I had wanted to make some silly comment about what foreign policy under Niska might look like. Then I realized I didn't have to. You all can just turn on the news. By the way, that's an actual bumper-sticker I happened across.
OK, so all of the pics are up in the My Life section of the website now. Here's the deal:
rehearsal2k5 it will be of a slightly lower quality than the things shot day of.uren2k5 AT williaty DOT dyndns DOT org You should be able to figure out what the email address should be from that.Let me know what you think, I hope you all like them.
I was just given a schedule change. It takes effect 20040926. You can see it on my calendar.
Yesterday, at approximately 21:00 EST, my 1989 Toyota 4Runner passed out of my hands. Known to many of you as "The Flintstone-mobile", she provided 15 years of faithful service to my family, the last 6 years to me alone. She was my first car and first manual transmission for many, many other people. Her forgiving and predictable nature saved my ass more times than I want to think about. She will be missed.
Yesterday, at approximately 21:30 EST, a new member of the Williams family arrived. He/she/it is as yet unnamed, pending determination of gender. I am now the proud driver of a 2005 Subaru Impreza 2.5RS Sport Wagon in Midnight Blue Pearl. At the moment, she is a bone-stock, stripped down model with the exception of the optional Arm Rest Extension, the Mud Flaps, the Center Console Arm Rest Extension, and the Rear Bumper Cover (all of which I didn't pay for). For those of you wondering, it has 3 point (shoulder harness type) seat belts at all 5 positions. Riders welcome.
It's 6:45am and I'm packing up my stuff in a hotel room in Cleveland overlooking a mud pit. The next 10 hours of my life are to be wasted by listening to a damn financial guru. The 4th floor is not nearly high enough to jump from.
A couple of people pointed out that I forgot to mention why I was in the ER. I was waiting on Michelle. She'd been stung by a bee in the inside of the wrist and wasn't reacting well to it. 10 hours after the sting she was still swelling and getting redder. Michele mentioned that this is what Terry does when she's stung and it leads to cellulitis. I was a bit worried that she was swelling enough to cause the same dangers that compartment hemorrhages do. So we went to the ER. We waited 2.5 hours and then they took her into the Triage station. They talked to her, didn't even look at her arm, and sent her on her way with a prescription for massive doses of steroids. The next afternoon, more than 24 hours from the sting, the swelling was still increasing, her color in her arm was terrible, her finger tips were getting cold, and the back of her hand was cold. I called Mom, who called Dr. Melvin, who called Dr. Vaquero, and we were off to the races. After flying across town in the car and nearly jogging across campus to the med center, we got to the office of Dr. Vaquero. By office I mean a place with a desk and filing cabinets and such, not a office with a examination room. He looked at Michelle for a while in the hallway. He had another passing doctor look at her as well. He asked if we'd seen anyone about it. We told him we'd gone to the ER the night before but that the attention he'd just paid to her arm was far in excess of everything the ER had done. He and the other doctor looked at each other in a amazed and displeased manner and made some comment about only being in a hallway. He asked what ER we had visited. When he found out it was OSU, he got a bit stony faced and didn't say anything. In the end, he had her stay on the steroids, though at a much lower and tapering dose, added a script for antibiotics, and recommended that she keep taking advil and benedryl. About 5 days later the swelling and redness began to disappear.
I nearly had a trip to the ER myself last night. I think I've mentioned that I've started making chainmail. One aspect that really interests me is the tooling. This is partly because one of the people I'm teaching has little hand strength and coiling is difficult for her. Two nights ago I woke up knowing how to make a little jig that would slide over the mandrel and force the wire to coil tightly against the mandrel. The angle of the coil would force the jig resulting is a quick and perfect coil. The best part was that it would require very little human intervention, just a fingertip's worth of pressure to keep the jig from spinning around the mandrel. Last night I built the jig. The first test went wonderful with the drill in low gear. I should mention that I don't have some pansy-assed drill from the Harder Side of Sears. I've got a top of the line DeWalt contractors drill that will turn 6500 RPM in high gear and has enough torque to roll me across the floor in low gear. I started a new coil and switched the drill into high. Everything was going along swimmingly until the wire feeding into the jig fouled, caught my hand, and pulled it into the mandrel. My fingers were coiled tightly around the mandrel under several wraps of wire before I could get my finger off the trigger. I ended up having to go find the snips with a mandrel and drill attached to my right hand. After cutting myself free, I realized how lucky it is that I'm a safety freak. When I coil I wear heavy leather gauntlets and a full face shield. Looking at my gloves (heavily grooved from the wire) and at my seriously bruised fingers, I've little doubt that since the wire was running as it tightened over my fingers, that I would have lost the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand. The wire to be taken up now is coiled around something so it can't foul. I can consistently turn 40 feet of wire into a coil in between 6 and 7 seconds now, which is a hell of a lot faster than by hand. My next adventure is to modify Wiss M3 snips to work with coil sizes 1/8" and smaller, as well as modify the snips to prevent them from closing far enough to cause C shaped rings. I love having a project.
I joined my first RPG last night. Yes, yes, I know I said I didn't like gaming, but this one is perfect for me. I've joined IdleRPG on darkmyst.org. It's great. All games should be this easy to learn and play. I'm so good at it.
Due to a recent photoshoot, I've once again been living in Photoshop. The machine I do my graphics work on has 1.38GB of RAM in it. Tonight I was swapping like mad. That kind of impresses me since I'm on an OS with masterful memory management. I also need a second video card to support a 3rd and 4th monitor. Yes, a 3rd and 4th, I've already got two. Tonight I had work sprawled out across the two monitors on the workstation and the laptop (I've got a thing so one mouse and one kbd just float across the computers [no, not a KVM, it's all software and relies on the computers autodetecting each other]). I need more screen real estate badly. When I was done with the images and ready to export them for web use, I was disappointed, as usual, with the resultant jpgs. I finally realized that if I was having a problem, other's were too, so I googled it. Turns out that nobody respects color profile information and so the images were being crashed from AdobeRGB to sRGB (the evilest of all color spaces) by the display programs. Converting from AdobeRGB to sRGB before jpeg compressing the files solved much of this dilemma. This also means I should go back and re-export every bit of content I've done for the web. Ever. Oh. Joy. However, I also found a annoying trend. No two display programs interpret the jpeg standard exactly the same. This image shows what I am talking about (WARNING: This image is large, dialup beware!). This is the same file, displayed on the same machine in three different programs. Note the variance. Basically this means I've no chance of actually showing you all what I want you to see. Wheee.
After fixing the jpegs I had to create a gallery of them for the website. I've got a little program that largely automates this process for me. However, it wasn't working quite right. It kept making bits of the page disappear. After cussing at it for some time, and finally setting display: inline; for every class, id, and tag I noticed that my very first rule in the stylesheet read span { display: none; }. I've no idea what I was trying to test months ago with at, but by god that line met a fiery death. Blarg.
6am. I go bed now.
Well, I'm sitting in the ER, as I have been for the last two and a half hours, so I figure I may as well blog. This one is going to go back a ways, at least a week. The Saturday before last Michelle, Michele, and I met Mary at Momo. Michelle ended up driving Michele home so I had to drop of Mary on my own. As I was leaving her place I noticed that Mich's car didn't have much of any gas left in it. I stopped at the Marathon at Chittenden and Summit. As I was filling up, a major pimpmobile pulled up. Gold chrome hundred-spokes, purple velvet seats, little gold crown on the rear deck. The driver got out and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and put something on the ground. I was thinking it was a small dog or suchlike. The driver walks into the store with a leash in his hand. On the other end of the leash was an alligator. About 5 feet long. The man walked his alligator into the store, bought some snacks, and walked back to his car. He picked the alligator up, and the damned thing stuck its nose out the window as they drove away. Only on Chittenden does that make sense.
In further car news, I went to ComFest on Sunday. It was... moderately interesting. I ran into a bunch of people I knew. Parking was a bitch though. I drove for 30 minutes trying to find a legal place to park. I finally came across a side street, well north of the event area, where there were no signs at all. I went up and down the street twice to make sure it wasn't marked as no parking. I parked the car and started walking towards High St. About 100 yards away from where I parked I walked past a gravel lot that was attached to a vacant factory building. As I looked, a car pulled in and parked. I thought about moving my car to the lot, but decided that it probably belonged to someone and I should be nice and not park there. I walked the mile and a half to the venue and stayed there for about 5 hours. Eventually, I hiked it back to the car. As I was walking up the street to where I had parked, I noticed that there were far too few cars and far too many cops and tow trucks. I approached the first cop and asked why they towed my car from a street not marked as a no-parking zone. He replied that the street was only 22 feet wide. "Well, good for it," I said. Glaring a bit he continued on to tell me that Columbus motor vehicle code forbids parking on streets narrower than 23 feet. Riiiiiight... I was supposed to notice the missing foot, less than a 5% difference, from a visual inspection. That also presumes that I was even aware such a crazy law existed. It was a two lane road with no signs, why in the hell wouldn't I be allowed to park there? Thankfully, Mich had just dropped Amanda off on campus and could pick me up. The next day I went with Jeff to pick the car up. He had to go since his name was on the title and registration (we also found out that the BMV still thinks he lives in Westerville). He also had to provide the cash. It cost me $126 to get the car back. A $70 holding fee, a $46 dolly fee, and a $10 ticket. Great.
The Columbus Impound Lot is west of High Street just south of downtown. If you ever have to go there, wear good walking shoes. It was a ten minute walk from the guard tower gate to the row my car was in. The lot had once been gravel but time and toil had reduced it to an ultrafine powder that stirred up from the ground with the least breath of air, hanging lazily, before covering every surface in sight. It was apparent that some of the cars had been there for quite some time, since before the last heavy rains at the very least. These resident cars were sunk into the ground. Abandon your conception of tires squelching ruts into the mud, these wheels had melted there. The ground formed perfectly flat against the tire, following its every contour. The ground between was flat and level as glass. There'd be no driving that riced out Civic with the broken in windows away without a shovel. As a final insult, the white serial number placed on the driver's side window will likely outlast the car.
In other news, Half Persians are the spawn of the devil. They're also incredibly interesting. HP is a bitch to start and a bitch to join. They are, however, extremely fast to make. From a mathematical standpoint, they're insanely great. Take an integer greater than three. Take a second integer that's less than the first. From these two numbers, a half persian can be built. The first number determines the density of the chain and the second number determines the chain's aspect ratio perpendicular to the longitudinal axis. It's pretty damn cool.
OK, we're moving somewhere, bye.
I had most of a good night tonight. I started with trying to go to the Arts Festival with Squish, Scarlet, Deuce, and Cassie. I got there, found a solitary Scarlet, then a solitary Squish. Briefly saw Cassie's head. As it turns out, Squish was moving at the breath taking speed of the Great Molasses Flood of Aught-Six. So Mich and I headed out on our own to look at the booths. I was pretty lame, really. Most of the work was unoriginal and self-similar. There was nothing I which I would have bought (and not just because of the prices!). There was one thing I would have hung in my house, had it been given to me. In the booth of the guy exhibiting prints from the Polaroid 20x30 camera, there were also a few collages of medium format black and white negatives. They were nice. Not great, not cool, just nice. And that was the best thing there. We finished with the whole site MUCH earlier than Squish and Scarlet, so we went to get sushi.
Later, we met Squish and Scarlet at Squish's house for booze and a movie. The booze was readily laid to hand, but there were provisions absent. We went to the grocery store. Scarlet was upset when Squish wetted her (Scarlet's) ass with her cold white jug. This led to two screaming college girls chasing each other through a desolate Kroger's lot in the middle of the night. Back home, we discovered the wonder that is Chocolate Thin Mint Yummmyness in Milk. Mmmmmmmm. The movie never got off the ground though. The four of us ended up talking for several house and making a rather good go of it. I was pleasantly surprised, as I wasn't sure of my standing with some members of the party and wasn't sure how it would go. All too soon everyone was tired and wanted to go home.
It was nice to have a night that mostly went well.
