That my hands can still type is a testament to the healing powers of my anti-inflammatory of choice. I’ve snagged my hands on every surface in the kitchen; on scrapers, fiberglass insulation, nasty bendy clips that need a screwdriver to push into place, plaster, 12 and 14 gauge electrical wire, three-quarter inch flexible conduit and unsanded attic joists. It looks like I’ve spent my life working construction. And it feels like it as well.

After weeks of demolition, chemicals and climbing into the attic via an access hole that requires the strength of a gymnast, my body is telling me something: “Drink bourbon pronto and watch reality television programs while semi-prone.”

I know that delivering a child is the penultimate human pain. So put down the pitchforks and torches, women readers. I feel like I’ve been in labor for about 3 weeks. I’m so numb and delirious that walking and talking require huge efforts. You know when you see the video from a natural disaster and victims are staggering around? That’s me.

However, one day soon, I’ll be able to put my dirty cocktail glass into a functioning dishwasher, push a button and it will emerge an hour later, fully disinfected and ready for re-use. Until then, I’m going to cower in a corner, try not to breathe the stale attic air for a day or two and actually enjoy an evening of doing nothing but being with the hardest ass kicker wife that ever was.

I will write about the attic, and my travails therein shortly. Until then, I will be heavily sedated, and possibly waiting in the lobby for the limo. o

To follow up the previous drool-ridden incoherent post, I’d like to point Panther (Mac OS 10.3) users here. This fixed my woes and let my desktop and finder sidebar aliai do their job. Apple, would it have been too hard to put this somewhere for the kids?

Hope this helps. What in the name of God were they thinking?

Coming Soon: Wiring, Zonolite and the Great Asbestos Fear Fest 2k3 o

After taking a giant step backwards in networking with Panther (random server access and then finally, none. For three days!), I broke down and downloaded a demo of ADmitMac. Imagine. Networking as it’s supposed to be. I can actually _see_ servers. Better, I can open files from the servers where I have such privileges. This is what I expected from Panther. I didn’t get it.

Apple. You are lying. Again. OS 10.3 has made my corporate life LIVING HELL. Apple, you have again made my IT manager’s life a constant stream of questions and troubleshooting for ONE MACHINE on his network. Interoperability, my ass.

There is a mitigating factor that OS X is better to look at, but if I can’t do my job, what value is your OS? And more importantly, I CAN SEE THROUGH THE LIES. Apple does not provide, out of the box, a working way for me to see and mount servers on a Windows network without my network person having to make their network less secure and not current.

Here’s a hint that might help those of you in this situation.

Oh the agonies one must face using the Lamborghini/ Ferrari/ Porsche of operating systems.

While I am thankful for my wife, my soon to be born child, my dog, my parents and siblings, this year the Thanksgiving holiday has been marked by utter destruction and chaos. I am particularly thankful for tools borrowed from family, the best of which are as follows:

A badass handheld sledge hammer, which if used correctly can put any furniture bashing in _Gummo_ to shame. In two days the kitchen has been utterly demolished.

Various and sundry crowbars. I had the luxury of using three. Which was nice. The kitchen had two layers of Congoleum vinyl flooring on top of a flake board (1960s version of MDF, but not as hard or heavy) and then the original linoleum. That’s three floors to remove.

A reciprocating saw. The importance of this in any remodeling job cannot be understated. One must have this tool to cut through anything. I believe it was this tool that started me dragging my knuckles and beating my chest upon cleaving the laminate countertop in two. Details are fuzzy at this point.

A suitable anti-inflammatory medication. I have taken approximately 2400 mg of these per day of demolition. I’m still sore and stiff and feel like I’m 87.

Libation for consumption upon completion of each day’s tasks.

Now we just have to put in new floor, lights, cabinets, plumbing, dishwasher and paint. Maybe the libation needs to come right about now. o

When I lived in Utah and was a practicing Mormon, I couldn’t wait to get out. It drove me crazy. The provincialism, the denial, the hypocrisy. I know a lot of people who are Mormon who feel this way. It’s strange to hear them now that I’m a non-Mormon homeowner who enjoys living in Utah.

If I have to live in a suburb of Los Angeles (and by suburb I’m talking Palmdale or similar) vs. where I do now, I’d pick here every time. I loved living in West Hollywood. It was fantastic. Homes in that hood were something like $450k to start, and that usually meant no off-street parking and no yard; a very very good reason to buy a home in the first place.

Benefits:

• Traffic, Schmaffic
• Sure, I have to buy booze from a state-run liquor store with less than friendly weekend hours, but it’s not Texas or Alabama.
• Salt Lake is, depending on which numbers you believe, 50% – 60% non-Mormon. Which means that I’m surrounded by people just like me; pissed off about another Bush in the White House.
• All the passive-aggressive narcissistic apocalyptic millennialism is now just quaint and weird, as opposed to anger-inducing.

It’s kind of nice not to have all the churchy weirdness to get angry about every week. I’m just happier now. Pass me my Maker’s Mark. o

2 Kraft® Handi Snack chocolate pudding paks
1.5 Chocolate Brownies
25 Peanut M&Ms

Place the Brownies into a bowl, breaking them up into bite size chunks.

Spoon the pudding over the top.

Sprinkle M&Ms.

Never eat chocolate again. o

In my real life, I play someone who needs to be able to activate fonts on the fly, i.e. someone in a design capacity. I prefer to use an application to activate fonts, regardless of which computing platform I’m using.

For years, I’ve used Suitcase, Font Juggler and the best of the lot, Adobe Type Manager Deluxe (ATM). I still wax nostalgic for the way that ATM Deluxe auto-activated fonts. If I had neglected to activate a font, I didn’t really have to worry, as ATM would catch it. It made font management easy. It took the voodoo out of font management.

Along came Apple’s OS X. Apple, the former king of ease of use, decided to repeatedly kick both itself and it’s users squarely in the crotch (repeatedly) by having not one place for fonts to reside, but about 70 (at last count). This made font management software critical for designers. No longer could we slack on a freelance system and just drag a few fonts or folders to the System Folder. We had to watch our shit.

When Suitcase became available for OS X, everybody started cheering and things looked just swell. It supported (sort of) auto-activation, but because Adobe hates everybody except Microsoft, they forced the use of auto-activation plug-ins for their applications. Plus, the Suitcase interface left room for improvement. Because OS X has about 700 fonts activated at start up, seeing what fonts you have activated was a little weird. I’m sure readers of Slashdot or Ars Technica are ready to shoot me, but I’m going somewhere. Just bear with me, people.

Apple, obviously sensing Adobe’s shift in love (we can only blame Final Cut Pro), decided that with it’s latest system update, 10.3 nee, Panther, that it was time to once again show people how it’s done with a tantalizing font manager called Font Book. It’s Free! It has a metallic interface!

The problem is that it’s clearly meant for no one to actually use.

I added a few hundred fonts to it. It was very fast. I started to move towards my Suitcase CD to fling it into the air like I just graduated from college. Then, my machine, a dual G5 (work is nice) slowed to a crawl. I stopped my move towards the Suitcase CD. Upon further notice, I now had something like 1,900 fonts open and trying to close them all took about 45 minutes. Font Book started to respond, but then would randomly jump. Font names wouldn’t correspond with the preview. I screamed and fled.

I tried to reset everything back to normal, but when I installed Suitcase, I found that Font Book had done something with my fonts. They were gone from their original folders. Fortunately, I had a back up of my fonts and was able to overwrite the shell of a font folder.

I’m forced to ask what millions of Windows users have asked everyday, what in the name of God is Apple smoking releasing such a pile of useless crap?

I was originally going to title this entry, “Showing the Better Half Too Much of My Ass Crack,” but I realized I’ve spent the majority of the last two weeks revealing far too much crack to my better half and she doesn’t need to read that kind of garbage from me on the internet. She’s seen it as I’ve been bending over to lift, paint, nudge and piledrive.

All of this comes because we are besieged by the Gantt chart/Visio wireframe involving the arrival of a newborn. That and our desire to complete the nursery before the child actually arrives. If I were left to my own devices, the nursery would consist of an iPod (40 gb) and a G5 (dual 2 Ghz) box. The baby would fit right into the G5 box and be ready to code PHP within three months after listening to subliminal coding lessons ripped and played back on the iPod.

So the nursery must be done and without cardboard boxes. We are faced with a bit of a situation. In order to make the nursery happen, two-thirds of our house must be upended and rearranged as if it were one of those sliding tile puzzles where there is one tile missing and you have to move everything just so to complete the picture that the tiles make if completed correctly. Imagine completing the picture, but being one column off. This is what we are faced with.

Everybody’s got a basement somewhere, and it’s full of shit. In order to actually finish the nursery, all the basment shit has to be unpacked (yes, I know we moved in six months ago and yes I know my wife is six months pregnant) and rearranged so that the garage shit, of which a subset contains the aforementioned nursery, can be moved in to the room formely known as the guest room and the better half’s former office can claim the title of guest bedroom. Add to that years of moving without properly purging and times that by two. Add to that the sudden realization that of the 7000 lbs which you paid to have moved, you will have lifted 75% in the past 18 hours. Your stubborn, southern and pregnant wife will have lifted most of it, dusted it, and arranged it with the precision the Teutons would have admired. I’m not lying when I say that as I was untangling and coiling a few spare ethernet cables, my amazing wife had completely organized a full third of the worst room in the basement.

Meanwhile, the garage has become a staging area for the nursery. It’s set to pop because it’s also the staging area for the garage sale we’re going to have. Next Spring. The garage itself is a micro version of the tile puzzle and so every time a box or bag is added, the puzzle is reset and must be re-solved. I’ve moved everything in the garage at least four times since we’ve moved in, and before the nursery is done, I’m sure it will have all been moved four more times.

Did I mention, prior to welcoming the baby, we are going to completely demolish and rebuild our kitchen? o

The above picture was created seven or so years ago, but describes my emotional state as a professional and an expectant father.

I’ve had little time to do things like writing or posting photos. I have a load of photos to post. Really.

The polarity of pending parenthood (“I can’t wait to see this baby!” “What in the name of God have we done??”) is matched by the fires in California, the snow currently falling and the possibility that two friends may be stuck somewhere on motorcycles in the middle of the two extremes. And I haven’t heard a word from either of them.

Nevermind that it’s looking like snow for the next several days and I have neither a snow removal implement in the form of a shovel nor a machine (preferred) to decimate the snow at 90 mph.

Plus, I was going to write about the joys of leaf management with this device, which I own. Upon unpacking said device, a kind of laughter emitted from Heather that I thought might mean an ER visit. Her peals were quieted upon witnessing the utter decimation of the leaves in our front yard, despite me holding the Mulchinator, appearing like the Governor-Elect of California in Terminator 7. Snow has pretty much destroyed any more chance of breaking out my latest design-by-phallus toy until next spring. o