Feb 28, 2005

...And Boy, Are My Arms Tired. Jen was visiting her father in the L-P city this weekend, so I took the opportunity to make as big of a mess as possible while she was gone. Friday night and all day saturday I spent mudding, taping, sanding and priming the upstairs and downstairs hallway. You're wondering why I said the downstairs hallway, when I've posted pictures of the "finished" product—well, as with any drywall job, you never notice the blemishes until you get the first coat of primer on it, and then suddenly it looks like Ray Liotta's face. Upstairs, the walls took two coats of primer and about four coats of white paint before they looked clean; now the Phillip Morris White on all the trimwork really stands out in contrast. Sunday I pulled the baseboards in the dining room and braved the fiberglas insulation to run wiring, so when we call the electrician back in, we can get ¾ of the first floor hooked up.

Other than that, four loads of laundry, and a sinkful of dishes, I did nothing. Two solid days of work, bachelor meals, and sleep. But it's 99% done. | link

Feb 25, 2005

The End Times Are Upon Us. Somebody busted out the Nerf darts at work today. For anybody who was employed by a certain alma mater of mine (or any dot-com, for that matter), this is a recognizable portent of doom.

<huddles under desk, shivering>

Update: It's worse than I thought. Todd brought me one of the darts, which has the company name printed on the side for GDC. The timetable for Judgement has been moved forward six months.

The End Of An Era. Growing up on the outskirts of the New York City area, the local TV stations played many commercials aimed at that market. Besides the Broadway musical, Ritz Thrift Shop, and Potampkin Cadillac ads, there was the ever-present jingle for Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, accompanied by shots of goy vacationers skiing down shallow slopes, doing the overbite shuffle to Engelbert Humperdinck, and lounging in heart-shaped jacuzzis. This, apparently, was the height of luxury. It was to my dismay this morning to read that the whole place is up for auction, including those heart-shaped tubs. (If those tubs could only talk....yeccch.)

Upgrade. Yesterday I took advantage of the lull at work (about half the staff stayed home to take care of their kids) to install Movable Type on my Powerbook. Following a combination of these directions and the included instructions, I had the whole thing running in about ten minutes, with some minor glitches. I'd used the previous 2.X series a couple years ago, and found it easy to use, but the lure of inexpensive bandwidth has kept me decidedly low-tech. Looking around at some options, however, I think I've decided to invest in a secondary web address and migrate this log off the domain to a seperate location. This will allow for (finally!) the ease of online content addition, as opposed to hand-coding every log entry; a solution to requests for an RSS feed, a local comments database, a sideblog or two, and other goodies. I'm currently wrestling the CSS included with Movable Type and redesigning the layout, and when I have a clean working layout, I'll pull the trigger and set up a new site. Suggestions for a new domain name, anyone? | link

Feb 24, 2005

Excellent. Jay won the whole thing last night, which made Jen and I very happy. I think he's the only one who didn't make an ass of himself during the lead-up to the finale, and his work was consistent. Kara's stuff was beautiful but the shoe thing was uncool, and her 'handling' of the situation was unprofessional.

Continuing on the camera thread from yesterday, I was thinking this morning that I need to unpack the 620 cameras and purchase some more film to play with. I'd like to use it to shoot portraits of people, if possible.

It appears the goddamn spammers have found a way to circumvent Mozilla's ability to suppress annoying popup windows. | link

Feb 23, 2005

I've not been using my camera these days for anything besides some random shots of the hallway which never seems to progress; it's a real shame because there are things out there to photograph, but I've just not been seeing them. Today, through one place to another, I visited heather's site (she's also responsible for the mirror project) and through hers another good photography site. I started thinking about pictures again. I remember when I first got my digital camera and was shooting everything I saw—living in a photogenic area of the city made finding subjects easy. Nowadays, I commute blindly by highway, rarely stopping to search for interesting shots. Instead of just carrying my camera around with me, I need to start using it again. Additionally: How to rig an old digital to take a picture a minute for the old Kodak sitting on the shelf.

Continuing on another thread, I'm rooting for Jay to win tonight, but thinking that Kara will probably take the whole thing.

Helpful Design Link: Fontleech, a site chronicling free fonts for poor designers.

painted hallway, 2.23.04

This morning my neck is a solid chunk of concrete, thanks to the hibernation-mode sleep I got last night. The good news is that the hallway is primed upstairs and 95% ready for a final coat of bright white paint; the bad news is that the entire house is covered in white dust again. Meanwhile Penn has suddenly developed that wierd eye swelling thing where the inside of the eyelid blows up like a balloon and makes him look like a post-match Rocky. This means I'll have to squirt medicine into his mouth (twice) and his eye once every 12 hours for the next week or so—I think the poor cat is ready to run away from home by now.

I think that's my old guitar...but I don't know the girl.

In the winter of 1986, my Dad drove me out to Mt. Kisco to look at a bass guitar listed in the classifieds. I'd just picked up electric bass after playing upright for three years, and it was time to find a beginner's instrument. We walked up a flight of stairs to a dark apartment building and met with a longhaired, half-stoned dude who took us into his practice room. He had several guitars lined up and handed us the largest of them all, a survivor from the late 1970's: an Ibanez Blazer, woodgrain with a black pickguard. It had the longest neck of any guitar I've ever seen (21 frets), it weighed more than a car, and it had deeper sound than a foghorn. I tried it out with a rudimentary blues line, feeling sheepish and embarrassed, and it sounded good. I don't know what my Dad paid for it, but we lugged it back to the Rabbit and took it home. On this bass I learned to play, finding it was easier learn jazz than keep up with Geddy Lee (not that I didn't try.) Later, I bought a Steinberger from my friend, finding its portability and size easier for college, and the Ibanez became second fiddle (pun intended.) Eventually, in the post-graduate purge, I "sold" it to a friend so that his wacky girlfriend could join an all-grrl punk band, and it passed out of my hands. I think the bass in this Microsoft ad could be mine, only because the pickups are white—we had the original pickups pulled and replaced by the music store in town, and for some dumb reason they gave us white—we never bothered to have them switched out. I heard that girl moved to Philadelphia and took it with her years ago, so imagine my surprise when I saw it again. It's nice to think that maybe one of us got famous. (And thanks, Dad.)

Feb 22, 2005

Nobody's Fault But Mine. Well, I'd love to tell you good folks that I was able to finish the hallway and clean up the mess, but that would just be too easy. Instead of the three solid days of work I thought I'd put in on the place, reality stepped in and hit me upside the head—Saturday was spent recovering from a walloping hangover due to a late-season holiday party, which required copious amounts of water, comfort food, and videos to fix; Sunday we took Penn to a behaviorist, cleaned up the house and visited with the Brizzis, and Monday I got an even later start but worked up until 11pm.

Unfortunately, there's a nasty seam right at the foot of the stairs that needs to be feathered out and smoothed, the taping upstairs is more extensive than I thought, Hunter S. Thompson killed himself, it was too wet/cold to get the Scout indoors, and I can't hold my liquor as well as I used to.

On the positive side, the freelance fairy keeps dumping stuff in my lap, so I'm going to be busy for the next eight or nine months at least.

R.I.P. Over at metafilter, the post on HST's passing has reached 492 comments at this writing, which must be a record of some kind. In college I got into a Beat/Wolfe/Thompson phase and burned through Fear and Loathing in one feverish night (no small feat, I can testify) which, after reading the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and drinking a six-pack of Boh, was much more accessible. Later, I read Hell's Angels and re-read FLLV several times to soak up what I'd missed the first time. Drug user, journalist, gun nut, misanthrope, patriot, American, author, original: his dispatches from the wilderness will be missed. | link

Feb 18, 2005

Slow Progress. The primer is creeping up the stairs and has made its way to the left side of the bathroom door, although there's a bunch of patching to be done up there. I hung my ass out over the stairs and finished scraping the last of the wallpaper, patched a few more holes, and caulked a bunch of the trim, stopping only for pizza and PBR (now our beer of choice, because it's tasty and it's $6.50/12pack.) This morning the sunlight reached all the way down into the hallway, and it made me feel good. Once the ceiling gets a clean coat of paint and the last of the old plaster is covered, it's going to make a huge difference. I'll post pictures of the whole thing on Monday, when it's cleaned up.

Word of the Day: Pulchritude, n. Great physical beauty and appeal, or: an ugly word to describe a beautiful thing. | link

Feb 17, 2005

5:09pm. OSX 10.2 is running, albeit slowly, but successfully on Renie's old beige G3. There are problems getting a DHCP address—smells like the router may have 10baseT support turned off.

Pee Your Pants Dept. Read this and try not to laugh.

Damn The Torpedoes Dept. Jen and I had a very impromptu discussion about our plans to travel to Europe for our first anniversary. Given that the list of stuff we need to get done is as long as my arm—and if I auctioned that arm off on Ebay I'd still not have enough money to pay for it all —we've been holding off on making any solid plans. This morning we talked about doing all the stuff we've been planning (floors sanded, new bed, etc.) and making reservations for Europe in spite of all that stuff. We're probably going to just *gulp* charge it and pay it off as we go, because gathering the money together before May doesn't look like it's going to happen. (And, honestly, if we didn't have both vehicles and all our credit cards paid off, there's no way in hell we'd do this.)

Sigh. If this Scout wasn't that hideous shade of yellow, I'd actually try to figure out a way to buy it. (Clean Scouts on the East Coast for less than $10k are hard to find.) | I purchased the 'Texas' T-shirt for my wife last week, and it showed up yesterday, but apparently 'medium'-sized women's shirts are made for three-year-old boys. I own socks that are larger than this shirt. So that gets put in the 'exchange' pile.

In the 'positive' column, there's a fresh white coat of primer on 99% of the downstairs hallway, and it's begun creeping up the walls to the second floor. There will be some creative ladderwork in my immediate future to clean up the rest of the wallpaper paste, some minor patching, and then we paint. After two and a half months of stumbling through clouds of fine white dust, the end is in sight! | link

Feb 16, 2005

Revelations, or: Another Reason I Love My Wife. This evening, over a dinner of grilled steak, broccoli, and avocado with PBR in front of a new episode of Lost, I discovered my wife and I shared an adolescent love for Hong Kong Phooey. (One of my favorite memories of my grandma Dugan was sitting at her kitchen table in front of a pair of mini-Frosted Flakes boxes while she adjusted the rabbit ears on the TV so that we could watch cartoons through the snow.)

Gift. Looks like we have next Monday off, which should give me a bunch of time to finish off some projects at the house. At the top of the list: Finishing the hallway, which is creeping slowly toward its conclusion. There's some finish sanding to be done, some caulking, and then I think we're ready for paint. I'm also going to take advantage of the forecasted good weather to see if I can't get the Scout into the garage.

I may have to give this application a try in the next couple of weeks. Apparently it's a stand-alone app for iTunes which will metatag all of your untagged music, complete with album art. The only hangup I have is whether or not it would overwrite my current custom tags or ratings.

I'm also going to try to install OSX on Renie's old beige G3 and see if I can make a FrankenComputer out of it, just for fun. (I have no idea what I could do with it right now, but I'm sure I'll think of something.) | link

Feb 15, 2005

Album of The Day. Bad Brains, Quickness. Sometimes I forget how hard these guys rock out. (Sometimes I miss the 80's/90's.)

Fixing The Little Orange Wagon, Part 2. I spoke with the animal behaviorist this morning and set up an appointment to bring Penn in for a consultation. Thankfully, it's priced reasonably, and she sounds professional. One thing I didn't know is that Prednizone (sp?), the medication he's been on to treat his high white blood cell count, causes many animals to be aggressive. Nice. I'm scheduled for a Sunday morning appointment, barring any other commitments. | link

Feb 14, 2005 - Happy Valentine's Day

Thanks Molly!

Wrap-Up. Christmas in July was great, and I think it lived up to expectations. We were even lucky enough to have snow falling on Saturday morning. I have to shout out to my sister for the new Porter & Cable router (we have two windows just itching to be refurbished with that) and to my pop for the camera tripod. Jen now has an entire library of gardening and cook books to choose from, Renie finally has a digital camera, Mom has a pile of wedding photos, and my Dad has a wireless hub to tinker with. It was great to see everybody, and we even got a visit with Grampy and Vince, who stopped by for bloody marys after church.

While we were there I updated Mom's iMac—OS9 gave way to OSX, crashing Eudora gave way to Mail.app, and the lousy Director-based Kodak photo software was replaced with iPhoto. The only hitch was finding that her beige Epson inkjet won't work with OSX (Epson didn't bother to write drivers for it.) I will say that I was relieved when Mail.app easily imported her old Eudora mailboxes and iPhoto immediately recognized her camera. She's going to have much better luck with her computer now.

Continued Geekery. On the way home, Jen and I played the Dream Casting game, coming up with our list of actors to play in the new Watchmen movie. (Jen hasn't read the book, so I had to attempt to distill the characters down as best I could for her to understand. I have to bust it out for her tonight to look at.) Apparently somebody found a way to adapt the book (although Terry Gilliam tried to do it and couldn't—now that would have been a movie). There's no word on official casting yet, but here's our list:

Extra reading: Wikipedia entry (excellent primer) | The Watchmen annotated guide. Your suggestions? | link

Feb 13, 2005

Geek Out. I wrote about my peculiar fascination with a particular bit of history here a few years back. In August of 1943, a bunch of American planes flew a bombing mission to the oil fields of Romania. What made this mission unique was that they flew at low-level—where most raids were flown at 20,000 feet, this one was at treetop height. I've always been interested about aviation history, and loved planes, but there was something about this story that stuck with me. Since I've been online, I've searched for information on the subject, and found some places where it's discussed in great detail by some of the men who flew the mission.

As Jen and I were leaving Baltimore last friday, we stopped at the Giant to pick up some snacks. On our way out I spied an older gentleman with a baseball cap sitting on a bench by the exits. Passing by, I noticed he had a 98th Bomb Group patch on the bill—one of the main groups involved with the bomb raid. Although we were in a bit of a hurry, I stopped and asked him about the patch, and his eyes lit up. After a few minutes of talking with him, it turned out he wasn't on the August raid (he missed it due to illness) but he eventually flew 37 missions—no small feat in thse days. Jen and I sat with him for a fascinating half hour, and he invited us to stop up to his house to look through his collection of papers and photos from the war, and talk about history. I can't wait. | link

Feb 11, 2005

Christmas In July. Jen and I are hitching up the sled dogs and heading north into the wilderness for a belated Christmas with the Dugans this weekend. This is exciting for a couple of reasons—we haven't seen them since Thanksgiving, it's freakin' Christmas, and this means we get to finally put all the boxes back in the basement.

Christmas with the Dugans is something I don't think my wife is quite used to yet. My family tends to go nuts on the present shopping for each other, to the point where it becomes kind of obscene. Not that I'm complaining, though—the thrill of the sucessful hunt is the real payoff, and we love to surprise each other (my family has a certain way of listening to you talk in April about that thing you'd like to have, or making a list of odd household items you don't currently own but could really use, and then surprising the crap out of you with them in December.) We also like to stretch the process out into a five-hour afternoon, complete with breakfast, champagne, and cookies—something speed-openers just can't understand.

I always look forward to the holidays up north because I don't see a lot of my family during the year, and it always makes me happy to see them. I think this year will be bittersweet for various reasons, but it's been good to have something to look forward to after the "real" Christmas season ended. | link

Feb 10, 2005

primed hallway (we're getting there...!), 2.10.04

Bad Monkey. For looking at, and spending a half hour attempting to rationalize, a Triumph TR-6 I saw on the Baltimore Craigslist yesterday. Or, the '62 Vespa for $650 in Dupont Circle. BAD MONKEY!! | link

Feb 9, 2005

Back Online. After a two-day outage, from what I'm told was a bad cable, I'm back. Email will reach me again, so fire away.

Hint #471 that Politics Suck (and yet another reason I don't like Robert Erlich). From the Baltimore Sun: Ehrlich associate targeted O'Malley.

"The governor had no idea," Steffen said. "I don't even think he knows where the Web site is. If anyone is guilty, it is me. There was no outside influence. It was all me."

Yeah, right.

Gerry Brewster, a Towson Democrat who ran against Ehrlich in the governor's first congressional election in 1994, said Steffen was well known as "the dirty tricks operative" of Ehrlich's campaign.

It kinda makes me think of another dirty-tricks operative in the news today.

Romesick. You'll need QuicktimeVR to view this shot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. (If that link doesn't work, go here, look for the PANORAMS 2004 pulldown on the upper right side of the page, and open the Spanish Steps link under 2005.) We ate dinner to the immediate left of the Samsung advertisement/monument on the right side of the steps. Our hotel was a mere three blocks up the steps and almost directly as the crow flies behind Ghandi's head.

In the sad news department, I read this afternoon that Incredible Jimmy Smith passed away today. If you're not aquainted with Jimmy Smith, he was the absolute tip-top MACK on the Hammond B-3 organ, recording such excellent tracks as "Organ Grinder's Swing" and "Root Down" (Sampled by the Beastie Boys, who always knew quality when they heard it). Recommended listening from the Dugan archive: Organ Grinder's Swing, The Blue Note Years, and Back at the Chicken Shack. RIP, Jimmy. | link

Feb 8, 2005

Never Going Back To My Old School. This morning I was in downtown Baltimore for a doctor's appointment, and decided to kill two birds by stopping by the nearest branch of the Johns Hopkins Credit Union to close my account out. This account has been open since my first "real" job out of college that didn't involve a hammer, ladder, or dust mask, as a print designer at Hopkins. The account has been sitting and slowly hemmorhaging money since they screwed up a couple of payments on a loan and reduced my balance below the minimum, so every month they deduct $1.50 for the ATM fee and add $0.90 in interest. Driving to the Bayview campus took me squarely through my old neighborhood, so I decided to mosey around and see what was happening.

First off, I read in the City Paper that DeGroen's Brewery is shutting down. After many years of making the best local beer around, they couldn't make a profit (and the construction around their location killed their foot traffic.) So my favorite Märzen will cease to exist.

Canton is still dotted with real-estate signs and renovation work trucks; what was Mrs. Bonnie's Elvis Shrine is now an empty rehab, sporting a vinyl advertisement for first-time homeowners. My old house looks good; the new owner removed the 1950's-era storm door off and put a gold kickplate and a large lockset on the front door. The whisky barrel continues to rot away next to the steps. My old-skool neighbors are still home—the Cadillac sits gleaming at its parking spot next door, and Nell's bench is still outside waiting for a group of friends to gather.

The cabinet factory one block over and behind 620 is now a levelled vacant lot, featuring a sign advertising three-floor townhomes (with garage) starting in at $400K. (There were rumors it was to become an outdoor biergarten and high-rise condos.) $400K for a breathtaking view of the Shell station parking lot and American Harry's roof. sweet. The rehabbed house on the north corner of Fleet, which had been vacant and empty for three years, is occupied again; the back parking pad now houses a motorcycle and gas grill where people used to throw their trash bags. (Note to the new owners: I used to watch bums climb through your kitchen window and piss on your living room floor. Enjoy!) Linwood Avenue now features nose-in parking, which probably alleviated the local lack of parking for about fifteen minutes.

Further up into Highlandtown, the march of Latino culture continues eastwards. Empty storefronts are now brightly colored bodegas and shops (Who knew that "Zapatas Botas" meant "Sneaky Feet?") and Provident Bank has taken up residence on a prominent corner. The once-beautiful Grand Theater has been razed to make way for a new branch of the Enoch Pratt Library. Old Baltimore still exists, though, in the old guy with the 60's era plaid pants crossing Eastern Avenue, the combination grocer/electronic store/garden center, and the heartwarming sight of 14-year-old mommies pushing their kids in strollers. Haussner's is still empty, but the Patterson movie theater is now a neighborhood rec center. Plus ça change, plus ça méme chose. | link

Feb 7, 2005

What was a bleary, semi-conscious but cheerful mood has turned ugly and black, courtesy of my work computer. I'm getting really tired of working on four-year-old technology, both here and at home. I've recently considered the possibility of a new laptop to replace the five-year-old Powerbook I'm on right now, but with our priority list remaining full and unchanging, I'll probably have to put it off a while longer. And a Mini, while inexpensive and fast, is still out of my current price range. (It's sad that over the years my target price range has dropped at the same rate as the street pricing of technology.) As for the work computer, I don't know if my bitching (and kicking) has changed anybody's priority levels either. Go to your happy place...

Saturday: HTML-> PHP-> library -> Photoshop-> lunch -> HomeSite-> dinner-> HomeSite-> beer-> posting-> sleep (3am.)

Sunday: HTML-> HomeSite-> posting-> duck, potatoes, chocolate-> Photoshop-> beer-> Illustrator-> HTML-> posting-> Illustrator-> tea-> Photoshop-> posting-> sleep (3:30am.) | link

Feb 4, 2005

Waterworld. Last night, we got water back at the house. ...Granted, it's rusty, hissing, orange water for the first ten or fifteen minutes. Filling a glass with it reveals a whole spinning universe of floating stuff, stuff that should be back in the reservoir it came from and not in my glass. However, it's water, it comes out of the shower head, and when I consider some of the questionable rivers and lakes I've bathed in before, it's not all that bad. (And the water is hot—an important distinction.) When we get another 50° day where I'm not doing five other things, I have to drain our hot-water heater and clean out the gallons of sediment I'm sure are sitting at the bottom.

In other news, the freelance fairy came and dropped a project in my lap for the weekend, one that's going to make our existing commitments that much more interesting to work around; it's another long-distance job which will test my knowledge of PHP, ssh, and the lovely VI editor. Fun (not that the Superbowl is going to be that interesting, anyway.) Money is a good thing. | link

Feb 3, 2005

Cranky, Part Doo. I don't think words can describe how fucking irritated I am with my work PC right now. I don't think it's possible to run a web browser, email client (Outlook, a memory pig if there ever was one) Max5 and Photoshop all at the same time without the entire thing coming to painful grinding halt. I spend more time waiting for the "End Program" dialog to finish whatever lousy kung-fu it does than I do working. (I seem to remember "End Program" actually doing something in 2000.) The funny thing is that this machine is a replacement "upgrade" from the previous one...and it runs slower.

Other than that, there's a big hole out across the street where a major water main blew under the sidewalk, and we have a trickle coming through the downstairs pipes; the jackhammers were working until midnight, and then they all left. So there's no telling when we'll get water back. (To the City employee who told my wife yesterday that the water running down the street was simply snowmelt: GET BENT. Why is my water ORANGE, you moron?) The lovely and accomodating Sara let us use her shower last night, so we don't reek, but I can't do anything with the house until I can shower again.

Meanwhile, I'm in some kind of wacked-out hibernation mode right now- my metabolism has sped up so that I'm constantly hungry, but I need 10 hours of sleep a night to be functional. (the fact that I'm averaging about 7, and that there's a storm blowing in this afternoon, which makes my sinuses feel like somebody's been filling them with concrete, does not help.) | link

Feb 2, 2005

So Fresh, So Clean. This morning I woke up blearlily and stumbled downstairs to make coffee. Running the water in the carafe to clean out the dregs took a little longer than usual, because the cold water came in a trickle. And so did the hot water. I got the coffee started and checked all the pipes downstairs to make sure the basement wasn't floating away. I checked the doctor's office bathroom to make sure it wasn't frozen solid. Then I went back upstairs to relieve myself, and found that the toilet tank wasn't even refilling. At this point, I looked out the window to see a lake across the street from our house on Frederick Road: a 20' section of sidewalk was covered in water where one of the mains had burst, directly across the street from our house. Swell. We have calls through to the Baltimore City DPW, but there's no telling when our pressure will be back to normal (or when that annoying rust in the water will be gone.) So that funk you may smell as you go about your busy day just might be me, the guy with the hat pulled down over his day-old hair. | link

Feb 1, 2005

Hello. Not much to write about today; I've been very busy. So I'll leave you with a shot of some azaleas at a house not too far from ours that I took last April.

pretty azaleas, 4.20.04

That is all. | link

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