http://people.redhat.com/bharris/blog/index.html


Quote of the Week:

"Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty."

-- Roland the Gunslinger (Stephen King's "The Dark Tower")

...  8AM Thu Jul 31 ...
Oif, the pain of early mornings -- hate 'em. But what can you do? However, there is a great SCO paper out today. But that's still not enough reason to be up at this hour. Bah.

Still primarily preoccupied with Morpheus in the evenings. Alice is still my favorite among the new toys, though I had to disappoint her last night in order to finish installing some graphics software and doing a little studying. I finally found some of my favorite fonts over again, and that made me at least reasonably happy.

...  6AM Sun Jul 27 ...
I am posting this from my new home machine's linux partition. I finally have left the realm of the sadly computer-less and rejoined the drool-worthy coterie of geeks around whom I spend much of my waking time. My pal bbrock and I danced over to Intrex and I slapped down some serious cash on a system to shame all systems. I'd been saving and looking and drooling and dreaming for over a year now, and here's the vitals for my new baby Morpheus:

Right now he's split between Windows XP (for games and design work) and Red Hat Linux 9 (for coding and job). He's amazing and beautiful and full of good things, like a very macabre little game named Alice. No time for blogging, it's gonna take me a week to get this set up right. ; )

You might notice there's no mention of mouse or keyboard or moniter -- that's with good reason. I already had a not-too-shabby moniter and a keyboard I love (old IBM, click-click-click), so I decided to spend those extra dollars on the hardware instead. Woo, hardware.

...  3AM Thu Jul 24 ...
Picked up some photos from Wolf camera as planned yesterday and began tinkering with some of the automated tools in Photoshop 7. I'm working on a better HTML template, but even if this one is devoid of CSS, it's still pretty svelte. The graveyard set was taken in Washinton, NC, my parents' ancestral home. The other set is just some random shots to see how well the color prints worked out. More to come, possibly a whole new frontend for this site this weekend, if I spend my Sunday in the labcave.

...  3PM Wed Jul 23 ...
Made plans with my current geek muse to go computer parts shopping on Saturday. Though I was tempted by the laziness factor and my roommate's phat-ass Dell, I wasn't willing to take the hit to my geek cred that would come with purchasing an assembled PC. So, a Saturday at Intrex for me. Woo woo.

In random masscom news (my favorite kind), UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center published the Gutenberg Bible online. Nifty. I was involved with several digital publishing endeavors when I worked at ibiblio with the super-cool Paul Jones.

...  10PM Tue Jul 22 ...
Went to the new Wolf Camera on Harrison Avenue this afternoon. It's a big store, and the guys behind the counter were nice enough, if a bit snotty. I guess they're used to the yuppies with the thousand-dollar cameras that haven't a clue what an f-stop is, but still... geesh. Though I suppose it was the end of the day, and after a full shift of Cary denizens, I think I'd be a bit put out too.

However, I'm not going to let a little condescention drive me away from convenient, well-done photo processing. ('Well done' meaning that they change the chemicals when they start to muddy the negatives!) I dropped off 7 rolls of film -- 1 B&W, 2x200, 3x400 and 1x100 -- all taken from recent trips and family events. Whee! Perhaps I'll finally get around to finishing my online photo album in the very near future. (Like anyone cares. Every Tom, Dick and Weirdo has their $25 digital shots slapped up on the internet...)

In any case, the main reason I wanted to scope out the Wolf was to see if they'd give me grief when I try to return/replace my LowePro camera bag. I love that thing, and hate to think that I will have to pick something stodgy, small and ugly. Sigh.

...  8AM Tue Jul 22 ...
Big goings-on with SCO today. Woo doggies.

...  10PM Sun Jul 20 ...
After a bit of much-needed vacation time that included several gatherings of friends and loved ones, I feel refreshed and a bit sunburnt as I return to the usually gruelling schedule of work and studying for work.

I'd love to say that I spent some of my vacation days brushing up on this or that l33+ web bit, but I didn't. I spent most of my time in a place where cel phones fear to roam and connectivity is best obtained via walkie-talkie. It was grand.

But now I have returned, and after battering my lanky front yard into submission (three weeks of weeds can be impressive in an english garden), I sighed and cracked open my laptop to do some couch-side surfing.

The big news is, of course, that AOL is yanking Netscape. It's been all over the place, slashdot even had a letter from a supposed NS team member. The Mozilla project, not to be undone, annouced its split from AOL (go figure). This makes the browser wars even more so "interesting" ("interesting" of course being a pseudonym for "giant pain in web developer's ass").

Though I must say, I'm particularly sad to see devedge go. It was just starting to get good.

...  11:45PM Sun Jul 6 ...
After a long weekend of travel and family-time, I came home to a distinct lack of connectivity. Which was a real pity, seeing as an interesting story from Adobe broke just recently. Appears they are starting to pull Mac support from some of their digital media software, starting with Premiere. They cited competition with Apple's Final Cut as the primary reason for the switch. Kind of makes a web person a bit nervous -- don't think I'm feeling the need to splash out on a G5, regardless of the drool factor, if there's a chance my 3K investment will be worthless in a few years time as Adobe pulls the plug on the tools I need. Sure, it's pretty -- but I haven't got the spare pennies to waste.

In other news, the lake weekend website is a smashing success. I didn't ever get around to finishing the print stylesheets site-wide, but I did make the directions page print-friendly. Usability, baby.