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Sunday, January 30, 2005

 
11:53 PM: not dead yet! [#] [0]

well, that's weird. the fix was working and now it's not. so eliot still loses its internet connection when it goes to sleep. grrr.

yesterday sven & i went to our second drawing class and then tried the hedge house for lunch, which i had unreasonably high hopes for because it was next to pix, which i adore. alas, hedge house is only wildly adequate but has pretensions for more. afterwards, we went to goodwill for zombie outfits so we could be extras in flesh of my flesh, which kept us in a chilly deserted mental institution for 9 hours. as a result, my cough from earlier this month has returned full force. but the zombies did scare the heck out of some teenage trespassers, some of whom freaked and called the cops.

tonight i went to an oregon symphony concert (tickets kindly provided by doug, whose son is unfortunately in the hospital for a while with RSV) and tried one of those starbucks "drinking chocolate"s just so i could stop wondering what they were like every time i saw one of their prolific ads. sven liked it, but i probably won't get one again.

Friday, January 28, 2005

 
10:20 AM: a well-deserved nap [#] [0]

i figured out that annoying "lose my internet connection when the laptop goes to sleep" issue in 10.3.7, the one that required a reboot every time! i'm using psu's cisco vpn client (3.7.2) so i can do remote access, and this solution totally works:

add UseLegacyIKEPort=0 to each profile (.pcf file) found in the /private/etc/CiscoSystemsVPNClient/Profiles/ directory.

that's it! and the sleep issues had nothing to do whether the vpn was even running or not, which is why it was so hard to figure out. eliot can finally sleep again!

in other upgrade news, confessor is now on 10.3, thanks to last night's mac salon where the temptation of delicious library was too strong for sven to ignore (thanks, michaelmas!). that upgrade has been the smoothest yet (*knock wood*): confessor can sleep without losing its connection, no kernel panics, and classic/quark still works (which implies maybe an archive/install might be in planet camino's future).

so i can finally see the end of all this crazy upgrading. i will be so relieved. i think i'll hold off a while on the tiger upgrade when it happens. maybe think about it in 2006.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

 
11:57 AM: gifts for me and my car [#] [0]

i received two boxes in the mail over two days:

1. terrilynn sent me the "flesh & spirit" piece i exhibited in the "outside the box" show right before i moved to portland. i forgot how neat that thing was. sven found the secret thing almost immediately.

2. i received two batches of magnetic poetry word for trixie, the last xmas present from sven. i will take her to the carwash and then clothe her in words again.

 
9:31 AM: thursday's child is going to make another call to capital one [#] [0]

it's thursday, and markalope rightly points out that i haven't even posted about artist's way yet. artist's way went really, really well, thank you. we got rob as a very-last-minute addition, so we had four people in the group. everyone listened politely through introductions and expectations, but the spark really happened during the art project, and i forgot how amazing that is when it happens. i'm doing the course with them though i'm not actually participating in the group, and i have yet to read the chapter myself (i've got to work on the timing of this with the heavy front-loaded schedule i've got), do any of the exercises, or set an artist date yet.

michael & i are watching 3rd season buffy again. we started at the beginning because i only started watching them with him (from california!) around season four. but we got sidetracked and i really haven't seen any of the faith/mayor episodes (even though as a villain i am quite fond of the mayor).

last night sven & i went to a copyright presentation hosted by portland community media which was unfortunately sort of scattered and the lawyer was unable to answer what i thought was a pretty direct question from a coherent audience member, even though she asked it three different times in three different ways. but it did make me realize (though he didn't actually this) that the only way to avoid copyright infringement (like pregnancy) is to not copy someone else's stuff. everything else is just a defense. and it gave me an idea: if we do the unconscious collective thing again, maybe we all pitch in $20 and use the money to talk to a lawyer when we have questions like what we should do about a project like the grashlycrumb tinies.

also of note: anything pre-1923 is public domain. keep your records of attempt to contact an estate. portlandia has copyright protection. set decoration could be actionable.

my bank lost another check. i sent it dec. 28 and it still hasn't posted. the last time this happened we cancelled the check, at which point it mysteriously cleared and we were both charged the fee. so i don't know what to do this time. and i still haven't received a letter from capital one confirming my account is closed, and when i checked my account online they've charged me another late fee. i've been battling this one since jan. 4. what's up with this?

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

 
2:39 PM: whoami [#] [0]

wondering who i am at psu? the alt text tells all.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

 
10:56 PM: new classes and edibles and studio bits [#] [0]

sven & i were slated to begin an "intro to drawing" class at the drawing studio that we've both been curious about last saturday, but there was the whole ice storm thing, which cancelled it (alas, not before we had already driven down the quiet icy streets to discover that). so it began again this saturday, and i don't know where it's going to go next, but this session left me with graphite all over my hands and cheek, and my fingers hurt from trying to make dark black marks. nothing representational yet; it was all about making marks and shapes.

then we went to jam on hawthorne because i have a chinook book coupon for it (thanks, michaelmas!) and i want to go to more new places this year. and i remember it from when i used to do poetry readings at cafe lena's when i didn't live here yet. jam is really quite good: it's hard to find a place that has excellent hashbrowns, much less a wrap that stays together and is still tasty. the acoustics & service are good even when it's packed, and of course their jams are very good, as well. it's the first local breakfasty place i've been to that i've thought, "oo! i'll come back!" (well, i liked cameo's, too, but it's awfully far away now that i don't live downtown anymore. :( ).

tomorrow is the first artist's way group for spring. eeeeee! that's what i'm preparing for right now. and sven's busy making a glorious mess in the studio so that i will have a flat file system for paper and art (and star lamps!). it's a little too close to the wire for my tastes, but i think it will be amazing when it's finished.

 
3:54 PM: camino update [#] [0]

so hal9000 is finally backed up! i think either 10.1.2 couldn't handle giant files like that, or getting rid of 30gb of space on camino's hard drive helped.

it looks like it was the zip100 drive that caused that horrible circle/slash crash (because all the other externals are behaving quite nicely, thank you), so i've downloaded new "drivers" (though iomega calls them iomegaware and makes it impossible for mac os x users to just download the drivers). so i'm waiting to see what happens next.

so the only thing -reaaaaaalllly- unhappy w/o a potential solution now is classic.

and yes, mph, i'm going to have to re-learn bash. *sighs*

Saturday, January 22, 2005

 
8:09 AM: a reason to wake up early [#] [0]

if you've never seen a rainbow at dawn, you don't know what you're missing. i certainly had no idea.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

 
6:15 PM: number 9, number 9 [#] [0]

oh, no! planet camino's 10.3 upgrade broke classic! when i attempt to start something that needs classic, it says "There is a problem with updating the Classic-specific files. Classic was unable to update its files in "System Folder" on "Planet Camino". even weirder, the damn thing can boot into os 9.2!

nooooooooooooooo!!!! sven has a bazillion quark files he still needs to access, using quark 4 in classic. his scanner, fortunately, now has an os 10 driver & application, so that's not an issue anymore. does anyone have any ideas? (other than "buy a new copy of quark!," please.)

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

 
11:59 PM: stormy weather [#] [0]

and can you believe how warm it was today? trixie said it was 63 degrees coming back from the mac meeting. you'd never know we had a freaking ice storm just a few days ago. and there was a spectacular sunset tonight, too.

btw, the whole itunes rendezvous sharing thing is really, really, really cool. unless the host computer crashes, which it did last night to my horror and dismay. i've never seen the circle-with-a-slash-through-it symbol upon boot before, and i hope i never. do. again. i was afraid it might be one of the firewire drives, but now i think it's either the old usb hub or one of the usb peripheral devices. more troubleshooting to commence tomorrow.

 
11:38 PM: living the artist's way [#] [0]

craigslist has changed my life again! because of an ad i posted in the "artists" section, someone from the multnomah athletic club (one of those places where a membership costs $4500 a YEAR to maintain -- if you can get in at all) contacted me to run an artist's way group for them in june. i met with them for the first time today. they're so enthusiastic about it that when the person who first contacted me found out i was in the office she ran up to hug me. because it's a summer session we've agreed to shorten it to 7 weeks instead of the usual 13, and they want it to run even if only a few people enroll, and they're not even charging their usual 20% overhead to members! so i'm very hopeful about this.

speaking of which, after a few weeks of thinking that neither my monday night or tuesday morning groups were going to make it, i now have three participants in my monday night group and a maybe (but really, proably not) for tuesday morning. i'm so excited!

that means this week is being spent (when not at work) making the studio ready, which really at this point is not very much work for me, but a lot of work now for sven, who has this amazing idea to create our own flatfile system and wants to implement it by monday. eep! and of course the really cool star lamps i've had for a year now but haven't had a place to put them. curse our tall studio ceilings!

while doing my part to put up curtainy things in the studio tonight, a decorative molding fell and socked me in the mouth. it split my lip so badly sven was initially afraid i'd need stitches. the studio refrigerator has no ice in it but it does have otter pops, so i used a "Louis Blue Raspberry" to numb my lip, which caused me to be unable to smile or say words with the letter "m" in them for the next couple of hours.

Sunday, January 16, 2005

 
8:22 PM: attack of the clones [#] [0]

i've just spent the weekend upgrading the studio computer, planet camino. the ultimate goal was to get it ready so that sven could get back to work on the lovecraft movie (due aug. 1!), but doing that required...

1. backing up all his data. which required ...
a. buying a new hard drive to hold all the backups, including his giant 200gb media drive (hal9000)
b. partitioning the new hard drive, something i had never done before
c. learning (and relearning and relearning, thanks, mph!) rsync
d. backing up, which in the case of hal9000, turned out to be full of crashes and hanging, so it -still- needs to get fully backed up (i'm hoping upgrading camino and freeing up 30gb of space on its hard drive will help the next round)
e. finding & installing new drivers for the firewire drives so the 10.3 install wouldn't destroy them as it has others

2. installing the os, which required...
a. the os disks (which we've had for, what, a year now? thanks, leopoldo!)
b. a conference chat between michaelmas, sven & mph
c. the first time camino didn't restart so i had to restart from cd, repair permissions & the disk
d. reinstalling after it still didn't restart
e. restarting after it hung again while trying to complete the stupid registration process
f. fixing a permissions issue that meant sven couldn't access any of his own files and many of his apps
h. moving sven's music to one of the external drive partitions so that he'd have more than 500mb of space left on his drive
h. re-configuring itunes
i. discovering that choosing "pause" during software update means you have to start all over again

3. getting it online, which required..
a. working out the options: would we get dsl at the studio, too? maybe use the studio dsl as our primary dsl and use camino as a server? would we get another airport hub? would airport express work? what about printing?
b. buying & installing an airport card, which for this computer meant we paid almost twice as much for an older card
c. buying, installing and configuring an airport xpress, which had its little moment of meh when sven's laptop confessor refused to print through it

all in all, this simple little project took over 6 months and several hundred dollars. and there's still some task cleanup, like a few more software updates, reconfiguring aliases between computers, fixing an odd system prefs pane, automating rsync backups and possibly getting another printer for the studio. but in the meantime, there are unspeakable horrors to animate.

Friday, January 14, 2005

 
9:21 PM: promise to be kind [#] [0]

this is really sven's post, because i'm sure he's got so much more to say about the mirah concert he attended last night (while i stayed home and attended to my gummy eyes and sore throat, which as an aside i called my doctor about this morning and was given a week's worth of antibiotics and told to call back monday if there was no change); he almost floated upstairs in sheer bliss when he got home. he loooooooooooooooooves mirah. :) but i'm writing because i am the beneficiary of sven's impulse to buy all available mirah albums, including the new one, which contains a particular song that made me cry so much i thought my heart would burst.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

 
2:30 PM: another thing to add to the series of unfortunate events [#] [0]

yesterday my eyes began itching and today i awoke with gummy eyes. ewwwwww! i haven't gone into work for a week because of the cold and i had a meeting at the mac (about artist's way!) this morning that i had to cancel to go to the doctor, who, believe it or not, says i have ALLERGIES rather than anything viral. which just seems crazy to me, but off she sent me with a 2-week supply of claritin and nasal spray and instructions to come back in a week (!) if the cold or the eyes don't seems to be getting any better.

in the meantime, i still have all the same symptoms i had before, so do i continue to stay home or do i try to get some work done? so far 2005 is all full of crises and meh. i hope the caramel apple and puppy truck tips over in our neighborhood soon; right now it seems like only the broccoli and racoon vans are stopping outside our house.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

 
1:27 PM: like morphine [#] [0]

it keeps coming in waves. now that we've struggled to the surface, past thanksgiving and christmas and new year's, we're sinking into the next little tsunamis: the heaviest portion of my job and sven's dad's memorial service, which is tomorrow (!) afternoon. his mom gets here early this evening and his brother & niece get here late tonight; we'll have company through saturday. sven's been busy transforming the studio into a sleepable space for three, and i've been doggedly pecking the keyboard like one of skinner's pigeon experiments with the random kernels of corn. sometimes it creates online courses.