June 28, 2002

I had the good fortune to meet Mike Lee, an information architect over at e.magination, last night; he invited me by the office to take a tour of the place and I bought him dinner and bent his ear. e.magination is very impressive—they are doing a lot of the things I was pushing for in previous web shops, like exhaustively trolling the client sites to catalog their information, dedicated testing, and focused documentation.

Mike is a very interesting guy, and I enjoyed talking with him about a bunch of different stuff- he's been experimenting with website mapping through non-two dimensional means, looking at alternate uses for low-technology toys (I have to buy one of these now) and evangelizing IA throughout the company. Over beers we touched on a bunch of different topics, including digital copyrighting, piracy, bypassing traditional publishing outlets, teaching and education, facing the technical learning curve inherent in our profession....

I spent so much time processing, thinking, questioning, and leaping ahead of myself while we were talking, I'm afraid nothing I said made cohesive sense. Mike, if I was hard to follow, my apologies! | link

June 26, 2002

Album of the day is Abductions & Reconstructions, by the Thievery Corporation.

I'm reading about WorldCom and wondering what all that means- more book-cooking and backdoor deals with a huge company. I sure hope the SEC is granted some kind of power so they can create and finally enforce some strong bookkeeping laws to put an end to this kind of stuff. NPR did a great piece a few weeks back on the Enron mess and how they were able to get away with a lot of what they did.

On other telecom fronts, apparently Cingular is buying ATT Wireless, my cell carrier, so I don't know what kind of disruption in service I'm going to suffer through here, but it should make life interesting.

By the way, you know you're getting older when your car radio is permanently tuned to the local NPR affiliate. I haven't listened to song-oriented radio in months. But at least I don't have to sit through the country's worst local news telecasts for the information of the day.

One of the programmers here wrote an email to the staff:

Exception 14

... buffer overrun error occurred when attempting to
... write soda to device fridge:
... your soda may be warm.

I need to keep an eye on this series of articles on O'Reillynet about Mac OSX and ColdFusion MX. | link

June 25, 2002

Well, I cleaned up a lot of loose ends yesterday; one of the major things is that I called the guy about the Wyoming Scout and let him know I have the cash ready; I was thinking about taking a week or so after the game is done and driving out to see the truck, but he mentioned that he's heading out there in two weeks. What I think I'm going to do is send him out there with a handful of disposable cameras to take pictures of all the areas I want.

I also have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to work out the deck in the backyard; instead of just nailing a sill to the back of the house and attaching stairs, I'm going to build a platform off the sill about 3' deep, and then attach the stairs to that. I think I have the other sections figured out too; there were some questions about how to anchor the supports to the ground, but there are some very simple galvanized steel standoffs made for 4'x4's. I also know how I'm going to set up the stair down to the brick (when the deck is made level to account for the slope, the top of the support at the brick will be one foot off the ground.)

They started leveling the Superfresh by my house yesterday- it's totally demolished and now they're in the process of hauling the debris away.

I've been reading Don't Make Me Think and getting a lot of very useful information out of it, along with some other links to places I've found in the last two weeks. I'm thinking that I'm going to test my family on the 10-20 system and see how they react to it, take notes, and write up a report for John when I get back. I know there are a number of improvements I already want to make on the interface and in the writing; going to Jakob Nielsen's site and reading through the writing sections has me thinking. I also need to dig out my copy of The Elements of Style from the basement boxes. | link

June 24, 2002

Life has been good. This weekend was really fun; We went to a great rooftop deck party on Saturday night with Jason and Shelly and drank and talked about non party-safe things. We also got the south planter filled and planted (temporarily) with flowers; lantana and another high-heat resistant breed I can't pronounce. | link

June 21, 2002

I've been offline for a couple of days now, but I'm about to post the log on the site.

Ok, I am humbled. 37signals. Wow. I have a lot of thinking to do in the next few days- I also got my copy of Don't Make Me Think today, and I found a great book on Photoshop tecniques at the discout book seller last night. | link

June 18, 2002

Dad made it through his pre-stress test with flying colors, so he will be making his appointment to have the surgery next month sometime. whew.

I found a couple of interesting articles from a variety of different sources; this one Meg Hourihan, about what we do when we blog, and why. Dave over at UserLand has a handy little primer on news aggregators with RSS, something I've been thinking about hooking up for some time now (as my links page is hopelessly outdated and useless.) | link

June 17, 2002

Driving through beautiful Highlandtown this weekend, I was interested to see a pile of burned-out drum equipment laying outside the pawn shop on the corner. Seems the whole second floor started burning and when the firemen showed up, they pitched all the burning debris out the window. The owners took the time to board up all the second-floor windows, but left all the crap on the sidewalk.

I am shocked, amazed, and happy to find a website with my old amigo Pat Finlay online; it's through his old art collective SimpArch (and the contact information is very old.) I have to get some kind of contact info for him that is newer and better (he's at a boatbuilding school in Berkeley right now, and I don't have current contact information.)

I'm not going to post any new photos online yet, but I got the gravel into the planters this weekend, the PVC cut and installed for the lighting, and the brick over the outflow pipe by the back gate put in. I also have a plan for the pergola roof, but I need to get permission from Dick, my neighbor, to drill into his wall in order to install the bases. It will be a much easier solution than digging holes, leveling posts, pouring concrete, and topping them from there... I hope he's cool with it.

As perfect a two and a half-minute long song could be: a shimmering, beautiful, melancholy paean to growing older: Mermaid Smiled, by XTC. | link

June 16, 2002

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June 15, 2002

Jen and I went to the Charleston restaurant on Friday to celebrate nothing in particular; It had been recommended to us by some folks, so we gave it a shot. After being seated, the service was spectacular, but the atmosphere was dulled by the conversation of a family seated behind me, specifically the daughter. Sample statement:

"So I have this spider bite on my leg. It's really gross- it got all big and pus-y."

So Jen and I slammed our cocktails. But the meal was great; fried green tomatoes are good! Even better is filet wrapped in bacon. I have to admit though, for sheer taste and enjoyment, we liked Louisiana (the first time) better.

So Anderson is guilty. I suddenly have a shred of hope for the American judicial system. | link

June 14, 2002

Last night I saw four of the Apple 'Switch' ads, and they were pretty good. They were effective in that they put a human face on some of the people who switched back from the PC; I found it interesting that A. they were booked during the Stanley Cup finals (good, because every other damn thing was a repeat) and B. all the people featured were creative in some way. Right on. Bring 'em back, Apple. These commercials made me think, for some reason, of the commercials of the mid to late 80's with simple people talking and identifying themselves. Well done.

This morning I was awakened by the clock radio, which is tuned to the local 'alternative' radio station (what a joke) and playing a new song by Eminem. Now, I don't understand how Eminem got 'alternative', and I've never understood why this dude has appeal. He has a nasal, whiny voice, and his backing track is the most annoying, cheap-ass beat I've ever heard. I can't imagine an entire album of that. | link

June 13, 2002

I just ordered a book from Amazon.com, Don't Make Me Think: Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug, and while I was at it, I picked up the new release by DJ Shadow. I found a weblog based here in Baltimore written by an IA at e.magination, and followed a link and found the recommendation.

One wonders why the makers of Eudora, when adding their dictionary for the spell-check feature, did not add the word 'internet'.

Not much to write about today- a pretty mindless day of updates and edits to the interface/print materials. I believe I may stop at the Home Depot and pick up some sand for the backyard, but I don't know if I can put it in tonight because of the weather. | link

June 12, 2002

Hard to get excited about anything today. Crappy edits from the beta testers on trivial bullshit. I have a headache, none of this stuff is going smoothly, and I'm bored out of my mind. Wahhhh.

Album of the day: Morphine's Bootleg Detroit, which Todd let me borrow. Mark Sandman sounds great, the mix is bass-heavy and beautiful, and the versions of all these songs are better than the album versions. God I miss this band.

10:44 pm - Well, it's a little premature, but I have to salute and wave farewell to Greycube, the partnership. During its brief but rewarding existence, we designed, built, and hosted scores of sites, worked together (mostly) as a team, and had some fun doing it. As a partnership of three very different individuals, sometimes it was difficult, but always challenging. Tonight I got together with Dan and Jason and we took the second-to-last distribution of funds from the bank account, and Jason took the server home.

I'm sad to see it disappear, but as with everything else in life, the cycle of change goes on. And it was a great ride while it lasted. | link

June 11, 2002

Some new pictures of the backyard, from 6.11.

On my way to work this morning, I had the windows down (it was about 60 degrees this morning, but due to rise into the 90's by noon) and took my customary route out of Canton to get to I-83 north. On my drive, I had the pleasure of smelling, in sequence, the salty air blowing off the harbor, fresh bread from the H&H bakery in Fell's Point, followed closely by bacon, waffles and syrup from a restaurant with its doors open. When I got to the onramp, I smelled freshly cut, damp grass from the wide median downtown. I got onto 83 and all the smells blended together as I got up to speed.

Found out that we're getting paid ½ our paycheck this month. Yay.

I found a great utility called snapGallery for posting online pics; it's a free VBS script (boo- no Mac support) but it works very well, and obviously was designed by somebody who posts pictures frequently. I think we will use this from now on. | link

June 10, 2002

So here is a living lesson in Internet Marketing Strategy. I work for a company that subcontracts from another company to produce a product which is eagerly awaited by a demographic which spends a lot of time online. This particular demographic spends time scouring the message boards and fan sites attempting to collect information about the product. We now run and maintain the 'central' site for the product, containing information about the design, pictures of the product, rules, changes, and explanations for how and why the product works.

The site went up in early May; it has not been updated since then.

The top-level company decided, months ago, that we were releasing too much information too quickly, and so they asked for a detailed list of what we would be publishing, when, and how much. This list was delayed for several weeks while E3 was happening, and then forwarded on to the company for review, comment, and approval. There has been no word since that time.

I am amazed that a modern marketing department, based in a company with such a strong online demographic, would choose to overlook/discredit/ignore such a powerful and focused medium. Especially considering that there is little or no overhead involved with online marketing. A focused, interactive article/talkback magazine format would be tailor-made for this project; somewhere that fans can go to read about different aspects of the product, then be allowed to comment in a moderated format directly following the article. Thus, potential buyers of the product would feel included in the release and be able to interact with the developers.

On other fronts, here are some pictures of the backyard, from 6.7.

Thinking more about the VPN research from last week, and I read now that A. I can get a 60GB FireWire external drive for somewhere around $300 these days, or if I choose, a FireWire CD burner for the same amount. So I think the idea of doing the VPN to the home machine is out; I'm just going to buy some kind of CD-burner for Scout here and possibly a copy of Retrospect Express or another catalog program, and just catalog the hell out of the entire collection via the Mac. One thing is sure, I need something to boot Scout off of so I can clean her up and get her running well again. | link

June 6, 2002

I'm doing some research into setting up a VPN for my house and for work, so I can share stuff off the home machine to myself and keep it in one place (and then I'll have to get some kind of tape backup, and...ugh.)

Doing a basic search sent me to this site, where I found a basic overview and some directions to the Microsoft site, with a white paper on PTPP installation for Windows NT machines, and some other smaller links. Netgear, as usual, has a fantastic primer on their site, which doubles as a tie-in to sell one of their products. On the MacinTouch site, i found the Nortel link for a client being developed for the Mac, which led to some other interesting ideas and links. I looked through the documentation for my SMC router and found that it supports PTPP tunneling, so it's a question of whether or not I can set up the protocol on SLANN.

On the brighter side, my camera arrived today! I've spent the afternoon fooling with it and I'm really pretty happy with the whole thing so far. The pictures look really great, the camera is easy to use, and I like the card reader interface a lot. It came with a 16MB card, which gives me 25 large-format pictures and somewhere around 125 medium-resolution pictures. More pictures as they become available, and I will start adding stuff to the site immediately. | link

June 5, 2002 - Wednesday

The past few days have been an attempt to remember 4 years of Quark Xpress that I thought I had forgotten. It's actually pretty funny how much I do remember, considering I've learned and forgotten X number of programs before and since then. Nevertheless, i remember why i do not enjoy print work, and long for the days when i can work the web again.

No joy on the digital camera yet either. It supposedly shipped Priority Mail on Monday, so I'm hopeful the dang thing will be here tomorrow.

One bright spot in the last few weeks has been the backyard and its progress; unfortunately I can't post pictures of it yet. The list looks like this:

• The brick is down on the ground in a basketweave pattern; it stetches from the old garage wall lip to the back wall.
• The south side planter is down and installed 4 bricks high.
• The north side planter is installed except for the third level half-circle in the main area.
• There is about 1/8 of a bag of sand in the front south corner between the bricks; i couldn't help myself and brushed some of it in, and it looks great.

Still to do (concrete projects):

• Finish off the half-cirle in the center and point in the outer walls of the planters that are sloppy.
• Point the edges of the floor brick to seal in the sand
• Drill drainage holes in both planters
• Haul in some rock, mulch or other base and dump it in the planters
• Haul in the soil and water
• Haul in a few bags of sand and sweep into the brick
• Buy some half-brick and finish off the area on the north wall by the gate (over the drainage pipe.)

— link

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