XenophobAmerica.

Yesterday afternoon, I heard a story on NPR where they were exploring the presidential campaign in terms of race; specifically they wanted to know if the racial experience of the voter had anything to do with their ultimate choice of candidate. So, they got a bunch of people from York, Pennsylvania together and asked them questions about the candidates and their own histories. One woman's comment stuck out in particular, and it's been bothering me ever since:

"I look at Obama, and I have a question in my mind," she says. "Years ago, was he taken into the Muslim faith? And my concern is the only way you are no longer a Muslim is if you are dead, killed. So in my mind, he's still alive."

Let's just sit and let that sink in for a minute.

Really, think about that. Can this woman be for real? Can she be so ignorant of other religions that she views Islam like it's the Borg? That she views Muslims as mindless zombies? I shook my head at the radio, and another thought came into my head. There are millions of other people in America that believe the same thing. At this point, I got scared. Because, I think, we are that stupid. We're a bunch of rich, ignorant xenophobes with too much power and no education. If any of us stopped to look around at the country we live in (cue your Toby Keith song here) we'd realize there are Muslims all around us. Muslims shop in the same stores, drive the same cars, pay their taxes, and quietly raise their families, just like the rest of us. To say that a Muslim cannot be considered for the Presidency of the United States on account of faith is to say that the First Amendment to our constitution is worthless. (You know, the one about free speech, freedom of religion, assembly, etc.)

Jen heard the same broadcast and we talked about it a little over dinner. She brought up the controversy surrounding John F. Kennedy's election as the only Roman Catholic president, and this evening I did a little digging to find out more. This is taken from a speech he gave on the 12th of September, 1960, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President—should he be Catholic—how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

...I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

It's pretty amazing to think there was a national debate about the dangers of electing a Catholic to the presidency as little as fifty years ago. History shows he didn't hand the country over to the Pope, and most people would agree he was a pretty effective, successful president following his own moral and ethical compass.

For the record, I believe Islam is a religion of peace, its rich history and meaning sullied by a handful of radical fundamentalists pushing their own agendas. It's frightening to see the same narrow-minded fundamentalism gaining traction here in America, especially when the national debate increasingly gets framed in terms of religion. My America is a land where anyone can practice any religion they choose without fear of persecution, and any citizen has the ability to be elected to public office, like Kennedy said. After all, this crazy, beautiful, maddening country was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. It's quite sad how often we as a country forget that. It's sadder still to hear how polarized and ignorant people can be.

Posted on September 12, 2008 11:30 AM | link to this entry | comments (3)

F*** Verizon.

So here I am at Panera again using their wi-fi because Verizon DSL is down in my area. For the fifth time in a month. The guy on the phone decided my trouble was worth $10 and credited our next bill, but I think what they're doing is deliberately plugging and unplugging the router every couple of weeks to get DSL customers like us to upgrade to fiber. (Strangely enough, fiber was the first thing Mr. $10 wanted to talk to me about). So I'm about a millimeter away from calling the *gulp* cable company.

Labor Day Weekend was filled with lots of labor. There are four coats of water-based polyurethane down on the porch floor, and I started installing baseboard yesterday. I don't know how well the water-base will hold up, but working with it is about a million times easier than oil-base.

The nursery is one step closer to being finished: the futon is out and a new dresser/changing table is in. IKEA, in their infinite Swedish wisdom, decided it would be a great idea to make an entire family of furniture and then offer each model in a different color scheme. So the big honking chest of drawers is offered in a pleasing dark brown stain, and the normal, changing-table sized dresser we like is offered in white melamine and red or yellow stain. We opted for the low price tag and red stain, figuring it wouldn't clash with the wall color. I like it better than I thought I would.

Back in 2003 we were browsing through an antique store and stumbled upon an old glass shade which looked perfect for a nursery. This weekend I bought a new light so that I could ditch the glass and use the fixture to finally hang it. it turned out the glass in the box was busted into about thirty pieces, so everyone made out alright.

I also cleaned up the Jeep and put the seat base in. I'd like to extend a hearty middle finger to the Graco corporation, who see fit to add a WARNING label and a DANGER sticker to every flat surface of the seat, base, and stroller, but can't be bothered to spend five minutes to design an installation guide properly. No wonder so many people get this shit wrong. I have to assume that the lap belt goes through the two big loops in the plastic base, but that whole thing seems sketchy and loose to me. So I'm going to get it checked out by the fire department and then bungee the shit out of it so that it won't move an inch.

That cabinet I've been working on since last freaking year is slowly nearing completion; the main section is finished but I had to resand and stain one of the doors because it went way too dark on the final coat. The shelves and back are finished, and hopefully with a couple of coats of poly on the doors it'll be ready for assembly.

Posted on September 2, 2008 1:14 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Random Bits, July Edition.

I've officially given up on attempting to drywall the entire porch myself, after getting the first six sheets hung last week before the parade. It will be easier and cheaper in the long run to hire out a pro, and so the nice fellow who did the ceiling in the living room will be back on Friday to finish out the work I started—as well as taping and mudding the whole thing. For an exceptionally reasonable price. Score. However, this means I need to hump thirteen sheets of drywall to the house before Friday afternoon.

Somehow, in the last two weeks, the short amount of time between now and the package delivery has filled up with stuff—good stuff, to be sure, but damn, man. I think we have more on our dance card in July than we had for the last six months of last year.

For the three or so people who use the Atom RSS feed to follow this here site, I fixed the problem with it so that it's actually updating again. Sorry about that.

Still no resolution on the videocam issue; I'm reading all kinds of reviews about the Flip product line, which basically boils down to: ±$100 instant-on, five-button, no-nonsense video recorder which captures the important moments in a child's life instantly, vs. ±$500 bulky, button-tastic über-recorder shooting HD quality. The archivist in me likes the idea of high quality, but the pragmatist knows that having a cigarette pack that turns on in two seconds for baby's-first-whatever will be priceless. I think I'm leaning towards value and convenience, honestly.

This is the first year we have run an A/C unit in the downstairs portion of the house, and by golly, it's nice. I haven't seen the latest electrical bill yet, but the ability to walk through 3/4 of the house and not seriously consider climbing into the refrigerator to cool off will be worth the extra cost. Addendum: I saw an ad for this Fujitsu system in the latest This Old House. I like the idea of not having to run ductwork from here to Cleveland, and I'd love to hide the compressor(s) out back somewhere.

Can I just say how freakin' much I'm digging on the Venture Brothers? The Adult Swim website has streaming copies of the last several episodes available (however, they don't have previous seasons, the bastards) and I've been on that like a cheap suit. I totally dug the old Johnny Quest cartoons as a kid, and this is an updated version of that series with a definite twist. Santa? Put the DVD collections on my list this year.

Posted on July 8, 2008 11:16 PM | link to this entry

A Strange Visit.

Working in the backyard on Sunday morning, Jen came to me and asked if I'd seen the instrument case hidden behind the neighbor's garage that abuts our yard. I went to investigate and found a full-size cello case laying on its side in a pile of brush behind our mulch piles, not a place I'd prefer to see a stringed wooden instrument stored. Fearing someone had stashed it there for nefarious reasons, I placed it upright and we left it there for the day to see if someone came to claim it.

At dusk, I went back out and swapped it for a small note taped to the wall of the garage: "We didn't want your friend getting wet. Ring the bell at the blue house." (It was threatening to rain last night). Inside the case is a full-size student cello, made last year, in great shape save a cracked neck arch.

Something about this is very wrong; the house behind us is occupied by a single woman with no children. The garage itself is locked, but there's a canvas awning to the side where the cello could have been stored out of the weather and eyesight. And why not the back porch of the house? If a child was locked out of the house, only to come back later, why not just leave it up there? This smells fishy to me, like someone stole it and stashed it.

So what should I do if someone actually does come to claim it? My respect for stringed instruments (I played upright bass for eight years) says I shouldn't on easy on the punk who left it outside; it's going to depend on who rings the bell, I suppose. If it's a concerned parent, it's a no-brainer. If it's a nervous kid, do I call their folks? If it's a tweaker, I ask them to describe it and see how they do, but what then? Ideas?

Posted on June 23, 2008 11:18 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

That Could Have Gone Better.

Remember when we were kids, and we'd play games out in the street or in someone's backyard, and we'd call a do-over? Somebody'd kick the ball into a bush, or a car would come down the road right in the middle of an important play, and it was universally understood that things would just rewind a couple of minutes and start again, like erasing a videotape. Well, I'd like a do-over for most of yesterday, please.

It started out on an upbeat note; Mr. Scout brought over the window regulator for the Jeep and we tore the door down to put it in; unfortunately, the part was not a match to the one in my Jeep, and there seemed to be no way to use parts from the replacement to fix the broken unit.

We then decided to take advantage of the weather and go back to the pick & pull yard to hunt more Jeeps. It seems that parts (and part vehicles) are more plentiful for Grand Cherokees than for the regular model, both online and in the junkyard, and my particular model (2-door, second generation, power window) is even rarer than the 4-door. We did however find a junked PT Cruiser, which featured luxurious bucket seats that are supposed to be bolt-in replacements for Scout seats. Eight bolts later, we were walking up to the pay area with the seats on our heads, but not before making a detour to a section of the yard we hadn't seen before, featuring some ancient Detroit iron: a three-porthole Buick, a rounded early 50's Ford, and a pair of Opels, among other things. I shot about ten pictures, and we were on our way. As we got up to the counter, the redneck in charge of shoplifting told me they have a strict no-camera policy, and made me erase my memory card after giving me some bullshit about smashing lenses.

Returning to the Scout we'd found last week, we pulled a lot of plastic and other rare parts, having no luck pulling the hubs or the seat bases. It was about this time I checked my phone and found this lovely sight:

I don't know when or how it happened, but it was enough to ruin my day right there. Strangely, I can still call in and out, and the touchscreen still works on the damaged areas. I'm going to visit the Apple store to see if there's some kind of repair they can make; if not, it looks like I'll be purchasing a 3G iPhone earlier than I planned.

My afternoon was spent working on an illustration; I decided to experiment with an idea I'd had a few months ago to see what results I'd get, using the negative space instead of the positive. The results were a lot less than I'd hoped for.

The linework looks cheaper, like a quick marker drawing, and not expressive like I'd imagined. It also could be because I've been having problems getting my cutting nibs to vary line weights properly—they seem to get dull very quickly, which is not what I'm used to. If I could regulate line weight better, I'd be happier with the results.

I took the same sketch and started making a traditional cut, and about three-quarters of the way through I realized the initial sketch, while reasonably good, did not capture McCain the way it should, and the resulting piece looks like someone else (Jen says it's Ed McMahon). His head is not as long as I'd made it here, and his distinguishing features aren't represented well enough.

There were several highlights from yesterday, so it's not like I was constantly followed by a black stormcloud: we have Andersen 400-series windows officially on order for the front porch. Jen had a great client meeting on a new project, and we got our second delivery from the organic farm (I don't know how we're going to eat all this lettuce, chard, and spinach). I was just hoping to produce a success of my own, something I'm sure everyone can understand.

So it's back to the drawing board for Jeep, phone, and scratchboard.

Update: One trip to the Apple Store, my choices were thus:

1. Continue to use the busted phone and guess at everything on the left side of the screen.
2. Wait until July and buy a new 3G iPhone for $200, but take an additional $10/mo. hit on my data plan.
3. Spend $250 to replace my iPhone with another 1st gen model.

I chose 3, because I'd love to have the 3G but I don't want to pay AT&T an additional $120/mo. for features I may not even use. As it was, when the Genius rang me out, he told me happily they'd just reduced the replacement cost from $250 to $199, so I "saved" a little more money.

Upon inspection of the iPhone cases available at the store, only a select few might have protected my phone from catastrophic screen damage, and they tended to be the ugliest offerings on the shelf. (Imitation calfskin? stitched black leather? I don't think so).

Posted on June 13, 2008 8:56 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Win Some, Lose Some.

The driver's side window has been busted on the Jeep since last summer. We were on our way to the St. Mary's Crab Festival, a hot afternoon, and when Jen tried to roll the window down, it just...stopped. by the time we got to the parking lot, the window had slid all the way down into the door like a drunk at last call. She was horrified she'd broken it, but after I pulled the door apart with a borrowed screwdriver, I found it wasn't hear fault: A worm screw attached to the electric motor housing is held into place by a $.05 piece of plastic, which picked that particular day to commit suicide. Simply replacing the broken plastic part is out of the question, because it's an integrated part of the motor assembly, and I'd have to pull the whole thing apart to replace it.

It was with great interest, then, that I recently Iearned Crazy Ray's, the local Mobtown pick & pull, has a location nearby as well as the one I'd been to over on the East side of town. Gathering my tools about me, I called Mr. Scout to see if he had some time to kill this afternoon, and he did.

The parking lot at Crazy Ray's is a mirror of the interesting personality types lurking inside the fence. There are the import tuner guys, in tricked-out, wildly colored sports cars; there's the taxicab and livery crowd, who hover over junked Crown Vics and Town Cars like ants at a picnic. There are the pimps, who roll up in late-model Cadillacs painted day-glo colors on huge shiny donks, looking for god-knows-what. There are the workingmen, who rumble up in wheezy pickups and vans, looking for parts to keep their livelihood running. Professional pickers circle the yard with tools on homemade carts, eyeing the new arrivals like buzzards. All of them return from the field with their prizes like hunters on safari: door panels, bucket seats, steering columns, leaking fluid and coolant and oil on the hot cement.

Into this sea of crumpled steel we wandered, toolbox in hand, looking for the white whale: a 97-02 Jeep Cherokee with electric windows. I was told when I bought the Jeep that "the earth is littered with them", and my advisor was not mistaken. However, today's survey revealed only earlier-model Cherokees with incompatible regulators, or Grand Cherokees with completely different components. Nothing in my date range, and no parts to strip.

In the middle of this wasteland, however, we found an odd and unexpected bird: a middle-vintage Scout II which had lost its wheels but little else. After making the rounds of the lot, we circled back and took stock, noting an exceptionally clean engine compartment, decent plastics, and two intact wheel hubs. Mr. Scout tried to beg off, telling me he'd come back to pick it over later, but I convinced him to pull the radiator and shroud, which were in almost perfect condition (intact fan shrouds being very rare and pricy), as well as some plastics and the rear-view mirror, while the iron was hot. After a half-hour's straining to reach all the proper bolts, we finally freed the fan and pulled our prize from the beast: several hundred dollars' worth of parts for the kingly sum of $92.

The plan is to return early next week to see if the hubs, lights, and alternator are still available; meanwhile, I'm going to keep searching for the right Cherokee in the hopes that I can find what I need without calling the local dealer.

Update: Mr. Scout found a '98 4-door Cherokee in a yard in West Virginia and pulled the window assembly for me on Saturday. Pray it will fit in the 2-door model (or that I can use the parts to make mine work correctly).

Posted on June 6, 2008 3:42 PM | link to this entry

Memorial Weekend.

This weekend was spent as any good summer weekend should be: lots of friends, outdoor activities, and laughter. I carried my camera with me pretty much everywhere but only took a select few pictures, which seems to be the M.O. these days.

I had a chance to catch up with Mr. Scout on Friday, who has been hard at work on a familiar friend:

Compare that shot with this one:

He's been able to get the body off, have the whole thing sandblasted and painted, then replace the fuel tank, brakes and brake lines, water pump and fan assembly, as well as a pile of other things too long to list here. it makes my heart feel good to see the old girl looking better.

We then joined he and his wife for the Herb Festival on Saturday morning, where we enjoyed the sunshine and picked up a cartful of plants and vegetables from the assembled vendors, including this little gem:

This is a Northern Purple pitcher plant, not as sexy or elegant as a Venus Flytrap, but still deadly to our eight-legged friends. Leaving the festival, we wasted no time feeding it a live ant, which now seems to be in a state of digestion. I set it up on our office windowsill in wait for more unwanted tenants, and we'll see how well it does.

Thus endeth the photographic portion of the weekend; we had another dinner and picnic scheduled for our remaining days, interspersed with yardwork, sloth, and delicious scratch-made coconut cake. Not a bad way to spend the holiday, in my opinion.

Posted on May 27, 2008 5:16 PM | link to this entry

No More Surplus.

Aw, crap. One of my favorite junk rummaging locations, State Salvage (google cache), is closing its doors. Over the last couple of months their inventory has been getting thinner and thinner, in contrast to years past when it's been filled to the gills with desks, chairs, computers, and heavy equipment. The guy at the desk told me they're selling what they have left on the floor and then it's all going on the internets, at a site called Govdeals.

Crap! Where am I going to find $10 coat racks or $5 steel shelving now?

Posted on February 27, 2008 4:28 PM | link to this entry

Back On The Air.

Update: After a day's worth of DNS outage, and another day where the database disappeared, I'm back. Lesson learned: the way I was archiving my Movable Type database was wrong, very wrong. I'm not making that mistake again. Now, on with our regularly scheduled fun:

Jen and I ventured out into the freezing Maryland morning to vote yesterday in the Chesapeake Primary, also referred to as the Potomac Primary on CNN. We sat on the bed sipping coffee in the morning and talked a little bit about each of the candidates and how we felt about them, feeling guilty that we'd not done more research before today. I can't watch too much of the election coverage in the news anymore, because it's just the same stupid sentences repeated over and over again, like a toddler banging pots together, so I'm not familiar with the media's version of how the candidates stand on the issues. And really, that's my bad for not following up on it. I like to think I'm a social liberal and a fiscal conservative—I don't believe in welfare as the cure for all society's ills, nor do I believe religion has any place in politics, and I think that the states should make their own choices in many issues the federal government has taken up for itself. As you may imagine, the last eight years has sucked moose balls for people like me. (Remember peace and prosperity? A balanced budget and a federal surplus? The current guy pissed that all away real quick.)

One thing I'm highly confused about is the issue of super delegates. We saw the NBC Nightly News a couple of days ago, and Katie Couric handed the desk over to two morons who decided to explain the idea of super delegates with a cartoon reel, like America is supposed to be a class of second-graders watching Nickelodeon. Their "explanation" of the whole thing was that no matter who wins the popular vote in America, the super delegates have the final say when caucus time comes around, essentially negating the choice of the people, and that super delegates aren't elected by the people at all. Sounding familiar?

Well, on NPR this morning I heard a different story from a correspondent who claimed that the super delegates only carry 40% of the final say in the party's choice, not the final say. The example given, of Gary Hart vs. Walter Mondale in the 1984 elections, is sobering. While I don't pretend to believe anyone, Republican or Democrat, would have beaten Reagan in '84, the super delegates' choice in that race was, obviously, a poor one.

Wikipedia has a pretty decent article up about the issue, although it's Wikipedia, so the usual caveat emptor applies. They claim that super delegates only make up 20% of the total number of delegates. Their article on brokered conventions is also worth a look, because from all I'm able to gather, it's looking that's the future for us registered Democrats.

So here's the crux of my confusion: which is it? Do the primaries really even matter (I don't buy the "super delegates take the primary results into consideration before voting" line of crap) or did I freeze my ass off just to piss in the wind?

Speaking of pissing in the wind, we saw several lawn signs for Ron Paul on our way to the polls. What is it with that guy? Looking at his campaign platform, he's all over the damn place. For every thing I see that I like, there's another five things where I think, Damn, you're crazy, dude.

The other thing that has me thinking: I heard a woman on NPR this afternoon, interviewed in Wisconsin, who was looking at her choices for the Republican primary, and she sort of laughed and said that she didn't think he had a chance of winning, but that she was going to vote for Huckabee because she didn't think McCain had enough Christian values.

I stand before you, puzzled, and ask this question honestly. What exactly are Christian values?

I'm looking at some basic facts about the two Republicans, and as I've always said, with a few differences of opinion, I like McCain. He lost his way during the Bush years, but he's the best Republican I've seen in my lifetime, and I'd really like to like a Republican for a change. I don't agree with his hawkish stance on the war, and I don't like the fact that he's changed his position on a lot of things (Roe v. Wade, marriage, and taxes), but I like a good portion of his other opinions. I get the feeling he would do whatever the fuck he thought was right once he got into office, within reason.

Huckabee I can't get behind due to a lot of his public statements about gays, marriage, creationism, and taxes. And I have strong feelings about religion mixed with politics, as stated above. I don't want fundamentalists anywhere near the Constitution or the big red button in the current social and global climate, and I get the feeling he's just waiting to write whole volumes of amendments.

So what exactly does a candidate have to do to have "good Christian values"? If I remember correctly, the current guy got elected on a platform of "good Christian values", and look where that's got us.

Posted on February 13, 2008 8:49 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Mixed Bag.

Saturday I took advantage of the freakishly warm weather (before the arctic cold blew in Sunday morning) and finished sanding the cabinet I'd started several months ago. After having spent a total of about 12 hours in a mask over the course of this project, I'm going to say this will probably be the last furniture heatgunning project I take on. Everything will get dipped from this point forward, and my fingers will thank me now that I have no skin left on them.

I have to buy a pair of new shelves and cut them to fit, a big piece of luann for the backing board, and have three new panes of glass cut. Finally, the original brass hardware is soaking in citrus stripper, and should be clean in another day or so. We're thinking a medium colored stain, nothing too dark, and this will make a fantastic bookcase.

Update: I found a picture I took of the cabinet before it got stripped:

With the cold air in town, we also tested out the insulating job I'd finished on the window last week, and the verdict is success, mostly: I didn't get each pocket entirely filled filled with insulation. I have to pull each spring out, stick some sort of wire down the hole, and break up the empty space at the bottom of each space, then stuff some more insulation in there. But the part that is insulated is toasty warm compared to the other windows in the house, and that's worth it to me.

In other news: I had no idea Bill Clinton was going to be in Catonsville yesterday. If I'd known that, I would have gone to see him, elbowing the retirees out of the way to shake his hand. Crap.

Trivia corner: Am I the only one who didn't know that the largest denomination the U.S. Treasury prints is the $100 bill?

And finally, a New Favorite Drink: The Lychee Martini, introduced by good friends at a dinner party on Saturday evening over a table of Korean food. Who knew that radish kimchi was so good? (Now, the problem: Identify radish kimchi from the hundreds of different varieties on the shelf at the Korean grocery.)

Posted on February 11, 2008 8:43 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

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

A Quick Shout-Out.

I've been thinking about my Mom's Mom for the past couple of weeks, even before Jen pulled Rappin' Santa out of the tupperware container labeled XMAS. Somewhere around Thanksgiving I started remembering the holidays at her house, which were always a high point of the year (except for the drive): the sound of my mom's relatives gathered around the dining room table, the taste and smell of fantastic food, King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, or It's A Wonderful Life on WNEW (Pre-Fox channel 5 out of NYC, "Your choice is FIVE!") in the downstairs family room, the smell of pipe smoke from my grandfather, Pop-Tarts for breakfast (served to us with a knowing, I'm-your-grandmother-so-I'm-spoiling-you twinkle), and the general sense of safety and happiness that enveloped us as we enjoyed the holiday together.

I miss my Grandma, but I'm happy to remember the holidays she hosted and the feeling it still gives me. Everyone should be so lucky.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Posted on December 24, 2007 8:22 PM | link to this entry

Communal Space.

One of the many weblogs I scan daily is Freelance Switch, which has all manner of helpful hints and information for the sole proprietor, small business owner, and hired gun. One recent article that caught my attention was about a group of Philadelphia free agents who essentially banded together to create a communal design space, called Independents Hall. The inspirational part, for me, was the story of the guy who saw a need to create a community, and went out and did it. The paragraph explaining how he got people involved is a case study for building interest in, well, anything, really:

“I started with going to all these different meet-up groups and finding ways to bring them together and cross-pollinate them. I did that sort of physical outreach and then started a mailing list, which was just a place for people to converse about…whatever. It didn’t really matter to me at the time. As long as they were talking, it was good,” he says. Soon, Hillman and some friends and colleagues started face-to-face events of their own...

...The first meeting consisted of four brave souls who came out in the middle of a snowstorm. The next one was a little bit bigger, and the next one even bigger. It kept snowballing from there says Hillman. “That whole visibility thing was finally starting to go somewhere, and people said ‘whoa I had no idea how much stuff was going on in Philadelphia. I had no idea that my neighbor was doing x-y-z,’ and I thought, ‘finally, people are getting this.’”

On a related topic, I've often thought it would be great to share part of the house here with other freelancers in the area, or find a cheap space to rent, fill it with tables, haul in a printer or two, set up a wireless network, and put the word out. I imagine, like any other community-building exercise, it would be taxing to be the glue and the energy, but I bet the underlying guidelines would be much the same as other successful online communities, only with flesh-and-blood people and not screen names.

Posted on September 28, 2007 1:58 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Gadget Envy, Decoration, and Light Hauling.

Looks like the iPhone made a big splash yesterday. I don't have one yet, but I think I'll take the plunge in a month or so to replace my aging Motorola v551. It was pretty funny to see a local pseudo-celebrity make a complete ass of himself for the 11PM newscast; when I knew him seven years ago, he was Johnny shit-on-Apple.

Yesterday we spent a good bit of time selecting, refining, and printing some photos so that we could finally hang something on our living room wall. A few days ago we spent a pile of money at IKEA for some black frames in assorted sizes and came up with an arrangement that would make a design professor proud. Guests who've visited must think we're strange because our house has featured virtually nothing on the walls in the main living areas—no pictures of us, no posters, wall hangings, tapestries, or animal pelts. I admit, that is pretty weird. After all the hard work we've put into this dump, it's great to finally put our personal mark on the walls and see familiar faces looking back at us.

Finally, in preparation for the Fourth of July celebration (and to take advantage of the relatively balmy weather), we did some cleaning in the yard around the woodpile, which was threatening to swallow the southwest corner of the yard. Two trips and eight boxes of dead wood later, we reclaimed a good portion of our lawn from the creeping english ivy and dead brush. This makes absolutely no difference in the condition of the lawn back there, which looks like a patch of the Kalahari desert—my attempt at tilling and reseeding failed miserably. I've recently come to the sad realization that the only thing that will help our back lawn is about five cubic tons of fill dirt and a truckload of sod. And I'll hire someone else to handle that project, for sure.

Posted on June 30, 2007 9:29 PM | link to this entry

Head Count

Yeah, the Idiot is still here. The weekend was a blur of planting, digging, hauling, weeding, watering, and mulching. Today I hit the ground running, fixing both our office network and spending a good part of the day fixing someone else's network. There hasn't been a whole lot of time for pictures or words, unfortunately, but I'm going to try to shoot at least one thing a day if I can't write anything and post it here.

As of 11:50, Flickr is down for maintenance, so I'm off the hook for today.

Posted on May 29, 2007 11:48 PM | link to this entry

Recap

There's been a lot of silence around here lately. I've been putting stuff up in the sidebar, but the main feed here has been quiet due to a hectic schedule and the winter blahs. I'll recap the highlights:

The storm that kicked the crap out of New England blew through here with a vengeance, but did no lasting damage to the Lockardugan compound. I thought for sure that I'd wake to find the greenhouse impaled by a large branch from the sugar maple in the backyard, but it's still standing. The blue house across the street did not fare so well, though—a century-old tree of unknown species gave up at the root ball and fell over into the empty side yard. A neighbor further down the street lost a pine tree which fell directly into his front porch, and as of yesterday afternoon the chippers made short work of it. Between some ill-advised elective pruning and this week's storm, that side of the street is looking much thinner this year.

Over the last few weeks I've been playing follow-the-bouncing-ball with the city over our water situation. We've been having problems with our water for years now: it goes from almost clear to disgustingly rusty in weekly cycles, with no real rhyme or reason, and it's ruined much of our whitest laundry. I spent time on the phone with DPW, who claim they came out and cleared the hydrants, and the city labs (who are supposedly tasked with testing the water), who gave me multiple numbers to call in a futile search for someone who could help. I gave up on the city, and yesterday morning we had a pair of plumbers in to install a commercial filter just inside the basement wall. Our plumbers are true Baltimoreans, in that they have the honest accent I can only mimic, and they always appear in a cloud of cigarette smoke, but they are knowledgeable, quick, and the nicest contractors I think I've ever dealt with. While they were here I had them quote on moving one of the radiators back into the dining room, and when we get a little money in the door I'll have them come back and do it in preparation for next winter.

Jen and I have been searching for floor coverings ever since we got in this house, and as anyone who has looked at rugs can relate, it's an expensive proposition. For a premade rug to mostly fit one of our bedrooms (most rugs come 6' x 9' or 8' x 10', and our bedrooms are all 12' x 12') we'd be paying over a grand for something that kind of looked good. Our good friends R&K hipped us to buying carpet remnants and having the edges bound, and it felt like the scene in The Miracle Worker where Helen Keller finally gets it. We drove out to Security to one of the local carpet dealers' warehouses and shlepped through forests of carpet rolls, holding this paint chip up against that color and marveling at some of the deep-discount patterns that reminded us of decades past. We settled on one color and pattern for our bedroom, but didn't have luck with the other rooms despite the selection.

For the rock-bottom price of $300, I scored an Aluminum G4 PowerBook from Craigslist last night for Jen to use as a travel laptop. It's 15" and been used pretty well (the power cord is a little flaky due to a drop, which may prompt the purchase of a replacement power board off eBay) but the screen is bright, everything works, and it came with a nice Brenthaven laptop backpack, which usually retails for over $100. I'd say we made out very well.

Finally, I'm frantically trying to fit in as much illustration as I can before May 3rd, which is the submission deadline for page layouts in the book I'll be advertising in. I have two images that I've settled on, but I need at least two more to feel comfortable, and I don't have them yet. For now, I'm working late in the evening trying to balance paying work and illustration so that I can hit all the deadlines...cross your fingers for me.

Posted on April 18, 2007 9:52 AM | link to this entry

Zeitgeist, Plus Or Minus 1 Year.

So while I was in San Francisco tippity-tapping away for the Man, Jen took advantage of our three-month extended NetFlix promotional and ordered the first three Deadwood DVDs to watch. She got all the way to Episode Seven before I got home, and we took some time out on Saturday to pop the next disc in. Already, I'm hooked, and that's only three episodes. Great writing, production values, and characters (not to mention the acting.) Yet another series we're coming in late on.

While I was in the S-F and staying with my friend Nick, Apple finally shipped the Apple TV, which required a trip to the Apple Store downtown to pick one up. He got it home and hooked it up to his plasma, and within about two minutes had music streaming from his laptop. The quality of the downloads available from iTunes was a little disappointing, to my eye—the encoding was pixellated and blocky. Not satisfied with the standard configuration, Nick devoured all twenty-two pages of forum postings by the Apple TV hackers, and during the course of the next evening I watched him dissect his box, load a few files via a FireWire enclosure, and reassemble it so that he had SSH and the ability to modify the system. From there, he encoded and uploaded several movies that weren't offered through iTunes, and they looked much better. He was still perfecting his process when I had to leave, so I'm not sure how much success he's had since then. My opinion of it is that it's a nice toy, but for $300 I'd rather buy a used Mini and build my own streaming video server to stick under the TV. It's not robust enough yet to warrant the cost or the limitations. Besides, we need a TIVO and a TV that has more than just a coaxial input first.

Finally, I had the opportunity to play with Aperture a little bit before I got too busy. My first reaction was WHOA. This application looks and feels like no other Apple product I've used. As I get further into it, I'll post results here.

Posted on April 2, 2007 10:23 AM | link to this entry

Prepare The Sled Dogs.

Well, InstaStormTrackerDopplerFirstWarningChopperOne weather (the Most Powerful In Maryland ^tm) alerts crawled across our TV screens last night warning us of something on the horizon, but after checking three different weathermen, the paper, and the gub'mint's website, nobody would commit to anything: the amount of self-promotional technology flogging is an inverse corrolary to the forecasting they actually do. We heard a lot of "well, we could get three to six inches of fresh snow, but it's probably going to be freezing rain." That forecast is about as useful as a sucking chest wound, asshole. What I'd appreciate is for you to commit to something so that I know for sure whether to join the mob at the safeway looting TP, milk, and Ho-Hos.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting any real snowfall this year, based on the schizophrenic weather we've had to date, but we seem to be getting some accumulation on the ground this morning, and they claim it's not stopping until tomorrow.

Note to the developer I met with yesterday: If you see me opening a MacBook Pro in front of you to give a presentation to our client, it's probably not a wise move to start in on an anti-Apple diatribe full of wild inaccuracies and total bullshit.

Posted on February 13, 2007 9:07 AM | link to this entry | comments (4)

Scattershot.

This morning at 7:45, on our way out to the gym, Jen mentioned that someone had parked their car in front of the house, and that there was nobody inside. We packed up the Jeep and sat at the head of our driveway for a minute, contemplating the idiocy: this person had stopped their Subaru on the road half in front of our driveway at a point where making a left turn would have been impossible. All manner of scenarios crossed my mind, but the top on the list was an empty gas tank and a dead motor. OK, fine; park on the side of the road and hike to the gas station. But to leave a car obviously blocking a driveway is a big what the fuck?

Really, what I wanted to do was go bumper-to-bumper with the Jeep in 4lo and push the fucker back ten feet, but Jen's cooler head prevailed. "Why don't you wait, and if it's here when we get back, you can move it," she suggested. Of course, it was gone when we returned, ruining any chance I had at automotive payback. The whole thing makes me wish I'd had one of these to stick under his windshield wiper.

* * *

Yesterday I rose at 7 to feed the cats and noticed a spectacular sunrise out the window as I checked my email. I put the G3 on my mini tripod and set the intervalometer to 1 minute, and left it for a 100-shot sequence (there's no way to increase the number of shots past 100, unfortunately; otherwise I'd leave it there all day and burn through a memory card). The sky was overcast and wound up killing most of the colors as the morning wore on, so the results are pretty dull.

This got me thinking, though, and I thought I'd revisit a project I did last year, where I shot one picture each day at roughly the same time for a month to see what the changes brought. (I have a particular fascination with time-lapse photography.) I've got an old Kodak DC-3400 that's been gathering dust for years now, and I decided to put it to use for a new project: one shot each day for the rest of the year (and maybe beyond) to compare the changes. We'll see what happens.

* * *

I sent an email to a new contact the other day, highlighting my illustration work, and I got a very favorable response back which made the brain start thinking of new assignments. I have one series that I'm going to start as soon as I get a little downtime (it's very busy around here right now) and I think I'm going to continue the Alphabet Project with some substitutions and a new A-Z series, as well as a focus on editorial work to build out my portfolio. I'm lucky enough to have a benefactor who made a sizable contribution to the Get-The-Idiot's-Promotional-Work-Out-There fund, and I aim to make that work as soon as I've got my book where I want it (I estimate another couple of months.)

* * *

I got a long-awaited check in the mail Saturday which should ease a little of the financial pinching I've been feeling lately; after some bills get paid and I sock a bunch away for taxes, I have a bunch of things I need to look at purchasing, in not so particular order:

• A Powerbook Sleeve - This machine is too valuable to get dinged up.
• A new iPod holder - for the gym. Mine disappeared the week I got my iPod. It's most likely still in the center console of the rental car I was driving at the time.
• New headphones - Again, for the gym. This pair is one hair away from falling apart.
• An LLC for my design business (as yet unnamed.) - Time to get serious.
• A camera bag - I was lucky enough to receive a HUGE zoom lens for X-mas this year, and I'd like to be able to protect it if at all possible.
• A smaller lens - The zoom is FANTASTIC but not for short to medium-length shots, something I wasn't counting on (at normal range, without zoom, it's still strong enough to view other planets.)
• Lens filters - To protect the investment.

Posted on January 24, 2007 10:51 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Happy Holidays

I haven't been writing much around here the last couple of weeks, sorry...it's been very busy here at Idiot Central. Everyone have a safe and healthy New Year, and I'll promise to write more in 2007.

Posted on December 31, 2006 7:06 PM | link to this entry

Bad News.

Penn is home again, and his belly is shaved from one side to the other, so he looks like a standard poodle shaving experiment gone horribly wrong. The vet isn't sure, but this could be one of two things: Feline infectious peritonitis, which is an untreatable virus thing that cats can get at birth, or, more seriously, mysenteric cancer (a fancy way of saying he might have a nonspecific cancer throughout the sac that surrounds his organs).

The vet is sending some of the fluid that's gathering in his abdomen out for some tests which might tell us something more conclusive, but the nature of FIP is such that they can't be positive about it. The next steps will probably be some form of exploratory surgery to determine exactly what's happening inside.

Neither one of these things is good news; FIP is lousy, and cancer is shitty. This sucks.

Posted on November 14, 2006 12:13 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Wednesday Night Stories.

Hmm. Another Lost where nothing really happened. I understand the need to balance the careful unraveling of the story vs. time constraints and suspense, but I'm getting a little X-filed out here. (X-filed is when three or four "special" programs go by that are supposed to "unlock new secrets" but really don't say anything at all-usually ending with Mulder or Scully outside an empty warehouse where all the secrets used to be, and nothing ever got solved.) Obviously the Others are on the island are there for some sort of corporate-sponsored mindfuck, but what the hell?

As for Project Runway, I'm thinking Jeffrey is getting booted. I'm half on his side and half thinking he may well have cheated, but who knows. It all reflects poorly on Laura for bringing it up.

Posted on October 11, 2006 11:36 PM | link to this entry

The Post Wherein Nothing Actually Happens.

That's right. There's not really anything new to report this week, other than working my ass off. The weekend was productive in areas other than the office, though—our yard, which was resembling the craggy face of a man who's lived in a dumpster for five years, got a shave and a shine, so it looks now like people actually live here. The back lawn got its first mow in four weeks (shrugs shoulders) and the garden got some long-needed attention. I also busted out the arbor saw and trimmed the oak tree back some more, so that the green stuff on the ground that resembles grass actually gets some sunlight and has a chance to grow.

In other unrelated news, we joined a phalanx of geekdom on Saturday morning to line up outside a mall and visit the grand opening of the Columbia Apple Store, which, by MapQuest's figuring, is only 9.24 miles from our house. Living in a major metropolitan area has its privileges. Dave joined us for the wait, and we entered the store to applause (?!?) and joined the masses filing around looking at pretty hardware. Jen fell in love immediately with the 30" Cinema display—and who wouldn't, really—while I peeped the MacBooks for the first time and also got an eyeful of the new 24" iMac. After some quality ogling time and a brief discussion, we collected our free T-shirts and headed out. On the ride home, I considered the idea of a second job, but Jen reminded me that I don't have enough time to finish my own work, let alone work retail hours. Still, the idea is strangely appealing....

Posted on September 26, 2006 9:22 AM | link to this entry | comments (5)

Grumble

I just wrote a long post about how annoyed I am with small-minded clients, but I'm going to leave that one as a draft and not publish it. Suffice it to say, I've had my fill of parties who don't listen to good advice.

Posted on September 20, 2006 2:40 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Random Thoughts.

• I haven't been writing much around here lately. Most of the stuff I'm posting goes over in the interesting links section, because I don't have enough time to write a full post about something, or I can't get coherent writing together about whatever it is I'm thinking.
• Project Runway was halfway surprising last night—basket-hat guy won, which was a big surprise, neck-tattoo guy almost lost (and continued to be a dick—no suprise), and boring barbie-guy got kicked off—again, no suprise.
• I haven't been taking too many pictures lately either. Having an office in one's house and living in the suburbs means you're taking pictures of your cats or nothing at all.
• Having a PC laptop with a dead clock battery is kind of like knowing the main character in Memento; just when you've fixed the BIOS settings, the clock settings, and rebooted twice, it's time to go to bed, so you have to shut it down and go through the process all over again because it won't sleep like a proper computer should (see: Apple.)
• Looks like I'm heading west again sometime in September. Details to come.

Posted on August 24, 2006 12:15 PM | link to this entry

Dear Fellow Scout Owner.

You may not remember me, but we crossed paths in the Citgo parking lot about two years ago, sitting in a ’78 Scout about the same color as yours. It turns out I live around the corner from you.

I’ve owned my Scout since 1997, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I bought it from a nice fellow in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who gave me a thick folder with all the receipts he’d collected while he owned it. It’s taken me to the beach, to the Outer Banks, camping, and to the Home Depot, and has always been a dependable truck.

Unfortunately, in the last two years, I haven’t been able to spend the money or the time on my Scout that it deserves, so it’s been sitting quietly in my driveway. As a result, the A and B pillars have finally given way to rust, and the front quarters have gone from OK to dissolving. I haven’t turned the engine over in a year, but she ran after I cleaned the fuel line and added some new gas to the tank.

I’m writing this letter to see if a fellow Scout owner would be interested in giving mine a good home. While it’s not in turnkey condition, and needs a good deal of work, I know that it’s got plenty of good parts, and I’d rather see somebody use it to keep a Scout running than cut it up for a Jeep. Here’s a breakdown, if you’re interested:

304 V-8, unknown number of miles (I’d guess somewhere in the 150K range)
3-speed Borg-Warner T-19 with a low 6-1 granny gear
Dana 44 axles (rear at 3.54)
Dana 20 transfer case
Aftermarket 3-piece rollbar
Steel top with pinhole leaks around rear corners, in relatively good shape, and a steel hatch. Sliding window glass, decent headliner.
Hi-back bucket seats and a good fold and tumble rear seat, all in green/brown vinyl
Kayline softtop in Nutmeg, with all accessories, in good shape-no leaks or tears.
Tuffy locking center console in black

I’ve also got a tub of parts, including a set of backup headlights, four steel quarter patches, and a second steel windshield with minor rust.

I don’t have a price set, but if you’re interested and would like to make an offer, or have any questions, please give me a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX and we can set up a time to talk or take a look at it.

* * *

I stopped off to deliver this letter last weekend to a neighbor up the street, and wound up meeting him on his way out the front door. As it turns out, he was going to approach me about buying his Scout. While I was half tempted to buy it from him, it still wouldn't get me to the place I'd like to be—a working, viable truck with no rust, so I turned him down.

My second option was to call my local Scout repair guy yesterday, only to find that he'd closed his shop six months ago and moved to Pennsylvania to be a welder. While I'm happy for him to be moving on, this also feels like another chapter ending in life. The close proximity of his shop was one of the reasons I decided to buy a 20-year-old truck. He was the first stop I made to have a rollbar installed and some carb work done, because he knew Scouts in and out, and suggested a number of things to make the truck run better (which he did, thankfully.) We struck up a funny kind of aquaintance, the kind that I usually have with mechanics and tradesmen, where they don't quite know what to make of the skinny little guy who knows how to clean a carb or sweat pipes or hang joists. I wound up doing a little work in trade with him, and he kept my truck running, but begged off on the bodywork.

He had a few ideas for who might be interested in my truck, but cautioned me that rigs and parts on eBay aren't moving as fast as they used to, with gas prices being where they are now. I thanked him for his time, wished him well, and hung up the phone.

I thought about it on and off for the remainder of the evening, and my feelings were mixed. While I'm glad to finally have resolved myself to selling my truck, I'm still torn by the emotional attachments I have to it. For awhile, I felt like I was making room for something better (perhaps this will make room for some work to be done on the garage, or a more efficient vehicle?), but now I'm discouraged. I think maybe getting the karmic wheel spinning is going to take a much bigger push than I'd hoped.

Posted on August 15, 2006 11:42 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Back From The Swamp.

The rest of the East Coast is hot as Hades right now, but our little corner of the world is cool. We're holed up in the bedroom, with the A/C on 75° waiting for the Smackdown Episode of Project Runway to come on at 10. Apparently somebody's getting the axe, and we're placing bets on who it might be. (I say crazy basket-head guy.)

Today's business trip to D.C. was successful, although predictably hot. We met up with our contact at Union Station and ate lunch under the huge barrel-vaulted ceiling of the main hall. Then we traveled a few blocks south, where we had a meeting in an office with a spectacular view of the Capitol Building. This particular meeting was Jen's show, and she did a great job with the clients (and the work!) while I was happy to take a back seat and watch.

Whoops—it's time to go. Make it work!

update: Wow, I didn't expect that.

Posted on August 2, 2006 9:44 PM | link to this entry

The Natural Order.

Let's all wish my sister Renie a warm, wonderful 29th birthday today! Renie, we hope it's a great day for you.

There's not much to discuss here in C-Ville, other than the fact that we're A. totally finished with picnic food for a while (them nitrates will clean you out, and not in a good way) and B. embarking on a Campaign To Eat Healthier, all in the wake of the 4th of July Parade. Being left with 24 hamburger patties on the 5th means we gave the FoodSaver a workout, stocking our freezer for the next year's worth of grilling. One of the benefits of post-party cleanup is that we still have a sizeable cache of beer in the basement, something that's been in pretty short supply around here lately.

Also, I finished the V entry for the Alphabet Project this morning, bringing order back from chaos. I'll make a slight detour to work on an obituary piece to commemorate Ken Lay's passing, and then return to X later in the week.

Posted on July 10, 2006 1:35 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Various And Sundry.

I really haven't been writing much around here lately. I don't know what to attribute this to—summer blahs, lack of free time, nothing to say, scattered brainwaves—but there is stuff going on right now. In the spirit of my old weblog, which used to feature myriad lists of random things, a sample braindump:

• Books to buy: Information Architecture For Designers, by Peter Van Djick: I peeped this at Borders today, and I need to own this book. It's got a lot of things that I know, but a whole lot of things that I don't, and some excellent suggestions for building larger sites. Designing for Small Screens, by Studio 7.5: Lately I've been pecking at the edges of design for wireless handsets, and I think there may be a larger project for me on the horizon. I'm going to hold off on buying this until I have the official go-ahead on that, but this book is full of meaty goodness—screen sizes, font selection, UI best practices, and colors.
• Vehicle Update: The Jeep is officially in the shop for repairs to the left butt-cheek. Apparently they're going to pull the bumper, see if there's any damage to the body, and straighten out the mount points before respraying the tailgate and adding a new endcap. It will be wondrous to be able to open the rear and haul stuff once again—the trusty Saturn has been doing yeoman's duty hauling dead bodies mulch, garbage, potting soil, etc.
• From Batteries.com, a 5-watt trickle charger. I need to read up on solar power and figure out if something like this would provide enough power to run a laptop, or if I'd need something much bigger.
• My PC laptop has been raised from the dead and hurtled into the new century; it's now cheerfully running a clean copy of XP Home, and life is rosier in the studio. Simple shit like screen refreshing, peripheral support, modern drivers and the ability to load and use current software is really swell. Thanks for the assist, Pop. (sidenote: in re-organizing the office this week, I found an old copy of Virtual PC from the late 90's in its original box: inside was a fresh Windows 98 install disc with the Microsoft packaging and serial number. Did you hear me slap my own forehead sometime Monday night? It was pretty loud.) After a long and noble career, the Celeron 466 clone with four cooling fans has been mothballed in the attic until further notice.
• The studio here at Lockardugan Industries has gone through some desperately-needed renovation. We bought $50 worth of modular shelving and installed it in the closet this past week, replacing a wobbly chipboard cabinet and acres of wasted space with wire racks and a Teutonic sense of order. $30 worth of IKEA plastic bins enclose most of our debris and get it up off the floor and out of our hair, which lends to a better working relationship. Jen also scored the Biggest Desk In The Universe, a slab of Swedish wood the size of a aircraft carrier, on sale—finally replacing the Doctor's ancient oak desk with something ergonomically functional. She now has workspace to breathe, although we will have to install warning lights to prevent planes on the glidepath to BWI from entering the office window at high speeds. I also bought some RJ-45 connectors (note to self: Belkin sucks donkey dicks) and replaced all our ancient patchcords with modern Cat 5e wiring, something that improved our network speed one hundredfold (I'm not kidding—There were at least two 10baseT wires in the office hooked up to a 100baseT switch. D'oh!) and makes printing so much better.
• Effective immediately, I'm going to be requiring a 30% down payment on acceptance of contract from my clients so that I can afford to keep the doors open. This net-90 shit is getting old.
• We will be buying an electric pet grooming clipper to shave Penn down to the skin at some point this month. This cat sheds more than a Siberian yak on holiday in Havana, and his hair is everywhere. It's shedding so fast that we cut mats of it out and more appear the next day. Pictures to come.
• Our garden seems to be producing some healthy plants. We have two tomatoes already growing, and the cucumber vines are five times the size of the anemic-looking stubs I grew last year. This weekend we have to build and install some kind of cage or ladder for them to climb, and then enclose the whole garden to keep the varmints out. (Mr. Squirrel, I'm looking at you.)

There's probably more, but I can't think of anything right now.

Posted on June 7, 2006 10:24 PM | link to this entry | comments (4)

Still On PDX Time.

Jen and I are groggily sipping (nay, gulping) coffee this morning and attempting to wake up. Last night's curtain call came at 4AM, after a long day of edits and new page layout for her and pre-production Photoshop work for me. She's been pulling these hours for two weeks now—we were talking via iChat at midnight PST last week while I was in Oregon—but this is the final stretch. The client is still trying to stuff new pages, pictures, and random changes into the mixture this morning, but she has slammed the door on their little fingers (the deadline is Friday) and we are in cleanup mode from here on out.

At one point last night, she asked me if all this was worth it, and I had to remind myself that we aren't working for someone else on a salary, we get to work together (shockingly well yesterday, I might add), and we get to make the decisions as to how far we'll go for our clients (which is usually pretty far).

Yeah, 4AM sucks, but the commute is pretty sweet.

Posted on May 25, 2006 10:40 AM | link to this entry

A Quick Snapshot.

Things around Idiot Central have been exceptionally busy this past week; we're doing a lot of running, planning, and (hopefully) lining up some good things for the future. I'm not going to have much time to write this week, nor will there be an addition to the Alphabet Project (even though the letter T lends itself to many willing and able participants). But I'll try to post pretty pictures in the next couple of days, so keep your eyes peeled.

Posted on April 24, 2006 1:27 PM | link to this entry

Is This A Bad Thing Or Not?

Should I be concerned about the fact that our government is selling the ownership of six US ports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates? (One of the ports is here in Baltimore.) Bush is now distancing himself from the deal and the chairman of the DHS is threatening to veto it all the way up the line, but I don't know if this is simply political rhetoric or if it's actually a threat to this country's security. The 'Merican in me sez it's a bad idea, even if I don't actually believe that our docs would suddenly be swarmed with UAE nationals. However, I'm seriously concerned that we'd sell off control of such important gateways to the country to a foreign-based power with little or no fanfare (or any Congressional hearings...did you hear them talking about it? I sure didn't). Given the state of sheer panic this Administration likes to keep us at—which is really the only reason I can give for their second term—I'm surprised they tried to end-run this little deal around us, and I wonder who is making money on the deal (and why nobody's dug up that story yet.)

Update: NPR reports that the current nominee to run the U.S. Maritime Administration, David Sanborn, was a former top official of Dubai Ports World, the overseas company mentioned above. Also, the current Treasury Secretary, John Snow, was a former official of the CSX corporation, who sold their port interests for over a billion dollars, to Dubai Ports World.

Posted on February 22, 2006 4:00 PM | link to this entry

Wherin Nothing Really Happened.

I could write here about viewing the Pianist on Saturday evening, and spending most of Sunday in an existential funk—watch the scene where Adrien Brody walks crying through the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, amid broken furniture and blowing feathers, and then try to look at the Crate & Barrel catalog without slitting your wrists.

I could mention how I spent my Sunday in the basement painting the last of the walls Kilz white, but that would be boring. I could take pictures and post them, too, but that would be incredibly dull, and you really don't give a shit about my basement. I could proudly mention that the basement is now somewhat organized, is about seven shades brighter, and has a pair of tables set up next to the only south-facing window under a grow lamp for our vegetable seed. I suppose that's a good thing.

Honestly, it was a pretty quiet weekend, and now it's Monday.

P.S. Lis- I get the Adrien Brody thing now. You're on your own with Buscemi, but I get the Brody thing.

Posted on January 16, 2006 11:47 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Ha Ha, Motherfucker.

Maryland OKs Wal-Mart Health Care Bill.

Lately (read: the last two weeks) our Republican governor has been announcing all kinds of new money for education programs here in Maryland. Most people who know the Idiot King know that I don't care much for our current Governor; those people should also understand that I held the last Governor, a Democrat who probably broke records for graft and mismanagement, somewhere below contempt. You could probably say I hate the player and the game. It's not lost on me that the previous administration left a mess in their wake, and the current Gov had to clean it up before he could start spending money again.

However, the current Gov vetoed the so-called "Wal-Mart Bill" last year, a bit of legislation designed to force companies with more than 10,000 employees to take on at least 8% of healthcare costs for those people they employ. Predictably, Wal-Mart is upset about this; predictably the other large companies in Maryland are upset about this too. And, predictably, our Governor is upset, because he got the shit lobbied out of him, and put himself firmly in the corner of Big Business. (I'll pause here to link to this page, which shows Wal-mart's profit sheet for the last year. Those are billions with a capital "B", by the way.) So pardon me if I don't give a shit about Wal-Mart crying in its coffee this morning. Am I going to be upset if the cost of cat litter at the Sam's Club goes up by a penny? No. Economies of scale for a company as large as Wal-Mart mean that I'll probably never see more than a 5 or 10-cent increase in the cost of my goods, even if most other states follow Maryland's lead and implement a similar bill—which, I'd guess, is going to happen in blue states but not red ones. (Full disclosure: We shop at Sam's Club but not Wal-Mart; if there was a Costco or BJ's closer to us, I'd switch.)

"We also find that 7% of the children of employees of large retailers are uninsured, compared to 19% reported by Wal-Mart. While 46% of the children of Wal-Mart workers are either uninsured or on Medicaid/SCHIP, the comparable figure for children of all large retail workers is 29%. Wal-Mart workers are less likely than workers in all large retail to have job based coverage (48% compared to 54%). Wal-Mart workers' enrollment in Medicaid nationally is similar to large retail as a whole." Source

As a self-employed individual who is shopping for health insurance to prepare for (hopefully) a family in the near future, I can testify here and to Congress just how fucking expensive it is to insure oneself. I can only imagine how hard it must be for a Wal-Mart employee, most of whom aren't making much above the Federal poverty level (FYI, in 2004 it's $18,850 for a family of four). Am I sad that large companies in this state are being forced to offer the minimum in health care benefits? No. I'd wager that most of these companies offer plans that are fair and comprehensive anyway. I have a problem with the huge ones, who are muscling their way into every community across the land and closing down smaller stores who most likely offered better benefits.

I am happy, though, that somebody realizes how difficult it is to keep up with the rising costs of living here in the middle class. And I'm happy my state is making a stand.

Posted on January 13, 2006 10:13 AM | link to this entry

Next Steps.

The day after Christmas, I spent a total of two minutes in the Kinko's making copies of two illustrations for finishing, and twenty minutes waiting to get out of the parking lot. Somewhere around minute fifteen I swore this was the last time I'd make the trip.

I bought a Canon D320 copier this afternoon with the money from one of my freelance checks. I spent a good deal of time in the two competing office stores comparing feature sets, pricing, and merchandise. Basically, the choices in my price point came down to a Sharp model and this Canon. I was leaning towards the Sharp because of two things: it had a 25-400% zoom range, vs. 50-200% on the Canon. It also looked like the scanning head inside was built a little stronger vs. the Canon—three pulleys instead of one. It also came with a document feeder on the hood, but that's like buying a house with a tennis court—it's nice, but how many times are you really gonna use it?

One thing caught my eye on the side of the Canon, though, that changed things: A USB port. Out of the box, it prints to a PC, which is a huge bonus. Plus, it's $50 cheaper with a rebate and it has an EnergyStar feature which powers it down to sleep after it's idle for two minutes. I wanted the Canon after my experience with my camera, and I figure the fact that the Canon print engine inside our twelve-year-old printer upstairs is still kicking has to mean something.

So, the next part of the puzzle is in place; I'm on the letter G, with I already done and H in the works. More updates later.

Posted on December 28, 2005 10:36 PM | link to this entry

Since When Did In Stock Mean January 3?

I'm spending the morning chasing down the orders I've placed online. Stuff that I bought a week and a half ago is taking way too long to ship. Apparently my mother's present, which was listed as "in stock" on the 6th, is now listed as "expected" by the 27th, which means it would show up on the 3rd. After 15 minutes listening to the cheery hold-message people sing the praises of a company-badged credit card, I find out it's actually discontinued (Mom, you're getting a call in 5 minutes.) My father's gift didn't ship until this morning, even though I bought it last monday. My sister's gift is "processing", which is shorthand for "we don't know where the fuck we put it, but we sure did charge the full amount on your VISA card."

On the sunnier side of Christmas, we put our ornaments on the tree on Thursday, after chasing down lights and hooks in two separate trips, one of which equated to a fifteen-minute wait on line at the dollar store. Want to get real good and depressed during the holiday season? Go hang out at the dollar store, baby. It's what I imagine a toilet-paper line in Soviet Russia to have been like, with bonus added Christmas Musak. Nobody looks happy to be there, least of all the cashiers, who move painfully slow like those robots at Disneyland.

Saturday night we stopped over to the Home of Dismay to have some drinks with the proprietors; thanks for the hospitality, C. and S. We sat in front of a warm fire, had fun chatting, and made some new degree-of-separation connections; this world is indeed smaller than it looks.

Sunday I started working in the basement to shore up the foundation walls. Step one is to scrape all the crud off with a steel brush, and inhale century-old dust. (I was wearing a mask, Mom. No worries.) Step two is to mix an acid solution and wash off the salt and other mineral deposits. Step three is to wash off the acid with water. Step four is to mix some hydraulic cement and fill in all the cracks, gaps, and edges of the walls. Step five is to sit back and drink a beer while everything dries. The final step is to use a big fat roller and start applying Drylok to what's left. I'd like to say I got far, but this is going to take some time; our walls are 80 years old and in need of some serious attention. I'm hopeful that this will cut back on some of the drafty air down there, as well as keep the moisture and crickets out. Plus, a coat of white Drylok with another coat of bright white paint will make the place a lot less depressing.

I'd have to say, mixing and applying the cement has to have been the most bizarre experience I've had in a while. When kneaded between the fingers, as the directions describe, it has the consistency of soft feces. (They call it "putty", but that's a lie.) Plus, it gets warm as it sets up, so I found myself smearing dark warm baby poo on the walls of my basement. After a while, I started really getting into it, trying to get the poo to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible, working it like sculptural clay, using the heel of my palm to flatten out the ridges. I stepped back and admired my basement poo sculpture with a sense of satisfaction.

Finally, our lights from Rejuvenation arrived last week, and I hung the two hall fixtures on Saturday. We were concerned when we held them up to the cieling, as the shades had a greenish cast to them, but when I put them in and flipped the switch, the hall was filled with wonderful, diffuse amber light. The quality of the construction is high (although I think the fixtures could be a little heavier-weight steel) and the shades are about ten pounds apiece. Overall, they blend into the cieling but also look like they've been there since the house was put up—I think we nailed the period pretty well.

Posted on December 12, 2005 11:10 AM | link to this entry | comments (1)

The Salt & Pepper Ticket.

BALTIMORE, December 8. O'Malley Picks Brown As His Running Mate. Are these guys not photogenic, or what? If they don't already have their own buddy movie in production, I think I could come up with a few ideas:

1. A pair of mismatched cops have to learn to get along as they take down a corrupt system in a large city.
2. A pair of superheroes fight crime, while keeping their alter egos as everyday politicians a secret.
3. A duo of action movie stars fight to keep from killing each other as they play politicians in a murderous fight for the Governor's office.
4. Two inner-city gigolos fight crime by day and get busy by night.
5. Two cowboys discover their forbidden love for each other in 1963 Montana. (You'd like that, ladies, wouldn't you?)

I think Governor Hairpiece has his work cut out for him.

Posted on December 8, 2005 9:49 PM | link to this entry

Do You See The Light?

This weekend Jen and I ventured up to the Towson mall to get replacements for our glasses, which were responsible for seven of the last ten Richter-scale headaches recorded in the greater Baltimore area this summer. Jen has an inner ear more sensitive than a baby's bottom, and she's been fighting the urge to puke for about the last three weeks now. Repeated adjustments to her frames have left them bent and her eyes completely fucked up.

My own glasses have been a travesty for longer than I care to admit. Two years ago, I paid top dollar for Ray-Ban frames, and the plastic on them has been delaminating and flaking off for the last year. The expensive lenses have gotten increasingly cloudy and hazed over; when I put on the new glasses, I felt like I'd just had sucessful cataract surgery. The new frames are much the same as the old ones, although they're a different manufacturer and not tortoise-shell. Jen found a pair of frames that have highlights of gold and blue which accent her eyes and skin tone perfectly. She's still on the fence about the prescription, but she sure does look durn pretty.

While we waited for the lenses to be cut, we ventured over to the Apple store to lay hands on a Nano, which is about the most beautiful little piece of hardware I've ever seen. Apparently there are some issues about scratching screens, but overall it's very sexy. I also looked at the larger hardware, and realized that I'm better off waiting to pick up a 17" or 20" iMac than spending money on a Mini and another monitor—I wasn't aware that iMacs had full-size harddrives, which is crucial to our home upgrading plans. So I'll have to wait out a few more checks for that to happen. (a 20" model with a gig of RAM is roughly $2K.)

Posted on September 26, 2005 12:17 PM | link to this entry | comments (6)

Not Laboring So Much.

Hot on the heels of our successful kitchen planning visit, Jen and I decided to set aside Saturday for research and informational purposes. The plan was to get an early start and hit the Sears to view the selection of shiny appliances, but I realized that the grass on the front lawn was getting higher than the house, so we spent the morning outside cutting, hacking, weeding, and taming the greenery in the front yard. Then, armed with five recent copies of Consumer Reports (thanx, mom) and a notepad, we hit the top floor of Sears and rebuffed the first of fifty offers for help. (Next time, I think we're going to wear shirts that simply say, in Large Capital Letters, NO, WE'RE JUST BROWSING, THANKS.) We found a dishwasher we like, and then a range, and finally a refrigerator, after opening, closing, reading, crosschecking, pricing, and consulting our articles. (More information on our front-runners later.) That evening we returned to the house and plucked the second of two eggplant from our garden, followed Martha's recipe, and made eggplant parmesan. My history with eggplant has been a rocky and contentious one (or, an oogy and slimy one, as the case may be) so this was big experimentation for the Lockardugans. It didn't make me gag, I didn't turn into mush, and it was right tasty with some fresh parmesan cheese. Will wonders never cease!

Sunday morning we drug ourselves out of bed, put on our Going To Town Clothes and drove to Frederick for a romantic day of antiquing. The sun was out but not hot, the streets were full of people, and we only spent $11—the stores full of bargains are slowly giving way to upscale expensive antique boutiques and new craftmade furniture dealers, signs that they've turned the corner from loveable run-down old-timey city center to Washington Suburb. However, we stopped in at a spanish/mexican restaurant and ate one of the tastiest seafood dishes I've had in years.

Monday we returned to the yard and continued straightening up our ghetto-fabulous house. I got a finish coat of paint on the back atrium windows and the attic peak, and installed two screens for better ventilation, something I've been meaning to get to for, oh, about two months now. All this just reminds me of the long list of stuff still to do—there are two more sides of windows to go outside—but it's always good to feel like something got accomplished.

Posted on September 6, 2005 2:46 PM | link to this entry

No Time.

Drove to Hampstead and looked at some kitchen stuff this weekend. Pretty pretty cabinets. (Struggle To Resist Self Immolation Moment: standing in the stupid K-mart buying paint, on line behind two annoying, slow, rude women yelling into a cellphone, while the Carpenters sang Top of The World.) Came home and painted, painted painted. Succumbed to temptation and watched Sideways on DVD. Good movie, uncomfortable-making. Sunday spent shopping. Hunt for discounted grill at Target thwarted by policy of not holding items between stores: drove to local store, then to store on other side of beltway to be told the last grill was sold 25 minutes prior to arrival. Gave up, shopped for Cauzzis. Visited with babies, changed diapers, huffed baby smell. Yummy fresh baby smell. Returned home, scared up dinner, attempted resurrection of backup drive: "Bad boot sectors found". Up until 1PM freelancing, working computer mojo to no avail.

Posted on August 29, 2005 3:41 PM | link to this entry

Creeping Ennui...

Not much to report around here lately; you can tell the summer blahs have got me firmly in their grip. Jen and I got a bunch of crap done around the house this weekend—the hallway is now a lovely shade of green called celadon, which is light enough to be soothing but muted enough not to send us into fits of homicidal panic. It's an excellent transition from the downstairs to the upstairs, and provides as neutral a divider for all the other rooms as possible outside of gray. There's a teeny little hummingbird hanging around Jen's butterfly bush outside the kitchen window, the first one we've seen all year. And we finally got to enjoy the first tomato from the garden on Sunday, which was a treat.

I'm also about a day or two away from finally walking into the Apple Store and buying a new iBook. One more check (hopefully tonig