Fuzzy Couch

The blog what speaks for Guido, Troy, Ryan, Brett and Matt

Guido Strotheide | Troy Lowe | Ryan Seggelke | Brett Thomson | Matt Janet

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Patio progress

Posted by Matt @ 7:31 AM

Still stuck in hell. I need to get a wet saw and finish the details. This is not the most recent, but it will give an idea of the scope.

Saturday, September 27, 2003

B'town too loud

Posted by guido @ 2:10 PM

Sydney and Jake thought the black powder rifles were too loud at the Beardstown Fall Fun Festival parade today. Being sans earplugs, I had to agree. They tell me this is the longest parade in Illinois.

I was denied on the Kathy's Kitchen front. From what I could tell, she didn't have a booth this year.

Friday, September 26, 2003

Everything scheduled at once

Posted by guido @ 9:12 PM

Route 66 Fest is this weekend in Springfield. In J'ville, we have the Prairieland Heritage Steam Show and the annual Cruise Night this weekend. In Beardstown, there is the Beardstown Fall Fun Festival. Geez. I think I'm just going to Beardstown this year. Julie wants to see the parade with her students. Maybe I'll be able to get some Vadalia onion relish and red pepper jelly from Kathy's Kitchen. She had a booth there last year.

They just said, on the news, that a tornado touched down near Lincoln.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

A challenge

Posted by guido @ 7:10 PM

What's a way to set up my TV components so that I can tape something and watch something else? Right now, when we tape something, we have to turn the stereo off and listen to the TV through the TV's speakers. It isn't a huge hastle, but I'd rather be watching CSI with the surround sound right now. Here's what I got:

TV

Receiver

DVD

VCR

Update:

TV has L and R audio in & out. I'm using only the video in from the receiver now.

DVD is out only. I'm not using the L/R audio out. Just RCA-style coaxial out for sound.

VCR has RCA L and R audio in and out. It has RCA video in and out. And coax in and out. I'm using all of them now.

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

backup backup backup

Posted by Troy @ 10:07 AM

The 3 most important rules of computer operation, no? So I've been flying naked here for several months... ever since I made the switch to Apple, I've not had a good backup strategy. A cool thing though; now that all my home machines are Unix I can leverage my mad shell scripting skillz to automate even more repetitive tasks!

So, last night I created a basic shell script that did the job. But in addition to that, I wrote my very first Applescript! I used the Applescript to wrap the shell scripts so that it would prompt my wife with dialog boxes for when to put in the CDR for example. Fun Stuff!

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Gave myself the bird(s)

Posted by guido @ 11:48 PM

I switched over to Firebird as default browser and Thunderbird as e-mail program. Had to do some very scary registry-type hacking or at least huge-dat-file hacking to get my old e-mail data into Thunderbird. Messing with the dat file wasn't mentioned in the info I found on migrating from Mozilla to Thunderbird, but it wouldn't take until I tried it.

I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to these dat files and javascript files and such. Hope it works without incident. I'm a little worried. Julie isn't too excited about switching. Hopefully, she'll like it.

Gloop

Posted by guido @ 8:10 PM

Bought The Smiths, "The Best ... 1", today and listened to it at work. I get to track 3 and it starts skipping around and then the rest of the tracks play fine. So I take it out and look at it. It has a big gloop of the ink on the bottom. It's the ink they silkscreen stuff on the top of the disc. So I had to take it back and wait for a new copy to come in. Darn. Pretty good CD, though.

Kitchen for more coffee

Posted by Troy @ 9:49 AM

My wife and I went to Japan (EPCOT) to buy some Nishiki premium rice and while we were there we noticed some new Spirited Away merchandise!! We both loved the movie and picked up these two items:

A little lapel pin representing an enchanted soot creature ... he is actually just sitting on top of our microwave currently

... and a little magnet of the bird friend which makes me smile everytime I go to the fridge :)

As I went to get my 4th cup of Starbucks Breakfast Blend from the kitchen, I noticed these guys sitting there, and I knew I had my blog topic for today.

Monday, September 22, 2003

Filched chicken finger

Posted by guido @ 8:09 PM

Utini just flipped my tray and bogarted my last chicken finger. I quickly recovered it from his mouth, but it was a bit doggie sogged. I don't think the five second rule counts if it falls in someone's mouth. Neither of us get it now.

I'm getting close on the Web site I've been putting together for my college professor. He gave me the text today and the photographer brought over the images. I've been sizing and optimizing all afternoon and evening. I might finish it tonight and only have to do some touch-ups later in the week.

Update: 11:53 p.m. -- OK, I think the site is done now. Check it out here if you want to.

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Tiny buttons

Posted by Troy @ 7:07 PM

Guido, the Steal These Buttons site you sent me is pretty nifty. In fact I am now addicted to the challenges of squeezing in themes/thoughts/ things I like in 80 x 15 pixels worth of space!

Here are my favorites so far... he he he:

Friday, September 19, 2003

Yodel girl

Posted by guido @ 4:24 PM

Taylor Ware, 8, whose parents are originally from my town, won the recorded submission portion of the Yahoo! Yodeling Challenge. She now faces about 8 others in the finals. The girl's grandparents still live here, and I'm pretty sure I bought my couch from one of her relatives. :)

Taylor and the other finalists can be found here. I might vote for her. The winner appears in a Yahoo! commercial.

Ginchy GIF

Posted by guido @ 11:09 AM

Watch this little animated movie ... it's just GIF file. Pretty neat. I like this guy's artwork too, if you wanna check the rest of his site out.

Thursday, September 18, 2003

That's a wrap III

Posted by guido @ 8:59 PM

Principal photography for Star Wars: Episode III, wrapped yesterday. That means I can hurry up and wait for the planned release is summer 2005.

change finally

Posted by Troy @ 10:18 AM

Well, after 9 months of being on the same project its finally done for me. I'm anxious to do something different now. This weekend I am going to the beach to take a mini-vacation before my next gig. I'm really looking forward to it. We are staying at this cool place right on the white sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Patio project from hell

Posted by Matt @ 8:57 PM

Well, the patio has been a nightmare, to say the least. Why does an outdoor project have to span 4 months? I guess when it involves a lot of shoveling anything can take a while. It is almost there with the final grading and paver install waiting.

The great state of Minnesota awaits a visit from Guido and Julie. If you're in the area be sure and let me know. We do have a big mall.

Mandy's 10 year reunion is coming up in a couple of weeks and we're actually going to suffer through this one. We paid well in advance so it makes it more worth the drive, plus it isn't 9 hours, only 5.5. It will be nice to hear all the trash about the past, especially when it doesn't pertain to me.

Peace out.

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

I'm all mixed up

Posted by guido @ 7:31 PM

I don't know anything about said "research," and some searching turned up no background, but this is amusing anyway:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, teh olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses adn you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

I actually washed the car today. Julie had the accutriments out and was finishing up on the Civic when I got home from work. So I gave the Jedi a quick scrub. It was in pretty bad shape, being parked under a tree most of the time.

Troy's brother, Travis, says he's going to stop by Ultimate practice this evening. Yea! Update: He's not coming today after all. Hopefully another day, though.

Monday, September 15, 2003

The North Star state

Posted by guido @ 8:45 PM

I made and added the button for Minnesota in the sidebar area. I think I fixed the comments feature on the archive pages, though I haven't checked it yet. Here's hoping. I talked to my uncle Jeff, who, it seems, got a new Dell last week. I just started seeing him pop on my buddy list. He's down by Troy -- an hour south of Disney, he said. I should visit the the two of you sometime, eh?

My watch mysteriously changes its own settings. Currently, it has decided to beep on the hour.

Where's the photographer?

Posted by guido @ 11:44 AM

I still haven't heard from the photog that has the images for Larry Calhoun's Web site. So I worked on the main page today, not really knowing how extensive the site is going to be. But it seems to be in good shape and I can't really do too much more without the images. ... wait, I just thought of one more thing I can get done ahead of time. OK, I'll do that now.

I did get the lawn mowed Sunday and it was an awesome day for Ultimate and we had adequate numbers. I picked up my comic book subscription in Springifeld. I even did a few dishes. Oh, and I read a bunch of "Daredevil" comics I'm very behind on.

Right now, I'm eating this crazy Cinnabon-flavored popcorn that comes with ICING! Weird. It's pretty good.

Saturday, September 13, 2003

Stuck in a comic book

Posted by guido @ 11:55 PM

Greetings, true believers. Will Guido get up early enough, tomorrow, to mow the lawn, wash the dishes, or work on the new and exciting Larry Calhoun Web site? Will the dasterdly drizzle foil our hero's advances against the overgrown lawn monster? Will anyone show up for Ultimate practice in the preciptiation? Tune in next time, loyal readers, to find out just how lazy Guido can be!

Here's a doodle from tonight (actually last night if you're a stickler for that sort of thing).

Julie and I went up to see my parents Friday night and came back Saturday afternoon. I spent part of the evening updating a few programs and clearing out all the extra programs that launch at startup on mom's computer. I used spybot to get rid of the spyware and adware and it even has a great process explorer feature that helps you figure out what all those processes actually are. That made things easier. I update the anti-virus stuff, ran Windows update, and ran scandisk and defrag. Had to do those in safe mode, of course. Hopefully it will be running a little faster now.

Erin's still convinced she has a CD burner in her laptop, but I'm not so sure. She thinks she's just missing the software, but I bet she either didn't order it or she ordered it and they didn't get the order right. I hope she actually has it, but ... oh we'll see. Mom's been on the phone with the company from which it was purchased several times, I guess. She isn't the most fluent in computer speak, though. I wish I would have thought to ask about that when I was there.

We hit the 33rd Annual Abraham Lincoln National Railsplitting Contest and Crafts Festival for lunch and checked out some cool vintage bicycles that were on display. I got the walleye sandwich with tartar sauce, tornado fries, strawberry shakeup and strawberry shortcake. I ran into a couple old acquaintances (i.e. Don, Marjorie and Ben Sapp and I met Ben's wife; John and Arlene Dewilde from Scouts; John _____ from the year ahead of me in high school; the Dave Wilmert, his parents and sister; saw Heather Shouse from a distance).

Ahhh! I just found the LCHS school song (which I torture people with every once in a while).

Unsafe I-net

Posted by Troy @ 3:15 PM

I was looking through my firewall logs today and noticed an increase in port scans. Mostly for windows vulnerabilities, but the volume of scans did surprise me. I can't recommend enough that you should run a firewall as part of your home's safe surfing strategy. I am a little less vulnerable since I run only Unix and variants, but it still concerns me as nothing is invulnerable.

- Windows users should look into Zone Alarm
- Mac OS X has a firewall built in (System Preferences, Sharing, Firewall), but for the same type of real time alerts like Zone Alarm provides Windows users Firewalk X 2 looks really good to me.
- Linux users have firewalls available in most distributions, Red Hat 9's can be configured with 'redhat-config-securitylevel'

Even inside my work-place network, I've been hit by scans from insiders! Maybe they were infected by trojans and unknowingly scanning for someone else, but still, how scary is that? No network is safe. Take care of yourself.

**Update: So I found out that this was known to be coming over at the Internet Storm Center.

Friday, September 12, 2003

The Man in Black

Posted by guido @ 11:41 AM

We've listened to "Johnny Cash At San Quentin" twice so far today. Good recording. Cash, 71, died this morning.

Lazer Tag & other randomness

Posted by guido @ 9:28 AM

The move to the new server hasn't been entirely smooth. The new message board at the Unofficial Lazer Tag Homepage is cool and has lots of features and people are starting to sign up. Only one post so far, though. The main page of the site is giving me fits, though. We haven't figured out why yet.

I'm beginning to think Ryan isn't going to join us. :-)

I'm going to be working on a site for my former art professor. Hope it doesn't take too much time. I'm going to make it pretty simple, I think, for compatibility sake. I might throw in some CSS for styling the body type, but I think I need to stick with tables for now for layout. I haven't talked to him much about future upkeep. I probably should, eh?

I made a new logo for this page, but I'll wait to see what Troy thinks of it before I post it. Either of you guys want to make a better fav icon? I just threw this one in there. I think we need a Minnesota button over in the sidebar, too. I can probably make that sometime.

I talked with Scot Bodnar Wednesday night for a little while. Nice to catch up.

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Feature-laden

Posted by guido @ 10:49 PM

Wow, Blogger added most of the Blogger Pro features to the free accounts. You readers won't really see much, maybe any, difference, but it is nice, I promise.

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Random comment

Posted by guido @ 10:17 AM

My sister says in an e-mail, yesterday:

"I checked out the new website, Josh. It's good, but I do have to say that some of that stuff is awfully random."

In random fashion, I'll note that we have a new comments system, powered by Posterchild PHP code. It is a bit different that the previous one from BlogSpeak, but we don't have to rely on someone else hosting it. I guess we're actually on a new server now, too. Thus the ability to use PHP now. Also, urelated to posting and PHP, my Ultimate group is switching from Tuesdays to Wednesdays so that, hopefully, more people have fewer conflicts. We've been having some UIS students coming out, so hopefully they will be able to bring even more students out.

Monday, September 08, 2003

re: religious art

Posted by Matt @ 10:09 AM

I think the church and person one represents me?

The patio is almost excavated, I have to start with laying the gravel and get this done before winter. The impending doom of winter is approaching!

Tron-esque

Posted by Troy @ 9:14 AM

I came across a cool opensource game this weekend.

It is kind of a Tron cycles type game. If you have ever played "snake" where you navigate the snake around a grid, twisting and turning avoiding walls and your own tail. This game is like that, only with many human controlled "snakes" looking like cycles in futuristic 3D!

It uses OpenGL for the graphics rendering so that makes it extrememly portable to other platforms. Runs on Mac OSX, Windoze, and Linux, check out Armagetron!

Saturday, September 06, 2003

Thieved

Posted by guido @ 10:52 PM

I've been a victim of thievery! 11 CDs stolen from one of the cars last night (or this morning). The car was right there in the driveway. Glad they didn't take the stereo, too. Goodbye Coldplay, goodbye Tori Amos, Liz Phair, and Travis.

Party night

Posted by Troy @ 10:37 AM

We went to Night of Joy 2003 last night, over at the Magic Kingdom. We saw Rebecca St. James, Stacie Orrico, and Jars of Clay. We tried to also see Switchfoot, but the rain started coming down from Tropical Storm Henri and they dealyed the performance (maybe canceled, we didn't stick around).

We had great fun! We even had time to hit a few rides between performances. We were both exhasted by the time we got home.... I think we are getting older.

Friday, September 05, 2003

Two little religion illustrations

Posted by guido @ 9:50 AM

I did these recently for the religion page. Jesus was last week; church was done yesterday. Can you guess what the church one is supposed to illustrate?

A special month

Posted by guido @ 9:45 AM

September is, among other things:
National Mushroom Month,
International Self-Awareness Month,
National Potato Month,
Pleasure Your Mate Month,
Menopause Awareness Month,
International Gay Square Dance Month,
National Humor in Business Month,
and National Rice Month
and National Lice Month (officially known as National Pediculosis Prevention Month).
I'm sure there are more.

Thursday, September 04, 2003

I'm a textbook example

Posted by guido @ 8:31 AM

Here are the images I promised about that book I'm mentioned in. It is the second edition of "Editing Today" by By Ron F. Smith and Loraine M. O'Connell. You should be able to make out my page on the cover of the book (alternate cover image), even. And here are the two graphs that reference the page.

"Editors at The Jacksonville Journal-Courier in Illinois had a good story recommending that readers take a day trip to a classic-car dealership in nearby East St. Louis. (See Figure 12.13.) But they did not have good pictures or graphics to use for the centerpiece. So, designer Guido Strotheide used type much the way he would have used a picture. The headline gives the focus to the page and creates interest in the story.

"Strotheide set the tracking of the letters in "Rte." and "incarnate" very tight. The "66" consists of two 6's that overlap. Two drop shadows, one blue and one gray, keep the numbers distinct. The 6's are gigantic 417-point type. "Rte." is smaller, but still it's huge by newspaper standadards (about 300 points). Finally, Strotheide used italics to drive home the pun in "incarnate." The headline and the deck are in the Journal-Courier's standard typeface, Industrial."

Wednesday, September 03, 2003

Ahhhh!

Posted by guido @ 4:58 PM

This is just too crazy. This guy falls off a ladder, lands face-first on freaking HUGE drill bit (18 inches by 1.5-inch diameter) on Aug. 15, and (except for his eye) he is basically OK today? It just doesn't seem possible. I mean ... it went through his eye and out the back of his head!

What's that sound?

Posted by guido @ 8:51 AM

Upcoming CDs that, at least, seem to be interesting:

SEPTEMBER 9
— Frank Black and the Catholics, "Show Me Your Tears": The latest solo work from the ex-Pixie.
— Beulah, "Yoko"
SEPTEMBER 16
— David Bowie, "Reality": Only one year after his last release.
— A Perfect Circle, "Thirteenth Step": A second album from this Tool offshoot, adding former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and a new bassist (Jeordie White, late of Marilyn Manson's band).
SEPTEMBER 23
— Rufus Wainwright, "Want One": The singer-songwriter expands the theatrical sound he explored on his debut and matches it to lyrics that look at love from all sides now.
OCTOBER 7
— Belle & Sebastian, "Step Into My Office": The latest from Scotland's most precious band.
— Howie Day, "Stop All the World Now"
— Beth Orton, "Pass in Time"
OCTOBER 14
— Jonny Lang, "Long Time Coming": The young blues guitarist
— Travis, "12 Memories"
OCTOBER 21
— The Shins, "Chutes Too Narrow"
OCTOBER 28
— The Strokes, "Room on Fire"
NOVEMBER 4
— Sarah McLachlan, "Afterglow." The sensitive singer-songwriter's first in four years.
NOVEMBER 11
— Tears For Fears, "Everyone Loves a Happy Ending": The synth duo's first album in 14 YEARS.

Early morning post

Posted by guido @ 6:37 AM

I can't tell if this cereal is supposed to taste like this, or if it is stale. I didn't think we've had it long enought for it to go stale.

This site seems pretty funny. I haven't explored it too much yet, but it sounds interesting on the face of it.

Monday, September 01, 2003

Only took 1 day for me to geek it up

Posted by Troy @ 3:20 PM

My Apple iPod arrived in time for the weekend! I loaded my music on it and still had over 8 gigs left! That is a lot of space that needed to be used for something. And I knew just the geeky utilitarian use for it.

A friend of mine is part of the Apple beta testing team for Panther. He was able to get me a copy to try out. So I used the ipod's spare space as the mount point for installing the beta OS. I must say that Exposé , a feature of the new OS, is awesome. It alone justifies whatever upgrade price Apple chooses to charge.

My single biggest problem switching from PC to MAC was that multi-task management was worse. I would have windows upon windows piled up and having to shuffle them around to find the one I wanted was a painful task. With Exposé, I am one click away to all windows, and another single click to where I want to go.

known Issues

This layout fails in IE4.5/Mac.

other credits

Green pattern by Travis Beckham. Pink and blue patterns by (now defunct) Pixel Adventures.

LCHS song

"Lincoln, Lincoln, we are proud of you. Lincoln, Lincoln, we will e'er be true. Following the bright Golden Rule, we get things done without much ado. We're happy, we're snappy when we send our call. Lend your voices one and all. If dear old Abe were here I know just what he'd do; He'd say Lincoln, we're proud of you!"

Jacksonville, IL, 62650

Lincoln, IL, 62656