I spent most of the day working on an upgrade to  Mom’s quilt shop’s website. This is a project I started when I was out there in February, and just haven’t had the time to finish, until today. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish it, completely. The whole reason I started the upgrade process was that her site suddenly used all its bandwidth, one day. The culprit seemed to be her cart software’s inability to create its own product thumbnails. It was just using html to resize the huge pictures, slowing all the loading times and eating up all her bandwidth. There was a system that would display thumbnails on the appropriate pages, if you created them and named them with a proper suffix and/or put them in the proper folder… but it wasn’t working. When I finally got things all upgraded and working again, I downloaded a bunch of her product photos, got them all thumbnail-sized … and then FTP stopped responding. Timeout, timeout, timeout. So, it’s not really done and the guy who might be able to look into why it’s not responding, and restart a service or something, is in England, and probably asleep.

Then I grabbed the Lumix GF2 that I got for Sarah, last year, and took a walk around the neighborhood. I haven’t really used it, but I found it pretty easy to get the hang of. It’s weird having to use the screen and not having a viewfinder, and I miss the flexibility of macro mode from my camera, which I couldn’t find in the menus upon menus… but it took some pretty nice shots, and the fact that I can change out that lens and even put something crazy like the Pinwide lens on there is darn cool. And it’s nice and light; I walked around the block with it on my neck and didn’t once feel it weighing me down.

circle

suburban pond

no skating

roots

twolips

flowering tree which will make a big mess soon

not latte art

cutes

Speaking of breaks, I have tomorrow off! Maybe I’ll play some video games, it’s been a while… a month or more, I think. It’s also Micro Four Thirds Day, and we happen to own a mu-43 camera, so maybe I’ll take some pictures!

Speaking of pictures, I saw this giant plume of dark smoke when I got close to home… in the exact direction of home… and I found myself hoping that home wasn’t on fire. I think, maybe, the landfill across the street from our subdivision is on fire. So maybe we’re safe. There’s certainly a lot of ash floating through the air.

Speaking of air…. um, I got nothing.

Winter. This is my real downtime. The holidays are over and work doesn’t start up again for a few weeks, unless we hire new people and have to train them. I usually entertain myself with a video game addiction at this point in the year, and this year is no exception. Sarah and Frank and I are all addicted to video games. Sarah is still spending most of her time on the Uncharted 2 multiplayer, and I’m almost finished with the The Saboteur. I could go back to Ghostbusters, if I finish it, I guess… Ghostbusters is fun, with all the cast voices in there, but The Saboteur is a way better game. I also have Brutal Legend to finish… and probably some others that I’m forgetting about.

This is the month where work usually wraps up… and that leads to the month when we wrap presents… and it will all blur into a month I will call Wraptember.

Those of you who plan on seeing Sarah and I when we’re back east, claim your days now.

In case you missed it. I made a silly, random tumblr called backsofpeople.tumblr.com and inserted it into the bottom of the right column of fashiondisaster.org. I made it open to submissions, too. I figure that I’m not the only one who goes through my photos and finds a bunch that I’d put up if they weren’t so monopolized by a view of someone’s back.

I was also approached by a band on Bandmix that needs a bass player, but the audition songs make me thing that I would not like playing in this group… it’s basically country. I thought I specifically said that I’d prefer not to do country in my profile somewhere, but I guess they can’t read. I should’ve known when they mentioned a Wynonna Judd song but said it was by Winona Ryder.

Right now, sitting at the desk at the Y, all I can really think about is seeing Star Trek. I’ve heard so many good things about it… sure, some classic trek fans have their issues, but it’s trying to reboot the Star Trek world, not continue it. With a bunch of the Fringe team behind the writing and production, it has to be good.
update: Star Trek didn’t happen tonight, but we did a lot of research into how to set up a clothesline for Patti for Mother’s Day. Hopefully we’ll fit Star Trek in, tomorrow.

Good things coming up: more days off, mini-vacations, new Fable II downloadable content, macbook

In the bummer zone: Garmin announced more delays for the Nuvifone. The android phones are looking more and more attractive, even though they don’t have turn-by-turn directions, yet. Unfortunately, the only android phone even rumored for Verizon has a crappy-looking keyboard. If I didn’t think I’d miss the real keyboard, I’d already have broken down and gone with the iPhone. In the meantime, my phone is surviving… only shutting itself off once or twice a day.

So… I had a fun birthday. We hit Olive Garden on Thursday and had some friends over on Friday for dinner. I prepped my Puerco Pibil on Wednesday and Sarah and her mom cooked it all. I think everyone liked it. Sarah also made some awesome little banana cupcakes with yummy honey-cinnamon frosting. I also got a couple more Apple gift cards. I want to resist the urge to replace the Dell with a Macbook… at least until the end of June, when I’ll almost definitely be in tax-free New Hampshire. The Dell is still running, but it’s loud again, and blowing out the dust doesn’t seem to help… it also takes forever to boot, and weighs about ten pounds… which is too much to carry to work, four days a week.

I slept in, yesterday, for the first time in who-knows-how-long… and will get to sleep in again tomorrow. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have another day off until March 23rd… unless I request another weekend day off. I was going to do that when I was at work, today, but I forgot. Maybe I’ll call them tomorrow and put in the request.

First, I should mention that I entered this shot of Penny into a photo contest with the extremely vague theme of “Black & White.” Sarah found the contest, she entered too – You should vote for us.

Sarah is working today. She went from no jobs to one retail job at Jo-Ann fabrics, one photojournalism gig at a local paper and one Promotions gig (web design, print newsletter design, photo slideshows, etc.) for a non-profit in Florida. It’s weird to be home while she’s not; that hasn’t happened in a while.

While she was in Florida, gathering photos for this job and meeting the people she’d be working for, I replaced the G4 with a G5. I grabbed a last-generation G5 (just before the intel switch) on eBay. It’s crazy fast, compared to the G4, and stable, so far. I got everyone’s accounts migrated onto it without too much trouble. The handles got a little bent in shipping, but that’s ok. The G4 has been a trusty computer for many years now, mostly as a backup, occasionally as Mark or Drew & Candace’s main machine in Woonsocket, but I think my constant hardware tweaking was finally too much for it. It was crashing at random. I mostly suspected the not-really-for-a-mac video card, but I didn’t want to go back to the one that was slowing the whole machine down. It’s downstairs and hooked up to that behemoth of a CRT monitor that Zombie is hooked up to. When I have time, I’ll mess with it and see if I can make it stable. Unfortunately, it never crashed on my watch, so I don’t know if I can duplicate the problem.

I’d like to be downstairs, now, playing with the other computers and catching up on my TV shows, but Frank’s friend Karol is sleeping on the couch down there. I’m trying to think of a way to make noise and wake him up but not give away the fact that I’m doing it just to wake him up.

I made all of my eMail go through Google Apps accounts, and then, instead of using POP to retrieve everything to my main gmail account, I’m having it forward there. Then, I made new labels for all of the mail. Then I went through my old labels (per account) and made filters for everything; All of my junkmail and advertisements go where they should and all my shopping related mail goes where it should and all my financial related mail goes where it should, etc. It is, essentially, the way I used to organize and filter my mail when I used Thunderbird to check all the POP accounts. I set up most of those filters as messages came in, though; For these, I went through my thousands of eMails and looked for any with no new labels on them, and, when appropriate, made a filter. Gmail is nice enough to find all the other existing eMails that match that filter and label them at the same time.

I also got rid of a superfluos account on the mac. My music was on a separate account (named itunes). I think I set up the account because I wanted to do simple ipod syncing and there was weird music in the itunes library of my actual account, not necessarily stuff I wanted on my ipod, stuff that past roommates had left on there. So I went through all of that music and threw away most of it, then exported the library from the itunes account, imported it into my account and deleted the itunes account. I also Restored my ipod. Maybe it’ll make that occasional error on start go away, maybe it won’t… but at least it’s a mac formatted ipod, now, so I can update its software, if there’s ever another update, from the computer I’m always hooking it up to.

Today, I started going through all my pictures on Flickr and assigning some of them to groups that I joined a long time ago and forgot about. This was a pretty futile excercise, though… it’s not streamlining the computer or making my eMail any easier to sort through, so I’ll probably just stop doing it, right now. I think it was just an attempt to kill the boredom while working at the front desk of the Y.

In exciting/fun news, one of Sarah’s polaroids from our trip back east is shot of the day on Polanoid … she even gets a gift card! Woot!

We’re going to see Step Brothers tonight with our recently engaged friends Jess and Jason. It looks like a typical Will Ferrel flick, which is usually a good take, and we used our $5 coupons from the opening night of Hancock… so it’s totally worth the price of admission, pretty much, no matter what.

Next weekend is our Theater in the Woods/Troll/etc weekend. I’ve definitely been looking forward to it. That also means that I have a four-day work week for camp… which is awesome. Not that camp’s hard, but it is a little draining. Only three weeks left, now. It also means that I get to do some more driving. Taking the metra/cta into work all summer has been fun, but I miss driving, and this should help make up for it. I guess I have to be more careful, now that I’m on my extended warranty. I didn’t know it was going to cost me a $100 deductible every time I needed something fixed for the next 50,000 miles.

In other news, I’ve found a new feed aggregator that I like: Swurl. It has a much more blog-like design, and the timeline feature is really neat. Here’s my swurl. I also got a new camera bag. The one that came with the Pentax owed me nothing, since it was, essentially, free… it finally got too beat up to be used, so I got a Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home and it fits a lot of stuff.

From there, we headed right over to City Museum and got a parking spot so close that there was an airplane visible through the sunroof. The party was mostly chaos, but it was definitely a good time. The place is really amazing. It was mostly teenagers and older, so we didn’t have to watch little kids crawl through all the tight spots and feel super jealous. There was free Monster energy drinks (which, after two sips, I decided are too gross for consumption) available the whole time that we were there and some other free foods became available later, but we were still pretty full from Hannegan’s. We could’ve used some water or something, but that wasn’t an option. Free admission and free food and free generic sodas is pretty good, though. I did buy a Ball Pit shirt, because mine smelled funny. We took a lot of pictures. I experimented with my new semi fish eye for the first time. I posted a bunch.

After a few hours, we took off and got some much needed rest at our hotel. The bathroom door(s) were like closet doors, with no lock. It was strange, but otherwise, the hotel was ok. We watched the silver surfer movie when it came on HBO and I think it might’ve been worse than the first fantastic 4 movie, which is saying a lot.

In the morning, we headed back downtown to get breakfast at a place called Rooster. We chose it based on Yelp ratings. I should really go review it (and Hannegan’s and City Museum), but I think I’ll save that for the morning. I had a Finnish Pancake and it was really delicious… Sarah got monstrous crepe filled with egg and bacon and Vermont Cheddar cheese. I tried some, it was awesome. She also got a side of Breakfast Potatoes of which I probably ate the most. They had a little hot pepper or something on them and it was really delicious.

We started home from there, stopping at every antique mall that we saw along the way and a restaurant that Sarah’s mom frequented when she was in school called Avanti’s, in Normal, IL. The antiques were fun, the food was decent and we missed all the bad Chicago traffic.

Gotta prepare a little for next week’s trip to Seattle, but it was great to get out of town for a day or two. It really makes me look forward to the longer trip.

And now, the sleep.

I’m back on a normal schedule, this week, at work. Last week was daytrip week. We did three in a row, and had good weather for the first, but rainy/snowy freezing temps on the second and a cold start on the last one. It tired me out pretty good.  We’re moving on to bigger and better problem solving initiatives. The boss is throwing some weird rules at us, that I really feel are hindering the natural progression of the groups… but apparently, we’re all about skills this season, not teams. Yet, we’re still experiential… so wouldn’t building a good team and forming naturally and working together in the best team possible be the best way to experience the skills needed in a community or team? Whatever. The daytrips were a great environment, but I’m glad that I’m back to the schedule that I’ve sort of grown accustomed to. I do have to start getting the stats from the initial surveys entered this week, but it shouldn’t take too much extra time.

I also made some eMail changes this week. I was playing around with Google Apps, and it really made me realize the superiority of GMail. I now have GMail retrieving (and then deleting from the server, thus solidifying my committment) all my POP accounts AND I’ve got the old HoTMaiL (I like to pretend that Microsoft didn’t take it over and ruin it, and therefore still spell it with the, admittedly obnoxious, capitalization that it originally debuted with) account forwarding there. Right now, I have them filtering into separate labels for each account, but I’m sure I’ll make up a set of labels and filters like the folders I have in Thunderbird now. I also enabled IMAP for the whole GMail account, so I can still use Thunderbird and see all my old mail and my new mail in one program, though in separate inboxes. I’m happy with it so far. Next web project: upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.5.

Now that Michigan is behind us, we’re rapidly approaching our Seattle trip. Sarah and her mom are all about having a good plan, so they’ve started asking around and researching attractions “not to miss” in the Seattle, Victoria & Vancouver areas. My first thought, when Seattle is mentioned, is Kurt Cobain. While I appreciated him as a songwriter and musician, I’m not enough of a fanatic to go seeking out any of his old hangouts or the house he died in or anything creepy/weird like that. We’ve got a week there, so I guess one of my goals is to find some great places to eat. I’ll definitely be using Yelp to see what the locals think.

I’d come upon reviews on Yelp while searching, but never realized what a big and active site it was, until Friendfeed tempted me to sign up for my own account. If you’ve got an account on Digg, Google Reader, Reddit, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp or a blog with an RSS feed, you should sign up for friendfeed. Then we can be friends and I can get updates about your stuff without having to make up an “imaginary friend” feed for you… and you can see updates from all your friends’ stuff on one page. I think it’s a brilliant use of RSS technology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Feeling a little hungry, I think… waiting for Sarah to come home. Maybe I’ll watch TV.