September 30, 2002

alley, charles village, 9.28

Mindless Consumerism Dept.: So Todd takes me over to the antique dealer down the street and I find an old Steelcase credenza in Government Green that has absolutely no scratches or fug on it, and I ponder it for an evening and drag Jen up there this weekend to look and we buy it and now it's in the back of the Scout awaiting delivery to my house. Damn you Todd (just kidding.)

I was considering the nature of things this weekend—bear with me here. I was using bath gel this past week because I ran out of soap (shut up- if you had the schedule I did last week, you'd just want to lie down and nap all day) and the bath gel wasn't working quite like soap does- the lather was weak, and I didn't feel like it had actually cleaned anything. I bought soap this Friday and we used it the next morning, and it felt so much better. I realized that soap had become a luxury in that week-long period. So I began thinking of all the things we make do without over the years, and then how much better things seem when we're able to fix those things. I then made a vow to myself never to let things break down around the house, because I am the personality type who will find a way to make do without things while I tell myself, "Oh, well, I'll fix that later, but right now I really need to devote my resources to X." When really, the toilet seat has been broken for two months, there are seventeen unfinished projects around the house, the Scout hasn't been driven in three weeks, and I had a total of five minutes' battery time on my cellphone (the batteries were two years old.) When I got new batteries for the cellphone a few weeks ago, all the assorted headaches associated with that old situation dissapeared.

Resolution: Take care of your stuff.

September 27, 2002

Geektacular. I stopped over Jason's house last night to have an OSX intervention; he sat me down and went over all the things he's learned in a few months of driving around with OSX. I think that was what I needed. He had much the same exerience I did—he hated it for the first month, then began to like it, and then found he couldn't go back to OS9. Anyway, mad gangsta props to Jason. (PS. if you're looking to hire a very talented web designer/scripter/man-of-all-trades, call Jason. He's good and he's funny, too.)

So Todd has a great idea for a website that would rank entries based on user input. If there's anybody out there who could contribute some time into some scripting and database work, I'll front the design and domain costs. I think it would be funny and interesting to see what the different opinions would be. (I'm keeping mum on the details so that other folks don't steal the idea. let us just say it's targeted at 28-35 year olds with an appreciation for pop culture.)

Rock the Hell On Dept.:
Soundbitten. Run by a freelance journalist out of S-F, it contains some great articles on a variety of topics, and makes for good reading. | link

September 26, 2002

I work, work work. I listen to this and this and this. Not in that particular order. Isn't that just thrilling?

A Thousand Monkeys Dept.: Last night while freelancing, I was finally able to figure out how to configure Adobe Distiller to work through the OS9 Chooser and print out a pretty PDF from Quark. Nick then helpfully suggested that OSX prints out PDFs natively. I resisted the urge to scream. Yes, it's boring, but it gave me great satisfaction. As a matter of fact, it's still giving me satisfaction. So there.

The internet is boring today. But they tell us that we "should be getting paid" real soon. For the previous pay period. Yippee. | link

September 25, 2002

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun. In a rare (and momentary) period of wealth, I ordered a David Sylvian CD for Jen to be delivered to her office. We borrowed one of his other CD's from our buddy Rob, and she reported back that playing it while working had a beneficial effect on her mental health and productivity. So hopefully this double-CD set will bring her double happiness. Being able to do things like that makes me feel good as well. I love you baby.

I looked at the download log for that UMAX scanner software; it took 5 hours last night for a 21MB file to download. On a clean T-1. Um... guys? you might want to set up a mirror somewhere...

Last night I had the most amazing sensation while in the pool. Even though I had an aluminum tank, fins, bouyancy compensator, mask, wetsuit, and 12 pounds of weights attached to me, I was at neutral bouyancy and floating gracefully through the water, using my breathing to lower the top of my tank under the lane dividers. The regulator worked flawlessly, and the only issues I had were the attempts to clear my mask- it is a hard thing indeed to program your brain to switch valves from exhaling through your mouth to the nose underwater. Next week I'll need to practice this repeatedly so that I don't panic in the quarry check-dive.

Some new albums to look into buying on the next paycheck: the new Underworld CD and Dirty Vegas, recommended by Matt. Also to consider: Boards of Canada. Plus, there's a new Thievery Corporation CD coming out October first. Bonus!

I finally, after a month or so of waiting, ordered three rolls of 620 film from Film for Classics for the stable of old cameras I bought at the beginning of August. I also paid off a bunch of niggling little bills that have been nipping at my heels for a few weeks. When I get the film, I'm going to take a walk on the main drag of Highlandtown and shoot some of the buildings still out there, like the movie theater and some of the storefronts.

Boy, Americans sure are stupid. This story about a woman in Houston who made a store put a fig leaf over a copy of Michelangelo's David is just mind-boggling. Why are people in this country so damn uptight? | link

September 24, 2002

The weather has definitely turned. I opened up all the windows and turned off the CAC last night. Woodsmoke drifted in through the windows and the cats were glued to the screens, sniffing the air. This morning the weatherman forecasted 70 degree weather for the whole week.

I got my official copy of Emperor today, courtesy of Sierra. Nice to have a game I can put up on my shelf and claim some ownership of.

I got an email inviting me to submit an application to meet and marry Beautiful Women of the Phillippines this afternoon. Somehow I don't think I'm going to take advantage of this outstanding opportunity. (Not that I am dissing the Beautiful Women of the Phillippines, it's just that I'm already involved. Sorry, Beautiful Women.) | link

September 23, 2002

korean grocery, 9.22

I am weak.
I'm back in the admittedly flat and boring OS9 right now, for reasons I can't quite explain to myself. Maybe it's the comfort of the application menu in the upper right corner, where I can hide any window I want immediately. Maybe it's the speed of the interface—I'm on a 400Mhz G3, and I notice a slight lag while it figures out what to do. Maybe it's the way OSX writes three files for every one it works on (iPhoto comes to mind here).

Maybe I'm just getting old; I don't know. I've made almost a ten-year investment in the interface I use every day, and it's not going to be easy to switch.

Jen and I went to the Korean grocery store this weekend and bought an entire meal's worth of vegetables, about a pound of sliced rib-eye steak, and assorted other items, and walked out $13 lighter. There is a certain sense of culture shock walking through that store—from the mingled conversations in several different languages to the mind-boggling assortment of exotic fruit, vegetables, and spices, to the old-world butcher and fish market in back—you feel as if you might be strolling through a market in Seoul or even Tokyo.

What happens when you spend all the money you make on opening new stores so that you can make even more money to open more stores? You start knocking down the old ones to make newer ones. Suggestion: Make decent food, train your employees to treat customers better, pay them more than minimum wage, and rebuild the expectations of your client base.

Nate sent this thought along in response to an email I sent about a cartoon that has some people upset:

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a political fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. Julius Caesar, 101 - 44 BC

— link

September 22, 2002

I used to be a big proponent of UMAX scanners, based on their quality and ease of use. I am now officially pissed off at UMAX, because it's going to take me an estimated 2 hours to download a 22MB file so that I can use the Astra 2200 I have here. Plus there's no OSX driver for any of their products.

the local UPN affiliate is showing edited episodes of the Larry Sanders Show on Sunday nights. For somebody who didn't want to pay for HBO to see the show, it's great to have it on regular TV. | link

September 20, 2002

fell's point, 9.18

Hand in the Cookie Jar Dept.: Credit Suisse First Boston, the scheduled underwriter for the IPO of a company I used to work for, is in big doo-doo for insider manipulation of stock ratings. D'oh! (I spent part of last night reading a copy of Fortune magazine from here at the office about white-collar crime.)

CNN just redesigned their site. Good or bad? Discuss.

Arrrrrrggghhh. I'm still trying to organize my drives with OSX, and it's becoming a nightmare. Trying to organize all my files in one coherent place, and then having the paranoia that won't let me throw anything away is a bad mixture. I'm attempting to burn copies of Stuffit archives onto PC discs (I don't have a Mac burner currently) and then put them away. Meanwhile, juggling three different bootable drives is getting tedious, especially when fonts, programs, and files are all looking in certain places for things they need.

1. I need a copy of Suitcase or ATM for OSX.
2. I need a CD burner pronto.
3. I need an OS how-to book badly.

September 19, 2002

One gripe about OSX: Lack of a UDF format reader. I spend half my time on my Windows machine, and because it has a burner with Roxio's DirectCD, I burn a lot or stuff onto data CD's with their software. OS9 has a reader extension, but Roxio hasn't made one for OSX. Bad move, guys. What's even worse is the fact that the CD gets swallowed when I insert it and I have to reboot to pull it out. Grrr.

Busy Busy Busy.
In case you haven't noticed, I've been struggling/migrating from OS9 to OSX in the last few days, and attempting to document the problems/solutions I've found so far. As it turns out, I'm on a new project at work and they have given me a new PC to use; it's a dual 1gHz P3, and it runs Win2000. So I've gone from WinNT>Win98>Win2000 in the last year. My head is spinning. I'm also sketching out cityscapes and beginning on some fiction for the backstory of the project.

Meanwhile, we still haven't been paid.

Here's a memo to insurance companies and the medical industry: make a simple barcode system for insurance cards. You issue me a card with all my stupid insurance/contact information on a magnetic stripe. I enter your office, and instead of making a copy of it, asking me to fill out the form (15 minutes of my time) and then paying somebody to enter in the information (20 minutes of your time @ $12/hr.), you have a simple stripe scanner which grabs the info off the card in some tab-delimited format which you can import into your data package. How hard is that? And don't give me static about refusing to provide my Soc number, either. You don't need that.

Good News Dept.: The Dooce is back online. Rock on! | link

September 18, 2002

national aquarium, 9.18

I got a bunch of info from some friends via e-mail last night on OSX; Mike sent along some good links for reference on OSX, including this site: macoshints.com, which has a wealth of good information listed in a blog-style newsletter format. Thanks Mike. I'm going to print out the hint booklet today! (Plus, via his blog, I found this link to the ipodlounge, where I will read about them until I can afford one myself.)

My PowerBook wakes up from sleep under OSX in about 1/2 a second. Contrast this with the minute or so it took to wake under OS9, an empty screen, and the wait for anything to happen. iPhoto is real nice, and I know there are a million things I need to learn with it. I also know that my old method of organizing files is not going to fly in the OSX world, so we're going to attempt to go with Apple's UNIX/user method and see how good it is.

New lexicon Dept.:
The City Paper did their Best Of issue this week, and they named the annoying habit Baltimore drivers have of sitting in their car out in front of a house on your street and blowing the horn: The Baltimore Doorbell.

I watched a good article tonight on domain name squabbles, but it gives me heartburn: Nissan Vs. Nissan. One is a computer dealer, the other is the company that makes the Altima. Apparently the computer company lost a court battle and may lose the domain name- the auto company claimed it diluted their brand. I sure hope it doesn't lose the fight- they registered in 1994, and in my opinion they should be allowed to keep it. | link

September 17, 2002

This morning I downloaded iCal from Apple's site and looked through it; I failed in finding a way to import Eudora info into the Mail client, and I'm not sure if the Mail client supports APOP authentification for my mail server. I also don't know how fonts work in OSX and if I have to buy new fonts all over again (not a happy thought) or if I need to convert them somehow...

Goodbye DAVE. I just logged in to the Win2000 server here at work. I also found Palm Desktop 4.0 and got that installed- now I'm trying to figure out what to do with fonts. I got Eudora working on OSX in the Classic mode, so that's another thing I don't need to depend on the FireWire drive for. I got Palm to open my existing data file, and exported my address book out into the OSX Address Book; I'm going to see if I can export my calendar data file to iCal.

It's hard to stop going to the upper right corner of the window to switch applications. | link

September 16, 2002

Sweet.
I'm typing this in BBEdit running in the Classic environment in OSX 10.2; it's seamless and fast and extremely impressive. It's going to take me some time to figure out exactly how to use this system, and I'm probably going to re-format the hard drive again into one partition (I did two, and installed the system on one), but for right now it's running via a FireWire drive off the back of Scout. I have a few days of installing my Classic software onto the second drive ahead of me, organizing the files, and figuring out how to organize the OSX volume. I'm going to have to buy a book on OSX just so I can catch up with the system and understand what to prune and what not to touch. There are a lot of things I want to learn about, and so far, after a somewhat rocky start, it's gone pretty smoothly.

The lag I noticed with the beta is gone. The Classic environment comes up quickly and painlessly. Fonts look beautiful in OSX. I was able to hook up with my server in about three seconds, and I'm going to attempt to organize it as a Favorite here in a minute. Probably the biggest thing to get used to will be the new layout of the Finder—after ten years or so, it's hard to re-program the brain. | link

September 15, 2002

Good times.
For a few hours on Saturday night, I felt like time had stood still—or at least flashed back to a summer six or seven years ago, when none of us had houses except for Rob, nobody had the responsibility of careers and children, and we were all living for the next party weekend. There were a few people missing, and their absence was felt, but it was great to have a scattered group of friends come together and have fun with each other.

All that having been said, it's great to see everybody happy and doing well in their adult lives. Gracie Kern is beautiful, Charlie is living back in the 'hood, Jen and I have standing monthly plans with Rob and Karean, and I am motivated to get back with a lot of people. | link

September 13, 2002

Sunset over the Archie Bunker backyard, 9.10

Tonight Matt rolls into town from San Francisco. I probably won't get to see him tonight, but tomorrow some other friends have organized a party and I'll see some folks that have been AWOL for a year or so. I'm really happy to get together with some of the old crew and I'll be sure to take a lot of pictures for everyone.

OS X looks real nice, but I can't install it on a remote FireWire drive, and I don't have the star-head screwdriver here to switch out my drives. So it will have to wait for sometime in the next couple of days.

I like when good things infiltrate mass media. This made me smile. It was a good episode, too. | link

September 12, 2002

Self-imposed media ban dept.: I would have punched the guy too. | God help us all. | I'm gonna buy this book. -thread link

I did hear on NPR that the former head of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq was on one of the early morning shows speaking out against the "regime change" policy, and offering an alternate solution. He went so far as to describe the current plan as foolhardy (my words, not his). I am impressed by his courage and proud of his ability to take a stand. Let us hope the Congress and U.N. dissuade the government from this plan.

Curious.
This link will tell you what else you might be listening to if you like Massive Attack. (Remove them from the URL bar and replace with your favorite artist; replace spaces with the "+" sign. Or take their survey.) | link

September 11, 2002

... Other than this link, I'm avoiding this subject today.

My drive and case showed up today. Both look great; I can't wait to set everything up. But I don't have a copy of OSX yet and we're not getting paid yet. In other news though, the game shipped today, and it looks really good. The four-sheet insert I put together in Quark on my laptop turned out very clean and very good (*WHEW*) so there's my first game in the can! | link

September 10, 2002

Update on the Appletalk over IP thread from yesterday: I set up my 8500 as a server, opened a port on the router and was able to connect up-from inside my house-over IP. I still can't connect up from work however. I also found that you can't leave your digital camera out in the sun- all the photos I took Saturday were corrupted.

Update on 3dsMax: I built my first model yesterday, and I was able to do a bunch of stuff that previously was impossible to figure out. And I actually had fun with it. Stay tuned... (today I'm working on promotional stuff for the rollout party of Emperor tonight. Also, inside sources tell us that as of yesterday, the demo has been downloaded over 20 thousand times since being posted last week.)

I found this article via camworld about an MIT professor who was ambushed on Donahue when invited to come and speak about violence in video games. It's too bad he wasn't able to explain his ideas in detail, but that's modern media culture, baby.

I got an email from my friend Todd last week, who commented on my half-formed August 30 post about personal freedoms:

Right on. I couldn't say it better myself.

Jen also had a comment, about the Cusack/Max article on Salon yesterday:

Which is a very, very good point. I can understand Spielberg bailing on the project for obvious reasons- his commitment to the Shoah Foundation is not considered lightly, and the Holocaust is a very sensitive subject- but the folks who backed away should stop and consider what they failed to offer the public as a means of discourse and self-reflection. | link

September 9, 2002

I spent a good portion of last night alternately getting a backup Mac server up and running, and listing the CD's I own so that I can A. figure out how many I have, and B. start trading stuff with my friend Rob to augment our individual collections. I now need to figure out how to share the Mac out through my DSL line- I'm going to give this a whirl again tonight.

Work is going steadily on the freelance project, and we have business cards, letterhead, advertising, a sellsheet, and a ton of other materials. I'm thinking that the official rollout will be sometime in the next few months, and for that I'm happy. There's other stuff in the works that I need to jump on tonight, as well as some possible stuff down the road.

The trellis is up and secured in place, so now I get to the part I've been dreading- drilling a plate into the sill of the house under the back door for the stair platform. I'm trying to decide whether I should do that or just build a support and anchor it to the ground. Either way, I'm going to have to cut off the vinyl siding under the door, and I will be able to see what color the brick is behind my house for the first time in 5 years.

I'll Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It Dept.: John Cusack and two other producers have spent the last year or two scraping funding together for a movie about the young Hitler in Munich, exploring who he was as a man before the Third Reich. One quote from the article really was interesting: "Walter Benjamin said when you fuse aesthetics with politics, you get fascism."
The three producers interviewed all share a strong interest in the subject and have researched the subject extensively. Also interesting was the reaction Cusack got from Maureen Dowd of the Times— she had never seen the movie but came out against it. Personally, I'm interested in seeing it.

I found a link to the work of Adrian Tomine, who writes some very good comics. I'm going to look into finding this one up at Atomic Books sometime. | link

September 6, 2002

So I went out this morning and bought this book and this book for to learn 3DS Max. I'll have a review of each as I go, but for now, out of a total of seven books at Border's, I think I got the two that will help me the most. And hopefully the company will reimburse me.

Jen and I went down into DC last night to see her brother Rob, and we had some very tasty Mongolian buffet (you throw a bunch of ingredients in a bowl, and a surly Oriental man adds sauce-type ingredients, then stir-fries it on a gigantic drum in the middle of the room). After eating we found an Irish pub and had some beers until it was time to leave town. Catching the final train out of Chinatown, we made it home to bed by 1am. Jen was glad to see her brother and I had a really good time. I miss DC and the cosmopolitan feeling I get there- Baltimore just doesn't have the same vibe.

My shout out to Other World Computing, a firm specializing in Mac sales; I sent in an order for some gear yesterday and got an email back asking to confirm my ship-to address, considering I'm having it delivered at work. So i called Visa and had them update my record there. Hopefully my stuff will show up on time next week. But I was happy they took the time to check that out. That's good customer service.

Friday Humor Dept.:This is a funny little satire of 2001, a Space Odyssey, and very well done. Plus it's in Legos. Rock on. | link

September 5, 2002

Lake, NY state 9.1

Well, after another beautiful vacation stay at my parents' place on the lake, a small disaster befell us on our trip home. The Tortoise decided that it was upset at me for neglecting to fill the oil and coolant, and the thermostat blew up on us. Luckily we were only 30 minutes away from my parents' place, so we were able to get it towed back to a good garage and be on the porch sipping vodka tonics four hours after the first sign of steam. Yesterday, after a morning of freelance work and worry over getting Jen to Rochester, we found out that it was only the thermostat and a hose, and I had not in fact fried a piston. $173.88 lighter, we packed it up for the second time in two days and made our way homeward to a house of worried, hungry cats.

I'll probably write some about the trip in a day or two, but for right now I'll just mention one of the first things that I think of: Crossing the street in front of my parents' house to try to take a picture of the stained glass window at the church in bare feet, at 10pm, realizing that there were no cars in either direction on Main Street, and that the Big Dipper was huge, clear and hanging over the village.

Thinking about catastrope this weekend got me jump-started today into ordering the drive and enclosure that I was thinking about; after some figuring I felt this was the best bet. (I was considering making an old 8500 a server, but decided not to support any more legacy equipment.) It will be good to have a definite backup solution in place. | link

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