03.26.98

avant-garde

Posted in Apple, Career, Media, Tech, Web at 6 pm

I’m slowly transfering my work machine to be based on MacOS 8. I’ve had it the 2 gig sitting in my machine for quite a while but have been slow to transfer over my preferences and set it as my startup disk. I finally moved my TCP setup over and I’m starting to get Malph re-setup piece by piece.. I know I could just copy over the Preference files, but it’s nice cleaning things out by hand. Though time-consuming to be sure. But damn, it’s _so_ responsive. Of course I haven’t installed all my fonts yet, either… :)

Forest Puzzles is looking good. In fact, here’s the URL for it: <http://www.omsi.edu/~rosso/forpuz/> That’s not the final place for it, so don’t bookmark it. However Busytown has reached it’s final destination at: <http://www.omsi.edu/busytown/> which is aliased to a longer more logical pathname as the site structure goes. It’s still got to get through Paramount’s okay (they own the rights to the characters), but it’s looking good.

I’m switching over to Netscape 4.0 as well. I’ve been sticking with 3.0 for a while, because I use the mail client to read my personal e-mail (and Eudora for my business mail). I really feel that Communicator is way overblown. I wish you could install just the parts that you want. For me, it’d be the browser and the mail client. OpenNS 5.0 perhaps?? Maybe I’ll try to find a different e-mail client, though Eudora is such a landmark, it’s hard to think of another one to use. Wait, didn’t Bare Bones come out with one? Time to do some research.

Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space has been a constant soundtrack for my life lately. It’s really a beautiful CD. VW recently used the title track in a commercial. This fits in with the concept that TV commercials are more (avant-garde) musically than commercial radio. Isn’t that sad?

This week shaped up to be pretty active and productive. These are two words that haven’t been part of my vocabulary for a few weeks lately. Winter doldrums? Hopefully I’m looking at an upturn here. I’ve certainly got enough projects that could use some work. And a partner who could use some attention.

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03.25.98

Jason and Paul of Clevland

Posted in Career, People at 6 pm

Been slow on keeping up, but I think I’ll make some more head way now.

I had been hitting a mental block at work. The Forest Puzzles project has just had me burned out, and it was standing in the way of a dozen other project. As of last night and today, however, I finally got some work done on the damn thing. Now I just got to get some photos scanned (which I’m dreading (and putting off) because my flatbed scanner is the most cantankerous piece of equipment I’ve ever dealt with.) Just today I got the final signatures on a new scanner (and a CD Burner!) that should be here in a couple of weeks, god and the finance department willing.

In the mean time, though, I’ve got to finish these photos up and pray that the scanner will be kind to me tonight.

In brighter news, I’m on verge of starting up a project for RODesign. It’s nice to have some outside work that I can throw some energy into. I sometimes feel like I’m beating my head against a wall with some of the politics (no worse than anywhere else, mind you) of an organization.

Today Jason of Clevland and Paul arrived and Amy and I picked them up at PDX. I had to rush off to work of course so Amy’s entertaining them this afternoon. I picked up some tickets for the Thrill Ride IMAX film here at the museum for Friday night. It should be good as both J and P are big rollercoaster fans.

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03.19.98

Postcard Postoffice

Posted in Career, Tech, Web at 10 am

Took a warm bath last night. It was nice. Did a little reading. (The Art of Human Computer Interface Design is a 600 page large format tome of a book. I really gotta get it finished soon.)

I’ve just about finished of the Busytown site. It’s a part of the Busytown exhibit which OMSI built about the Richard Scarry characters. It’s a very playful site, though there’s not much depth. It’s somewhat of a side project. It does however have a cute little postcard postoffice facility that I’m thinking of re-purposing for the OMSI site. I’m thinking it needs cool shots of the OMSI logo, the building and famous scientists. If you know any good repositories of famous scientists portraits, drop me a line. I’d appreciate it.

I think I’ve just about got the the archiver for this journal thought through. Piece by piece, it’s coming together in my head…

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03.18.98

Behind Schedule

Posted in Career at 10 am

Now that I’ve got this thing, I feel like I don’t have much to say.

I’m having troubles with a client at work. Their project is about 2 months behind schedule. There’s about 2 days worth of work left to do on it, but it feels like it might as well be a month.

This project has dragged out so long, I’m burned out. The worse thing about it is that I’m really proud of the design and style of the thing. It’s really a very cool project.

But I’ve got to finish it. Those last couple of feet to the finish line have been the hardest. Perhaps it’s because the finish line has kept moving. That explains a lot.

And I didn’t do anything on yesterday’s to-do list, except for the banners on the online page:

<http://www.omsi.edu/online/>

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03.17.98

Air Travelers

Posted in Career, Life, People at 11 am

Much to do today: Call Karen about the peeling wall in the shower, Call WM about an IRA rollover. I want to add a better looking list of OMSI’s web offerings on the Online Activities page. Note to Amy: I found the original PSD files for Air Travelers.

Still need to call my parents and e-mail Teeg today. It looks like my friend Maurice will be visiting from The Netherlands in April. That should be fun!

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03.16.98

Quake Army Knife

Posted in Career, Media, Tech at 10 am

Ah Monday, day two of my workweek. Slow morning, though I’ve got a dept meeting at work at 11:00. Gotta get going.

I installed and played with a demo version of Quake last night. I think I’ve got a feel for how the game works, now I just gotta check out the tools for building custom maps. There’s a util call QuArK (QUake ARmy Knife) which looks like a good place to start. I wonder if I’ll have to pony up the money for the full version of Quake II to make this work. I hope not.

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03.15.98

Unix Memorization

Posted in Career, Tech at 12 pm

Sunday morning and time to head into work. I’ve been seeing what I can set up on OMSI’s site that I can do maintenance wise from home. It’s amazing, this thing called UNIX, though I still have a lot to memorize. I would say learn, but really no one learns UNIX, they just memorize it.

The JavaScript redirect on the OMSI error page has really cleared up a bunch of bad hits. I’m really happy with it’s performance. No, it’s not as fail safe as using a server command redirect, but it’s much more flexible. I really feel like I’m cleaning the error logs up.

The RatCam died again, but I can’t say I’m surprised…

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03.14.98

Quake in OMSI

Posted in Career, Life, Media, People at 12 pm

Ah… Saturday Morning. Running laundry downstairs and trying to keep Simone off the top of the entertainment center.

Amy and I went out for a drive last night. We ended up in Longview, Washington. She gave me the grand tour of the town, which seemed more like a deserted movie set than a place where people live. It seems everyone goes to bed there at 11:00 pm on Friday nights.

Amy showed me the houses she used to live in and all three of the public schools she went to. She said it’s strange to think of other people living in the same house that she grew up in. I imagine it would be pretty weird, since it’s never happened to me. My parents still live in the same house they’ve always been in, since I can remember.

I decided a new project I’d like to tackle is building a Quake level of OMSI. I’ve been looking for utilities that I could work with. It looks like they’re all Wintel based, so I’m going to try to hijack some CPU cycles from a machine at work.

In addition to having a really cool layout for a QuakeWorld, I think I may be able to use it as a navigation aid for visitors. I’ll have to look into it. If you have any tips that would help me out, please let me know!

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03.12.98

She's a Peach

Posted in Career, Life, Meta, People, Web at 7 pm

Toady I’m doing part of a teacher workshop put on by OMSI. These are teachers with little or no experience with web development, and I’ll be giving them the basics. I’ll be trying to show them a way of critiquing sites so they can understand the difference between good and bad design. I’ve only got half and hour, so we’ll see how it goes.

Amy and I had a great night last night. Details unavailable. :) “She’s a Peach…”

I got caught up on my e-mail back to about late Monday. I’ve still got stuff back to early last week… :(

I finally got a counter on this page. It will be interesting to see how many I’m getting. As well, I implemented that new error page for OMSI. It’s working really well from what I can see. The only problem is that if it works well, then no one will know it’s there… :p

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03.09.98

Water Works

Posted in Career, Media, Web at 3 pm

Monday morning and I’m back into the fray. Had a department meeting with Marilyn and Stacey that lasted quite a while.

I took the WaterWorks web site on OMSI’s pages and cleaned it up a bit, added a couple of needed pages and links and cleaned up the file structure. It’s an interesting resources though the graphics area really lacking: <http://www.omsi.edu/sln/ww/>

Feeling really busy and yet little to show for it. I guess I’m still trying to get a few pieces into place so that the work I’ve been going can be put out in the open. It’s the waiting that’s the hardest part – Tom Petty

I took one of Amy’s O-+> CD’s to work. The Hits 2.

Good stuff.

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