In my effort to procrastinate doing the things that will improve my life, I’ve been working on improving Shoshanah’s.  Specifically, her car.  She despises doing anything to maintain her car with a kind of weird passion, so it falls to me.  For example, she’d been bugging me to replace the wiper blades on it so her old ones joined a few dozen others in the trashcan outside the auto parts store.  Plus, I had found replacement gas lifts for her PT Cruiser ($55 for the pair, shipped); the hatch started drifting down and whanging us on the head from time to time.  So I added my sweat to the blood and tears this had cost us (however did I live without this Makita cordless impact driver?!  I’ve needed it so many times now) and now the hatch drifts gracefully up with a little nudge, and stays there, like it did when we got it.  Sweet.

Now here’s the tough one.  Her amplifier.  The power amp under the driver’s seat has caught a bit of abuse in seven years and the right channels for both pairs of speakers were having problems.  Seems the posts from the RCA connectors sheared off inside the receptacles.  I managed to fish one out with a pair of pliers but the other one is way in there.

So being me, I took the thing apart.  I was hoping to poke the post out from behind but the connector is buried.  To slide the mainboard out turned out to be incredibly involved as this Arc Audio Class D amp consists of maybe 30 amplifier IC’s pasted to long heatsink rails with thermal grease and as many black metal retaining clips.  So I let my son remove the clips and I loosened the IC’s from their greasy seal and eventually, after finding a few more screws that were required (and removing a few screws that really didn’t need removing), I slid the mainboard out.  A bittersweet victory because I know that now I’m going to have to run to Fry’s to get more thermal grease — the little tube I have ain’t gonna cut it — and grease and clip and screw it all back together.  Not to mention rebuilding the RCA connectors without losing much wire — there’s a minimum of play to work with and it might end up being a splice job — and I’ll have to replace a fuse I think because (ahem) the hot brushed the case when I was deinstalling it.

And it turns out that’s not going to be enough. I figured I needed to take a break before desoldering the six points holding the connector block in place.  So I sat and had a think, and I think that my best bet is to solder something to the errant post and yank it out when the solder dries.  It might melt the connector interior plastic a bit, which is why I had initially dismissed the idea, but I keep getting into riskier territory with this $350 amp and this is starting to sound safer.

The irritating thing is that I could have taken that approach without even cracking the case.

I’ve resolved to eat my way through our the freezer in the garage. This has been a big bone of contention between my wife and I. She’s convinced anything over about 3 months old in the freezer is “freezerburnt and nasty” and I have a difficult time getting her to prepare it. We end up throwing a lot of stuff away and it makes me insane.

So, between my new (ahem) flexibility in schedule and the need to conserve money, I’ve begun to cook it myself. Starting with breakfasts, mostly. I have a lot to learn. Like — I have to plan ahead! Stuff has to thaw. That’s why, yesterday morning, I ended up cooking those kinda crummy meatless sausages; they don’t need to thaw. But hey — they got et. Check! I tried to cook eggs at the same time. I’m not really ready for that; it’s kind of hectic and I didn’t get to give the eggs the loving attention I usually like to — lots of fussing and adding spices etc. — but I got it done and we both ate it, it was OK.

Today I got the mango sausages from Trader Joe’s, which went considerably better. I didn’t try to cook them at the same time as anything. Later I cooked an egg and toasted an english muffin and added a slice of Havarti cheese and made myself a breakfast muffin.

Shosh identified the trend and got me some things I’ll need at the grocery store, which was pretty nice. But I’m going through a lot of pans now so I kind of have to wash them right away since we don’t run the dishwasher that often. The sucky part is that it’s easy for me to get distracted and forget to come back and do so after everything’s cool enough.

Distracted, for example, by my MP3 server.

I’m using it more often too, now; it’s on an Iomega Home Media Network Drive which can serve music via DLNA and iTunes, so in theory my computers, my living room receiver (an Onkyo TX-NR906), and even my TV (!) (an Samsung LN40B650 1080p LCD) can play music from it directly. And during my time off in October I used features in my Airport Express and my receiver, allowing me to route iTunes output to the living room stereo and, by extension, the speakers in my wife’s studio (I LOVE finally using the just-in-case wiring I put into my walls during the remodel). I’m approaching nerdvana, right?

Well, there was one hitch.The server had indexed like 80,000 songs, so whenever I chose that server it would take like FOUR minutes (literally) to load the library. And I quickly discovered that you can’t make playlists from shared servers. (@%$^$%*) Finally, a problem I’ve been dreading solving for a long time:

Duplicates!
My main folder has a lot of dupes from accidentally reripping, or consolidating libraries or whatever. Plus, that server hosts all my backups from various retired machines, iPods and (ahem) other peoples’ collections. (Like, 290GB worth!) So when I hit that server I’d have like 5 copies of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones or whatever and each song would play 5 times in a row. Combined with the lack of playlisting, there was really nothing for it but to consolidate those libraries.

I guess I kept waiting for the software that would go by ID3 tag and neatly consolidate my libraries for me and eliminate duplicates. I tried a few Windows products that all sucked, and I didn’t see anything promising on the Mac. So I copied the server to a USB drive and sat and consolidated everything more or less by brute force. It sucked, and took forever. But I was really surprised at how much music I have, stuff I didn’t even know I had. Kind of exciting, actually.By the time I had finished I was down to 180GB. I suspect there are plenty more duplicates, so I’m going to go through it again, maybe using some of the organizational features in iTunes itself. But I’m already in vastly better shape.

I really like that I’m able to make music a part of my life again. It kind of fell by the wayside.

Again with the not going back to sleep after dropping Grey off.  What a good boy am I.  I came back and got to work, working the networks (of people) a bit.  I got frustrated because I have so many collections of contact information with a mix of stale data.  I guess I should sign up for Plaxo or something but I simply resolved to gather all that data in one place — my Mac Address Book.  I liked that you can sync it into the cloud with MobileMe, and subsequently onto my iPhone.  Nice backup, nice accessibility, nice synchronization.

I had recently, at long last, found the data cable for my old Samsung phone so i could suck all the contacts off of it.  So I finally sat down and consolidated all that stuff once and for all.  Up to the cloud it went, down to my phone it didn’t.  I have noidea why.  MobileMe could find my phone via GPS, and the options were all turned on, and I tried syncing from the system prefs and updating from the MobileMe web site. No dice.

And when I headed downtown to conduct some business at the Adobe offices, the guy I called had left his cel phone in his trunk.  So I was stuck in the lobby, still smarting from the mild humiliation of the guy at the parking garage booth calling his manager to see if it was OK to let me in the building, and I could not find anyone in my phone list who was actually in the building at the time.  They were in the master phonelist in MobileMe, but Apple does not allow you to log into that site from the iPhone, insisting resolutely that there is no need as everything is synchronized.

I was there in the lobby for almost 40 minutes before I managed to get upstairs.

On the bright side I saw a buddy from another product team who said there were “rumblings” about needing some extra help on a product I like and know very well, so that could be cool.  I guess that’s why the universe stuck me in that lobby for all that time.

After Adobe I went to Fry’s to return a barbequeued USB hub.  I wonder if plugging all those drives into it fried it?  In any case I got a different one that works very well.  While I was there I surveyed the computer training books aisle, rows of books with titles like “ASP.NET for Dummies,” and I was awestruck by all the stuff I don’t know.  I’m going to have to focus the scope of my retraining a little.

So I guess it was mostly a down day.  Not without its highlights, but it was the first really hard day emotionally for me since the day I got sacked.

All right, enough’s enough.  I have, gathered before me, close to SEVEN  TERABYTES of external hard drives and NAS network drives.  Each individual drive is partitioned in various ways for various reasons; needed a FAT volume for to share with Windows machines, or NTFS for very large files for Windows, or formatted for whatever this Linksys NAS wants to use, or trying to keep peoples’ backups on their own partitions, or whatever.  But in the end that really hasn’t worked out well for me, and my needs have changed.  Windows is now a footnote in my home, and the main family machine has a terabyte inside and Time Machine requires more than that to store old versions of things.  And I’m getting rid of a lot of stray video files that I won’t be needing any more.

Right now what I want is a way to aggregate many of these individual drives into one jumbo volume, but not seeing a good consumer option for this (hey Apple, you listening?  I’ve got a Time Capsule with a USB hub, any chance that someday you could pool my storage instead of leaving me with a bunch of different volumes?) I’m just trying to repartition each volume as big as I can get it. To do this, I have to move a lot of data off of the existing partitions, then reformat.  Resizing isn’t usually an option for various reasons.

And here’s the thing that kills me. A 500GB backup of my wife’s data takes an amazingly long time to copy!  When I had everything going through a powered USB hub, it said it was going to take 19 hours just going from one partition to another on the same drive, and a whopping 30 hours going to a separate drive through the hub.  So I got the hub out of the picture and connected the drives in question directly to USB on this early-model Core 2 Duo MacBook.  That cut it down by 35%, back to 19 hours.  Sheesh.

When complaining about the bloat of Adobe’s applications (ha!  I get to say that now) there was always some butthead in the meeting who says “big drives are cheap.”  Well, that may be but it still takes a damn long time to move around and back up that data.  And now I don’t have any machines that support eSATA or ePCIe (Hello, forward-thinking Apple?) I’m stuck with at best FireWire 800, but mostly USB.  And it sucks!  This consolidation process is going to take days!

On the bright side I don’t have to be around for much of this  I can walk away and come back the next day. But the way my wife’s computer has been behaving and since I have now blown away my backup of MY main machine I’m feeling a bit paranoid.  I’d like to get this all done, stuff the servers back in the wiring closet, point Time Machine to those volumes and breathe a little easier.

Fun Time Machine fact:  If you have a folder in the Users directory that is not an actual user account on the system, Time Machine doesn’t back that up.  Fortunately I noticed this after restoring the wife’s system and before blowing away her original partition, so I still had a copy.  But it was a weird feeling for a minute. “I don’t get it.  I restored her system to a new drive and there’s 30GB missing. How am I ever going to figure out what didn’t get restored?”  Then I figured out that it was the whole Hannah Grey folder that I stuck in Users even though there was no corresponding account.  That would have been a MASSIVE bummer — all of Shosh’s business docs, database, images, artwork from her design team, product photos, branding assets… None of that was being backed up and if her drive had truly died it would have been… awkward. Eeep!

Today was spent mostly wrestling with technical problems in the computers at the house, especially Shoshanah’s iMac which has been kernel-panicking routinely.  I wiped the internal drive, reinstalled Snow Leopard and copied the data from a backup on an external drive.  It SEEMS to be stable now but we’ll see.

I’m sure glad for Time Machine, though restoring a half terabyte over a network took 12 hours when I did it Friday, and connected via USB it still took like 5 hours.  >whew!<  But now Time Machine is complaining that my server volume isn’t big enough.  I think it no longer recognizes what’s already there?  Not sure.  More housecleaning to do.

I upgraded the firmware in my Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive to v1.0.40 and mostly it’s a step backward. The media shows up in iTunes but with 57,000-odd files it takes four minutes for the list to appear.  There are many duplicates so I cn’t usually just hit Play, and I can’t manage the duplicates from within iTunes on a shared server.  And I can’t make playlists either.  So in the end: Not useful.  In the meantime the permissions control now works backwards: Each share point is set to “Everyone” by default, and there’s a list of users you grant access to — which is weird.  And when you choose a user, it gets set to “Secure”, which makes sense, but then the list of users disappears, which does not.  But it doesn’t matter because now all my Macs only see a “backup” share and none of the other shares regardless of setting or how they’re connected.  If I log in it offers another share named for the user but that mostly can’t be accessed when you click on it.  The BitTorrent feature doesn’t work at all and according to the user forums it never has.  They added a new feature with a new release for automatically resizing photos or some shit but pulled it because that feature didn’t work right — the few who got to it in time were outraged that it didn’t fix the torrent thing.  The ftp server feature thinks it’s working but the connection keeps being refused.  I’ve routed all inbound ftp requests to the server in my firewall.  Still could be a configuration issue, but as upgrade features go I’m 0 for 5.  Monday I’ll try to figure out how to downgrade the firmware.

I cleaned up the kitchen Mac of bloat and got it backed up; it’s sort of my development machine for the moment, with all my Web development, Flex Builder and so on on it.  I need to get that on a separate machine since it’s supposed to be a family machine.  I’ll do that when I get the office sorted out.

I’m plowing through various external drives and consolidating data.  I’ve deleted hundreds of gigabytes of Adobe stuff, chiefly test movies.  That felt pretty good.  Bummer for my friends still at Adobe but that’s the way it goes.  They can make more test movies I’m sure.  I have a lot of partitions that aren’t the right size or format for what I need them to be so I have to keep moving data around so that I can wipe the drives.  The ones where I used a Master Boot Record can’t be resized or anything, got to start fresh.  Basically trying to wrangle my backup and archive space has been feeling like scooping up mercury.  But I’ll get there.

I’m experimenting with the beta of Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst.  Right now I’m distracted by FB4’s support for PHP, that’s pretty fun.  I’m making a Flex-based admin browser for osCommerce.  I’ll let you know how it goes.   I think an admin console for osCommerce might be a nice portfolio piece.

I got DreamWeaver set up to edit all of the sites I’m managing. Synchronizing took a long time mostly because of all the copies of the HannahGrey server I have — ZenCart versions, staging versions, backup versions etc.

I also sucked down all the content from a hosting service I don’t use any more.  Now I think I can kill it, which will save $100 a year.  Not much but hey it’s something.

Hopefully this is the most boring blog post I will ever write.  And the most boring weekend I will ever have.

Day 3 continued in the same vein — get up, get kid to school, and go to work getting work.

The night before I was considering how to jumpstart my Photoshop and Lightroom teaching opportunities.  I was a bit rueful that I had lost my Acrobat Connect Pro account with my Adobe job; it has a REALLY cool system for doing online training.  I even looked into paying for it out of pocket.  But it’s like $55 a month and that version doesn’t appear to have some of the features I wanted, like being able to create breakout sessions and stuff.  The one that does, they don’t even quote a price, you have to talk to Adobe.

So I created an Acrobat.com account and tried out their ConnectNow module with a friend in a faraway land.  It’s not as slick as Connect Pro but I think it will work.  The 2-way webcam/voice chat thing worked, cross-platform, and I was able to let her take over my computer and operate Photoshop.  There’s a little chat thingy and a whiteboard.  And to get more users it’s just $15/month.  So that’s pretty cool, I’ll probably start doing that pretty soon.

Also, I take back the mean things I said about Adobe’s chosen outplacement service.  It’s more elaborate than it seemed at first blush; I had just expected them to be a kind of employment agency, which they aren’t.  They do, however, give you access to something similar called JobScout. The first thing I got enthused about was was the 2½ months of technical and business training at skillsoft.com.  (I also found out that if you start in December you get another 2 weeks.)

I’d prefer Lynda.com (or Total Training, but they’re more exclusively about creative apps), since skillsoft.com is so Microsoft-centric.  But it’s still pretty cool, and the business stuff might be useful if I can stomach it.  I’ll probably try to suck that site dry.  I called the company to suss out how much SkillSoft costs.  I never got an answer, but it’s definitely in the four figures per month. (The other two are $3-400 a YEAR.)

But the service comes with other stuff. I guess you can go there and get a little workspace to squat in; desk, computer, phones, printer, fax, whatever.  I’ve got most of that at home (except for the solitude), and if a company wants me to fax something ferchrissakes I’m not sure I want to work for them.  (Seriously, faxes?  Seemed like magic 25 years ago but come on…)  But they do have topic-specific experts who can help you find places to look for jobs, might be helpful, I don’t know.  And there’s training in a bunch of things like how to negotiate salary, can’t hurt, right?

And with the good news comes the bad.  It turns out that, although my title is “Technical Project Manager” I am not classified as a manager.  This is important because when it comes to layoffs there are four classifications: “Individual Contributor,” “Manager”, “Director” and “Vice President”.  This classification determines much of your package — the base severance (in months) and the “service recognition” maximum.  A VP who has been around for 10 years and gets sacked gets 10 months on top of his base severance.  But the maximum for directors is I think 5, and for managers is 2.  For individual contributors it’s 1.  In other words, as an individual contributor, my ten years gets me the same one month that some one-yer newbie gets.  But wait, there’s more!  The manager also gets 2½ months as a base severance, to my 1½.

Because I don’t happen to have any direct reports at this moment I’m in the second-from-the-bottom tier for severance, despite my ten years and the title and the fact that I’ve had direct reports in the past.

I Think I’m Trying to Kill Myself

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

I have made so many mistakes with so many mysterious chemicals today that I’m just walking around the kitchen in this painter’s respirator.

I keep doing things like heating up copper without removing the plastic backing. That iron there? Just ruined it. Tried to do an acetone/heat transfer off of coated stock, and the back of the paper had an invisible plastic coating on it that fused to the iron. I got it off as best I could but this iron will now smell terrible for eternity.

And then there’s the etchant — 2 parts muriatic acid (pool acid) to one part hydrogen peroxide. I tried to be nice and neutralize it afterwards with a bunch of baking soda but that caused it to bubble and sizzle and emit a suspicious gas.

Finally there’s the patination solution, this wicked Griffith stuff — who knows what’s happening when that gets warm.

Sheesh.

Note the open window. Can I just say that it’s damned cold outside today?

Poladroid - Click it so see the gritty details

Originally uploaded by Tymcode
In the lower left is my original picture. I dragged it into a little Mac application called Poladroid a couple of times, and this is what I got.

What this app does is crop your picture to square, frame it in a Polaroid frame, add vignetting, add some random dust, and transform the color in Polaroid-like ways.

The first thing it does is pop out a little mini-polaroid that is the dull brown we know and love. And then it actuallymakes you wait for it to develop! Slowly.

If you turn the Stripe on in the preferences, it will add a fingerprint on the photo, the paper, or both, in random positions. It also randomizes the color effects, as you can see at the lower right from another one I got from the same picture.

Extra fun fact — if you put an alias to Poladroid in the Lightroom Export Actions folder, you can generate a Poladroid picture directly from Lightroom. (If you want me to explain that in detail, comment or email. you can do the same trick with Flickr Uploadr.)

Admit it — you love it.

Thanks to galadarling for bringing this fun little application to my attention.

This woman from Quebec known here and there as La Flaneuse has singlehandedly revived my interest in graphic design. I found her on flickr as copyright depuis 1965, I think for her photography. But the most recent sets of images she has posted has caused me to re-evaluate the relationship between image processing and graphic layout.

Le Temps de Vivre and Le Trou Noir are magnificently elegant harmonies of composition and Photoshop processing. I’ve been looking at the way she uses her palette and the way she washes images in elegant decay to create a tranquil, focused whole, where each would be significantly less interesting and effective without the other.

She’s also revived my interest in typography by her restrained, impactful use of face and whitespace, and even image processing that I forget to do on the text itself. Time to figure out smart filters on type layers in Photoshop…

So I’m just going to confess it right now — just about everything I do in Photoshop for at least a while is probably going to be a shameless aping of this mysterious designer.
Update: Her blog is now at téte de caboche.

First off, I should disclose that I used to operate a hybrid digital/analog studio.  I loved the immediacy of my analog console and I think it really helped my creative flow to not have to page through menus.

I adore the Breeders, and I’m thrilled that they’re coming out with a new record.  The thing that kills me, is that it’s a record! There’s a notion here about “All Wave” recording, wherein none of the process uses digital anything.  I’ll have to wait until I hear the album to decide if this is a good thing or not, but right now I’m a little ambivalent.  I think for the Breeders it’s appropriate, but hell, for them, it would be appropriate to sell an album they recorded live into a boombox using its built-in condenser mic.  Their music doesn’t need much to become what they wanted it to be, and I can totally understand why they’re resistant to the idea of assembling a song by digital microsurgery.

But I guess the question for me is this: Why eliminate digital entirely from the chain?  What does it add that, say, a live recording into a DAT wouldn’t?  I know there are audiophiles who have their answer, which probably involves phrases like “it really opens up the soundstage.”

But if it’s going to be consumed digitally, which will be the case for all but about thirty or forty people, then what’s the upside?

Recording in analog, sure.  Mixing in analog, I’m a big fan.  Some of my favorite mastering gear is analog too, so I can even get behind that.  But dogmatically eliminating all digital anything throughout seems to me to be a gimmicky affectation.

I admit this post is premature, as I haven’t heard the recording yet, but it doesn’t matter.  I have a lot of equipment for enjoying analog media — a USB turntable, cassette decks and so on.  But my receiver immediately digitizes everything anyway, so at this point it would be a major pain in the ass for me to listen to this record the way it was meant to be listened to, in a pure analog mode, end to end.  And that is not the way I listen to music — it’s on my iPod or in my car or wherever.  And it’s got to work wherever I am, so I’m just going to digitize it anyway.