May 30, 2003

I posted pictures from the NY trip this afternoon. Tractors, type, barns and boats. Big fun, people.

Reality Check. I've been wanting to move out of the city for some time now. I've been here for twelve years, since the first Bush administration, and I'm ready for a change of scenery.

I've been increasingly unhappy with the city experience over the last couple of years; minor gripes with the amount of space in my house have grown to include things like an intense hatred for the police helicopters hovering over the bedroom each night; the endlessly repeating song coming from the ice cream truck (yeah, it's cute the first time, but just wait until the frickin thing crawls down your street at 2 mph), and the kids walking down the street who FEEL THE NEED TO YELL ALL THE TIME. I'd like to actually have a lawn, some trees, a garage, and a house with windows on all four sides. And now that life is getting serious, I'd like us to live in a place where the schools are public and good.

That being said, I drove out to Finksburg to look at a house listed online. On paper, it sounded good: Built in 1900, four bedrooms and three and a half baths, an acre of land, fireplaces, central air. I drove, and I drove, and I drove. I wound up out in farm country, following single-lane roads through rolling countryside, until I found the house.

The house wasn't what we were hoping for, at least in my opinion—the neighboring house is stuck right up on one side of this place, and it's a plumber's office, with the attendant vans parked outside. The area is surrounded by farmland, and the distance to any main highway is far. The first live being I saw after getting out of the car was a Holstein cow. But that's not what spooked me.

I got scared when I began thinking about the changes about to take place in our lives—both Jen and I have lived in the same place for years. We're used to our routines, we're used to our habits; we have a relationship with our surroundings and our neighborhoods that's easy and comfortable. Need a good cup of coffee? I've got you covered. Need a valve job? We know the guy. Looking for a great dinner? Jen can point you to several within a ten minute drive of her house.

I'm not scared to join households with my fiancee. (I'm not afraid to use the word fiancee, either.) I'm not scared to start an adult life with her, to arrange joint accounts and save for retirement and think about marriage plans and buy stuff for babies. I'm looking forward to it, in fact.

I'm concerned about all the unknowns that go along with buying a house. I'm afraid of redneck neighbors, termites, radon, tornados, decreasing property value, indian burial sites, eminent domain, locust infestation...

We are at the edge of a wide chasm, Jen and I, and we're about to jump together. Knowing that makes me feel better, but I'm still worried about the unknowns.

My (incomplete) artist suggestions for Apple to include in the iTunes Store:

• The Pogues
• Dismemberment Plan
• The New Pornographers
• The White Stripes
• Sigur Ros (was up there, but is now gone)
• The Rolling Stones

Song of the Day: Go With The Flow, Queens of the Stone Age. Rawwwwk! | link

May 29, 2003

Weak. I broke down and bought a Jelly Roll Morton album From the iTunes Store last night. 22 of the best mid-20's Jazz standards for $10? I'm all over that.
Link not work? Sorry, you need iTunes on a Mac.

On my mind, currently: Please god don't let my Mac barf on OSX 10.2.6.

OK, so anybody who might be reading this: Jen is looking for part or full-time print design work in the DC/Baltimore area, starting immediately. She's had five years' experience in the field, has a Master's degree from the University of Baltimore publication design department, and she does excellent work (I may be biased, but I tell the truth here.) If you have any leads or suggestions, please let her know at jenllockard@excite.com.

You may or may not have noticed, but the style sheet problem with Safari got fixed today. I spent an evening banging my head against the wall trying to fix it, then ran the page through Dreamweaver, cleaned up the HTML, and fixed it. Something must have gotten bollixed up about last December or so and just got recopied since then. The pages looked fine in all browsers save the latest build of Safari, where they became craptacular. Whew. It's nice to have that cleaned up. | link

May 15, 2003

arabber, formstone, 5.15.03

I stopped on my way home this afternoon to take a picture of a vanishing Baltimore icon: an Araber stopped by the side of the road, selling produce from the back of a cart. Jen and I have heard them wheeling slowly through the neighborhood over the last few months, and it occurred to me that I haven't bought produce from one in a long time. This gentleman gave me two bags of seedless grapes for $4 and let me take his picture. I consider that a pretty good bargain. I hope I see him again in the neighborhood. note: (I would have linked to a good info site on arabers, but there don't seem to be any.)

Huh. People are all freaked out about the journalist who got fired by the New York Times for making stuff up, which comes right on the heels of the announcement by the journalist who previously got fired for making stuff up writing a novel...about a journalist who makes stuff up. Ain't America sweet?

Jen is in the middle of talking to my alma mater about teaching a flex class there in the fall, and wanted to know if i was interested in teaching a web design class as well. I'm intrigued and hopeful that they will call me back, as I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the last time I did it, and would like to try it again.

This morning I loaded Miramar's PC MacLAN on my PC at home, looking for a way to get around the ._ hassles that OSX comes with; I was also hoping I could use the Mac volume as a storage facility for music files with iTunes as well. We'll see how it works over the network tonight—I'm still working out some of the bugs in the system. It would also be nice to have the printer shared throughout the network. | link

May 14, 2003

I've been working on a project where the issue of readability has come up more than once, especially long lines of text in paragraphs. Searching for some hard data, I came upon the Usability News site, and also the University of Wichita's psychology department and their studies based on usability testing. I'm impressed by the breadth and depth of the results, as well as its layout online. I'm going to be linking back to this one (and doing a lot of reading) in the next few weeks.

Todd, my cube-neighbor, asked me a few weeks ago if anybody I knew would be interested in a beautiful used dining room table for sale; he and his wife were selling it to make room for their new table. After a brief consultation with Jen, and a visit to look at the table (and a very tasty frittatta which Heather claimed was burnt—it was not), I signed on the dotted line. Tonight it will appear in my dining room, which is little more than a narrow hallway between the living room and kitchen, and hopefully not dwarf the rest of the house.

Outstanding television. The West Wing, over the course of the last couple of episodes (that I've seen, at least) has been some of the best television I've watched in a long time. This evening's episode, the season finale, was gripping, intelligent drama—and last week's leadup was some of the most suspenseful TV I've seen in years. And John Frickin' Goodman as the Speaker of the House! | link

May 13, 2003

An open letter to my lazy-ass neighbor:

No, my truck was not abandoned simply because I parked it out in front of your stupid house. If you have such an issue with the fact that my truck is parked three doors down from my house out in front of your door, get off your fat ass and walk down to ask me to move it. Don't call the cops and complain that somebody left the truck there, especially since it had only been there since sunday morning. And if you have a problem with the way my truck looks, perhaps you should walk out your front door, turn around, and get an eyeful of the sorry-ass front of your house. Maybe I should call and complain to the ASPCA the next time I walk past your air conditioner and get a noseful of that rotten cat piss stink fuming out of your living room.

And, you know, I did buy a cover for it, so that I'd be a better neighbor and you wouldn't have to look at it. I kept that cover on it right up to the day somebody ripped it off in broad daylight and you didn't call the cops. So thanks, neighbor.

If my truck gets towed, you better believe your car will soon be sitting on four flat tires, bucko.

...

So you're bored of all the average-looking cars out there on the road, and you want something distinctive. A Civic is too plain, a Hummer H2 is too big, and there's already a Z8 parked on your block. Why not a DeLorean? A company in Texas will be happy to sell you a "remanufactured" model with a 6/6000 mile warranty. Already got one? then you've probably heard about their extensive warehouse full of OEM parts, shipped straight from the factory in Ireland when the company shut down. Heck, if I had $35K burning a hole in my pocket, I'd be interested in buying one for giggles. | link

May 12, 2003

Rock Stars (mostly.) So this weekend our friends Tim and Betty were married in D.C., kicking off the last great wave of marriages among our group from college. We had folks fly in from San Francisco and put a serious hurt on me when I tried to keep up with them (a bad idea—they had cast-iron livers and the time change on their side-I never stood a chance); we had folks drive down from New York and suffer mechanical disaster only miles from the Delaware Memorial Bridge. We randomly bumped into two other different couples we knew on two different days in two different locations, thus filling our karmic quota for the year.

Jen got the award for Best Resurrection From The Dead for her ability to shake off a vodka hangover and power through the morning of the wedding; there was a point where I thought I might lose her, but when she looked me in the eye and asked for a bloody mary, I knew my girl would make it, and look good too. After making it from the Baltimore beltway to the DC beltway in about fifteen minutes, I got us almost lost and then to the church with ten minutes to spare.

The ceremony and reception were as beautiful and elegant as you would hope for; the bride and groom were as gracious, relaxed and perfect as you would sell your soul to be. And it was fantastic to sit and catch up with old friends. | link

May 8, 2003

I Want.

1. An Applescript or basic widget smart enough to open a local directory at a predetermined time, mount a remote mirror, check both file creation dates and update/backup files in both places.
2. Another widget that runs in the background on my Powerbook. When it senses that I've mounted a predetermined volume (my backup volume), it backs up the volume based on file creation date.

Yes, I have Retrospect, and No, I don't like it. I'd like to not have the massive overhead and all that crud floating around my system- I just want a simple daemon quietly humming in the background which is smart enough to back my stuff up without hosing my machine or costing $200. Is that too much to ask? | link

May 7, 2003

Dear John Wells Dick Wolf.

I've been watching your show on the TV, Law and Order, for something like seven or eight years now. And I have to admit, I've been a fan of the show for a long time. Lately, though, I've been...unfulfilled. I feel like I need something more. Something different.

When we started out, it was heavenly...a new, exciting relationship; constantly changing locations, witty dialog. There was a crackle in the air. Your stories seduced me with their complexity; you told them with verve and urban grit. When you took off your police badge and put on your shiny lawyer's suit, you sweet-talked me into a guilty verdict, every time. And I switched off the TV at ten, happy and complete.

Something happened along the way, though—you began to change. OK, I really didn't care much for Paul Sorvino. He was a nice guy, but I didn't really care to follow him around New York City all night. You had that Ken dude, who was cool, and of course Jerry Orbach, in the top five of Guys I'd Most Like To Catch A Drink With Sometime; There was that first DA dude with the buggy eyes that got booted off the show for Sam Waterston with the raspy throat and bouncy head thing. And, of course, the DA Babes—Jill Hennessey, now in that atrocious CSI ripoff show; Angie Harmon, who left to marry some football player and who hasn't been seen since; the J. Crew model chick who married Richard Gere (Richard frickin' Gere), and now the blonde.

The revolving door aside, the people all really sit secondary to the storylines, which, while being Ripped From The Headlines, are mostly a blur to me these days. I crack a beer at ten, and by the time I've hit the 3/4 mark, Sam and the DA Babe have the case and have been handed the first big plot twist. Jerry and Jesse are nowhere to be seen, and I gotta say, they are the reason I watch the show.

The point is, those exotic urban locales are looking all the same to me. The storylines blur into each other. Even though you've robbed pretty much every real-life true crime story for a plot, they all blend together by about the second commercial break. And don't even get me started on the fact that you have an old episode of the show running on every major cable channel at every hour of the day.

You're clever, though. You knew I was getting bored, so you put a new, shiny show in front of me—SVU. And I have to give you props—you didn't create a drastically inferior spinoff with an unwatchable star. That Oz guy is cool, but his eyes are a little too psycho for me, and that Mariska chick is trying too hard to be a hardass. You did get me with the inspired pairing of Ice-T and The Belz together; if you want a great show, put them together in their own gritty cop drama. But this show is much the same in pacing and layout, with a lot more sermonizing thrown in. I almost feel like I'm at the tail end of the last M.A.S.H. season where Alan Alda got waaaay too preachy.

You then figured it would be cool to throw me another bone—you got the Criminal Intent on Sunday night going with that spooky D'Onofrio guy, and heck, I thought, I watched him blow his head off on the toilet. This might be good. But as I watched it, I realized, This guy plays an intelligent, but strangely creepy detective. And I can't shake the fact that I think he's intelligent and strangely creepy in real life. And that kind of spooked me out. His partner is cool, though—that's the first woman you've cast who I actually believe could whup my ass. Courtney B. Vance could smooth-talk a tiger out of its stripes, which is why he makes a great lawyer and why I don't ever believe he'd be a D.A.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm looking for alternatives to your shows these days. Wednesday is no longer a lock, although I have absolutely no idea what goes up against L&O; SVU is for when we're home on a Friday and don't give a shit, and Criminal Intent is at least mildly interesting while being a little creepy before bedtime. So thanks for the memories, John Dick; maybe we'll see each other again, on Court TV, or Lifetime, or TNT, or... | link

May 6, 2003

Salon has an article on the new Matrix sequels and the change in atmosphere since the first movie was released, back in 1999. Yeah, I'd have to say things are much different now.

So I was looking through some weblogs on my lunchbreak and stumbled over a fansite for a Canadian band I always loved back in the day, one my buddy Pat turned me on to our freshman year of college: The Pursuit Of Happiness. There's a ton of info on there about Moe and the gals; even better, there's an MP3 archive of live shows from the mid-90's. Interesting trivia: right after producing the beautiful Skylarking with XTC, Todd Rundgren was paired up with TPOH to produce Love Junk—two of my favorite albums.

Cleansing, Part Two: One of the drawbacks to owning a house in the city is the hassle of parking your car two blocks away from your house. Growing up in the 'burbs, we were always blessed with houses where the driveways were long and wide, and you could leave your car wide open with the radio on for the afternoon while you emptied the back seat of all the fast-food wrappers, gym socks, and soda cans you had been lugging around. Nowadays, by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is pull up out in front of the house and clean out the Tortoise. Therefore, the trunk of my car has resembled the floor of a crack den. Today I backed up to the Dumpster behind my office and took ten minutes to sort through the debris:

• Fifteen bungie cords, in various conditions
• Two teal bath towels inherited from my Mom, used to clean car parts
• Two homemade speaker cabinets with 6x9 Infinity drivers pinched from a repo car in '88 (dumped)
• Various cans of car-resuscitation fluid (starter, brake, oil, etc.)
• Several sheets of paper from the MVA warning me that my car is suspended for a broken taillight (gotta get that worked out.)
• One fire extinguisher reading "empty"; it lied, 'cause that white stuff shot about twenty feet
• One rusty, broken umbrella (dumped)
• Two Slim Jims—not the food-product kind, the Grand Theft Auto kind (hidden)
• One plastic go-cup (dumped)
• A fleece blanket from Mom, for the day when the car plunges off a snowy cliff and I am pinned in the wreckage; nevermind that it will be locked in the trunk
• The plastic safety panel from the top of my radiator
• Two ancient highway flares, dangerous and waiting to burst into flame directly over my gas tank
• A $12 set of standard Popular Mechanics ratchets (like I'm gonna leave the Snap-Ons in the trunk, are you kidding?)

May 5, 2003

Whew. Busy weekend. Saturday saw us visiting the estimable Petit Louis with Todd, Heather, Nate and Kristen for a French repast of mouthwatering proportions. Duck Leg Confit is the super-shiznit, according to half the table. Jen took a well-deserved and brief detour from the diet she's on (and she looks fine, let me tell you) to indulge in the pot de créme for dessert—and who wouldn't? Afterwards we visited the Spur Design gallery for a show of Luba Lukova's poster work, and said hello to a bunch of folks we knew there.

Sunday was spent working out back, where the dry sink finally made it on to the wall, the final sections of the deck were cut and placed, and the interior stairs were stained. Later, we took a walk through Patterson Park and enjoyed the afternoon sun as well as the newly opened boat lake. It's good to see the city investing some money in its recreational areas. | link

May 2, 2003

tulips, 5.1.03

So I've begun compiling the scattered MP3 collection I have laying about on CD, removable disk, hard drive and laptop. Currently, with the stuff in constant rotation on the laptop (approx. 6 gigs) and the stuff from the removable drive, I have almost 12 gigs of music burned and catalogued. I'd love to have it all on OSX in iTunes, but for peace and paycheck's sake it's on the PC. The good news is that it looks like Apple is going to develop an iTunes client for Windows as well. That means the 100-disc CD carousel which does not remember how to play within groups will most likely go to the living room and the PC will take over as the house jukebox. Now to figure out how to wire the house from the PC.

I've also taken the drastic step of buying one of those CD book things they sell at the Target in the interest of throwing away all four hundred jewelbox cases that sit around the house collecting dust. Problem is, after pulling the sleeve inserts and CD's from the cases, I can't make the leap to throwing away the jewelboxes. It seems wrong and somehow very wasteful to just chuck all that stuff out. I'm going to check into recycling and see if the city will take them; that means, however, that i have to go back and pry the backs off of each one to get the rear insert out. Joy. | link

May 1, 2003

Good News. I read on Pitchfork this morning that UNKLE is set to release a new album sometime this year; while it won't be a dual DJ Shadow/James Lavelle project, Lavelle is getting some awesome people to guest on the disc, so it should be challenging, if nothing else. The Flaming Lips also released a companion disc to Yoshimi, which could be good for a listen or three, if Apple adds it to the iTunes library.

This Could Be Very Dangerous. Signing up for, and using the iTunes music service, is remarkably simple, hideously easy, and could be bad for my bank account. A few days ago there weren't a whole lot of tunes I was interested in buying, but they've added a lot of stuff into the database since then. I'm impressed by the process, the seamless integration of the service into the iTunes interface, and the satisfaction level I have upon completion. This is a great way to buy music.

Now, the big problem is to try to resist the urge to fill out the catalog—the entire Rush back catalog is there, for the High School still left in me; there's a ton of electronica to fill out; don't even get me started on the jazz selections... this is a baaaaaaaaaad thing for me. I only bought one track from the new Massive Attack remix EP, but there's a Jelly Roll Morton '26-'35 compilation of about 25 songs for $10, which is a fantastic deal. Must resist....

On the PC front, Dan has helped me resurrect my old 466 Celeron back from the brink of extinction to a condition of relevance; we swapped out an old CD-ROM for a burner I had laying around, and he gave me a bunch of old components laying around the office- RAM, a 10/100 NIC card, and some other small goodies. We wiped NT4 off the drive and replaced it with Win2000, so the list of available hardware and software I can use has greatly expanded. It was sad to see old SLANN go, but it's a much happier machine now. | link

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