Vlad land

Vlad land
Originally uploaded by stevepack

Lindsey and I are in Biloxi for Coastcon and are staying with our
friend Vlad who sells WWII collectables and happens to have a great
and twisted sense of humor. This was what greeted us when we brought
our bags in.

I'm hoping to get the chance to take a look around the city to see how
things are developing. Rossana is in NC to finish the last weekend of
the fair. Maybe she'll get lucky and get at least one sunny day.

Dangerocity + Tools

I think that it is necessary to come up with a new scale for measuring projects. I humbly suggest this new scale be called something like "TheTool/Dangerocity Scale" or simply the TDS

You see, it doesn't matter how complex a project is. It's how many tools you use to complete it, how much danger was involved and how badly you hurt yourself doing it. Changing your oil is fairly simple. You only need a new tools and the risks aren't that high. And yet many people still manage to injure themselves or break parts of the car. But you still did it yourself and you deserve credit for it. It was far harder and more dangerous than you had guessed and there should be some way to quantify that.

Yesterdays project seemed simple. In preparation for Spring I wanted to sharpen the blades on my lawn mover. Of course I called up Grimm, because he's done this before.

Or not.

After staring at the mower for a bit and poking it with a stick we decided to jack up the front end rather than figure out how to disconnect the deck.

Tools used: Jack, board, bricks

Once the front of the mower was precariously balanced atop some bricks we crawled under the deck with a grinder to get at the blades.

Tools used: Body grinder, carpet, scraper, extension cord, safety glasses.

We set to work but after the first blade we could see that one of the blades was pretty chewed up from being used as an impromptu mulcher during regular mowing operations. After some more grunting we thought we'd try to take the blades off the deck so we could work on them without constantly being remonded that we were old and fat.

Tools used: Compressor, air wrench, socket.

Indeed one of the blades was gouged pretty bad. One might consider simply getting a new blade but Grimm is well known for his 'frugalocity'.

"Why drive into town and spend money. You've got a welder! Weld a new bead along the edge and then grind it down." This seemed like an almost sane idea at first. We pulled off the blades and set up the welding rig.

Tools used: Stick welder (gloves, mask, hammer, rods), 2 saw horses, slab of marble to weld on

With new material added to the edge of the blade we then ground it to shape and generally cleaned up our previous work. We reinstalled the blades and I decided to grease the fittings.

Tools used: Grease gun, needle nosed pliers to remove old grease tube, paper towels and gunk remover to clean up the grease which went everywhere.

In the end I used a crapload of tools to achieve a pretty simple task. I would give this job a 7 out of 10. It would have been a 8 but neither of us injured ourselves during the proceedings.

Next week I may dig a hole. It will take some work but I'm sure I can jack that TDS up to 9 somehow.

ALL ONE!!! ALL CLEAN!!

If you don't know about Dr. Bronners soap you must live in a cave. It's pretty amazing stuff. Not just because it works, is biodegradable and makes your private areas tingle when using it. No!

Its the label that really gets your attention. Go check it out.

Sad little fair

Its 46 degrees here. Thank the gods our booth is inside. Despite
similar weather yesterday we still did pretty well. I don't have as
high hopes for today but we soldier on.

Technology...is there anything it CAN do?

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MegaCon and more

I ran into R2 at the Con. He looks good for his age but I thought he might want to try out "The Shatner" model to keep that slight gut in check.


















The very rare double headed Rhino. She's a beauty!





















THIS is what you look like after the ride that "doesn't get you very wet" according to my beloved wife.

















Two lorikeets sharing some nectar at Busch Gardens

Keen

Long ass day today. 14 hours or so. Setup was a clusterfuck. No
assigned tables. At least we did some sales. Bonus, Peter Mathew did
some shopping at my booth today. If you don't know who that is then
turn in your geek card. (or check the googles).

edit: I meant Peter Mayhew aka Chewbaca!!!!!!

Meh

Two website upgrades went horribly wrong just as we departed Ohio.
Megacon was so-so.
Caught a cold.
On the other hand its 70 down here in Tampa and yesterday we went to
Busch Gardens.

Like clockwork...

Tomorrow we head out on the road for Florida and MEGACON. The house is clean, Cat Nanny, Lindsey and our neighbor are looking after our hyperactive Cats. Van is loaded. Audio books procured.

And then the phone rings...

At this point you'd like I would have learned not to answer the damned thing. But I, like Pavlov's dog, am well trained.

It's my friend Rupp.

He's early. His site shouldn't crap out until I'm at least 500 miles from home. Preferably in another country. Surrounded by headhunters.

I fire off some emails to determine what's up with his website. Then another client calls. He's been dragging his feet for MONTHS on a project and now he has an overwhelming urge to get the thing done TODAY. I spend several hours on the phone with the client, more in a chat session with support people, another hour on hold before talking to a real human. All culminating with the certain knowledge that the pinhead at my clients bank ignored all the instruction we gave him months ago.

A developer call me back. We've been talking about trying to find out what makes my friend Rupps site crash. We settle on doing a pretty serious upgrade. Settle on a price.

Call Bank, bark at moron.
Call Rupp, get approval for project.
Call Developer, green light upgrades.

Clicky-clicky on computer. Set up everything.

And now, I leave. Tadaa!

I'm sure that nothing at all will go wrong.

The memory of snow...

When the snow came last week I stayed inside. Work to do.

But at last I could no longer stand being cooped up and I walked out to the shop. The moment my shoes hit the snow I had the strangest feeling of deja vu. Or maybe not deja vu. Maybe the strange sensation of knowing this snow. Of having felt it before.

It's almost impossible to explain this to someone who hasn't lived in a Northern clime. They say that the Eskimos have 50 different words for ice (which I doubt) but there are many kinds of snow. It can take on many textures and weights. From a fine powder to a packable mess. And as I stepped out into the cold air I remembered the last time I had felt that exact snow before. It was the winter of 77/78.

You can go and look up records for that year. You can see pictures of people in Buffalo digging down 6 feet to find the top of their cars. I made a lot of money shoveling snow that year and spent a lot of time out doors. And since that year I have not felt snow exactly like it. It's crunch, it's stickiness. After some 30 years or so.

Strange.

When you need a slushie yesterday...

How is this for a cool concept. A faux store with a time travel theme! It appears that money raised form the sale of things like "Barbarian Repellent" and "Robot Cow Milk" goes to support a non-profit tutoring and writing center.


This is the kind of thing that I could SO get behind. We need more coolness like this in the world.

Wow

Here is a trailer for a film I had heard NOTHING about called The Fall. It looks good. DAMN good. Take a peek:




This is by the director of The Cell, which was beautiful to look at but not a great story. Then again, I love eye candy. And thanks to the internets, I learned that the music in the trailer is from Beethoven's 7th symphony. My man Ludwig was one hell of a composer.

What have I done?

I have spoken before about how I am not to be left unsupervised for any reason. This is double so any time I am near shiny objects. So I feel completely comfortable blaming my lovely wife for this entire fiasco. Oh sure , she had nothing to do with it in any direct way. But if I blame myself I'll just stress out and we all know that stress is bad for you, right?

And it's not like I could have resisted the siren-like call even if I HAD any kind of self control (which I do not). Can I be blamed for letting my eyes rest upon the shapely, sexy form that was before me? Could any man have remained faithful. NO I say. There are carnal urges, and they must be sated.

So... I bought and iphone.

It was not something I needed to do. I have a phone and it mostly works. At one time I thought it was powerful and even a little sexy (in a Bill Gates kind of way). The Treo 650 had email, could surf the internet, had a color screen, ran the Palm OS and could sync with my PC. It seemed like the right thing to get. It was pricey. But I told myself that it would allow me to stay in contact while on the road. Indeed, the treo was very handy, mostly as an email device. It saved me and my clients several times when things went wrong with their websites. There were times when using only my phone I corrected settings on a clients website while sitting in a tent in the middle of nowhere during a rainstorm. But lately the spark had gone out of the relationship. It crashed on occasion. I expect this from my PC, but my phone? Yes it ran the Palm OS, but we all know that that like investing in a dodo farm.

The browser was functional but finicky. The notes feature just stopped working. The sync often created duplicate entries in outlook. It was a qwerty keyboard but my fingers are not the nimble digits of a piano player but the meaty paws of a wookie.

I thought it was time my phone and I started seeing other people.

The experience of getting the phone at an AT&T store was more pleasant than I had imagined or read about. It wasn't a paradise with 72 virgins and streams of wine, but it wasn't a red hot poker up the ass either. The young man (I think his name was Bark, or Brad or something) answered my questions. He had an iphone, as did 2 of the other 3 sales people. Two had jailbroken them (hacked them to run unofficial applications).

Then I learned that switching to the iphone with a data plan would actually be $20 a month cheaper than my current plan. Well, hell. In a year it would half-way pay for itself. (This is what passes for rational though in a tech fevered mind).

I bought it and took it home.

Setting up the Treo had been fun in the same way that having someone poke you in the eye is fun. The basic setup was simple enough, but setting up the email failed. I went online and finally tracked down an obscure tech document with clues on how to get email working. It turns out this information had actually be printed up by the helpful sales guy and stuffed in the bag with the phone when I bought the Treo, but AT&T had given me something like 50 pieces of paper with the phone. Manuals, promotions, recipie books, addendum's firmware update info.

When I took the iphone out, I plugged in the dock and stuck the phone in it.

I went through a setup form. It synced my contacts and itunes playlists. I went outside to get signal and in a minute it was activated. My sole interaction was to enter a password for my email and that was it. It just worked. I played with it. Tweaked it. Added a few widgets, moved some icons around on its desktop. All of it intuitively. I never looked at the skinny users guide.

As a former usability person all I can say is that this is simply the best designed device around. Although there is a volume rocker switch on the side and a sleep button on top, they aren't needed. It essentially has ONE button. That's it.

Jacob Neilson masturbates to his iphone.
(and if anyone else other than Ed get that joke, I'm impressed)

Since I try not to use cell phones while driving there have been times that I've needed Rossana to call someone or try to check directions or whatever. This was never a pleasant experience. First you had to push the center button, then tap the screen to unlock it. The either push the phone button or the menu button. You could then use the rocker button to select 'contacts' or push the on screen icon for the virtual keypad. And this was just the phone! It's easy enough if you are comfortable with tech but Rossana eyes tech the way I eye shellfish, as an evil entity that is lying in wait to attack me.

I handed Rossana the phone and had her push its single button. From there, everything else was pretty much self explanatory. Typing on the virtual keyboard takes some getting used to. But it's no slower than the pinheads that the treo had. She smiled.

I snapped a pic of the box and emailed it to my brother. He and I have discussed the iphone back and forth for a while. It's strange that he, who used a Mac for many years is now very attached to a Windows mobile phone. I played with it at his wedding and it is a great phone. It has a slide out keyboard and GPS. It's very nice and I was tempted by it.

But in the end I went for the iphone. After the clunky, asymmetrical block of the Treo I could not resist the sexy black buttonless slab. This is not to say that it is perfect. It has flaws. The most obvious is the fact that standard headphone jacks don't work without an adapter ($5). Flash isn't natively supported. It doesn't have GPS (although it can get a rough fix on your position) and it's not 3G which means it's not as fast when surfing the wb (although it can use wifi, which is sweet). My brother told me I would feel the fool once Apple releases a 3G version this summer. Perhaps. Or I may just sell it on ebay for a profit. This thing is in high demand around the world. Even the sales kid at the store told me that I would be better off ebaying it if I didn't like it than returning it for a 10% restocking fee.

Of course, now that I have it. I have to pay for it. This means I need to clear out my closet. The first two things that have to go are the Treo and my 40 gig ipod. Both have served me well. I used the Treo to Blog about volunteering in New Orleans and travelling through Egypt. The ipod has kept us awake during long drives to shows with audio books from the library. Both work great. The treo's memo function is wonky, but I'm sure resetting it to factory setting will take care of that. I replaced the ipod battery with a new one only five months ago. It's better than the original. If anyone is interested in either drop me a line or leave a comment. I'll give it a week before they go on ebay along with some other stuff.

I'm off to Samarkand..

Actually... I'm not. But if I WAS going to Samarkand or Timbuktu I would want to use this luggage.


It is achingly beautiful, handcrafted and so pricey that by the time I got the luggage I couldn't afford to go to on a day trip to Windsor and play the Nickel slots. They make a great satchel case as well. Still too expensive. Ah... some day...

Obey the Kitteh

The glorious revolution and it's leader will crush the running dogs of the west.



And then play with the toy mousy and take a nap. Get the shirts and schwag here, (they also have dog stuff too, if you're into that sort of thing.