« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »

October 31, 2006

Boo-ha-ha

Meh. About 40 or so kids this year, but not a steady stream. One group of about 30 fought to get up our stairs, get candy, and get back down all at the same time. The house looked friendly, though.

Posted on October 31, 2006 10:25 PM | link to this entry

October 30, 2006

That Sound You Hear...

...is the sound of pigs flying. Your humble correspondent visited the gym this afternoon.

Posted on October 30, 2006 5:11 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

October 27, 2006

Time Out for the Diner

Jen's been away for the past three days, helping her father out (the Word is: he's fine; everything went smoothly) so I've been bachelorizing it here at the Lockardugan Estates. Without her moderating influence, I've been staying up and getting up later, working longer, eating whatever's easy to make and generally not taking care of myself. Today I decided to get out of here for lunch, and ventured out to the Forest Diner for a burger.

The Forest Diner sits across from what used to be the Enchanted Forest, a family owned amusement park that closed years ago. In its place somebody put a Safeway, and at some point the local Diner Conglomerate dropped one of its ugly concrete boxes next to the railcar-original Forest in an attempt to take over the turf. The plucky little diner has held on, however, and they continue to make decent food in a clean, retro atmosphere. The menu may not be as huge, the available seating not as spacious, but the Forest is my favorite place to get a quiet cup of coffee and read the paper.

Posted on October 27, 2006 4:24 PM | link to this entry

October 24, 2006

Lights, Camera...Shit, The House Is A Mess

So, the electricians are back downstairs, running wires, cutting holes, and troubleshooting the nightmare of our electric service. The kitchen lights are in (w00t!), a major triumph, and the living room baseboard is going in as we speak. However, the $10 deep-discount hanging lights we bought for the dining room turned out to be 40-watt duds which only take mini bulbs. So they're going to put in a single worklight over the table on a new dimmer and I'll replace it with a chandelier when we actually find something we like.

Pictures of my kitchen cieling to follow.

Posted on October 24, 2006 5:20 PM | link to this entry

October 23, 2006

Beer and Oysters

Six years ago, Jen invited me down to the County to attend the Oyster Festival with her family. I underestimated the travel time and arrived late (not a good first impression) but attempted to make up for it by trying raw oysters for the first time to impress both Jen and her mother ( I still don't know if I was successful, but we're married, at least.)

Saturday we took Jen's father for his first time, and while we didn't get him to try the oysters, we did enjoy some St. Mary's stuffed ham, funnel cake, and Sam Adams Octoberfest on a warm, sunny autumn day. What could be better?

Posted on October 23, 2006 10:33 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

October 19, 2006

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

Last Thursday, we had two electricians here sawing into the living room ceiling to install recessed lights. I'll point you over to the often-ignored houseblog for the gory details, but that's not the focus of this little story. No, the funny thing is just how messed up the wiring is in this house of ours.

The good Doctor, over the years, made additions and modifications to this house to suit the needs of a family of nine. However, none of these were made with any common sense, and they were carried out by bumbling incompetents. Originally built in 1925, the house came with knob and wire going to each bedroom for a total of one light (in the middle of the ceiling), one switch (for aformentioned light) and one baseboard outlet (varying in quality from a single ungrounded socket to a crumbling ungrounded dual socket.) Additions to this system included raised track wiring in one bedroom for a total of three sockets, Bell Telephone hookups into the front bedroom which resulted in the careless removal of one floor plank and replacement with a board of lesser height and value, and a bewildering maze of additions to random circuits for new lights and sockets throughout the house.

Much like the addition of heat to the doctor's office on the front porch (which simply involved relocating the radiators that used to be in the living room and dining room, leaving the bottom front of the house cold and drafty), addition of wiring to the office was done randomly and without regard to already overtaxed circuits. At one point, the Doctor had the entire doctor's exam room, his office, and the baseboard for the first floor on one 15-amp breaker. It's a miracle this house hasn't gone up in a brilliant ball of flame by now. (Don't even get me started on the live gas line going up into the exam bathroom, theoretically for a bunsen burner or some other gas-fired scientific equipment—that fucker never passed a code inspection.)

As a result, our electrical panel in the basement, which is a brand-new 220 service, is nearly full. Throwing a breaker is a little like playing Russian Roulette, because there's no rhyme or reason to the wiring layout. Turning off the breaker clearly marked "living room" disables one socket in the northwest corner. The other three are still live—the east side sockets are on the breaker marked "office lights" and the other western socket is a holdover from the days when the entire first floor shared a breaker. Currently, I can shut off power to a basement outlet and kill the attic lights in the bargain. Power to the atrium outlet is shared by the lamp at the end of our front walkway.

In the last three years, we've made progress remedying this situation. Each bedroom is now on its own circuit, as is the kitchen, the hallway, and the dining room. As we've bypassed them, we've killed the old circuits, but this often has unintended consequences: an outlet in some random location will cease to function.

The electricians finished the living room lights last week and had to schedule next Tuesday to finish the other jobs. In the meantime, the power on three of the four baseboards is off, which means that the entire east side of the doctor's office is dark—lights, sockets, everything. The lights in the iceroom and coal cellar are dead too. And so is my music server, which sits on a cabinet in the exam room. I miss my music.

(Humorous sidenote: The electricians put a hole in the living room wall for the dimmer switches and found a "patch" over the original outlet box hole, consisting of wadded pages of a 1952 Baltimore Sun covered with a quart of plaster. The wiring in the walls, leading to a hastily capped junction box in the ceiling, were still live. This, apparently, was how electrical repairs were done during the Eiesenhower Administration.)

Posted on October 19, 2006 10:42 AM | link to this entry

October 16, 2006

Field of Screams

A couple of weeks ago, after a particularly hard series of workdays, Jen and I copped out on making dinner and ordered a pizza. When I stopped in to pick it up, I noticed a sheaf of brochures on the counter resembling an Iron Maiden album cover. A knockoff of Eddie was shilling the Field of Screams, a haunted house attraction in Pennsylvania, which was billed as the best attraction in the area, featuring two separate haunted houses and a hayride. (However, it's not on this list of the "13 best haunted houses in America.")

Feeling adventurous, we decided to rally the troops and check it out with some of Jen's family. After fortifying ourselves with some burgers, we piled in a car and headed north to Lancaster, where the Field is located. After parking the car in an adjoining lot, we walked a quarter-mile or so to the entrance. From our viewpoint, it resembled a dusty County Fair: a vast field packed with people, surrounding two houses dressed up to look spooky, flanked with refreshment counters, ticket booths, and portapotties. In the center, on a wooden stage, two talentless hacks attempted to battle-rap while disinterested crowds, stranded on line before them, pretended not to notice.

The ticket booth turned out to be on the other side of the park, so we trudged up the hill in its direction, found the end of the official queue, and then followed the line of people straggling down the road behind it until we reached the end of the unoffical queue.

In the next hour, we were treated to the best and the worst of Pennsylvania's population as we slowly navigated the rope maze: bored yo-boys in hoodies and west-coast-style flat brimmed caps, squealing cheerleaders busily texting their friends instead of advancing the line, pierced couples busily sucking face, overweight couples horsing down pizza that smelled like feet, camoflagued gits comparing about bore size and barrel length, frat-types discussing the parties they were missing, squads of high-school jock types in matching letterman jackets, alterno-punks in standard issue Sid Vicious™ outfits, mothers wheeling strollers, and some of the most hideous sets of summerteeth I've ever witnessed. Meanwhile, the crowd decided to stay warm by collectively smoking an entire years' crop of tobacco and blowing it on us. For some meteorological reason, the smoke didn't dissipate into the night sky above us, but hung around our heads like fog, giving us all a wicked contact buzz. Overhead, two speakers alternated between the theme to "Ghostbusters", selections from Blizzard of Ozz, and various 80's-era dance favorites to "set the mood".

Once we'd made our way through the ticket line (with 20 minutes to spare before it closed), we entered the park itself and quickly got in line for the first of the two haunted houses, the Den of Darkness. Here the line was about as long as the line for the tickets themselves, and we soon found ourselves stranded in front of the stage again. Mercifully, we missed the battle-rap and instead were treated to a mixture of local advertising, soundless clips from Resident Evil, and Pink Floyd concert footage spliced together to be shown on a large white billboard over our heads. The night got a little colder, the smoke got heavier, and we were getting tired of waiting, but after an hour or so we found ourselves at the door of the Den and ready to go inside.

At first, we were all together, and the opening rooms didn't bring the scare as much as we were expecting. But when we got to the area where the kid with the circular saw was taking swipes at the legs of passers-by (bladeless, of course) as they stared at the rubber limbs hanging from the cieling, it started getting interesting. Many stairs, switchbacks, turns and short tunnels followed—at one point, I reached out to place my hand on Jen's sister's back so that I didn't run into her, and she shrieked all the way down the hall until her boyfriend and I calmed her down. (That was probably the highlight of my evening, followed closely by two children of ten or so who ran down the exit ramp screaming at a pitch that woke dogs for miles in every direction.) Jen, who is a veteran of countless Texas haunted houses, was expecting people to be grabbing at us as we navigated narrow corridors, but there seemed to be a hands-off policy in effect; most of the scare was implied. The effect was further blunted by the diminuitive size of most of the ghouls on shift; we'd enter a room set up to be spooky, and a 10th-grader in a rubber mask would appear from behind a curtain, look up at us and try to be frightening. I also found myself wondering how the building passed code—at a moment when I was supposed to have been scared by soemthing, I was observing the makeshift construction of a wall or a support beam, festooned with exposed wire and sharp angles.

There were some genuinely creepy moments, though—dark corridors filled with body parts hanging from the cieling, makeshift morgues with corpses open and flayed in blood-spattered glory, the odd shock of canned air to the face, and some perfectly timed entrances by spooks from hidden doorways, who wordlessly invaded one's space and then melted back into the shadows. Towards the end, we began to smell two-stroke exhaust and found ourselves at one end of a long room where a masked man with a chainsaw waited for us to make a break to the other door. As we ran past, he'd swipe at our legs, and the efffect was such that we missed the guy in the next room, who was painted to match the disorienting checkerboard pattern from floor to cieling, and who appeared from nowhere to chase us back out into the night.

The second attraction was billed as a 3-D asylum, and the effect was pronounced for the first couple of rooms, but by the second floor, it began to get old. The glasses provided worked well enough, but the combination of blacklight and day-glo paint used for the effect began to get garish. A few well-crafted rooms made me slightly claustrophobic, and the clowns up on the third floor got spooky, but overall the asylum was a bit of a letdown from the first attraction.

Across the field as we exited, the queue for the hayride was still miles deep, and we debated the merit of buying tickets and standing in line for another hour, but nobody had the heart (or the warmth) to follow through. So we packed up the car and headed south again, content with our evening's thrills, and called it an evening.

Posted on October 16, 2006 12:08 AM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

October 13, 2006

Living Room Lighting.

Every year at about this time, when the leaves begin to fall and the storm windows start coming down, Jen and I get the irresistable urge to start changing stuff around. This is in part due to the proximity of Thanksgiving, when the Dugan clan makes its pilgrimage south for the Eating Of The Bird, and our own natural nesting instincts kicking into gear.

In general, this year has been different than the last, because we've ignored our house for eight months while our businesses have been getting traction. Sure, I was able to get the living room windows scraped, cleaned, and painted, and Jen made good headway on the garden, but that was in the spring, centuries ago, when it was warm.

Last week, after a few checks came in, we decided to call in some pros and finally get our living room wired. Up until now, it's been incomplete, with a coat of paint on the walls, no baseboards, and a cardboard facade over the nasty fireplace brick.

Our electrician recommended recessed lighting for the ceiling as a way to warm up the space evenly and add some variation to the lighting zones. The living room at one time had a central chandelier which was taken down and capped over, so there was no light switch in the whole room.

During:

The blue tape in this shot is the outline of what will soon be the pass-through French door into the doctor's office. To the left of the door on the other side is a half-bath.

The hole in the center is the location of the old chandelier box, which is now gone. The little holes behind that are from the wire hopping the joists. They will be covered by drywall at the end of the job.

The housings are HALO brand 6" fittings; I think in hindsight I'd choose the 4", and that's what I'm going to specify for the kitchen. Overall, the light they throw is warm and full. We put the two over the fireplace on their own dimmer, and the other eight are ganged on a 600w dimmer of their own.

This is step one; The next phase is to wire the baseboards and get the room on its own circuit. We'll be putting two plugs in on each baseboard as well as cable, phone and ethernet jacks. Phase three is to have professional drywallers come in and put 1/2" sheetrock up on the ceiling over the plaster and around the lights so that the ripples and patches in the ceiling are covered for a smooth appearance.

Posted on October 13, 2006 3:56 PM | link to this entry

October 12, 2006

Spinning Head.

Oh, boy, I've blown an entire morning reading about content management systems, the differencs between off-the-shelf blogging platforms and professional CMS applications, the wisdom of hacking at free blogging systems to fill unique needs, and the growing desire to have an easy, extensible framework to build one's own CMS system to do what the user wants without hacking, plugins, or ju-jitsu. (Having bounced around five or six websites, run through the comments, and absorbed the discussions, I feel small and pitiful in comparison to some of the talent that's out there.) You may have noticed the popularity of CMS-based posts in the linkblog recently—that's because I'm still looking for the right one.

Let's say I've got a client who needs a simple update application so that they can add content to their site when it comes up. I can A. hire someone to write such an application, B. buy an off-the-shelf CMS application, or C. use one of the free blogging apps out there and hack away at it myself to get the results I need. A. is usually prohibitively expensive, B. is ridiculously expensive, and C. can be hard to justify and support when everyone is used to the Microsoft model of business applications.

In the last two cases, this also means a certain amount of hacking is in order to excise the "features" the end user doesn't need-comments, RSS feeds, bulletin boards, etc., which often takes more time than is reasonably necessary, often breaks other parts of the CMS, and usually blows up once an upgrade of the engine is performed. (My main complaint of of open-source scripting code and applications are that they are crammed full of "features" the authors thought would be cool, as opposed to stuff that actually might be useful.) I'm not a programmer, nor do I play one on TV; My skills are rudimentary, but I can look stuff up and make educated guesses as to how to fix things. So I can't write the stuff myself; I have to depend on other folks to do that for me.

The solution is to have a framework for developing the application(s) I need. Something that's smart enough to let me define my needs and help me build it, then just work and get the hell out of the way. This is my basic understanding of Django—that it's a framework for building what I need in the method I choose.

I think (you're saying, 'ha ha, Dugan, you're changing course again') that in order to get ahead of the curve and not merely six months behind it, that I'm going to do some more research on Django and Python, buy some books, install the code, and see if I can't roll something of my own.

Bibliography:
Subtraction, The Movable Feast Got Away from Movable Type
Jeff Croft, On personal content management.
Blurbomat, Annual Post Where I Question the Tools I Use.

Posted on October 12, 2006 12:16 PM | link to this entry

October 11, 2006

Wednesday Night Stories.

Hmm. Another Lost where nothing really happened. I understand the need to balance the careful unraveling of the story vs. time constraints and suspense, but I'm getting a little X-filed out here. (X-filed is when three or four "special" programs go by that are supposed to "unlock new secrets" but really don't say anything at all-usually ending with Mulder or Scully outside an empty warehouse where all the secrets used to be, and nothing ever got solved.) Obviously the Others are on the island are there for some sort of corporate-sponsored mindfuck, but what the hell?

As for Project Runway, I'm thinking Jeffrey is getting booted. I'm half on his side and half thinking he may well have cheated, but who knows. It all reflects poorly on Laura for bringing it up.

Posted on October 11, 2006 11:36 PM | link to this entry

October 9, 2006

Sometimes I Doubt Your Commitment To Sparkle Motion.

Sometimes this gig is about making a difference, finding a voice, or adding something valuable to the conversation. It can be challenging and exciting to begin a new project or help something grow. Even when the monetary compensation is less than hoped, the rewards sometimes outweigh the effort spent, because there's a lingering sense of satisfaction and pride on a job well executed.

And sometimes, it's just about doing the shit and getting paid.

Posted on October 9, 2006 3:04 PM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

October 6, 2006

From The Back 40

Because it's a downright sucky day for Baltimore, I figured I'd post a picture of yesterday's yield from the vegetable garden in the hopes that it would brighten things up a little. Seriously, we pulled about 5 lbs. of tomatoes off the vines yesterday, adding to the 5 lbs. we have on the counter in the kitchen already. We're going to bust out the pots and cook us up some more sauce this weekend.

Posted on October 6, 2006 11:21 AM | link to this entry | Comments (5)

October 5, 2006

Another Reason To Love Iggy Pop.

I love the guy for who he is, not so much for the music (although I'm already preparing to hear some lengthy discourse on how the Stooges were the basis for all punk that came afterwords, etc.) but this concert rider, courtesy of The Smoking Gun, is worth the read. If this guy surrounds himself with roadies who write stuff this funny, I can only imagine what a tour with the guy must be like.

"As for smoke, if you could save it for sending messages to indigenous North American tribespeople, I, Big Chief Fucks-Around-With-Drums, would be um heap grateful."

Rock & Roll may not be dead after all.

Posted on October 5, 2006 11:43 AM | link to this entry

October 4, 2006

You Rent The Van, I'll Buy The Pizza.

I'm finally undertaking the effort of moving my main web domain from a box hosted by a friend to a commercial server in California. This mirgation, while filling me with a sense of dread (I can't afford any downtime) will allow for such technologically advance features as FTP access (I've been limping along with AFP/Samba, which is cool but slow as shit and unreachable from my PC), multiple subdomains, WebDAV, includes, MySQL, PHP and Perl. Plus, I can migrate over to Mail.app and abandon Eudora on the side of the road like the broke-down '75 Pacer it is. Sweet zombie Jesus, I'm excited.

Right now I'm making a master backup of the site, which will take an hour or two (there's a ton of old content there—I don't even want to look at the old weblog right now) and then I have to push it all live to the new server, then point the DNS over and pray for success.

When things slow down a bit in the future, I'll add a weblog to the illustration directory, clean up the link rot, set up some web calendars, and have a personalized sandbox for each of my clients to use.

Now, it's back to the grind.

Posted on October 4, 2006 4:37 PM | link to this entry

October 3, 2006

First of a Million

Taking a rare (and well-deserved) walk with my wife last night, I noticed little dots of color here and there on the ground. I noticed that the older trees in our neigghborhood are still green and full, but many of the younger maples are beginning to redden and drop leaves- a sign of the season to come.

Posted on October 3, 2006 11:43 PM | link to this entry

October 2, 2006

Green Lantern!

I don't honestly know what's cooler- getting a letter postmarked from San Francisco with a Big Fat Check inside one week after the invoice went out, or the fact that it carries a Green Lantern stamp instead of a boring corporate postmark.

Posted on October 2, 2006 4:21 PM | link to this entry | Comments (3)

October 1, 2006

Angry Bill.

You should go fuck yourselves, because your "installation instructions" are for shit!

Oh, and thanks, Apple, for messing with the standard install for DBD::mysql, so that I can't run it on my iBook without knowing how to write the fucking thing myself.