Interstate Road Signage.

I found out, through doing some research for a project here at work, that the exact green used for U.S. highway signage is Pantone 342.

The Men Who Stare at Screens

Oh, crap. The NYT reports that men who spend the majority of their time sitting (say, in front of a computer, for example) have a much higher risk of heart disease, even if they get regular exercise.

Looking Forward.

1. Family Date Night is tonight, which means we will take advantage of the slightly less humid weather to walk downtown for milksheep and icecream.

2. Tomorrow we’re heading north for Grampy’s 95th birthday bash at the lake, a visit with Renie, Grandma and Grandpa (not to be confused with Grampy, who is technically Great-Grampy) and a good portion of the extended family. It will be all too short but a good time regardless.

3. Cooler weather in the forecast.

Yard Sale All-Stars.

Early Saturday morning, Finn woke up from a bad dream and called to us from her crib. I went in (Mama has weekends off) and soothed her, laid her back down and tried to leave quietly, but she wasn’t having it. After I settled her down again and laid on the spare bed in her room, she snuffled her way back to sleep, leaving me to try and catch a few more Z’s before dawn broke. I’d just found my way back to REM sleep when it was time to get up for some breakfast, and we went downstairs to find Mama was already out the door on her mission for the morning: to check out the nearly new sale at the Howard County Fairgrounds. No sooner had I hit the bottom step when she called in to check on us; she’d seen a used red wagon that had been snatched from her grasp at the last second and wanted to know if we’d left the house yet. Finn and I wolfed down some breakfast, changed into dayclothes, and hit the road for our mission: picking over the community yard sale across the street.

In years past, we’ve found all sorts of useful things for sale in the surrounding area, from cameras to toys to cars. We were hoping to fill some of the small gaps in Finn’s wardrobe and maybe find some larger used items so that we weren’t paying full dealer price; the depreciation on little red wagons is atrocious as soon as you’ve driven them off the lot. Because we’d gotten a late start, she and I didn’t hit the bricks until 9:30, a full hour and a half after the official starting bell, so much of the good stuff was gone by the time we made the rounds.

This year’s sale seemed to favor fussy wingback chairs, Christmas decorations from the Reagan era, a metric ton of stupid glassware (always with the glassware, these people) and ramshackle pressboard furniture, but little or no interesting or useful stuff. There were some isolated deals on children’s books, and when Mama joined up with us, we scored a pair of $.50 Converse lowtops with room to grow in for the girl, but otherwise the local selection of kids items was thin. Perhaps the biggest surprise, then, was when Jen pointed out a sign at an otherwise uninteresting sale which mentioned radiator covers. Curious, we followed the seller back and peeped out a metal cover in excellent condition stored in the back of a garage; we hurried home with measurements and a phone number, and confirmed that it was perfect for our dining room.

After returning home, we bundled up the girl and headed out to her swim lesson. She’s doing really well with the stuff that scared her the first couple of weeks, like being underwater and floating on her back. She still has a look of confusion when she comes back out of the water, but she’s not as prone to crying about it like before. We played together until I could feel her shivering in my hands, and then it was time to go home. But not before checking out a fire engine in the parking lot! The local volunteer department brought it down for kids to check out, so Finn got to sit in the rear jumpseat and poke around the cabin while we chatted up one of the firemen.

Saturday afternoon I started working on cleaning up the clutter in our basement, first by hauling our old kitchen cabinets from of the center of the floor and hanging them on the back wall of the garage. At that point I realized the garage was in far worse shape than the basement, and commenced to organizing and cleaning as much as I could in there. Into the cabinets went the piles of debris from the workbench, a crate of motor oil, and a crateful of garden fertilizer and tools. I pulled the remainder of the rodent-chewed insulation off the walls and bagged it for disposal, reorganized the handtools, and put parts spares up into the attic. Nothing is going to make the floor any cleaner, but having the raised portion cleaned up is very nice. And when I’ve got a dumpster parked outside for the side porch, I’m going to find a way to disconnect the old gas stove and make that disappear as well.

One of the things I keep running into as I’m working on our cars is an unorganized toolbox filled with an explosion of wrenches. I’ve got two sets of SAE and one set of metric box-heads, and being able to find them quickly would be really helpful. After looking through the organizational section at the Home Depot and coming away unimpressed, I decided something simple would be the best solution—I’ll be happy to buy a couple of these when our budget allows. I’ve also got to find a way to organize sockets by size and type so that I’ll wind up with the correct handle for the right socket.

Sunday was just as busy. Finn’s friend Stella turned 2, so we stopped by her birthday party and sang, danced, painted, and played games with a group of other children the same age. By the time we left, she was pooped, and slept pretty much the whole way home.

While she was down I continued working outside, getting the back lawn mowed for the first time, then doing some battery swapping with the Slattern. It looks like the battery I bought last fall to replace the original is bad, but I’m not 100% sure; I replaced it with the Jeep battery and the car seemed to fire over a lot more happily. I also switched out the taillight wiring on the off chance there was a short in the original, but I’m going to try to see how well Pep Boys honors their 1 year replacement warranty this evening before I call this fixed.

Sore.

My physical therapist and I have a certain weekly routine, where he puts electrodes on my back and I lift weights and watch Harry Potter on my iPhone and try to ignore 120V of direct current that’s making my muscles tense into iron rods. Then he does ultrasound, which is like having a mostly relaxing massage with a warm curling iron. Next, he does manual massage, including a technique where he grabs my skull and attempts to pop it upwards off my spinal column like the head of a dandelion. Usually, that’s about the worst point; after that, I stand in front of a machine with a big crank and do six repetitions with each arm, and he slowly turns the resistance higher. The result is a slightly sore but satisfying ache in the muscle that usually leads to fitful sleep and an increase in mobility.

Last night the other therapist put the electrodes in the usual place and I made it to the end of the quiddich match in Half-Blood Prince, and then everything went to hell. She is a quiet lady with a thick European accent, and her timid demeanor hides a frightening ability to inflict pain for extended periods of time. She started with massage around my neck, and when she found the knot in my left shoulder, she said, “aha!’ in a quiet voice, just before she attempted to push it through the other side of my body and out the front of my chest using only the tip of her finger. After about five grueling minutes of deep-tissue torture, I was ready to confess to anything Dick Cheney could dream up in his worst paranoid fantasies. Then, she used a pair of iron-hard knuckles and about thirty foot pounds of pressure applied directly to the screaming muscle mass and told me to turn my head to the side five times, slowly. Once I’d gotten through that and fought off the urge to puke, she had me do it facing the other way.

After that, it was back to the old routine, but my enthusiasm for turning the big crank was gone. Especially after the front desk guy changed the music from classical to the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which made me feel even more foolish than I normally do. This afternoon, I’m sore and creaky and tired from tossing and turning all night, which hasn’t happened in a week or so. I know that often things have to get worse before they get better, but I think I want to go back to my original therapist next week, because I don’t know what I did to his partner to make her dislike me so much.

Baby Steps.

Old news by now, but here’s my take: It’s about fucking time. I went without health insurance for five years out of college, routinely rolling the dice by hanging my ass off a two-story ladder while trying to afford to run my own business. Buying health insurance in 1994 was no picnic, and it’s a ridiculously expensive proposition today, especially for a family. Here’s the thing that nobody seems to realize: if I’d fallen off that ladder in 1994, the ambulance would have taken me to the hospital, and we’d all be paying for my treatment. We’re all paying for it one way or another. The next step is to regulate the crap out of the insurance companies. Period.

Also, I like the rule that states that nobody with a preexisting condition can be denied coverage.

Comfortably Numb.

I had my second visit to the PT clinic Monday night, and got hooked up to the electrical stimulus machine for the second time. It’s an interesting sensation, that of having enough current applied directly to the muscle to tighten them involuntarily: Oh, look, that machine is making my arms twitch like a spastic Muppet. After the therapist spun my head around on my neck 175° until I could feel my spine creaking, he had me stand in front of a big crank machine and spin a wheel around in a circle six times on each side, which made my left arm feel warm, stiff, and angry after about five minutes.

When I got home I was sore but not in pain, which was a nice change. I was able to sleep well overnight—a far cry from Friday, when I tossed and turned for six of the eight hours I was in bed—and woke refreshed, but late for work. I’m down to one or two Advil a day from a total of five, which is a welcome relief, and I can move my head around a little more without having to use my whole upper body to steer it.

On the way home in daylight for the first time in four months, I felt the gnawing need for more sunlight, more outdoors, and more activity. Once this stupid shoulder heals up, I’m looking forward to some regular workouts with our neighbor, as well as some time on the bike and hiking with the girl. This sedentary shit has got to stop.

Pain in the Neck.

I’m battling a severe shoulder/neck/arm pain this week, brought on by stress, bad posture, and hefting large electronic equipment. I’ve had this happen before to a lesser degree, but this is the worst by far. It was so bad last night that I needed to take sleeping pills to fully relax the muscles completely. This is not how I want to head into the weekend, especially as they’re forecasting 50° and sunny.

4:15 PM: God damn, my shoulder hurts.

Update 3/5/10: This is not getting any better, even with Napricin. I can’t move my neck and there are shooting pains down the front of my shoulder. This afternoon I made a physical therapy appointment for Monday after work.

Cheep.

Our current fleet here at the Lockardugan Compound has gotten quite out of hand lately. With the addition of the CR-V, we’ve now got four cars clogging the driveway (three, actually, because the Scout is still in the garage) but our plan was always to ditch the least practical of the remaining three. Because the Jeep and the Scout both have two doors, an equal amount of cargo space and similar gas mileage, one of them has to go. I don’t think I have to tell you which one is nominated. (It’s the one without its own website).

I thought we might have a buyer lined up when we bumped into a friend at the coffee shop the day we bought the ‘V and happened to mention we were going to sell the Jeep; three weeks and two snowstorms later she took it in to her mechanic for a once-over, and came back with some disappointing news. He claimed it needs a new catalytic converter to pass inspection, as well as new front tires (we knew this) and pointed out an interesting bug with the reverse lights—they don’t work. She decided to pass, so we’re back to square 1 for the time being. Which suits me fine, because there’s more snow coming this week, I can’t get the Scout out of the driveway without moving the other three cars, and I’ve got at least three trips worth of garbage in the basement to be hauled to the dump.

Plus Ca Change.

It took $65 to confirm what I’d suspected all along: My eyeglass prescription hasn’t changed one bit in 10 years.

The Pipes Are Calling.

Walking back to work from the Safeway on Charles Street this afternoon, I heard a familiar sound and continued south to investigate: a bagpiper busking out in front of the Equitable building, the sounds echoing off the tall brick and steel around him. I stopped to listen, then waited for traffic light to cross the street and drop a dollar into his case.

Give Thanks.

This morning I woke with Finn to give Mama a break, and after we’d finished a bowl of oatmeal, some apple, and a little bit of a tangelo(sp?) together, there was a knock at the door. Two surly men dropped off three shiny new windows, which will (weather permitting) get installed by Mr. Scout on Thursday. Halleleujah!

* * *
As of yesterday, we are one (large) step closer to a new baby-hauling vehicle. Amen!

* * *
Last night, I added the word “Golly” to Finn’s ever-expanding vocabulary. I don’t care that she’s not walking by herself yet; that kid has more words than Webster’s, and she’s 14 months old. Thank you, Sky Pilot.

* * *
Sunday afternoon, apropos of nothing at all, Mr. Clean and Brian H. stopped over to help me diagnose the coolant problems with the Scout. It turns out the water pump is almost brand-new, but wasn’t installed with any form of gasketry. We replaced it correctly (with a gasket this time) and with the fan shroud in place; I need to fabricate a mount for that and replace the thermostat. Thanks, guys.

Housecleaning.

In preparation for a family Turkey Day visit, Jen and I have been hard at work cleaning up the Estate, so we decided it would be a good investment to have a cleaning service come in and help us get a leg up on the hard work so that we could concentrate on other important chores. Saturday morning I let four strange women enter our house and buzz around with mops, vacuums, and squeegees while I trapped myself in the basement with the cats in order to stay out of their way. Given that we’re not made of money, it took us both a little time to come to grips with the idea that we were considering paying someone to clean our house, but overall they did a pretty decent job, even if they didn’t mop the baseboards or clean the windowsills as we would have liked. Now we just have to keep everything clean for the next two weeks.

* * *
Now that we’ve got a fancy-shmancy color laser printer, I set up a Yahoo Pipe which scrapes Craigslist for Xerox Phaser supplies in the Baltimore, D.C. area in the hopes that maybe somebody somewhere will be divesting themselves of a bunch of toner cartridges. Please?
Meanwhile, my quest to find a usable service manual for this model has been met with a slew of pay-for-PDF websites, ranging from $5 to $25 in price. Good grief!

* * *
I signed up for Angie’s List last week in order to vet out some local service providers (the houselceaning service being the first). I’d have to say the information is good while the presentation is bad. I did some design and architecture work on a very similar website a number of years ago, and while there are difficult problems to solve with a user content driven site, this one makes that simplest of actions, search, all but impossible to find. I probably should have done the monthly tryout first. Oh, well.
I also signed up for Freecycle this morning in order to get rid of our old kitchen cabinets and some other stuff we’ve been collecting in the basement; I’m going to post some stuff tonight and see if we get any takers. I’d have to say the Freecycle interface is about as helpful as the Angie’s List design.

Back On The Air.

After some wrangling, several phone calls, and a weekend of frightening media darkness, we’re back online. A Verizon dude came to the house, looked at the outside boxes, mumbled something to Jen about “going back to look at the mainframe”, and left. Hours passed, and then another nice man came out to make sure service had been restored. His efforts to make sure the DSL was working were thwarted by the updates I’d made to our cable routing during the downtime; I set up a honest-to-god punchdown block in the basement and commenced to rerouting and sorting miles of data cable hanging from the rafters like so many burmese pythons. After I got home from work, I made a few quick changes to the patch cables and restored the internet to glorious cinemascope. I still have to tighten up the remainder of the wiring, reroute coax that’s mixed in with the data cabling, and finish cleaning up the punchdown block before I can call it done, but it’s better than before. Oh, yeah, adding a 24-port switch to add into the rack would be nice…but it’s not necessary.

* * *
Over the weekend our neighbors invited us to a “green” meeting (local folks coming together to talk about environmentally friendly methods and practices at the Lutheran church), and while the speaker was relatively good (a semi-nervous woman who sells eco-friendly products), it just so happened there was a used tool sale going on in the back of the room. For $15, we walked away with a 22″ hedge clipper, a full-size shovel, edging tool, and gravel rake, a pipe cutter, two channel locks, several snap-on wrenches, two unused paint scrapers, a sharpening stone, and the big find: a shaft-driven Bolens edging trimmer in unknown condition for the princely sum of $3. If I can get it running and swap out the gas tank (there’s a hole in it), my days of hauling 150′ of electrical cord around the yard will be over for good.

* * *
After some confusion and a misplaced paper were cleared up last week, I finally got a box this afternoon containing ten window balances from Pullman, which will go into use just as soon as I can block the time out to install them.

Random List: Tuesday Edition.

I spent some quality time at the local Pep Boys shopping for a new battery yesterday, a store I loathe particularly for its emphasis on selling dumb fake chrome shit one can glue to the side of one’s car instead of actual auto parts. The Saturn suddenly decided it didn’t want to start reliably last week, giving me a little bit of a scare when I was just barely able to get it running in the parking garage late one afternoon. At first I thought it might be the busted taillight somehow shorting out and draining the battery, given all the rain we’ve been experiencing, but an entire day to dry out in the garage yielded the same result. In the meantime, I was traveling with the battery from the Scout and a set of cables and giving myself hillbilly jumpstarts in order to get going. After replacing both batteries in the driveway last night, all is right in our vehicular world, and I have a UPS tracking number for our new (used) taillight.

My intent was to drive the Scout in this morning and take advantage of the lovely weather, but I got a late start this morning. I overslept and woke up with a giggling Finn on my stomach—which is not a bad way to start the day—but barely made it out the door with a cup of coffee (thanks Mama) and clean clothes.

Mixed Messages in Advertising Dept.:
This morning I passed a minivan sporting a large white decal of the Tasmanian Devil, applied to the back window, containing the words

Get In
Sit Down
Shut Up
Hang On

On the side door of the same van was a magnetic decal advertising the Happy Feet Daycare center.

Dragging Ass.

I’m fighting off some kind of cold which has my nose draining and my throat sore, and which also means I’m snoring (keeping poor Jen awake) and getting lousy sleep. So today I’m viewing a spreadsheet through half-lidded eyes.
One highlight of the day is that I’m using the magnificent Data Rescue II to resurrect our failed photo archive disc; After almost having given up on it, I’ve been able to snatch all of 2004, 2006, and 2007 from the jaws of digital doom.

Quick Updates.

Well, it’s official: Saturn is dead. I kind of knew it would happen, even when they claimed that Roger Penske was going to buy it (buy what, exactly? Build what? That whole story never made sense).
I’ve spent a good deal of quality time with OS X Server (Tiger) over the last couple of weeks, and my experience has been very good overall. I had a previous install to learn from, so doing things like setting up users, groups, share points and sharing were a lot easier to do than if I’d tried it out of the box. Opening up ports for HTTP, FTP and VNC went smoothly, and I followed some helpful directions to log into the server using SSH and then share via AFP over a secure connection. I’m curious to get a copy of Snow Leopard Server and look at the differences.
I also bartered some networking help for a used G5 tower, which means our setup here at the house will be current as of 2004. The big thing is to have a machine that will take a SATA drive, which are cheap and plentiful—I’ve been cobbling together servers with ancient hardware for years, so when I can put an enterprise-level terrabyte drive in a five-year-old machine for ~$100, it means I can finally collect all of our photos, music, video, and backups in one place. I started moving files last night, and with the help of a utility called SmartReporter, I’m hoping I can avoid the catastrophic failure of our last music server.
I did not know this before, but the 3rd generation iPod will not charge from a USB connection, which sucks, because Apple decided to drop FireWire 400 ports from the back of new Intel iMacs. Which means I can listen to what’s on my iPod from my work computer, but I can’t charge it unless it’s plugged into the wall.
We are inching closer to that new car, but it’s slow going.
I’m going to have to break down and dip into the home equity fund to buy three more windows for the front porch before the really cold weather hits. It’s chillier at night now, and I’m too used to being able to work out there quietly. Also, having two computers on the dining room table for a second year in a row is unacceptable—especially with all of the cords hanging at Finn-height. Meanwhile, I just ordered ten more Pullman window counterbalances for the rest of the upstairs windows. Ten is about all the budget for this month will allow, and it’ll take me a weekend or two to get them all installed. The next step is to figure out a good way to blow paper insulation into the empty window pocket cavities without getting it all over the house.

Unordered List.

I drove the Scout into work today to take advantage of the cool weather and sunny skies. A group of local friends and I have bought, transported, and stripped down a roller Scout in preparation for divvying up some good parts and selling the rest to make back our money. I’ll walk away with another good windshield, two inner fenders, and assorted smaller items.

Our home file server seems to have blown up yesterday. There are two drives installed, one of which houses our entire music collection, and it started clicking ominously yesterday morning. I ran some utilities on it and brought it back last night, but we’ll probably have to buy a replacement drive and offload files. Drat!

This is a fantastic, concise explanation of the current healthcare debate. On paper napkins. Here’s the Slideshare version:

Reprieve.

There’s forward progress on several fronts at Lockardugan Industries, much of which I’ll be keeping under wraps until the contracts are signed and the checks are cashed. As I’ve gotten older, I find I’m more superstitious about good news until long after it’s proven itself out, for fear of someone or something suddenly snatching it away from me with no advance warning. I think overall I’ve had a very lucky experience on this earth, but I’m still careful not to tempt fate, spit in the eye of karma, or bring bad juju on myself by jinxing good fortune before it arrives. At the risk of fucking things up, I’ll share the following with you:

The hot, sticky weather has lifted itself from the Baltimore region, leaving a balmy 81° sunshine in its place, which demanded a ride in the beast this morning. Plans are afoot to go on a recovery mission with several Scout friends to salvage a derelict and a huge cache of parts this Sunday; there will be trailering, jacking, lifting, and towing involved, and it should be loads of fun. I will, hopefully, walk away with a clean rear bench seat, a clean windshield frame, salvageable inner fenders, and a few other assorted goodies, which makes me happy.

In other vehicle news, we did some further research into the Cash for Clunkers program, comparing it with buying a comparable used vehicle off the lot at Carmax, and found that buying used was indeed cheaper, even factoring in a $4500 check from the gub’mint. Because I have an account with USAA (thanks, baby), we can get a great loan rate, and in addition to a chunk of money at signing, I think we can finagle a monthly payment of around $200 for a slightly used four-door 4WD baby-hauling vehicle. My new target is the CRX/RAV4-sized class, where we can fit more than a breadbasket in the cargo hold and have two (that’s right, two) children in the rear seats. Gas mileage won’t be on par with the Fit, but maybe we can get one of those as a replacement for the Saturn. Saturday afternoon, we’re planning to do some test driving to see how we like the available choices.

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.