Saturday, January 12, 2002

Sara and her grandmother Clara 6:17:22 PM

Jake made a wooden climbing bear in his shop class, and he's putting it together, burning the ends of the nylon cord in our woodstove. (He's not going to put his chessboard in the stove, but it would burn better.) 3:06:56 PM

Working on Radio 8. Time to bring in my websites from Frontier 5. I opened the Frontier.root from F5 and did a Batch Export of the websites, then brought the pick o' the litter into Radio. So far, so good. I wanted to keep the ability to edit pages with BBEdit, so I brought in the menubar command from Frontier. So far, so good. I tried to publish a page from one of the Frontier sities. The Frontier FTP worked, but the autoParagraphs did not. Hmm. I added "autoParagraphs=true" to the website prefs. Worked! So far, so good. Oops. I'm missing my "yahooPaths" macro. Brought it over, published the page, and it worked. So far, so good. I think I'm happy. I need to figure out how to active the "***" shortcut for bold headlines. I'll check it later. 2:31:53 PM

A resolution for 2002: steer clear of the stuff that drove me crazy last year. The Pedee School endeavor started strong, but ground the family into the ground. We're still licking our wounds, but it's good to be out of a strange and unpleasant situation. Democratic politics is also a drag. I did some useful things. I helped redesign the state party website. I became chair of a congressional district committee. I was a party plaintiff in the congressional reapportionment litigation. Moments of accomplishment, but I'm still viewed as a pesky critter by the old guard. I'm not drawn any closer to self-actualization, so I'm pulling back my commitment. With the Pedee School effort, Kim and I spent nine months fashioning a new architecture for our lives. We abandoned tasks that competed for our time, all with the hope that we could turn dream to reality. In many ways, we succeeded, but not in the fundamental desire to create a superior educational opportunity for children. Trying new ideas in old communities is risky business, and we got burned for it. C'est la vie. What's on deck? I have a few ideas. Some of opportunities vanished in the Pedee School efforts, and for others, we are less enthralled than we used to be. January and February will be a time of re-entrenchment. I'm getting the tech part of my life in order (at least as much as my PowerBook and OS X will allow), and I've been playing more music with friends than ever. A broad swath of useful experience - law, politics, business, education, Internet - but a lack of focus in application. But thoughts are bubbling. Stay tuned. 1:41:25 PM

First one set of problems with Canvas, then others arose. Not-Quite-Ready for PrimeTime, IMHO. Slow development of reliable device drivers is the bane of the OS X experience. Hope that we'll work out the kinks by the end of the month. 1:09:09 PM

A couple weeks ago, I purchased a PowerBook G4/667. As I move to OS X, I'm updating old software and installing new gizmos. This morning's task: get printing to work on Canvas 8. I was caught in an endless loop between print dialogs. Fortunately, I found a hidden update. Unfortunately, the update didn't update. So I'm downloading a bigger updater. Arg. Next project: get realtime rendering to work on Final Cut Pro 3. Supposed to work on my PowerBook, but doesn't do so in any noticeable fashion. Other quirks: Entourage seems to choke on e-cost mail. If I get mail in Mail and clear the offending message, Entourage can pick up where we left off. Next gadget scheduled for delivery: Wacom Intuos2 6x8 tablet. I think it's time to retire my ADB tablet. Strangest gizmo I purchased: Kensington FlyLight. MacOS X wait list: Scanner drivers for OS X. 9:04:02 AM

© Copyright 2002 David Sherman.