The Indefinite Article.: 01/01/2005

Kung Pow!

Photoshop Question

I have some guides set up all nice and neat for a psd file. I would like to use those same guides on another psd file. Is there a way to use the same guides across multiple files?

New PB G4

The new PowerBook G4s make the Powerbook/iBook equation more interesting again. What is even more interesting is that the 128 MB video cards support the dual input requirements of the Apple 30 inch display. Does this mean that a Powerbook with the 128 MB video support two external monitors?

first iSight movie

Check it out. i broke down and bought iLife '05 and created this little movie.

overall iMovie 5 is alright. it feels a bit slower than the previous version and there is a terrible fast/slow/reverse thing that happens when opening previous projects. a few new effects and transitions, but i will not be able to take advantage of some of the most advanced features, as i lack a 'real' video camera.

Opacity Masks in Illustrator CS

Opacity Masks in Illustrator CS: This article helped me understand how to use transparency in Illustrator. One of the things that I did not find in my reading of the article (more like detailed skimming) was how to exit opacity mask mode. The only way that I could figure out was to to back to the Transparency window and click on the left of the two preview panes. Maybe this would be obvious to a more proficient Illustrator or Adobe products user as clicking on the right hand preview put you in opacity mask editing mode.

CyberDuck ?

Got clued into a sweet free & open source FTP client for OS X called : CyberDuck! Its quick, chock full of features and most wonderfully it allows TextMate to be used and external editor. Also, the stoned-out looking duck icon reminds me of killy and that rubber ducky thing he has!

You can download it here

Cached iChat iCons

Joys of Working from Home

One of the joys of working from home is having a full kitchen with iron skillets, leftovers, etc. available to quickly use during lunch. I just made pesto eggy spaghetti with leftover noodles, two eggs and some pesto. Yum!

HaloDos

So Taggart, Paul, Todd and I played Halo last night, and it was really fun. I think that next time we should plug in the first version of Halo and play that a bit to see if the game-play is much different. Double-wielding weapons is definitely something that makes the attack/defend/counter equation more interesting. Close attack or defend? Shotgun and Plasma Grenades. Medium range stalking in relatively open spaces? Dual Needlers. Running attack in mid range? Dual Sub Machine Guns. Medium defend? Rocket Launcher. Long range precision stalking? Sniper rifle with shotgun as defense backup.

Paul did really well with the Covenant Energy Sword. It may be worthwhile to use that as the close combat weapon with the Assault Rifle as the longer range weapon.

Some maps get dominated by certain weapons, like how Beaver Creek is ruled by dual Needlers. Since is it a middle to close range encounter map with not too much cover, the two Needlers firing simultaneously can fry someone quick. One of the additional benefits is that even if someone kills you in a game of Juggernaut, then the Needler rounds you fired will likely kill them after you die, leaving you as the Juggernaut again--sweet!

that ical thingy ...

That ical thingy is pretty cool. it's great to not have to launch ical to see stuff what's going on. plus, i like the configurable clock.

The Aviator

So the Aviator got 11 or so Oscar Nominations ... Has anybody seen it? Reviews ?

Cool iCal Doodad

MenuCalenderClock

My buddy Skip turned me on to this cool iCal doodad this sits in your menu bar (next to Display, Volume, etc Menu Items). When you click on it a handy window drops down giving you a quick view to you the month and events. So much faster than opening up iCal, so much less intrusive then leaving iCal running in the Dock!

Mac & Target?

According to Engadget, ,Target is taking pre-orders for Mac-minis. How sweet it would be to see people buying a mac in a box no larger than the laundry detergent they've also got in their cart.

k.

iPod made new again ...

I had been reluctant to post about this because i was scared that i had broken it somehow. maybe i am too heavy handed sometimes with my ipod? About a week ago, the ipod froze while i was listening to it while i was reading a book. It just stopped. I tried not to react, a la Adolph, hoping that my nonchalance would somehow make the ipod believe that there really wasn't a problem at all and it should just start working again to bring the universe back into balance. So i left the silent earbuds in my ears as i continued reading. Maybe half and hour later (i had actually forgotten that i still had the earbuds in my ears) the ipod was still dead and the screen was frozen. The buttons didin't respond â not even a click-y sound.

I just put in my backback and hoped that once i juiced it up it would return back to normal. I left the ipod on the charger overnight. When i came back to it the next day, the clickwheel and buttons were responding once again. Confident that the charge had done it, i chose a song. It froze again. No song. No sound.

I was scared.

I avoided the ipod for a few days. I came back to it yesterday. Over the days i thought about all the music i had on there (most of it is backed up to a data DVD)I plugged it into the powebook to see if i could hear the songs from there. I could. I could even copy, delete and access data from it. I figured at this point that maybe there was some problem with the touchpad.

I went to the apple store today and asked about how much it would cost to get an ipod repaired. I was lucky to get the guy i did, he asked me what was wrong and suggested that i try to reset the ipod by holding down the two middle buttons (menu and play/pause) at the same time for about six seconds.

As soon as i got home I did exactly what he said, and VOILA! MY IPOD CAME BACK TO LIFE.

thanks, apple guy!

Hope this helps someone else at some point.

Another amusing thing...

I came across this and chuckled.

Last night, carol and I stayed up and put together adolfo's final xmas present. This was the big one that we couldn't find locally nor afford at the time: a Step 2 Kitchen. It was 15 minutes to midnight when we picked it up off the floor and pushed it along the floor to it's spot in the kitchen next to the pantry.

It hadn't occured to me until just now that we have still been singing "Santa Clause is Coming to Town" with adolfo. This may have been more concious on Carol's part, who had kept up a determined search for the kitchen since Christmas. Yesterday, while running an office errand to find parchment-style card stock for award certificates, she poked her head into the Toys-R-Us that was next door to Office Max and found exactly what she wanted. It was too big to fit into the car, so she had it removed from the box and placed into the car in pieces.

This morning adolfo walked into the kichen, went to the fridge, pulled the large apple juice out of the fridge and handed it to his mother as he does every morning, without even a glance toward his new kitchen. He took his juice and walked past the kitchen to his high chair, climbed in and had a cup of yogurt for breakfast. He does this quietly, choosing to wake up slowly, rather than roar headlong into awake-ness. He does the same thing after naps.

I dressed him right afterwards. Being able to wake up slowly put him in a good happy mood. He smiled and laughed with me as i changed his diaper and clothes. I quickly glanced at his backside and little privates to see if the substantial rash he had a couple of days earlier was visible. His skin had returned to it's normal color of vanilla ice-cream. I told him that i had a surprise for him and he raised his eyebrows with a smile. "Do you know what a surprise is?"

"Su-pwise," he answered through his smile.

"You ask me, 'What is it daddy? Is it a car?"

"Wuzit da-eey? Cawr?" he asked.

"Is it a Choo-choo train?"

"chew-chew chwain?" he asked.

"Is my surprise a new house?"

"howse?" he asked.

We went on like this until i had pulled his red, white, and blue stripped shirt over his head. Then we went, again, to the kitchen. "Where is your surprise?" i asked him. He stood in the middle of the kitchen while Carol and I stood right next to his toy kitchen. He looked around the kithchen with a helpless little smile, not really knowing what was going on. It wasn't until i kicked his kitchen that he even noticed it.

"Look at all this!" he said clear as day. He even pointed to it which i take as a pretty good sign. I remeber, as a child, pointing at my Millenium Falcon when it was under the tree. That was the ultimate expression, the ultimate acknowledgement. It exists! There it is! Do you see it, right there! At the end of my finger! I can touch it!

I remember when adolfo was much younger having trouble pointing things out to him. Instead of following the invisible line off of my finger that lead to the moon, or the cars on the road, or the bird that just flew by, he would just stare at the end of my finger mezmerized by it. Now, for sure, i know he has developed his own invisible lines his own way of acknowledging things that exist around him.

If he points to it, it it more important? I am thinking know about when he points. He points at particular foods that he wants. "That one, da-eey," he will explain to me as we share food from a bowl. He is particular, not picky. For example, he won't eat the chocolate ice-cream, but he will eat the vanilla; he will only eat the tops of the brocoli. He points sloppily but deliberately towards me when i ask him to do something he would rather not do (like kick the soccer ball) and says, "..no day-ee, YOU kick it."

So maybe it is not an expression of importance, but more an expression of certainty. Here is this kitchen in front of me, he says; i want that particular food right there, he says; you kick the ball daddy, he says.

Getting Things Done

Something beautiful ...

Here is a beautiful page of audio and video cllips. I particulary enjoyed T.S. Eliot reading the first few lines of "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". Another beautiful sound is Oe Kenzaburo reading the first paragraph of his novel, "A Personal Matter", which is how i got to this page in the first place.

I've been incapacitated all day with a migraine. It started at around 10 a.m. and didn't let up all day. Carol says that i exhaust myself, but i don't believe her. What have i done to exhaust myself?

I've thought that maybe my migraines are coming back ...

I haven't had regular migraines since i was maybe fifteen years old. Once i started high school, they vanished. Of course, i would get a headache every now and then, but never the same intensity like those when i was younger. When i was twelve or so the headaches would come so often and so regularly that i ended up at the hospital and had a brain scan done.

This conjures up images of a young killy being fed into a CT magnet, but this never happened. Instead, a woman tied up my hair revealing a scalp that she could attach some wires to. I was sitting in a chair with my head leaning back. If i remember correctly, i believe another device was placed on my head that resembled a collander. This might explain my affinity for Eternal Sunshine...

The thought of my headaches returning is a scary one. I spent most of the day going in and out of sleep at work. Luckily, there is so little to do, my lethargy was hardly noticed. Only when my co-worker asked if i wanted to go out for lunch did he realize the extent of my pain. I talked to him with my eyes closed; I turned off my monitors; I moved the phone off of my desk. The pain was excrutiating. I slept for lunch. I tried to eat, but my stomach began to revolt as well.

I left 1/2 early without telling anyone. I just walked out the door. I had to get home. Luckily my mother happened to be in the mecical center accompanying my aunt to a Dr. appt. She drove me home while i lay down in the backseat. I jumped out of the car and headed straight to the bathroom for the most powerful wretch i had in a long time. It came with a force and pain that reminded me at once of my childhood - hitting my head against the wall to relieve the pain in my head; purposefully throwing up to get the nausea out of my stomach; burying myself under blanket after blanket to shielf my eyes from light, from sound, and from air; alternating between being really really hot and really really cold ...

another interesting phenomenon is the sweating. i wake up in the middle of the night just drenched with sweat. so much so that i have to towel myself off. this has been happening maybe once a week for the last three weeks or so. what can this mean? i vaguely remember sweating as a symptom of my migraines when i was a child. Is this common, i wonder.

diana? liz?

Ughh!!!

What a freakin Troll.!!!

Gentleman Raindrops

By Why The Lucky Stiff

As if ...

"Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," Bush said Thursday.

As if this is some kind of deep life lesson that only years of seasoned experience can give you. What a fucking moron this guy is.

How's the Epson Stylus CX4600 ?

It's an all-in-one that had great reviews on amazon -- is anyone here familiar with it? It's another printer/scanner/copier, which we do need for Ant's business. Looks like it's got very high res scanning and printing, too..

Printer Problems

Hola mi computadora amigos! I'm having some problems with my printer -- we've steadily had a deteriorating relationshop between our iMac and our hp psc 2210 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier... it started with us not being able to print on random occasions ... the problem was always remedied by us turning off the computer and printer and rebooting...

now, it says "unable to open printer connection" and won't print after a reboot -- I've uninstalled and reinstalled the printer driver 3 times now to no avail, paid hp tech suppport guy $30 for phone chat to no avail, rebuilt my desktop, unplugged printer from power strip and plugged into wall socket.

The weird thing is, we can scan and copy still, we just can't print -- so far, I've tried printing from word, photoshop, and outlook and had no success ... but when i click on the printer toolbox and print a test or a diagnostic report, it works! oh, and I went out and bought a new USB line, which didn't help ... and tried unplugging it from one USB port and putiing it into another one.

Any ideas???

Bright Eyes - Listen to

As the old saying goes, You can lead a whore to water, but you cant make him bathe,

well I will lead ya'll to Bright Eyes, but I can't make you listen.

If you go to this link,

http://www.saddle-creek.com/

there are four songs to listen to off forthcoming albums.
I think this guy is one of the best songwriters in a long time.

Manuok Live!

My brother was on television! Check out the clip here...

As Cool as the Cube Was . . .

As cool as the Cube was, the Mac mini seems to beat it at its own game and is priced just above what the Cube goes for used. I'm looking forward to seeing it in person, although it is so simple that I'm certain that the trip to the store will take longer than the look at it.

I just took a scratch sheet of copy paper, cut two and a half inches off off the long end and gave it folds at two inches on two adjoining sides. The partial box approximates the size of the Mac mini. It is about the size of my Linksys wireless router. It is significantly smaller than my cable modem. It is significantly smaller than my external hard drive. It is more powerful and flexible than either.

Of course, it does have an external power supply. You can see it in the Quicktime VR spin-around. (It is the longer box. The square box is the Cinema Display's power supply. The display also routes USB through the power supply so it has just one cable leading to the display.) The "third-party accessorie"s Quicktime VR looks like a direct shot at Dell. It is like saying "you guys built a business on being the cheapest replaceable commodities and we have replacement box that is inexpensive but not cheap."

I think that once the refurbs and what-not start showing up, I will pick one up to use as a household file and printer server. It will be a lot better than the collection of dinosaurs I have around here that I keep meaning to make into servers.

!

Hi all..........bang pow!

New Years Happy to be to you be having,

resolutions.
solve all worldly dilemmas that are concurretly consuming most of my thought time

figure out how to work from a concept and stick to it

organize more effectively

correspond more often.

that last one is a joke, I hate everyone.

Hey Paul, in that video, is the truck driver that's singing, is that your brother or is it the lead singer from the Black Crows?

Either way, it was great, it is funny how the one really good song from the VIA SATELLITE cd was your brother singing.

Is his CD out?

BESTS OF THE PAST YEAR.

BEST CD.
BRIGHT EYES_LIFTED(THE STROY IS IN THE SOIL)

BEST BOOK.
EAST OF EDEN_STEINBECK

BEST GIFT.
HANNAH SEWED A DESIGN ON A T-SHIRT FOR ME

BEST REVELATION.
STARTING TO ACTUALLY FEEL LIKE AN ADULT

BEST THING TO EAT.
LAURA'S HOMEMADE PIZZA

HAPPY HOLIDAYS ALL.

Access Kiosks Up And Running!!!!

Wow! It looks over this last week about 25 Kiosks have been installed in MD Anderson! Apparently folks have already used them and they work!!!! Check out some more pics here...

Hey Killy, check them out and grab me a couple of pics!

Friday, January 07, 2005

01.2005

If i had to give this coming year a name i would prolly name it "The Year of the Bean Taco". Carol and i have an unspoken resolution (for fear of not following through with it) to not eat out nearly as much anymore. For carol this means a fresh pot of beans every few days, and a lot of toritllas.

Not much has changed for Adolfo iv, though. He still gets a pb&j and honey sandwich in the mornings, and a couple of scrambled eggs if we get up early enough. From time to time, we'll even get a bowl of oatmeal to go with our coffee.

The start to this year bodes nothing for me. I am not particularly hopefull of things to come, nor do i have any particular anxiety about what this has in store for us. I'm in a state of equilibrium, it seems.

That isn't to say that there aren't some pretty wonderful things slated to happen this year:

- Amber and Adolph are getting married.

- Todd and Diana are getting married.

- My sister is getting married.

- My son is turning 3 years old and at the same time become eligable for enrollment at St. Steven's Catholic School. (i pray that i would be able to afford it.)

- I will have been at M.D. Anderson for 3 years in February.

Another wonderful thing this year: Killy's one resolution - make homemade flour tortillas ...

... with lard.

Welcome to Access!

Well folks, 6 long months of work are about to pay off! Today MD Anderson is going live with the web-portal interface to Access Wayfinding System. Check it out here
Of cource, the web-portal is only one small piece of the entire Access System, which also includes physical signage, pathways, free-standing and wall-mounted Kiosks, brochures, helpful hints, flashing lights, beeping noises, etc ...

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Matias OS X Keyboard

Oh Todd, you may have bought that keyboard too soon, the Matias OS X Keyboard has all those typographical whats-its printed on the keys. Of course, it kind of begs the question, "When you are looking for a œ or ∑ or ´ or ®† or ¥, are you really going to crane your head over the keyboard and look at each key?"

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

all your ram are belong to me.

Monday, January 03, 2005

QoS, VOIP and the WRT54G

Oh what a rabbit hole I jumped into this evening! I have some pretty special home network needs. I want Vonage VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and to be able to VPN (Virtual Private Network) into the office. If I put the Vonage router in front of the wireless router (the WRT54G), then the VPN connection to the office doesn't work. If I put the wireless router in front of the Vonage one, the VOIP sounds craptacular. Solution: Add a QoS (Quality of Service) hack to the WRT54G. The one I used comes from sveasoft.com and was pretty simple to install.

Upgrade the WRT54G's firmware with Sveasoft's
Enable QoS in the WRT54G administration tool
Get the mac address of the Vonage router by logging into its administration tool
Put the Vonage router's mac address into the WRT54G's admin tool and set its priority to "Premium"

The basic idea behind QoS is that the router collects packets of data right before it sends them. If it gets a packet that meets certain criteria (like from a specific mac address), it puts it in the front of the line to send out. This done, you can string the Vonage router behind the wireless so you can connect via VPN and still have nice call quality. I'd hate to not be halfway knowledgeable about this stuff and have to set this up/fix it. I think that the one thing that will keep VOIP from becoming mainstream is that the different pieces of the puzzle are still not able to communicate to one another so that they will play well without human interaction

Liz's Best Of 04

movie: Eternal Sunshine
album: Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlantacism
Best Moment: Passing RN board exam...then getting a nice paycheck!
worst moment: bush wins election
best aftermoment: his voters are beginning to realize they made a big mistake
Best Restaraunt experience: Mushachino Sushi
Best latte: JP's java on campus
Best groovin song: Lyrics Born:callin out
I only read nursing books this year-boring. but the best read has been cnn online news
Best new game: catch phrase!!
Taggart's in Delaware-
Amber-did you take out our trash this am?
if so, thanks!

New years resolutions
laugh more, complain less
read more books
call my mother in law
get taggart better gifts (poor guy got sucky ones this year)
more yoga
cook more
get up earlier
be better
Happy new year!

Safari is to KHTML as iWork is to . . .

I'm looking forward to 11AM CST on the 11th. The hardware is always cool to think about, but the stuff that keeps my old mac running is the improved software Apple keeps putting out.

It will be doubly interesting to see what iWork is because of Apple's approach towards free and open source software. Will iWork be a slick version one like Keynote, an acquisition like Final Cut, or something that draws on an open source base, like Safari did. I could see them buying a stong and venable word processing environment like Nisus Writer or making a front end to OpenOffice that rocks.

I wonder if Apple has an official leak office within their PR department as the leaks are not stealing anyone's thunder but are perking people's interest.

Latest Rumors:

SNOW IN HOUSTON CHRISTMAS 2004

Saturday, January 01, 2005

Happy New Year Everyone

New years resolution #1: Stop mourning Adolph's move to austin

The Indefinite Article.

Monday, January 31, 2005

Kung Pow!

Photoshop Question

New PB G4

Sunday, January 30, 2005

first iSight movie

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Opacity Masks in Illustrator CS

CyberDuck ?

Wednesday, January 26, 2005