes when I'm ready to give up Chewbacca, I know who to approach for a good home.

* * *

In other news, I got an email from a fellow who publishes an online magazine, asking if he could use some of my Bimini photos to accompany a story he wrote about the island. He also mentioned that the Compleat Angler, a bar/hotel we drank at while we were there, and a historic landmark of the island (Hemmingway preferred to stay there when he was on the island), burned down in January. I can't tell you how sad this news is, and how devastating this must be for the local economy—there aren't more than five bars we saw for tourists to visit on the south end of the island, and the Angler was hands-down the one with the most style and panache. On the heels of the plane crash last December, this is just awful news.

Posted on June 13, 2006 9:48 AM | link to this entry

June 12, 2006

Harrumph.

Anybody have one of those kind of days when all the music you own is boring? I can't find a single thing in my MP3 collection I'd really like to listen to right now. Besides that, the internets has been hella slow and boring today, and nobody's emailed me today besides two comment spammers posting discount pharmaceutical links on my weblog. Perhaps it's because Jen and I got so much stuff done yesterday that today's work is so damn dull. Anybody else having the same Monday I am?

Posted on June 12, 2006 3:38 PM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

June 9, 2006

Praise Be To Allah.

Getting paid is a Good Thing.

Posted on June 9, 2006 12:54 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

June 7, 2006

Various And Sundry.

I really haven't been writing much around here lately. I don't know what to attribute this to—summer blahs, lack of free time, nothing to say, scattered brainwaves—but there is stuff going on right now. In the spirit of my old weblog, which used to feature myriad lists of random things, a sample braindump:

Books to buy: Information Architecture For Designers, by Peter Van Djick: I peeped this at Borders today, and I need to own this book. It's got a lot of things that I know, but a whole lot of things that I don't, and some excellent suggestions for building larger sites. Designing for Small Screens, by Studio 7.5: Lately I've been pecking at the edges of design for wireless handsets, and I think there may be a larger project for me on the horizon. I'm going to hold off on buying this until I have the official go-ahead on that, but this book is full of meaty goodness—screen sizes, font selection, UI best practices, and colors.

Vehicle Update: The Jeep is officially in the shop for repairs to the left butt-cheek. Apparently they're going to pull the bumper, see if there's any damage to the body, and straighten out the mount points before respraying the tailgate and adding a new endcap. It will be wondrous to be able to open the rear and haul stuff once again—the trusty Saturn has been doing yeoman's duty hauling ~~dead bodies~~ mulch, garbage, potting soil, etc.

From Batteries.com, a 5-watt trickle charger. I need to read up on solar power and figure out if something like this would provide enough power to run a laptop, or if I'd need something much bigger.

My PC laptop has been raised from the dead and hurtled into the new century; it's now cheerfully running a clean copy of XP Home, and life is rosier in the studio. Simple shit like screen refreshing, peripheral support, modern drivers and the ability to load and use current software is really swell. Thanks for the assist, Pop. (sidenote: in re-organizing the office this week, I found an old copy of Virtual PC from the late 90's in its original box: inside was a fresh Windows 98 install disc with the Microsoft packaging and serial number. Did you hear me slap my own forehead sometime Monday night? It was pretty loud.) After a long and noble career, the Celeron 466 clone with four cooling fans has been mothballed in the attic until further notice.

The studio here at Lockardugan Industries has gone through some desperately-needed renovation. We bought $50 worth of modular shelving and installed it in the closet this past week, replacing a wobbly chipboard cabinet and acres of wasted space with wire racks and a Teutonic sense of order. $30 worth of IKEA plastic bins enclose most of our debris and get it up off the floor and out of our hair, which lends to a better working relationship. Jen also scored the Biggest Desk In The Universe, a slab of Swedish wood the size of a aircraft carrier, on sale—finally replacing the Doctor's ancient oak desk with something ergonomically functional. She now has workspace to breathe, although we will have to install warning lights to prevent planes on the glidepath to BWI from entering the office window at high speeds. I also bought some RJ-45 connectors (note to self: Belkin sucks donkey dicks) and replaced all our ancient patchcords with modern Cat 5e wiring, something that improved our network speed one hundredfold (I'm not kidding—There were at least two 10baseT wires in the office hooked up to a 100baseT switch. D'oh!) and makes printing so much better.

Effective immediately, I'm going to be requiring a 30% down payment on acceptance of contract from my clients so that I can afford to keep the doors open. This net-90 shit is getting old.

We will be buying an electric pet grooming clipper to shave Penn down to the skin at some point this month. This cat sheds more than a Siberian yak on holiday in Havana, and his hair is everywhere. It's shedding so fast that we cut mats of it out and more appear the next day. Pictures to come.

Our garden seems to be producing some healthy plants. We have two tomatoes already growing, and the cucumber vines are five times the size of the anemic-looking stubs I grew last year. This weekend we have to build and install some kind of cage or ladder for them to climb, and then enclose the whole garden to keep the varmints out. (Mr. Squirrel, I'm looking at you.)

There's probably more, but I can't think of anything right now.

Posted on June 7, 2006 10:24 PM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

June 5, 2006

Mr. Coffee.

I've been sitting here at my computer getting various things done and wondering what I ate that's making me so sleepy—granted, the two hot dogs from IKEA were probably not the better part of a balanced meal, but they were damn tasty. Then I remembered that I was up until 2:30AM on a conference call with a quartet of people on the west coast. (I'm not saying this to brag, but because I completely forgot about it until just now. Time to reheat some java.)

Jen and I decided to get the hell out of town early on Saturday, and we drove north to scenic Lancaster, PA to visit a mythical Pottery Barn outlet we'd been told about by friends months ago. I never realized what a cottage industry the Amish faith was until we passed the Dutch Wonderland and its attendant motels, spread over acres of old pasture; this odd attraction is now giving way to the modern amusement park, otherwise known as the outlet mall. Once there, we scored a pair of cabinets from Hold Everything on super-deep 50% discount, a pair of lights for the dining room (finally!) and a wool runner for the hallway at 2/3 of the price. The rest of the day was spent getting lost in actual Amish country and marveling at how much Lancaster County resembles Ireland. (I'd have a picture of the "Welcome to Intercourse" sign to show you, but we were hungry, and stopped at the White Horse Inn for a decidedly non-chain-restaurant dinner.)

Posted on June 5, 2006 4:07 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

June 1, 2006

Contrasts.

Yesterday, I worked on a pair of laptops. The first is the battered G4 Powerbook of a client of mine; it's about four years old, and it's been through the ringer. When I first started working with her, it was intermittently hanging and crashing, and I was able to resuscitate it twice (once with FireWire disk mode after a particularly hair-raising death), so she bought a new hard drive for it and handed it off to me yesterday. After following some remarkably clear directions on Apple's website, I had the bottom of the case cracked and the drive installed in about ten minutes; an hour later I had a brand-new, up to date install of OS X happily humming on the machine. Case closed.

The other laptop is my Thinkpad, which has been running a ghosted copy of Windows 98—which is about as useful as a hatchet in my neck. Every other time I start up the machine I have to go through some kind of recovery process to get it to work, half the applications I own don't run on it, and the network support is abysmal. I picked up a copy of Win XP yesterday in the hopes that I could upgrade the OS to something from this century. I popped the disk in and loaded the installer, which helpfully informed me that it needed a CD to "verify" my upgrade path, something the back of the box failed to mention. It listed pretty much every lousy OS Microsoft has published except the one I have a legal copy of (Windows NT Server), and refused to recognize that disk altogether. So I decided I'd upgrade the OS I have, figuring it would be better than nothing.

I was wrong.

Three hours after I started the "upgrade", I found myself in Windows XP, and figured things had gone smoothly. There were various driver issues to be resolved, so I went to the Lenovo site and started downloading the updates for my particular system, installed one, and rebooted. It was then that I knew I was in trouble, because I got some screen that mentioned something about the FAT file system, windows/DUMP.temp, and that my "first allocation unit is not valid", and then sent me into some kind of a low-res Windows XP screen, and then I got a blue screen that showed up for about one second, and then I went right back to the black BIOS screen for another cycle of the same crap all over again. I resisted the urge to scream, because it was 1AM and Jen was asleep upstairs.

This morning I booted off the install CD and chose "repair installation" from the menu, thinking I'd get something that would help me troubleshoot the problem. Again, I was too optimistic. I was greeted with a black command-line screen full of cryptic commands that were supposed to "help" me with my problem. CHKDSK is the one I recognize, so I ran that, and it told me there are errors on my disk. Yeah, no kidding. So what do I do about it? Got any suggestions, you stupid piece of shit? All the other "utilities" wanted to do stuff like repartition my drive or re-order my boot sequence, something I can do in BIOS already. Where's the command for "fix that shit you told me was broke?"

I put a call into my Dad, who has several Win 98 discs laying around, and hopefully he can send me one so I can spoof this shit software into thinking it's OK to do a clean installation instead of doing it ghetto-style on top of Win 98.

It's not that I'm mad at Microsoft for making piracy hard; I understand, to a point, where they're coming from. My anger lies in the incomprehensible installation process, made difficult for people who are not CS majors or CompUSA employees. Would I be able to walk my mother through this process remotely if I was trying to troubleshoot her PC (If I was stupid enough to recommend a PC to my Mother in the first place)? Not a chance. Would I recommend this software to anyone else? Not on your life. One of the reasons I decided to install it myself was because I'd heard that the big computer manufacturers are bundling spyware and other crap on the computers they sell, and I want to have as little of that shit to deal with as possible. It looks like I have a whole other mess I have to deal with instead.