February 29, 2004

Take The F---ing Hint. Nothing is more humorous than listening to Jen try to close a long-dormant AOL account via the phone while the moron on the other end tries to keep her from doing so. Apparently the script they have been given involves the phrase, "I understand that, Ma'am, but did you know (insert worthless offer of AOL product here)...?" Seriously, she must have said the words "I just want to close my account" about fifteen times. I think it was at the point when she mentioned that they're only supposed to try three times before they have to listen to you when Skippy The Wonder Salesman got the message.

Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal. Friday I got all my home automation gear from FedEx, and after work I tried plugging it in to make some stuff turn on and off. Installation is simple, and the Indigo software recognized the USB hub immediately, but none of the lights I plugged in seemed to respond to the X10 commands. Jen and I retreated to the Whistle Stop for beers and food, and I devised a new plan of attack; Saturday morning I plugged the USB controller into my Powerbook and took it to a different wall socket—Voila! No loading drivers, no patches, no greasy kid stuff—the software worked out of the box. Apparently there's too much noise on the socket the iMac is plugged in to (it shares a socket with a BackUPS Pro 1000, Airport Base Station, SMC DSL switch, DSL modem, and cordless phone, which is a no-no in the X10 world) so I'll have to figure out some form of filter or double-socket approach for the final setup. One drawback that I found is that the outgoing email alerts don't support authenticated SMTP yet, which means I have to write, compile, and link to AppleScripts to send myself mail when something goes boom (or, for that matter, send the house an email and have it turn on the living room lights, then send me back a confirmation email.)

On the other hand, Indigo's author is a very helpful and responsive fellow, and had replied to my forum post within a half-hour. I'm only about three days into the trial period on the software, but I'm definitely buying a copy of Indigo—I'm that impressed.

I think I'm going to start a page detailing the trials and tribulations of my home automation experience to help other folks who may be looking for help. There were a few things that weren't clear to me right off the bat, and it may be helpful for other folks to hear about my experience before they jump in.

(Note: in my days as a production artist at a local hack design shop, I worked on an account for a home automation system called HAL 2000, a branding move about as smart as naming your firstborn child Charles Manson. Did these people even watch the movie?) | link

February 27, 2004

The Electric Company. So yesterday evening I get a call from my fianceé, who was stumbling around our house in the dark, tripping over the cats and wondering why there was no power. We live on a grid in Catonsville that is about as twitchy as a crack whore; a child sneezes in Minneapolis and we lose our electricity. I think it's safe to say that in six months I've dealt with more blackouts in this house than an Irish dockworker, so I was ready to light the hurricane lamps and wait out the repairs, but she told me all the other houses on our grid still had power....?!? At this point I became confused, because when half my bank account recently disappeared with an audible thunk, I knew the current bill had been paid. Jen called BG&E to find out what the hell was going on while I drove home. As it turns out, the good doctor, who has been dead and buried two years, still has an open balance on his account. This problem is exacerbated by BG&E's insistence on listing his account at the '2nd floor', while we are listed as the '1st floor'. The CSR looked at our records, put Jen on hold, then came back and admitted their mistake—they saw activity on his account, and decided without notifying us or realizing that there's only one meter to shut the power off at 2:45 yesterday afternoon. (It's a lucky thing the temperatures are still in the 40's, because if that 12-pack of beer in the fridge we just bought had skunked, I would have been apoplectic.) | link

February 26, 2004

Wildlife. One of the great things about living outside the city is having a house with a yard. One of the great things about having a yard is that frequently you'll see animals outside your windows. Hopefully they're not trying to burrow their way in to get at your food, like the raccoons who occasionally dropped in on Jen's old apartment, but coexist peacefully in the suburban microcosm that you call home. For us, this means chipmunks burrowing around the tree roots in our backyard, and a helpful neighborhood dog who enjoys digging out great patches of our lawn to try and roust them from their holes. We have squirrels who probably could take on the worst of Central Park's crack-addled fauna—One morning, while sipping our coffee peacefully on the couch, we saw two local squirrels chase a hawk the size of a dalmatian from the branch of one of 'their' trees. We have a feral neighborhood cat with no tail or ears who enjoys beating the crap out of any animal unlucky enough to get close to it, and who dines from our garbage cans.

We also have a pair of cardinals who visit the side yard outside our kitchen window. Back when the Doctor lived there, he had a pole-stand birdhouse in that yard next to a sundial, and when the house changed hands both found their way into somebody's car or the dumpster they filled in the driveway. The cardinals came by every morning last fall and sat on the scrubby apple tree, waiting for the bird feeder to reappear. Then one morning, they were gone. Today I was cleaning out the coffeepot and looked up to see both of them again, which was a relief. The gray female flitted about in the gray underbrush, looking for something to eat, while the red male sat on the branch looking magnificent, bored, and useless. I'd like to think his presence was the portent of a warm, enjoyable spring right around the corner, but I'm sure his mate was looking in the window at me saying, "make with some birdseed, you cheap prick."

Another Jungian Test. Jason sent this over to me this morning, and the results were different than the pre-Cana test Jen and I took a few weeks back: ENFJ. Funny how the results change based on which test you take.

Wow. I want to go here. I love finding things like this collection of pictures, not only because they're aesthetically beautiful, but because I have about a million different stories I'm writing in my head about the subject. | link

February 25, 2004

Point Proven. See, this is why the Republicans want to preserve the sanctity of marriage. So that intelligent role models like this couple will educate future generations about the holy bond of matrimony. (...Simpson. Simp—son.)

Rawk! Dept. I'm listening to Sleater-Kinney's One Beat. I find it sadly hilarious that these ladies rock out harder than 3/4 of the panty-waisted Nü-Metal acts on the dial these days. Sadly because the songs are melodic, individual, and exciting, and they get zero airplay. Remember when songs were melodic and they rocked? (Yesterday I leaned over to Todd and said quietly, "Remember when that chick was prom queen? Oh, Wow." Without missing a beat, he said, "Take it off! Take it all off!")

This Link Will Be Dead In 3 Months Dept. This truck makes me wish I had $5K+ to spend right now. | link

February 24, 2004

For The Love Of Mike. Vote Democrat. (for the record, Kerry and Edwards are only willing to go as far as civil ceremonies, but I'd really prefer not to have a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, even if I don't think it would ever pass through every state.)

I think I was probably one of the first folks in Maryland to get my music settlement check frum the gub'mint; it came on Monday for the sweet, sweet total of $13.86. I also have two winning Pepsi caps ready for use at the iTunes Music Store...this hack makes me wish I had thought of it myself. | link

February 23, 2004

God Damn it, does the Windows Media Player suck ass. I'm playing a WMA file locally on my PC (dual 1gig Intel chips) and the stupid thing keeps skipping. What a piece of shit. I'm going back to my iPod.

Round-Up. We have tuxedos and bridesmaid's dresses, which is very good. We both have new haircuts, which, in my case, is very good. (I was looking like a member of Kansas for a while there.) We're entering our christmas card in a design annual, which could be very good.

Saturday we met with the priest who will officiate our wedding, and we both left feeling very good. This guy could easily be a ninth uncle on my Dad's side. Besides going through the Catholic pre-wedding requirements, we found out a little more about the neighborhood and some of the people in it. I've also narrowed down the wedding music playlist, which I'm posting here for review or comment (and no, the Chicken Dance, Hokey-Pokey, and Macarena are not making it on the list.) This list does not include the traditional wedding classical I've gotten lined up and still have to sample for the first hour of dinner music.

drop ceiling...

dropped ceiling.

Sunday Jen got busy cleaning the house while I moved crap around upstairs and got the office ready to go. The drop ceiling came down, the kickplates came out, and I'm just about ready to start fishing wire through the walls. | link

February 22, 2004

Insert The 'Rednecks Driving In A Circle' Jokes Here. There's something about the sound of football on the TV that makes me happy, especially when I'm working in the house. I like to tune in and listen to the games while I'm building something, or pulling down walls (one of the most Zen moments I can remember in my old house was installing the backyard deck under a brilliant sunset—the Ravens game was on, and every time somebody would score, I could hear the folks in American Harry's around the corner yelling at the TV) but the problem is that I usually wind up watching the game more than working. Especially around the fourth quarter. Which is why I now enjoy the NASCAR when I'm demolishing a room. You see, NASCAR is so frigging boring for 99% of the time, I'm not tempted to look at the TV at all. The announcers are always yammering on about 'adjustments', e.g. "He's been runnin' that car so hot for so long, they're gonna need to make some adjustments," or "The car was super, and we switched the tires and made some adjustments..." Who the hell cares? This is a sport where people get excited about stopping for gas. The good part is, it's mostly dull with the possibility of major catastrophe at any time. And that's really the only reason I leave it on. Unlike football, I could give a crap about who actually wins, but I like to have some kind of conversation going in the background. | link

February 20, 2004

the bel-loc diner, towson md, 2.19.04

Reality Check. Y'know, all this talk of weddings and stress has sort of blinded me to something that's been not-so-quietly happening out in California. I looked at this site and suddenly remembered that there are people who can't get legally married here in America, and that our right as a heterosexual couple is something I take for granted. Go take a look.

Dissapointingly, most of the WMA -> MP3 converters I've tried thus far make files with the fidelity of a drunken brass band underwater. Which is a shame, because I've suddenly got a reason to use one.

All Quiet. Much like Todd's post yesterday, work has been pretty dull lately. So I've been enjoying the workbench project at the house this past week. As of this morning the frame is set up and leveled off (not an easy task in an 80-year-old basement) to the back wall under the stairs; I have to finish the top of the bench and put in the bottom shelf, then rip the old Bell Systems switchbox off the back wall and rewire the local outlet to supply power to the lights (there will be lights under the cabinet and over top of it—no more fumbling around in the dark for tools I can't find.)

Meanwhile, this weekend I'm going to attempt to make some progress in the Office upstairs. First up is removal of the kickplates, then pulling down the drop ceiling to see what the rest of the plaster looks like (shudder.) Then, gently pulling the plaster away from the floorboards and running yet more wire. We also have a Saturday appointment with the priest who will be officiating our wedding—you know you're in good hands when the Father tells you to knock twice on the back door of the rectory and ask for "Louie". We went to his service last Sunday, and he is the spitting image of my Uncle Dave, from the white hair to the ruddy Irish complexion, which will make the service that much better.

Hopefully Jen and I will be able to get away on Sunday for a day of non-wedding fun in DC; we had plans to hit a museum on the Mall last weekend but didn't make it before the weather turned cold. I'm really looking forward to a day alone with her.

I got a freelence check for a whopping $75 the other day, which paid for a USB interface and two adjustable lamp controllers to test out a home automation system. The Indigo software is beautiful and intuitive (30-day trial download), and I'm excited to set up something that will make our huge dark house look like somebody actually lives there. | link

February 18, 2004

The old Neighborhood. It's been a little under 6 months, three budget-busting gas bills, two cases of vodka and 940 lbs. of cat litter since we moved into our new double-wide in the kuntry. Because of our schedules and geographic location, it's rare that Jen and I get into the city much anymore; with the city hiking the one-way tunnel toll to $2, any random need for getting a fix of Mobtown is gone. So tonight when I drove in to the old 'hood to meet up with friends for dinner, my head was somewhere between nostalgia and curiousity. My old house was dark and quiet—she hasn't changed the door, or fixed that strip of flashing on the basement window, and the plants out front are dead—but Matt and Emily's place was warm and inviting. He greeted me by sticking his head out the door and saying, "Hard not to walk up those steps out of habit, is it?"

We cruised up to Peter's Inn, a favorite haunt from the old days, and caught up on our lives over beers, garlic bread, and tasty food. (Beef. It's what's for dinner.) They're doing great in their newly remodeled house and enjoying the city life with Ulysses the cat and a blurry mass of fur that resembles a dog. In the time I've been away, the spooky stucco place on the corner finally went up for sale, the empty bookstore by the water was transformed into an Outback steakhouse, the wildly overpriced condos at the old Superfresh site were finished, and Canton generally got more crowded. Finding a parking spot was no easier than I remember it, which made me smile when I thought of our driveway. Say that slowly—drrrrrrriiiiiiivvvvveeeewaaaayyyy. So nice to always have a place to park.

My Fiancee Loves Me. I looked at a 1974 Jeep Cherokee that's been parked down the street from my office yesterday; it's a gold/maroon color with a white top, original rims and hubcaps, and a small "For Sale" sign in the window. Curious, I stopped in to look at it, and while it's in reasonably good shape, I realized that one rusting 20-year-old truck is enough, and that I'd rather spend $3500 on a new galvanized Scout tub instead of $2000 on a truck with holes in the floor. For her part, Jen was very supportive when I told her about it, but rightfully wary of a fleet of trucks in our driveway. | link

February 17, 2004

Goodbye, Monkey. Webmonkey, the online help site Wired put together back in 1996 to help morons like me learn how to code HTML, is no more. Terra Lycos, who bought Wired Online's assets, pulled the plug and fired the remaining staff last week, which is a shame. Many a day I was hunched over the keyboard attempting to learn Javascript or figure out the maddening rules of frames, and Webmonkey was the place I looked for answers.

Mike Lee posted a link to a new article on the O'Reilly MacDevCenter about home automation, which reminds me of a previous post; there's some good juicy info in this article with more to come. (My thought was to pick up three or four outlets and the software to control the lights while we're away on our honeymoon.)

Tonight I was alone, as Jen was at a work pow-wow, so I picked up some more 2x4's and started building a workbench in the basement. I've been making do with a leftover bench from the garage—'bench' only loosely defines this collection of planking, nails and scrap wood—and it's gotten to the point where stuff is piled on the floor in heaps. The plan calls for an eight-foot long bench three feet high with one large shelf underneath. I had enough wood and deck screws to get the main frame built but I need more of each to finish the job. Dad will be happy to know I used his laser level to get the thing close to stable, but sad to learn that one of the two leveling bubbles is cracked and empty, which means I will have to test the Sears return policy. | link

February 16, 2004

President's Day. Today I took advantage of my day off not by lounging around the house in my PJ's, but by continuing the incremental gains made on both the Pink and Blue rooms. All the relevant kickplates are in, and aside from one patch of drywall in a closet, all problem areas have been mudded and sanded at least once. My good friend Robby stopped by to pick my brain about Apple laptops, and I convinced him that a refurbished Powerbook was better for his needs than a new iBook. Which he ordered today, making me extremely jealous. Another Rob stopped by to drop off our DVD-ROM drive and offer his PDF services with the invitation, which we may need to take him up on. Jen worked a full day and made it home late after hitting the gym, where she has an appointment with her training advisor this Friday. We sat on the couch and enjoyed the improved feng shui of the living room—yesterday I moved the couch and recentered the 'sitting' side, which makes the whole thing work much better. | link

February 15, 2004

Frustration. For those of you who are print-design oriented, or even just computer savvy, this rant may strike a chord. For those of you who aren't, or don't use OSX, trust me when I say there is nothing more frustrating than trying to print a PDF from Quark 5. We are finishing up our wedding invitation (that's the sound of one big checkmark off the list) and trying any and all methods for getting a Mac Quark file to Jen's work PC with fonts, formatting, and sanity intact so that we may take advantage of some extra space on a print job leaving next week. As you may have guessed, we are only marginally successful at this late hour (10:13PM.) Acrobat Distiller 5 is as helpful as an IRS audit, and every workaround I can think of is crashing and burning. Unfortunately, I don't have an OSX version of Quark 6 (and from what I hear, I don't think I want one), nor does Jen have one decent font on her work PC's. I've devised a stopgap measure which may or may not work involving a little-known application called FontMonger; you feed Mac TrueType fonts in and out come PC versions—with some caveats. Sometimes the points get messed up; sometimes the hints get garbled, and sometimes whole letters get dropped out. I'm trying to devise a way to get this done without having to buy a PC version of Adobe Bembo, because we really need that $100 for other stuff. Like a punchbowl full of Xanax. | link

February 14, 2004

Neighborhood. Well, it's getting a little friendlier in our online world; looks like everybody's getting to know each other. I've been meaning to add Dave to my list of friends in the lower left for a while now. Perhaps my writing about it will *ahem* nudge him *ahem* into writing a little more. One of the interesting things is that he's opened his blog to his family, and here and there they've posted things too, which is an unorthodox but clever way of keeping folks up tp date.

On a related note, and further solidifying my belief that Home Anthology is the center of the universe, our friends Jen and Todd told us a story about stopping in to see what Rob and Nini had at the store, and over conversation a certain doctor's exam table came up, leading back to...the Lockardugans. (A funny aside: Both Jens and I met at the now-defunct Cidera, where we shared a love for beer, crass humor, and making fun of the squares. When we met her husband Todd, it turned out that he works at a company whose website I had designed at a previous job. When he learned my last name, he started good-naturedly giving me shit for being the guy who never updated his website—it turns out he had been the guy emailing me each week asking me to post links to new data, something I was slacking at doing. I can assure you, my customer service has improved greatly since those days.) Over beers down the street at the Whistle Stop, we laughed about how damn small this town is. Since I've met Todd and Heather, these seemingly far-flung circles of people have suddenly coalesced into quite a solar system!

On another related note, if you're inclined to link to this humble site, use this snippet of HTML:
<a href="http://www.billdugan.com/log/">
The page at that location will automatically forward to the current entry. | link

Friday the 13th

purties for my sweetie, 2.13.04

Take Our Quiz! In honor of Valentines Day, NPR did a report last night on couples who get cold feet at the altar and call off weddings; I the report cheerfully mentioned that roughly 20% of Catholic couples who make it through pre-counseling sessions call off the wedding, and the majority of weddings are cancelled by the groom (90%). Buoyed by these facts, Jen and I went to our second pre-cana meeting with our sponsor couple. The church seems to dig on its tests, because we took about seventeen of them last night. When I say tests, what I really mean are sheets of paper with lots of questions and a general 5-answer selection, from "Always" to "Never", and you're supposed to mark in your little square and then compare notes. There's some validity in these tests, but also some voodoo science which sort of feels like you're doing a sex quiz in the back of Cosmo—in front of your neighbors. I know that these tests are really to promote private discussion and conversation about all the crap a couple may not have talked about before (e.g., "What do you mean, you have a gambling problem?!" or "I never knew you thought I was spending too much time with my mother!") but I have to wonder how some couples, who may have buried these revelations in a deep, black pit of denial, are equipped to talk about them after two hours of light conversation and a few Entenmann's doughnuts?

The good news is that we passed our Catholic SAT's, which means we can get into heaven on a scholarship.

Thanks to the Rockhaus, here's a Thursday Three:

1. Have you ever had a great Valentine's Day?

Yes. I've had a few, even though I dislike corporate holidays as a rule.

2. Ever had a completely awful Valentine's Day?

I'm almost positive, but I've blocked them all out. My therapist says I'm making progress though, so I don't scream incomprehensibly and fling poo anymore when the subject comes up.

3. Best thing about Valentine's Day?

When all the damn diamond commercials leave the airwaves on the 15th. You know the ones.

February 12, 2004

Oh, Hell Yeah. This is funny, but perhaps NSFW. But then again, maybe it is. Todd has a link on his site to a barber's 'greatest hits' picture page. Yeah, that's right! Laurel, Maryland! The funny thing is that it looks like half the pictures are of the same kid. Where's the one that says, "Punch Me Here?"

Blah. For a guy who got 8 hours' sleep last night, I sure feel cranky, bored, and uninspired. | link

February 10, 2004

Follow-Up. I love Jen, and she loves me; I'm at least reasonably sure of this because she came home last night and didn't immediately attempt to kill me. This weekend was pretty brutal for the two of us because of the stress involved in choosing bridesmaid's dresses. I'm actually pretty good at helping Jen pick out clothes for events—once I learned how to shop with her (and the Oprah phrase you make that dress look great, babe), we've made a good team together, and I've helped her find more than one beautiful dress over the years. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have been involved in this particular hunt, but with her sisters scattered to the four winds, she needed all the help she could get. And a spare pair of eyes to seek out the elusive color periwinkle, which seems to have been banned from current clothing altogether by an evil cabal of gay vampires who only favor black, white, and red.

Our first brief stop downtown to look at a formal dress store was not sucessful. The colors blue, green, and yellow have apparrently been banned from production, unless you're looking at the J.Crew catalog, in which case you look like a Bennetton model from 1984. We also found out that when you're a gymnast visiting from out of town, you have to wear a kerchief, or at least a little sock, on the required pile of cat sick which goes on the top of your skull. (There was some kind of gymnast/cat sick convention this weekend.)

We cruised through the exciting, squawking hell that is David's Bridal, where hundreds of crazed women fought over dresses, changing rooms, and mirrors like sharks with blood in the water. I've never seen a spectacle quite like it. On the racks, the dresses hung limply after having been stretched, pulled, poked, and walked over; we found the three styles that matched up with Jen's vision the closest and brought them to the front desk, where an angry-looking woman put them on a rack and had us wait for a changing room. Now, I like certain types of crowds, like New York City crowds, because they know what side of the subway platform to walk on, and how not to get in your way. Here, clucking Glen Burnie Hons ran willy-nilly through the store, tugging on dresses that crossed between styles like Spanish Harlot and Frosted Birthday Cake. Other women considered bridesmaid's dresses that were less appealing than a hazmat suit, holding them up to their skin and yelling out to people across the store. "Oh, I like this color!" Well, it makes you look like you have jaundice, sweetie.

After waiting for about ten minutes and people watching, Angry Woman got us a room. Jen tried each of the dresses on, we took notes, snapped pictures, and consulted. There were two possibles, but no strong candidate. While she changed, I watched a group of women convince a tired-looking girl to buy a wedding dress stacked with more lace than a French whorehouse. (A woman who I took to be her mother was grabbing two handfuls of the back of the dress in an attempt to keep her boobs from falling out the front, while insisting, "They can take it in! They can take it in!")

After a quick stop at the local formalwear store (where a bored 15-year-old barely resisted the urge to crack her gum while offering no help whatsoever), we retreated to the Towson Mall to look through a few other stores. I bought us some cafe mochas and we sat to regroup, which was good and bad—we got our gameplan together but wound up sugar crashing about a half-hour later. Here again, we found that black and red were the only colors offered by anybody on the three formal dresses in the whole mall. It was pretty depressing, really. The one dress we found in the right material and shape was an orphan in the Nordstrom Rack, missing its separate and worse for wear.

The upside to this story is that after returning home, Jen was able to get four or five dresses organized online, got her sisters to look at them, and spent about an hour in conference with Heather, the patron saint of dysfunctional weddings and cranky fianceés, who helped her narrow the field to a contender. Which was fantastic, because I had ceased to be effective or communicative sometime around 4:30. She was also able to resist the urge to kill me, for which I am thankful, because I know I was not helping her as much as I could have been. I think she may be on the downslope of this particular circle of hell, and I give her all the credit in the world, because I did not realize just how difficult this whole process has been until I experienced it first hand.

The Powerbook is much, much quicker now—erasing all that crap from the drive really helped a lot. | link

February 9, 2004

Saturday night I stayed up way too late to watch one of my favorite movies of all time: The Right Stuff. You can't get much better than a great movie based on a great book by one of my favorite authors, starring some of my favorite actors. And let's thank God for the TCM network and its decision to broadcast good movies without commercial interruption, bleeping, or bad dubbing (e.g. "Forget You!" in place of the F-bomb.) Heck, you can even see boobies on a good night of the week, if you're lucky. And that's what I say: More boobies and more F-bombs on cable channels.

Geek-Out. Last night, while Jen sat on the couch and IM'ed her sisters attempting to come to some kind of consensus on bridesmaids' dresses (which was about as sucessful as recent attempts for peace in the Middle East), I went through iTunes on my laptop and erased about 3/4 of my local music library. My Pismo has been getting slower and slower over the last few months, and while I fully understand that I'm using a four-year-old laptop, I've really noticed it slowing down using Photoshop 6 in Classic, which used to run like greased lightning. Anytime I get ahead of the user interface by a second or more, I get extremely frustrated, because often times my thought processes are two or three steps ahead of what I'm currently doing and it's annoying to have to wait for the computer to complete some stupid task like making a button change color. (This would be the reason I have a copy of PS 7 for OSX and don't use it.) Today I'll be cleaning off some more gunk from the drive to free up some swap space and see if things improve. And thanks to Jason for the maintenance suggestion. | link

February 8, 2004

Fun Quiz Sunday. In honor of the previously mentioned Catholic SAT's and the Jungian personality test (ENFP) they sent us home with, I bring you humorous games: Check out this link and tell me how you did. Fascinating stuff. I got 15/20, and it seemed that I mistook each type (fake/real) almost equally. #13 threw me, but I called it right.

Then, go take this test at McSweeney's (Linda, this one is for you) to see how well you fare under the rule of the Empire. | link

February 7, 2004

Update From The Cat House. This morning Jen and I made the first preliminary plunge into weddinghood by opening a joint checking account at the bank, which means that we actually have to save some money to put in it. Today we're venturing out to a few places to look at bridesmaid's dresses and wedding bands so that we can cross those off the huge list of Stuff We Really, Really Need To Get Done Quickly.

Yesterday I was iced in at the house and got some more work done in the Blue bedroom. Now that the demolition part of the rehab is over with, which is the easiest part, I started cutting shims for the plaster and replacing the baseboards around the room. The doorframe is back in, and the sections of plaster that fell out have been replaced with patches of drywall, which will require seventeen applications of mud and sandings—this after I thought I was done with all that crap.

In more optimistic news, it looks like the patch job on the roof over the upstairs office is holding firm. Two solid days of icy rain, thawing snow, and general moisture have failed to leak through to the wall below, so I'm going to chalk that up in the 'fixed column' and prepare to start the long repair job. | link

February 6, 2004

As if you didn't have enough reasons to vote Bush out of office. "Fiscally Conservative" my ass. Remember when we had a balanced budget? That sure was swell.

Yeah, we have five cats. So this link is hilariously funny. What makes it even better is that the 'lead singer' cat looks like our own Geneva, and the bassist/guitarist looks just like Jen's parents' unfortunately-named Precious. Bulging eyeballs and everything. (Caution: Seizure Robots in effect. View at your own risk.) | link

February 5, 2004

Sharpened #2 Pencils. The Catholic church has this mandatory thing they do for couples who want to get married in their church where they sit the kids down with upstanding members of the congregation for 'counseling sessions'. On the surface, it's actually a good idea, because, as a friend of ours said, it's a lot easier to get married than to stay married. However, as with any activity or social group consisting of more than three people, I looked at the idea with more than a healthy dose of skepticism. What are they going to ask us? Are they going to split us up into separate rooms and come at us like the Scientologists? Are they going to grill us on our beliefs or quote scripture at us until we beg for mercy?

We talked to a good friend about it the night before, and she assured us it was not as bad as our (OK, my) imagination. Essentially, the Church is trying to weed out the folks who aren't really prepared for marriage—the kids who saw Nick and Jessica get married on MTV and thought it would be bitchin'. So after about a half hour through the first meeting with our sponsor couple last night, I felt a lot more at ease. (There was a point, when she read a prayer for marriage early on in the meeting, when I got a little worried, though.)

One of the things they do is sit you down with a booklet, a pencil, and a Scan-Tron sheet like the ones we got in 9th grade for spelling tests, and have you each answer the same set of 150 questions. The test is designed to highlight the stuff in your relationship you haven't really thought of or covered yet, like money, sexual, or family issues, and see if you have the manual dexterity to fill in a page full of teeny circles. The questions range from the mundane—Would it create a problem for you if your future spouse earned more money than you did? to the funny—I have a gambling problem which will cause future problems in our relationship—to the expected—We have decided to raise our children as members of the Catholic Church. You fill in an answer for 'Agree', 'Disagree', or 'Uncertain'. They take these answers, collate them, and then work on the areas where you're out of sync.

Really, we weren't supposed to be comparing our answers, but some of the questions were vague or worded poorly, and it took some figuring to understand what the question was really asking. (e.g.: My future spouse and I seldom disagree about how we spend money.) We did find, however, that our money situation is the place where we need to pow-wow before we sit down with the counselors again, because we still approach it as two separate individuals instead of one single unit. I do have to say, though, that based on a lot of those questions, I think we're about forty light-years ahead of other folks. Still, I'm nervous about getting our church SAT's back, because I'm pretty bad with math, and if I fail us, we won't get into heaven.

Under the Radar. Because he is a on the down-low, 'I'm not into making a big deal about my birthday' kind of guy, Todd has not mentioned his birthday today. I had to read about it on his log. (frowning.) So stop over the the Land Of Pleasant Living and say "Happy Third Birthday" to XLT.

Random Fun Links. ooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh. Nice. Totally gotta get us one of these little babies. You Are Watching Big Brother. Swipe, from the good folks at Turbulence.org, helps you read your driver's license barcode, provides links to data warehouses, and calculates how much money you should charge for your personal data. | link

February 4, 2004

winter (via my beautiful fiancee), 2.4.04

Relativity. It could just be my brain playing tricks on me, but this morning I woke up and the house was positively balmy. For the past two months, I've been wandering from room to room layering and unlayering like a Vegas stripper due to the unequal climate zones in our house. The first floor is barely heated because many of the radiators were moved out to the enclosed porch, which is barely insulated. Our clothes are stored out there (long story), and there have been weeks where picking out that day's wardrobe meant hopping from foot to foot and peering through the fog of one's own breath. Making coffee in the morning started not with cleaning the pot, grinding beans, or getting the milk, but opening the lower oven door and cranking it up so my feet weren't frozen into blocks of ice, ghetto-style. Meanwhile, the upstairs rooms are a faithful recreation of the Sahara desert. Jen has been positioning herself directly over the humidifier to stave off splitting sinus headaches due to the total lack of moisture in the air.

Today I was grinding coffee beans and looked out at the thermometer in the kitchen window. It read thirty degrees, which was enough to send me into spasms of chills a month ago. This morning, I casually considered wearing shorts to work.

Q: Is It Gonna Make Me Sweat? A: Yeah! I learned this afternoon, in doing some research on steam heat that if your radiators are noisy (e.g. the radiator in Jen's bedroom, or the one in the living room), you should place a small, thin block of wood under the side without the pipe to off-level it slightly for better water circulation. I also found out that in steam heat systems, cleaning or replacing the air vent can wake up a dead radiator—close the shutoff valve at the bottom, unscrew the air valve, boil it in vinegar and water for a half hour, and replace it. And finally, using the shutoff valves to regulate the amount of heat won't work in steam systems; you need an adjustable air vent instead. All of this is good information.

Welcome To The Jungle. Li'l Gn'R. I shit you not. | link

February 3, 2004

High Technology. Today I looked at a free comment service called HaloScan and signed up for a membership. It seems to be pretty easy to use; the code is clean and doesn't muck anything up on the page, so I'm going to test it out over the next few weeks to see how I like it. So let me hear what you think, people! If I write something stupid on here, tell me about it. If I write something good, let me know. You'll see a small 'Comment' link at the end of a post if I'm interested in hearing feedback—but I probably won't be adding one for each.

Fambly. This Christmas my Mom asked me if I could scan and retouch a picture for her; in a story involving a Coach purse, some guilt, a picture frame, and an anniversary, she's hoping I can take a beat-up Polaroid of my late grandfather and clean it up to the point where we get some new prints made. I scanned the picture in at 400dpi, cleaned and sharpened it, and looked at the results. The resolution was not up to snuff, so I rescanned at 800dpi and enlarged by 200%, hoping the extra information would be enough to extrapolate good pixels from bad. This time I got better results, and I'm almost done cleaning to the point of cropping. (Mom, I'm going with the one you don't favor, because your father is actually smiling in this one.) Once I'm done, I'm going to import it into iPhoto and send out for prints, probably tonight.

I don't have a whole lot of information about my biological grandfather, only short anecdotal stories; I know that he was a stonemason his whole life, supporting his family at a very early age, and he built his own house. He had big hands, and played the piano. He didn't like having his picture taken, which is why this is a big deal. He died a month before I was born. Maybe my Mom will write me with some more information about him that I can share here.

Oh, Well. The ice storm that was supposed to shut the mid-atlantic area down never materialized; it's raining outside but of course they shut every school system down within a 100-mile radius. I'm considering home schooling for our future children, because it seems that the local public school systems will cancel classes for a strong breeze. Jen and I were hunkered down last night rubbing our rabbits' feet, hoping we could make some inclement weather happen; she was hoping for a day to catch up on sleep and I was looking forward to a solid day to concentrate upstairs. As it was, she was asleep by 10:15 and I got a bunch of drywall installed in the Blue room. It's going to be a long slog to repair the plaster, because it's been beaten on enough that it's brittle, but I think the Pink room will go a lot quicker—the plaster in there came off a lot cleaner.

I have not seen one bottle of Pepsi in this area featuring this promotion. I'd drink yer damn Pepsi if I could just find a bottle. | link

February 2, 2004

Street-Legal. The Tortoise has been running on a suspended registration for longer than I care to admit. I got pulled over in front of the stupid Royal Farms on Fleet Street last year by a city cop who apologetically wrote me a ticket for a busted taillight, saying that the state poopers were cracking down on them. I got caught up in moving and so forgot all about the ticket until I realized that the sticker on my license plate was a month out of date. At this point, every time I got behind the wheel, I became Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, constantly searching over my shoulder for the cops on motorcycles to chase me over the hill firing guns. So this Saturday I got the work order inspected, and ventured down to the MVA this morning to get my new registration. I brought three books, figuring I'd be trapped in the usual Soviet-era queue hell, but surprisingly I was in and out in twenty minutes—the longest I waited was for a parking spot.

Thoughts on the Superbowl.

• Good frickin' game.
• Who the hell is Puff Daddy and why is he famous?
• The commercials, which were hyped as much as the game, were mediocre.
• No, seriously. Puff Daddy? My Dad could rap better than that guy. And who the hell is 'Nelly'?
• Adam Viniateri is breathing a huge sigh of relief this morning.
• Jen's brother Rob called me right after the halftime show to ask me if I had also seen Janet Jackson's boob pop out. Unfortunately I was washing a bowl at that time, so I missed it.
• The Panthers, who I was not rooting for, played a hell of a game.

February 1, 2004

God Has Given You The Finger. Friday night Jen and I had Todd and Heather over to the house for a cocktail and to start the Wedding Dress Face-Off. Heather was not ecstatic about the first one, which meant that a second trip to the car dealership bridal shop was needed to decide. After the modeling was finished, we drove into the frigid depths of Columbia to try out an Indian restaurant Jen's friend Meg told us about. The menu selection was larger than a Manhattan phone book (and the names were just as exotic), so we started with appetizers: the best samosas I've ever had, as well as some potato pancake type things, and some tasteless white cakes served with dipping sauce. Once we had some drinks and food in us, we found it was easier to decide on entrees. Heather tried something whose name I can't remember, which was delicious; Todd had the palak paneer and Jen had alu ghobi, which was just spiced enough to be perfect, and I ordered dosai masala, which sounded great on paper but came out looking like a giant rolled pancake. Inquiring how to eat this massive thing, I asked our waitress, who told me in her best english to use my hands. (This was about the time when the other patrons of the store were laughing at me.) Everything was excellent, and vegan to boot, so I think we've found a new favorite restaurant to explore southern Indian cusine—just minutes from home.

Saturday, Jen and Heather returned to the original bridal shop to look again at the first dress that caught Jen's eye; after a prolonged search for the dress in question, they found it and Jen began to put it on. Heather took one look and agreed—it was the dress. Here's the best part: when they got it to the counter, it turned out that the dress was 1/2 off the original listed price. Score! | link

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