Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

deep breath

Catching my breath after a big, super-busy week.

Tuesday: We have a new pope! (Well, “we” as in “we Catholics.” Although, given the way the papal election process has been given saturation coverage, you’d think everyone’s a Catholic now.) I’m not really enthused by the selection of Pope Benedict XVI — my impression is that he’s uber-conservative, compared with some of the other candidates — but we’ll see how things go.

This year’s edition of Swing, the Washington Post local golf guide, went live late in the day. I put together the online page design (based on the design I used for the 2005 Inauguration coverage), the Flash-based golf course map and the printable PDF brochure / map. (I didn’t create the original maps; I just repurposed maps created by folks at the Post.)

Also, after nearly seven months of working with an ancient G4 (one of the first single-processor / 400 MHz G4s) that was so slow I was resorting to using my personal laptop for processor-intensive tasks (like working with big maps from the Post), I got a dual-processor / 2 GHz G5! I spent much of the day “ooh”ing and “ahhhh”ing over how super-speedy it was. For at least a few hours, I was in speedfreak design heaven.

Wednesday: The G5 blew up.

I’d gotten the Mac “gray screen of death” late in the day on Tuesday, and when the computer froze up on reboot, I gave up and went home for the night. Wednesday morning, it was no better. A course of “Repair Disk Permissions” and “ejecting” my old computer (I’d hooked it up as a Firewire drive the day before to get my old files off) brought things to the point where I could at least log into my account on the computer — but only temporarily, as it would inevitably freeze again after a couple clicks.

So it was back to the laptop.

Irony being what it is, it happened that the G5 went down just as I was in the middle of a project that it was perfect for: the 2005 edition of “The Guide,” an annual community guide that appears in the paper’s zoned editions and features lots of huge — and often incredibly detailed — maps. Brian, Nelson and I divvied up the long list of maps and got everything done by the time the package went live late that night.

My other contribution the project was the Flash version of a large local recreation map produced by the Post, the code for which I shamelessly borrowed from the golf map I’d done. After having spent the morning troubleshooting the G5, I didn’t get a chance to work on the map until late afternoon. I nearly cried with relief when I plugged the new map into the golf map Flash file and it worked without any extra code wrangling. I’d forgotten that, when coding the original map, I’d made all the height, width and limit variables relative, rather than hard-coding them in.

Thursday: Picked up my car from the body shop and dropped off the rental at Enterprise. The rep I talked to at Auto Craft warned me that my car battery was having problems taking a charge the day before, and that they’d tried to charge it overnight. The car seemed to start okay for me, though, and I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t die on me this weekend: Rob and I had a long road trip ahead of us.

Work was a bit of a blur, mostly cleaning up loose ends from the day before. I left early, at around 3, to pick up Rob and head out to Roanoke, Va., where, with Doug, we were to head up a session the next day at the College Communicators Association spring conference.

Thursday was also “freelancefreelancefreelance” day for me, as I was on call for last-minute corrections and bug fixes for a project set to go live that night, and I had a conference call on the road for another project.

Between obsessive checks of my e-mail, I got to explore our way-spiffier-than-I’d-expected hotel a little bit and joined Rob and Doug for dinner at a nice Indian place a short walk away.

Friday: Attended the CCA conference with Rob and Doug. I felt a bit conspicuous, the employer name on my nametag generating curious looks and occasional “what brings you here?” questions from other attendees.

We met the Web team from the University of Virginia at lunch, and it was fascinating to hear what they’re working on, in terms of experimenting with new Web trends and technologies, and the various challenges they face as a small team and as a large university.

After lunch: Our session, where Rob, Doug and I led a group discussion / critique of higher ed Web sites, showing sites we liked (or disliked) as well as those belonging to brave souls who offered up their own sites for critique. It was fascinating to watch the group dymanic evolve over the course of the one-hour session.

Afterward, the three of us hung out at a local coffeeshop (with free WiFi!) and went to dinner at a nearby Cajun restaurant before heading our separate ways: Doug, to visit a friend in a nearby town, Rob and I, to head back to D.C. and try (unsuccessfully) to get out of town before a major thunderstorm hit.

Saturday: Errand and chore day: dry cleaning, laundry, bills, new batteries for my car’s keyfob, etc. That night, at Rob’s suggestion, we went to IOTA in Clarendon to see Michael Penn, with opening act Jim Boggia. Great concert — mostly just the singers with their guitars (Penn had backup in the form of a guy on keyboards), and in all better than I’d expected. However, the noise from the restaurant next door and the rowdy “we’re not really here for the music” foursome who stood in front of us during the opening act were more than a bit distracting at times.

I’d only heard one of Penn’s songs before — his one big hit, “No Myth” (iTMS) — but after hearing more of his work, I’m thinking about checking out his other albums. Right now the chorus to the very Dylan “Brave New World” (iTMS) is stuck in my head. His style seems to mesh really well with that of his wife, Aimee Mann, who Rob and I are going to see next month at the Birchmere.

Today: Lunch with Rob at Quizno’s. Meeting with a freelance client in half an hour. Dinner with Rob, Dari and Kearns at a sushi restaurant in Alexandria. Maybe grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. Maybe a late-night showing of Kung Fu Hustle.