Mar 20, 2005

End Transmission. It's been almost four years to the day that I started writing on this website, and in that time I've switched jobs, been engaged, gotten married (which almost didn't happen, I love you baby!) and bought a new house. We've come a long way since 2001, and I've tried to write and photograph about as much of it as I could. For both our birthdays, I decided to finally invest in a commercial weblog application and move into the future. This journal will stay online at this location and be put into archive mode, and I'll update the links to point to the new domain easily.

For the final name choice, I decided to boost a song title from Soul Coughing and bought www.idiotking.org for my new site. Come on over and join me! | link

Mar 18, 2005

Old Friends. I met my buddy Jason at an Irish bar down the street for lunch and some beers this afternoon. Jason and I used to work for the same company in the early, silly days of the Internet, building sites together like the Jewish Times and the Columbia Village Centers. (You laugh, but they are both six years old now, designed for 256 colors and Pentium 100's, and they still work.) Among other things, he's an English expatriate, an old drinking buddy, a business partner, and a good friend. He's between jobs right now, enjoying his free time, and awaiting the birth of his first baby. I couldn't be happier for him. We talked about old times, shared friends, and our future plans, and made a promise not to fall out of touch again. It was great to see him, and I'm looking forward to a foosball rematch sometime soon.

Penn busted his orange ass out of the hole this afternoon and beat the shit out of Geneva, which pretty much ends the struggle to integrate him. We're going to put him up for adoption next week. If anybody in the Baltimore area is interested in an otherwise normal, four-year-old orange tabby, who doesn't own any other cats, we have a fellow who'd like to meet you. Honestly, he's a happy, well-adjusted cat when he's not around other cats, he's loving, and he's had all his shots. Help me find him a home. | link

Erin Go Bragh

Identity. The domain name search has been an exercise in frustration. I used to think that I'd be able to come up with something in five minutes, but when I actually put my mind to it, it stumped me. A word or a phrase or a nickname that isn't too embarrassing, perhaps. (I didn't really have anything other than my last name, which worked fine usually, but isn't what I want for this site.) Hopefully nobody else has taken it yet. Do a domain name search for it.... Chances are, it's already gone. Adding a level of complexity, tailoring the name around what the site is about- art, poetry, quantum physics... chances are somebody's got it. Or worse, somebody's squatting on it and willing to sell it for an inflated price. This stuff gets harder and harder.

Now, I'm also a snob because I don't want a .biz or .us or .info extension, so I realize I'm being picky. I tried phrases that reflected the house, and things inside it, e.g. the toilet in the basement, which always makes me laugh, has a yellow seatcover with a smiley face painted on the top: Pottyface.org. I tried silly words I use all the time: all permeutations of craptacular and craptastic are taken. (Most of the other phrases I use are PG-13 and R-rated, unfortunately.)

Then I started thinking of common phrases and dissecting them: one came to mind immediately, which was [open mouth] insertfoot.org. Another was [this house/truck/tool is] donebusted.org. Song titles that might lend a name were consulted: idiotking.org is available. I haven't decided on anything yet, but I'm going to make a decision in the next 24 hours so I can get this thing off the ground.

Bling. This past weekend, I noticed a new realty sign on the corner down the street on my way to work. Always curious, Jen and I did a search and found that the four-square around the corner (same floorplan, same square footage) is on the market for the astronomical sum of $550K. Good LORD. We'd better spiff up our house before the neighborhood upscales us out of existence. | link

Mar 16, 2005

Busy. No, I'm still here. Today was Meeting Day, when both the project team I'm working with and the entire art staff at work met at two separate times for long periods of talking. Then I had to pump out a sketch of an impossibly convoluted UI screen for a meeting tomorrow morning before leaving tonight. | link

Mar 15, 2005

The Search Goes On. Foresight, foursite and foursight are unavailable in the usual extensions. Foursquared.org is available; fourscore is out. Jen and I have been thinking of names for the whole morning and we can't come up with anything really catchy. We're trying to play off the 'fourth' in my full name (I'm the fourth Bill Dugan, yes) but that gets pretty limiting. I'm trying to keep it relatively neutral but still connected in some way to who I am. As much as I like Blogdahlia (thanks XLC) I'm trying to keep 'blog' out of it—I dislike the word—and I'm trying to make it as concise as possible. (www.thelongesturlnamevercreatedbyman.com is kind of a drag to type in.) Austinscarlett.com is already taken. whatsthefrequency.org is available.

Love Is. When your wife bakes you a fresh turkey pot pie and a chocolate cake in the same evening. I was so stuffed I couldn't move last night. | link

Mar 14, 2005

Cobbler's Kids. This morning I awoke to the sound of the doorbell click-clacking and a knock on the door. I was laying in bed ignoring the snooze alarm and trying to decide if the beep-beep-beep sound outside was a road crew hot-patching the hole across the road (it wasn't) and later, if the hollow tapping sound was our door, when I suddenly realized we had an appointment with a cabinet installer, who was supposed to take measurements of our kitchen so that we can find out just how much blood we have to sell to finance a remodel. He seemed ok when I greeted him in my pajamas and bedhead, and clucked when he saw the room. The good news is that we'll probably be able to fit a dishwasher in there, and running a gas line for a range should be easy. The bad news is that it's still small, the stove stays where it is, and there's not a whole lot we can do with the fridge.

In the meantime, I've been lax about writing here so that I can put the finishing touches on the local version of a new weblog. I have a sideblog installed (a sort of secondary blog of interesting links, in this case) and the templates completed; I'm still working out the archive sections and the search result page. Unfortunately, I've been neglecting to settle on a name for the damned thing, which is kind of important in buying a domain. Suggestions? Really, I'm kind of stumped here.

foursquare and brokedown are all unavailable with the extensions I want (.com, .net or .org). Fivecentsplease has been ruled out. Waitingroom is unavailable. (I'm thinking of a doctor/house theme here, have you noticed?) PerpetualRenovations is available but a little long—maybe there's a shorter cousin...? ThisOldGrouse is available.

It Is Decided. Our firstborn son will be named Octavio.

Corrollary: It took us about an hour to remember the third Bee Gee's name (Jen finally got it). Can you get all three? No cheating... | link

Mar 11, 2005

Success And Failure. I've got a lot of the templates set up in my local copy of Movable Type, and now that I've been immersed in it for a week, it's making a lot more sense. I guess it didn't help me at first using a year-old book geared for the previous version, but between that and the internet I've figured out quite a bit of this on my own. Stay tuned...

In other geek news, I reformatted a spare drive, loaded OS9, put RAM, a battery, and the hard drive back in the busted iMac, plugged it in, and...watched as the screen went dim, the power shut off, and a wisp of ozone-laced smoke wafted out of the grillework. Looks like the flyback transformer finally barfed, rendering it useless. Not that I need it anyway, but I'm always up for a challenge.

There's not much else to tell—between work and freelance, I haven't had much time to sit still. Jen, however, cooked me a roast chicken in her dutch oven last night and got me to stay on the couch for almost the whole duration of CSI. | link

Mar 10, 2005

Down With The Technology. Progress is being made on the design front; I have a working, usable index page template in Movable Type running on my Powerbook's webserver (where my test install of MT resides) and it's been slowly coming together. I'm tweaking the fonts and coloring, and I've moved some stuff around. Next up is enabling and configuring the comment section (popup vs. inline?) and then wrassling with the Archive section. Finally, I'll install some sideblogs for other content (the music and links sections). I'm excited.

Can somebody else out there with IE6 or 5 check my home page and tell me if the image shows up at all? Thanks! (My install of IE here at work is hopelessly buggy.)

This weekend looks like it's going to be very barfy around here, so we may keep close to home and get things done around the house. I'd like to finish the painting job and put the baseboards back permanently, and actually get to work on the wiring in the back bedroom. I also got in touch with a friend's wife who designs kitchens, in the hopes that we can get our disaster cleaned up before we're in the family way. Note: the other night I pulled up about five square inches of the linoleum to expose a thin layer of plywood and green pre-war linoleum underneath. Under the green is pretty pine flooring, ready for sanding. No word yet on its condition.... | link

Mar 9, 2005

Progress. Let me know what you think of this here sketch for a new weblog. Anything broken? Out of alignment? on fire? | link

Mar 8, 2005

Heh, Heh. Funny to hear the correspondent on our local NPR affiliate's technology show pronounce the word "stymied" as "stemmied" during a segment on older workers being afraid of newer technology. Perhaps we younger workers shouldn't be afraid of dictionaries.

Inspiration. I'm in the middle of a creative funk. My plan was to have a new weblog (for the record, let me tell you that I hate that word) up and running on a new domain by the middle of the month. It's turning out to be harder than I thought it would. Part of the problem is that I'm trying to design a new look for the site, and I want to build something beautiful, but I'm having a lot of problems making anything work. I was going to use a variation on one of the canned templates at first, but then I decided to make something new and clean. Most of my previous work has been very flat and one-dimensional, so I started playing with depth, which quickly looked gimmicky and trendy.

Then I played with a radical design, dropping a photo in the middle of the grid and running the columns around it. It was nice, but I want to get this thing live this year, and I know that wrestling the CSS/PHP to make it work the way I want would take too long—in between two freelance projects, this would be the bastard stepchild. So I went back to some of the photos I was taking last year to find a good unused subject to start from. I got depressed, because most of the photos I took last year were documentary (celebrations or home renovation) and not artistic like the ones I took in 2002-03, when I got my first camera and shot everything I saw. Yesterday I got an idea looking at the control panel on the elevator here at work to use it as navigation, but after an hour of Photoshop wrangling I decided to scrap it—I didn't want white type on a black background anyway.

The other issue I have is what to keep and what to toss, and how to organize what stays in. Do I keep the month-based calendar for the archives, or toss it in favor of four year-based links? Do I make the music section a sideblog? (Yes.) Do I add a sideblog for links? (Probably.) Do I keep links to all the photos? (Not likely-it'll be a separate page from now on.) Do I add a rotating photo somewhere? (possibly.)

Fortunately, some of the photos I was looking at that I took in 2003 started my brain working. As a sidenote, I have to underline what other people have said-it's not the camera that takes good/bad pictures, it's the photographer. Many of the shots I took with a crappy, second gen point-and-shoot are as good, if not better than the ones I shot with the G3.

Geek, Take Two. There's a blue 400mhz iMac sitting in our basement without RAM, a hard drive, or a battery, because the screen is dead. A year ago I was in the middle of setting it up with OSX, and accidentally kicked out the power cord. After that, it ceased to work properly. I looked and looked for any kind of fixit advice online, and found nothing. Having stumbled across some new information this morning, I'm going to mount a rescue mission in the next couple of days to see if I can't further my score in raising the dead. | link

Mar 7, 2005

Social Butterflies. Jen and I got about a months' worth of social contact this weekend, something we really haven't done in a long time. Friday night we had Dave over for dinner and the resurrection of his main music drive, which had crashed catastrophically the previous week. He brought over his new Mini for us to drool over (my review: absolutely beautiful engineering. Fast, QUIET, and elegant. One drawback: only one FireWire port. However, we will own one) and we stuffed him full of lasagna and PBR while waiting for the progress bar on Disk Warrior to inch rightwards. Success was achieved early Saturday morning, and we sent him into the darkness knowing his music collection was safe. (Disk Warrior comes recommended.)

Saturday we knocked around town running errands and enjoying the sunshine; later that evening we stopped over to our neighbors' house for pizza, beer, and caught up with the latest local news. Sunday we took up Dave's offer to visit his church, and sat in on the 10:30 service. The service was very modern, very upbeat, and the sermon was a thoughtful reflection on child-rearing that had Jen and I talking over our coffee for an hour after we left. Later in the day I started on the trimwork and made my way up the stairs to the hallway, covering all the doorframes but one with a coat of fresh white paint. Oh. My. God. It's like a brand new house up there. | link

Mar 4, 2005

Observations From Catonsville. In no particular order.

• Before it became a hipster drink of choice, supplanting that headache-inducing brew known as Yuengling (and, before that, Rolling Rock), my parents reintroduced Jen and I to the simple joy of Pabst Blue Ribbon on a can, based on its recommendation in Consumer Reports. Yes, I drink beer not because the Cool Kids tell me to, but because Consumer Reports gives it a little red dot. I understand now why my father kept a case of Black Label in the basement when I was growing up; it's much better to always have a 12-pack of cheap cans in our fridge than a monthly six-pack of foo-foo microbrews. Not that I'd ever drink Black label again.
• The huge steel plate on the road outside our house can't get filled soon enough. Having city buses thunk-thunk over that thing like a kettle drum every fifteen minutes during rush hour is damned annoying.
• Two coats of bright white paint on the trimwork in the hallway make the place look so much brighter. I'm sure the upstairs hallway will be a new room once it gets the same treatment. Now, unfortunately we have a houseful of drab, alligatored Phillip Morris White doors, all patiently awaiting a dip at the refinishers'.
• Yesterday, I was officially ready for spring. The wind was howling Chicago-style, the snow was looking gray and dirty, the trees all looked tired and saggy, and the air smelled like copper. It's time for bulbs, shoots, sprouts, and seedlings. It's time for mulch, loam, fertilizer, and compost. It's time to have the windows open, and have the smell of fresh breezes and summer air throughout the house.

Penn is now off the Xanax and back on Prednizone. I have no idea what is wrong with this cat, and I'm not sure what to do next. I wish we could get a straight answer from somebody.

The GeoUrl link on the left there works again; after about six months of busted they updated the engine to re-index everybody. | link

Mar 3, 2005

Score. We are the proud owners of a used 400mhz G3 tower, bought off Craigslist this morning for a very good price. This will make a good backup system for Jen to work on until we buy a faster Mini or other up-to-date machine, and it came with a full-size keyboard and optical mouse, as well as a Jaz drive and ½gig of RAM.

In the other good news column, the repairs to the Saturn were almost $50 cheaper than what they quoted, so we're pretty happy with that.

Shit. Somebody's got hold of my bankcard number and has been dropping incremental charges of $1 on me for the past couple of months; I caught it finally when I saw they had upped a charge to $25. Looking around the internet, I read about another fellow's experience and the sobering news that it's going to be a hard road to clean up this mess. From what one person writes in the comments, the companies billing me (Trilegant, Faces.com) are in bed with somebody else that I have purchased through and sold me and my information down the river. Great. The interesting thing is that they claim I went to netflip.com and signed up for the "service"—with my old mailing address. From what I've read, it's some kind of opt-out direct mail scam where you are signed up if you don't mail them back something, a la Columbia House. So, my advice is to carefully scrutinize your bank statements (I had gotten lazy in the last two months) and make sure you're not getting scammed.

Oy, With The Howling. Jen called to let me know that Penn is in a bad way—yowling, farting, limping... the poor cat has been on so many medicines it's a wonder he's not on the street giving $5 favors away for a snort of Special K. Jen has an appointment this afternoon with another doctor to see if he can figure out what's going on.

4:50pm update. Jen called to let me know that Penn's bowels opened up all over the inside of his cage, and that it is like no other substance she has ever smelled in her life. I will bring my wife pretty, fragrant flowers tonight for dealing with this mess. | link

Mar 2, 2005

It's Worse Than That, He's Dead, Jim. This morning Jen and I dropped the Saturn off at the shop down the street for to be looked at. I drove it to experience the problems she described, and found that turning the wheel was almost impossible. When I pulled into the lot and popped the hood, my suspicions were correct—the belt running to (what I think is) the alternator was not moving at all, meaning the power steering was kaput. I was amazed it even started, considering the temperature outside. I don't know if this means Blue will need thousands of dollars of repairs, but I'm hoping the cost is low. The guy behind the counter was real nice, and we took that as a good omen, but the story remains to be told. Cross your fingers for us (and do not use the phrase "timing chain".)

Update: It appears to be a "belt tensioner," which means a couple of hours and $300. Strange.

When I drive Jen to work, I take Route 70 to pick her up. There's a bridge across the Patapsco river out there that the DOT spent all of last year sanding and painting. Recently, it got tagged by some uninspired individual, who hung his ass 100 feet out over the valley to hit each empty span with his ugly name. Recently, somebody else came out and covered the center sections with a better message: "FEAR BREEDS FASCISM". I'd like to tip my hat to you, my friend.

Has anybody else here noticed just how bad the Smoking Gun has been sucking this year? | link

Mar 1, 2005

So Much For The Snow. We were hoping for blizzard-like conditions in Catonsville so that we'd get snowed in with warm tea, tasty food and cold beer, but that didn't happen. Instead, Jen's Saturn decided it would begin making funny noises and turn on the battery light, which was a little disturbing. We're going to try out the repair shop down the street and see how they diagnose the issue instead of going with our usual mechanic, who unfortunately is a twenty-minute drive away.

snow trees, 3.1.05

This little gadget looks pretty neat; if I had some spending cash and there was actually something worth taping on TV, I might consider it. | link

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