April 30, 2004

The Friday Question (in the tradition of Miss Lis' Thursday Three):

Make a list of common albums that every one of your girl/boyfriends owned.

For example, every one of my previous girlfriends owned these albums:

Tears For Fears, Songs From The Big Chair
Sinead O'Connor, The Lion And The Cobra
Tracy Chapman, that album with "Fast Car"
New Order, at least one album (usually Republic)
Peter Gabriel, So
U2, The Joshua Tree

Your list?

Take That, Pop Music. Mogwai, Mogwai Fear Satan. Goddamn, this is good stuff.

Reality Check. On the five-page questionaire the vet sent home with Jen, for Penn's checkup, there's a list of four or five questions towards the end, which go something like this:

1. I am concerned about my animal's behavior, but do not want to do anything about it.
2. I am concerned about my animal's behavior, and want to try something about it, but don't care what happens either way (I'm paraphrasing here.)
3. I'm concerned about my animal's behavior, and want to try something; if it doesn't work, I'm going to try something else, but I won't give up my animal.
4. I'm concerned, and if the treatment doesn't work, I want to euthanize my animal.

Penn is a good cat at heart, but I had to check the final box. I'm no animal killer, nor PETA member, but I can't have him hurting the other cats any more. Especially when it looks like he's doing simply for our attention. | link

April 29, 2004

Dirty, Guilty Pleasure Dept., or, I Am A Whore For Finely Crafted Pop Melodies: (Some tracks not so much, but some are very well made.)

We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Bill Dept.: Go check out the Freakwater site for some good kickin' alt-kuntry music. I'd heard of this band for years but never got around to checking out their music. I particularly like the Waitress Song.

I have yet to check out the newly introduced Apple Lossless Format for encoding music, but you can be damn well sure I'm going to try it out. I also could have used the WMA->MP3 converter about two months ago. Now that I've spent countless hours ripping and updating MP3 files from the personal collection, I'm not happy about having to go back and re-rip stuff for better quality so soon, but that's a gripe for another day. I'll report back here tomorrow. | link

April 28, 2004

The Internet is slow today, or at least HaloScan is slow, which is bogging my pageloads down. So if'n you tried to leave a comment here and couldn't, try again later. My peeps with iPods and iTunes should boogie over to Apple.com and download the iTunes 4.5 and the iPod 2.2 updater—it's not offered in Software Update, so it won't automatically load for you.

Put Him In The Hole. While packing up to leave work yesterday, I got a call from Jen, who asked for an ETA. It turned out that Penn decided to jump on Geneva for no good reason, chomping her on the leg, drawing a frightening amount of blood and scaring the shit out of Jen. She quickly got Geneva bundled up and off to the vet while I returned home to clean up after Penn's mess.

I should stop here and describe all the occupants in the House Of Cats for everyone to understand (and I'm sure Jen will have things to add here.) We have five:

Sage, A.K.A. Chocolate Love, Chubbo, The Big Man, Barry White. Big, black, and on your lap. Sage is the most mellow of the five, has the best personality, and keeps the others in line (mostly.) Saved from a dumpster in Texas many moons ago, he is the first of Jen's family.

Geneva, A.K.A. Miss Thing, Pretty Girl. A teeny little barn tabby Jen rescued years ago; a fearless mouser in her prime, she doesn't see so good any more. She has also become the target of my two teenaged hellions on account of her X chromosome.

Pique, A.K.A. Get Off, Peekaboo, Coaldust, Dr. Zaius. Possibly the dumbest of the five, he avoids all conflict by the sheer force of stupidity. His superhero power is the ability to seek out painful pressure points and full bladders by standing on them for long periods of time. He would probably stare at the sun and blind himself if he was smart enough to look up.

Penn, A.K.A. Mr. Ben, Shitbrain, Shut Up, Penndandy. I picked him up at the ASPCA when he sat in his cage staring at me and meowing repeatedly; I mistook stupidity for intelligence (a fault of mine.) Easily the most aggressive and self-centered of the five, he can be both a well-behaved fop and an insufferable prick at the drop of a hat. Alive only because of his good looks. (ASPCA name: Dandy)

Teller, A.K.A. Get Down, Telleropolis, Stony Ray. Adopted the same day as Penn, he has a quiet personality and big green eyes; he can be sweet and loving but sometimes belligerent as well. (ASPCA name: Raymond)

So, after cleaning up the pool of blood near the radiator, I put food, water, a litter box, and a towel in the front basement room and threw Penn in there for a night of solitary confinement. Because this is an ongoing problem, we are bringing him to the vet for a psych test and a prescription of Little Blue Pills; hopefully his attitude will mellow and peace will reign over our little kingdom for the first time.

Geneva is fine. The vet said that cats generally close right up after being bitten, and that it was a good thing she bled out (cleaning the wound.) We have two weeks of antibiotics and a painkiller to administer, which involves a towel, two people, a bottle of Bactine, and some kitty wrasslin'. She doesn't understand why life suddenly got worse, but she's taking it pretty well. | link

April 27, 2004

Excellent Article. Read this and tell me if you still feel like keeping the current administration in power. I've found my illustration subject for the week.

To-do list for Italy.

1. Travel books
2. Power adapter—iPod, Camera, and Powerbook
3. New walking sneakers
4. Weather information
5. Copy of Indigo for the house lights, 2 more light controllers.

April 26, 2004

spending time shooting pictures instead of going to work, 4.26.04

This weekend was a blur of activity, from getting a coat or two of paint on the trim in the Pink room, to moving my bed out of the living room into the Blue room (my first night sleeping upstairs was peaceful and comfortable), beginning the purge of the front porch (all boxes will leave before the wedding), having dinner with a friend and her new beau, mowing the overgrown lawn, moving the Doc's old workbench to the greenhouse as a potting stand, hitting church on Sunday to talk with the musician (who wasn't there, so we ducked out of the service to buy groceries—sorry, God), putting more paint on the trim, and spending a quiet evening together. | link

April 23, 2004

This is interesting news from California. Guess what other state currently uses Deibold voting machines? That's right. Think it's going to have any effect on voting in Maryland? I doubt it.

Aichmophobia. I went to have some bloodwork done this morning for a diagnosis (as well as a checkup—what is my cholesterol level, anyhow?) after, uh, avoiding it for a few days. I have what phlebotomists call a "dream arm": thin and full of juicy veins close to the surface. I also have an inordinate fear of needles. Spiders, rats, bugs, gunk, blood (other people's, mostly)—no problem. Show me a needle, and I get squirrelly. Heights above three stories and anything to do with the eye round out my trio of personal fears, but anything involving cold steel poking into my veins completely freaks me out. (Which is kind of funny, because I'll work the whole day with a splinter sticking out of my hand, or a bloody gash, but I don't get with the needles.) Which begs the question: What's your worst fear? Add a comment below.

Anyhow, I left a warm caffeinated cup of pee and got blood drawn for the docs to run their tests on without passing out (about three years ago an older doctor took about a gallon of blood out of me, and I went down like a drunken prizefighter) and ran out of the building clutching my arm, happy to have it over with. We'll see what the results say in a few days.

Housekeeping. Last night I added a list of links to the upper right there for the iTunes music store with a bunch of stuff I keep meaning to buy but don't have the money for. I figure I'll leave them there where they can't get away. | link

April 22, 2004

headband (courtesy of and thanks to the P.S.D.F.), 4.22.04

Huh. Busy Town.

One of the drawbacks to writing a weblog under one's own name is the fact that you can't write about everything you're thinking for fear of co-workers, bosses, or potential employers finding your self-centered griping online. I wrote a whole post about work, life, and some recent developments, and haven't posted it. I'll spill this much: I'm unhappy about one particular thing, I could be doing some things better than I am, and I found out what could be the root of the problem. More on that later.

Meanwhile, as if I didn't know this already, it's amazing how much better the Tortoise shifts into gear when it actually has oil. I checked the level today as I filled up on gas and was greeted with a naked "ADD 1 QT" marker on the dipstick. These days, because the Ford burns oil at a half-quart a week, I don't carry single refils around with me—I carry a case of generic brand in the trunk. They are gonna love me at the emissions station. (Interesting trivia: Between my Mazda pickup, Honda CRX, Tortoise, and Scout, the 26-year-old V-8 with 150K+ miles has been the only vehicle to consistently pass emissions.) | link

April 20, 2004

Wish list. As I wander through the house a mere month before the wedding, I make a mental list of stuff that I'd like to do or have done. Besides the obviously huge projects (central air, adding that wing off the back for the wine cellar, putting the second floor studio on the garage, fencing the yard, bulldozing the neighbors' yard for our hedge maze), there's a pile of smaller things I'd like to do when we get back from Italy:

• Keyed locksets for the doors. (We have more keys for this house than the Home Depot.)
• A bird feeder. (All of the feeders I've seen so far are crap—thin plastic, cheap-ass poles, or pitifully ugly. I want to feed the birds, not run a squirrel soup kitchen.)
• A ladder. (Our gutters are full of more gunk than a restauraunt sink drain, and we have a house's worth of windows crying for paint. Nevermind the rest of the house.)
• A dishwasher. (Cheap by itself, but the reconfiguring of our door-tastic kitchen is going to take a lot of work.)
• Shelving for the basement. (Getting all the crap off the front porch into the basement is simply moving one mess to another location; organization is in order here.)
• A new dryer. (The Brady Bunch-era unit we use now is both useless and small, and we need some serious commercial drying muscle—as well as better energy efficiency.)
• A gas range. (Oh, my HELL, to borrow a phrase from the P.S.D.F., does our electric oven suck donkeys. I'm sure we bring down the power grid in Catonsville every time we turn on the damned thing, and it cooks as well as a heroin addict.)

Spurred on by a comment from Lis, I posted a bunch of pictures of our garden I took this weekend. For the tech-heads, I'm using a Canon G3 with a 58mm close-up lens (thanks Dad) in natural sunlight. The one on the home page is the only one I lit additionally—just a mini-maglight from underneath to brighten the center.

I also got off my ass and started up the picture-a-week thing I've been threatening for years; I'm going to try to post a new illustration on varying topics, and I'm going to involve you, my four loyal readers. Each Monday, I'll take suggestions from you for an interesting editorial story, article, or biography, and choose one for an illustration, and then post it (gulp) by Friday. So, send me an interesting article you've seen online (please keep it under 2-3 pages) that could make for an interesting illustration, and I'll draw you a drawering. | link

April 19, 2004

daffodils and sky, 4.19.04

I Have The Power.™ With a small flourish, and little fanfare, Ben the electrician threw the breakers on three of the bedrooms Saturday afternoon. Now hooked in to the main panel are the pink, blue, and office rooms, as well as the linen closet in the hall. I can't tell you how happy this makes us. There were a few moments of worry when the pink room's breaker kept blowing (I had nightmare visions of ripping out half the baseboards to find a nail had shredded the wire), but Ben traced it down to a pinched connection in one of the boxes. A nicer guy you could not ask for—he did a great job.

Meanwhile, Jen spent the better part of the weekend herding family all over creation, putting about a thousand miles on her car in ten hours. Thankfully, all three sisters have now been fitted for their dresses, the bridal gown is in for alterations, the veil situation has been addressed, and everybody made their plane home.

Other highlights of the weekend include a trip to Mango Grove on Friday night, a garden in full bloom for the whole weekend, a visit from Dave, 80° weather, and a peaceful Sunday night in front of Kill Bill with fresh guacamole and vodka tonics. | link

April 17, 2004

Eighty degrees, sunny, and mild. Jen has been running all over creation this weekend in preparation for the wedding. Her sisters have been air-dropping in like the Special Forces since Thursday, getting their bridesmaid's dresses fitted and altered, which is not unlike keeping control of a flock of third-grade students—their attention span is about as long. Hopefully, all will go well this morning, they will say their goodbyes, and she will be able to sit quietly in the backyard with a tall vodka tonic.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing for Ben the electrician, who will be hooking up all four thousand of the outlets I installed upstairs and wiring them into the panel. If all goes well, by lunchtime we'll have electricity in three of the four bedrooms. This afternoon, depending on how my neck feels, I'm planning on resurrecting the lawnmower and taking a swipe at our yard, which looks like a science experiment gone wrong. | link

April 16, 2004

Another awesome link, and one that I will abuse when I have discretionary income again: American Science and Surplus. I need a surplus radiation detector. I need a collection of Pyrex beakers. I need a 90 VDC 15-amp motor.

This One Takes Me Back. Opening this website may send you back thirty years or so, to the age when public television was the place you could plop your kid in front of for an hour and expect him or her to learn Spanish with no fear of commercial shills. The opening sound totally brought me back in time, and I expect it'll do the same for most of you—make sure you have speakers/headphones on. (via boing boing) | link

April 14, 2004

This One's About Being Thankful. So it's about 55 degrees outside and raining. With the exception of last Friday (or, Let's Throw Our Back Out Day) and a little on Saturday, the weather has been for crap lately. As a result, I've not been writing very well, or taking pretty pictures, or being creative in any fashion. So right now I have to take time out, slap myself around a little, and think about all the positives that are currently happening:

• The office and blue room, which are awaiting the attentions of Ben, the friendly helpful electrician, tomorrow night;
• Moving two people's worth of living upstairs, and beginning to use the other half of our house;
• The waves of daffodils, tulips, and other bulbs blooming in the side garden;
• The Patron Saint of Dysfunctional Weddings, whose birthday is today, and who is fashioning the headpiece for Jen (shout-outs to you);
• Jen's sudden promotion from a two-week freelance gig to part time work two miles from our house;
• Five weeks to the wedding and no dead bodies;
• The Federal Government, whose loan came due just in time to pay for half our honeymoon to Italy.

The weather is clearing up this weekend, by all accounts, and hopefully so will my creative block. | link

April 13, 2004

If This Gonna Be That Kinda Party, I'm'a Stick My **** In The Mashed Potatoes. A brilliant waste of time: Annotated Beastie Boys. Puzzling over the opening drum riff on the second cut of Paul's Boutique? Wonder where the "Graffiti Guys" sample came from on Professor Booty? Chances are, this site can tell you. (The mashed potatoes sample still has no known attribution.) (via metafilter) | link

April 12, 2004

Booked. We have reservations made for an eight-night stay in Rome at the Palace Hotel, a short walk away from the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps. I am alternately nervous and excited about going to Europe for the first time in my life. This is going to be great!

Bring Out The Gimp. Jen drove me in to work this morning, as my range of motion is still severely limited and turning my head still brings tears to my eyes. (It's actually much better today—I'm just shamefully soliciting sympathy and cash donations.) I kinda look like Frankenstein, keeping my head squarely on top of my shoulders (the afflicted muscles are between my shoulderblades, the ones that branch out into all the others in my back) and trying not to look down too much. Which makes bathroom breaks interesting, let me tell you.

Meanwhile, downtime on my current project at work means I've been switched off to another one, which at first glance is the worst "game" I've ever seen. Making something work out of this mess will require either a stroke of genius or a frontal lobotomy, and I know which one of these I can attempt with a cordless drill and some gauze.

Resolution. If I get some time tonight, I'm going to finish cleaning up an HTML divelog I started but never finished last year after returning from Bimini—#153 in the long list of uncompleted web projects. Stay tuned! | link

April 10, 2004

This is brilliant. Here's a link to a do-it-yourself steadicam project—for $14 you can build a pretty professional camera stabilization rig and shoot DV like the pros. (via boing boing)

Whiplash. So much for moving furniture today. My neck, which was giving me aches and pains yesterday, feels like it's going to give way completely and let the rest of my head fall off the back of my shoulders. This morning we moved the doctor's oak desk, one file cabinet, and my IKEA table into the office before Jen (the Voice Of Reason) told me we were stopping. I don't know what I did to myself, or why it feels so friggin' bad right now, but I can't turn my head in any direction without the sensation of having a ballpeen hammer hitting directly on my spine. Just great.

Flashback. One year ago today, I was on a boat bobbing in the Bahamas, diving on coral reefs for a project at work that has since been cancelled and will most likely never come back. | link

April 9, 2004

Good Friday. Taking advantage of my day off, Jen and I lugged ten bags of mulch to the front yard ($34 delivered to our driveway, courtesy of the local middle school) and raked it around our sad-looking hedges in the hopes that we can bring them back from the dead in time for the wedding. Last year, we had a growth of stringy vines infest the west side of the hedge and expand its way down the street, threatening to engulf the holly tree, small children, and passing import cars on Frederick Road. I waded into the mess and hauled out about six bags worth of leaves, vines, and debris, uncovering three rose bushes and about twenty square feet of bare earth. After eating lunch, Jen peeled off to continue her freelance work and I put a final coat of polyurethane on the floor in the office and blue rooms. Tomorrow, if the floors look dry, we may be moving furniture...!

We also appear to be back in our neighbor's good graces after the Christmas card fiasco; the Judge appeared on our doorstep this morning with a twinkle in his eye and a covered dish of hot cross buns. Perhaps we aren't going to hell after all. | link

tulip tree in bloom, front lawn, 4.7.04

April 8, 2004

For Your Listening Enjoyment. Fans of the Beatles, Metallica, and mash-ups will dig on this link: Beatallica. The lyrics are absolutely hysterical, and the impersonation of Hetfield's voice is right on. Apologies to XLT for ignoring/forgetting his mention of this gem.

Sweet. In my pile of SCSI-compatible (and thusly extinct) mac peripherals, I have an Apple Pro keyboard, righteously regarded as the best keyboard ever made. Since the move to USB, Apple has been making junky keyboards without the tactile feel of the mechanical original. Now that Jen and I have a workstation, we're going to need a good keyboard to go along with it. Here's the answer. | link

April 7, 2004

Spring? The 300 or so bulbs we planted last fall have all made their way above ground, and are blooming in waves: first came the scouts, the daffodils, who braved the whipsaw temperature changes and grew tall and straight. Then came the tulips, spreading fat leaves and daring the deer with their bright red petals. (several of these soldiers have fallen to the hungry enemy, their headless stems at attention among the other troops.) Now we're seeing the crocuses bloom, low to the ground, and the hyacinths, which are taller and fat with the promise of purple blooms. On the side of the house, the tiger lilies are sending their shoots over the dead leaves, and the tulip tree is in full bloom over the front sidewalk. Even Jen's amaryllis is about to bloom, still in gulag over the back porch.

Forward Progress, or: When Technology Actually Works. I'm using the new version of Eudora, which features a spam filter for incoming mail. You "train" the application by marking junk mail, and it "learns" what your preferences are over the course of a few weeks. I was averaging about 100 spam emails a day (having my address on the website didn't help) and going through the inbox for one good message among the 99 bad ones was getting to be a drag. Currently, I'm seeing about 30 in my inbox, and the number keeps decreasing each day. Let us all praise the gods of software.

Check it Out. An all-percussion version of Paranoid Android by the UMASS Front Percussion Ensemble. (via Pitchfork) | link

April 6, 2004

Done. The redesign of the site is live. Let me know if you see anything broken. | link

April 5, 2004

Shooting Yourself In The Ass. Some bean counter at Kinko's decided that it just doesn't make sense to support Macs as part of their in-house systems. So they're phasing them all out. Which means you gotta bring a Powerbook if you need to print something in color. Ain't that just great?

Some early thoughts about Panther: Gawd, this thing is so much faster. It's a pleasure to use this laptop again- something I thought I'd never say after I left OS9 by the side of the road. The redraw and UI feedback are almost as quick as OS9 used to be, which is saying a lot. I'm usually about three steps ahead of the UI in terms of what I'm trying to do with the computer, so when Jaguar got slowed down figuring out how to draw this fancy transition or make that button blink, I got stuck waiting for the machine to catch up to me. Very annoying. Command-Tab for the applications menu is a fantastic addition—something from Windows that I miss on the Mac. Expose is OK but I haven't found a real need for it just yet. (Designing on a laptop screen means you get real picky about workspace organization.) Overall, I'm impressed and very happy that I can squeeze another year out of ol' reliable here.

Whupped. This weekend was a blur of nothing but work, work, work on the house. Pictures are here and here. That is all. | link

April 2, 2004

So, in case the wedding invitations were still a little oblique for some of you, here's some more information about the bug on the cover.

Update 5 pm. This tower is running smoothly, and the Powerbook has a new lease on life. To my peeps who have Pismos (*cough* Rob and Dave *cough*), you gotta upgrade. It's like having a whole new Powerbook.

Update 3:34 pm. Looks like (knock, knock) everything went smoothly and well. All my stuff is where it should be; I enabled journaling on my existing partition seamlessly, chose the "Archive and Install" option, and crossed my fingers as it started. 30 minutes later, I'm checking email, loading the updates, and it looks almost exactly the same.

One drawback about Panther is that it looks like ATM under Classic, the benchmark font utility, does not pass open font info along to Panther, so I have to use the OSX version of Suitcase. Sigh.

Last Post From Planet Jaguar. I'm offline for a few hours while I upgrade the Pismo to OSX 10.3. Wish me luck.

Great News. Looks like Hellboy is getting good reviews around the net this morning, which makes me very happy. I think the books are some of the most expressive, beautiful comics I've ever seen, and the stories only make them better. I think Jen and I may go see it this weekend (she doesn't know that yet.)

Not So Great News. Unfortunately, we may have to walk: the transmission in the Taurus was giving me fits this morning. I merged on to the Beltway, and while I couldn't hear anything over the sound of the rain, traffic, and radio, my Spidey-sense noticed that the engine was rumbling in a different way—I was still in first gear doing 55mph. I pulled over, shut it down, and re-started the engine, and that seemed to help, but the wonderful clunk of shifting into gear is getting more and more noticable each day.

There's a great quote on the second track of Psyence Fiction by UNKLE: the beat slows, and you hear someone say "There were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane." I found out last night reading an article on Lawrence Fishburne in last week's New Yorker that the speaker was Francis Ford Coppola, describing US involvement in Vietnam. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but.... | link

April 1, 2004

April Fool's. I don't have any kind of snarky joke to play on you folks; let it be known that I would have a sense of humor if I had more time.

This is a very nice site for all my mid-century modern peeps out there: Meteor Lights features lamps and shades from the 50's for the modern bohemian. (via Boing Boing)

Money. Jen and I have been in the middle of a bureaucratic nightmare with Baltimore Gas and Electric since we first opened the door to our new house. It involved the last vestigal traces of an operational doctor's office after they hauled the desk, waiting room chairs, miniature skeleton, and filing cabinets out of the front rooms: two electrical meters bolted to the basement wall, clicking merrily away on commercial rates. The sellers graciously offered to have it converted to a single service, and footed the bill—a quiet man named Ben came and wrestled the rat's nest of Eisenhower-era wiring into a single, beautiful panel with about fifteen empty slots, signed the work order, and disappeared into the warm October afternoon like Robert DeNiro in Brazil.

Since then, we've battled the faceless drones at BG&E to get two bills consolidated into one, which has involved repeated visits from representatives of the company, a three-month wait for somebody to hook up the outside service (while the HUGE main feed wire into the house hung loose at the bottom of the basement steps, promising swift death to anybody brushing up against it with a laundry basket), another wait for somebody to finish the job inside, then an inspection, then another inspection to make sure we aren't using the house commercially to grow pot (that's what the greenhouse is for), and then a call to a drone to actually consolidate the bills.

The sum of this lovely exercise came today: $675 in current and backdated charges for gas and electric. Kinda makes that check I just wrote for $1.43 for the water bill look that much better. | link

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