The Bark Blog

Tracking hours for a handful of billable projects can be a lot of scribblin’ and calculatin’. So I was pleased to find the PunchClock time tracker application for PalmOS. It’s missing a few features I’d like, but on the whole it does a great job. The main problem is counting hours for my bi-monthly timesheet. PunchClock can show summaries by day, by week, by two-week, by month, and by year…but not bi-monthly. So I’m still stuck with hand-calculating it myself.
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First there were Music Mashups, collages of existing songs spliced together to make “new” music. You got chocolate in my peanut butter! Now there’s Video Mashups. Except this effort is more deliberate. They are making blue-screened films for the explicit purpose of handing it over to amateur mashers, whereas music mashers tend to yoink commercially released songs without the express written permission of said artists. I think it’s a great idea (both mashers, actually). Give amateur filmmakers a chance to experiment with special effects and compositing techniques.

What’s next, real-life mashups? Reorganizing someone’s life for your personal amusement? Oh wait, that’s The Game.

Or is that healthily insane? We just dropped a pretty penny on a top-of-the-line Hoist home gym. Looks pretty simple, but it’s solid as a rock, easy to use, and as flexible as we’d ever need. We’ll still keep our Gold’s Gym memberships (what are we, insane?) for the kickin’ cardio equipment. But what was I thinking? There goes my handy list of excuses for not exercising, right out the window. Yeah, it’s a pain to drive the two miles to the gym and back, to brave the cold, to get all sweaty and have to take another shower, to have to touch all the icky, sweaty gym equipment. I’ll have to invent a whole new class of excuses…my shoulder hurts, I’m feeling lightheaded today, my cholesterol is fiiiiiine. I’ll have a week and a half to generate a new list before they deliver the monster. No problem!

Finally got around to transferring the blog to a standalone domain. This makes it much easier to manage the graphics, and possible to maintain the stylesheet in a separate file. No more CSS hackery inside a browser text box, right on! I’m really diggin’ DreamHost. Was a snap to add a new shell account for the SFTP Blogger.com connection (not about to give blogger.com my main account password!).