Grumble Grumble.

The National Weather Service claims we will be inundated with heavy rain, thunderstorms, the possibility of hail, and other unspecified biblical plagues. On the basis of their advice, I left the Scout home for the second full week and played it safe. However, my morning commute was full of sunshine.

We’d better get some category 5 hurricane shit up in this mutha by lunchtime, or I’m going to be pissed.

Early Afternoon Update: I’m officially pissed.

4:30: We got showered upon, and now the skies are sunny. Radar shows the worst of it is off to the east and there’s nothing on the horizon. Still pissed.

Tomato Blight?

Oh, crap. Late Blight Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
“…the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April.” We started a bunch of ours from seed but two of the ones I’ve got in containers are organics from Home Depot.
Here’s info on identification and treatment.

Random Notes.

After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.

Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.

The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.

This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.

Baby Balloon Box

Sometimes, the simplest things are the best.

Hi!

Boy, I’d love for this to be her first actual words.

Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up

This will make your head explode: Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up. I didn’t think it was possible to mix oil and water.

Walking With My Ladies.

This picture is actually from the weekend, but it’s a good illustration for this morning. Mama, Finn and I got up early and took advantage of this freakish beautiful weather to got for a walk around the neighborhood, something we have resolved to do each morning as a family. Finn is rocking a new backpack carrier, one that distributes her weight more evenly across the back, shoulders, and waist—and one I paid $8 for at a neighborhood yard sale a few weeks back.

She spent a good bit of the weekend accompanying me to the hardware and auto parts store, and was happily content to watch everyone walking by, examine the merchandise, and play with her fuzzy elephant. When it was time to examine something in better detail, she would hoist herself up, grab both my ears, and lean forward over my shoulder until I held up the spark plugs or paint can or shovel so that she could see what I was dithering about.

Reunion Manifesto

Wow, this is pretty amazing: Why I won’t be at my high school reunion. My high school experience wasn’t nearly as bad as this one, but I echo the sentiment at the end: Our kids will have some kind of kung-fu lessons and be able to finish physical conflicts on their own terms. I think that kind of self-confidence is essential in this day and age.

Out for a Walk.

I’m backing up Jen, who is on a deadline this afternoon, because our childcare had to cancel today. So I woke with the girl and she took me for a walk up to the state park and back after breakfast, and we enjoyed the quiet before everyone got up and went to work.

Important Milestone Alert: This is the 1009th entry of this weblog, something I only realized as I was tidying things up this morning. That’s roughly 19 entries a month since March of 2005, when I stopped writing pages by hand and installed weblogging software. We’re also at 1001 comments over the same period, which means I need to work on my community-building skills!

In the very near future, I’ve got an overhaul planned for the site which will involve a CMS change and a design facelift. Now, to find some spare time…

Driving Stick.

Thanks to Mama for the excellent photo!

FontXChange

Be still my beating heart: FontXChange converts fonts to OpenType, TrueType or PS Type 1 format. And it works, too! This means I can retire my copy of FontMonger for good, and with it, any legacy need for OS 9. Sweet.

The Automotive Gods Are Angry.

Tuesday morning, I got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the back way into the city simply by trying to avoid another clog on the main route; Apparently something happened somewhere and the entire Beltway slowed to a crawl. Inching forward, somewhere around Oriole Park, I started to smell hot antifreeze, and I knew something wasn’t right somewhere, but I hoped it wasn’t me. As I got onto Pratt Street and edged closer to the Convention Center, I noticed steam coming from under my hood, and pulled the Saturn off into a bus pickup lane to cool off. After a half hour had passed and traffic had cleared up, I hypermiled the last half mile to work, parking on the street so I could refill the reservoir with water. Not once did I hear the fan cycle on, which leads me to believe the thermostat has gone dead (and possibly the EGR valve as well).
In the meantime, my mother’s Subaru, which was just in the shop for a major head gasket overhaul, blew up on her yesterday morning for reasons as yet unknown.
And concurrently, my sister’s Subaru, also coming off some major repairs, decided it would shed a wheel after the bearings gave out.
Now, none of these cars are new—our family has a tradition of driving and maintaining our cars well into the hundreds of thousands of miles, and no person in my nuclear family owns a car under ten years old. It’s just strange that all three cars would decide to get sick on the same morning. What have we done to offend you, mighty Piston, God of Thunder? Have we not made the proper sacrifices, wise Gasket, Bringer of Coolant and Oil?

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

An Open Letter.

To the douchebag in the BMW who cut me off yesterday:
This is the second time in about two months that you’ve decided, when you were sitting at a stopsign perpendicular to the lane I was already sitting in, that you’d just pull out in front of my car without looking, even though I had the right-of-way. I recognized you yesterday because of the suit you were wearing, the shiny silver BMW you were driving, and the look of disgust you shot at me after I called you a douchebag loudly out my window. The first time, you even shot me the finger, as if I’d inconvenienced you somehow. Let’s be honest here: had you waved and asked, I would gladly have let you in. I do it all the time. But the fact that you never looked really irritates me.
I’m going to make an assumption here and guess you’re either a banker or a lawyer, given the neighborhood we both work in; the street you were on only holds parking garages. Somehow I doubt you’re a caseworker at the Goodwill headquarters across the street or a dishwasher at the diner downstairs. No, by your obvious sense of entitlement and inconsiderate manners, I’m guessing you make four times my salary, you bought that car new off the lot, and you’re used to people letting you do whatever you want. While I know for a fact that many BMW drivers are nice, upstanding people who rescue kittens and donate time to charity organizations, you seem to think that hand-sewn leather and a twelve speaker stereo entitle you to drive wherever the fuck you want at any time.
I really hope I never see you again, and that this will be the last time I think of you. Because if you try the same thing when I’m behind the wheel of my Scout, I’m not going to stop when you pull out in front of me without asking.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things.

This morning, I dragged my road bike out of the basement, dusted off the valves, aired up the tires, and dug my kryptonite lock out of the “bike stuff” milk carton. I have to return a parking pass to the office across town—which is a quick bike ride but a long walk. It felt good to ride the 1/2 block from my new garage to the office.
My sister’s birthday is today. Hooray!
The weather has been magnificent this week. 85° and sunny, little to no humidity. Thank you, Sky Pilot.
I drove the Scout into work this morning (see the bike item above; I doubt it would fit in the Saturn comfortably) with no throttle problems whatsoever.
Mama dressed Finn in a pretty outfit this morning, and we laughed and played in the jumper while I woke up over coffee and sang with some of her musical toys. Her smile, like that of her mother, is one of the best things in the world.
Addendum, 11:06 AM: My boss suddenly and inexplicably got the overwhelming urge for pie. So he went across the street and got some, and shared it with us.

Macromedia HomeSite 5.5, RIP

Pour a little out on the curb for my homie: Adobe discontinues Macromedia HomeSite 5.5. It’s funny—Adobe hasn’t done shit with it in five years, and they’re finally killing it now. I still use this program today; it’s one of the main reasons I have an XP install on my MacBook Pro. (via)

New!

The Odd Lies of Sarah Palin

This is good stuff: The Odd Lies of Sarah Palin. All the “misstatements” collected in one place. On a related note: Sarah Palin Is Not Stupid. I used to make the mistake of saying she is a crazy, stupid woman; I am in fact afraid of the idea that people take her seriously, but it’s better to respectfully disagree with almost everything that comes out of her mouth than call her names.

The Auteurs

The Auteurs Films: A site that streams high-quality arthouse films, with a better selection than Hulu (The Seven Samurai, Breathless, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, etc.)

Ebb and Flow.

Monday night we spent a little time with some friends in the industry, trading gossip, war stories, and news, and it left me feeling a little sick to my stomach. I know that times are tough out there, but the more bad news I hear, the more discouraged I get. This business is cyclical in nature, and having lasted through three recessions since joining the full-time workforce (exiting college right in the middle of one, no less) I know that this will be the way of things until I retire or give up and go sell insurance.
This one has me more worried than the last two, and that’s probably because I’m wired into the scene a lot better than I was in ’93 or ’01, and a lot more knowledgeable about the economy, our country, and my insignificant place on the edge of the whole mess. Work is scarce, jobs are even harder to find, and the money that people are spending is net 120 at best, so I’m holding on to what I’ve got for dear life and hoping we can ride this one out.
Compounding my worry was a rough time I was having with a project at work, which seemed to be dragging onward with no resolution. I’d sketched and sketched and between fifteen or so pages I had three distinct approaches, but I was having a hell of a time getting them to flesh out onscreen. At times like this it’s easy to get into an “I suck” mentality, which becomes self-defeating (and self-prophesying), but I’ve learned the hard way over the years that time and a little perspective can be an ally. I came home, helped give the baby a bath, watered the garden, spent some time with Jen, and then took another look at what I’d done. Within an hour or so I felt the quiet, pleasurable shift of things starting to fall into place, and soon I had had one solution finished, the second on its way, and the elements of the third sorted out for the next morning.
I guess the upshot of all this rambling is that even though my chosen profession doesn’t have the stability of, say, law, banking (ha), or civil service, it’s more rewarding than anything else I can think of. That feeling of the gears meshing and elements clicking together is one of the best things in the world—I’d be hard-pressed to find something else so rewarding that I could get paid to do, even when it seems like the industry is groaning and creaking and imploding around me.