What's the deal
with the trucks? (in progress)
picks of the month:
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New Order - Republic
Down with the old-school dance-pop circa 1988.
steely dan - Citizen Disc 4
Nothing better to chill with than Steely Dan.
Urban Dance Squad - Life & Perspectives...
I always loved this band. Who would have thought that a bunch of Dutch skatepunks could rock so damn hard?
train - Mississippi
Jen got me hooked on this song, and now I'm driving everybody at work crazy with it.
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Max Payne
I got the demo off a Computer Gaming World CD. Very cool game- one section is set in the NYC subway, and damn, if they didn't get all the details just right. Very good. Too bad they laid off the whole development staff.
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- - - - movies - - - -
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I don't have a wish list. If I want something, I'll buy it my damn self.
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November 29, 2001
The Phone company came by to fix my line- it smells like a problem on their end. The guy came in, tested the line, re-connected the outside wiring and we got a dialtone. He came downstairs, looked over my wiring job, told me I did a good job, and then tested the lines again with the phones plugged in- the line is perfect, no shorts or bad equipment. He told me he wasn't going to write it up as an inside job. So, I'll go home and continue the wiring job, and tackle all the coax next. Once all that is out of the way, we'll focus on the network cabling.
Jeez,I forgot all about this. ho-ho.| link
November 28, 2001
I'm kind of scatterbrained today; I've not been getting enough sleep, so it's getting harder and harder to concentrate. The Breakaway web page is coming along well; it's probably the best corporate site I've done in years, and it was pretty simple to lay out.
Looking on Ebay, I realize that the comics collection I spent about $100 on when I was 17 is now worth about $50. I have a box of X-men comics from somewhere around issue 150 or so up until 220, and looking at comparable collections on Ebay I find stuff going for $50-75 or so. It would be great to at least realize a face value return on these, as I don't look at them anymore, but that's doubtful. | link
November 27, 2001
Leftover count: 5 meals and counting. >burp<
The phone company has to come in to fix my line this Thursday. I hooked in the new lines and now it's down. There's a dial tone out in the interface box but none at the two terminals next to the RJ-11 jack next to it; I think the little unit outside is busted. So I have to cough up $80 for the guy to come out and replace a $5 part.
Sun redesigned their site into an ugly piece of junk. For a company I always looked up to as far as having a strong, well developed design identity, they sure messed it up. What an ugly site they made.| link
November 26, 2001 - Monday
gobble gobble.
Home phone line is not working, but my DSL is. I also found out I should have used Cat5 cabling instead of 4-wire copper phone line in my house. Oh well. I think the wiring in my phone line got switched somehow but I'm not sure. I sure am learning a lot about phone wiring though...
more on the Thanksgiving stuff later...I'm tired and I feel like playing a game right now.| link
November 20, 2001
Came in this morning and found it hard to get moving; I was up until 1 last night cleaning the house (and I only got the first floor done!) I have to shop for food tonight and probably finish up the upstairs on Wednesday night. I was able to get everything back on the Palm as well; I lost the last two months of stuff or so, but I'll get back in the habit of sync'ing up the unit now.
I was able also to put in hooks and hang the bikes downstairs, move the speakers around and generally clean up the mess in the basement in order to pull the table away from the wall, open it up and clean out the wall behind it, as well as hang pictures back up in the dining room. Thank Christ, it's been too long.
Unfortunately, this also illuminates just how badly the whole frickin' house is crying out to be painted.
On the design front, I found this link today for a fantastic poster printing shop, and another one linked off of that. (via dooce)
This news makes it pretty clear that the salad days of having self-taught design/programming chops are pretty much over. With this "certification", shops are going to require poor shlebs to have taken some stupid test so that they can get a job.
And, looking at the show list on this site, it occurs to me just how much better music was in 1992.
Speaking of good music, here are a set of albums by a band called Hooverphonic, whose song This Strange Effect was remixed by Thievery Corporation a while back, and which I love. | link
November 19, 2001 - Monday
Back from NY state this weekend; Jen and I drove up to put the top on the Scout and see the folks. New York State, and especially Aurora, is beautiful this time of year. The town is filled with colorful leaves that actually haven't fallen yet (up on the hill, they're all gone, but down in town they were still up.) We got to see a lot of the family too; after getting everything done on Saturday we ordered pizza, drank PBR in cans (Consumer Reports listed it as the best domestic canned beer, and damn if it wasn't too bad!)
The Scout top went on without a hitch; it was actually easier this year than last year, funny enough. Jen, Renie and I put it on ourselves with judicious use of the sawhorses and some ingenuity, and all the screws went it smoothly. We even got the dome light hooked up again.
At 3am on Sunday morning, my mother woke us quietly, and we wrapped ourselves in warm clothes. We met in the kitchen, where she was brewing hot tea, and waited for my sister. We piled in her car and drove up Sherwood Road to a laneway above Brick Church Lane and parked; then we looked up and took in the incredible sight of the Leonid Meteor Shower. For about 15 minutes we watched outside until it got too cold, then jumped in the car and watched for another 45 minutes or so. Returning at 4:30, we crawled back into bed and slept until 10:30.
My Palm Pilot went down this weekend. I hard-reset it and it seems to have come back up (at least it's working.) But I have to re-sync it with the NT box tonight; I lost everything on it.
Great story about how a well-used symbol was developed. | Ha-ha, dummy. Your picture's all over the internet now. (via metafilter)| link
November 16, 2001
Didn't write yesterday- life was moving too quickly. But the carpet is now in the basement, and it looks fantastic. I spent a few nights organizing stuff down there, and hopefully with another few nights I can get everything from the dining room down there and put away in some fashion. The only stuff that's left upstairs are the two bikes, the cooler and some miscellaneous items.
Next up is to cut and install the shelf by the window; I got paid yesterday so when I get back I can get food and after Turkey Week is over, finish off the front of the house. I also have to have Jeff Curley over for beers when I get the wiring sorted out and roughed in (and the phone lines run) so that he can help me sort out the network questions I have. I also have to run the phone and network cabling up to the back bedroom, which entails cutting into the box in the back of the kitchen to start the line.
I think, after this project has wound down, I'm going to put up the plant hooks I was thinking about in the front room, replace the ugly track lighting in the living room with a longer, better positioned white track, and then *gulp* look at moving the light in the kitchen to the center of the room and replacing it with a cieling fan.
Seen on a highway overpass on I-83 leaving Baltimore this morning: "We Arm The World" written on an American flag.
Interesting info from Super Scout Specialists as to the highest sale figures for Light Line trucks in America, from highest to lowest:
- Pennsylvania
- California
- Colorado
- Illinois
- Texas
- Ohio
- New York
- Indiana
- Wisconsin
- Virginia
Maryland is number 38.| link
November 14, 2001
Sitting here at home waiting for the carpet guys to show up. pleasepleasepleaseplease!
I read up on the Epson printer this morning and found that it won't print if the black or color cartridges are empty, which is the case. So i have to see how much a black ink cartridge is and drop one in, then see if she'll print. Hopefully it will be under $20 or so, otherwise I'll look to see if there's a good aftermarket ink supply place around. I don't want to drop $40 on a printer that might not work. promising though, is that the printer powers up and I get a reaction when the test is triggered.
Here's an interesting link about blocking ads in your browser. The only thing i can't get to is blocking the proxy settings (step 2). Here also is what is billed as the true story of L.Ron Hubbard. | link
November 13, 2001
This morning, buried down by the bottom of the 'entertainment' section of abcnews.com, I found an obit for Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Merry Prankster extraordinaire. I spent a long semester reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and became a Kesey fan pretty quickly; taking a Beat class by the late Joe Cardarelli at MICA drew me into the world of Kerouac, and I loved the idea of Neal Cassady driving the bus all over the country while Kesey and the other Pranksters howled and tripped in back. Kesey withdrew from public view in the late 60's and quietly farmed in Oregon with his family; only in the early 90's he came back out and began teaching and publishing again. He was 66, and passed away after battling cancer. God bless, man.
I went out and bought the wire rack from Sam's Club last night; installed in the basement, it just clears the tops of the joists and holds nine of the green Tupperware storage tubs, which is perfect. There's room on the top shelf for another set of items; currently I have all the old CPU's up there but I'll replace them with other stuff when they get put in the closet. I was able to remove everything except the cooler and radio boxes from the dining room last night- what a relief. Tonight I'll organize some more and hopefully be able to get the rest of them downstairs so I can begin cleaning the dining room and perhaps *gasp* paint...!
The Epson printer is dead, at least through the AppleTalk port. I'm taking it home tonight and hooking it up to the NT box through the serial cable, and we'll see if there's any luck there.| link
November 12, 2001 - Veteran's Day
I had a very busy weekend; Saturday I got up and cleaned the basement for an hour before I left for Jen's house; we left for the Maryland/Clemson game in College Park at 2pm. The game was fantastic; we had the entire Lockard clan there save Rob and Annie, and Maryland beat Clemson's ass pretty soundly. We were treated to the vision of the whole crowd rushing the field and taunting the assembled event staff surrounding the goalposts; I'd say about 5-7,000 kids then rushed the cops and overpowered them. The goalpost dipped under the weight of hundreds of kids, and then sank into the crowd like a torpedoed liner. We then returned to the parking lot and shivered over fried chicken and pasta salad.
Sunday I got up and headed back over to Jen's place; after a fantastic breakfast we picked up supplies and I built a set of shelves in her pantry closet and another set in her outer closet, so she can actually store canned food near her kitchen, get stuff out of the blue bedroom, and store heavy stuff in the outer closet. When I pulled the shelves down in there, the wood they used to tack up supports were pulling out of the wall and about to fall down- basically 1/8 plywood-essentially veneer-over top of a few stringers held in with decking nails. The look on her face after she saw the shelves covered with cans was worth the whole day, but she made me a fantastic chicken dinner with scalloped potatoes and cold beer, and that made it even better. All in all a great weekend.
We found out about an hour ago that another plane fell on NYC. CNN is completely bogged down, but Dan came by and told me that robots.cnn.com is a search area backdoor for cnn, and lo and behold the page pulled up almost immediately. I'm also impressed with cbs's online news site as well- it's very comprehensive and came up quickly.
Jen's neighbor is cleaning out her storage room, and was getting rid of an Epson Stylus Color 800, which I promptly snagged to bring home. It's sitting here on the floor waiting for a mac printer cable, which I was not able to find this morning.
Great tools for searching websites: atomz.com | Also, these tools will have some relevance in the future on this site: Userland software wrote and builds a lot of XML/RSS tools for the web. At some point I'd love to have my portal page set up with a newsfeed from AP nad CNN.
I found this information on Friday when I had a half hour to kill. This story has always fascinated me, ever since I read Ploesti by Carrol and Dugan (no relation.) I can't think of any better way to salute the men and women of the military than to educate and read about the sacrifice these men made back in August of 43. B-24bestweb | 98th bomb group | Yahoo Tidal Wave message board | heavybombers.com | Maternity Ward | Bomber Pilot | Into the guns of Ploesti| link
November 9, 2001
Last night I got the stairs re-installed, save the bottom and top treads. I still need to do the top kickplate, and cut a new bottom kickplate before the carpet guys show up on Wednesday. I was also able to mount the shelf in the closet firmly on the end, so there's no more sag, and run two 4" wood screws through the wall into the frame around the switchbox, so the closet pole is sturdy and ready for hanging. Now to just clean the rest of the crap from behind the workbench and give the place about an hour's good scouring, and then paint the uncovered parts of the floor, and I'll consider letting the cats downstairs.
The workmen out back had finished the wall in the backyard about 2 weeks ago, but are just now cutting the concrete pad out back to re-pour the footings (!!!). I toyed with the idea of bribing them to just leave the whole thing unpoured so I could set up the planters on my own time, but then decided against it. I'm just going to buy a bunch of used brick and build new planters over top of the pad.
Looking around the web this morning before I went to work: Laid off. | The Samuel L. Jackson Soundboard. | Nowhere girl, a really well-done graphic novel published online.
These are some truly heroic and very sad photos of the WTC, taken by a guy on his way out of the building. | link
November 8, 2001
Last night, I was able to pull off the bottom and top stair risers and sand/stain them, drawing the Toxic Refinishing portion of the project to a close. They look pretty good; I suppose they could look better, but I need to get them re-installed and finished pretty quick. Once the treads are down, I'll probably put about 2 more coats of poly on them, but they look pretty good so far. All the backs are covered with 2 coats of white paint so they'll match the rest of the basement (and not look so frickin' bad) and at least surface-sanded. The only thing left is the very top kickplate (actually the cross-joist support) which needs to be heat-gunned and sanded/painted.
I also put in the closet pole; the brick wall side went in fine but the closet wall side is a victim of poor planning- I didn't put any vertical supports in so there's nothing to nail or tie that support into directly under the drywall. I think what I can do though is put a set of 3" drywall screws through to the box I made which straddles the 4-pot electrical box on the other side of the wall. If there's too much vertical stress, I'll add a 4" support running from the bottom of the bracket down to the top of the kickplate. Above the closet pole I installed the wire shelf, and this also fell into the 'should have planned better' category. There are two central studs in the middle of the wall, but nothing on the ends off the wall, so there's about a 1' length that is unsupported- unacceptable. I'm going to buy a third long angle support and try the 3" screw trick at an angle to try to hit the edge of the stud frame. Other than those issues, it looks great; I'm really happy with the results. Now that the shelves are up I can get to working on the wiring issues.
Next up is getting the stairwell finished- sanding, priming and painting the rest of the uncovered drywall and then painting the whole enclosure. Then I'll vacuum up the rest of the dust and generally clean up the mess; there's a lot of covering painting to do, but that can wait for now. I have to wait for my next paycheck to pick up a 4'x4' sheet of sanded finish plywood-that will be about $25 or so-for the front shelf. I measured out a 4'x'4 square on the floor and laid the two 10" planks to see if I could get one sheet of wood out of it- it looks to be no problem, although I don't like the idea of cutting across the grain of the plywood. We'll see how it goes. I'd like to concentrate on the wiring next, and get the phone and cable hooked up; after that we tackle the admittedly harder job of wiring the RJ-45. I'd also like to do some of the small stuff around the house, like actually cut and install the finish molding in the upstairs hall and clean up the old radiator-area in the front bedroom.| link
November 7, 2001
Steely Dan seems to be the right selection of music for today. Very melancholy, world-weary, cynical, vaguely optimistic jazz-pop from the 70's.
Last night, after throwing my non-functional Uniden portable phone at the floor and breaking it in an attempt at leaping two flights of stairs between four rings of the phone, I was able to sand and stain all but one of the stair risers, mount the telco junction box on the wall, and cut a piece of trim to fit between the top of the closet doorway and the joists. The basement is now filled with toxic lead paint dust, and surely killing me slowly. Yay. | link
November 6, 2001
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This morning I read that the Mr. Showbiz site is defunct- Disney pulled the plug on it and redirected it to the ABC site, which now pops up two ads. F--king mouse. Not that I looked at it a lot anyway, but every once in awhile I wound up there, linked off another site. On a related not, some of the first links in Google for the search term anti-disney come up with some disturbing sites. The first guy-and I'm not linking to his site-seems to have a problem with the "Gay Issue" (his capitalization) but he doesn't want to cover it for fear of losing sight of Disney's "other sins". Some of the others are just silly.
Mapquest has this service where they show you satellite photos of the address you plug in when you come to the map view. So here's my house, somewhere in the center of that last shot.
I'm just looking back and realizing this is the first time I've been able to keep up with a daily journal of sorts; with the exception of June, I was able to make an average of about 5 entries a week since the end of march. I'm thinking what I might do is take a snapshot of my Palm Pilot, where I kept track of what I was doing then, and post it on the June page, so I at least have a reference as to what I was doing.
Brushing up on some of the home networking sites now that I'm going to attempt this thing; I also found a few sites that support DNS services for dynamic IP's, i.e. DSL or cable services. Going to buy the box for the wiring tonight and put it in while the paint dries on the stair risers. I can't wait to get a good night in on the basement- I'm excited to make some progress.
12:31am - Anybody else notice that our Commander-In-Chief, the guy we barely voted in office (and who didn't have a clue where Afghanistan was on a map until last November), while giving a teleconferenced speech to assembled international heads of state in a UN council meeting yesterday, pronounced the word nuclear "nu-cu-lur"?
So many people are crying about how phony they feel to see people waving flags and putting up signs that say "God Bless America", etc. Know what? I think it's great. I don't think this completely fractured, divided, schizophrenic culture we call America has felt like a greater part of something in a long time- since probably around the early 60's. I like to see that people have pride in something. Not their Mustang 5.0, not their nails, but something greater than the sum of their parts. What I do have a problem with is the new idea that we can't criticize or question our government now that we are 'at war'. I think, given this new feeling of patriotism sweeping the country, that now is the ideal time to question our actions in the far east, starting with how we got involved there back in the 70's, and actually learn something about them. And I think we should start by questioning the guys who put the wheels in motion back then, namely Messrs. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush Sr.| link
November 5, 2001
Jen and I got back from Virginia yesterday, after a fantastic weekend in the back woods looking for wineries. We found three of four vineyards in a tour, and had some great wine, only getting lost once. Saturday we took our time getting up and moving and made it down to Fredericksburg right around dinnertime; bypassing the crappy strip-mall fare right off the interstate, we followed the signs into the middle of the town and parked, then walked about 2 blocks to a restaurant we found called Le Petite Auberge. Inside, after walking up a wide hall decorated with very tacky Leroy Neiman ripoff paintings, we had an outstanding meal together: lobster bisque and cream of tomato soup; I had a sirloin covered in roquefort cheese and pecans (sounds like too much, but damn, it was good) and Jen had a filet with a peppercorn sauce-that was great.
After a restful night spent at the Ramada Inn and a breakfast thrown at us at an Aunt Sarah's, we followed the maps into the heart of cantral VA in search of the Lake Anna winery, which was a beautiful new place set back off the road and serving a really wide variety of wine. Jen and I bought two bottles of merlot and I bought a cabernet. Cooper vineyards were a little less established, basically a tractor shed about ¼ off the road behind a Chevy truck graveyard, but staffed by a real nice Lasik surgeon and his wife. Very sweet wine, and very young. Greyhaven was a bit more established, but only serving two sweet dessert wines; luckily the owners were a wonderful old-Virginia couple who owned a gospel-loving Boston Terrier named Bubba and a huge hairy Bouvier named Reubens, who was pouting on the seat of a golf cart-long story. We got lost on the way to the final vineyard and as it was 5pm and we were outside Richmond, we wisely decided to give up and head for home, forfeiting our T-shirts. Oh, well.
I found this trying to find a link to the restaurant. We'll keep this in mind....
1:01pm - Jen sent this to me this morning under the subject line OH, MY GOD, I'VE DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN and I took a little time to follow it around- what a hilarious site this is. There's more stuff to laugh at than you can shake a stick at. I think I'm going to buy her the "Unsaved" T-shirt just to piss her mom off...! Personally, I like the preacher man logo.
5:20pm - I didn't get to buy the wiring cabinet last week, but I'll pick it up tomorrow; I'm also gonna pick up that steel shelving I want for the tupperware at Sam's Club too. It's time to get all that junk out of the dining room. I've had enough of it. I'm currently burning a copy of the House of Blues Volume 2 for this evening; I'm also making Jen some Veal Scallopini with green beans for dinner instead of going to Peter's- I think she'll enjoy the surprise.| link
November 2, 2001
Well, another one bites the dust- EA Engineering redid their website, and I have to say with no small bit of modesty that it looks about 1,00 times worse than the site I did for them 4 years ago.
Not a whole lot getting done on the basement this week. I got all but two of the stairs pulled up, and I got the tread faces sanded with 60 grit paper, but I need to finish-sand the others and then sand the bottoms. I'm going to use the old stair kickplates for the new treads, removing 1 layer of paint off the bottom, and use the old treads for the new kickplates. The old treads were just so destroyed from years of abuse, the edges were chewed off-then painted over. Taking layers of paint and varnish off the tops of the old treads was just so time consuming, and the treads were just so messed up, this seemed to be the best way to do things. I stained one tread last night and looked at it today, and it's OK- there's some discoloration at the edges, but the tone is relatively even and clean, and the wood is beautifully deep and rich in color.
I was also able to buy a 4' wire shelf-that shelving you see in those 'custom closet' pictures, where it's dipped in white vinyl. With brackets, arms, and shelf included, the whole thing was $10. You just can't beat that. Now I have to do some work to find exactly where the studwork is and install it and the hanger pole on the right side of the closet. I'm also going to pick up the steel case for the A/V wiring today-it's about $40-but I like the idea of keeping all the dust and crap out of the wiring bundle. Next I need to figure out how to wire up the DSL switch and mount it to the wall- it has no brackets or mounting hardware at all. Once the A/V cabinet is installed, I'm going to re-wire the phone line from the entry point at the basement door through to the closet. Currently it's a mess, and dates back about 40 years.
Network Solutions just emailed me with the invoice for Duganfamily.net; I'm going to let it lapse, because I have noplace to host it, nor do I have the time to update it. So I'll archive the pictures and dump the domain name, unless my pop wants to buy it.
God is broke. This is funny, and also a little creepy. Read the FAQ section.| link
November 1, 2001
This is a color I would never have used in a million years.
Just got off the phone with the carpet guys. We have an appointment on the 14th to have the carpeting installed. Halleleujah, amen. Let's get this done and over with, already.
What else is going on? I found this article on the Baltimore Business Journal today- these guys were the agency of record for one of my previous employers. I felt bad for them- we charged them with designing a message for us and the upper management that ran our company's marketing strategy could never come up with a graspable description of what it was we did. We would go into meetings with them and they would present their ideas, and our VP's and his toadies would wave their arms around and yell that they hadn't 'gotten our core message'. And then our VP would get out his little pens and scribble all over the whiteboard, and come up with some form of garbled diagram (that was changing just about every other day) and then fold his hairy arms and smile that smug little "I make more money than you do, and my Andersen Consulting job means that I don't crap anything but little piles of gold" smile, and then say condecendingly, "OK? Go to it. That's what we're paying you for."
And the poor Cornerstone guys would just look at him, and the circles of sweat under their arms would grow, and you could tell they had absolutely no idea of how to translate this 'message' into something visual or explainable (believe me, it was impossible- I tried for a year and a half). I daresay they are psyched they don't have that account anymore.
On a related note- ha fucking ha. This is funny too- I'm wondering if it's worth it. And finally, I found this little excerpt from a particular guy who we used to work with-and I'm not making this up-about his new company:
"Prior to such an agreement on interenterprise business processes for forecasting and replenishment, all we had was agreement on data standards. With the increased awareness of the need for realtime process synchronization across enterprise boundaries, we are going to see more such standardization on inter-enterprise processesÑwhether it is for transportation, logistics, procurement, or financials for multiple enterprises in a multi-tier value chain."| link
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