Went to a meeting for work at the downtown corporate offices. The meeting was at 11.30 and included free lunch, which was cool. Then, around 1.00, when we got out, I got my parking validated for the whole day. I decided that I couldn’t just pass up free parking in the city, so I called Sarah and her mom and asked for some suggestions on how to take advantage of my free parking. I took a walk over to Millennium Park and took a few pictures on Sarah’s suggestion. I walked around a few blocks looking for other things worth shooting, but architecture is only so interesting and I wasn’t feeling cityscape or urban fragment sort of inspiration. Plus, it was still pretty cold and windy, so the longer I wandered, the more I felt pulled toward the car and heading home. It was fun, though. Still working through this modified Holga roll… no idea how many pictures I’ve taken or how many should be left. I shot with the digital a little bit. I think I’ve got a couple new icon/userpics for all the various sites.
Archive for the 'Web' Category
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So, I’ve been reading a lot more, lately. Reading instead of doing my homework for adventure ed seems to be my favorite pastime. I reread Childhood’s End around Christmas. I finally decided to give it another read after I heard about Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday. Sarah’s mom picked me up a cheap hardcover copy of Anansi Boys on the clearance rack of a book store in the Borders Outlet at Gurnee Mills and I read it almost immediately. Sarah challenged me to read a book I wouldn’t finish in two days and suggested House of Leaves. I think I spent five to seven days on it. I remember when Drew lived in Woonsocket the first time, He and Candace were reading it, maybe, possibly they were just admiring it, I never really talked to him about it, cause I wasn’t reading it. I suppose I should ask him if he ever did end up actually reading the whole thing. I started American Gods on Saturday. As I’m reading, I get to a part where they visit The House on the Rock, up in Wisconsin, and I can see each room as he’s describing it. I think about all the pictures that I took when Sarah and I went there and pop onto Flickr to check some of them out… and they’re not on Flickr. I somehow managed to not post any of them or mention the visit in my blog at all. I guess it wasn’t until November or so that I decided I want to write here more often.
Sometime in late September, Sarah and I took a trip up to Wisconsin to see a play at an outdoor theater. We booked a hotel stay with the tickets and then planned a couple little adventures around the show. We saw [most of] the Mount Horeb trolls and had a wonderful dinner there. We visited the House on the Rock and took two of the three tours. I really got a kick out of the 60s/70s vibe to all the rugs and appliances and the various collections were really awesome… There was also a life-size whale & giant squid battle that reminded me of Childhood’s End [and the They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 album cover], but the little plaque said nothing of taking its influence from the book. We saw the show at the outdoor theater… in the rain. It was very wet, but the show was funny. There were some near-spills due to wet stage and a complete false start, due to a downpour about a minute into the first scene. We also picked up some meat on a detour on the way home from a favorite butcher of the family. It was a mini-vacation, it was a lot fun and I still don’t know how I failed to mention it here at all.
I went through the pictures last night and picked out some decent ones and added them to my flickr. As I logged in to flickr, I shuddered at the thought of it becoming a Microsoft-owned and controlled site. The Microhoo merger seems like an all around bad idea to me. Maybe I’m still upset about Microsoft taking over HoTMaiL. I certainly stopped using it for anything but junk after that and it’s pretty close to unusable, now, with all the crazy Windows Live crap they turned it into. Yahoo didn’t ruin flickr. Hopefully, if that merger happens, Microsoft won’t either… but their online track record is pretty bad.
Before going through the pictures, though, I watched the game. I formally apologize to all of my friends back east who care about sports and to the Patriots for watching the game. I was completely aware that every Patriots game I watch turns into a loss for them, but I really wanted to see if there were any really funny commercials. In my defense, they were still in the lead when I paused it for dinner. So they may have lost while I was eating and not while I was actually watching… but I did return to the TV and watch the rest of the game. So it’s most likely my fault. Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your perfect season.
Cookie week has come to a close. The cookies are being packed into boxes to be sent to friends and family across the country. I need to bring them to the post office tomorrow, after work, I guess, and get them all in the mail. Round three included chocolate covered pretzel rods, in white and semi-sweet chocolate, with lots of fun decorations like itty bitty snowflakes and candy cane pieces, icing and putting sparkly sugar on the gingerbread snowflakes and the chocolate and almond slivers to finish off the Czech bear paws. The bear paws only called for a little bit of choclate, but we decided that more chocolate is always better. They turned out adorable and delicious. It was a mostly decorative day and quite a fun one. I put more pictures up yesterday and today, and you can see all of Sarah’s pics together with mine, since we tagged them all COOKIEpalooza 2007. Most of mine are wider shots with many, many cookies in them and Sarah’s are detail shots on a couple cookies. Peanut watched the whole thing, but had no comment.
Kinda sad that I have to actually go to work in the morning. It’s been a fun week of being a total bum. Not that I did nothing… we did plenty …but I’ve totally pushed off all the other work-related stuff I should’ve been doing. Adventure Ed stats aren’t done yet; gotta finish those this weekend and make a nice presentable summary file. I definitely blew off a staff holiday party tonight, probably gonna blow off one, if not both, tomorrow night as well. Might work one long day in the city, on Monday. I need to turn in the stats and help pass out t-shirts.
I had a couple little geek triumphs this week when I successfully added reCAPTCHA and tinyMCE to the simple blog script running Sarah’s site. Technically, I just got reCAPTCHA working and displaying the simplest of custom themes, we haven’t tweaked it to the way we actually want it to look yet… and the tinyMCE is running on my testing site until I get a chance to add it to Sarah’s code. It truly makes me appreciate all the work that goes into a CMS package, when I try to integrate a seemingly simple feature… meanwhile, my old friend and bandmate, Shana, is putting my web adventures to shame with her new site, Stylastic. It’s kind of like Hot or Not for style. I signed up. Those rating sites are a guilty pleasure, always have been. I know what your thinking… shouldn’t an existential fashion disaster be the arch-nemesis of such a site? Well… maybe … but we all know that’s just a witty name for my blog and it has nothing to do with fashion or clothes (of which I have a lot) or style (of which I have only a little). My Threadless obsession doesn’t count.
Work early tomorrow… should be sleeping. Off I go.
hacked… something about world writable folders, lots of accounts, not just mine. I didn’t even know I had any world writable ones. I had to go through and change them all and then test things to make sure everything still worked. I’m still doing it now, actually. After I post this, I gotta see if it worked and see if all the logs worked and then experiment with posting from the phone again. It took a lot of time and effort because my backup wouldn’t quite restore correctly. Had to kinda build a place for the site from scratch and then import it in piece by piece. Anyway, I think it’s all back now.
Thankfully this happened early Saturday morning, so I was completely distracted by the fact that I was going to see They Might Be Giants. It was a great show and brought back a lot of memories of some good times. Unfortunately, driving to a show in Chicago is worse than driving to a show in Boston. We learned our lesson though (took an hour to find parking). Next time, we’ll take the train in from O’Hare or go out early and make a day-long event out of it. They almost wouldn’t let Sarah in because she had her Diana camera with her. But she convinced them that it wasn’t going to take any high quality videos of the band, that it was basically a toy, and they let her in. The venue was cool, nice balcony seats and a few benches throughout the floor area. We were there a little too late to snag a seat for ourselves… again, lesson learned. It was a real treat to see them with the horn section. I do kinda miss the Eric and Graham/Hal days, but the Dans are good, there’s no denying it. The banter was as witty as ever.
Enjoying my day off, so far. The tentative plan was to catch up on all the TV shows we’re behind on. We’ll see what really happens once Sarah gets up and we get motivated (or don’t 
). Got another Adventure Ed overnight this week (and next week). There’s pictures from last week’s trip on the gallery (mostly taken by the kids). There’s more staff lined up for this week, so I should be able to take more myself.
Last night, after a little issue with the scanner and a reinstallation of some drivers, a couple of my programs were acting weird, so I rebooted, and right after logging in, my screen went black. It seemed like the system was running. I managed to blind reboot it once. I couldn’t log in via VNC, though, so I knew the video drivers weren’t running correctly. I tried reloading the original Dell drivers, but it made no difference… still went black. Removed the video drivers and I could log in just fine… though I can only deal with giant chunky 800×600 for so long. At some point I found out that the user account I set up for Sarah could log in just fine with the Dell video drivers loaded… so that led me to believe there was some sort of software/driver thing going on. I couldn’t figure out what was causing it, though. I tried disabling everything I could think of, and it still went black on my username. So I refocused on the video drivers, tried a couple different ones and a couple methods of completely removing the old drivers… but still no luck. Finally, I tried these Omega drivers and they seemed to do the trick. I dunno how well hooking the laptop up to the TV is going to go, the next time we want to watch something I downloaded on the big screen, but at least I’m not computerless anymore. There’s a bit more fear, as time goes on, that this laptop will just plain die, one day soon… regardless of the transplant/replacement of most of its innards.
There was also a threat of canceling the Adventure Ed overnight for one of the schools because of some new electronic filing system that all trips have to go through and some CPS paperwork and legal department bull… but I guess they finally worked it all out today. We got the go ahead this afternoon. We were on the verge of coming up with some sort of concelation day for all the kids who had signed up. They were still signed out of their classes and stuff, so they were technically ours for the day, but we probably would’ve been restricted to school property. I’m glad that didn’t end up happening. The high ropes experience is really a key element in my mind.
Psyched that I got the mophoblogging going again. I was doing that stuff back in early 2005 (via Livejournal). I’m pretty sure moblogs and that term existed then, but I wonder if I could’ve coined mophoblogging, or snagged a related domain name or something.
Seems like that urge I had to write more, via shorter and more frequent posts, goes right in line with the Twitter phenomenon… Something similar to the posting via phone I was doing in the past, except my Twitter updates (twitters? tweets?) will just show up in the little box at the top of the sidebar. I like it. It kinda makes me want to reintroduce my mo-pho-blogging ability. I used to enjoy sending a pic of what I was up to when I got bored. I’ll look into that next, I guess. I’m not sure that I really have a need to be updated on my phone about a bunch of friends’ whereabouts and goings on, but I guess it’s cool to be able to post mine from my phone and have them show up here.
Since the Flickr integration went so well, I decided to try the Wordpress upgrade, too. I’m not terribly attached to tags, but the tag integration isn’t as cool as the tag plugin I was using… I really miss the click the tag to add it thing on the post writing page. I have yet to go through all the old posts that linked to images on the Gallery2 pages. I’ll get to that soon enough. Maybe I’ll even add some more photos… I’ve got some from Adventure Ed class days. I totally didn’t break out my camera during the day trip… I don’t think it even made it out of my car. I’ll be sure to get pictures at the overnight trips. Those are coming right up, too. The first one is next week! This season flew by. I feel like we missed out on a lot of great activities, but it hasn’t been a bad season.
Feeling a little hungry, I think… waiting for Sarah to come home. Maybe I’ll watch TV.
I was late for work this morning. My Emerson “SmartSet” alarm clock still believes that this is the weekend that we change the clocks… as does this computer, here at work, along with about half of the electronics of the members here at the YMCA that I’ve talked to. This automagical technology starts to lose its charm when it’s just plain wrong. Added a new clock to my amazon wishlist.
I want to start writing more. I used to use this as a journal, of sorts, and I kind of miss writing in a journal, but don’t want to actually carry one around with me. So there may be a whole lot more entries, here. And there may be some really short ones… which I may or may not try to designate as more of a note than an entry.
I’m also considering phasing out the existing photo gallery and going completely Flickr. I’ll have to move a few photos over, but I hesitate to move any that I don’t actually have the original, full-sized files for… or maybe I’ll put them in a special set – “Lost Originals” or something like that. Here’s my first attempt at flickr integration . There were a couple more snazzy plugins, but the server needs libcurl installed to use them, and apparently, it’s not installed.
In one week, Sarah and I are going to see Serenity in the theater. Every year there is a charity event called Can’t Stop The Serenity, and we’ve got tickets for the Chicagoland show. In preparation, we’ll probably be watching Firefly – The Complete Series
Phase One of this week’s computer upgrade project is complete. I gutted the old Gateway that Frank, Sarah’s little brother, had been using and put in a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive. It took a little more work than I expected, due to the fact that gateway’s choice of case didn’t have all the right holes on the back for the motherboard ports… so some creative sawing was necessary. All that’s really left to do on that machine is add some front audio ports so frank can plug in his headset for his games.
Phase Two involves all the hardware we pulled out of the Gateway and a fish tank full of mineral oil. I’m following the specs detailed by Puget Custom Computers on this page. Fish tank and oil and random parts are all ordered and on their way. I’ll have to go to Home Depot to get the sheet of acrylic and all the necessary sealant. Wish me luck!
The Adventure Education season ended. The overnights went well, I put some pics up. Now I’m in my break between that and summer camp season. I decided to work for the camp run by my boss from adventure ed… not because there seems to be any team-building or teens or anything else I’m into, but simply to keep that connection alive. My other option was driving skate camp for the Y I’m working for, the ages would’ve been better, and that’s my only regret in turning it down.
So what have I been doing on my break?
for the first time, and I think a couple other Robert Rodriguez flicks are in my queue. Saw Pirates 3 as well: not bad, but was lacking the cleverness of the first and the crazy chase scenes of the second.
. I keep dying in the flopside pit of 100 trials… got all the way to the end last time and freaked out at the boss battle and messed up.On the family front, my Aunt Rosemarie died. She was my Dad’s older sister. I wasn’t terribly close to her. She always seemed pretty kooky to me. I’m pretty sure she’s the only aunt who ever fit into that crazy old relative who gives you weird sloppy kisses category. The family’s talking about spreading her ashes, along with her husband’s, on the East coast… maybe sometime this summer.
Not much else is going on. Lots of relaxing, which is good. Threadless is having another one of those week-long sales where they release new shirts every day. If you’ve been waiting for the sale to pick up that clever shirt, now is the time.
Sarah’s got an interview at Calumet, this week. Think good thoughts, send her the good vibes, wish her luck… whatever your style is … much appreciated.
