breaktime lunch on the back lawn, 10/11

Tired. This weekend was a busy one. My sister Renie came down Friday night to stay with us and help work on the house, and we had a heck of a lot for her to do. Saturday morning we got up and fed her fresh muffins and coffee, and before she was done she had a paint roller in her hand. Between the three of us we got the Anxious room and the Pink room rolled with two coats of white paint, the closet in the Anxious room cleaned, mudded and ready to prime, and the closet in the Cream room painted. Renie also brought us a beautiful oak dresser she hasn't had time to work on, which we'll finish refinishing, and a huge red rug for in front of the fireplace.

home anthology, pre-opening, 10/11

We broke at four to take Renie over to Home Anthology, a favorite antique dealer of ours, and see their new space. Luckily they were there, and let us in a week before the grand opening of the new location. Todd and Heather were also there helping arrange furniture, and we walked the length of the space amazed at the collection. From there we took Renie to our favorite Thai restaurant to have dinner.

Sunday morning we got up and Renie decided that we needed to see what was under the carpet in the Pink room. We pulled it up to find newer padding (foam) and relatively virgin hardwood underneath that. It took about an hour to clean that room, and then Renie convinced us to pull up the hallway carpeting. Unfortunately, the Doctor had put linoleum down at some point (the same linoleum that's down over the original hexagonal tile in the bathroom) in the hallway...over top of a sheet of mdf plywood. So pulling the linoleum up was relatively easy, after we got under the plywood. Luckily the plywood saved the floor underneath, so we continued...down the stairs. As of today there's no more carpet upstairs, or on the stairs. They look pretty good—the risers are one-piece planks, and they're beat up, but still in good shape. After spending hours pulling staples and nails from the floor, we washed it good and put Jen's blue rug down in the upstairs hall. The pink room looks cleaner and larger, and the hallway looks brighter and warmer. I've posted a series of pictures here for you to look at. | link

Oct 10, 2003

Plus ça change, plus ça méme chose. My pop sent a picture of our old house in Jersey to my sister and I. I lived there from 1st to 5th grade, and I mostly remember this house as the one I grew up in. It looks a lot different—they cut down the weeping willow tree I fell out of and broke my arm under; they resided it with white clapboard (or a reasonable facsimile); they put a basketball hoop up in the driveway and got rid of my Dad's circular flower bed in the side yard. Other than that, it looks really good, like the family who lives there takes care of it. I think every so often about that house, and whether the pool we dug is still in the backyard, if there are still matchbox cars buried in the driveway (it was dirt when we lived there) or Star Wars figures under the grass in the backyard. I wonder if anybody I know still lives there, and what ever became of the kids we played pickle and flashlight tag with.

Jen Rocks The World. That is all.

Grrr. I was able to figure out what the deal with dyndns was this morning, after spending about an hour laying in bed feeling like I was going to hurl. Internally at the house I can see the web server and mount the shared volumes but I'm still not able to see it from work. Perhaps I have to wait until the DNS is updated throughout the land. I watched a funny old-time movie on AMC while waiting for a killer headache to go away and enjoyed two cats sleeping on either side of my chest. Not a bad way to start the morning.

I'm moving all the Dyndns stuff to a different page, so that it stays off this log- you didn't want to read about all that boring crap here anyway, right? | link

Oct 9, 2003

Interesting... there's news that Apple will be releasing a version of iTunes for Windows, which might mean we can postpone a hard drive upgrade for the iMac. I hope the functionality is as robust as the Mac version...if it means we can host the music on the server and stream the library to the Powerbooks, that would be fantastic.

Mash-up. Pitchfork Media did a review of a recompiled track called Sly Beyonce Walks Like A Nerd, which is a remix of a Sly Stone, Beyonce, Bangles and NERD track on top of each other. Todd had turned me on to mash-ups last year when he played an MP3 of an Eminem rap over Zeppelin's The Wanton Wanted Song. There's a guy in the UK who works under the name Go Home Productions who has a whole catalog of stuff that I'd love to get my hands on. This stuff is brilliant—there's Madonna singing Ray Of Light over the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant (it sounds like it wouldn't work, but it really does), and Morcheeba's World Looking In over a remixed drum track of Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love. (which goes to prove that you can take any Zeppelin track, mix out the vocals, drop something completely different on top, and have yourself another hit record. Try that, Creed.) I wish there were more MP3's available but he obviously had to take most of them down for copyright reasons. Right on.

I started looking into some way I can get two separate calendars linked up in one place so that Jen and I can keep our schedules together. I'd love to do it through iCal, as Jen will hopefully have a Mac on her work desk sometime next year. I've been trying to figure out how to sync two calendars up without spending $99 on Apple's .Mac service, especially since I'm running a webserver at home. After looking around at a bunch of dead links, I was able to find a good primer on enabling WebDAV service built in to OSX. Of course, I'm putting the cart in front of the horse because I still haven't worked out the issues with dyndns and tunneling through my router. Arrggh.

I'm also starting to look at updating the design on my weblog/website; I'd like to move over to a CSS-based layout (at least for the log pages) and modify the other pages, as the design is now about two years old. Some of the things I'd like to keep on the main site are:

• The update and photo on the home page.
• The basic page layout, but move to a stepped-page portfolio listing.
• The white background/gray highlights/Univers typeface.

Some things I don't like are the leftover Garamond from my circa-1993 identity (let's just get that out behind the barn and shoot it), the green/gray horizontal lines (they're falling apart, and they don't transfer to my print collateral at all), the dead space on the right of the Design section, and the fact that the Scout and Log sections don't live well with the other sections. | link

Oct 8, 2003

Tortoise. Seems the prodigal Ford is repaired...well, it wasn't even broke in the first place. The hose clamp on the radiator let go, and when that happened it vented coolant all over the engine. My mechanic says that this model Ford has an issue with adding coolant to the point where the engine is happy, and my continued overheating issues were due to that fact. Whatever it was, it's hopefully fixed now.

Interesting. By chance, I checked out the Supon website today to see if they've updated it—they have. Looks like they must have been swallowed up by another firm, one with a craptacular website.

Not that I actually buy physical CD's anymore, but if you happen to buy one published by the BMG Music Group, and you can't seem to get past the copy protection to rip it to your hard drive, simply hold down the Shift key. Brilliant!

I Was Once Misinformed About Your Intentions. I may have let the cat out of the bag with Todd's new blog, but I'm still happy to welcome him to the fold.

Today I'm reading with interest about Panther, the new upgrade to OSX. It looks like there's a bunch of juicy new features throughout, and that will be great for future monkeying. I'm still waiting to get paid so's I can buy a large drive for the iMac, and install Jaguar on that machine. I also need to find a cheap Firewire enclosure for Rob's donated drive, which seems to have some issues with bad blocks at the beginning of the platter, making it unusable with OSX.

We didn't get anything new done with the house last night, but I figure another quick hour with the cut-in brush, a good mop job, and a coat of white paint in the closet, and the cream room will be ready for Jen's twin bed. Renie is coming down this weekend (we're very excited about that), and we have a couple of jobs lined up for her to help us with:

• Painting the Anxious room white. I exchanged the white brown paint for White Tint Base, which is actually white. Having two rooms painted will make a huge difference upstairs.
• Painting three of the four walls in the Pink room. I may be able to pick up drywall today at the Home Despot and get that mudded in by Saturday. If so, that will be three rooms painted, which means we can tear up carpeting and make way for the floor sander.
• Planting bulbs. Since last year's fall sales, Jen and I have bought about a zillion different bulbs of different colors, types, and sizes; starting with a box of 70 blue gladiolus bulbs I got at the Sam's Club, we've added white tulips, pastel tulips, fuzzy white and red tulips, and crocuses. We're going to have more bulbs in the ground than the country of Holland. That is, if the assorted chipmunks, squirrels, and other backyard creatures don't dig them all up and have a kegger while we're at work.

Depending on how productive I feel tonight, I may also try to build another fire for practice this evening. I'd love to be able to use that fireplace a lot this winter. | link

Oct 7, 2003

I reorganized the sidebar links over on the left to read a little better; I got rid of the 'picks of the month' column because I wasn't updating it and replaced it with some blogging links. This is all basically a futile exercise, as I'm going to begin a redesign of the log this month anyway. Today we should also welcome Todd to the fold of bloggers online.

A rant, directed at the general IT director mindset in corporate America:

You are probably a forty-something middle manager who has a lot of money invested in a MCSE or other accredited certification, which was expensive and time-consuming to earn. Your livelihood depends on your ability to oversee, manage, upgrade, and plan a computer network around this certification. Because, after all, if your company goes to something other than Wintel, your job is in jeopardy, and you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay for. I understand that.

Where you piss me off is when you decide arbitrarily that creative professionals (defined as print designers and to some degree web designers) MUST use Wintel machines because you say so. That's bullshit, and I'll tell you why:

1. Most designers have been trained on Macs. They know all the ins and outs of Quark (or now, InDesign) on the Mac, and they know the ins and outs of OS9 and what they have to do to get it to work with printers, removable media, outside vendors, and most importantly, their home machines, which they usually have a good deal of money invested in. This is called a specialty. It's why your company hired them in the first place.
2. They have legacy applications and fonts they've been using for years, often totalling thousands of dollars, which they most likely own and often will bring with them to the company. When was the last time you priced out a font family at ITC or Adobe? Didn't think so, slappy.
3. Font handling. Wintel fonts print and look like shit. End of fucking discussion.
4. Have you ever heard of workflow? Designers have a workflow they are comfortable with. Windows machines are totally different in the way they lay out everything. That translates to hours of time wasted.
5. Service bureaus, printers, and prepress shops hate PC's. And will sometimes charge you more to service files created on them. How is that cost-effective?

Your job is to support your employees. If you don't know how to support the machines, read a fucking book. Take a fucking class. Don't outlaw a tool because you don't know how to use it.

The argument that you are specifying PC's for the creative department because you can rotate them out when the creative people leave is an argument that defeats itself. That's a great way to piss off your designers and get them to leave. Happy now, jackass? You're a genius.

Here you can see the difference between the old carpeting, and how it makes the whole world dark, and the sunny hardwood floor. Amazing! | link

Oct 6, 2003

11:34 PM. I finished the ceiling, and put a coat of semi-gloss white on the trim in the sticky cream bedroom. Covering over the varnish/oil paint/nicotine/Kilz is slow going, but we can see progress already. Not satisfied with that, I cut the ancient all-weather carpeting into quarters and tore that out; underneath was some highly flammable fiber-based padding that was left over from the Civil War. After inhaling several centuries worth of the dust of the Pharoahs trying to get all this crap into a couple of Hefty bags, I pulled the carpeting strips out and we swept up the dirt. The floor is pretty beat up but still in decent shape. There are a few spots where the floor took a beating from the bedframes, and a square by the radiator where someone cut the flooring to repair the pipes. Overall, the room looks warmer and (to me) larger in the sunlight. I'll post some pictures tomorrow.

My Mom has been reading my log for the past few weeks, and her main comment is that I complain a lot. My apologies, mom; I'll try not to bitch about everything so much.

In the meantime, I took pictures of the heater, thermostat and irrigation systems in the greenhouse this morning so that I could research the builders and figure out of they're still in business, but I forgot the PCMCIA carrier at home. So, no photos of the party until tonight. Sorry, everyone. I did bust out the white trim paint and put a first coat on about 30% of the south window in the sticky cream bedroom this morning, and it looks pretty good so far. I have to return the 5-gallon drum of 'white' paint I bought a month ago, because 'white' actually means 'sort of beige' to Glidden, apparently. I have to look for 'super-ultra-bright-gleaming-ivory white' or some such crap like that. And try to get my money back for an open drum of paint- ha ha.

Oops, sorry, I was complaining. | link

Oct 5, 2003

This weekend was a busy one. Friday we stopped over at our friend Rob's house to have some beers, meet his wife Karen and their kids, and do some quick surgery on his Mac. Rob and Karen have the two most beautiful kids on the planet, and a bathtub that seems to sweat soap bubbles. Thanks for dinner, guys!

Saturday was a lot of moving and cleaning and running. I don't remember much about it other than that I slept very well that night. Oh, and the car broke down with a trunk full of beer and barbecue. I got as far as the Rt. 70 exit on the beltway when I noticed the temp light was at the red line, so I pulled over and popped the hood to find the main coolant hose spitting steam at the radiator junction. I closed it up with the Leatherman and filled the reservoir with coolant, but she continued to overheat, so I took short 10-minute breaks between each half-mile and made it to the Edmonson exit without frying a piston. I'm getting tired of this, and it's looking like we may have to buy a used car sooner than we planned.

Sunday we finished up the preparations and got the house ready for the moving celebration, which was a lot of fun. Selected observations:

1. Both Saranac and Sam Adams are making a very tasty Oktoberfest brew this year.
2. Andy Nelson's is the bomb. If you're in the Baltimore area, you can't do better Bar-B-Q than them.
3. Our friends rock the world. Thanks everybody!
4. Jen made Ghirardelli brownies for dessert, and they are still calling for me out in the kitchen.
5. The only thing better than Andy Nelson's for dinner is Andy Nelson's leftovers for lunch the next day.
6. And the beer left in the cooler-can't forget about that...

Oct 3, 2003

This is a quick report for Jen, cribbed from a report on the Macintouch site (quietly thanking myself for donating money to Ric- it just paid for itself) about justifying Macs in a creative development environment. Some of the data is skewed towards OS9, and some of it is skewed towards the computer lab environment, but it's all pretty good information. Her employer has her designing for print on the PC, which is about as comfortable (to me) as repeatedly jamming a stick in my eye. Anybody else have suggestions?

Bar-B-Q this weekend!

I bought some overpriced firewood at the Safeway last night to build a fire: $4 for a bag of "kiln dried" logs, which is roughly a dollar a log. Years of building fires at places like Assateague, Cub Scout camp, and various keg parties should have taught me how to construct a satisfactory blaze, but I was stymied by a pair of logs that refused to do anything but smolder. We'll try again tonight.

The house seems to heat up well with the furnace on; the piping works very well throughout with the exception of the kitchen radiator, which seems to be on vacation. I walked through and closed all the storm windows the other night and that seemed to make a big difference in cutting the chill back. At some point I'm going to have to pull some of the plaster off the outside walls to see how much insulation (if any) there is. We also put the first coat of finish paint on the walls of the Sticky room, and when we got done we realized that we hadn't sanded enough of the wallpaper sizing off. This morning I took the random orbital and sanded about half the paint back off to knock the texture down. I think it looks pretty good (alright, it looks like crap, but I see the possibilities.)

Thanks to Kristen for sending the Virgin Suicides soundtrack in with Nate. | link

Oct 2, 2003

Still no luck with the dyndns stuff. Frustrating.