July 26, 2007

From the Garden

Jen came upstairs as I was hunched over the computer to show me this. With the exception of the basket, everything in there came out of our garden, and there's a lot more to come. We have a ton of corn coming in, the squirrels seem to have left the second wave of beans alone, and there are several eggplant growing larger. The green peppers are getting pretty big, too. Plus, we've already used a couple bushels of basil leaves.

Posted on July 26, 2007 10:32 PM | link to this entry | Comments (5)

July 25, 2007

Back to the Land Of The Mouse.

Tickets are being purchased for another business trip, this time to sunny Orlando, home of the Mouse. It's been a few years since we were there (This child is now a part-time model and Harvard law professor), but we had lots of fun while we were there; instead of relying on Corporate America to entertain us, I went looking for some alternatives. Jen has already been to Gatorland and Kennedy Space Center, but I'd like to see both, if possible. Any suggestions?

Posted on July 25, 2007 2:56 PM | link to this entry | Comments (9)

July 24, 2007

MMMMMM Beer and Crabs

Saturday evening Jen treated her sister, her sister's boyfriend and I to a crab feast on the picnic table out back. Happy Birthday to the twins, and thanks for the Old Bay, baby.

Posted on July 24, 2007 12:55 AM | link to this entry

July 23, 2007

You're Spelling Is Bad

That's a Seagate ad, spied in the Towson CompUSA this morning. They make hard drives. You may have heard of them.

Posted on July 23, 2007 11:35 AM | link to this entry | Comments (8)

Because Two Isn't Enough.

Bush Aide: Military Could Go Into Pakistan.

So, let me break this down a little here. Our president, whose approval numbers are in the dumper, but who still controls the Senate, has a plan to make America love him again: He's thinking about going into Pakistan to get Bin Laden because Musharraf hasn't done so.

I can't think of a more misguided foreign policy that that, other than, perhaps, just nuking Russia for the hell of it. Pakistan is already a pretty shaky ally, and Musharraf by all accounts is walking a thin line between secular progress and another Islamic state. (Remember, Pakistan and India have been lobbing 'test nukes' at each other for ten years, and Pakistan is also pretty cozy with China.) What our government still hasn't grasped is the fact that things aren't black and white like they insist on believing—and why their policy in Iraq has gone so badly. A thousand years of tribal, ethnic, and religious quarrels between hundreds of separate groups is not going to miraculously work itself out after the tanks enter town and everyone gets a Hershey bar.

The simple idea that the leadership of this country is even considering entering another country and destabilizing the government there—can anybody say Cambodia?—makes me shudder. I hope to god the commanding generals find their balls and talk some sense into the cowboys in the White House.

Also, why isn't this the top headline in today's news? Seriously, in about 30-point type?

Posted on July 23, 2007 8:31 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

July 20, 2007

Knives

Another classic, onsite at a client location.

Posted on July 20, 2007 5:10 PM | link to this entry

July 18, 2007

Sprite

This is the front end of a beautiful little Austin-Healey I spied in a parking garage where I've been doing some consulting this week. It took a herculean effort not to commit Grand Theft Convertible, so I opted for pictures instead.

Posted on July 18, 2007 6:57 PM | link to this entry

July 15, 2007

Return of the King.

The Apple Store called yesterday to inform me that IdiotCentral, my MacBook Pro, was finished and ready to be picked up. "We didn't even need to replace the logic board," the Genius told me. "It was the LCD."

I stopped in this morning, weaved past the consumers ogling the iPhone display, and a nice tattooed associate brought my baby back to me. Within two minutes I had signed the paperwork and was ready to leave—with a gentle reminder that AppleCare might be a good idea for a portable.

My new screen is bright and clean, and the hinge is actually a little tighter now. After a failed attempt to migrate my data back onto the machine this afternoon, I rooted out the cause (permission issues) and I'm now 2 minutes away from restarting into my old work environment—not a day too soon. At the client site where I worked on Friday, the guys helping me get up to speed (and the IT guy they sent over) looked at my battered eight year old stunt laptop and shook their heads in amazement. (Apart from a failure to be able to connect to their wireless network, my eight year old laptop worked fine, thank you.)

Overall, besides a week's wait to have the unit repaired, my customer experience was flawless and professional, something I've come to expect from Apple, and something I always recommend to friends.

Posted on July 15, 2007 6:15 PM | link to this entry | Comments (3)

July 14, 2007

Music Migration

Last night at 2AM, I finished a month-long project I've been working on late nights and on weekends: consolidating, normalizing and archiving my master music library to a backup disc so that I can swap drives around. To make a long story short, the drive in my iMac music server went bad enough that I can't use it as a boot disc anymore, so I had to compare the music on two separate drives (the working iTunes library and the backup I made a few months ago), make sure the backup was updated, and then get the bad drive ready for its new job. I tried using a couple of utilities for this task, SuperSync and syncOtunes, and found them lacking in many different respects. SyperSync does a pretty fair job of working through two iTunes libraries to find duplicates and differences, but its UI is a nightmare of little icons, buttons, and lists, and the 'filtering' features are arcane and nonintuitive. I found myself spending more time reading the manual repeatedly to make sure I didn't erase anything than I did syncing files, so I gave up on it. syncOtunes semed to work, but my experience was that it didn't find all the duplicates or missing files. Instead, I resorted to looking through side-by-side folder directories and comparing file sizes to see where I had differences from one side to the other. This was time-consuming and tedious, but it satisfied the anal-retentive part of my brain and helped me prune the duplicates and bad files from the library.

My plan is to build a Smart Folder for the iTunes server, which will import any music file I add into iTunes and then write out a logfile of the additions so that I can keep track of the changes. I had a basic version of this on the old music server I ran at work, but I found it would get backed up as iTunes added the files and cancel itself out, which was unreliable and annoying. I'd also like to make a script that will create a record of which files get metadata additions or changes so that I can update the backup drive, but that's a little more involved.

Posted on July 14, 2007 1:48 PM | link to this entry

July 13, 2007

New!

Posted on July 13, 2007 12:25 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

July 11, 2007

Whoops

Hey, I forgot to send birthday shout-outs to my sister yesterday. Ren, happy birthday!

Posted on July 11, 2007 1:49 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

July 10, 2007

Classy!

I saw this in a parking lot on a way to a client meeting this morning. It's a miniature pole dancer that hangs off a car radio antenna.

Posted on July 10, 2007 9:14 PM | link to this entry

July 9, 2007

Brownout.

Our power blinked out at a little before 2PM this afternoon. I hope this is not a common occurrence this summer, because handling conference calls at the local Panera with my backup laptop is not optimal.

Posted on July 9, 2007 3:04 PM | link to this entry

July 8, 2007

Fireworks

Usually, after the Catonsville Parade is over with, Jen and I spend the evening recovering from heat prostration in the comfort of air conditioning, with eight or nine beers each. It's usually at this time that we make solemn promises to each other that we will NEVER do the parade party again, because of the ever increasing preparation time it takes and the triple-digit heat that always accompanies Independence Day. (Jen wryly pointed out that our prep time increases with the addition of completed rooms in the house. By my calculations, when the whole house is finished, it will take us 364 days to get the place ready for the parade, and then the whole mess will start over again the following day.)

Somewhere around Thanksgiving we start talking about it again, and by Christmas we've forgotten our promises and begun making lists. Then, somewhere around the middle of June, she pokes me and asks if I've remembered that it's bearing down on us like a crazed rhinoceros. I give her a look of dazed panic, she gives me the oh-for-the-love-of-GOD-you're-daft look, and we start preparing.

This year's celebration was a departure from years past on several fronts. The first crucial difference was that we decided not to make so much food: we bought burgers, dogs, and buns, and made a gallon or two of guacamole. And that was it. In years past, we've been cutting and mixing and baking up until the sirens start up outside, which usually means we're hosed.

The second difference was that it was a balmy 85° which made human life tolerable. In years past, after having busted ass for the week leading up to the party, by the time the floats have disappeared and the crowds have dispersed, most of our guests are arranging transport to local hospitals for treatment of heat exhaustion. This year we had a thunderstorm which punctuated the end of the parade, cooled everyone down, and washed away plans for the local fireworks display. That was kind of a drag—we'd been hoping we could convince some friends to check it out with us.

Taking full advantage of the weather and the rain date, last night we packed a bag with water, a blanket, camera gear, and bug spray, and set up a spot on the grounds of the Children's Home of Catonsville to view the spectacle. The field was covered with families, children, dogs, and hooligans lighting off bargain fireworks, so we figured we were in good shape. However, as the official display began, we realized our vantage spot was behind too many trees (they weren't shooting them very high, either) and we hiked down the street to camp out in front of someone's house, where the view was much better. I'm proud to say I didn't spend the entire time behind the lens of my camera, even though I snapped about fifty shots; somewhere in the last 3/4 of the show I leaned over and gave my wife a kiss as the colors lit her face full of wonder and beauty.

Posted on July 8, 2007 5:34 PM | link to this entry

July 7, 2007

Authorized Repairs.

Last week, after six months of faithful service, the screen on my MacBook Pro started acting up. The lower half of the LCD displayed thousands of vertical lines from the middle of the screen to the bottom, obscuring everything underneath it. No amount of cajoling, adjusting the display, or resetting the PRAM would fix the problem, so I made an appointment at the local Apple Store and spent the better part of yesterday getting my laptop ready for its journey.

The first thing I did was to repair permissions and purchase a large external backup drive: a 250GB Seagate I dropped in an enclosure I had laying around. Next, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the laptop drive, and tested it by booting from it successfully. Then, I wiped the internal hard drive clean by doing a seven-pass erase, and reinstalled 10.4.6 from the factory disks.

The Genius at the Apple Store took one look at the screen and said, "Whoa." He didn't blink, though, and within ten minutes I had a work authorization for a new LCD and logic board, all covered under warranty. I should have my laptop back within seven days, although the iPhone launch may back things up a little.

While I was at the store, I got my first hands-on look at the iPhone, and it's official: I'm going to buy one. Probably not this month, but within the next couple of months to be sure. It's light, sexy, responsive, and the UI is a thing of beauty.

Posted on July 7, 2007 11:44 AM | link to this entry

July 5, 2007

Parade Photos

There's a set of photos from the 2007 Lockardugan Parade Spectacular up on Flickr this morning. As susal, the bulk of the photos are from the actual parade and not from the party, as I spent a good deal of time behind the grill. As always, it was fantastic to see friends and family, and everyone enjoyed the under 85° weather, up until the point it started pouring (and then we just moved the party inside.)

Posted on July 5, 2007 12:28 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

July 2, 2007

Mr. President? The Clue Phone Is Ringing.

There are some pretty good reasons Why W's approval ratings are in the toilet. This could be one of them.

Seriously, is this shit for real? Me, I wanted to know what happened to a guy named 'Scooter' after getting thrown in the Big House.

Posted on July 2, 2007 6:19 PM | link to this entry

Lily

Our neighbor has about 20 of these beauties in his backyard.