March 29, 2002

Bored today. Not a lot going on; I have a bunch of little icons built for the China game, but there's not much excitement in doing them. Now I'm building little squares that will later be tiled together to make a large zoomed spy map. Big joy.

Boxes and Arrows is a very clean, crisp site that has a lot of very good information on Information Architecture. | link

March 28, 2002

Thinking about a bunch of things today; first and foremost I found this article online and I want to take care of this immediately because my shower is looking NASTY.

I was considering the financial situation I'm in as well, and I've begun to prioritize for my later financial goals. I'm going to attack the VISA bill first when I get the Greycube payout, and use the remainder (with some savings kicked in) to kill the second mortgage on the house. With the $50-$250/mo. recouped from that, I can start chipping at the third, as well as put more cash away into the IRA. Meanwhile, put cash into savings for the down payment on house#2.

I just took delivery of the Zip100 removable drive for the Powerbook, and it works very well. For $45 new in the box, I'm very, very happy- Jen will be able to send out files at will from the house when we really get into the print end of freelance work.

Music to buy list.

Called my contact about the Wyoming Scout and found out where it lives; tomorrow I'm going to search for some online auto transport companies to see how much it'll cost to get her shipped out here. I hope she's in good shape. Mikey says I can trust this guy, and this guy says it's rust-free. I figure anything has to be better than Chewbacca at this point... | link

March 27, 2002

Downloaded Palm Desktop 4.0 today. Will try it out tonight. I also found the camera I will probably buy when I get around to buying a digital camera.

The CapitalDesignDC site went live yesterday; I think Katie is really happy with it. I have to invoice her tonight. I also have to get an invoice printed and sent to Kevin for the Oakleaf stuff. John also seems happy with the 10-20 work I've done- I have icons to tackle tonight (big fun.) | link

March 26, 2002

Interesting; I was bitching about Palm Desktop yesterday and found out this morning that Palm released 4.0 of their Mac software. Guess I'm going to try to download it today. We'll see what happens.

I scanned a copy of my backyard diagram in yesterday and sketched out a first draft of what I'd like to do with it during a staff meeting; I think I have the method by which I'm going to install the poles for the fencing, and how I'm going to do the gate (I'll probably have to build my own, but that's no big deal.) I want to run two sets of lights around the perimeter; there will be three or four lights higher than eye level on the sides of the neighbor's houses around the deck area and one by the rear gate. There will be another set in each flowerbed on another circuit and switch so that they can go on independently of the top lights. The fence will be 6' or 7' tall, probably squared across the top, and secured into the wall with lag bolts and masonry anchors. I still need to buy brick for the planters and figure out how to set the flooring—whether or not I need to set them in mortar, brick, or sand is still up in the air.

Then there is the problem of the pergola above the deck and how I'm going to do that; that is another day's thinking.

I decided, since I've thought about this every time I've been to Blockbuster, that there are some movies I will pay $15 to own and a bunch that I won't. So here is a beginning list of future DVD wants/purchases:

• Apocalypse Now Redux
• Toy Story 2
• Alien/Aliens (Director's Cuts)
• Forest Gump
• Mad Max (with the Australian voice track)
• Apollo 13
• Akira (in English this time)

March 25, 2002 - Monday

This past Friday marked the year anniversary of my writing in this log, and I have to say, I'm proud of the fact that I've kept with it this long.

Instant Palm Desktop 2.6.3 is crap. Oh, and so is NT Server. Oh, and so is DAVE when you're trying to copy something to a Win box over 50K. On a happier front, I was able to find and buy a 100MB Zip expansion bay drive for Scout for $45 new from the dealer; on sale and with 10% off, free UPS shipping. Sweet! No cables, no power supply, no other bull, just what I want.

Elsewhere, I'm sending my electronic vibes out over the airwaves: Sell, dammit! Sell! | link

March 21, 2002 - Thursday

Very, very tired today. I was down in Laurel working on 10-20 until about 12:15 last night, so I got to bed at 1am. Site is looking good, but I want a solid day of tweaking it on a PC (i.e. from home) to get it looking tight.

Today I was pulling up to a light to make a left, and I was behind a guy in a big Mercedes. He had a bumper sticker on his car (on the paint, the ignorant fuck) that said 'Vote Bush' and in smaller letters 'Fight for Freedom' or some such bullshit. Now, since I've been in Baltimore, my tendency to hit the horn button on people has dramatically decreased since the NY State days. But when this dude sat through the first 10 seconds of the green light, I gave him a good old hearty honk for being asleep.

I have been fighting off crushing, absolute boredom here at work trying to learn 3D StudioMax from a book. It is not working. I am not happy. I have almost fallen asleep twice attempting to read the book.

Huh. Pretty nice. Also, 10% off and free shipping until March 31. Something to consider- most of the FireWire CD-burners are around $250 or so. | link

March 18, 2002 - Monday

Hey, it's my birthday!

Wow. Busy weekend. Not quite what I wanted to do; I was down in Laurel again working on 10-20, and while it wasn't exciting, it was professionally interesting. Jen however knocked herself out on Sunday by baking me a cake and making a fantastic dinner of lamb and potato-leek soup with homemade wheat muffins. Delicious. It was the best birthday I've had in 10 years.

There was a beautiful short Steelcase desk out in the alley this morning, and I thought I might have an undexpected birthday present, but when I tipped it up, I noticed that all the drawers were gone. Too bad- it's one of the old-style rounded corner desks from the 50's, and in good shape would be a killer piece of furniture. Oh, well. I also pulled out the chunks of concrete from under my A/C unit out back and exposed the dirt, so that the guys pouring the concrete (for the second time) will actually fix what got broke, and not overlook it.

Taxes are mailed. Halleleujah, amen. Gimme my money!

I am one of the proud few who has never composed an e-mail message or a web page containing an emoticon. I am very happy about this fact, as I don't like emoticons. They sound too much like Decepticons. | link

March 15, 2002

Last night, my printer crapped out on me. It's a LaserJet 4ML, and I had it set up to print through the Barricade router to the PC, but I was going to get it set up to print through the 7100 as a bridge when I bought the server rack. Last night it printed three pages and then started making a horrendous clacking noise like the gears were shot. I stayed up until about 1 pulling the cover, where I found the main drive gear off the motor was coming loose from the spindle, so I pushed it back on and replaced the cover. A print of a test page only repeated the sound. There's some kill switch that does not allow you to print with the cover off the unit, so I can't see exactly what is going wrong, but I'm going to do some surgery on it this weekend. a search on Google revealed this parts site, where the drive motor is $44 and the gear assembly is $40. Maybe if I can't resurrect it by myself I'll find somebody to fix it, because it's a great little machine.
In the meantime, I'll hook up the Epson 740 and use that.

Printers have dropped in price dramatically, too. For under $300, there's this Brother printer which (I think) has the serial interface I need, as well as USB. This Lexmark has parallel, serial and USB and it's around $500. And this Epson is $300, has parallel and USB, and prints at 1200x1200. Huh. Well, we'll see what happens. | link

March 14, 2002

I found this primer on e-mail spoofing today, attached to a funny story about some dude who duped Slate into letting him write a fake 'journal'. Whoops.

Somewhere in space, this all may be happening, right now.... ...???

We're getting together this weekend with Martha, who I haven't seen in about 2 years. She's going away to New Zealand <jealousy> and getting together with a bunch of folks before she leaves. Hope she's doing well. | link

March 13, 2002

I'm tired. I did however find a solution to the issue of jumping pages; go to the september log page of last year and find one of the pop screens from the basement project. The old javascript was a hack and would pop you to the top of the page, thereby losing your place. The new javascript pops the mini window and preserves your place on the page.

Spent the majority of the evening doing stuffI wanted to do, like laundry, the dishes, watering the plants, cleaning the couch/living room, and sanding the holes in the ceiling where the rad pipes were. It felt really good to get some of that basic housekeeping work done. Tonight hopefully I'll be able to get the ceiling finish-sanded and primed for painting the whole room, which is one of the ideas for this weekend. It looks like I might wind up in Laurel for another day this weekend. We'll see. I got some work done last night, but not as much as I was hoping to. Still, it was great to take a break.

My birthday present from the ladies arrived today: The shelves I've been wanting for the living room. Three four-foot shelves in a real pretty honey color; I'm going to put them over the TV in a stepped fashion so that they overlap vertically. Thanks go to Jen, Renie, and Mom. You guys are great!

When i get paid, I'm going to buy myself some new music for my birthday. Here are the selections:
Kruder & Dorfmeister | Air | Benny Goodman | Thievery Corporation | St. Germain
Because this totals somewhere around 5 thousand bucks, I'm going to narrow it down to three or so. | link

March 12, 2002

Whew. I'm back in the office after *cough* a rough patch of *cough* sickness. *ahem*.
I spent all weekend down in lovely Laurel doing work for John, and I'm really thrilled with the results so far. I think he's really happy with it too. It felt great to be immersed in a site and working with Nick (the programmer) to build out a new site. I wish I could do that every day again- it makes my heart ache sometimes, because I'm good at it, and I love the challenge. There's still another good day's work to do on the front-end and probably a week's worth of after-hours cleanup, so we're looking very good there.

Went up to BelAir to see Laura about taxes, and the results are very good. I'll be able to buy the Wisconsin Scout, after waiting to earn the money for almost a year. Hopefully Bill still has it, and hopefully it's still in great shape.

I'm looking forward to being back at my house for an evening. I haven't spent any time other than sleeping there in the last couple of days, and I'm anxious to do some cleaning and laundry for a little peace-of-mind. I also have work coming from Katie and the logo to finish up for Kevin.

Loaded up Mozilla today on both machines, and I have to say, damn. What a great-looking browser so far. I'm gonna use it for a week or so and see if it blows up at all, but my first impressions are very positive. | link

March 7, 2002

Feeling a measure better today. It's mid 60's outside, sunny, and feels warm. I'm still unmotivated at work, but I feel a measure better than I did yesterday.

I have a bone to pick with Palm, the makers of my otherwise fantastic handheld, the IIIxe. Why is it so hard to A. figure out where a file is, B. find a simple file that should be on your site at all times, and C. figure out that both your company and Microsoft are providing misleading information as to what and what can't be synchronized on the handheld and through the Desktop software? Here you say that the handheld will sync with Outlook and Outlook Express, but here you tell us that it won't work with Outlook Express, and because I don't want to use bloated, buggy Outlook, I can't synchronize my Palm with my e-mail client, a simple function of matching up database records and importing/exporting data. In a perfect, user-friendly world, I should be able to have one central database of contact information for all my peeps, and be able to send it to my cellphone, PDA and computer so that all of them are intelligently updated and current. Instead I have three seperate units all carrying different and outdated information and only one way to update them all- waste my time entering repetitive text for three different OS's.
I also have to give Microsoft their props here: I get the feeling that they were kind enough to provide a working, functional conduit for the transfer, but Palm decided they weren't allowed to do that and updated the Desktop software to break when it was installed. (at least, that's what mine is doing.)

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Hardware that works like it should dept.: I love my PowerBook. Love it. I'm so happy I bought it. It is beautiful.
I gave up on the Palm. Too much work. | link

March 6, 2002

Utterly depressed today. What a wonderful feeling. I'm tired, Jen and I are strained, it's miserable outside and I'm not motivated.

Isn't this swell? | link

March 5, 2002

I posted the logos for Kevin last night, sketched out a flowchart, and emailed off a contract for Katie. It feels like I'm on top of things llike right now, and that's good. I'm hoping Katie and Kevin will get back to me soon, and that this weekend goes well with John. I started on a website sketch for John's site, and I'm pretty happy with it, although I want to have about 3 more for him to see.

We heard back from Kevin and Teri, and they really like the fifth logo idea, which is an illustrated, arts-and-crafts style approach. I'm excited. Jen and I did a good job on these, and I think she's excited to get a finished logo out of something. I'm also going to Laurel tonight to discuss the other project, so hopefully we'll get the ball rolling in that court.

Gotta buy this sometime. And I do have to pick this up next time I see it. | link

March 1, 2002

OK, as far as the backup efforts went, I got the beta stuff off SLANN and burned to a disk; unfortunately the UDF format isn't working on my Mac, so it can't read the disk. All the S/N's are updated and on the USB drive, and all the installers/updaters are backed up there too. It holds all my fonts and pretty much everything I can't burn to CD on SLANN, so we're looking good there. I was also able to get the last backed up System Folder from Massachussetts (ex-Supon laptop) onto the USB drive and off SLANN, so that freed up about 500MB of space.

Next I have to compare copies of Beta and the Clients backups and figure out if I'm missing anything, then bless the latest and greatest and hide the others downstairs (when I clean up the CD racks.) Overall we're looking pretty good.

This truck went up for sale in North Carolina for somewhere around $7K. It's the same color as Chewbacca and has all the tricks. *sigh*. | link

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