McC Journal

Sea Lions at Fisherman’s Wharf from Coleman McCormick on Vimeo.

After moving into our new house, painting, buying furniture, assembling the furniture, painting the furniture, reorganizing, and finally, setting up the rooms, I was anxious to get everything in our new home office set up the way I’ve always wanted it. One of the biggest problems for myself in a home office is the epic amount of tangled cables, computer equipment, and downright crap all over my desk. After some thinking and internet searching, I set off on a project to get all this equipment properly organized.

I found couple of articles on the interwebs about installing cheap pegboard on the bottom or back of a desk to keep cable- and device-clutter to a minimum, so I decided to hack together my own solution inspired by these examples.

Materials:

• Pegboard - 24″ x 48″ section
• Steel eyes - Qty. 4 (for my table, YMMV)
• Wooden dowels (if you need them) - small enough to fit through the eyes

Tools:

• Saw
• Sandpaper
• Drill
• Pliers (if you have a hardwood table)

You could probably get by with less that this, but these are the tools I had and used.

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So I’m trying to install some management software for our Toshiba phone system, and I keep getting this error:

“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.”

And stupid me, I assume it’s a permissions error (that’s what it looks like, right?), but it turns out it’s a security feature that Windows XP SP2 uses to protect the end user from a file they’ve copied from another location. Since I copied said .exe file from a network share on the network, Server 2003 thought it was a dangerous file, so I couldn’t get to it anymore. If you want even to execute the file, you have to right-click and go to the file properties and select “Unblock” in order to stop the OS from stopping you. Kinda silly… I thought I would have seen this issue before.

I just completed a website for the Davis Island Civic Association (a Tampa Bay-area local organization). Check it out here. I’m pretty happy with it, considering the speed with which I put it together. Leave some feedback for me!

I just recently finished up everything in The Orange Box. First I tackled Portal (one of the best games ever in its own right). Then I played through the original Half-Life 2 again. I had played it once on the PC a while ago, but my PC was so shoddy that it wasn’t very exciting. I then beat Episodes 1 and 2 over the weekend. HL2: Episode One was something of a disappointment. It has some gameplay elements that add to the experience of HL2, but overall, I don’t really enjoy fighting only zombies in the dark. Episode Two was a total delight to play, a tremendous improvement over both previous games, in my opinion. The hunters in Episode Two have the potential to be something more annoying than exciting (a la the Flood in Halo…), but they only show up occasionally and actually provide awesome battles. The AI is pretty incredible, they’ll chase you around and if you hide in a certain room of a building they can’t get to, they’ll go outside and cap you through the window. Valve has also proven to be the master of building gigantic set-pieces and immersing you in the action; sometimes you may have control over the scene, others are interactive “cut-scenes” that you’re watching from the ground. Episode Two’s environments also show off the Source engine in ways the first two games couldn’t. Because the setting is mainly the White Forest between City 17 and the research facility you’re trying to reach, and you cross miles of landscape in a bitchin’ ride, Ep. 2 takes the opportunity to wow you with some sick visuals.

Up next: Call of Duty 4.

At every IT job I’ve worked, I’ve noticed that the ability to create PDF files in business today is nothing less than an absolute necessity. Even with the pricing of Adobe Acrobat skyrocketing (about $250 per seat), and PDF becoming an open standard, it’s still difficult to find a reliable, totally free method for creating PDF documents.

My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.

What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!

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It’s the binder clip dock! Bet you never thought of this. I’d hate to have bought some $30 plastic piece of crap from the Apple Store…

Instructables [via Make]

One of the best songs ever.

I know I’m a latecomer to the party, but I just subscribed to Netflix. yesterday. I’ve been debating subscribing for a while now and I couldn’t resist trying it out anymore. It seems like I’ve constantly got this long list of movies I want to see, and it always gets longer, never shorter. I wouldn’t call myself a “film buff” exactly, but I do like seeing movies. My laptop even has a running text file I use called “movies to see.txt” that grows ever longer by the day.

Anyways, I signed up for the lowest possible plan they’ve got, which is $5 per month: 1 DVD at a time, 2 per month. Seems like a good enough starting point for me. Lately we’ve probably been watching 1 per month, maybe less. I see more movies in the theater than at home. But ever since we got the 47″ HDTV, it’s been pretty underutilized. I play a fair number of games on it in HD, and watch the paltry few HD channels we get, but we never watch movies on it. I think we downloaded one HD flick off of Xbox Live Marketplace (BEERFEST!) since we’ve had the TV. I’m sure there are some jealous damn people out there right now.

For Colette and I, watching movies at home has always been something of a chore. You have to think of what you want to see, remember to get it somehow, then actually have it laying around somewhere accessible when you want to sit down and watch it while eating dinner. The TV is usually on the History Channel, or Discovery or something like that because we just never have the stuff we want in an easy-to-reach place. The whole business model of Netflix is as if it was created for people like me. Remove all roadblocks to getting movies onto my TV. For my $5 per month, all I’ve got to do is check the mail. Done.

Their rating and queueing systems are amazing, too. I ran through the whole rating game and rated about 30 movies initially, and the first 8 suggestions I got were all 5 star comedies in my book (even though I’d already seen them all). Without the rating system, finding something to watch is as bad as wandering around Blockbuster at 11pm with no idea what to grab. I think the effectiveness of the queueing system is evidenced by my queue length in about half an hour: 35 DVDs.

So yeah, now I’ve got like a year-long queue already on my account. I can’t wait to actually watch some stuff, instead of simply wanting to watch stuff.

Harry Potter 5 is now officially my favorite (both the book and the movie).  I just saw the film on Sunday and it has proven that wizards don’t always have to look fruity when pointing wands at each other.  On the contrary, this movie shows us some bad ass wizard skills.  The third installment, the Prisoner of Azkaban is still a close second in both the book and movie categories, but it just doesn’t have the magical ass-whoopings that Order of the Phoenix has.  The massive wizard battle in the Ministry of Magic alone edges this movie over all the others, in my opinion.  Watching Dumbledore and Voldemort go head to head is, I think, what we’ve all been waiting to see throughout the whole series.  I only wish Richard Harris hadn’t died after the second film… he was a much more authentic Dumbledore.  He made Dumbledore feel older, wiser, and more respectable, sort of like the Yoda of the wizarding world.  Imagine the shock and awe had it been Harris dominating Voldemort instead of Michael Gambon.  It really would’ve been like finally seeing Yoda bust out his true Jedi skills in Attack of the Clones.

Though I loved Phoenix, I still think that all of the Potter movies suffer slightly from “bookish-ness” (sometimes you gotta make up words, right?), which is to say that it’s trying to be a little too true to the continuity, pacing, and storyline from the books, so the movie feels more like watching a book than watching a movie.  In some ways this is a good thing, especially having read each book before seeing the movies.  You get more of that fulfilling of expectations when you already know the story and events.  But when it comes to watching a blockbuster movie, the bookish traits wear on me a little.  It’s not that staying true to the novels’ events ruins the movies, it’s just something that I’m constantly aware of while watching them.  I think given a slightly tweaked screenplay and a little different pacing/directing, you could achieve the same goal without making it so obvious that Harry Potter is a book first, and a film second.

I hope they can keep this stellar cast around for all seven films, even though Dan Radcliffe’s gonna be 35 by the end of this saga.