January 30, 2004

God damn it, people, secure your frigging computers. (or: God damn it, Microsoft, get your heads out of your asses.)

I had some time to kill today, and started thinking about home automation, and looking at programs and systems that support the X-10 interface. (No, it's not the X-10 camera people you love to hate.) These guys have a program for OS9 which allows you to control as many outlets in your house as you can afford to install. There are also OSX native versions from different vendors which all require further investigation. It would be great to have the server turn the lights upstairs on and off based on the time and date, or alert me if there's an intruder...

And, on a somewhat related note: for all those that share my annoyance at over-complicated electronics, CNN did a story about it. | link

January 29, 2004

8 PM—Debate. Besides the fact that I'm pissed that the debate is only available on MSNBC, the Democratic candidates all sound very good. I'm impressed with all of these guys, and they all have made some fantastic points. Dean doesn't sound as good as Clark or Kerry; I like Kuchinich's points and gusto, Lieberman sounds like he finally woke up, and Sharpton impressed me with a couple of great points. Food for thought.

Greasy Kid Stuff. Our buddy Nate is one of the more intelligent people I've ever met. There are only a few people on this earth I know who can lead a conversation through science fiction, programming, anime, music trivia, politics, and random philosophy safely without losing anybody; the man is sort of a geek buddha. There are a few areas where I tease him goodnaturedly, and because he is a benevolent, friendly fellow, he doesn't kick my ass.

Among the many choices for fast food here in Happy Valley, there is a tasty Iranian kabob restaurant in a nondescript strip mall. The food is good, the service is friendly, and the garlic in the food has a half-life of fifty years or so. Next door to this restaurant is a store where Nate buys comic books. He's unapologetic about this, for which I give him credit (some guys get all mad and insist that they're called "graphic novels", not comix, as if a different name for a picture book featuring guys in leotards makes it literature), and I've often followed him in there to browse while we wait for our food. Now, I've not bought a comic book in ten years or more, so it's always kind of strange to walk in there with him. I don't want to be that guy, the one who has a whole wing of his house devoted to boxes of comic books, or the shifty guy who buys the anime porn on the top shelf, or the guy who has the bust of Spider-Man on his dresser. I like books that have a good story, or look pretty, or in some rare cases, both.

So I see some Hellboy comix on the shelf, and think back to the ones Nate showed me, which I liked. I find a book that I haven't seen, which looks great, and... I take it up to the counter. Unfolding my wallet, Ronnie James Dio starts singing "Stranger In The Dark" on the radio behind the counter. And suddenly, I'm that dork wearing the denim jacket in 1987 all over again.

It is a good book, though.

(Note: I did not like Ronnie James Dio in high school. I was just surrounded by people who did.)

Pop Media Recap. There's a disturbing ad on the radio right now for Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in downtown Baltimore where they're promoting midget oatmeal wrestling. I don't know what's more disturbing, the thought of midgets wrestling in breakfast cereal, or the way the dumb announcer chick pronounces the word 'eoowwt-meel' in that peculiar Baltimore dialect. There's no accent more disturbing than a Balwmore accent, Hon.

I disagree completely with this reviewer's take on Psyence Fiction, so I'm taking his review of the new UNKLE album with a large grain of salt.

Jen and I caught the Kajagoogoo episode of Bands Reunited on VH1 last weekend; besides humming the melody of "Too Shy" for the rest of the day, we thought it was pretty good. The band seems to have dealt with their meteoric rise and sudden plunge to obscurity pretty well; they were able to put aside their differences with relative ease and it looked like they had a great time playing together again. Discussion topic: Why would anyone change their name to "Limahl"? | link

January 28, 2004

I feel old and stupid. | link

January 27, 2004

Boring House Update. Yesterday I enjoyed a snow day from work, which brought back memories of Star Blazers, Legos and grilled cheese sandwiches in second grade. Instead of regressing to age eight (I don't own feety pajamas anymore) I packed Jen off to work, answered some email, and then looked over the linen closet in the hall with a fresh cup of coffee. Over the years it's been hacked apart for access to the tub plumbing, new shelves have been jury-rigged, and the floorboards were cut open. I've been wanting to get inside and start rehabbing it for a while now, and because I've got the shared wall opened up in the blue room, the time was right.

I started by pulling the shelves down and the trimwork out, then began to scrape the ancient wallpaper the old-fashioned way—hot water and elbow grease. Once the walls were clear, I started a wire run from one side to the other (the door opens from left to right, and we decided to have a light switch on the left inside wall). By dinnertime, I had wire installed from the inside of the Blue room (the linen closet will share the same circuit) up the wall, over the doorframe, and down the left wall to the switchbox. There's a ton of stuff to be accomplished before it's done, but having a light in there will be a great start.

Your Mailbox is Full. Based on the amount of bullshit email I got this morning, this stupid new worm is making the rounds. If you emailed me in the last 24 hours and haven't heard anything from me, assume I mistakenly deleted your email with all the emails titled "Mail Delivery System" and "Test". Apparently the purpose of the worm is to DDoS the SCO corporation, which is kind of funny, but still annoying. I'm glad I run OSX.

Random Fun Links. Excellent reading from Edmunds.com about Car Salesmen. Given the dilapidated condition of the Taurus, I'm sure this will come in handy. | link

January 26, 2004

movie star Penn, 1.25.04

The Heathens Next Door. This morning we got up early to dig Jen's car out of the snow so that she could follow misguided company policy and be one of only seventeen people in the Baltimore area who had to go to work today. Catonsville was pretty quiet, because the snow was sitting on the roads refusing to melt and the plows were just pushing it around. Once I got the driveway cleared, we got Jen out and on the road to work, and I looked over at our next-door neighbor's house.

Now, when Jen and I started looking at houses in the this town, she warned me about the neighborhood—not that it's bad, or filled with toxic waste, but that it's as old-school as old-school gets. There's a church every thirty feet. We moved in next to a house with a crucifix on the front lawn, flanked by a plastic sign featuring the Ten Commandments; we knew things would be interesting with our neighbors when they found out we were engaged and not married, and bless their hearts, they have been warm and cordial with us—until I gave them our Christmas card. We've not seen them much since then; it could be because the average temperature here in Maryland has been hovering around the 20-degree mark, or because they are inside praying for our mortal heathen souls.

So I cleared the sidewalk out in front of their house with my non-believer shovel.

Wow. From Rob, I found this link to Margaret Cho's site. It seems some right-wing site quoted part of her website and suddenly she was inundated with half-literate emails from racist homophobes. Isn't America lovely? | link

January 25, 2004

flower (special thanks to Dad for the macro lens), 1.25.04

Weekend. Among the things Jen and I got done this weekend was meeting with our florist for the wedding, which started out like Scott's expedition to the North Pole. We were referred to a wonderful lady north of the city, and with her help, working out the arrangements took about two hours. I think we both left the shop relieved and confident—the flowers came within our budget and beyond our expectations.

Saturday evening we drove to the Ram's Head in Annapolis to meet up with the Montheazletts and Caudizzis for drinks and dinner to celebrate Nate's birthday. Entering the bar with no dinner reservations, we stood at the bar for a while until we found some seating at the Irish pub down the street. We also got to meet Dave the Tunemaster, who looks a little too much like me (skinny, goateed men with square glasses and hyperactive temperaments, although he has better hair than me), and Steve and Carol. While I pimped my real estate agent on Kristen, Jen and Heather made plans to hit the original bridal shop to have a steel cage match next weekend.

Sunday I was able to get power, data and cable run from the Blue room to the basement, as well as insulation put in the wall and surrounding the bathtub, which will put us in the vicinity of the schedule I was hoping for. | link

January 23, 2004

hard-knock life, 1.20.04

Fan Mail. I think I got more mail about meatloaf yesterday than I've gotten all month about anything I've written here, which is alternately flattering ("...you like me....you really like me!") and funny, because if I'd have known how much response it got, I would have started a whole page on handling ground beef years ago. Or abusing Martha Stewart. Our friend Linda brought up a related point:

...as for Martha Stewart, I'm pretty confident she's not a very nice person, but not for one second do I think a MAN in her position would be as scorned or persecuted.

I'm not too sure. I think any media celebrity in her place would have been just as crucified; I think she's a convenient placeholder for people like Ken Lay of Enron, who, by most accounts, is going to be impossible to prosecute. (I searched for a relevant article on this subject that ran a few months back in the New Yorker, but they're not providing past articles for deep linking. Essentially, the author argued that no jury will ever be able to understand months of boring testimony about numbers.)

Heather wrote:

...the recipe sounds wonky to me- People who suggest carrots and celery in meatloaf have their heads up their asses.

I think we'd agree with you there, girl.

Renie wrote to tell us she almost made meatloaf at Christmas for us. Which would have been nice, but I should probably explain a bit further: It's not that Jen hates meatloaf, per se, but that she hates the idea of meatloaf: generally it makes her think of a blackened, tasteless pile of carbon scraped from a pan and covered with ketchup. Yum!

How F**king Dangerous Is That Dept.: the iTunes Music Store now has something called "iTunes Essentials" which are compilations of songs, like Hair Bands or 70's AM Radio Classics, programmed much like Greatest Hits or AOR radio playlists, and priced as singles or as group purchases. Keep my credit card away from my computer, please. (On a related note, I need to look at Zero 7 and Verve Remixed when I get some money together.)

Random Fun Links. Holy Mary, Mother of God, what I would give to have this calendar. | link

January 22, 2004

Martha Stewart Can Kiss My Ass. Jen, in her loving, special way, decided she would try to make me some meatloaf this week. (Actually, she has been planning to bring the cow for about a week now, but took sick last Thursday.) She looked at Martha's site and found a recipe that sounded good and looked easy. Now, let me just clarify here: She hates meatloaf. As with tacos, eggs, ham, water, and practically any other recipe, her mother has burned, undercooked, or otherwise wrung the enjoyment out of meatloaf for her to this very day. So it was with a sense of destiny and great foreboding that she mixed the ingredients and placed it in the oven. I got home, gave her a kiss, and told her that it smelled really good (it did); we waited for the required hour, and pulled it out.

It was not done. It was still pretty loose; it smelled good but had a gooshy texture, so we upped the temperature and put it back in. And we waited.

45 minutes later, the top was black, but the insides still fell apart like loose ground beef. it did not look like the example in the picture. I tried to console Jen, telling her it was because the recipe was bad, and I think she agreed with me, but she has vowed to never make meatloaf again.

Which, upon reflection, isn't really a bad thing anyway.

Call Me. Looks like AT&T Wireless is putting itself on the block for sale. Considering Jen and I both have AT&T as our cell carriers, it should be interesting to see who buys them and what happens after that. I'm still trying to find the time to research other cell plans and decide who to go with.

Random Fun Links. Yesterday I updated both the Pink and the Blue room pages with some boring shots of wiring. | link

January 21, 2004

Dodged Bullet. I called one of our real estate agents last week and got the name of a roofer she recommended; he stopped by this morning to give us a quote on repairing the roof leak. I've had people guess how much they think the repairs will cost, and their answers confirm my anxiety—I was thinking this was gonna be at least a grand or so. So when the roofer stopped back in and gave me a price of $100, my jaw hit the floor. For $200 he's going to repair the leak and a couple of other slates further down, and I couldn't be more relieved.

Wow. I've loved Gary Panter for years—he's an artist/illustrator who has an extremely raw style and unique voice in the world of commercial illustration. Anybody who can stay as true to his craft as this guy, and become as well-known, is a hero to me. (Anybody that will coat cicada shells in latex and sell them to the public, while cheerfully warning you not to eat them, is a genius.) Turns out he's selling custom drawings for $125 based on a couple of keywords you send him; I think this is a bargain and a unique opportunity reminicent of Howard Finster's ads in the back of Rolling Stone. (Sidebar: Our old boss at Cidera, a mild-mannered manager who suffered some of the worst paint-peeling halitosis known to Man, had answered one of the ads in the early 80's and had an original Finster. I was envious.) I don't have a whole lot of money right now, but I'm seriously considering this. | link

January 20, 2004

!!?!??! I guess everybody has their prid—I mean, price.

Trivial Pursuit Buffs, Rejoice. Bow down before the One Hit Wonders. This makes me want to fire up the P2P all over again. (I went through another site about two years ago which listed the top 100 songs by year and started plugging the ones I remembered into Kazaa. That was a good day.) Also, on a related note: The Guide To Electronic Music. | link

January 19, 2004

Overheard. The scene: the express (10 items or less!!!) line at the Hunt Valley Giant. The players: handsome early 60's male patron, smartly dressed, no wedding ring. Attractive late 50's female clerk, requisite Giant uniform, nice hair, no wedding ring. The exchange:

Man: Helloo there!

Woman: Hi. (Checking items.)

Man: So, how did your football teams do this weekend?

Woman: (Barely perceptible pause) Oh, I don't follow football.

Man: (Who's got nothing) Awww, what are you, some kind of... (panic setting in) non...sports...liking...person?

Woman: (Not looking up) ...

Man: (Grabbing for anything at this point) ...Well, college basketball is really my thing.

I could only stand behind this poor sap and shake my head quietly as his ass caught fire and plunged into the ground. I'm no playa like Engelbert Humperdink, but I understand that A. it's not smart to include sports in your opening line. Unless you're hitting on a woman you're playing sports with, leave the football chatter at home. B. have a follow-up line to your line. Chances are you'll get shot down, and sometimes it's better to have a good comeback—women like the chase, and if you're interesting, you may get a second chance. C. Don't follow a brush-off with an insult. Duh. D. Enough about you. What does she like? Why don't you ask her, genius? She doesn't give a crap about whether or not you like college basketball.

All of these things I wanted to explain to this poor guy, who may or may not have been trying to git some, but I figured he was already shamed enough as it was.

Yesterday afternoon I continued the Blue room demolition and reached the point where I can start snaking wire. While I made noise and yanked plaster down, Jen bundled up on the bed and drank TheraFlu to try and ward off the evil nasties. Outside, the freezing rain made an icy shell on top of the snow we got Saturday night.

Movie Review. Underworld was an entertaining, if not derivative movie about vampires and werewolves; the chick from Pearl Harbor ran around shooting guns trying to save the singer dude from Creed. "Romance story" this movie ain't, but I can see how people could get "sexy" from the sheer amount of leather pants worn in the film. Thankfully, kung-fu was kept to an absolute minimum in favor of gunplay. But yeah, you've seen this movie before. | link

January 17, 2004

I Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way. The idea of owning a newly-constructed house has never really appealed to me, for many reasons. The lack of soul in any recently built dwelling has been enough to put me off, really—there's a line I draw between 'Modern', (loosely defined as 'simply designed for elegant living', and translating into 'you don't have enough money to live this cool') and 'Cheaply Built'. Cheaply Built apes the easy parts of Modern, in that there are little or no finishing touches—not because the builder was consciously making a design decision, but because the carpenter was doing time for drug possession that week. (My experience has shown the three groups of people who are always holding are carpenters, painters and waiters.) Cheaply Built means that there are no trees within thirty feet of the house. It's a lot like government contracting—the people who built your house were the lowest bidders. Walk into any new condo or McMansion and you will see great swaths of bare wall offset with little tiny strips of molded wood shavings which are called 'finishing'. The floors will be wood laminate or linoleum in some hateful pattern, and the siding will be vinyl in a pastel color. And you will be lucky to have ten feet between your neighbor's bedroom window and your own.

All that having been said, owning an older home presents its own set of problems. That charming slate roof, which should last 100 years, is now 85 and dropping shingles like dandruff. The mature trees surrounding our house, which add so much character, were in dire need of a pruning five years ago. The wiring throughout the house, which was installed in fits and starts with each passing decade by electricians of questionable license, now resembles a handful of cooked spaghetti. There's no way to explain why the piping for the heating system is routed under the front porch, or why the linen closet was once painted metallic silver. And the idea of more than one full bathroom is madness, unless the prior owners decided to add an extension.

All this doesn't faze me, though, because I grew up in a variety of different houses over the years. My parents owned everything from a 60's tract home to a prewar Cape Cod where they built a master bedroom out of the attic. I'm used to mysterious cold drafts, unheated rooms, balky furnaces the size of luxury sedans, flooded sump pumps, ancient wiring, carcinogenic insulation, hot pink bathroom tile, and barely functional appliances. I've had a 50-year-old used tampon fall out of the ceiling on my head while demoing a basement. (Don't ask.)

We've had a family joke for years that says that the Dugan Way is to buy a house, spend a number of years fixing it up, and the minute it's finished, sell it and start over again. We spent years helping my Dad shingle roofs, hang drywall, sweat pipes, run wiring, fix cars, and landscape yards. If you had asked me at age 13 if I enjoyed any of that, I would have denied it, because given the choice I'd rather have been riding my bike than digging a hole in the backyard for a pool, but I see the value in it now. I grew up in awe of my Dad, because the guy could do anything. Having seen him cut holes in the roof, or mix concrete, or build an entire bathroom from scratch, I grew up learning how to do stuff, and more importantly, without fear of doing it myself. I don't think I could have been given a better gift than that.

I'm also thankful that I found a woman who will put up with having all her laundry out on a subzero porch, or inches of plaster dust on all flat surfaces, or living six months without a proper bedroom. She has the vision thing, which means she can see past the cracking plaster, moldering carpet, dying shrubbery, and leaky basement into the future, when we have happy children playing in a clean, painted, updated house.

I have to admit, though, that the kitchen floor has been freezing the last couple of weeks, and I'm kind of tired of that. | link

January 16, 2004

In addition to the wire work done last night, I got down below the pantry this morning, fighting the wind and a 5x5' sheet of plastic (that was fun) to seal up the insulation I put in the other night. This project was prompted by the newscast last night where they said that New Hampshire got down to frickin' 98 below zero.

Random Fun Links. Disney sells Celebration community. It's a Small World! (via dominey) Get your Mars on. Right On. I only wish this guy had some better merchandise, 'cause I'd buy it. (via boing boing) iPod sound quality. I should be encoding in AAC at 160kb/s... | link

January 15, 2004

This evening I dropped $100—gulp—on cable at the Home Depot. $100 got me 1,000 feet of Cat 5e network cable and 500 feet of coax cable, enough wire to wrap around my house about a hundred times or start my own copper mine. I got the rest of the wire run from the Pink room to the basement and began to cut out the baseboards for the outlets. Hopefully by tomorrow night I can have the pink room finished and start on the blue room next.

Scammed. The anticipated "1-3 inches of snow, with the possibility of 2-4 during Thursday" translated to a slight dusting. The state of Maryland continued its long tradition of freaking out and dumping millions of dollars worth of salt on clear roads, putting schools on 2-hour delays, and excercising "Snow Emergency Plans." I remain unimpressed. So much for getting snowed in with my baby.

Random Fun Links. Quicktime 3-D view of Mars, put together from NASA photgraphs. That's compelling stuff. | link

January 14, 2004

Audio Update. Actually, I misspoke yesterday. The mini-headphone-to-RCA plug does work, it's just that the input level to the receiver is very low. So I have to crank the receiver up to high volume to hear the output from the iPod. The S-Video cable still doesn't work, and the main issue there is that my TV is old and only has a coax input. At some point I will need to buy a TV with S or Component video inputs to get the whole enchilada.

This Old House, Part 2. So I got the insulation installed under the pantry last night. It was actually pretty easy to do—cutting down the stringers was easy with the compound miter saw, and actually putting the insulation in was a snap. Unfortunately, the kitchen is still pretty cold because the radiator is barely alive. So, no quick fix.

Legion of Boom by the Crystal Method is a disappointment. Not as melodic as Vegas ("Busy Child", "Trip Like I Do") or compelling as Tweekend ("Name of the Game", "Roll It Up"), none of the tracks on this album stand out, make me want to do kung-fu, shoot people up, or drive cars fast. And that is the standard by which I judge all my big-beat electronica. "Weapons of Mass Distortion" and "Broken Glass" come close to the old-skool soundtrack for ass-whuppin', but this is pretty uninspiring stuff.

Missing. Todd just reminded me that Spalding Gray is missing and presumed bumming; apparently he was in a bad car wreck back in '01 and has not been right ever since. My friend Martha and I both went to see Gray's Anatomy at Center Stage back in '94 or so; it turns out that Todd could have been there the same night (and, based on our particular brand of shared coincidence, I would put money on it) and we all enjoyed the show. God bless, man, and I hope you're OK.

Random Fun Links. Heavy rotation this morning: Pete Yorn's Musicforthemorningafter, specifically "On Your Side". Beautiful stuff. This could be very cool. Provided I can get it to work. Don't let the door hit you in the ass. This translates, in Industry-speak, as "Get out, you loser." (this has direct bearing on a certain project I was working on last year.) | link

January 13, 2004

While You Were Out. The cover for the couch came yesterday, and while I waited for Jen to get home, I figured out how to put the thing on the couch. It fits really well, but $200 is pretty steep for the thin material it's made of, but I guess that's in line with the four hundred percent markup Pottery Barn charges.

This Old House. Our kitchen is small by contemporary standards, but it's functional for us, largely in part because there's a 5'x5' pantry off the back of the house. It's suspended off the ground about four feet by two concrete pillars, and the underside is finished off with tar paper. The kitchen is also the coldest room in the house, in part because the radiator there is the last one on the chain, and in part because the pantry is poorly insulated. I took a look under there this morning and found that the tar paper is holding in a layer of blown fiberglas insulation, but I can't be sure how old, thick or even it is. I'm going to buy a couple of 2'x4's and a roll of pink insulation today and see if I can't seal it up a bit better before the temperatures plunge again.

Oh, and those two cables I bought at the Best Buy last week? Neither of them work.

Random Link Fun. 100 Mowst mispelled werds. Know it. Learn it. Live it. Clean your 1st gen iPod. Gonna try this one tonight. VoIP hiccup. Doesn't apply to my IP phone though... Dead iPod? Follow those instructions. Also, Helpful iPod support.

4:55 PM. Apparently a whole swath of I-95 is on fire or something, not too far from Catonsville. A tanker truck did a header off an overpass onto two other tanker trucks. What are the chances of that? This should make the evening commute a pleasant one. I think I may wind up staying late at work this evening. | link

January 12, 2004

duckpin bowling, hillendale lanes, 1.12.04

The Recap. The wedding dress search has been sort of a Crusade for Jen over the last few months. Between pushy sales staff, incompatible schedules, stacks of bridal magazines, unpredictable sisters, and a mother with more conflicting opinions than a Sunday Fox News show, she has been laying awake each night dreading each attempt to buy something. This Friday we hosted her mother and sister, taking them out for Thai at our favorite local restaurant, in preparation for another skirmish on Saturday. The good news is that they found a dress. The bad news is that all joy, confidence, and self-esteem Jen had in the dress was smacked out of her on the car ride home by her mother, who is now banished from any further wedding planning.

Meanwhile, I forcibly removed all the skin from my knuckles while running wire through the Pink room. There are enough loops for seven outlets, which should be enough plugs to power an entire branch of Circuit City. Sunday, I got the wire down through the wall in the dining room and through the basement to the panel, a production about as complicated (and pleasant) as trying to ski blindfolded through a minefield. In addition, I put another electrical line in the wall for the future bathroom, and one of two planned data cables.

Saturday night Jen had plans, so I went duckpin bowling with Jason and his friends Heather, Sharon, and Dave at the Hillendale bowling center, a quaint facility north of the city that dates back to the Eisenhower administration. Duckpin bowling is an odd Baltimore tradition, where the ball and pins are about a quarter the normal size, and about five times as hard to knock over. The good thing is that you can really whip that little ball down the lane. The bad thing is that unless you hit the pins just so, you'll take out two pins and leave the rest standing. I'm ashamed to admit that my old neighborhood featured a duckpin bowling center, the venerable Patterson Bowling Center, and in the six years I lived there I didn't make it over for a game. I'm also ashamed to admit that I'm a poor duckpin bowler, and that I ranked dead last in the competition.

Hold On To Your Lunch. No, really, Hold on to your lunch. Don't say I didn't warn you. | link

January 9, 2004

Recommendation. Looking for some good work music? Go pick up Richard Ashcroft's Alone With Everybody. Melodic, relaxed rock, great vocals, outstanding production. Looking for something to laugh at after you watch the news? ("Don't look at that war over there that we're not winning. Don't pay attention to those body counts, or that spiralling deficit or the thrumming beat of inflation, or our weakening dollar. Look to the sky. Look to...a new space program! Yeah, that's it!" I call bullshit.) Go Get Your War On.

Weapons Of Mass Confusion. The back panel of our new receiver scares me. It looks like the control room wall of a Russian nuclear power plant; it's filled with ports and connectors and diagrams silk-screened onto the black metal that are supposed to "help" me figure out how to hook this thing up in audiophile-speak. There are whole 10-page chapters in the manual focused on subjects like "Plugging in Your Receiver" and "Attaching The FM Antenna." I feel like I'm sitting down to an SAT again. Once I navigated through the dissertation on the six different types of cable it's possible to use, (as far as I can tell, Optical > S-Video > Coax > RCA) and had a rudimentary understanding of where to put them (back in the bag with the receipt, because invariably I bought the wrong one), I turned to the chapters on "Using Your Tuner," or "What Are All These Flashing Lights For?", bypassing the volume on "Configuring Your Receiver" because I don't have the required thirteen surround-sound speakers nor the patience to stab at the little buttons on the front panel.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love this thing, and I'm forever indebted to my sister for giving it to us for Christmas. It's just that over the last ten years, in the absence of money and high-end audio equipment, I'm out of the loop on all this stuff. I'm thinking that the technology got a lot smarter and I got a lot dumber. I kind of feel like my parents when they are confronted with the blinking 12:00 display on the front of their VCR. Somewhere along the way this stuff got really complicated. There are seventeen different types of surround sound and a whole college-level course required to understand the differences. Not only do you have to drop a month's salary on one component, you have to blow the Christmas bonus on the cabling to go with it. These days there's interconnect wire thicker than my arm to connect your components; one foot of speaker wire is $3 and weighs heavier than anchor chain. After looking through the rows of boxes of gold-plated this and double-shielded that I found the normal section and picked up a regular S-video cable for the DVD player and a splitter to RCA-jack cable for the iPod. Grand total: $9. | link

January 8, 2004

Can Anybody Hear This Broadcast. Dan, our underpaid and under appreciated IT god around here, just hooked up a new HP network printer that my Mac can see. Apparently the old one was networked but you had to open a port to it or some such bullshit, and it wasn't PostScript, so it was worthless and invisible to Rendezvous.

In other news, I got the rest of the plaster and lathe down in the Pink room last night and began the process of drilling through the studs to start fishing wire. In some cases there are some roadblocks—the closet corner is framed in such a way that I don't have clearance for a shovelhead drillbit, or even the drill, so I'm going to have to get jiggy with it. The area in the front corner behind the radiator is the main trouble spot though, because the kickplate still won't come out. There's not enough room to maneuver behind it, plus I can't get at the nails that hold it in place. I am, however, in love with my loaner Sawzall. I've forgotten just how much fun a 12 amp motor connected to a 4" metal blade can be. It reminds me of the remarkably un-PC Joe Piscopo line from Johnny Dangerously, the one where he holds up the 88 Magnum: "It shoots through schools."

I should also give a shout-out to my pops (not to be confused with my peeps) for the super-science laser level he gave me for Christmas. I put some batteries in this thing and turned it on the other night, and it immediately pointed out the fact that the house is out of level in five dimensions, at which time it radioed Sears Central and called in backup from the Craftsman Emergency Response Team. I'm going to need a degree in geometry to square out my house, and this thing will make life much easier. Plus, the included red-lens glasses make me look like Devo when I wear them. Thanks, Dad.

Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Consumer Goods. Tuesday I broke down and bought a present for our 8-year-old IKEA Varnamo couch (the one they don't sell anymore). Over the years this poor couch has been slept, dripped, stood, scratched, snoozed, fought, laughed, cried, played, drank, eaten, and jumped on; it's really showing its age at this point. With $200 I don't really have to spend, I got a Pottery Barn slipcover on clearance, which will be great news for our friends who are allergic to the five square feet of cat fur embedded in the upholstery.

Random Link Fun. Here's an interesting site on the Curta hand calculator, sort of a mechanical adding machine. (via Slashdot). An Awesome illustration site. (via Boing Boing). And finally an Awesome poster site. Cheap, too. (via Coudal). | link

January 7, 2004

Ouch. Jen was in the kitchen this morning cutting down a set of comps for the project she's working on, when suddenly I heard her say, "FUCK. OK, Ow. That was not good." Knowing she had done something Very Bad, I walked in to find her holding the two pieces of her left thumb together. Quickly my advanced Cub Scout training kicked into gear and we bundled it up in paper towels and made our way to St. Agnes Hospital, where we waited three hours to have a nice man cut her nail off and stitch up the finger. So officially, the count is now X-Actos 2, Lockardugans 0.

Wedding Monkeys. When Jen and I first started planning our wedding, it was fun; we talked about eloping and Vegas and spangled jumpsuits, then jetting somewhere international with the buckets of money we'd be saving. After the reality and obligations set in, we started researching the event locally, figuring that the house is big enough to hold the reception and that the backyard would fit everyone perfectly. It was still fun—food tastings were about eating hors d'oeuvres and getting shitty on free booze, and the cake was the first thing we put money down on.

Then, the wedding monkey started getting bigger. The tent guy told us that the backyard is too uneven for a reception, which is an understatement. (Our backyard is a sloping collection of tree roots and gopher holes waiting to capture ankles like tiger traps.) This means our tents will go on the front lawn next to Frederick Road, a situation not unlike having dinner next to a freeway overpass. The food estimate came back at roughly half our current budget, Which means that we will be poor but well-fed. Jen's experiences with the Catholic Church resemble the movie Brazil—you have to wait three weeks for a paper to be sent to you by one diocese to prove to another diocese that you have all your shots, but it has to be a certain paper which the original diocese failed to send you. And so far dress shopping has resembled a night of WWF Smackdown Live.

We've been slacking for the last month while the Christmas rush sorted itself out, and now that January has arrived like a past-due gambling debt, we are scrambling to pick up where we left off. And that damn monkey has grown into a 500-lb. gorilla.

Looks like Apple released a mini iPod yesterday; 1,000 songs (4GB) for $250 is still kind of steep, but I suppose lots of people will buy one for the cool factor. | link

January 6, 2004

Crash. I started doing some exploratory surgery in the Pink room last night to see how difficult it will be to put the electrical lines in upstairs. Starting with the bulge wall (the one it shares with the bathroom) I got around to the end of the front wall cleared and ready to drill. It's pretty easy going so far, but I haven't gotten to the drilling or cutting yet, so I'm reserving judgement. Of course, the hardest part is going to be getting the wiring down to the basement—and that part I haven't figured out completely. I did get to see the movie Cast Away on ABC while I was working, and I thought it was a great flick. It puts my "Wilson" experience into perspective, too. | link

January 5, 2004

The Party's Over. This morning Jen and I stumbled around the house trying to get ready for work, still stuck in the lazy patterns of vacation established at my sister's house, where we got used to rising after 9:30, sipping coffee until noon and then venturing out into the freakishly warm upstate New York weather. (Really—60 degrees in January up there is a bit like snow in Jamaica. There are whole regions of Siberia that are warmer in the wintertime.) Five cats who had grown accustomed to having our house to themselves dodged between feet while I attempted to make two cups of coffee out of half a tablespoon of beans. Jen was out the door early to tackle a big project at work, leaving me squinting at the latest BG&E bill while listening to the weatherdork predict a week of sub-freezing nightly temperatures. Oh, and the county decided to re-assess our property—for an extra hundred thousand dollars.

I broke down and bought an iTrip for the iPod before we left (the rental only had a CD player) and I have good news to report. With the exception of changing stations, the unit worked flawlessly. We were even able to transmit Motown to Renie's stereo receiver during dinner on Friday night.

The macro lens for the G3 works exceptionally well; I may break down later on and buy the fisheye lens for it now that I have the adapter ring, but for the time being this one will capture my attention and hold it. | link

January 3, 2004

william edward dugan jr., 1.4.04

Some Thoughts On Christmas. Jen and I are thankful, happy, and a little overwhelmed by the sheer Christmas-osity of the Dugan clan; between my folks and my sister, we have to figure out how to fit an entire furniture store's worth of stuff into our rented Chevy Trailblazer. Jen has a new garden composter the size of a cement mixer; it will provide rich, meaty humus for the entire neighborhood. We have a brand-new amplifier with enough inputs on the back to control the Maryland power grid. It will be the command center for our wedding music selection and the basis of our entertainment center, supplanting the hand-me-down Sherwood receiver I inherited as payment for moving my friend Sophie seventeen times after college. I have a new close-focus lens for the G3, which means I will be bombarding all five of you readers with macro shots of everything under the sun. We have enough cookbooks to start our own library branch, more boxer shorts for me, and Jen has a heavenly pearl necklace from my sister which could possibly (but not definitely) be a stunning counterpoint to a wedding dress.

We stopped in to see my Grampa Dugan on Saturday, and it was great to sit with him for an hour or so. He looks fantastic for a man of 89 (definitely better than he has the last few times we've been up), and he's looking forward to the new golf season. My aunts and uncles have each arranged to take him for a couple of weeks this winter, which will be good for him, as he'll be eating better and actually using the heat. | link

Jan 2, 2004

1973 wink contest (from the super-8 film festival), 1.1.04

Hey folks— I'm reporting to you live from my sister's living room, where she and I are geeking out while Jen showers. Lots to write about; a fantastic Christmas here in NY State, preceded by a very low-key New Year's at my parents' place (we were in bed by 12:15, romantics that we are). | link

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