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The mostly harmless pedant.
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|11:53 am] |
I was vaguely aware of this 'Verified by Visa' think as something I had to mess with once before, but I'd entirely forgotten about it until trying to order tires today. I even still had the password for this yet another annoyance-of-a-process from the last time, so I copied and pasted it in.
It didn't work. I tried other possibilities and locked it out. Oops. Fortunately there was a number to call on that page. So I called it. And got transferred to another department. Who transferred me to another department. Whee.
Having made it to the right person, I had to answer some security questions to get my account unlocked. The first one was easy; choose from a list of vehicles which one I'd owned. Then there was a list of addresses that I had to pick one from that was associated with me or my family. I'd never heard of any of them before so I chose none of the above. The same happened with the second list. I swear, I've never heard of any of these addresses in my life.
But that was the wrong answer. So, I am unable to get my password reset without visiting a branch. I'm mildly annoyed, but will deal with it when I have a working car I guess. Amazing how these things all come together at once, isn't it? I can order the tires with my other debit card. Assuming I don't have the same problem with it, it being a Visa too.
But what I'm really curious about is where the heck these addresses come from!? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|09:16 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  working | ] |
The picture of the day is another from my trip through the Keweenau peninsula last year.
I love vintage advertisements that you see painted on top of brickwork. It grabs my imagination to walk through a city like Chicago, full of glass-and-steel behemoths, and come upon the side of an old brick building, perhaps recently exposed due to construction or demolition, that has an ad for corsets, or wagon repair. It really makes me feel a sense of connection to the history of the place I"m in.
I don't know how old this sign actually is; it looks much less faded and weather-beaten than most. But it definitely has a vintage feel to it that made me stop and make a picture.
This sign is in Houghton, Michigan, a town that sits on the south shore of Portage Lake, part of the waterway that connects Lake Superior across the base of the peninsula. Houghton is home to a bunch of neat places, including a vintage movie theatre, the Lode, which I didn't get a very good picture of, unfortunately. I'll probably add a picture when I put together a set of movie houses anyway. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|07:44 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  awake | ] |
There was excitement with my car this morning. I mean that in the worst sense, unfortunately.
The alternator seems to be non-functional on the Neon. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) moiracoon called me at six o' clock to come jump the car. I got over there in the KIA and did so, but it wasn't long before it stalled again. The ScanGauge shows the voltage at about 11.5 to 12 after the jump, but it quickly slid down, past ten, nine, and eight, to seven, where it died.
I jumped it again and let it charge via cable for about ten minutes and tried to drive home, but I only got .38 miles down the road (according to Google Earth) before it stalled again. I had Moira drive me home and take her car, which is still in need of replacement tires and having some clunking noise issues, but seems to be largely ok.
I'm debating whether I want to wait until Andrea gets home to use her car to pick up the battery from the Neon to charge on the charger here, then try and drive it home this evening. Alternately, I could just call my mechanic and have them tow it and fix it. A tow from in town should be relatively cheap, right? I hate to throw money away if I can get it there under it's own power though. I wonder if sitting for ten hours with little charge is enough to permanently damage the battery anyway.
Amusingly, today is the exact date of my last payment on the Aveo; a short payment of about 46 dollars. At least we'll have a little extra money for car stuff now, as my intention is to put the same amount of money per month into savings dedicated to a replacement car and/or car repairs. How did the Neon know? It's uncanny.
At least I can wash clothes today, so it's not all bad. And I got extra time with my sweetie this morning, which is always nice, regardless of the circumstance.
Love you Moira! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|02:31 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | working | ] |
The drain cleaning service that our handyman sent over to resolve the backing-up of waster water into our basement came by with a big chrome machine that looked like it came from 1940 to clean out the pipes. I commented on how neat the machine looked and he told me that, though it was built in '95, it follows basically the same design that's been used for probably fifty years.
That bit of conversation lead to me spending about forty-five minutes talking to him about manufacturing in Chicago, the basements and secret places of the old buildings in that city that he's worked in, how Chicago managed to maintain its place in society while rust belt cities like Detroit, Gary, and Pittsburgh fell, and about abandoned buildings that I'd been to and what they were like, and the history of the raising of street levels in Chicago that made first-floors into basements and how he'd stood on what used to be a sidewalk seventy years ago that was now below street level.
It was awesome!
And he cut through all the roots that were blocking the drain too, so our basement will stop flooding when we wash clothes!
And for bonus points, as we talked about how roots grow into pipes and what that means for their integrity, he made a comment about how trees are 'living things, struggling for life like everything else'.
This was all just conversation that I totally did not expect from someone who looked younger than me and, well, kind of mainstream. Maybe I don't give the general population enough credit. He was so interesting to talk to that I'd actually kind of like to see him again. Maybe go exploring or something. Maybe I should have asked him.
==============
I put in for time off for the New York trip. I think it will be fun.
This weekend will consist of Moira and I going to visit anarchist_nomad while he's in country on Saturday (which happens to be the date of our anniversary! Whee!) and, on Sunday, a bicycle trip around downtown Chicago for me. At least, that's the plan as of now. Anybody want to go with? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|09:30 am] |
Sadly, I still haven't managed to post much about my trip to the Keweenau Peninsula in May of last year. It was a really great trip, and it felt so good to be away from everything but my car and my dog for a while. I'm going to do something like it again this year if I can.
I drove north from Kenosha after work and kept going until it got too dark, and I got too tired. I stopped in a farm field near Pound, Wisconsin, and not too far from a marker at the 'half way north' point: the 45th parallel, 3107.47 miles from the equator, and from the north pole. (I have a picture of that too, of course.)
The next morning, I drove on, arriving at the base of the Keweenau Peninsula, just west of L'anse. There I found the Bishop Baraga shrine that I'd read about in Roadside America.
Bishop Baraga was a priest and missionary who travelled all around Lake Superior, through both modern United States and Canada, by foot on snowshoes. He established five major missions around the lake, and became fluent in native languages, writing a dictionary that is still in use.
Here's a close up of the statue that is the shrine's center point.
I've got to say; to me, he looks like he's ready to start some shit with a vampire. I like it.
Though officially, this is The Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest, I refer to this site as "The Shrine of the Spider-priest". To see why (and for a cute picture of my dog), look behind the cut. Those pictures aren't quite as nice as the one above (they're kind of snap-shotty), but you can at least get context for the statue from them.
( These pictures aren't quite as nice as the one above, but you can at least get context for the statue from them. ) |
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| And now for something completely different |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|11:06 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  Having library-envy | ] |
This is is a tall, narrow library behind a science lab in an abandoned high school in Northwest Indiana.
It's also very much what I want my library at home to look like some day, except even more so. I mean, check out that rolling ladder on a runner! Does that not just scream 'I am a book slut!'? Want.
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|09:13 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | working | ] |
I'm stingy with my time off.
I get a certain amount every year; of course, those of us who have salaried, ore even hourly, jobs usually do. In my case it's 23 days a year. Not a lot, but it could be worse. And I move to 26 next year. Anyway, my time off is very precious to me. Money is a good thing, and benefits like insurance are important too, of course. But time is the one thing that you can never get back once it's gone. I'd prefer to spend as much of it as possible away from my job and doing something wonderful enough to justify expenditure of my limited time off.
Andrea and I looked at scheduling last night for the next couple of months. I just requested (and got approved for) July 24th and August 21st. We'll leave for a trip to the UP on the 23rd of this month, and a trip to Detroit on the 21st of the next. That leaves me with 16 and a half days.
For a while, barton_fender has been planning a trip to New York, along with akreaveter, my other brother No-LJ-James (and girlfriend), and possibly farm_cat even. With No-LJ moving to Lansing for law school, it might be the last time for a year or more I get to spend a bunch of time with him.
We'd be staying at a hostel fairly cheaply, so I'm not too worried about cost (though I am a little bit). We'd be gone from a Monday night through the next Monday. I'd probably eat as dirt-cheap as possible. I may rent a camera lens to take with though, which I'm more than happy to spend a little money on. It would be a good opportunity to try out the 10-22 I've been eying. (I guess this says something about my priorities when it comes to money. Food is temporary; why spend lots of money on it?)
I've pretty much decided I'm going to go (assuming I can get those dates approved). But I keep having niggling doubts about it somehow not working out. Like, it'll turn out to not be interesting, or cost too much, or something stupid like that. Or what if the experience there isn't that different than one I could get by staying in Chicago? Plus, it's over the dates as the LAFF waterpark trip. I don't know when I'll get another chance to see New York. I should go. Tell me so, would you? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|10:15 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | working | ] |
*whines* My paw has been sore since Saturday when I ran the super weed-whacker through the backyard and man-handled it into and out of the trunk of my car. I'm wearing my wrist brace like I normally do, but a couple times now I've leaned against a wall, or tried to pick something up and been rewarded with shooting pains where I had the surgery years ago. I've decided to see a doctor about it and find out whether there's anything that can be done, as the problem there in general doesn't seem to be getting better on its own.
I'm going to call the the office of the doctor that moiracoon sees. The one I've been going to is ok, but he's a nephrology specialist, not so much of a general practitioner. I was going to him because he's been my dad's doctor forever (my dad being diabetic), but I like my sweetie's description of her guy, so I'm going to try him out.
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I had a really nice weekend, spent partly working on household projects and Ebay, and partly (yesterday afternoon) on a mini road-trip with the raccoon to an antique store in Richmond where she and mocha_mephooki had previously located a hoard of vintage tools. Though I was hoping for smithing tools and didn't find any, it was still a really fun trip and I found a number of things to oggle. I kept looking at the ice tongs and other old metalwork, trying to decide whether they were hand-forged or not. I don't think I'm experienced enough to tell.
From there, we went to Lake Geneva, where we ate at Popeye's (no, not that Popeye's; another one), spent a few minutes at the arcade (I got in games of Arkanoid, Asteroids, and Addams Family pinball), and capped it with a little ice cream from Kilwin's. It was a first for me; I'd never had Blue Moon before. I can only describe the taste as...blue. But I liked it.
Unfortunately, Moira took a mis-step and hurt her ankle; the same one she sprained quite badly in Minnesota a ways back. I'm sending good thoughts to her today. After being unable to locate crutches in the house, I got dressed and drove back out at ten-thirty to my parents' house to borrow some and make sure she'd have them for today if she needed them.
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One picture a day seems to be a good amount. I don't end up putting a ton of stuff out there behind a cut that nobody looks at, and I actually get a few comments. Plus, I get to share some of my pictures that I like, and know that it won't be forever and a day until I get to them. Here's today's:
This is looking up toward the top of the control structure of the Damen Silos. This small, squarish section of the building rises to double the height of the silos (which are no slouches themselves in the height department) and contains ductwork, chutes, and gears. The top floor houses the remants of an electrical distribution system. (As always, you can see a larger version by clicking on the pictures, and then clicking 'all sizes' at the top of the image on the Flickr page.)
This picture is from a vantage point on the riverfront side of the silos, on a dock constructed of weather-greyed boards that ripple up and down in places. The occasional pleasure-boat passed by as we explored, but didn't seem to pay us any mind, fortunately.
While I think the lens flare on this picture actually added something to it, I don't like it on the one above. But so it goes. Maybe I need to get hoods for my lenses if I'm going to do a lot of looking-into-the-sky shots. |
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| Job number three done! |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|03:42 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | accomplished | ] |
Here's my backyard after attacking it with the weed wacker of doom.
We really hadn't done much with it for about four years, so I was surprised by how quickly I got through it all. It's about ninety percent done; I broke the string of the wacker against a stump I missed seeing. I may dig out what stumps and big woody stems are there and continue next weekend. I'd like to get the area against the garage, and the little cubby back behind it, done.
I recommend Lee's Rent-It in Kenosha. Easy to deal with, and they have a big Black Lab who lives in the store. Pretty dog!
( Here's what it looked like before the mass deforestation (but with better lighting). )
I like the willow tree in my backyard; I've always loved willows. Plus, I love having a yard that backs up against the train tracks. On top of the fact that I just love trains, we have a yard with a lot more privacy than might typically be afforded in the 'burbs. I need to take care of it better; it's worth it to have a space there to go out to. Man does my wrist hurt after running that thing though.
My 'coonie-grrl offered to buy me dinner after seeing the yard. She is nice! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|10:47 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  sleepy | ] |
It turns out that I misunderstood, or misremembered, what Devin told me. He's working tomorrow, so he can't go anywhere. I'm hesitant about going to abandoned buildings alone, so maybe that won't be happening. I may go down to Chicago anyway and take pictures, or I may stay at the house and work on Ebay. Not quite sure. But I really need to get all of this stuff out of here so I can fully concentrate on things I really want to do. Not to mention have extra money in case my partner has job issues.
====================
While going through stuff to put on Ebay, I found one more HX4700 iPaq. These are HP PDAs. This one has a 640x480, full VGA screen that be viewed either portrait or landscape. It has onboard wi-fi and bluetooth, as well as 64MB of memory, expandable via either SD or CF card. It's running Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition version 4.21.1088.
I think this will run a VNC client. I thought for a bit about hanging onto it as a control module for my car computer, that I want to construct at some ambiguous future time. But I don't know when that's going to happen. If I really, actually want one when the time comes, I can buy another. murstein picked one of these up from me a while ago and, I think seems to like it.
On Ebay, these are averaging about 100 dollars used, and 150 to 200 new, it seems. For someone I know, I'll take 75, including shipping if necessary. If you're interested, let me know. Otherwise I'll put it on Ebay next Wednesday.
I'm also putting up a lot of 8 iPaq 3850s (old and obsolete iPaqs; ok, even more so) and a Firebox Soho 6 (new in box). serinthia, I'll let you know how much that Soho thing goes for, if anything, so we can split it.) |
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| Mona Lisa - She's everywhere you want to be |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|09:55 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | working | ] |
Here's a picture of a certain, nearly universally known, piece of art, oddly replicated on the window of an abandoned building on the site of the Damen Silos, in Chicago's lower west side.
I'm thinking about this one as a candidate for a convention art show.
This is actually a crop from a larger image that shows a bit more of the building. My thoughts in selecting the portion I want included the following:
*Is there too much bright green grass? Is it distracting from the picture's centerpiece, the Mona Lisa?
*Is there enough of the building present in the frame to provide context for the Lisa's location?
*Does the selection of building that's in the image act as a good frame for the content? I like the vertical brickwork at the top an the horizontal brickwork at the left that provide straight lines in to the middle, but is there too much, or too little?
I may still tweak it some as I look at it. I have a while. I may decide to take more grass out, or crop in on the right just a touch to frame between a couple of window panes. Depends on whether I want the building to seem to go on significantly off the right side of the frame, or if I want the piece to have a definite border on the right.
The more pictures I take, the more I see how much like painting it all is; the very same thought needs to be put into matters of composition and form. I see, too, how distortable reality really is through the lens. It's been a sometimes-surprising learning process. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|09:18 pm] |
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Does anybody want to come visit me tomorrow? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|01:22 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  puzzled | ] |
A couple people I've never heard of have sent me automated emails telling me I should join Facebook. The names are kind of spammy-sounding (and my apologies if you are, or know, one of those people; they just are reminiscent of those fake names you see in spam emails that always have two or three parts, plus an initial, like Thrombosis K Addlepated or something); Susan K Penrod Pilcher, and G Warren Olsen. Do other people get these? Are these real people?
A bunch of my family is on Facebook (as well as LJ), but I've never heard of these folks. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|09:09 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | working | ] |
This may have been the highlight of the walking trip through Chicago on Monday evening. The Kinzie Street railroad bridge, essentially abandoned and permanently in its raised position since 2001. That was when the last business receiving freight traffic across it, the Chicago Sun-Times, moved its printing press out of downtown Chicago.
I wrote a bit more about the history of this bridge, once the longest and heaviest of its type in the world, on my Flickr page, which you can get to by clicking the picture. (Yes, my research consists primarily of looking at Wikipedia. It's a matter of time, you know?)
===============
My plans for this weekend include another photo trip with Devin. Not quite sure where yet, but most likely the power plant to try to get some steam-punk looking pictures for shows, since that seems to be what everybody's into. Plenty of good candidates there! I'm thinking about going into Chicago proper after that, and maybe looking at Lincoln Park, and going north to one of the current cemeteries. The plan is still formulating. Anyone interested in coming along? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|11:50 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | working | ] |
I felt kind of lonely and disconnected on Monday night, as I lay on the couch and drifted toward sleep, despite the fact that I was among friends down in Chicago. This certainly had nothing to do with my hosts, who make some really fantastic food, on top of being great friends. I just sometimes start feeling like I should be doing more to establish and maintain connections with people, and that I'm failing at that. It's not an instinctive thing for me to do; it takes effort, and sometimes life gets busy or stressful and I don't expend that effort. And then, if I haven't talked to people in a long time, I start feeling like it's weird for me to approach them again, which I'm not good at anyway.
This is one of my neuroses. I'm sorry.
Here's another picture from my downtown walk with jimcyl. This is 191 North Wacker Drive, a very modern building completed just seven years ago. It has a commanding location quite near the riverfront, and the open space across the water provides plenty of opportunity to grab a huge swath of the sky and reflect it back to the ground in a stunning 500 foot display.
This one's nice, apart from that things are slanting to the right; that ubiquitous problem I have keeping things level. You know, Ken Rockwell may say that you don't need a tripod with a digital SLR, but I'm not so sure. I think a tripod with a ball head and levels would help me make things straighter; not being square-on is really amplified by all the straight lines that big buildings have. At the same time, I'm sure I got around a lot faster without one than I would have if I was carrying one everywhere, so I don't know.
The red brick building in the foreground could be brightened up a bit. Good task for Photoshop. I really need to get that set up soon. (Or maybe it's just my monitor. I have this monitor turned ninety degrees, and sometimes I'm not sure it's intended to be seen from the angle I'm looking at it from and the colors do weird things. It looks better on one of the other monitors.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|11:05 am] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  annoyed | ] |
I got an email from my manager at 5:00 yesterday asking that I check on a problem an employee was having logging in. I didn't check my email this morning because, being 'on queue', I've been busy dealing with incoming calls, including time spent resolving four different problems at one person's desk, and a problem at another desk. I got an email from the employee's manager asking for an update, then a minute later, and email from my manager asking what the delay was.
This could have been resolved much more swiftly if:
*I was paged via after-hours system if it's important enough to jump the normal line.
*My manager had called the employee who the ticket had actually been assigned to since she was on queue at the time and could just as easily have enabled the account.
*My manager had emailed or called someone who was not busy with both being 'on queue' on on call at the same time.
I don't understand why these things did not happen. I'm really puzzled primarily about why the person who owned the ticket didn't get an email, but all of it is confusing. On the other hand, our manager doesn't seem to really know what our schedule is anyway. At one point prior to the move, he told our team lead he should be off 'on queue' duties for a week while we got ready. He wasn't on them to begin with. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|09:00 am] |
I'm 'on queue' at work today, which means that all the incoming calls are my joint responsibility along with one partner. We rotate through being responsible for incoming calls on one day and having two days to work on and resolve those calls. We do this instead of something sensible like having an actual tiered support system where we have level one techs who take calls and escalate to level 2 and level 3 because...well, I'm still trying to figure that out.
As I dig further in here, have a picture.
This is the south face of the Merchandise Mart, one of Chicago's largest commercial buildings, seen from the Franklin street bridge. At the time of its opening, it had the most occupiable floor space of any building in the world, a title which it held until the completion of the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The bronze heads are captains of Chicago industry and commerce.
I like this picture, but I wish I hadn't put one of the decorative columns on the river-facing balcony right in front of the main entrance, and I think there's just a touch too much space on the right side. Plus the buildings are a little slanty, which I can't seem to help when photographing large buildings. It's really tough to get everything perfectly leveled. I have another one where there's a little less space on the right, but the buildings are leaning a touch to the right instead of a touch to the left, which looks worse. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|10:02 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | sleepy | ] |
jimcyl and I spent a few hours after work wandering around the northwest portion of the loop, generally having a great time and pointing our cameras at anything that looked interesting. I shot a couple hundred pictures. I even have a handful, maybe five or ten, that I really like. They're not perfect, but I finally feel, as I page through my images, that I'm looking at more than just a collection of snapshots.
Anyway, here's a picture of a section of el track near the Blommer chocolate company. I'd never heard of them before, and unfortunately the public store portion was closed so I couldn't sample them either. But it smelled heavenly.
It was hard to avoid blowing out highlights in the sky without losing the details under the overpass. I really need to get Photoshop set up so I can play with more in depth processing on these.
(And now that I look at it this morning, I think it might have been better for the siding of the overpass to terminate right in the middle of the upper-right corner, rather than let one edge go into the corner.)
It's nice spending the night down here in Chicago. I get to sleep an extra two hours, 'till seven o' clock. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|02:55 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| | awed | ] |
Another view of the east side of the Canal Street railroad bridge.
This structure is so big that it looks somehow unreal from a vantage point at its base, especially looking up at one of the end towers. I've seen a lot of gigantic structures on this scale since I started doing a lot of urbex, and it's one of my favorite experiences. Seeing something so big my brain doesn't have a reference point to make sense of the size in relation to a man-made structure. A little mental (not to mention physical!) vertigo from time to time is good for the soul.
====================
More pictures from this weekend as I get to them. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|02:39 pm] |
| [ | State of Being |
| |  excited | ] |
From my trip down to Chicago yesterday with posicat and Devin, a friend of my brother's.
This is looking north along the east side of the Canal Street railroad bridge, with another Chicago landmark in the background.
What do you think? Do you like the black and white? Maybe I should have left it color? Grayscale seems to suit such an industrial structure, of such venerability.
When it was completed in 1915, this bridge had the heaviest vertically lifted movable span in the country. As the couple of railroad personnel said when we bumped into them while I was taking pictures and generally gaping, this bridge is the only one of its kind in Chicago. It takes a lot of maintenance and work to keep it up.
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I haven't been on LJ or online much since Wednesday. I had Thursday and Friday off, and my weekend's been happily full, despite the odd support call or two. Today, we're heading out to my grandparents' house for the extended family gathering. I'm bringing my portable hard drive to show off all my new pictures from the last several months. Whee! |
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