Home Again

I’m back in Baltimore after a whirlwind tour of San Francisco. My internal time clock, which has never really been that accurate, woke me up at 7:45 EST after being forced backwards all week.

I didn’t really get the chance to take a lot of pictures this time around, because much of my time was spent working, commuting, eating, or sleeping. The job itself is new and challenging, and I like the people a lot. While I was out there I was able to catch up with a bunch of friends, which made the trip twice as valuable to me—a lot of good people are out on the Left Coast now, and my work schedule has made it possible to visit with them and get paid for it, something I appreciate greatly.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken over some additional responsibility on a current project which should make April a very frantic month, something I view with a mixture of excitement and dread. There are a lot of balls to juggle in the upcoming weeks, and I hope I have the ability to do so.

Witness to History.

San Francisco banned plastic shopping bags today, and I was here to witness history. Imagine what would happen if Baltimore banned them too? The Official Bird of Baltimore would face extinction.

Next Exit

On the way to work this morning, I snapped this shot of a highway overpass sign. I thought it was funny.

Danger

The peeling wall of a gun battery in Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This place reminded me of the old batteries on the North Jersey shore by my grandmother’s house, and the photos I’ve seen of the prewar fortifications in the Philippines. This kind of stuff fascinates me for reasons I can’t explain; I like the idea of modern concrete castles and huge guns on disappearing carriages guarding the city from attack by sea.

Spamera

Make a camera out of a can of Spam. I have too many projects already, but this is cool.

Calla Lilies

Another shot from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Point Bonita Lighthouse

Through the fog.

The Clock Is Ticking…

I have one more day (today) to prepare for my trip west, and I’m no further along than I was last Tuesday. This week has been spent putting out fires, taking care of current work, and fitting in the odd moment of personal time where I can—but mainly, it’s been a series of twelve to fourteen hour days set up like dominoes, each crashing into the next.

I have a pile of junk on my desk (the “take with me” file) and another pile of stuff on the floor (the “might take it with me” pile) which is making it difficult to use the new Bluetooth mouse I bought at the Apple Store yesterday (yes, they had Apple TV there, but no, I didn’t get to see it or buy one). It’s a Logitech V270 optical mouse, and I’m probably going to take it back for an exchange. The buttons are too hard to press—I don’t need to exacerbate my carpal tunnel here—and the scroll wheel does that annoying thing where it’s slow to start and then speeds up too fast, like selecting text in MS Word in Windows: just when I get to the thing I want, suddenly I’m seventy-three pages past it. So it’s back to the junk mouse for now.

I haven’t been taking too many pictures these days, both because I don’t have a lot of good subject matter and because time is at a premium. I’m hoping to change that when I’m in Cali, because I need a change of scenery to get some creative juices flowing. I was hoping to bring some illustration work with me to work on, but it’s looking more like I’m going to be reading a new book in preparation for a project that’s taken a completely different turn while I’m out there, as well as trying out some new software to help the process along.

Crap. It’s 5:30 already, I owe two proposals this afternoon and I haven’t packed anything yet.

Shorpy, the 100-year-old photo blog

Shorpy calls itself the 100-year-old photo blog. A new picture each day, all from an age long past, all beautiful in their own way. (via)

Magnetic Ribbons

Seen last week on one of those magnetic ribbons people seem to love to plaster on the bumpers of their cars:
Just Pretend/It’s All OK

What a Colossal Waste Of Time

The Netgear FVS114 router is a small little box, but don’t let it fool you: It’s the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to configure. VPN on the whole seems to be some kind of smoke-and-mirrors, propellerhead handjob involving IP addresses (check), shared keys, certificates (uh…), authentications, policies (WTF?), and seventy-three other acronyms that make my eyeballs bleed. This product is billed as an easy-to-configure product for the average homeowner, but this is LIES. The only homeowner doing any configuring on this thing is that guy who ran the computer lab in college who smelled like cheese.

Buying the box and configuring it is pretty straightforward, I guess. I say “I guess” because it could be continually pinging every server in the Czech Republic and I wouldn’t know; after I stepped through their wizard, there was a pretty simple little screen that came up and connected with the Netgear website, and I could see the internets, and so I figured it was working OK.

Attempting to connect using the built-in VPN client in XP met with a big zero: Netgear wanted to read a menu in Mandarin Chinese and XP wanted to recite times tables in Swahili. After looking around for open-source help (hint: don’t bother), I found that Netgear sells VPN client software which is supposed to work seamlessly with the box, and come with pre-configured setup files that I could use to connect to the router. Not wishing to waste any more of my client’s time, I ordered it, and it arrived this afternoon.

My installation process went something like this:

1. Install the software.
2. Use the “wizard”, which misconfigured my client software so badly that I had to uninstall and reinstall it.
3. Follow the PDF “Manual,” which was written for the entire family of VPN routers but mainly focused on the more expensive FVS318 VPN router, and includes multiple menu items that our router doesn’t have, making configuration impossible.
4. Folow the software “Help” files, which recommend a THIRD, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT METHOD OF CONFIGURING THE SOFTWARE. Which doesn’t work. And results in another uninstall/reinstall cycle.
5. Research the downloadable profiles, and find that there are only two files written for routers that I don’t have.
6. Realize there is no online help, and that support via Netgear is fee-based.
7. Uninstall the software for the last time.

Netgear’s documentation is the most poorly written, incomprehensible mess I’ve ever been forced to read: each of the manuals were written on different continents by different engineers about different products. And none of them worked; if I’d been able to get one of them to function properly, I’d be happy.

Consider yourself warned: This is crap. Stay away.

The Score.

The Idiot: 0

Technology: 5

Parallels Problem

WHOA. I almost freaked out there… I just installed the new build of Parallels (3188) and when I installed the Parallels Tools suite after booting into Windows, the whole thing went black. There is no mention of this on the Parallels site, but I found a solution here: Essentially, boot Windows into Safe Mode and then install Parallels Tools. *whew*.

Going Back To Cali.

It’s not quite official yet, but OK, it’s official. The word on the street is that I’m headed back out to San Francisco at the end of this month for a project kickoff meeting with a new client (I’m keeping names and places confidential). I will be spending the next two weeks brushing up on several new technologies, a content management system, and my sparkling personality.

* * *

In other news, a brief interruption in Movable Type service here at Idiot Central was traced back to a botched install of MT-Akismet in hopes of stemming the tide of comment spam. I was about to freak out yesterday when all I got after logging in to the management section was a blank page, but I walked away from it for half a day and remembered what things I’d monkeyed with when the site started to go south. So, to sum up: When the manual says that MT-Akismet doesn’t work with MT 3.1, it’s not kidding.

* * *

I’m finding that installing and configuring a private VPN is about as easy as assembling a nuclear reactor underwater with directions in Chinese. I’m not a stupid man, but do they make this shit impossible to understand on purpose? Seriously, I haven’t had to deal with this many acronyms at one time in my life! And it seems like the vendors all have different acronyms for the same thing. Just call it one word and be done with it, you dorks.

* * *

After a good bit of time in development, I’ve posted a replacement for (what I considered) one of the weaker illustrations at the Alphabet Project, the letter Q. I was trying something different, but I wasn’t ever really happy with the solution. The new solution is in the form of a concert poster for a show I didn’t attend, and it stars a lady I figured I’d find much more about here on the internets-but didn’t. I wound up using screen grabs from a video I found online for photo reference.

I’m also working furiously on new art for a larger project, something I’ve been threatening to do for years, and something it took a well-timed and much appreciated push from my wife to actually begin: I made a down payment for an advertisement at the Directory of Illustration last week. The Directory is a combination of marketing tools which include a searchable website, a hardback book which gets distributed in the fall, and a pile of other resources for promotion. This means that my work will be seen by a ton of new people very quickly. This also means I need to have a page layout for the book by the beginning of May, and I have space reserved for 20 illustrations on their website right now. Part of my revisit to the Alphabet Project is to clean up the work I’m not entirely happy with, which means that Paul Bremer will get a rework. Mark Felt will probably get looked at (or maybe replaced). And Interpol will probably get cleaned up too. Once I’ve got that stuff looking tight, I’m going to post a handful on the other site and see if anything happens.

I don’t think I’m going to be sleeping much in the near future…

Possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen so far this year.

This is oh, so not safe for work, but good goddamn, it’s funny. I laughed so hard my stomach hurts.

From The Consumer Affairs Desk

A few months ago, Jen and I bought a Pur water filter from Sam’s Club, the kind that screws onto the end of the faucet and hangs over the sink. For $40, I figured it was better than buying another stupid Pur filter for the pitcher in our fridge. Installation was pretty easy, and when I turned the water on, it flowed through the tap smoothly. When I turned the filter on, however, water began shooting from each seam in the plastic housing, bypassing the filter and spraying the entire sink. No amount of tinkering fixed the problem, and I gave up on it in disgust.

The second contestant is pictured here:

It’s a Whirlpool WHCF-SUF under sink main faucet filtration system. Theoretically, it’s supposed to sit in between the cold water supply valve and your kitchen faucet, and filter out all sorts of harmful impurities from your cold water. In reality, it’s a waste of money and time.

See the little blue hoses there? Some genius engineer at Whirlpool decided to substitute them in place of normal $.50 threaded hoses, the kind that are easily obtainable at any hardware store. This is a halfassed plastic hose and pressure clamp attachment that does not stand up to normal water pressure. This means that after one has spent fifteen backbreaking minutes under the kitchen sink, disconnecting the old hoses, screwing the filter head into the cabinet wall, and attaching the plastic hoses, water will spray all over the underside of the cabinet when the pressure is turned back on. No attempt to correct the situation will result in success, and only result in soaked frustration.

I’m no plumber, but I’ve run a couple hundred feet of PVC tubing and sweated my share of copper joints. I should have realized this was a bullshit product when I opened the box, but I chose to give it a try. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

We’re going to have a real plumber come in and give us a quote on installing a whole-house filtration system, something that goes in with copper tubing, pressure relief valves, and a warranty. Enough of the mickey mouse bullshit.

Third RJD2 Album Review

Ouch, a 3.7. Pitchfork spears RJD2′s new album, something I had high hopes for, unfortunately. On the heels of DJ Shadow’s dismal new album, this is a dark time for my favorite genre of music.

On Shiny Things: Automobile Edition.

Would it be completely assinine of me to even consider purchasing this beauty of a vehicle? Something this large, expensive, improbable, unwieldy, and impractical? Because that bumper is about a mile wide, and I’d swear to Dog it’s smiling at me.

I need a real garage…

Humbucker Music, Orange amps

Huh, who knew that Orange amps are still being made, and are available here in the states? They’re pricy as hell, but I bet that thing makes one fat sound. And orange tolex makes one heck of a statement.

Reward