Oh, give me a freaking break...
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
I'd add a preamble to this link, but I'm speechless. The K'nexintosh
You probably spend a good part of your waking hours there, so why not take a minute to show off your true desktop? My own digitally enhanced reliquary is one of the featured heaps of acrylic-encased technology and other personal detritus in Mat Hoy's new image project, the True Desktop Collection. It's worth a peek.
Monday, April 29, 2002
A short history of Apple's Espy Sans and Espy Serif typefaces. Now if only someone would expound on the virtues of 18 pt eWorld Tight, the typeface I use for the headers on this very site. Now, that's a damn fine font if you ask me.
Sunday, April 28, 2002
Oh, give me a freaking break...
Heck, even I learned something over at the Geek & Co. geek tip of the week page.
Saturday, April 27, 2002
Don't worry, it was just a small creative spasm. Not only did I unglue my duff this evening and finally get around to converting the spiral logo page to a standards-compliant style sheet format, but I managed to add a couple morevictimscontestants to the critique. Now, let's see what else I can fix up tonight...
Commodore Pet at computer recycling drive. Anderson Station, Calgary.
Damn. Apparently you can't configure a 320 GB Iomega DataSafe network attached storage device over TCP/IP using the supplied installation wizard when the client resides within a Virtual PC environment. Even after a triplet of fine, hand-crafted local ales, which I thought for sure would help smooth out the whole process. According to this here tech note, there's still a chance it might work. But it looks like I might have to dig that piece of shit 486 out from under the pile in the basement after all. Why can't things just work?
Friday, April 26, 2002
Pardon my exuberance, but I just can't resist posting another one of these little poetic morsels. Indulge me for a brief moment and give due consideration to this new installment of Three Line Poems from the Subject Lines of Spam.Economic IndicatorsHey, it almost rhymed that time.
[Bousquet, lynd3bedsole, Mike, 2002]
What will Greenspan do next?
Profit from high gas prices
Your invitation is enclosed
Your sensitive graphic treatment of the airline sickness bag didn't make the cut for either of the Design For Chunks collections. It was obviously rampant nepotism that caused your concept for the relaunch of K10K to be completely ignored. And of course, in true style-over-stability fashion, the BD4D site was redesigned after the end of the SK8 Deck Design Competition and the pages containing your entries were forever vanquished to the land of linkrot. Fortunately, all is not lost Johnny. You can still knuckle down to the mouse pad and fling a few million pixels at the Stereostyle CD design and Hektik t-shirt design competitions. Two fresh venues in which to vent your vocation. Start clicking and dragging, baby.
Now, see what happens when you let the developers handle the event marketing? Some well intentioned, but questionably driven souls down in Cupertino are doing their darndest to crank up a little bit of last minute public relations hoopla for the Worldwide Developer Conference next month. I know this because the Apple Developer Connection just sent me a powerfully fruity e-card invitation explaining how exciting a preview of the next version of OS X will be. As a developer, I probably don't need any additional hoopla to get me excited about the next version of anything OS X related. Especially the type of hoopla that involves poorly executed, center-justified, faux-handwritten messages sent as JPEG-format e-mail attachments. Personally, I think that Microsoft's Comic Sans should be banned from use outright, but that's another can of kern pairs altogether. Oh, and a suppose placing the code name of the unreleased operating system in quotations (and not even typographically correct quotes at that...) makes it seem as if I'm in on some great, perhaps even ironic secret. Feh. I wish I could manage to find a way to go to the conference, if only to point out how un-Apple this doe-eyed attempt at direct marketing was.
Bidirectional communication. It's a good thing.
Thursday, April 25, 2002
Tree shadow on sidewalk. 5th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
If dear sweet Jane can continue to produce a reasonably regular literary installment in the form of the lusciously variable Poetry Friday, then dammitall so can I. Introducing a little something that I am calling, for obvious reasons, Three Line Poems from the Subject Lines of Spam. Please enjoy the first couple of stanzas. They can only get better from this point on.Security
[bilsn331611, trtr, Trisha, 2002]
Protect your family - free info
Trying to reach you again
It will be too late soon...The SolutionAs always, kindly forward any and all comments to the proprietor.
[limestay, jekjr, wj, 2002]
Want to save some money on your vacation?
We've got some extremely good news for you...
Fight allergies, room by room
Monday, April 22, 2002
Glenn Anderson just scooched out another tidy update to EIMS for all you folks that run Mac-based mail servers. I did a little happy dance to celebrate. And you? Via Archipelago
Adam Tow, a fine chap and the purveyor of nifty software products, including a veritable flash card full of absurdly useful packages that I use daily on my Newton, has released JPEG-JFIF Repair. This program, surprisingly enough, basically does what it says. Certain digital cameras create what are seemingly valid JPEG files, but those same files do not conform to the JFIF specification, which can cause problems when applications attempt to embed colour profiles. Although an image with malformed JFIF tags will not generally affect it's opening or viewing, it could potentially become an issue when trying to use the same image in a colour-managed environment. Having worked with thousands of JPEG images before, all with embedded profiles, I can tell you that incorrect file headers are be the bane of an otherwise well-oiled workflow. Thanks Adam. Your software is the berries.
No, I don't think I will, thank you very much. As much as I'd love to search for my software disk, give up, locate an appropriate version online, download and decompress a self-mounting disk image, and than reinstall Open Transport just because the Network Time control panel insists on blaming the network layer as opposed to it's own inconsistant behavior, I can probably get by with my computer's clock being off by a few seconds today.
Saturday, April 20, 2002
Racks, finally? Because the configurations are announced enormous.
Friday, April 19, 2002
Wondering where we went? The splorp.com ADSL connection was down for a couple of hours this evening. Sorry about that. But, wait a minute here... why am I apologizing? It's not like it was my fault. At least not this time. Of course, nothing regarding the outage would ever dare show up on Cadvision's status page, right? Must have been another Telus engineer slopping coffee all over the network access point again.
Headphones on desk in the late afternoon. Calgary.
Thursday, April 18, 2002
Two separate times tonight I started writing a blog entry and then stopped half way through, deciding that the point I was trying to make was either too bland or too forced to warrant posting after all. Now that I think about it, I probably should have stopped myself a third time.
Oh my flipping word. This is turning out to be quite the week for software. First of all, Adobe manages to ship an OS X friendly version of Photoshop and now this... an actual, honest to goodness Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate. What could possibly be next in the queue? Beta WaveLan drivers for my Newton perhaps?
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Guess what finally appeared on the doorstep? The appropriately named Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Plug-in apparently allows anyone with even a glimmer of technical chutzpah to create scripts to control Adobe's ubiquitous pixel mashing software using JavaScript and AppleScript. The mind simply boggles at the possibilities. Via mac.scripting.com
Developer: I have a couple of questions about those files you sent me.Me: Sure.Developer: So, you know that black space at the top of every page?Me: Yes...Developer: Is that where the navigation is going to go?Me: What do you mean, going to go? You don't see it?Developer: No.Me: It's just a black stripe across the top of the page? There's no graphics?Developer: Right.Me: Your server isn't parsing the SSI tags. The navbar is an include file. If the page isn't parsed for SSI, the navbar won't show up. Neither will the footer text.Developer: Oh.Me: You guys are running an IIS server, right?Developer: Yes.Me: Well, IIS only parses .asp and .shtm files by default. You need to add .htm and .html extensions to the configuration in order for the server to parse those types of files for server side tags.Developer: Oh?Me: Change one of the file extensions from .html to .asp and see if that works.Developer: Ah. Yeah, that's better.Me: How about if I just send you files with .asp extensions instead? Would that be simpler?Developer: Yeah, that 'd be good. Thanks.
Yellow extension cord in parking stall. 4th Street and 7th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
One of the best reasons for getting down and documenting a comprehensive site map for a web project that has already been designed is to familiarize yourself with all of the required pages that remain to be coded. Pages that the designers somehow neglected to mention. Pages that don't currently appear anywhere in the workflow. Hmmm. Do you think that this particular scenario might impact your ability to hit a deadline or two? Oh, perhaps. It's a good thing I've never been too fond of deadlines.
Monday, April 15, 2002
Morning sun on McDougall School. 5th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Sunday, April 14, 2002
Who wouldn't want to enter a photo contest where you can show off your very own visage engrossed in the pages of a fine piece of modern day literature? Especially a photo contest that has been unassumingly instigated by the one and only Mr Zeldman, and where the fine piece of modern day literature in question is none other than his very own enlightened tome du jour. Who wouldn't, indeed?
Oh yeah, it's tax time on both sides of the 49th parallel, isn't it? I guess I should start thinking about that, shouldn't I? You'd think it'd be an easier chore for me this year, since I took nine blessed months off of work to cleanse my soul and revive my spirit. However, I do believe that my little self-induced hiatus only managed to complicate things beyond any amount of reason. Forced exercising of options, unused vacation day payouts, multiple sources of income, and convoluted employer-deducted Canada pension plan payments do not help simplify the tax preparation process. I guess that's why you hire accountants when you can afford them. Flaming cripes almighty, I hate it when the powers that be have you by the short and curlies...
There's really no need to pay any attention to this particular post. I'm just beta testing the new post via email feature of Blogger Pro and this post is fairly free of content. However, if you can read this, then it worked. If you can't read this, never you mind.
Friday, April 12, 2002
Where does the time go? I just realized this afternoon that two milestones of questionable significance have occurred within the past week. April 5th marked two full years of running this here rambling weblog of mine. Egad. That's quite the mental kick in the pants for me. I don't think that I could have kept up and put up with a journal or diary in the more traditional sense for that length of time. But wait, there's more. Today is also the first anniversary of my leaving EyeWire. Of course, this would be a much happier day to reminisce and chortle about times and experiences past if there was actually anything left of that once amazing company besides a diluted brand and an 800 number. Sigh. On the sunnier side of the street, I'm now working with a baker's dozen of fab folks that landed here via the old stomping grounds. Familiar faces and new projects are so thick, I can't walk away from my desk without tripping over a pile of them. Another year from now, things should be at least as interesting as they are today.
Thursday, April 11, 2002
Of course, it must have seemed that I left all of you available domain name of the week fans hanging in the lurch, didn't it? Symptoms of withdrawal already? Tsk, tsk. Steer clear of the line up at the Methadone clinic, your regular fix has arrived. I managed to post four weeks worth of contenders worthy of your perusal and partakement. Enjoy.
Cheese and crackers, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. Or maybe I'm just feeling slightly whelmed, coated with a light dusting of guilt. In the past two days, I think I've managed to plough though about a tenth of the 5,800 or so email messages that piled up during my hiatus. I'll admit that most of those messages were from mailing lists, and I generally pay attention to only half of those list messages on a regular basis anyway. But there's still a lot of important mail from important folk about important things tumbling about my in box that I am desperately trying to get to. Honest. If I didn't have to code a pile of master html templates and finalize the style sheets for a new site we're working on by Monday, I'd have answered them all by now. Himmelherrgott!
Silicon Graphics salvage next to compost bins and water barrels. Calgary.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
My apologies, things got busy today. Real busy. Busier than I could have possibly imagined. And you know what? I'm enjoying absolutely every minute of it. Tomorrow I'll maybe have something for you. Perhaps a photograph or two. Gosh, I could sure use a nap.
Tuesday, April 09, 2002
Regular programming will resume tomorrow. I promise.
