Jan 31, 2005

Inspiration> Take a look at this presentation on inspiration and let me know if it speaks to you. (BIG download—make sure you have a broadband connection and 45 min. to watch.)

sanded, wiring run, 1.29

It's All In My Head. Asleep At The Trigger, Autolux. Endlessly, for the last week. (Hey, at least it's drowning out the voices, kids.)

Maintenance. I cleaned up all the house progress pages this morning after finding they had all gotten corrupted in transfer last week. Yuck. Jen also found a bunch of older pics on her laptop from the original walkthrough that I'll be posting this afternoon of the Pink room and the hallway, and I have an in-progress shot of the hallway cieling sanding. (The inside of our house actually got about 4" of dust this weekend, compared to the 2" of snow we got outside.) Sunday it all got too much for us, so we did what any normal 30-somethings do when they get cabin fever: We drove to IKEA. Now, before you scoff and wag your finger, know that we actually had plans to drive to D.C. to visit a few museums, look at pretty art, and replenish some creativity. The fact that it was snowing until noon sort of pre-empted our cultural plans (stuff closes at 5 on Sundays) so we contented ourselves with BILLY and STRÖGG and LACKVAR and $3 hotdawgs.

It had been rumored through channels that a picture of my wife and her father were featured in some current bridal magazines, so we stopped into the adjacent mall to find a bookstore. After paging through a couple of magazines, we came upon an ad for Documentary Associates, featuring a black-and-white of the two of them dancing. Again, we can't recommend Shannon and Gunes enough; if you're getting hitched in the Mid-Atlantic area or in Turkey, give them a call. | link

Jan 28, 2005

Thankful. It was good to sip coffee this morning, look up, and see the ceiling in the hallway with a second coat of mud dry and ready to be sanded (which made last night's dry-air nosebleed worthwhile.) It was good to hear this morning that my main freelance client has plenty of work planned for 2005, which means Jen won't throw my ass out on the corner to shake my moneymaker. It was also good to get a call from a consulting client last night looking for more help (and letting me know that the stuff I've already done is working fine.) I may not have two pennies to rub together, but things are still moving along.

Fixing The Little Orange Wagon. As you may or may not know, we at the House Of Cats have a problem child. Penn has been banished up in the office/atrium extention for the better part of eight months while we try various medications to settle him down. (Recap: He began to get aggressive towards Geneva, the lone female, almost immediately after the Tribal Merge, until he was actively seeking her out for fights. Geneva is no pushover, but when the stress level started affecting her eating habits, we separated the two boxers into their respective corners.) We've gone through four different meds for Penn, each with its own effects:

1. Paxil: mellowed his orange ass out for a week, and then gave him a pleasant buzz, like a month-long amphetamine binge. We switched when he started yowling at the wall during the day like a mental pateint.
2. [forgot the name]: The switchover was a peaceful three or four days, and then it was back to yowling. He slept and ate more at this period, too.
3. Prozac: this was probably the best of the lot, although he still lunged at Geneva when she walked past. We switched when he began picking out the food with the medicine on it and eating the rest.
4. Valium: I'd heard through second-hand sources that the Big V was supposed to be King Daddy of chillout drugs, but this is LIES! Valium is sort of like a kitty crystal meth for Penn—he paces the room constantly. When he hears my voice, he starts a methodical clawing of the door that sounds like we have the Mother Under The Bed from that X-Files episode trapped upstairs.

So, we brought him back in for $450 worth of bloodwork, having his anal glands unclogged (eccchh) and a bag of special kitty food worth its weight in gold. The diagnosis now is that he has some kind of inflamed bowel syndrome (an abnormally high white blood cell count), which means he needs steroids, expensive steroids, and we haven't even paid off the bloodwork bill yet.

The bottom line here is that he's not gotten any better. He wants to be the Alpha cat, but Geneva has already locked up the nomination and crushed all other opposition. He can't be out in the general population while he's aggressive, and we can't condemn him to a solitary life in the Penn-itentiary upstairs. We're going to give him the steroids and then try whatever medicine worked the best (probably the Prozac again) for one last shot at feline harmony; if he can't fit in we're going to have to put him up for adoption in a single-kitty home.

Gift. When I do get some bucks together, I am totally buying this T-Shirt for my wife. | link

Jan 27, 2005

Not As Young As I Used To Be. Jen and I met a friend for drinks last night down the street at Bar, where the atmosphere was basketball, the PBR was $2, and the cigarette smoke was thicker than week-old fudge. It was good to get out and visit after our voluntary two-month timeout. We met at 9pm and wound up getting home at 2am (?!!?!) which is something I've not done in years on a school night. Topics of discussion included Work, People We Know From The Scene, Smalltimore (thanx Todd) and Embarassing Ex Stories. This morning it took a little longer than usual to crack open my eyelids, and I got to relive the joy of scrubbing a carton's worth of nicotine off my skin. Good times. | link

Jan 26, 2005

I. Hate. My. Work. PC. Windows XP sucks. That is all.

Link Fun. I'm going to have to try this photoshop filter effect. (via curiouslee) | A crystal meth testimonial. (via kottke) | Turn your mac Mini into a media server. (via macintouch) | Sharing a central iTunes library from multiple computers. | link

Jan 25, 2005

Before demolition, 1.17

What we wound up with, 1.20

Drywall in place (the dark patch is just one sheet hung upside-down), 1.24

Postcards From The Beltway. Somebody upstairs always knows when I have a meeting at work to attend, because they schedule an accident on the beltway for those days. Here are some brief notes from my hour-long commute this morning:

To the woman in the red Kia minivan: Your lack of purchasing intelligence is evident in your choice of vehicle, but you showed how ignorant you truly are when the shrieking, flashing, honking ambulance pulled up directly behind you (and beside me) and you sat there like a hump without pulling into the breakdown lane. Nice going.

To the man in the Boxster with the dog: Thank you for the belly laugh you and your puppy gave me while I sat waiting. There's nothing funnier than the beautiful lines of a German sportscar interrupted by the homely face of a panting english bulldog hanging out the window.

Finally, to the brain surgeon in the Jeep who passed us all in the breakdown lane with your hazards on: Many times I've cursed people like you, who feel that their need to get to the dentist's appointment, bingo parlor, or afternoon quickie supercedes everybody else's. Not content to just drive illegally on the left shoulder, usually you're doing mach 5 while yammering on your cellphone. Many times, I've wished I was an unmarked State Trooper with a big D.I. hat and an even bigger citation booklet, so that I could pull your ass over and tow your car away. Today, I got a front-row seat to watch you get stopped by that very cop. SWEET REVENGE! I think the best part about it was the fact that you looked pissed. Have a nice day, jackass. | link

Jan 24, 2005

Blizzard of Oz. When there is a blip on the weather radar here in Maryland, people tend to get all freaky. The accredited, schooled, certified, experienced Weather-Scientist Guys on the news wring their hands with glee, fire up the high-techlology toys (usually called something like SuperStormTracker Doppler Radar®), send a few interns out into the snow, and then hole up in the SuperStormTracker Headquarters with a fresh suit and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Every channel features a helpful info graphic and a crawl on the bottom of the screen. The shocking twist at the end of Law&Order is broken in on at 10:45 by the news desk, who helpfully tell us that absolutely nothing has changed. We then see an hour of file footage featuring panicked citizens looting the SuperFresh for toilet paper and Hot Pockets; "Team Coverage" of cub reporters interviewing bored tow truck drivers, and ten minutes with a moron on top of the news building, measuring the snow with a yardstick.

Usually, the predictions are wrong, and like this weekend, the "foot to a foot and a half of snow" turns out to be 4". Jen and I usually shop in advance for our snow survival kit, which includes a generous helping of booze, snacks, and food, in the hopes that we'll get snowed in and have to camp out for a few days. Even though the snow stopped mid-afternoon on Saturday, we pretended it was window-high and played hooky. Jen made all kinds of tasty food while I finished the prep work in the hallway—fixture pots and wiring for two new hallway lights, as well as a new lead for a porch light and switch—and we said goodbye to the Ugliest Chandelier Known To Man. Sunday I finished up this work and we began hanging drywall, and by 11pm had all but a 4'x14" section covered. Now we have three weeks of white dust ahead while I smooth the whole thing out, and then it's time for paint.

P.S. Props to my folks, for giving me that laser level for Christmas two years ago. It just paid for itself. | link

Jan 21, 2005

Friday Fun. Courtesy Brian, our resident IT fellow (who we like.) The Hasselhofian Recursion. Click if you dare.

Good news: it looks like the new version of iPhoto has added support for both photos and movies. No more accidentally erasing movies left on the CF card.

Recap. Jen and I have been thinking about where the hell last year went; in some respects it feels like we did nothing, and in other respects, I feel like a whole new person. In no particular order, here are some of the things accomplished in 2004:

• Planned a wedding. (Jen really took this one on; I can't take but about 25% of the credit here.)
• Um, got married.
• Traveled overseas to Rome, and decided we didn't want to come home.
• Painted the outside of the house. (two sides' worth of windows still to go)
• Took the better part of two months to nurse Jen's Mom back out of the hospital.
• Completed three of four upstairs rooms in the house (sanded/stained/sealed floors, new electrical, paint, trim, and furnishings)
• Finished the linen closet. w00t!
• Planted three separate beds of bulbs and flowers, grew tomatoes, cayenne peppers, and five types of herbs on the back porch
• Left a job over "creative differences"
• Freelanced our asses off
• Bought a new (used) car; donated a very used car to charity (RIP, Tortoise)
• Had an alarm system installed, so now a woman in Pikesville can call to tell us our front door has blown open again
• Had the roof repaired (ouch)
• Nursed Jen's Mom up until her final day, in her own house, and took care of the family
• Played Santa for the Lockard family.
• Paid off three separate credit cards and the entire honeymoon

I know I'm forgetting something here. Babe, what did I leave out? | link

Jan 20, 2005 - four more years of idiocy

Yeah, not a good day for the home team. I want a beer.

Cranky McBitchyPants. Lemme get on a soapbox here and just rant about how fucking pathetic Windows XP is. I have a "new" machine at work which runs moderately well at best to begin with: XP is a resource pig. When I open Internet Explorer, the system grinds to a halt and I'm immediately beset with popup adware and my browser settings are hijacked. Scanning the drive for Malware reveals, on average, about 350 bad files, from actual running processes to cookies I don't want. I quarantine everything, remove it, and my browser gets hijacked again. All ActiveX permissions are turned off; MS's "security" settings are all on High, for whatever good it does me. I've spent about two hours playing the 'remove the spyware' game today, and it's getting to the point where I want to stab myself in the eye with a pencil. I want to go back to 2000 Server. I never had problems like this on Server.

Before anybody helpfully suggests to "use Mozilla" or "use a Mac," BEWARE: I already do. Running IE is not something I choose to do; it's required in my alternate life as a web designer.

Goddamn waste-of-time POS. | link

Jan 19, 2005

Fun With Plumbing. I *gulp* sawed through the waste line in the hallway ceiling last night and installed a neoprene coupler over the leaking joint and pipe (not the optimal solution, but when faced with the alternative—pulling half the wall down, replacing a three-way PVC joint and three or four runs of mixed-size copper pipe—the best solution) and had Jen run the water upstairs: there was not a drop of water to be found. This morning it was bone-dry after my shower, and hopefully after Jen's as well. This means I'll get started on re-hanging the ceiling this week. I was kind of hoping to have a snow day this morning, but Mother Nature decided to start the job after I got to work.

In response to the continual rusty water Baltimore County is delivering to us, I picked up a GE brand home filtration kit at Home Depot last night as well—installation involves shutting off the main house supply and putting in a splice; given that every "simple" project has a difficult twist where this house is concerned, it means I have a vertical run of about 4' to work with. So I'll have to *gulp* cut through the main house supply at some point in the next couple of days. | link

Jan 18, 2005

abandoned flattops, Patuxent River NAS, 1.3.04.

I added a picture of the hallway demolition below.

Album Of The Week. Autolux, Future Perfect. I don't get the current fawning top-10 craze over The Arcade Fire (I'd say it's in the top 50, but not a number 1) so the comparison is pretty flawed, in my opinion, but this is good stuff. To quote one Amazon reviewer, think of a quieter, more pleasant mixture of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. (For the record, I dug on Daydream Nation, but SY's later catalog made me yawn.) Thanks, Nate.

Life in Catonsville is pretty quiet this week; it's cold and very windy out there (apparently the artists' space below us here at work is extremely cold while they work out some HVAC issues) and they're calling for some snow this week. Valium apparently has absolutely no effect on Penn the cat. Prozac made him a sullen, morose teenager, prone to quick outbursts of anger and long mellow periods. Valium, for him, is like a four-day crystal meth binge: if he could find a way to crawl up inside my skin for MORE PETS RIGHT NOW, I think he'd do it. Thursday we'll up the dose to Bring Down An Elephant and see if he doesn't burn through that in fifteen minutes. After half a year of being cooped up in that room, it would be nice to let him out into the house again and reclaim our office. | link

Jan 17, 2005

Home Remodeling. Saturday I got back underway with the hallway project, which has been lurching along slowly while the holidays and other events have worked themselves out. The walls have been (mostly) washed of all remaining wallpaper paste, and about 75% of the the holes and cracks have been smoothed out. The 4' X 10' bulge by the stairwell was pulled out and replaced, and the odd concrete fill job has been patched. During the cleanup on Saturday I asked Jen if she'd like me to pull the ceiling tile down to see what was underneath. Jen, having hated the tile since we looked at the house, gave her OK.

After about fifteen minutes of demolition, I realized why the drop ceiling had been installed. When the doctor had replaced the shower tub and bathroom plumbing directly above, the workmen had to contend with a poured concrete subfloor, which meant a shallow 4" run for the piping. (All piping should have a slight angle running downward to let gravity help the water go where it should.) Thus, to avoid the concrete, the elbow drain for the shower extends about 2" below the ceiling line in the hallway. I guess I wouldn't be so upset if the work had been done well, but I've done better plumbing work on my first attempt. This looks like somebody's bastard half-cousin used a cigarette lighter to sweat the joints in the copper and nearly set fire to the house in the process. Oh, and they sawed completely through one of the floor joists to put in the hot and cold lines.

hallway demolition, 1.15.04.

So, there will be a few days of repair and remediation before we cover everything back up. As it turns out, there's a slight leak in the PVC waste line that I have to fix, and I can also blow some fiber insulation in between the first few floor joists by the front of the house for added heat retention, as well as add some around the inside of the bathtub. Todd W. was good enough to answer his neighbor's call and help me hustle five sheets of drywall from Home Depot the front porch, which means I can start hanging the ceiling anytime I need to. At some point this week, I'll update the photos.

Saturday also marked the end of the Ghetto Driveway Tent; the seventeenth windstormof the season finally blew it all to hell and jammed everything up in between the garage and the side of the house, so I disassembled it and put it away. On the positive side, I took another look at the floor in the garage and I think I have a way to brace the wood subfloor up with enough strength to hold the Scout.

Efforts to get Apple Remote Desktop working have succeeded. Bring on my Mini!

*sigh.* I'm going to miss Dan Rather. | link

Jan 14, 2005

Findings. Research on the cellphone thing has been coming along. Luckily, an issue of Consumer Reports just came across our doorstep with a comprehensive article on wireless carriers and phones. From what I understand, Cingular's network (GSM) is well-suited towards phones with good technology like Bluetooth. However, the type of digital service and lack of analog backup means the coverage is a lot spottier, especially in rural areas. All the decent phone deals they offer ("Free cameraphone!") are for a 2-year contract which is shit; I want a one-year deal with a good phone for cheap. The storefront sells that Sony Ericsson handset for $99/2-year deal or 199$/1-year deal while online it's free/2-years; they have a Motorola handset with Bluetooth and a camera for $129/1-year deal. So, in essence:

• If I want a phone that syncs automatically with my computer, I have to use Cingular;
• If I want to use Cingular, I have to put up with spotty coverage in places like mid-Pennsylvannia, and;
• If I want a one-year contract, I'm going to have to pay at least $100 for a phone.

In other news, I'm mucking around with Apple Desktop Client right now-it's essentially VNC for headless Macs. Very nice, although it's a bit balky with a 4-year old pair of G3's. I can share out a bunch of stuff (it's weird to see the laptop's screen on the iMac) but I'm having problems taking control of the iMac itself.

My Bad. Perhaps I should clarify my brief comment from yesterday regarding the textbook stickers:

"The schools placed the stickers after more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life."

The stickers read, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

I understand why these parents were upset, and I can see why the school board chose to put the stickers in the books. I can also see why other parents sued to have the stickers removed. Practice your faith. Teach your children. But please don't teach them that one God is better than the other, or that somebody else's faith/belief system is wrong. My personal knee-jerk mistrust colored my original post; My apologies to those I offended. Thanks for the smack upside the head, Dave. | link

Jan 13, 2005 - Arctic Tundra Diary, Day Four.

I need to bring in a parka or some kind of electric ass warmer, because it's freezing in here today.

Guilty Pleasure Dept.: Project Runway. Watch this show and marvel at its stupid, vapid brilliance. Where else can you make fun of supermodels, mincing clothing designers, "fashion", and normal people all in one place? Besides, it's funny to realize just how average (and annoying) professional models can be before the stylists perform their studio magic and turn them into sexless, plastic robots. Girl, you skin nasty. We may have to make a party night out of this...

Birthing Babies. Congratulations to our friends the Mat-uh-YOW-skees, who just gave birth to their second child, Fletcher Owen. (The spelling is mine; I had to phoneticize it the first time I wrote it down so that I wouldn't muff it when I shook hands.)

Suggestions. My 4-year-old Motorola phone, an ancient V-series handset, is falling apart. The battery lasts about 20 minutes, the headset jack is busted, and the interface is about as unusable as a Korean karaoke menu. I'm looking for a new-generation phone, something that will work with my computer, something that is easy to use, and best of all, cheap. I may have found my phone. Does anybody have a Sony/Ericsson phone, and what do you think of it? (My experience with Sony has been lackluster. I don't need a phone camera, but I want Bluetooth. I could give a rat's ass about ringtones and instant messaging—give me an interface I can work with.) I'm going to find a Cingular store and see if I can't lay hands on one this evening.

A Small Slice of Sanity. Thank god somebody still has a brain. | link

Jan 12, 2005

More Lists. We've moved into a new, spiffy building (yeah, I know, pictures to come, blah blah) and into very corporate-looking cubes. Todd has already been bitch-slapped for riding the Razor scooter, and we have a new "corporate identity". Our little company has gone upmarket. Here are some other random thoughts:

• This place is still as cold as the old office (the thermostat is set on "Super Blast Chill" which means the register above my head is cheerfully blowing snow onto my shoulders), and I'm nowhere near a window anymore.
• There are whiteboards everywhere. I'm sitting next to one. Thus, if you ever hear me say, "Let's whiteboard this," I'm a half-mile down Corporate Bullshitspeak Lane, and you have permission to kick me in the groin.
• No more private bathrooms. (This is a blessing and a curse. I have bathroom privacy issues. There, I've said it.) Currently they are always occupied by assorted workmen washing brushes or taking coffee breaks. I'll wait until I get home, thanks.
• There's more space here. It's kind of nice to spread my junk out instead of move piles of debris from one place to the next.
• I put up the iTunes server and almost immediately had five people on it. Time to rethink my bandwidth strategy.

As the veteran of many office moves—four with Skycache alone—I have to say this place is pretty nice, however.

Last night Todd W. rang us up and asked if I'd like to have the piles of leaves in our driveway hauled off to the dump. They've been sitting out in front of our house, adding to the ghetto mystique (the Scout sitting under a wind-blasted, drunken tent is the centerpiece) since November, right around the time things started getting crazy. This morning we got about half of them in the bed and dumped them with a few more boxes of plaster from the hallway, and I bought him some coffee at Starbuck's, with a promise to finish the job tomorrow. We've got good friends. | link

Jan 11, 2005

Oh, Fucking Hell. Looks like I'll have to pick one of these up for an inexpensive iTunes server to replace the iMac. Sweet. However, it looks like that rumored phone they were supposed to offer is not appearing, so I'm going to be looking into a new handset this week.

Postscript. I posted a picture of Jen and her mother on Sunday's entry, one that I saw and immediately loved. I think it shows how much happiness and love each had for the other (and two more photogenic subjects I've never seen.)

Some thoughts on our travels last week:

• It's funny how funerals are often more about the family consoling the guests than the other way around. Well, maybe it's not so funny.
• People in Ohio are surprised when the lower half of their state floods. I mean, how could a huge floodplain directly under lake-effect precipitation fill with water so fast? Remarkable! (We made it in directly under the wire—hours after we made it to the hotel, our highway was under water.)
• In a week when hard liquor was never needed more desperately by two people, Jen and I held ourselves to one Corona each, on the evening before we left for home. This is like Ted Kennedy going without vodka for a week, or Dick Cheney passing on his daily infusion of innocent children's blood.
• People in Ohio love to smoke. Not like you smoke when you hit the bar on Friday night after a few beers—no, these folks take their lung cancer seriously, like Russian factory workers. In the one-horse town of Logan, where the town square is a block away from the local grain elevator, there are three cigarette stores, each with exotic names like "Smokes For Less" (a converted Shell station) and "Cheap Smokes" (in the deserted Ames shopping center.) They advertise prices in Ohio by the crate.
• West Virginia is absolutely devoid of life. It's one continuous interstate, punctuated every four or five miles by a crumbling farmhouse set in a hollow. You can still see the paths they beat getting the hell out of that godforsaken place. All those jokes about Appalachia make sense to me now.
• There was a point where Jen and I seriously questioned our responsibility to her mother's peaceful burial: it came about the time traffic stalled us directly in front of the two-lane bridge into town, where half the Ohio river was six inches from the bottom of the span, and whole tree trunks were floating past. I think we hit about Mach 3 going across that sucker.
• Ohio in January is sort of how I imagine Scotland in winter. But colder, and they have more teeth.
• I meant to pinch the purple magnetic "Funeral" flag they put on the Jeep, so that I could speed to and from work with my lights on, but they took it while we were graveside.
• Props to Jen's Dad, for being a class act the whole way through. To Sara, for watching the house, keeping the cats company, and making a huge dish of lasagna for us the day we got home. To Jen's extended family, for making a skinny Irish kid feel welcome in an emotionally draining time. To all our friends and relatives for keeping us in their thoughts and giving us help and support. | link

Jan 10, 2005

Welcome Back. I went back to work this morning, but I didn't park in front of the same shapeless shoebox I've called home for four years. No, while we were gone, my humble employer packed up the tent and moved to a new campsite: the headquarters of a recently downsized defense contractor, not a half-mile up the street. The main floor of the space is a sprawling two-story greenhouse—a far cry from the cramped, low-ceilinged hovel we used to work from. Instead of the "welcome to my cousin's basement" vibe our company used to have, now it looks like we actually produce something other than empty pizza boxes. Of course, for some reason that makes sense to people with larger paychecks than me, I'm banished to a different part of the building than the rest of the artists, who live down in the airy glassed-in section. Todd and I have been put upstairs in a section mostly populated by programmers, which isn't bad, but a little demoralizing for me. There are a few perks: better workspace (still cubes, tho'), an on-site cafeteria, for the days we don't feel like bringing or going out in the rain for food, better climate control (they're still working out some kinks) and SPACE. Sweet, glorious space. Pictures will follow shortly. | link

Jan 9, 2005

My wife and her mother, 1970.

Back. The past two weeks have been pretty tough. For a couple who have only been married a total of seven months, I have to say Jen and I held together pretty damned well. We attended three viewings, one mass and burial, dodged calamitous flooding throughout southeastern Ohio, met up with much of the extended Beck family, and went through a set of brakes and 2,000 miles on the Jeep without one instance of homicide. My wife's strength throughout the last week has been incredible, between caring for her mother, helping her father make the arrangements, guiding the family through the week, and dealing with the pain of loss herself.

I learned many new things about my mother-in-law from friends, relatives, and family in the past week. While I may have had my differences with her in some places, I learned that she touched the lives of many people with humor, kindness, and love. Go in peace, Mrs. Lockard. | link

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