(There Is No Cat will be back to it's usual dapper self tomorrow. Today, we show off the glory of our semantic markup.)

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A couple of my favorite stores in my old stomping grounds of State College, Pennsylvania, get shout outs. Arboria is closed. I spent a lot of time and money there in my years in State College. My friend Josh, who did the blues program at the campus radio station where I worked, was the manager there. They carried mostly used stuff (all vinyl back then), but had one wall of new records. A lot of them were cheap imports of dubious quality from places like Italy. My first copy of The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight was one of those. I certainly couldn't afford to pay for the UK import at the time. Arboria was great.

The owner of City Lights Records is quoted in the article. I'm glad to see they're still around, even if they're hanging on by a thread. They opened up in my last year in State College, around 1985. They focused more on new merchandise than used, so they were a nice complement to Arboria. I remember buying the first Yo La Tengo single there, before anyone had heard of them. I hadn't heard of them either, but they were from Hoboken, and that was good enough for me. The single wasn't even in the racks yet; it was in a pile of a dozen or so singles sitting on the counter that the owner hadn't gotten around to filing yet, just in that day.

As a fan of obscure music, I always found that the indie stores in college towns were the best places to go. I always made an effort whenever I travelled to seek them out. I guess that's not going to be such an effective tactic any more.

I think I'm going to have to make a music run to Other Music at lunch time....

Tags: record store arboria city lights music

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Tags: election primary bumper sticker gore obama dream ticket

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Not to worry! I went to the Channel 4 Radio site this morning and found, right there in a big banner on the home page, that Ravenscroft has returned. The show is now called New Music Download and it's only every other week instead of every week. And it's not at the same URL as Slash Music, so if you subscribed to the old Slash Music podcast, you won't automatically get the new program; you'll have to resubscribe. But hey, beggers can't be choosers. I'm just glad to have new shows from the ever-droll Mr. Ravenscroft.

Tags: new music download channel 4 radio john peel tom ravenscroft podcast music

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• iPods are ubiquitous.

  Some mornings I can look across an entire five person row on the train and every single person will be listening to an iPod. I have yet to see another kind of MP3 player. No Zunes, no iRivers, no aging Rios, nothing. They don't exist. There is nothing but iPod.

• iPhones don't exist in the wild.

  There are a lot of smartphones in use on the train. Now that I'm spending so much time on the train every day, for the first time I feel a need for one. But with all the attention paid to the iPhone, you would think I would see some on the train. Nope, they're not there. I see some Windows Mobile-based phones, but mostly I see Crackberries. They're not as dominant as iPods are, but they're the clear leader. By contrast, in the office, I was treated to the sight of four of my co-workers holding their iPhones trying to figure out why it wouldn't work with Exchange. iPhones seem to be mainly for geeks at this point and haven't penetrated business culture as far as I can tell. Or at least not commuter train culture. Maybe everyone's doing what I'm doing and waiting for an iPhone that operates on 3G networks instead of AT&T's slow EDGE network.

• It's better to be on the bottom than on the top.

  On a couple of occasions, I've had the opportunity to ride home on one of the newfangled double-decker trains that NJ Transit is starting to adopt. I think they're mainly for the Northeast Corridor line to start, but they've been used on the Jersey Coast line that I take as well, and will be increasingly so as they get more of the cars. The first time, I got a seat on the bottom level. It was interesting. When you pull into a station, your eyes are at about ankle level of the people on the platform. It's an interesting change in perspective. The second time I rode one, I got a seat on the top level. You can see more from up there, but every little bump in the tracks is magnified. If you're at all prone to motion sickness, and even if you're not, it can be difficult being on top. I'm not usually someone who suffers from motion sickness, but I found my stomach becoming a bit unsettled when I was on top. In either case, though, the double decker trains have one big advantage over the older cars that NJ Transit typically uses: there are no three-across seats. Middle seat on a three-across during a busy rush hour commute can be an unpleasant way to travel home.

Like I said, nothing important, just some observations.

Tags: iPod iPhone trains commuting

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Last Friday marked eight weeks since I was laid off from my previous job. The job search was active, certainly much more so than when I was out of work in 2002 and 2003, and I had a number of interviews, but nothing was coming through.

That changed.

Friday morning at 11, I had an interview for a Front End Web Developer position at Magnani Caruso Dutton, a medium-sized creative agency in Manhattan. They've been around for several years. One of the recruiters I was working with told me in the course of prepping me for the interview that their interviews often went quickly and that I shouldn't be alarmed if it was over in a half hour. And so it was; by 11:30 I was back on the street and headed for home.

I hadn't even made it on to the train before I got the call. I was sitting in Penn Station when my cell phone rang. It was the recruiter with some good news; they had made an offer. That totally floored me; for one thing, I had been told that they had a couple of other candidates to talk to. I guess I made a good impression. :-) Also, I gathered that they had the impression that I had some other things going on, which was true, although they were things I wasn't truly interested in (for example, if the publishing company I interviewed at a couple of weeks earlier had called with an offer, I would have been presented with a difficult decision, as the job was with some very impressive people working in a way I like to work, but the corporate culture was one I didn't consider a good fit). Maybe they felt they had to strike while the iron was hot. And so they did; I got that phone call 45 minutes after the interview ended. I didn't want to discuss money and stuff while I was sitting in a train station, so we waited until I got home, but I think it took all of 60 seconds once I got the details to accept the offer. I was positively giddy on the train home.

The position is what they call freelance for now. Where I come from, it would be called a contract position. To me, freelance is where you work on various projects with unstable hours and pay your own taxes. Contract is where you work through a contract house and they take care of the taxes and stuff and send you a W2 at the end of the year. But as long as the money is green, I'll call it whatever they want. As another indication of how quickly they make decisions and things change, I started there on Monday. There's a possibility the job may become permanent/direct at some point, but it's not clear to me after two days when that might happen.

One of my biggest frustrations in my old job (the web part, not the running payroll part) was the tendency marketing and communications had to go to outside agencies for much of the fun stuff, leaving mostly the drudge work for us. We got a few bones, but most of the stuff you could sink your teeth into went elsewhere. I've largely been aiming my job search at small companies, and in particular at creative agencies and startups. So I got exactly what I was looking for, and now I'll be on the side that gets to do the fun stuff.

The other really good aspect of this new job as opposed to the old one is that they seemed to be particularly interested in my knowledge of web standards, semantic markup, and CSS (plus DOM-based Javascripting and Ajax). Those things don't seem to be on the radar at all in New Jersey, where most web development is firmly mired in 1997, but in New York City, they're becoming almost essential and appear to be in demand at the moment. Not everyone, not even most places, but enough places that there's finally a market for my approach to building sites. Finally, all those years in the wilderness trying to spread the good word are paying off. You're not going to find many people out there who have been using that approach for as long as I have. I was determined that on my next job, I would be able to take advantage of all the stuff I've learned over the years and wouldn't be trapped in the muck of table-infested legacy code. It appears that I've succeeded.

The one sad part about this is that I'm not sure how much time I'll have available for blogging and other hobbies in the future. The one good thing about my old job, the one thing that kept me there for so long, was that they were local at first, and then when they moved out of the area, they let me work from home. So work only consumed the hours between 9 and 5, which left me time for the stuff that kept me sane. Now that I'm working in the city, the commute alone has largely wiped out what used to be my leisure time.

Tags: employment job

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My condolences to her widow, Jack William Bell, grandson R, and the rest of her family.

Tags: anitarowland

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There's one problem with this: unusually for me, I'm not actually reading anything at the moment.

Normally, I would have two or three books going in various states of being read. But despite the fact that I nominally have nothing but time on my hands lately, I seem to be too busy to do much reading.

There's a couple of reference books I purchased recently, but they're not exactly barn-burners, not the kind of thing you read from cover to cover. I find the list of shortwave broadcasts in Passport to World Band Radio very useful, but as a narrative it lacks something.

So this is more for the most recent book I read, It's All Too Much — An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh. I used to watch him on TLC's Clean Sweep all the time back when I was hooked on home improvement shows.

Page 161, sentence 6:

Here is a tried and true way to find out.

You'll have to get the book to find out what you're trying to find out. I see on Peter's site that the paperback version just came out.

I'll do my friends a favor and spare them from passing this on.

Tags: meme 161 books clutter

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So it occurred to me, why should they have all the fun? I can create my own Lomo Wall.

I went to the local art supply store and found a piece of foam core measuring 40 inches tall and 60 inches wide. Unfortunately, that size wouldn't fit in my car, so I had to ask them to cut it down a bit, which I think actually worked a bit better. I ultimately wound up with a piece of foam core 32 inches tall and 60 inches wide. With each photograph measuring 4 × 6, I could fit 80 photographs on it.

The whole thing wound up costing me about $35, if you don't figure in the cost of developing and printing the film, which I was doing anyway. And it was dead easy to make. Here's what I did.

I had the idea that I wanted to be able to swap out photos, so it would be great if I could find something like PostIt Note® adhesive that would be easily removable. The guys at the art supply store recommended something called StudioTac.

Armed with my foam core and my StudioTac, I set to building my wall. I selected 80 of my photographs, all printed in landscape orientation, that I thought might be interesting, and laid them out, swapping them around until I was happy with their juxtapositions.

Then I started applying the StudioTac. It comes in sheets, but I didn't need entire sheets, just a small section per photo. So I cut a number of sheets into small strips.

The StudioTac comes as two pieces of paper with little adhesive dots between them. The idea is to peel them apart, then place the strip that contains the adhesive on to the photograph.

After placing the StudioTac paper on the back of the photo, I used a rubber roller on the back to make sure the adhesive adhered to the photo. You could use a burnisher, or a pencil, or your finger, whatever works.

Then I peeled the paper off the back of the photo, and placed the photo in the corner of the foam core.

I used the roller on the photo to make sure it stuck to the foam core.

Rinse and repeat.

Here's the Lomo Wall on the floor with all the photos attached and the scrap backing from the StudioTac waiting to be thrown away.

I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to hang this monstrosity, but didn't really want to spring for a frame. I went out to A. C. Moore looking for some ideas and came back with these. They're called Tap On Fasteners. A package of a dozen cost something like 99 cents.

I stuck two fasteners into the back of the foam core.

The I got some picture wire, also about 99 cents from A. C. Moore, cut an appropriate length, and looped it through the holes of the fasteners.

A little bit of twisting....

And finally, a little bit of tape to make sure the fasteners stay in. This wouldn't be necessary if you used them on a wooden frame like they were intended, but with soft foam core, I didn't trust that they'd stay put on their own.

A couple of nails in the wall, and voila, one Lomo Wall.

Note that you don't have to have a Lomo to do this sort of thing. The majority of the photos here are probably from my LC-A, but there are also some from my LSI Fisheye 2, from my Kodak Retina Ia, and even one ringer from my Polaroid 250. I may try to do a smaller version of this with photos from my Holga and Dianas, which measure 5 × 5 each.

Tags: arts and crafts lc-a lomo photography home decor kodak polaroid

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I can't say I'm heartbroken. I was bored to tears. I dug into my temporary project as well as I could, and can honestly say I now know more about banking and printing checks than I ever wanted to. But there just wasn't enough work to keep me occupied, and I was getting increasingly frustrated. In the week and a half since I left, I've really realized how badly I felt at that job since December; even with all the uncertainty that unemployment entails, I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. My months of exile are over. One thing that leaving the job has done for me is freed me to think of myself as a web guy again. I had been aware of a little project started by Lisa Herrod in Australia a few months ago, I work on the web, for people to post photos of themselves on Flickr and tell their story about working on the web, but as my months of printing checks dragged on, I was starting to wonder if I would ever work on the web again, so I hesitated to post my story. Being laid off freed me to do that.

So anyway, the low-key job search I've been running since the spring has kicked in to high gear. I had two interviews within three days of my job ending. There's a possibility one of those may come through with a job, but I don't want to jinx it by writing about it.

In the meantime, I've been trying to enjoy my time off, and largely succeeding. We've been renovating our family room this summer. I've been able to work on some finishing touches for the room, installing the moulding, moving the furniture back in to the room, that sort of thing. I'll probably post more about that once the room is really finished. We ordered a couch a few weeks ago (after I found out I was losing my job, in fact; we had the money for it saved up and decided not to let my employment situation get in the way of finishing the room), and hopefully it will be showing up in the next couple of weeks. One of our wedding presents a few years ago was a home theater-enabled stereo, but I hadn't gotten around to installing the extra surround sound speakers. Now I have. Right now, I'm building a bookcase for the room to hold the DVDs that are currently scattered around the house in piles. It's sitting in the garage partially assembled at the moment.

I've been spending a lot of time on Flickr in recent months. I've found my toy photography habit a useful way to engage my creative side while the creative side of my job disappeared. There are a lot of photos from trips I've taken in recent months: Ohio back in August, Wildwood over Labor Day weekend, and earlier this month Cape May. Laura and I went out with some toy cameras on October 20 to mark World Toy Camera Day, shooting in the morning out on Sandy Hook, and in the afternoon down in Point Pleasant Beach. That was fun. I haven't posted my photos from that day on Flickr yet, but will over the next week or so.

2007 up to this point has felt almost like a lost year. I suppose that's a big part of why I haven't been posting here much. (The other part, I think, was that I was pretty shaken up by a lightning strike that hit our house in July and took out about $10,000 of electronics while I was sitting right next to them.) I'm not sure I'll be getting any better about that any time soon, though; I just haven't had much to say, and I'm starting to rethink what it is that I want to do with this site. So I may be relatively quiet for a while longer.

Tags: unemployment photography

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