fontosaurus

I cannot tell if I am just cranky as shit today, or if people are just being obtuse obstructionist idiots that can't seem to rub enough neurons together to understand that, hey it's time to move, when I approach the bovine herd that's blocking the entire hallway. There is no safety in numbers, fuckers, and if I could release a hungry tiger in here to prove it, I totally would.

I've got an awesome idea for an Arduino project, based on the fact that all my data sources on the bike will be using the ANT+Sport protocol for communication.

The plan is to build an advanced data logger than can keep track of more than just the basics. I'll be adding two buttons to the handlebar that, when clicked, will log food or fluid intake so that I can use that data to see how my power output, heart rate, and speed were altered further down the line. Include some basic weather -- temperature, humidity, and air pressure -- to see how that changes things, and you could have a pretty awesome black-box data recorder that covered a lot more than just the basics.

What I haven't decided is what to do with the data. With Arduino, I can store it to a 1GB SD card and then download that data when I get home, or if I'm feeling particularly saucy, I could get the cellular shield for the Arduino and dump all that data to my home server as I'm riding, which would create a really cool situation in which you could see everything via the web in realtime. And that, compadres, would be AWESOME.

Away from the geeky and the snarky, we move on Teh Sads. Kate leaves on Sunday to go to NC for nine weeks. Sure, I'll get to see her here-and-there, but I'll still be missing her like mad. And it sucks.

What's new with you, Internets?

So there's a write-up over at DB.N about my adventures with the Arduino board and my woes with the bike upgrades: http://www.danbailey.net/590/a-few-random-things

Also, my future wife kicks ass for more reasons than I can actually address here. I just don't want you, the reader, thinking it's all negative stuff, because while I do vent here more than I post about positive things, it's important to note that for every one little incident of bad that I vent about in here, there's a thousand moments of awesome where she makes me laugh until my ribs hurt, gives me butterflies in my stomach, or makes me wonder how I ever lived without her.

So last night, I hooked the Wintel box up to my monitor, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, and gave 'er a rip. She booted on the first try, and I got Ubuntu installed without any headaches. The only downside is the lack of a simple driver setup for my wifi card. I've been dancing with ndiswrapper since yesterday evening, to no avail. For now, there's an Ethernet cable running at an angle from the far corner of my living room to the desk at the opposite corner. I hope to get this resolved tonight.

Tonight, I am supposed to start swimming lessons, and Kate will be my instructor. I never learned to swim, and there's a long story behind that, that I'll be conveying over at DB.N later today, or sometime tomorrow. After work today, I need to hit up a Sportmart or something for a lock, towel, swimsuit and goggles. I'm trying to blow off the minor snit we had this morning at about 6 a.m. When I went to leave I was still really irritated, but I stopped before I left, forced myself to calm down and went in and kissed her goodbye and told her that I loved her. Now, hours later, the irritation is coming back a bit. Must relax. Should definitely not carry this into swimming lessons.

Back to the geek side of the house, there's this thing called Tikitag, which I'm looking at, and thinking is a brilliant idea. I'm thinking I'm going to invest in one, and see if I can't tie it to documents on my hard drive. It'd be nice to have a sticker on the frame of a bike, for example, that would pull up the specs document for the frame and the maintenance logs. Basically, someone figured out how to market RFID tags.

On the sports side of things, apparently all Vince Young needs is a hug, and he'll be alright. There used to be rumors that Daunte Culpepper had a fragile ego. Sounds like he's met his match in Vince Young.

In other jock stuff, Lance Armstrong formally announced his return to racing yesterday. I'm sure that Nike, Trek and Oakley are all shitting themselves with glee. Unless, of course, he signs with a team other than Astana...in which case, only Nike and Oakley will be shitting themselves with glee.

So Saturday's agenda did not go exactly as planned. Went rollerblading around Calhoun with Batgar (Dan), Ben, and Karl and his wife Carla; Ben's fianceé opted to go for a run instead of blading. Carla did two easy laps and we (the guys) did three very fast laps... I've determined I have been putting in too many hard rides and not enough recovery rides...as soon as we started, my heart rate shot up to near redline, and I just wasn't able to recover at all. That's bad. So I'm going to take a couple-o'-three days to sit back, relax, and just take short, slow rides, and recover from the pounding I've been putting on my cardiovascular system. Also -- I think the stem on my bike might be a hair too long...the lower back has been twinging a lot lately after rides, and I'm really getting a lot of work on the muscles down there...they're tired all the time.

So anyway, afterwards, I dropped off Ben and Heather at Ben's place and followed Batgar over to his place. He gave me this old USB color inkjet he got for nothing...clearing out the house he is. Turns out that he and the wife are "with child" -- I'm quite happy for them...they've been trying for awhile.

Anyway, after that, I hit McD's for a cheeseburger -- my first meal of the day. Yum!

Then I decided to meet a friend at Valleyfair for the day. Hell yeah! Right off the bat, we went straight over to Wild Thing and got a front seat for it. Dayam! What a ride! Total rush! The downside was, all the coasters were pretty anticlimactic after that. We did make a point to ride all of the coasters in the part at least once, esp. given that most of the lines were pretty short. The breakdown was this: Wild Thing x2, High Roller x1, Excalibur x1, the new Wild Mouse coaster x1, the Corkscrew x3 (front, middle, and back). We also hit the Power Tower (a "Whoa Belly" for those of you that have played Roller Coaster Tycoon) -- both sides...the launch and the drop. We also hit the go-karts and one water ride. And I won a stuffed Spiderman at one of the games... I was stoked. We tried to avoid the wussy rides. By the time we'd done all that, we were pretty well exhausted and split.

Last night I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. Slept like a log. Today, all my muscles are tiiiiired. I'm going to sit here and write some code today and get those fonts finished. :-)

Other stuff:

Don't ask me, I just work here.

The most important thought of the 20th century: When your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.

Public Service Announcement for those of you that have not seen it yet.

Chez Geek. One of the "most funnest" card games ever. Right now, my only competitors are never around. Once I get a place of my own again, I need to get some beer and a bottle of Cuervo and get a bunch of people to come over and play. Fucking hilarious game. :-)

WHY GOD? WHY? WHY THE EASTER BUNNY, YOU CRUEL FUCKER?

Tags: bike, dating, funny, geek, lists

This is going to be thrilling.

Friday: Going to hook the Win(D'OH!)s machine back up so I can access this database I'm working on for writergroups.com. Want to get that site working in some capacity tonight, with a full-blown launch in the next 4-5 days. Whee. Also doing some work on steamlocomotives.info. Do I sound excited? I shouldn't. It's Friday and I'm sitting at home playing web geek. Panic over lack of job and imminent cessation of unemployment benefits.

Saturday: Rollerblading with the guys @ Lake Calhoun...leaving from Burnsville at 10am. Charge! Going to be there a few hours. Come home...more web work. Start sending out résumés for jobs I'm not even remotely qualified for. Finish font work for Chank. Supposed to go to a movie Saturday afternoon, too. Panic over lack of job and imminent cessation of unemployment benefits.

Sunday: Put together at least one new free font for Fontosaurus.com. Been too long since my last font update. Have a good potential candidate for a "grunge" font. Think about a new design for my whiteymustpay.com site. Maybe I'll sell t-shirts through CafePress or something. Who knows? Any extra revenue stream would be helpful at this point. Panic over lack of job and imminent cessation of unemployment benefits.

New Job Ideas:

1. Sanitation Engineer. Pros: Union job, probably has decent wages; the movie Men at Work made me laugh my ass off. Cons: smell like garbage, have to get up an unholy hours of the morning, brain-dead all day like.

2. Cat Burglar. Pros: Might get to see chicks nekkid, could finally score than Playstation 2 I've been lusting after, feel all proud like I'm Robin Hood or something. Cons: illegal as hell, I'm scared of heights, I'm too clumsy to stay quiet.

3. Superhero. Pros: Feel good about self, save world, kill Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, X-ray vision significantly improves "the scenery" at Lake Calhoun. Cons: I don't have X-ray vision, my one superpower seems to be stretching my money, scrawny cyclist's upper-body would look goofy in Spandex, that Wolverine guy could kick my ass.

4. Pimp. Pros: surrounded by women all day long, make lots of money, get to say "bitch where's mah money?". Cons: feel guilty about taking womens' money, can't bring myself to do mean stuff to people, no health insurance plan.

5. Professional Skee-ball Player. Pros: life of total slack, entertaining, pro skee-ballers now allowed in Olympics. Cons: beer belly, no groupies, "skee-ball elbow", shitty income, endorsement deals hard to come by,

Resolutions:

• I WILL GET A FUCKING JOB. SOON.


• No reading of the 4th Harry Potter book until I have a job.


• No more computer games until I have a job.


• No more masturbat--dammit, who am I kidding with that one?


• No more looking at pornogra--dammit, that won't work either.


• I WILL GET A FUCKING JOB. SOON

Man, I am a productive muthafucka. I just finished my redesign of my personal site -- mindwired.com. I'm da bomb. :-)

I'm also checking my mindwired email account for the first time in probably 6 months. Holy shit. Well over 1300 emails and still going. Betcha dad's going to love having them deleted off the server. :-)

For the record, that Blogger shit really sucks my white ass. It's an integral part of bitterfatbitch.com, and I can't get it to save a new layout template to save my life. Fuck them right in their ear, dude.

In other news: I have been listening to Moby all goddamned day. Suddenly I feel like buying a pair of leather pants and shaving my head.

My Muse taunts me so much. I just had a GREAT idea for a company with an immediate revenue-stream, and if it were 1999, VC firms would be throwing money at me.

DAMMIT. Why do I think of these things far too late?

Man, you guys need to start posting. I am soooo fucking bored again today. I know, I know, I should be making follow-up calls today, and I will. But you guys need to post stuff. Seriously.

I haven't gotten to the experiment with ViaVoice yet. Should be interesting, though...I have really vivid dreams (at least, lately I do), so it wouldn't surprise me if I talk during them. On the computer subject, though, I need to burn all these MP3's and warez off to a couple of CDs. Hard drive is getting full. Very full. So what am I doing? Downloading the soundtrack to American Pie 2. Scratch that, it's finished...on to Coldplay's "Parachutes" album.

Anyway, my project to code a replacement for Fontographer is looking more and more feasible. And something that could be done relatively quickly -- in code terms that means a matter of a few months. Today, I am going to start scribbling my ideas and notes on paper and see if I can't come up with something totally kewl. I need ideas for a name, too, if anyone has any suggestions. This is going to be a Mac OS X-only program, and if you don't like it, you can lump it. Objective-C (Cocoa) is the way of the future, my friend.

Ideas for font design program name: FonteX, Fontonomicon. Anyone? Bueller?

I would like a garlic bagel with cream cheese for breakfast today. But I don't think Bruegger's would give me one for free. Fuckers. Did you know that Greg LeMond (the first American to win the Tour de France and all-around good guy) owns a large chunk of that company?

Playboy has an article on the obvious. And this guy needs to find himself a meek/quiet dolphin. Anyway, I think that generally speaking, that the article is pretty much dead-on-the-money, even given my personal experience.

Hey Minneapolis-ites -- do they still hold Ribfest in July? Wanna come downtown and help me harass the PETA freaks? Yum! Beef!

Bitterfatbitch.com is well underway. I got the navigation files in the thing today, and running, which is a good step in the right direction. Really all I have left to do is about five lines of ASP/VBScript code, configure mso's Blogger so that the homepage will render properly, and fill out some basic content. Once that's done, the site will be a fully functional babe magnet.

A Castle in the Sun needs to get finished. I've been working on this thing for over a year now. That's far too long. I want to be a published author now. Thank you, drive thru.

Writergroups.com falls into a similar category as the previous two. It needs to be finished. I haven't got much coding left. Some, granted, but not a whole ton.

You nosy bastards that wanted to see my screenshots -- if you can't, it's probably because you're behind a firewall that has port 2000 blocked. So sorry. Live in shame of your weak Internet abilities. :-)

Boredom: why isn't the government spending money to deal with this problem? Hello...George...? You wanna get re-elected...nationalize the country's amusement parks and make them free. Bread and circuses. I'd vote for ya.

Hello? Where is everyone today?

I am so fucking bored, that I am going to allow you nosy bastards to snoop on my iBook some more. You might see me coding Javascript. Or Cocoa. Or just maybe surfing porn. (If I stay on one pic for a long time, it probably means I am spankin' it.)

Goddammit. Will someone entertain me or something?

Well, the template for msO's website is up so that you can get a laugh out of it -- bitterfatbitch.com is da bomb! Now I just need to add content and navigation, and it'll be good-to-go.

So I'm involved with three sites right now, with a fourth on the horizon. There is, of course, fontosaurus.com, which is a large-scale project and is going to be the biggest pain in the ass. I'm also working on getting writergroups.com finished in the next few days. mso's website, bitterfatbitch.com just got client approval for the user interface last night, and will be going up in a few days. (Don't bother trying to link there, at the moment, the lookup table here at the ISP is linking to entirely the wrong site.) After these are finished, I have to dig into steamlocomotives.info -- a project of my dad's. I don't get paid for that one -- just get half the ad revenues.

Just so there's no confusion, I did this as a response to beewitched's website, there's certainly not anything going on. (To the person this disclaimer is for: you know who you are! *grin*)

SimilarMinds.com Compatibility Test

Your match with beewitched 92% friendship compatibility 93% relationship compatibility

How Compatible are You with Me?

Anyway, I went and got that O'Reilly's book on learning Cocoa programming. It looks to be a bit on the "thin" side from an information perspective. I guess I'll have to read the documentation that came with the dev tools, too. I am highly stoked to see that the language has built-in vector graphics tools and font libraries. This will make coding a replacement for Fontographer ten million times easier.

Got my XTerra over to the crew at Nissan to get my sunroof fixed, too. They were supposed to call last Tuesday/Wednesday and never did, so I called them and then took it over there, and voila! -- instant fix. Too bad a major storm system is moving in right now.

Well, I figure I'm going to learn to code in Cocoa (Objective-C for Mac OS X). There's some programs I've been wanting to write, including a phat LJ client that will have all sorts of groovy features built into it. So I'm poring over documentation right now, trying to get a handle on all this. Interesting. Might have to drop some money on an O'Reilly's book later this week. O'Reilly is god.

I guess the best thing about being unemployed is that I've managed to keep busy. I just got home from Dave and Kristin's place -- played some Chez Geek and some Scrabble. Discussed Dave's upcoming Mac system. Lots of bad jokes, as always.

Got to pick mso at the airport tomorrow. Also going to try to get over to Calhoun for some rollerblading.

I'm so happy with Apple's handling of my iBook repairs -- to fix the flickering screen, they replaced the battery/power sub-unit, and not only did it resolve that, but my battery life is much-improved. After an experience like this, I'm so pleased, I'd take a bullet for Steve Jobs.

Anyway, it's been a long day. I finally figured out what book I wanted to buy -- two hours after B&N closed. I'm going to pick up a copy of Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose. Yes, the book the HBO miniseries was based on.

But, I'm sleepy, so it's off to bed for me. G'nite.

Well, I've been laying in bed for an hour now. My cats have been lounging around with me, instructing me in the fine art of being lazy. They're such an inspiration.

I'm supposed to be riding a century right now (that's a 1-day 100-mile ride for you non-cycling types), but with the way my back feels, it's pretty much out of the question. Major drag. I was looking forward to it.

Dave and Kristin are coming back into town today -- they were in Iowa yesterday for a wedding. We may be getting together to play some Chez Geek today...or tomorrow. Who knows?

For those that don't read my postings over in the Macintosh community, I'll recap here. Friday, I dropped mso off at the airport. I came home, and my parents were unloading all sorts of toys from the back of my stepmom's Grand Cherokee. My stepmom got herself a top-of-the-line Powerbook G4 (the titanium monster), a new iPod, etc. (I tell you, that iPod is going to disappear into my boxes when I move out). My dad has decided to make the switch and will be buying an iBook of his own, shortly. Then my friend Dave called to tell me that he might be getting an iMac and a bunch of video production stuff. Too cool! Looks like I'll be teaching a lot of people the innards of OS X.

OS X good. Windows bad. Remember that.

The iBook just arrived! How cool is that? Everything's kosher now! They replaced the battery subassembly and my old battery, and replaced the hard drive. The only downside is, I'm going to be spending my day getting all my shit working.

Must remember that I have to take mso to the airport today. She's going to Atlanta to visit a friend. Personally, I think it's a Nookie Run, but whatever... :-)

LiveJournal Connect! Enter your username in the left box, someone else's username (or a * for a random one) in the right box, and press the button! -> Suppress Explanation Mutual Friends Only Coded by sachmet

And the other cool thing is that my mom is taking me out to dinner tonight. How cool is that? Mom rules!