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Sunday, July 18, 2004 Link
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Eight years, that is. Eight years since this site went live. Eight years since I first paid Internic for the privilege of having a place to call home on the internet. Eight years of running a web server on a series of archaic, retrofitted Macintosh boxes that along the road somebody else figured weren't useful anymore. Eight years of feeling compelled to operate a webcam and narrowcast my debatably winsome mug across the ether. Eight years of other people looking at that debatably winsome mug and questioning why someone would want to even have a webcam. Eight years of hardware failures, partial backup strategies, application glitches, subnet updates, ISP changes, and of course, the regular assortment of DNS propagation bugaboos. Eight years of forgetting this anniversary every second year. Eight years and I still haven't managed to get this site more than marginally standards compliant. Eight years that I wouldn't have traded for anything else.
Saturday, July 17, 2004 Link
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This masking tape badge of honour was presented to me by my eldest daughter yesterday. She is always commenting that I 'add serifs to everything', meaning that I have to constantly fiddle with stuff after it's handed to me. Like adding ground pepper or salsa to my food. Yesterday, I apparently was 'adding serifs' because I wanted to see how an origami swan she had given me would look with a small vertical tail. I'll be the first to admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist, but It's not that I'm trying to make things absolutely perfect. The gist of it: I am simply customizing and personalizing my environment. Well, that and I do like to fiddle with things.
Friday, July 16, 2004 Link
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Amidst the aforementioned hardware issues experienced earlier in the week, I actually managed to accomplish quite a few things without access to my usual complement of application preferences, archived email, and customized keyboard shortcuts. It's funny how much faster a clean, unmodified system runs in comparison to one that has been tweaked and preened and retrofitted with all manner of software and terminal hackage originally intended to make your life more efficient. Or maybe it's faster simply because the loaner you're currently using has nearly quadruple the processing power of your regular box hummed away under it's plastic hood. And speaking of being more efficient, one of those things I accomplished was sweating over a particularly stubborn AppleScript for use in Adobe InDesign. After smacking my head on the desk in frustration over the glaring lack of human-readable documentation of library changes between InDesign 2.x and CS, I had a honest to goodness 'eureka' moment. Not only does the revamped script work with both versions of InDesign now, I was also able to shave off a dozen lines of extraneous code in the process. Next up... writing a few scripts to rid Apple Mail of some aggravating limitations I've discovered while running it through it's paces. It's still no Claris Emailer, but it's growing on me.
Tuesday, July 13, 2004 Link
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At least the hard drive that contained data I had actually backed up still works. The other drive - my boot drive - doesn't. Applications. Email. Prefs. Several gigabytes worth of current work files scattered all over the blessed desktop. Poof. Reflecting on this incident, I have determined that I feel much more comfortable with catastrophic hardware failures when the device in question makes angonizingly painful noises before it runs up the curtain. Scratch. Scrape. Click-chunk. Click-chunk. At least you know something is wrong. It's the silent deaths that bother me. Like the one that happened today. All I did was open a PDF and then, suddenly... the world was frozen solid. One big slice of bitmapped work-in-progress staring back at me, zombie-like, from Cinema Display purgatory. Ah, but there's always a bright side, right? The thing about the silence... it generally means that the on-board drive controller pooched, not the platters. When there's a lack audible evidence indicating that disks and heads have been gouging high-velocity chunks out of each other - it's good news for the data recovery boys. Yes, I should've had my home folder backed up. I know that. I've always known that. Yes, I do have half of it backed up somewhere. I think it's been ripening for a few dozen months on the server. Should be ready to go any minute now. Feh. And you know what topped the day off? The office coffee maker went tits up this morning as well. Tempting fate, I'm just sitting around this evening waiting for the third boot to drop.
Thursday, July 08, 2004 Link
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The available domain name of the week is filterati.com
Tuesday, July 06, 2004 Link
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Photocopied image on mailbox. Kensington Road, Calgary.
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