Nov 30, 2003

Gobble Gobble. Well, we sent the folks on their way this morning after a breakfast at the Double 'T' on Rt. 40; a great time was had by all. Jen and I got up Thursday morning and simultaneously cooked food, cleaned house, and moved furniture before my folks arrived. We had a 14 lb. bird, harvest stuffing, smashed potatoes, candied yams, fresh snapped beans, and Mom's gravy (winner and still champ-een, two years running.) It was great to be able to sit and have a real family meal around the new (to us) table in the dining room like grown-ups, as well—the day of the little enamel-top table is done. Dessert was a choice of homemade pecan pumpkin pie or carrot cake (Jen spoils us) and coffee. We all slept very heavy that night.

Friday Jen served us her homemade cinnamon buns for breakfast, and we ventured out into the rain to Home Anthology, where Jen and I cashed in our gift certificate (thanks Nate, Kristen, Heather and Todd) for a beautiful mirror for over the fireplace. We wandered around Ellicott City and had lunch at the brewpub on the hill. Mercifully, we didn't buy a ton of stuff while we were there.

Saturday we drove to Andy Nelson's to pick up twelve pounds of barbecue, and got the house ready for Jen's fambly. They drove up in Big Blue at about 4:30, two hours later than we were planning, but we got them likkered up and built a fire and sat around the living room and told stories. Much better than last year, when we shoehorned everyone into the rowhome and then took them to the typhoid breeding ground for dinner.

Today's menu is full of leisure, leftovers, and low maintenance. I did rake the rest of the leaves off the back lawn and bagged them when we got home from breakfast, however. And it looks like Isabel, or whatever funky weather pattern we've had since then, dropped a branch into the roof of the greenhouse by the top, which I have to figure out how to fix before snowfall. | link

Nov 26, 2003

Grumble Grumble. Today I got hit with requests for work on three different projects, all due Monday morning. Two of the three were surprises, while the other was something that I was given Monday afternoon for completion COB yesterday...which then bled into today. So already I'm in a wonderful mood. Add to that the utterly craptacular MFC interface two programmers put in front of me, with bright shining smiles. Imagine their horror when I told them, without pity, that it was crap and that I was redesigning everything. Hint to programmers: 1. MFC makes me cranky. 2. Don't ever tell me "we can't do that". 3. Don't ever tell me that managing three windows on one screen in a game is OK. 4. Quit trying to design and get back to work.

Venturing out to the Baja Fresh with a gaggle of people for lunch, Nate and I were ignored for about ten solid minutes by the manager and assistant manager, who thought it was time better spent yelling at each other and the five guys frantically putting food together behind the counter. We walked out and went to Qdoba, where the act of putting a burrito together is not considered open-heart surgery. Upon returning to the office, Nate bit into his burrito only to find it was my burrito, so I had to settle for a dry, bland collection of rice and beans sprinkled sparingly with dry pieces of steak. (I ordered chicken molé.)

About the only thing that's gone right so far is the open box of Dunkin' Donuts in the lunchroom, which was still full.

In other news, class went well last night, I think, with a few exceptions; I was also able to pick up another iMac for a dirt-cheap price to continue the MP3 -> iPod saga. More on that later. Plus, a DOA Apple Pro Mouse for free, which I'm going to do surgery on next week, if I have time. | link

Nov 25, 2003

You Have Been Warned. So I don't have enough space on the Powerbook for all the songs I've got ripped to MP3. I have the iMac, but it doesn't have a FireWire port. So Jason suggested that I wipe my iTunes preferences, mount the iMac drive as a volume, and then point iTunes to it as the music library folder. All fine and good...except that the Ratings do not transfer from the remote volume to the Powerbook—which negates the full power of Smart Playlists. So I can go through all 6210+ songs and re-rate each individual one again...or find another way of doing this.

Music of the Day: Red Snapper, Making Bones. Good electronic/live instrumental mixture with some soaring vocals over top, just what I like. Imagine the rythym section of Soul Coughing fronted by N'dea Davenport and somebody throwing keyboards in behind. I have to say, if I was to start a band, I'd hire a drummer and play nothing but upright funk bass.

Random Thoughts. It's about 30 degrees in Baltimore today, and I can feel it in the finger I broke five years ago (playing football drunk with a friend in Nag's Head, I caught a pass straight-on with my left ring finger, fracturing both sockets in the middle bone. I did finish the game, though.) Jen is picking up the final groceries for this weekend; my folks are getting into town after noon on Thursday, and we have another pile of food on order from Andy Nelson's. | link

Nov 24, 2003

This link is one I'm going to keep because I've heard of people losing power in their iPods after very short periods of time. Being the tinkering type, though, I don't have a problem cracking the case on anything.

Recap Busy weekend—in a nutshell: tasting at the Brass Elephant successful, polyurethane on upstairs floors completed (including hallway, whew), mission to Lockard family house for turkey day complete. Lots to do before the break, little time. Details to follow. | link

Nov 21, 2003

Girly man. Parsa Kabob, the local Persian restaurant, is tucked away in the side of a shopping mall a little south of my office. It's staffed by a friendly fellow who knows your favorite dish before you've reached the counter, and it smells like garlic and fresh bread inside. I drove Todd there for lunch this afternoon, and instead of walking next door to the comic book store (super sweet!) while waiting for his order, we checked out the dollar store. Inside, for $7.35, I picked up three rolls of X-mas wrapping paper, a box of boxes, a pair of work gloves, a green lightbulb (so that folks can "stop at the green light" as opposed to sailing on past our house and into Ellicott City), and Lieutenant Extreme. Lieutenant Extreme is a 1' poseable plastic action figure, sort of a poor kid's old-skool GI Joe, and the particular LT I bought is wearing a camofluage hoodie and packing an M-16. This is the kind of thing I would have paid months of allowance for when I was eight or so. Look at the beauty in buying Lieutenant Extreme in bulk at the dollar store: Your kid could spend all week beating the crap out of Lieutenant Extreme and blow him up on Sunday, and you'd have another one waiting for him Monday morning for the kingly sum of $1. He may not pose quite as well as Mr. Joe, or have comparable footwear (Lieutenant Extreme has two-piece plastic boots that snap together over his feet like concrete sneakers), but you get a lot for your Washington. Right now he's standing point on my monitor, plastic eyes scanning the horizon for signs of trouble, M-16 set on "full auto." Step off, yo.

Another Aspirin, Please. I met Jason last night at the Brewer's Art for some drinks and conversation; we had a great time catching up and sampled the Ozzy (any beer poured from a tap sporting a rubber hand in the 'metal ruuuules' pose is one you have to drink) but I found that three glasses of 7.5ABV beer is not so good for my head in the morning.

One good thing is that being in a bar talking loudly over other people in cigarette smoke drops my otherwise squeaky (to me) voice down about two octaves.

Looks like Todd has signed on to the HDR project as well as my eight students; I'm trying to figure out how I can get his stuff critiqued by the class (if they'll even let me.) Somehow i think the new MICA isn't going to let non-students come in and audit classes like my friend Jason did back in the day. | link

Nov 20, 2003

that's just super, 11.20.03

Yay. Let's all hear it for Mr. Active Roof Leak, everyone! Thanks.

Album of the Day. The Roots' Phrenology. Lots of juicy good tracks on here. I'm not a huge hip-hop or rap fan, although my tastes do run to the DJ genre (see Shadow, RJD2, Cut Chemist, et. al.), but I enjoy the Roots' sound. In the year 2003 these guys still care about the production and the words; I think the fact that the band acually plays each track is central to the quality of the music.

This morning I posted a bunch of pictures of the rooms that have been stained; in no particular order, here are the pink room, ocean room, and the office. Additionally, I stained the floor in the cream room this morning before leaving for work, because we have a forecast of 60+ degree weather through Monday. Pictures of that room to come tomorrow. | link

Nov 19, 2003

More Humor. A friend just sent me this link: It's a compendium of great client horror stories from the dot-com days. It's all text, pretty quick, but riotously funny. Reminds me of my days in the saltmine:

Asshole Marketing VP: We want to have a flashy movie on our homepage to showcase how fast the service is.
Me: (considering outside help) Well, OK, how much money do we have to...
AMVP: We don't have any money. Just do that voodoo thing you do.
Me: But I need stuff like music and video to drop in there...
AMVP: Steal something. Find a song you like and use that.
Me: Uh, that's illegal.
AMVP: Why are you being difficult? Just get it done.
Me: (pissed.) Alright. When do we need to have it done?
AMVP: Two weeks. And put lots of action in there. Make it edgy.
Me: ...
AMVP: What's the matter?

...I could go on...

CompUSA gave me a full-price refund for an open box return, so I turned around and ordered a FireWire enclosure for the 28GB drive our friend Rob gave me. Plan B is to dump the MP3 collection on that drive and point iTunes to it via the Powerbook. I'll find a way to get my songs on the iPod somehow.

Fun for the Whole Family. Check this link. The fan-produced Pokemon video for this song is mind-numbingly funny.

Who's Bad? Why is it the cops aren't busting down doors and arresting Michael frickin' Jackson? Why are they "negotiating" his surrender?

My Old School. So last night I was at MICA at 6:30 and the class actually happened. I met up with the two other teachers and we traded histories; turns out I graduated a couple of years after one and designed a company website for the other. We gave our pitches, and after having practiced mine at least five times, I forgot most of it. However, it seemed to go well, and I think I got the students interested in the project. My group told me I was their first choice (the teachers pitch their projects and the students vote for their choices), which made me feel pretty good. So I'll post more updates to the class page as it unfolds; I'm going to take pictures of the work as it comes in and try to answer all the questions by adding information as it gets worked out.

One of the students was interested in contacting the government to see if we could propose the final comps as an alternative to the current design, which is something I had considered but ultimately had to shelve while trying to find the samples. I'm going to look back into that and see if there's somebody who knows somebody who knows the person. | link

Nov 18, 2003

Closed... are my eyes. We've found that the coffee sold by the Metro (a local Maryland chain) is so crappy, you can't smell the difference between decaf French roast and 'southern pecan'. So Jen and I have been playing russian roulette with the coffee this past week, and I think I keep losing. Luckily the management at work brough two automatic coffee makers into work for us, and in a rare stroke of luck, there's half & half in the fridge. So I'm now drinking my third cup of coffee and trying to keep my eyelids open.

...But No Cigar. The FireWire card I bought for the PC worked fine when I put it in the PC, but XPlay did not work the way I hoped it would. I wanted to use iTunes the way I do on the Mac, but XPlay has you managing your music manually, which is what I'm trying to get away from. So it's back to the drawing board. | link

Nov 17, 2003

sage and his mama (this looks light on a Mac, I swear), 11.14.03

Recap. Because I was paid on time, I think I may treat myself to that $22 FireWire card down at the CompUSA tonight on my way home from work. I used two nifty features of my iPod last night—the sleep timer and the alarm clock—to put myself to sleep with some Thievery Corporation and wake myself up, respectively. It would be grand to get the bulk of my music on this little gizmo. Thanks go to Jen for the bounty of bulk consumer products she stocked us with at the Sam's this weekend; besides a pallet of toilet paper, we found her a very inexpensive, but stylish cashmere winter coat. Hotcha hotcha! And thanks also to Nate for the bevy of good new music.

I'm Feeling Much Better Now, Thanks. I woke up at seven this morning (OK, 7:15) and made Jen some breakfast; after she left I put on my kneepads and started staining the floors. By 9:15 I had three rooms done and sealed the upstairs in plastic like a hermetic bubble. I made it into work and told Todd that when I pass out and begin twitching under my desk to inform the paramedics that I've been huffing glue all morning.

I'm getting some pretty good visuals here. | link

Nov 16, 2003

Hold Your Breath. Yesterday I tore the built-in shelves out of the office so that we could sand the floors underneath; there was no good way to pull selected parts off without ripping out the whole damn thing. Luckily the shelves behind the doors were less difficult and I didn't have to demolish them. As of tonight, the pink, blue and office floors are palm-sanded, cleaned, and ready to be stained tomorrow morning. Jen and I agreed on pecan for the color, so we picked up a gallon of it this morning. I'll rise early tomorrow and see if I can't get all three rooms done before work.

Found via the mighty Metafilter this evening: The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were. | link

A few things, found via one of my new favorite design sites: Interrobang Letterpress. Tasty and sweet. Also, a racy bit of non-worksafe fun: Motel Fetish.

Walking With A Panther. I have 10.3 running on Jen's Powerbook; it got the original 12GB drive from my machine with a clean install. Jen's going to be moving to OSX at some point at work and I want her to be familiar with it as soon as she can be so the IT idiots there don't get involved. It looks and runs very well on a 400Mhz G3, which is a good sign.

Grumble Grumble. So last night I got home and the power was out. Again. This makes the third time since we've moved in—admittedly the first time was during the hurricane, but this is frickin' high wind. Everybody else in Catonsville had power, for crying out loud.

So we drove to Kelsey's Irish pub and had some warm food while the Maryland game played in the background; when the longhaired 40-year-old band began setting up in the corner, we beat feet back to the ice chest. Jen put seventy blankets on the bed while I stoked the fire; our sleep was interrupted repeatedly by the cats, who became punting targets as they jumped on the bed. (try sleeping with five blankets and four cats on one bed. It's kind of like being covered in warm cement.) Around 4:30 the lights came back on, and the heat slowly returned, thank god.

I've learned a couple of new things about the house; apparently the front porch holds absolutely no heat, the chimney damper definitely needs to be fixed, and we are in the market for a generator. Also, there's a radiator behind the inside front door. | link

Nov 13, 2003

Metadata. I've been spending about an hour each night with the monotonous task of entering data into the MP3 tags in my music library. The obsessive-compulsive side of my brain is silently singing happy songs to itself because it has something else to do besides make my nose twitch or worry about the coffeepot; when I get done, I'll be able to use the Smart Playlists feature of iTunes to update and organize the 25+GB of music into a comprehensive collection, weeding out the average of 50% filler on each album. Which means, of course, that I have to wade through each artist and categorize by genre, then drill down to the album category and categorize by year, and then finally wade through each individual song and rate fron zero to five. (Nevermind that I could theoretically erase the songs which rate, say 1 or below: this is about compulsive behavior, remember.)

Whew. I'm somewhere in the M's, I think, and I have about 2,000 more to go. I keep telling myself it will be worth it when I'm done. It is nice to start making dinner, though, and start the 'Early Jazz' playlist: All songs in the Jazz, Big Band, and Swing category recorded between 1920 and 1929 with a rating above three gives me a pleasant mixture of early Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, and Fletcher Henderson.

Here's a fantastic gallery of pictures from Iraq taken by a soldier there. It's worth a look.

My Kingdom For A T8 Star Wrench. Dammit. I have Jen's Powerbook here at work ready to install Panther and I forgot that the hard drive sled takes a star wrench—the size below the standard in every stupid wrench set sold. (I'm swapping her 6GB drive for a 12GB drive.) I have one, but I think it's at home. Along with my wallet. Can you tell it's one of those mornings? | link

Nov 12, 2003

You May Begin. I finally have some direction on the second project I've been tasked with; what I thought was going to be a mindless creation of small tileable elements has turned into something that could be interesting and challenging to model in 3DSmax. I have some basic ideas and need to take some reference photos tomorrow—I'm actually looking forward to this!

To the Guy At My Company Who Borrowed The Company Camera And Left It At His House The Day There's A '64 Mercury Monterrey In The Parking Lot Here At Work: Thanks a bunch, douchebag. You're a prince. Memo to self: Never, ever leave the camera at home, even if you're carrying three hundred pounds of crap to the car.

Update Update. Turns out the folks at MICA left a helpful typo in the letter they sent me about the class, so I showed up a week early. Isn't that great? | link

Nov 11, 2003

Update. Looks like the class isn't tonight. I'm hoping to hell I didn't mess up the schedule, but the letter they sent me says November 11, 7pm in big letters.

Higher Education. I'm sitting in a lobby area of the Bunting center, which formerly was the AAA building with the cheap cafeteria on the basement level. The whole outside of MICA has changed dramatically since I was here last; the big glass sail thing overwhelms the Fox building and Mt. Royal Avenue, and there's a frickin' fountain where the parking lot used to be. All the kids look the same though (funny how dreadlocks are still so art school), and the air still smells of turpentine and Patchouli oil. I'm not sure where I have to go or what room this class is in because the visual communication in the Visual Communication department blows. More on that later.

Dust In The Wind. I got the rest of the upstairs edged with the hand sander this afternoon; with the exception of the areas under the built-in shelves in the office, the floor is clear of varnish. I have to finish sand the Pink room and the edges I tore up today, but otherwise all is ready for stain.

Everything Must Go. To our neighbors, the renters across the street: Thanks for parking your broke-down Dodge Diplomat on the front lawn with the For Sale sign in the window. That's great. I'm gonna put on my plaid suit and go inflate the giant pumpkin on my lawn.

What's The Frequency, Kenneth? Unable to sleep last night, I started researching the Griffin iTrip, the little add-on to the iPod that broadcasts your songlist to FM radio. Jason told me he had read bad reviews about it, so I looked at a few message boards and found that there's a lot of negative feedback, especially in metro radio markets saturated with FM stations. So the iTrip is off my Christmas list, and instead I'll have to find an aftermarket car radio with a line-in plug. Sigh. | link

Nov 10, 2003

leaf, frederick road, 11.9.03

Thanks to Jason for Panther; I'm kind of nervous about installing it just yet, but it's great to have ready.

Additions. Renie reminded me to add another cherished memory from childhood:

Don't forget about the William Tell Overture and HOURS of hauling firewood—nay, large dead trees—to the green Ford F150.

(My Dad, in a well-meant bid for lower fuel bills in the gas crunch of the late 70's, decided to install a wood stove in the basemen of our house. Which, naturally, meant we had to go chop wood, drag it to the truck, haul it to the house, split it, stack it down by the shed, and carry wheelbarrowfuls to the basement window each night after dinner. Ah, the memories. Don't get me started on the time he made me climb a ladder to throw a brick down the flue to clean it...)

The 1812 Overture. One of the wonderful things about living in Catonsville is the number of old trees that surround the neighborhood. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and our yard has been looking like a vacant lot for about two weeks. My father, in the old days, used to wake us for raking duty by putting records on his 1950's era console record player and blasting the volume; usually it was Tchaikovsky, and he would roust us from bed in the hours before dawn, prop us at the table in front of bacon and eggs, and then kick us out the front door with rakes in our hands to clean the yard. Being young and stupid, we would complain, fool around, and make the job last until long after lunch, when he would stick his head out of the garage or from under the car to tell us to get back to work. I quickly developed a dislike for raking and a Pavlovian response to Tchaikovsky. When I moved to the city and bought a rowhouse, I said a prayer of thanks for the lack of lawn to mow and rake. When we bought the house in Catonsville, I knew what I was getting into, but found that mowing was actually kind of satisfying; unfortunately I've confirmed that my dislike of raking is still alive and well.

(To be fair, doing the front yard was kind of fun. About halfway through the backyard, I got sick of it suddenly.) | link