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January 30, 2008

If Cleaning Required.

In a quiet rest stop somewhere between Baltimore and Columbus, I found this switch hidden behind the door as I washed my hands. I'd like to know how we could get this installed in our bathroom so we don't have to clean it.

Posted on January 30, 2008 10:25 PM | link to this entry

January 29, 2008

Guitar Lesson, Week 4.

Given the fact that I spent most of three days in the back of a van or freezing my ass off in a windswept field in Ohio, I didn't get to practice much this past week. Knowing that I had ground to make up, and wanting to avoid the old, familiar shame of being in a music lesson unprepared, I spent a couple of hours working the first three fingers of my left hand numb to the bone yesterday and today.

My teacher was kind, and I actually did make it all the way through "Peaceful Easy Feeling" with only a few hiccups. His words were encouraging, and I didn't feel like I was wasting his time—or mine. So we moved on to the next song, "Boys Better", and I continued to fumble around the quick G-D-A change, unable to keep up. I've got the rhythm but the change is still too fast. We then moved on to the chorus, which is a counterpoint to the verse—all power chords instead of the clean, proper chords I've been learning. So I got my first lesson in "Smoke On The Water" and "Iron Man", and put that knowledge to good use as we worked on the song.

And, playing it through slowly, for the first time, I felt like I could actually learn this damned thing.

On the way out I had the nice fellows behind the counter look at the action on the strings; my teacher was amazed at how high they were (thereby forcing me to work much harder to play it). I felt mighty sheepish handing over my beginner's Fender to guys selling guitars worth more than my Jeep, but the man who worked on it smiled at me as he turned the key in the truss rod. "No, we're not going to be mean, because when you're ready to buy a better guitar, we want you to buy it from us."

There's a bit of inspiration in those words; I'd like to be worthy of a handmade guitar someday.

Posted on January 29, 2008 7:22 PM | link to this entry

January 27, 2008

Well, I Went Back To Ohio.

We gathered around the gravesite, huddled under a small blue tent with three open sides, waiting for the priest to finish the final part of the ceremony, and all I could think was didn't he already go over this stuff in the church? Seriously, I think we asked the Lord three times to hear the same prayer.

This marks the second funeral I've been to in Ohio in January, and it wasn't any warmer this year. Ohioans are a strange bunch, too—when all sensible out-of-state visitors have returned to the heating vents in their vehicles, coaxing blood back into their extremities, Ohioans stand around the gravesite chatting like it's an afternoon in August.

They are kind, too. They will open up their church on a ~~Sunday~~ Saturday afternoon and cook a huge meal for a frostbitten family, load our plates with food, offer us freshly brewed coffee, and provide a table of desserts loaded to the breaking point. They understand that doughnuts are an important part of the grieving process, and for that I will be forever grateful.

Posted on January 27, 2008 10:54 PM | link to this entry

January 24, 2008

Ken Hoover, RIP

Photos by Shannon Bishop

We just got word last night that Jen's uncle passed yesterday after a long bout with cystic fibrosis.

I didn't personally know him very well, but the few times I did get to spend time with him, I enjoyed his company. He was a big man but he gave off a gentle vibe, and he smiled almost constantly, telling stories on Jen when she was younger with a twinkle in his eye. I'm told he loved a good party, and in true fashion, after a long night of laughter and fun, he left our wedding late with slurred speech and a six-pack of beer in his hand.

Posted on January 24, 2008 10:08 AM | link to this entry | Comments (3)

January 22, 2008

Guitar Lesson, Week 3

[expletive deleted] D chord.

I went in last week very rusty (not a whole lot of practice) and came out embarrassed, but my teacher is kind and went easy on me. I've had some more time this week to get the repetitive muscle memory working, but it turned out that dyslexic Bill had gotten the first and second fingers wrong on the D chord. So I had to unlearn and relearn it, which has been problematic. My first and second fingers are all about the chords, and are like two soldiers fresh out of boot camp, ready to snap at attention. My third finger was on the special bus and missed the drills, so it's confused by all of this moving around. It wants to get in the way or lay down for a nap, muffling the other strings and messing it up for everybody. Playing the G chord is easy for everyone, and the third finger is happy to go to the right place, but every time it has to go back to D it all falls apart.

I've gone through the progressions ad nauseum for the last couple of days, and I still can't get it clean. Arrggh!

Posted on January 22, 2008 2:43 PM | link to this entry

Shiny New Toy

I went ahead and did it, even though a chorus of voices in my head told me not to spend the money. The Apple Store was a zoo last night at 5:30, and I had to wait around a while for a concierge to see me standing in line behind a flock of interesting people:

Hipster Dude and Friend, who sat idly at the otherwise empty workshop desk playing with Photoshop, checking out the chicks across the store,

Obsessive Compulsive iMac Man, who unpacked and packed and unpacked and packed an iMac about six times in front of the Genius Bar, standing directly in the way of any tech who tried to come out to the showroom floor,

Tiny iPhone Girl, who walked in expecting to talk to someone immediately about something, and when faced with the idea of making an appointment, blinked no less than seventeen times while the shiny perfumed gears in her head crashed together in an attempt to make a decision,

Screamy iPod Return It NOW Woman, who kept throwing an old Shuffle on the iPod Bar and yelling at the tech, who calmly repeated the store policy about reservations five times while she huffed and wheezed and screamed and interrupted someone else's reservation, causing all of us other people to roll our eyes and stare plainly.

Once I caught the young concierge's eye, and told her quietly that I'd like an iPhone, we did a dance around the screamy woman and all the other people sitting at the Bar to complete the transaction, and I got the hell out of there.

Setup was a breeze, and it took minutes to sync up with my calendars and address book, as well as my Safari bookmarks. It's a beautiful piece of gadgetry, really—the first time the phone, iPod and Palm have come together in one package to be useful. I think I'm going to be very happy with it.

Posted on January 22, 2008 8:32 AM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

January 21, 2008

New Pantry Shelves, Take Three

After finally taking the time to listen to Jen, I pulled the top six shelves down out of the pantry and replaced them with deeper versions spaced further apart. Instead of spending lots of cash on new lumber, I recycled the shelves from the doctor's exam room out on the porch, kicking off the process of remodeling that space. (strange factoid: the exam room was wallpapered with a fox hunting pattern at one point. Very, very strange.)

The original version of the pantry didn't allow enough room for multiple stacked items, and the shelves were too shallow to hold more than a can and a half of food. The new shelves are double the depth and have two extra inches of height, so they should be able to hold anything we can think of.

Posted on January 21, 2008 1:53 PM | link to this entry

January 19, 2008

Hooray Beer!

Beer

Posted on January 19, 2008 12:17 PM | link to this entry

January 17, 2008

Mystified.

This commercial has been on for a couple of weeks now, and I am so totally considering paying $45 a head just to go bear witness to the awesomeness that is Shawn Anthony.

It's playing across the street from the Mount Royal Tavern. Jen and I could go there before the show, get bombed, and take in the show.

Or, we could just catch his juggling act at the Ren Faire this summer.

(Check him falling out of the shower at 0:30. Jen laughs every time.)

Posted on January 17, 2008 7:08 PM | link to this entry | Comments (2)

Snowing!

In the last three hours or so, we've gotten about three inches of snow.

Posted on January 17, 2008 1:06 PM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

Familiar Church.

The only things we bought last week at the DC Big Flea were very, very small. Jen stopped at a vendor who had vast plastic trays of postcards arranged on a table, categorized by location, and her eagle eye found the county my parents live in almost immediately. She picked up a small sheaf of cards and two immediately caught her attention: the church across the street from my parents' house, and a shot of Main street in their town.

Lousy camerphone image, sorry

The helpful vendor dated them for us sometime between 1901 and 1908, when they were known as "souvenir cards". At that time the USPS still prohibited private companies from calling them post cards, and the sender could only include a short message on the front side. In 1908 the prohibition was struck down, and anyone could publish post cards with the familiar divided back.

These two were printed in Germany, a sign of their quality, and have the location printed in script on the front (I've removed it to protect the innocent). At the time, it cost one US Cent to mail.

I would give anything to go back in time to turn the camera about 120° to the left for a shot of my folks' house.

Posted on January 17, 2008 9:25 AM | link to this entry

January 15, 2008

Con for firmation.

Looks like I'm cleared for takeoff on a new iPhone...no new updates to the hardware, just software additions for the time being. I kind of figured they'd wait until fall to refresh it, but I wanted to be sure.

Posted on January 15, 2008 12:49 PM | link to this entry

January 14, 2008

Guitar Lesson, Week 2.

I had my first guitar lesson last Tuesday, and it was pretty humbling how much seven years of instrumental training I've forgotten. High school music is not a professional education, no matter how good the program (ours was pretty damn good) so I was always able to get by on a minimum of practice and a very good ear, no matter how my teachers lectured me. Plus, renting and transporting a full-size bass violin is not a simple matter, so if I was playing it was at school.

Still, I thought I should have retained more of my theory and reading ability. My teacher patiently ran through the basics with me again, and I had to stop myself from trying to be a know-it-all before I'd even started working with him. We talked about what I wanted to get out of lessons, and after first telling him I wanted to shred like Eddie Van Halen, I told him I'd be happy to learn chords and passable rhythm guitar. He told me to make a CD of some songs I wanted to learn and we'd work on them in turn, so I put together a playlist on my iPod this evening to start.

In no particular order:

The Eagles	Peaceful Easy Feeling	I have the Eagles Anthology guitar book, so this is a no-brainer.
The Dandy Warhols	Boys Better	I have loved the chord progression in this song forever.
Weezer	The World Has Turned and Left Me Here	Again, a great chord progression.
Wilco	Kamera	I don't listen to Wilco a lot, but I do like this song.
U2	Until the End of the World	I figured I should try at least one U2 song.
The La's	There She Goes	A classic, and a solid rhythm part too.
R.E.M.	Texarkana	Can't go wrong with REM.
R.E.M.	Radio Free Europe	Another good REM tune, and it's a pretty simple chord progression.
The Stone Roses	Love Spreads	Love me some Stone Roses.
Sixpence None The Richer	Kiss Me	A beautiful acoustic song
The Cars	Just What I Needed	Oh, hell yes.
Stone Temple Pilots	Interstate Love Song	I love playing this on bass, and it's full of meaty power chords.
~~The Sundays>~~	~~Here's Where The Story Ends~~	pretty one-note, now that I listen to it
Matthew Sweet	Girlfriend	As much as I'd like to play the lead on this, I'll be happy to learn the rhythm.
The Rolling Stones	Gimme Shelter	I need to learn some Stones, and this is my favorite tune.
The White Stripes	Fell In Love With A Girl	This is like Punk 101—guitar and drums.
The The	Dogs Of Lust	Eventually I'd like to learn this whole album.
The Police	De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da	This may be difficult, but I want to try it.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse	Cinnamon Girl	More meaty power chords.

So far, I've got my muscle memory trained for the basic A, G, E and D chords, and I'm working on transitioning between them all fluidly. The D chord is a disaster for my meaty fingertips, like a game of Twister with the lights out, but I've got it down where there's no more buzz on the frets. This evening I worked out the first verses of Boys Better and got the chord changes almost clean—except for that damn D chord. The fingertips on my left hand have a satisfying callous and a pronounced divot.

Posted on January 14, 2008 11:16 PM | link to this entry | Comments (3)

Touring Car

My bride and I have a history of antiquing together. The first time I asked her out was to take a trip up to Frederick to go warehouse digging (this was before all the warehouses got turned into lofts and good, inexpensive antiques were still somewhat available). I found that we gravitated towards a lot of the same things and that our tastes in design and history were very compatible. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and later, a beautiful marriage.

So when she told me about the DC Big Flea, I was immediately interested. We dragged ourselves out of bed and got on the road as early as we could to get the "good stuff", whatever that might be. Having never been before, we weren't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be much better than the average local junk markets found around here. We found huge selections of furniture, pottery, collectibles and other stuff jammed into two large convention halls, stuffed to the gills with shoppers and surrounded by filled parking lots. We took a couple of hours to browse the aisles, but didn't find anything we needed—but lots of stuff we wanted.

Flea markets like this can be overwhelming and numbing after a while, because of the sheer amount of stuff to look at. Every once in a while, something stood out among the clutter. For example: sitting upon one table was a beautiful pressed metal touring car, long and lean, designed with curves and lines from a quarter century ago. But what caught our eyes was the matching bubble trailer behind it, something that looks more like a spaceship from the era of Flash Gordon. The long nose of the car hints at a big V-12 growling under the hood, while the front windows of the trailer remind me of the Rocketeer's helmet, a collection of curves unique to the era.

Of course, the price was prohibitive, but I was able to snap a couple of quick shots of it before moving on.

Posted on January 14, 2008 12:16 AM | link to this entry

January 11, 2008

Calendar

A brown package showed up on the doorstep yesterday, containing the calendar I've been talking about lately. It's really out of the ordinary—the whole thing is printed on 14 sheets of thick pressboard, notched in the top and on the bottom. Sliding any one of the cards into the top notch displays a month, and there's a photo on front and back. My photo is technically the 'back' of January (turning the whole thing around reveals a shot of the Aquarium with the dates printed over top).

Posted on January 11, 2008 3:55 PM | link to this entry

January 10, 2008

Indian Spring

Two tentative forays into future technology have been accomplished here at Idiot Central, both involving radio. Regular readers will recall my annoyance and distaste with the stock Chrysler radio in my Jeep, which craps out after the temperature rises over 80° or when it passes a strong radio tower (I used to turn it off on my way to work every day, coming and going, at the Reisterstown exit for this very reason).

Well, Santa brought me a fancy new car stereo, one with a detachable face, a CD player, and most importantly, an auxilliary input on the front. And it's not made out of candle wax and chewing gum, ensuring it will function at temperatures found most commonly in the dashboard of a black vehicle. I installed it this evening and it sounds fantastic.

Secondly, he brought a subscription card for the XM radio set we've had sitting in our closet since 2006. Hallelujah! Thank you, Santa.

In unrelated news, I was able to take advantage of 45 minutes outside in 69° weather yesterday to get the rest of the cabinet sanded down to bare wood, and one door heatgunned and sanded. There will be a lot more finish sanding to do with sheets of paper and elbow grease, but the big annoying work has been completed.

Posted on January 10, 2008 5:40 PM | link to this entry

January 8, 2008

69°

If I wasn't inside earning good money today, I'd be outside doing something stupid.

Posted on January 8, 2008 1:24 PM | link to this entry

January 7, 2008

Off the Road

We're back in town from Christmas, Part Two. We left the Ville in single-digit weather, drove north to the snow and enjoyed two cozy Christmas celebrations: the first was a white elephant party with the extended family, where the rules of the game were more complicated than some drinking games I've played. After careful ~~theft~~ contemplation and manipulation, we walked with a bottle of Irish cream whiskey and a box of funnel cake mix.

Sunday we had a smaller celebration with the nuclear family, enjoying our customary champagne breakfast and a lazy morning of unwrapping, lasting well into the mid-afternoon. Thank you, everyone!

Coming home through our neighborhood this evening, many of the cheerful lights are now gone, and the weather is an unnaturally high 60°. Christmas always seems to come too quickly and end too soon.

Posted on January 7, 2008 10:56 PM | link to this entry

January 1, 2008

Automator 2.0.

A few weeks before Christmas, I was given a Leopard install disc to play with. A few days later I found a fantastic deal on an iMac through Craigslist, and finally upgraded my desktop workstation from an ancient G3 built in 1999 to a maxed out 17" G5. Good grief, what a difference. Apart from a loud fan and a tendency to spit CDs out the side slot like a pissed-off llama, the iMac has been perfect. And playing around with Leopard has been educational; there's lots of new features and upgrades to the system that I love.

One of the things I got excited about was Automator 2.0. I'd like to be able to use Automator in Leopard to make my life easier, now that I've got a faster workstation. I have a laundry list of specialized workflows I'd love to be able to script, not only for me but for my consulting clients, for example: A folder action that wakes up, scrubs newly added fonts through Font Doctor and adds them to Font Agent Pro in a new set when they are dropped into a specific folder. (In my experience, Font Doctor's Automator action does not recognize single fonts and instead runs a check of all fonts on the hard drive. Annoying.)

I've already created one with the built-in actions that ship with Transmit to back up all files on this site on a recurring date in iCal and then email me upon completion. This is how it should work: easy, intuitive, functional.

However, I'm finding that simple tasks that should be easy are not easy at all—like connecting to a server on a local network. Now that I've got two machines again, I'd like to set up an action that keeps specific files on both machines synchronized. Sounds simple, right? Nope. Using the "Connect to Servers" action presents me with an action that has no inputs: I can't specify what server I want to connect to, or figure out how to do so. From the looks of things, I need to have a server pre-chosen somehow. Where? How?

Why is this so hard? And where is the documentation? Lazyweb has no helpful links yet.