the diary of antoine roquentin

I hated the old favicon (the little icon that shows up in the browser bar), so tonight I made a new one. Er…actually I made a bunch of new ones. I didn’t like any of the other versions after looking at them for a few minutes, so here is the final one I came up with. Simplicity saves the day.

Here’s an older version…I didn’t like how it looked when I got it up and running:

Unfortunately, favicons are only 16×16 pixels, so most of the detail is lost and they look totally different once they are scaled down.

Here’s an earlier version, but when it was scaled down it was illegible.

If you’re using Safari, empty your cache and clear your history and you’ll see the new one. In Firefox, I think all you need to do is empty your cache. In IE, I would assume it would be the same sort of thing.

I sorted out all my cell phone stuff and found out how much it will all cost…even though it took like HOURS due to my Internet connection.

All my life I have wanted a sexy cell phone, and I’m getting one. The Nokia 6235i.

It’s $160, but hey…their cheapest phone is a hundred dollars… why not pay 60 more and have a phone to be proud of? I don’t know…I can’t really justify it, but it’s another component in my moving away fantasy, and it must be fulfilled. I really want a RAZR v3c, but I really can’t afford that one…it’s $300. Maybe I’ll save that for my moving to SF fantasy.

I am SO freaking excited. I can’t wait for Monday. As soon as I start training the new girl, the week will frickin’ fly by.

Categories: Ennui

Today’s photo scanning has included of bunch of stuff from my dad and his siblings from the 70s, and some photos my dad took of while on his sailboat. I presume this is one of my dad’s fishing buddies. And yes, I would totally hit that.

Here’s my dad and Kelly’s mom, circa 1975. I swear, my dad looks like Grizzly Adams in every freaking photo!

Here’s a pic of Kelly’s mom from 1976. I love her smile.

Next task is an album of photos from when my dad put his boat into the river. It’s not going to be very entertaining work, but this is about all I’m going to be able to show my grandkids about my dad…I’d better scan them all if I’m going to make it so that I can milk a good twenty minutes out of this album sometime in the future.

Categories: Ennui

I scanned in 172 photos today. And it’s only 11:30.

I don’t know why I feel the need to digitize all these photos. The closest I can come to it is that I will probably never look at them again if I don’t scan them now. Also, there is a big stack of memorabilia lying around that I would love to digitize and throw out. Exhibit A:

After work I went over to the library to use their Internet. I knew that it would be a pointless waste of time, but I had a glimmer of hope. It was dashed within the first five minutes. All of their computers are set on 800×600 resolution and use Internet Explorer.

I couldn’t multitask at all. I checked my e-mail and tried to write blog post, but that’s just not possible when you know you have a 15 minute limit.

Tonight I hope to scan the color photos I took when I was in my photography class, and some pictures I took a Kelly’s house a very long time ago (especially infuriating, because I know I have them on CD somewhere). Eh, I think I will save those for last.

Well, here are some photos from what I’m scanning. Here’s me in my senior year of high school:

Here’s my grandma and grandpa chillin’ at Manhattan Beach in SoCal in 1942

Here’s a photo I took while I was in Times Square a few years ago.

Here’s a picture from October of 1976 of the boat my dad built near the Sacramento River. It’s called the Nasci Liber (free person, in Latin). He’s into all that Ayn Rand crap. My mom told me that the other fishermen called it the “nasty liber.” ;):

Categories: Ennui

Aaaand I’m done with the first photo album. One hundred and thirty one pictures.

131.

Every single one tediously cropped out.

But at least I finished one album, my goal is to do one album a day until they are all done.

Right now, this seems more a fantasy than an actual plan:

I want to post them all on my Flickr account, but no high-speed. I need to:

a) mod my Mac Mini into my car and drive over to RayJen’s (easy, except for I don’t have an LCD)

b) wait until Sacramento to upload all these pics.

Hmm…I could put them on a CD and upload them at the library, possibly. Hmm.

I’m scanning them all in as 600 dpi TIFFs, so I could make enlargements if I wanted to. A lot of them are covered in dust and such which would require a lot of Photoshopping to fix. However, I can fix them, so it’s worth saving them now before they get all moldified in my dad’s closet.

Well, I’m going to kick back and watch some Aqua Teen Hungerforce while I regain my strength. before I go, here are a few choice photos from the first photo album:

My dad.

My dad’s sister, Ann. She died of cancer when her son Michael was only a little boy. Ann was also a Buddhist. “She was a nice lady,” my mom told me today, “but she chanted a lot.”

Meticulously archiving all these dead people seems like it might be an ultimately pointless struggle. What do you think?

Categories: Ennui

Dial-up is weird.

I am actually identifying with those people that go “Oh, I don’t need the Internet.” It’s scary.

An hour after leaving work, I’ve visited a grand total of six web pages, most of which didn’t load with images on them. Annoyed, I went out and played with my dad’s dog, and now I’m considering making myself a smoothie. The Net just seems so…antiquated…when you’re on dial-up. I wonder what kind of Web experience we will have when everyone has fiber-optic!

Damn, I meant to stop by the library on the way home and use their Internet. As I suspected, Measure A didn’t pass, yet again. Nobody cares about the libraries here. Even my dad voted against it (he’s borderline illiterate). Well, now that I think about it, I’m perplexed that I can actually form sentences with half of my genome coming from him.

My big project for today can only begin once my brand new scanner arrives. It’s scheduled for delivery for today, and is out on the truck, according to the website. The plan is to archive all the family photos from the albums that my dad has onto my computer, so that I won’t have to wait until he dies to see them all again. It’s also a wealth of photographic information on my father, of whom I know little about.

All I know about my dad:

Born somewhere in SoCal in the forties

His mom divorced his dad and married some other guy

She and the new hubby worked at an air force base near there

In one anedote, my dad would drive around in the fields with his friends in Sac (it used to be rural)

He became a fisherman, and was an avid drinker (my mother says they called him the Viking because he would get trashed and pick up barmaids and like carry them around over his shoulders)

One time at dinner he said that he used to do amphetamines for fun.

Then he met my mom. She worked in the commercial fising industry for many years. This is actually a funny story… no wait… did I say funny? I meant pathetic.

My mother and her friend Reese (I know that is not the correct spelling, as she is Swiss) were living in San Francisco, in the Haight-Asbury district. Reese was going out with my dad at the time. He lived in Sausalito, and Reese would ride a bike all the way from the peninsula over the Golden Gate Bridge to see him. Then she got pregnant. My dad refused to admit that it was his child, and insisted that he was sterile from a motorcycle accident. After they broke up, him and my mom started going out. Well, after a year or so my mom and I were living together and my Grandpa (on my mom’s side) was coming to visit, and my mom said that it would have looked weird, so she proposed that they get married.

So that’s about all I know about my dad’s life before he met my mom.

When I open those photo albums, it’s like evidence that he’s not an alien from planet Emotional Retardation. I’m going to put all the photos into a special album and tag them all with “historical” or something like that. With my luck, it’s going to show up at 5 PM.

Well, my other task for today was to apply for the fee waiver. I should do that now.

Categories: Ennui