Ch-Ch-Changes

A lot of things have been afoot lately, some major, some just the march of time, and some that are minor. Shall we dive in?

1. I got a new grill. No I didn't convert to the heathens with gas but I plain wore out my old Weber so I bought a new one. I did switch from red to blue though. The new grill has a few changes - the handles are plastic instead of wood and it doesn't have the hole for sticking a themometer into the lid. Also instead of an external rail to catch the lid the lid has a hook internally. I'm not sure I'm wild about those changes but I can see an argument for them and I haven't used it enough to be used to them so I'll reserve judgement. I took some pictures - see them here.
2. The contract work I've been doing for the past year or so has dried up, leaving me less-employed. I'm taking some time to work on iOS and Mac apps and we'll see if I can really make a go of selling any of them in the various App Stores. I haven't done much of anything in Xcode in about a year and a half so it's taken some time to blow the rust off my Objective-C skills. I've also been hassling with updating my iOS app that was written against iOS 2 code back in 2008. It wasn't even called iOS back then and Interface Builder wasn't really useful for iPhone apps. A bunch has changed by iOS 4 :-).
3. Sort of tied into being self-employed again is the fact that I've been needing to reset my OS and start over. Something is really wrong in Safari which beach balls all the time (and sometimes crashes at the end of that), and there's just generally a lot of old cruft installed on TinyGod. When I suddenly didn't have deadlines and OS X Lion (10.7) is around the corner that meant the stars were aligning for doing a fresh install.
4. I decided not to buy a new computer - I think there's still plenty of horsepower in this old Mac Pro but since I was going to install fresh anyways … it seemed like jumping to SSD was a good move. After some reading I ended up deciding on getting an OCZ Agility 2 SSD. Note to anybody thinking of doing the same - although that unit does come with an adapter for a 3.5" bay it doesn't have the screw holes in the top surface that you need to put it on a Mac Pro drive sled (it would work in a old-school drive bay where you're screwing the sides of the drive into the bay, but that isn't how it works on a Mac Pro). I bought a fairly generic convertor and it seems fine. Man, it's CRAZY how fast Lion boots on this drive. I haven't switched over to using Lion full time yet, although I am writing this blog post in it. Anyways, I recommend the SSD upgrade if people are considering it. I'm not sure about the TRIM command - it's not on, but there's some sort of garbage collection on the drive itself so I've seen stuff on the web claiming TRIM is harmful in that case. I guess I'll wait and see. Then I plunked a 1Tb drive in for my document & media storage, leaving the SSD for just programs.
5. I have not installed iOS 5.0 on anything yet. These early builds are apparently really–for–serious–not–for–use–on–a–primary–machine and I don't want to consign either my phone or my iPad to it. At some point I'll want to look at iCloud storage and maybe if I get that far before a solid beta arrives I'll buy a development-only iPod Touch.
6. I also recently decided to try a standing desk. I'm not going to lie to you Marge, for about two weeks it was killing my feet but I've rounded the corner on that and I think I do like it better. Rather than spending a ton of cash to try out something I wasn't sure I wanted I bought some cheapie particle-board shelving units at Target and just plopped them down on my desk and used reams of paper to tweak my monitor height. In a while I might think about wanting to get a nicer standing desk - either by going to IKEA or by going crazy-nuts and splurging on something really sweet, but either of those will have to wait a bit, as the discretionary funds were devoured by the bathroom remodel. I put some pictures of the evolution of the setup on Flickr.
7. Oh yeah, the bathroom remodel. We had some water damage on the floor in the master bathroom and I had started trying to pull up the icky lineoleum and then decided that I wanted a pro to look at the floor and that we needed something more waterproof than vinyl tiles. That was back in March and the project is almost done now (sigh). In fairness some of that is my fault - it took a couple of months before we even got contractors in to look at it. And at that point the prices were reasonable enough to decide to just redo everything - not just fix the floor and tile but pull out the extant shower, toilet, and vanity and whatnot. We're keeping the vanity itself but we got a new countertop and sink for it. It's still the right call, I'm really happy with how it's going to look once everything is here but that's the rub. Not everything is here yet. The floor and tiled shower walls are done, a new toilet is installed, and the new countertop is at Lowe's but the glass walls & door for the shower are still pending.

State of the (Boy) Cat Address, 2011

So about that darn cat. He's diabetic again. We've known that for about six weeks now but it took a month to establish that he was just not going to respond to glipizide this time. At least now I've learned that "Hey I'm going to start peeing in weird places" means "I've got diabetes, check my glucose levels", plus I had the glucose meter on hand. All that means I'm about a week into giving him insulin injections. Hard to say what's that's doing for certain. I haven't done a full glucose curve for him (we're supposed to wait two weeks for his blood chemistry to stabilize), but I have been peeking roughly daily. Truth is halfway between his breakfast and his dinner the numbers still seem bad, which probably means I'll need to up his dosage. But then there's the anecdotal side of it - the pee volume is down (locations are still wrong, damnit cat!), and he's definitely more active since the injections started. I hate to read too much into his behavior when it might be just that I'm watching him more carefully, but this really was a matter of the day I gave him the first injection he was considerably more underfoot and playful that day. So maybe the insulin is giving him good numbers for a big chunk of the day, and just at the nadir between injections the numbers are bad again. I'm no expert …

For reasons I don't quite understand, the doctors insist that there's no interaction between any of these diabetes treatments and the Metacam (for his walking). Which I would believe – it's not that I don't trust them – but the thing is that the reason I thought there was an interaction was that they told me there was back in 2009 when all of this diabetes & walking stuff started. As far as I can tell they didn't want to start him on Metacam while he was having diabetes because kidney function is weird in diabetics. But now that we know Metacam is OK with his chemistry it's OK to add the glipizide or the insulin on top of the Metacam - even though they weren't willing to add Metacam on top of glipizide before. Either that or something new is known in 2011 that we didn't know in 2009. I'm not sure which.

At any rate, that's the deal now. He still gets his Metacam syrup every three days and he gets a shot of insulin with every meal. I was dreading that but the truth is that he doesn't notice the needle. He appears to think it's normal for me to pet him after each meal and so he's more than happy to come over and sit with me and get the shot.

Of course, the first time I won't be around at the feeding I'll have to convince Karin that the needle isn't "gross". We'll see how that goes …

Cleaning up a D&D Character File

A couple of months ago Wizards of the Coast "upgraded" the Character Builder program from the downloadable .NET application for Windows to a Silverlight program that can run on a Mac. In theory I support this. However, one crazy thing happened: the new program doesn't send text to a printer and instead sends big images. This means if you print to a PDF file two things happen: the file size is obscene (12 or more Mb for a four page file), and the text is blurry as all get out.

After some struggling with this I had an epiphany: if WotC wants to give me images go ahead and work with that, process the images, and get a smaller, sharper file. After some messing about I came up with a process that works well for me. If you have a Mac and you want to play along here's an Automator app. You'll also need a scriptable image editor - I use Acorn from Flying Meat software. (You might ask why not Pixelmator. The answer is Pixelmator seems crashy when run from script. I have a version of this that uses Pixelmator but I have to run it 5-6 times to get a successful output.) Here's what you do:

1. Run the Character Builder and hit the Print button.
2. When the print dialog opens use the PDF button in the lower left and choose "Save PDF to folder as TIFF". Pick someplace (I use the Desktop) and let it run. You now have a TIFF file for each page in the character file. These are fat and they are blurry but we'll fix that next.
3. Select all of the pages and drop them on the Automator App.
4. The Automator app uses Applescript to tell Acorn to open all of the TIFF files, run an Unsharp Mask on them, and save them again.
5. The Automator app then creates a new PDF from the Images. This will be named Character.pdf and it will be on your Desktop. You can now delete the TIFF files and enjoy a readable PDF that can put on an iPad (for example.)

To be clear, this is still a work-around. The Character Builder ought to output text and then you could just use the print to PDF button normally. This workaround isn't great - there's still some definite halo effects on the text and the files are still pretty fat. My sorcerer (Gurdrian) was a 471 Kb PDF file with the old builder and my current version is 6.1Meg - over an order of magnitude larger, while looking worse. This is sucky, but it's less sucky than the 15 Mb version simply printing from the app to a PDF create

Anyway, if this helps somebody out there, here's my Automator app. No warranty, etc, blah, blah but it does the trick for me. If you try it and have an issue drop me a line and I'll see what I do to help.

Character Builder Cleanup App

Awesome Shop Vac Video

I almost didn't watch this because I worried that "kinetic typography" meant people nattering about how Helvetica is better than Arial (yawn). Nothing further from the truth. This is a very cool video and it's surprising to me how much having the right font really adds to the imagery. Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet it's worth taking a look.
(via Twitter. I first saw it from Len Peralta, but it's been well retweeted since then.)

Addendum

On a whim last week I reread Pattern Recognition. I was about halfway through Cayce's story when I had an epiphany about Spook Country and Zero History. The thing about PR is that it genuinely is Cayce's story. It's chock full of other stuff about advertising and 9/11, and corporate espionage and the like, but that is all revealed through the lens of a major event of the protagonist's life. ZH has multiple protagonists but they are both involved in the core story of the novel.  In contrast, SC's story isn't really the protagonists's story - it is really the story of this offstage character who the reader sees briefly but never really identifies with. Hollis Henry is very passive and seems hardly changed from beginning to end. Milgrim has a significant change, but the nature of his events is that he passively watches the majority of the story and he pretty much drops out of the book just when the real story shows up.

The whole point of Spook Country is really that the movers and shakers of history are often hidden and not recorded. The main story is a shadowy fight between a couple of spooks and our viewpoint characters have no real agency in the matter. That makes it a very passive book. That's why Gibson can take many of the same characters in Zero History and I like the book so much better. Hollis Henry isn't just watching in mild bewilderment in ZH - she's doing things and make shit happen.

So there you have it. After two lengthy book reviews where I sort of hemmed and hawwed my way around what the difference was I can boil it down to that: Spook Country isn't about the protagonists and they don't really undergo a transformation.