Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

I've been working, believe it or not.

With my impending departure for South America with Bon Jovi looming, I'm looking at a foreshortened timeline and thinking about how I can get work completed for MWS before I go.  It's a short-ish timeline, given the back-and-forth that has to happen, but still, it's doable.  Then, through Priscilla, I booked a gig working on the practically-abandoned non-profit website CAN-DO.org.

The founders live across the yard at the moment, and Eric just left for Haiti, so it's a time crunch to get everything updated and working.  The site isn't a CMS, but instead was written in Dreamweaver (I can only assume) and the pages that I have are all a disaster.  Totally unnecessary nested tables within more and more tables, no real patterns (each box is slightly different from the rest, or boxes within sections have different problems), and almost no CSS.  Each page has some random CSS generated by Dreamweaver at the top, and the stylesheet is an amalgam of overlapping styles and mess.

Long story short, I now have more work than I can handle.  Or almost more work than I can handle.  I'm writing this blog post, for example, while I await replies to two emails and rest my eyes from staring at the code, wondering why the site works so radically differently on IE than on Firefox (and, indeed, everything else).  At least I'm building karma on this one, right?  My rate is slashed and I'll be able to claim some tax advantage at the end of the year, supposedly.

Yesterday, typical, low-key Sunday, saw everyone else watching the Emmys and me doing super geeky stuff in the garage and up here.  Click through for the story, but I warn you, it's SUPER FUCKING GEEKY.

Dunno where to file this one, but the heatwave came in with a vengeance yesterday.  By the time I realized it, it was late in the afternoon, so we didn't turn on the air.  But if we had, we'd have realized that the air broke sometime in the last month that it's been off.  So... no AC today.  At least it's supposed to cool down tomorrow?  We'll see how that goes - they were saying the weekend wasn't going to get out of the 70s this morning, so we can hope.

Anyway, besides the heat, the only things of note are Casey's mom's visit that's been nice, and the fact that I'm now back to work on MWS stuff.  Also, I need to get a Yellow Fever shot - i wonder how I do that.  I should also get some pictures taken for visas and such tomorrow.  And pick up the plexi tray for the 4-shell road case.  and get a haircut. errands abound.

I'm not quite ready to ditch Win7 (but I'd like to!) on my main computer yet, but I've been having really good luck with Ubuntu, both as the only installation on my laptop and as a VM on my workstation.  I've had to work with the virtualization more and more recently due to some website testing, and I just leave it up a lot otherwise because I like seeing it over there.

I'm using Ubunto 10.04, and I love Gnome, I love apt-get installing things (SO EASY!) and I love the built-in feel that this version has with a lot of the base installs.  Chat app?  Built in.  Standard, useful desktop stuff installed?  Absolutely.  And having a desktop within a desktop is especially weird - when I use the Desktop Cube effect from Compiz in the VM it almost blows my mind.

I'm using AWN as a dock, which I like a lot, but it does come with a simple problem or two - I don't know where to find icons for installed programs that I want to put in my dock.  I'm told I really should try Docky, but what it'll do that AWN doesn't is a mystery.  Maybe when I run up against a shortfall in AWN I'll try it.

And I'm definitely using only Ubuntu on whatever my "real" laptop becomes this fall - it'll be time to get something then (a t410s, maybe?), and Ubuntu will be the only OS on there for sure.

That's it for the geeky linux love for now.

This is one of those times when two weeks have gone by, almost identical, day-by-day and every day, I think, "I'll post something in the morning..." and every day, well... you know.  Now it's gotten so long that I'm afraid to post because it'll take SO LONG.

Well, not this time.  I'm just here to say hi, to tell you to enjoy your weekend and to warn you that I might even post a picture or two soon.  I shot two people over the past two days for BRANDED.  Yay me.  I've redone the site a little, too, and developed a logo that'll have to stick, at least for the time being.

I'll be back.  Happy Friday, though.

The other day, I made the comments shortlist on Wine.Woot.

I know that this is pretty much just a "most recent decent comments" section, but still - I'd like to crow about it anyway.

Of course, I bought the wine and I've been to the vineyard more than the rest of the wooters combined (maybe), so it's not that impressive, but still, I like that I made it on there.  The wine was on a great special - $20/bottle for a bottle that they usually charge $45 for, so that's nice.  And it'll be good to have some excellent pinot to drink on hand.

In other big news, I bought the new Canon T2i - the first SLR that really made me want to replace my aging XTi. So far, the biggest difference (and I've only shot test shots), is the low-light performance.  It's amazing what a difference ISO6400 makes when you're used to shooting at a max of ISO1600.  Couple that with the fact that I'm soon going to get a lens that I'm buying specifically because it's going to give me similar results to the lens on Dad's Yashica, and you end up with a happy Matt.

Once I've taken my first real set of pictures, I'll post some up here, of course, but they'll have to be shrunken some, because 18MP is a shitload of megapixels.

Additionally, the T2i shoots FullHD video, so this is going to be the camera for my brownie projects in the forseeable future, which is awesome.  I've been through too many tape-based minicams that all suck ass and break after no time at all, so it's time to upgrade to something in a product family I trust (I still love my XTi and am keeping it to shoot random crap with).  I can't wait to have my first FullHD brownie project to post.  Fun times.

Okay, the full (huge) wine.woot thing is after the break.

So a year ago today (in a few hours) I was loading out my gear from the MJ show at Staples.  That's the show that was probably going to take me to the O2 Arena.  One year and one day later, I'll be loading out at the O2 for real, having finished Bon Jovi's run here in London.

It's interesting where your life goes - how it gets shaped.  Who would be on the Bon Jovi show?  Would we be prompting it?  Doubtful, but you never know.

Anyway, I'm surprisingly daunted by the prospect of hunting down potential places to taste wine.  Something about going alone makes it all seem lame.  Ah well.  I'm also considering going back to Mt. Ste Michelle... we'll see.

Here I am, back on Bon Jovi and back to not blogging.  Silliness, I tell you, when I'm half a world away from home and trying to do new things (as well as some old ones).

So far, the shows have been fine - Jon picked out a song that wasn't on my computer (networking was down again) and that pointed out the fact that I needed to have the entire archive on the laptop, too, so that's what I did.  In the meanwhile, I'm trying to update the "everything" file with the latest version of every song so I can make sure that each night looks identical to the last night.  I'm hoping, for example, that tonight's set list is much less obscure than the one from the other night - I was rushing to get everything in and everyone was waiting on me.  Fun times.

Also, I'd really like to get networking working properly on these two machines, but failing that, I'll at least teach myself the proper use of bluetooth filesharing so I can get one file back and forth with ease.

Okay, enough shop talk, except to say that I might be continuing on this tour by going to South America in September.  We'll see.

On Monday I'm going to go to Stonehenge (on the summer solstice, even - I'm such a hippie!), and then to Bath and to see the Magna Carta on a bus tour that some of the other roadies are going on.  Should be fun.  I'll bring my camera there, as I have yet to even pull it out of the bag I brought it in.  Ghetto!

The lifted restrictions on pub hours have allowed me to stay out late one night, and will probably allow the same thing in the future, although I will be trying to be a good boy and going to bed early if there's nothing specific planned or if I have a long day ahead (Sunday night seems especially likely).

And that's that.  Time to go search for some internet so I can post this bastard and get on with my waiting.  Waiting-HO!