Well the WRX is home! I didn’t do as well as I had hoped on financing (6.9%) but I did pretty well on the price (slightly over invoice, although they kept telling me that I did better than that). I’ll throw some pictures up online (and modify the toys page to make room for the 3rd in the garage).
Archive for March, 2005
New site design
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005
I finally got off my ass and reworked my website (or at least started to.) I’m going to try and migrate the rest of my site over to this format in the next couple of days. Then I might migrate my old data into this blogger (although I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep using Bogger.)
Maturity, I have it not.
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005
At some point yesterday during our meeting with our DJ the subject of age came up. I told Kurt (the DJ) that I was 32 which surprised him a bit. I’ve always felt younger than I am, and I think that’s about my actions and not the way I look (and I think people get an impression of me more so from my actions than the way i look). The bottom line is that I’m immature.
I don’t really see this as a huge problem, although to really turn it to an advantage I’d have to be more daring and funnier than I am. I kind of enjoy acting like a 25 year old (or younger), I just have to watch out that I don’t end up being “that old guy” that hangs out at the bars with all the 20-something year olds.
Damn Macs
Monday, March 28th, 2005
Cara complained to me Monday morning on her way out of MA to meet me that “my computer doesn’t work.” Of course this usually means something simple, something is slightly out of wack and just needs a subtle convincing to get things back in shape.
I pulled the laptop out of the case and immediately smelled ozone, that and the computer was warm/hot. I hit the battery button and I got a single LED which means that there’s not much juice in the battery. Not a problem, maybe the machine didn’t go to sleep properly (bound to happen). I figured, probably the Power Management Unit. After a couple control-option-command-power button restarts I got the bootup window, well for a moment.
The screen goes on the fritz and I get fun static. Uh oh… looks like bad logic board (well video on the logic board). I know about the bad logic board issue because MY iBook suffered from the same issue (and was covered by an Apple recall). So I quickly check the Apple site to see the status of the recall (they keep extending the coverage date), to find out that coverage ended March 18 (a mere 10 days ago).
All hope isn’t lost, but we’ll have to see what Apple says when I take a trip over to the Apple Store tomorrow.
Drinking is a dangerous sport
Saturday, March 26th, 2005
I drank a tad too much last night (polished off 1/2 a case of Bass and two car bombs). Honestly it was a great night, I was able to hang out with some of the people that I like the most in this world (true that Cara and a few others weren’t there). Ben was up from DC and John and Sarah drove to Manchester from Mass.
I have this habit of pissing people off without intending to. Usually alcohol is involved (but not always). Ben told me that I made a drunken commit about him “never getting a girlfriend ever again” at John’s bachelor party about a year ago. I don’t remember this, but I wouldn’t put it past me. As you can imagine this struck a nerve which affected Ben’s relationship with me for a while (which probably could have been repaired earlier if I had a clue). This is certainly further proof that I can be a complete idiot from time to time, and I can only hope that I can change this as I get older. On the up side Ben has forgiven (he now has a nice woman that he’s been dating for quite a while), and it seems like it’s water under the bridge.
Which brings me back to last night. I think things broke up around midnight, I drank a couple glasses of water and hung out for a while and hit the sack. I think my biggest mistake is the fact that I have nothing to eat in the house (I’ve been putting off shopping for as long as possible), so my stomach isn’t happy with me.
Home again… home again…
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
So Nigel the ferret is home. Yes, we’re calling him Nigel. Cara said “I’ll let you name him.” Which is of course a mistake because I think life should be funny. Pet names are difficult because the rules are different from human names. I mean no one would bat an eye at “Smokey” or “Buttons” for a pet (but I doubt those names would go over very well if it was your kid). So my first idea for the ferret’s name was Kevin. My second was Eric, I figured if python can name a bee Eric I could name a ferret Eric. Of course Cara then suggested Nigel which I really don’t think could be trumped.
As a side note, I ran across The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager which is a pretty cool Java Applet that allows you to look through the popularity of various names from 1900-2000.
A list of all my previous animal names:
- Tyrone (shoelaces)
- Morris
- Thompson
- TinTin
- Trillian
- Dante
- Nigel
Weekend shopping, ferrets and cars
Monday, March 21st, 2005
I received a phone call Friday afternoon from Cara. One of the few concerns I have about Cara and I is the situation where there is a sick animal under her care that is “savable” but the owners don’t want to pay to save the animal. Usually the owners are willing to give up the animal (and the responsibility,) in these cases as long as someone is willing to take the animal. That’s where the rub is (or at least could be), how do you let an animal die because of money? Especially if the animal is otherwise healthy. Cara and I have covered this ground pretty well, and we both agree that there is a line that needs to be drawn.
So anyway, she called me on Friday afternoon. There was a young ferret that the owners were going to euthanize because they didn’t want to pay for a fairly simple surgery. I don’t know if she was expecting me to say “no” or not, but I didn’t. I figured that if she’s going to take in a stray that this was as good of a cause as any. Of course I didn’t say “yes” either, I left it up to her. It’s probably not the best time to get another pet, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable either (and I really didn’t have a valid reason for saying “no”).
The ferret was going to stay in the hospital all weekend anyway, so Cara came to CT and we spent another weekend shopping, well actually, browsing. I think the only things we actually bought were a couple gifts and some marshmallow Peeps. We did a combination of car shopping, pet store shopping and registry shopping, and by the end of the weekend we were both pretty exhausted.
The Jeep just ain’t cuttin’ it
Friday, March 18th, 2005
I’ve finally decided that I’m going to relieve the Jeep from “daily driver” status. It’s clocked 115,000 miles (75k of those are mine), and although I honestly think that it will go another 100k it’s gotten to the point that it needs some TLC and a watchful eye (and the errant electrical gremlins will begin rearing their ugly heads when it starts getting warmer again.)
So I’ve started making a list of potential replacements. My goals are to buy something sedanish (4 doors), sporty (so probably not the base model of something), reliable and good in poor weather. My initial list consists of:
Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V
Nissan Altima 3.5
Mazda 3 (4 door s)
Mazda 6
Toyota Matrix
Subaru Impreza WRX
I grabbed online access to Consumer Reports today and checked out all of the above. I was a tad disappointed that the Sentra doesn’t rate very well over the long term, although I think honestly I just wanted an excuse to drop it off the list. The Mazda 3 is the least expensive on the list (just a hair under $20k), but I’m leaning toward the Impreza (all wheel drive and some more balls, and CR gives it very high marks).
Good designers gone bad
Sunday, March 13th, 2005
I recently visited an ex-coworker’s website and was startled to see… or more to the point hear what he had put online. Music, that bane of the web, came bellowing out of my computer speakers when I reached the (newly redesigned) home page. I can’t tell you how this annoys me and saddens me at the same time. His job (at least as far as I still know,) is web related which means he really should know better. So I wonder, what the hell happened?
Now as far as the music choice is concerned, it’s not unpleasent (and knowing him, it’s probably something that he actually recorded). That said, it’s still music… on the home page. Of course then there is the design of the page, which is decent enough, but really doesn’t show much growth (it looks pretty much like everything he’s done in the last five years). This also saddens me and reinforces my belief that his employeer provides a stagnate creative atmosphere.
The issue is that he’s probably become like everyone else in the department, happy to work there until they retire. I guess there is nothing wrong with that, but I guess I just wanted more. That said, I know I don’t have “more” now, but at least there is the potential for change.
New ForeSite web
Saturday, March 12th, 2005
After plugging away for about a month on ForeSite’s website I finally put a new version online on Friday. As part of this project I started developing a pretty cool plug-in system that will allow me to add capabilities to other sites fairly effortlessly. The hardest part was trying to make all the user updated sections conform to XHTML standards. Check it out at www.ForeSiteTech.com.
Valid XHTML
Friday, March 4th, 2005
So I figured that I should try to be valid in my CSS and XHTML from the start with this site, so I spent some time this morning working on validation. At first I thought I found a blogger error, but it was instead an error in the template I copied (from them). The good news is that my code validated pretty easily. My next task might be to re-create the template without using tables.
Upgrades everywhere!
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
I just took a look at HostRocket’s shared hosting costs, and realized that I’ve been paying way to much for too little to host DrieStone.com (my professional site.) So I “upgraded” to 3 domain names, 3Gig of space and a bunch of other cool stuff, all for $1 more a month than what I was paying.
So now I have to decide what gets hosted there. I think I’m going to move DrieStone.net over there and maybe BuddyWish (which may be enough incentive for me to finish something up.)
CSS and valid web development
Tuesday, March 1st, 2005
There are so many technologies in existence for a variety of things in the computer world. I think everyone like the power of choice, but it does tend to be a bit oppressive too. Don’t get me wrong, this is not unique to the computing industry, I think every industry has some form of this.
The problem is standards, and as a professional what do you support? Take for instance, the great divide Microsoft vs. the rest of the world. Although one could learn both developers rarely do. It is better to concentrate on one discipline and become as skilled as possible without being forced to dilute your time and knowledge with basically a duplication of effort.
This, of course, does potentially put you at a disadvantage. Invariably someone will want the skill set that you don’t have (whether it’s a new job or a particular client.) I personally think going the non-Microsoft direction is safer since statistics show that most of the web world is non-Windows based (we’re talking servers here, not desktops.)
So I admit that I’ve always been a little slow to explore new technologies when it comes to development, and I still don’t know many older technologies. Which gets me to my point: Cascading Style Sheets. For years I’ve used CSS in only the most basic way, as a low level template system. It is one of those doors that I’ve never really opened fully, until now.
The problem is, traditional web design is very intolerant. It flies in the face of the purpose of the web (to present information.) I admit that I’m a horrible offender. I use (one might say overuse) tables to align and position things on the screen to look right. Although at it’s core this isn’t some big social mistake (humans are very visual so a good looking website IS important,) CSS allows us to separate content from the code (or more to the point, combine code and content in an effective manner.) Not to mention, proper CSS and XHTML code means that the pages (should) work on any compliant browser (truly browser independent.)
So, I am expanding my CSS knowledge, a good technology (and something I should have learned to properly wield years ago.)