- Today's the January Critical Mass ride. The server for Minnesota Critical Mass is down at the moment, but Yahoo! Groups : bicyclelane is the mailing list. The forecast for 5pm today: cloudy, high 20s, sun setting at 5:19PM. I think I'll be staying home.
- Speaking of staying home, Just how much cable do you want? Did you know you could order premium channels without getting the "standard" package? Time-Warner hasn't been promoting the option much because they say it's not a good value. Yeah. That's the ticket. [strib]
- Bill to mark foreigner's licenses clears Minnesota House. I've heard some people getting upset about this, but I just don't see why. It may be
no different than a scarlet letter ... or a yellow star
but it's only on the driver's license (so it is different, and the solution is easy enough. Become a citizen or a resident alien (yeah, I know, easier said than done), and the status check on the license will go away. - Ireland bans smoking in all workplaces beginning Jan. 1, and that includes pubs. It's such a big change they're telling people about it 11 months ahead of time. According to my friend Turly, who lives in Ireland, it looks like it'll go through, but not without one almighty battle!
I think it stems from fear of litigation. The unions representing bar staff have always been pressing for this, and recent medical reports have implicated secondary smoking as being much worse to one's health than previously thought, so...
That makes sense. The no smoking in bars thing in CA was also done to protect the bar workers (most of whom smoked anyhow, so it didn't make that much sense to me). Turly continues:I think most non-smokers who go to pubs don't really care one way or the other - though it'll be interesting to see if we develop California-like beer-gardens where smoking (and drinking) is allowed. The weather here might make nipping out for a fag a bit of a mission, though...
I wonder how the Irish would handle sitting on the patio in the middle of winter, basking in the warm glow of a propane-powered space heater that's heating the great outdoors (a common picture in CA bars). Somehow I can't quite picture it. [strib] - So when Steph did her Mini Apple thing, she intentionally left out many of the "who did who" details. Maybe SnogWeb's the place to fill in those details. [flutterby]
- Did you know that Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems? That's what the page says. [flutterby]
- If You're Not Atlas, Are You Still Allowed To Shrug?, by Joel Simon. A nice tale about principles. [endwar]
- Refinery seen by artistic eye prompts threat of call to FBI. A UW-Madison grad student decided the old Koch Refinery (now called the Flint Hills Refinery) looked interesting in the sunshine. So he decided to take a few pictures of it. The security guards confiscated the film from his camera in the name of national security. Sounds like the kind of thing we were warned about when we were going into East Berlin in 1980. I think that's all the commentary that's needed. [strib]
Delmonico's is up for sale. I stopped in yesterday to ask them about the listing, and it's true. They're looking around for someone to buy the store, and are hoping they'll find someone who'll keep it as a neighborhood deli. But it's a tough business to be in, according to the guys there. The idea of running a little store like that is vaguely tempting, but I seem to have left my spare $365k in my other pants, and a business plan of Well, I have no idea, but I learn pretty quick.
doesn't inspire confidence in the hearts of bankers. Besides, it's not really so much that I want to own a store (though changing careers looks like a pretty good idea some days) — it's more that I just don't want the store that's there to go away. There's already one store (Brotherson's) that's gone from the list I put together two and a half years ago, and I don't want to lose any more. [steph]- After wettest summer comes driest winter. More on the goofy weather we've had this year. I still have trouble thinking that it's January (and almost February) when there's less than an inch of snow on the ground. But the below-zero temperatures are an effective reminder. Then again, they're saying it may hit 40 today, which means we'll lose all the snow we've got. But there's more on the way. 7 of the next 10 days have forecasts that include snow. [strib]
- City Pages: We Shoot, We Score:
On Tuesday, January 28, the Minnesota Court of Appeals sided with City Pages in our two-year quest to compel the state and Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Minnesota to disclose the joint legal bills associated with Minnesota's lawsuit against the tobacco industry.
Score one for the somewhat more independant press. It'll be interesting to see the details when they finally come out. - In Pushing Tin, The City Pages talks about Hilltop. A charming little community to the north of me, which had the highest crime rate in the Twin Cities metro area for a while. It also has one of the liquor stores in the area that's open until 10pm six days a week (unlike other cities which make them close at 8pm Monday-Thursday).
- Yesterday's CSS tinkering had brought in about 1000 hits by 4:30pm CST (in the first 10 hours it was up, basically). But only 47 of those people went on to look at anything else on my site. Similarly, most people who visit from google don't look at anything but the one page they came here for. I think I've gotta figure out how to entice people to look around more. Meanwhile, it's time to catch up on the linkage.
- Since I got a fair number of hits yesterday, I also decided it was time to look at Optimizing my PHP at least a little. There were peak-periods when I noticed my server getting a little less responsive (though most other people probably didn't notice). I haven't improved things a whole lot yet, but I think I have a handle on what's slow, and that's the first step in optimizing.
- Time Warner subscribers out in the cold when it comes to FSN. There's also a link on the right side of the article telling more details of why FSN has gone to being the Missing Sports Network. But as I pointed out a while back, I'm not that torn up over the loss of FSN, and probably won't be during baseball season either. The games I want to see aren't televised much in Minneapolis anyhow.
- Rear-Drive Returns in Grand Fashion. Apparently it was gone, and I didn't notice. They also neglect to mention the all-important whippin' shitties benefit of rear-drive in snowy parts of the country. [fark!]
- Utah bowled over by meteor plan. The plan? To drop bowling balls out of high-flying airplanes to simulate meteor strikes on the salt-flats (to see what they look like so they can identify terrain features that are meteor strikes). The problem? The BLM said that the prospect of high speed bowling balls plunging into the weather stations, geology researchers or racing car enthusiasts that populate the salt flat was simply not acceptable. [boing boing]
- For those who dig road travel Some people collect stamps. Others collect highways, or at least catalog and write about their local freeways in a highly detailed manner. Don't miss Upper Midwest Freeway Exit Guides and the Fictional Exit List for MN 77, MN 62 to MN 55. The latter is interesting in a "looking at someone else's mess in SimCity" kind of way. [reed]
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- The Newseum has Today's Front Pages online. 168 front pages from 22 countries. Just images of the front pages, but still, that's pretty damned cool. [WVSR]
- Crime Is Soaring in Cyberspace. Why? Because the economy's doing badly, so people are looking for a quick buck. And law enforcement still doesn't know how to track cyber-crime very well, so the odds of getting away with it are higher. [scripting]
- A Google Win in SearchKing Case means that Google doesn't have to artificially re-inflate the ranking for SearchKing sites. [scripting]
- Hey! My friend Kate's getting married today. Zow! I found out last night and nearly got on a plane to San Francisco.
- It took a flash movie to bring home another reason I really like my TiVo. See you can run the TiVo in 2x speed, and the closed-captions still work (at least on networks that actually broadcast them). It means you can zip through shows at double-speed and all you miss is the soundtrack, but you can still read the words people are saying. It's not perfect, and I wish TiVo would hook up some spiffy software to make the audio play at double speed without pitch-shifting, but as it is, I find that the average movie on TV (2 hours running time) can take as little as an hour to watch. Skip the commercials, and you're down to about 80 minutes, then fast-forward some of the boring parts, and you can cut the total time-commitment almost in half. Useful!
- The Economist offers a radical rethink of copyright. Fourteen years, with one fourteen year extension possible. Talking about the current system, they say:
The alternative is to return to the original purpose of copyright, something no national legislature has yet been willing to do.
Amen. The shorter-term copyrights would have to be enforceable, but I don't think I'd have much problem with that as long as there was hope of things that were initially published before my parents were born ever hitting the public domain. - I expect an attack on Iraq. the Atlanta Journal Constitution has information related to when. Mid-February is likely because that will cause the least disruption in oil prices. [Jim]
- Internet traffic broadly affected by electronic attack which kept me from updating last night. Grr. [strib]
- Is this The Year The Music Dies? Could well be. The major labels continue to screw themselves by ignoring what their customers actually want.
- At the Apple's core: An inside look at Happy Apple's breakthrough album. It's cool to see people I know get deals like this, and that's the part of the music that won't die. But contrary to what this article says, the Auto Body Experience is not defunct, and will be plaing in St. Cloud tomorrow night (I've verified that they will be playing for sure). Happy Apple's CD Release party is tonight and tomorrow night at the Cedar Cultural Center. [strib]
- D'Ohh! I almost forgot! Tomorrow's also the 12th Annual World Championship Human Powered Ice Races. Watch people on bikes (mostly recumbents) go skidding around on the ice.
- Well, I didn't get make the cut for the bloggies, but maybe I can get nominated for one of the Anti-Bloggies. Or maybe I'll just continue living in the shadows of the blog-world. It's probably for the best.
- Become a wireless ISP: for £300. Cool. That's around US$500. Buy a box, plug it into your wired network, and it'll start forming a mesh of wireless nets. Or if you don't have a wired network, it can extend an existing network that one of your neighbors set up. The only real problem I see is that there's a good chance of there being too many competing standards here, and it'll be a tower of babel problem.[boing boing]
- Man claims links to Web sites a way to protest GOP. He's bought domain names which are the names of politicians and uses them to point to political speech about those politicians. They're trying to take the domain names from him.
- State of the Union: Congress Meets Wall Street. All kinds of good information about which industries are buying government. [boing boing]
- James Lileks takes on the Red Menace. And maybe among his circle, calling someone a communist raises suspicions about you. In the group I hang out with, me calling someone a communist means I think they support politicians who take money from me, and want to give it to someone else, usually one of the groups listed in the poster mentioned in the previous post as spending a lot of money on political donations. [lileks]
- From The People of Venezuela To The World - Elections in Venezuela Now! Miguel Octavio and his brother, are having a Blog Day for Venezuela today, the 45th anniversary of the overthrow of the their last dictatorship.
The idea is that on that day, those that would like to participate will either put a banner in their page designed by us to that effect or a text which links directly to the following page, where we simply are calling for elections as a resolution to the Venezuelan crisis.
[some guy] - Consumers rebel as new round of cable rate hikes hits. The article doesn't even mention how Time-Warner Cable here in Minneapolis has bumped the rates and dropped Fox Sports Net. About the only reason I'm keeping cable at this point is that the NASCAR races are on Fox and FX, and not the missing Fox Sports Net. [scripting]
- Trying to remember a song? German Scientists Find the Key to searching for it if you can hum a few bars. From the Frauhofer Institut, the same fine people who brought you MP3. [boing boing]
- HELLO, my name is Scott! It's a guy (named Scott) who's trying to make the world a friendlier place by wearing a nametag saying HELLO, my name is Scott!
- I think I'm in lust with Beer chan. But then I've been drinking.
- Well, near as I can tell, I wasn't even nominated for the 2003 Bloggies. But I still love you, man.
No really, I mean that.
Well, okay. Maybe I love your mom more. - Hey, there's blogs near me! I should probably make a permanent thingie over there on the right for the list.
- And lest you thought this was going to be completely content-free, Don't bother about burglary, police told (in the U.K.). Seems there are more pressing problems like murder, rape, and hate crimes. And yet if you try and defend yourself against a burglar or an assault, you're likely to be charged with something that'll put you away a lot longer than the goblin would spend in gaol.
- Major labels bring back Net music giveaway in hopes of convincing people to download free music legitimately. Well, not quite free. And only in Europe. But Peter Gabriel's involved.
- Working Musicians (ISBN:0061076066) is a new book by rock critic Bruce Pollock. It includes interviews and stories from many musicians including Brenda Kahn - an old friend of Jim's and webmaster of womanrock.com. Womanrock has some of the interviews [Jim]
- No Harmony Yet in Content Land. Last week, there was a lot of noise about various groups agreeing to oppose digital copy-protection mandates from Congress. I didn't say much about it, mostly because it held virtually no interest for me. There's no voice of the customer there, so I still see it as a bunch of industry groups masturbating together. [scripting]
- Your Logo Here / With CaféPress, now anyone can have personalized swag. Sometime in 2003 they'll start offering print-on-demand books, CDs and DVDs. Maybe this'll be the excuse I need to get Mead Made Easy back into print. All I'd need to get it into Amazon.com at that point would be an ISBN, which CaféPress can provide. I can think of a few musicians that might benefit from having CaféPress making their CDs, too. [boing boing]
- And speaking of music, The Auto Body Experience is playing in St. Cloud at the Tavern on Germain this coming Saturday (the 25th). Road trip? Probably not, but you never know.
- It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which has always seemed to me to be in the second tier of holidays. There's no mail delivery, but other than that, pretty much everyone has to work. King Boulevard to be dedicated today at State Capitol, renaming Constitution Avenue. I'd rather not see Constitution Avenue renamed, but I guess it's an okay choice. And it fits with the times, where the Constitution seems to matter less every year.
- Bike commuters lament losing old Cedar Avenue bridge. I thought it was already gone, actually. As is mentioned in the article, there's no real good trails leading to it on the north side of the river, which is a problem shared by the 494 crossing. The article misses the fact that you can cross the river at the Medota Bridge, which actually has connections to other bike trails, and is a better crossing if you're headed closer to downtown (rather than to the airport, like the commuter mentioned in the article). The National Park Service has a good map showing the Mendota Bridge connections. [strib]
- Speaking of bikes, This Biker Brakes for Penguins on his custom-built ice-bike. Adventurer Doug Stoup is preparing to be the first person to cycle to the South Pole. His website has more updates.
- Speaking of biking on ice, this coming Saturday is the 12th Annual World Championship Human Powered Ice Races. I don't plan on riding, but I may go to watch and take some pictures.
- Ice-hole in lake defies explanation In a lake near Brainerd, Minnesota, a large portion of a lake refuses to ice over. Scientists are baffled, and the story finally made the national news. It's not the lake where the races will be held. [reed]
- Looking to put some content on the internet? Read How to Write Like A Wanker first so you can be sure to get it right.
- I stumbled onto this list of How to annoy people in the bathroom stall next to you and it made me laugh. Out loud. Enough that I worried about the neighbors hearing.
- In Mouth Wide Shut, Joel talks about the dangers of pre-announcing features. Another danger in software development is tying yourself into a calendar schedule and development cycle that don't work together. There's a big difference in how you should do your development if you want to have a release every year and if you want to release whenever things are ready.
- sklar.com : PHP and the OWASP Top Ten Security Vulnerabilities. Looking through the list, I think I'm in pretty good shape.
- Credit Card-Size Hard Drive Can Hold 5GB. Now there's the replacement for ZIP disks that I've been looking for! If these things actually ship and are even mildly reliable, I think they'll sell a lot of them.
- The Danger Hiptop smart mobile offers web to go. Apparently Danger's going to introduce a color model in Europe this summer. I expect the color one will ship in the US sometime next fall, when the one-year plans are up for everyone who got one in October. [boing boing]
- Tesco (a UK supermarket chain) is developing a Credit card that tells you when you're drunk. Breathe on it, and it'll change color to reflect how likkered up you are. Won't do you any good if you're drunk enough to lose it, but otherwise breathe on it, and if it turns red, you may want to think again about the purchase you're about to make. [boing boing]
- A day at the office in 2013 is a cautionary tale. But it's not that far-fetched.
- How about Canada's gun registration program that I talked about late last year? Cost soars for gun registry computer system, and the Ontario Minister of Public Safety and Security says
This is an unconscionable waste of taxpayers' money on an initiative that focuses primarily on law-abiding citizens.
Apparently the program which was supposed to come in at around $120 million (Canadian) is going to cost over $1 Billion. There's more in A gang that couldn't shoot straight. - It's time to Put Government on a Diet. I haven't really been all that excited about who's going to benefit from the tax cut GW proposed. Doesn't really matter to me whether I'll see any direct benefit or not. But if it takes over half a trillion out of the hands of the kleptocrats in DC, that's a good start. They can't spend the money on pork if they don't have it to spend in the first place. When Reagan used a similar cut in the 80s to get the economy going again, his critics said it was a
starve the beast
strategy. Starving the beast sounds more like a compliment to me than a criticism, and it's one of the only times (or possibly the only time) in my life that the federal budget shrank. - House Makes a Plea To Keep BlackBerrys, even though they infringe on a patent, and we all know how protective the House is of intellectual property, but couldn't you all just give us a break this once because we're hooked on this technology even though it infringes on your patents, so please don't shut it down, okay? After all, these owners of intellectual property, unlike the RIAA, haven't shipped a bunch of bags of money to D.C. Legislators aren't special and don't deserve special treatment in IP battles. Maybe that's a message that will get Congress to pull its collective head out of its keister over IP issues. [boing boing]
- Hear about the Los Alamos Nuke Storage Snafu? Here's another reason I don't much believe anyone who says
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
If this was a private business, they'd either have to buy off a regulator or two or would get fined into backruptcy. But because it's a government lab, people will probably get promoted. [boing boing] - Senators vow to halt `data mining' project. It's nice to see someone other than Ron Paul and Russ Feingold finally notice that our civil liberties are being trampled. And hey! In Human rights / Trading away America's treasure the Strib finally notices that our civil liberties are being trampled. But in their typical pro-government thinking, they say:
Who is attacking it? The last gang you'd expect.
Well, actually when civil liberties are threatened, the gang that's doing the attacking is the first gang I'd expect. [strib] - The Lie Behind the Lie Detector A free PDF e-book on polygraph (lie detector) testing. Covers the scientific status of polygraphy, polygraph policy (in the U.S.), how the "test" actually works (exposing the charlatanry behind it), and explains in detail how to beat the polygraph (you don't have to go to spy school or somehow believe your own lies). See AntiPolygraph.org for additional documentation on lie detector testing. I have no idea whether the site has real information or just crackpot stuff, but someone suggested the link, and I figured what the heck.
- I was watching Chicago: City of the Century the other night, and now I apparently have another reason to not shop at the former Dayton's.
After the Haymarket trials, there was a move to grant clemency to the convicted conspirators. Lawyers pointed out that the bomber had never been identified, and even a few leading businessmen favored a pardon in an effort to improve relations with labor. [Marshall] Field, the richest man in the city, refused to consider clemency, and once his position was known, not many businessmen wished to publicly disagree with him.
It was obvious none of these men had thrown the bomb, and yet Field, who could have spared them by asking for clemency, let them hang. That's the name that Dayton's thought would be more a better draw for people in Minneapolis. - Craig Hughes' cool head helps in battle against spam. But now SpamAssassin is a NetAss property, and that worries me. Well, I guess it's not so bad. Deersoft, the company they formed to sell commercial uses of SpamAssassin has been acquired by the people who tried to kill PGP, but the software's still open source.
- Why Snood Gets No Respect explores Snood. It's good game design, with relatively simple programming. It's the kind of game I like.
- Supreme Court Upholds Extended Copyrights [warning: popups]. The Bono Law stands. The court was
not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be.
[boing boing] - Speaking of Intellectual Property, and the Mouse, $485 Million doesn't count?! talks about why we probably won't see a good Toy Story 3 anytime soon. [flutterby]
- Stop Saying MANPANTIES! The demise of TCPunk. As I understand it, the boards just got to be too much of a hassle to administer.
- Thinking more about online content (following my rant from a couple days ago), people talk about search engine optimization as though it's some sort of holy grail and something every web-developer should be working on. Me, I've always concentrated on making better content, and the search engines seem to find me just fine. That's part of the whole philosophy I try to bring to Better Nerds. Some of our clients want a shortcut to being highly placed in the search engines, but anything you do that cheats the system may work on the engines today, but it could all change tomorrow, and then you may actually be ranked lower than you might have been had you not cheated (message 7 is a good explanation). Google continually tweaks PageRank to try and offer better search results to their customers (that's all of us who use it).
For more on the lawsuit over the changing PageRank results, check out Google replies to SearchKing lawsuit - Venerable Schell's, now Minnesota's biggest brewer, bets on reviving Grain Belt. I didn't know Schell's was the biggest brewer in Minnesota, but I guess it makes sense. Taking on the Grain Belt label is a gamble for them, but if they can make the Grain Belt customers happy, the rewards should be worth it. [strib]
- Getting your coffeemaker talking to your computer. Years ago AppleTalk made it possible to plug your new printer into the network and have it magically available for printing. No driver installation or arcane configuration needed. These days in our TCP/IP world two standards are emerging to do much the same -- Microsoft's UPnP and Apple's Zeroconf/Rendezvous. I heard all about Rendezvous at the OSX Con last year, and it sounds pretty cool. It almost gets us back to where AppleTalk was for usability in the late 80's. Reed thinks you won't see it on corporate nets, but I suspect you will. It's just too easy to set up. [reed]
- There's a lot of Sturm und Drang out there over XHTML 2.0. Mark Pilgrim's talking about the Semantic obsolescence in XHTML 2.0, and Eddies in the space-time continuum. Zeldman's not all that happy about XHTML 2 and all that, either, but he sees some hope. Namely, it's not a replacement for XHTML 1.0 plus CSS, but rather an alternative. It'll be a while before any browser in the universe supports it, and it's probably best to just not worry for the moment. Me, I'm planning to stick with XHTML 1.0 and CSS for a while yet. I just don't see any reason to upgrade until the browsers start supporting newer stuff.
- Would You Really Follow a Manager into Battle? It's a pretty harsh criticism of middle management.
- The paperless office, more efficient or an impediment to getting real thinking done? In my case, the piles of paper are critical. They're reminders that are there even when the computer is off. They also never crash.
- Tech refugee's trek shows path others tread, too, or how one woman made the move from high-tech to something else. [strib]
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Free Content. Now admittedly, this is from a site that's trying to publicly figure out how to make money putting content on the internet, but the author misses out on one of the big reasons for people to provide content for free: self-promotion. One of the reasons I keep putting free content on the web is that the free content helps people find me, and keeps work rolling in for me. People discover that I've written about printing and then I get offered contracts.
Another of the big reasons for me to provide online content for free is that it actually makes life easier. I initially wrote Mead Made Easy thinking I might make some money from the book. I put it online because that helped sales, but also because it kept people from asking me questions I'd covered in the book. Same thing with a lot of the writing I do. If I've answered the same question two or three times via email, I'll spend a little time editing up a good answer and put it online. Then people can either find the link with google or if they do email me, I can reply with a link in a few seconds, rather than retyping a long message. And again, because I'm providing answers, people who are looking to hire help see me as someone who can provide answers.
It might be hard to believe, but the only time I've gone looking for work has been when I decided to drive school-bus back in the late 80s. Other than that, jobs have come to me. And now that I'm a contractor, I need to have work find me more frequently. My free content online helps that work find me. - Stolen Beatles tape found! - So, how long 'til there's a new CD? [Jim]
- RIAA hacked again. This is the fourth time in recent months. You'd think they'd eventually figure out how to secure their servers. [fark!]
- Montreal English is a 'linguistic laboratory' in the only major city in North America where English is a minority language. That minority status makes interesting changes to the English. Speaking of Montreal is another article about Charles Boberg, who's also studying The phonetics of Canadian English, eh. [boing boing]
- Without protest, Americans are giving up freedom.
The government now has the power to enter your home or your computer and secretly record whatever they find without ever having to notify you. They do not even have to obtain a warrant from a publicly accountable judge showing reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed.
Nothing really new here. I pointed most of this out back in the ten minutes or so when USA-PATRIOT was being debated. - Burningbird's Tyranny of the Commons discusses the Lone Blogger, and Movable Type Competition? points out that Dean fits the mold, in part because he's building his own blogging tools. Well, so am I. I probably fit the Lone Blogger mold, too. I acknowledge the community a little. There's that blogroll and the referrers list over there on the right. But I'm not planning to dive into "the blogging community", because there is no single blogging community. There are cliques out there. Some are based around which tool you use. Some are based on geography and knowing people in meatspace. Some are based in business relationships (like some of the O'Reilly blogs and Salon blogs). Me, I tried some of the tools and decided that I'd rather write my own tools and control my own destiny.
Geography plays an important part, too. Minnesota is not one of the "blogging hot-spots". There are enough of us around here that there are occassional meetups of folks, but I've only been to one of them. Part of the reason I don't show up more is because I'm busy, and part is because I'm just not a joiner. You see, I'm a Minnesotan, which leads to a certain reticence. Again, I play the Lone Blogger. Obviously I don't think that's a bad thing, it's just different from those who want a huge social circle. - Want to keep track of the on-going war against Iraq? U.S. Bombing Watch tries to provide info on every US bombing (there's usually at least one a day). [Jim]
- TIMEeurope.com: Poll -- The Biggest Threat To Peace - another dumb, unscientific internet poll. Still, it amused me because of which nation is "winning". [Jim]
- My experience is that cold weather deters turn out for political demonstrations. In spite of that Demonstrators rally to protest possible war with Iraq shows that organizers claim a turnout of 2400 for an anti-war rally in uptown on Saturday. Indymedia has more info. [Jim]
- Greenpeace Gives Dow Chemical Taste of Bhopal Waste. The leak in 1984 killed 8,000 people and injured half a million. Neither Union Carbide (who was operating the plant at the time) nor Dow Chemical (who bought Union Carbide in 2001). The really appalling part is that internal documents that Dow was forced to release show that Union Carbide eliminated safety features at Bhopal in order to save money. [fark!]
- According to the Guardian Unlimited IQ test, I should be making nearly triple what I currently am. Ouch. Then again, there wasn't a category for "slacker" for job type, so that probably threw off the results. [some guy]
- According to the Are You Dateable Test, I'm 61% dateable. Then again, I think there might be something funny with that number, because I'm also apparently in the 17th percentile.
- I wrote up the results of some Digital Camera Timing Tests I did. They'll probably be interesting to at least a couple geeks out there.
- One of the big complaints I have about eBay is that things are usually wildly misclassified. For example, in the Digital SLR category, less than 30% of the items listed are actually digital SLRs. There are a bunch of non-SLR cameras. There are accessories. There's random crap.
I keep looking at eBay thinking that I'll be able to find what I'm looking for, and every time I do, I'm sadly disappointed. Sigh. - There was a time when I was a member of The Five O'clock Club. And I seem to be headed that direction again. I've been waking up earlier every morning this week.
- Wordspy's top 100 recently coined words Ranges from the funny, al desko (al.DES.koh) adv. At a desk; to the insightful timeporn (TYM porn) n. Television shows and other media that portray characters as having excessive amounts of spare time. [reed]
- After 34 years, the Yardbirds Are Back. The lineup includes original members Chris Dreja (guitar) and Jim McCarty (drums), and new guys Gypie Mayo (lead guitar), John Idan (bassist) and harmonica player Alan Glen. Beck and Clapton make guest appearances. One of the interesting things about this story is that I found out about it watching the "crawl" on CNN while lunching at a bar on Wednesday, but couldn't find it on CNN's website 7 hours later and had to pull the story from somewhere else. Google News to the rescue.
- Like smanchhey, I worry more (or less) about the cleanliness of the commode in my place more (or less) based upon who might be seeing it. Does that make me shallow? Obsessive? Paranoid? Nuts.
- Big Dead Place is a collection of stories from Antarctica. Not a blog per se, but rather the sometimes-in-progress manuscript for a book that probably won't ever be published. [boing boing]
- Just a little bit paranoid, but while gps stalking is supposedly not for private citizens I can't help but think it'll be found perfectly acceptable for er, other "groups". [steph]
- Speaking of paranoia, check out the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002. How many of your favorites are on the list? There's some good ones there.
- Wake Up is a blog that's mostly anti-corporate, with a left lean to it. I might have to add it to the reading-list, though. Jim almost certainly wants to give it a look.
- Whistle Stop, from the City Pages talks about how a whistleblower at Northwest Airlines was treated. No help from his union (at the time - but Northwest mechanics picked a new union, partly because of him), no help from the FAA, and no help from the courts, because Minnesota's whistleblower protection law doesn't cover airline mechanics, due to the Airline Deregulation Act, which prohibits such suits at the state level.
The real problem isn't that the airlines have been deregulated, it's that their workers are still regulated and aren't allowed to strike in most cases. The balance of power has tipped too far. - The shame of Minneapolis -- 100 years ago. Doc Ames was mayor, and the town was corrupt. [strib]
- Which has no connection at all to FTC Hits Funding Snag in Effort To Restrict Telemarketing Calls. Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) is blocking any funding for the plan until after the reps have a chance to discuss the merits of the plan. It wouldn't have anything to do with fishing for campaign donations from telemarketers. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) also wants to delay the program, having our best interests in mind. Aren't they swell representatives? [some guy]
- Prosecutor drops charges in shooting of 4 officers by a man who shot them when they busted in his front door. There was no proof that the police had identified themselves as police and he thought it was a robbery, so it was ruled that he fired in self-defense. [endwar]
- The Minnesota Department of Public "Safety" has developed a form for local governments to report possible "terrorism" risks. Apparently, the greater the "risk" the more money will be available to "fight terrrorism."
On the first version (unfortunately no longer available) a "sample group" was listed. "Anti-tobacco". Their risk factor was 3 of 10. The unnamed environmental group was more dangerous, with chemical, explosive and incendiary weapons of mass destruction at hand. I got a screen capture of the original form somehow.
Are you scared yet? Just wait until the reports start flowing in.... [Jim] - Wow. Layne made the best 23 blogs of 2002 list.
JenniCam for the lit set.
Congrats, Layne. - Other folks were all a-twitter yesterday about other things Steve Jobs had said during his keynote, but the one thing that cought my attention was the PowerBook G4 12. Fast. Small. Lightweight. I almost ordered one, but I decided to wait a month or so. I don't need it today, and I'll let other people figure out what's wrong with 'em first.
- Mark Pilgrim has a Safari review that covers Apple's new browser. It's interesting to see the problems in the rendering, but more interesting for me was that I fired it up, started to do a little surfing, and less than 10 minutes into it, while trying to put this commentary together using the Add a Pick bookmarklet and when I tried to scroll Mark's review, I was suddenly into a Spinning Pizza of Death, so I finished writing up the comment in Mozilla and BBEdit. Even worse, I can't seem to force-quit Safari in order to restart my computer cleanly. No way to kill it from the GUI, so I guess I'll be launching terminal to whack the stuck Safari. But Dave's Picks seems to render just fine in Safari, which is what I was really wanting to know.
- I think that I shall never see -- my Nikes in the old U tree? I went for a walk Monday afternoon, and walked past the tree. Thought about taking a picture, but the light wasn't cooperating. [strib]
- Some freaks out there pushed the envelope and tried to mail various things through the US Mail. The conclusion?
The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.
Go read the whole thing, and if you're like me, you'll have a newfound faith in agencies of the federal gummint. - Microsoft's masterplan to screw phone partner. No way! Microsoft screwing a "partner"!?! Erm.
The claim alleges - are you ready to start counting? - misappropriation of trade secrets, common law misappropriation, conversion, unfair competition, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, two counts of negligent misrepresentation, two counts of breach of contract, fraudulent inducement and tortious interference. Phew.
As near as I can tell the whole thing boils down to a clause in the contract that says that if Sendo went broke, MS would get all the intellectual property. And then MS drove Sendo into bankruptcy by not shipping on time (I know, it's inconceivable, Microsoft shipping something late). [flutterby] - I took the Political Compass test, and surprise, surprise, I ended up being "right libertarian" which isn't that big of surprise. But by their scale, there's not a single politician in the U.K. in my quadrant. The surprising thing for some out there would be that I turn out just barely right (though I'm strongly libertarian).
- Dick Armey's warning:
We the people, had better keep an eye on ... our government. Not out of contempt or lack of appreciation or disrespect, but out of a sense of guardianship.
Why? Because along with Ron Paul and Bob Barr, Armey's actually a pretty darned good defender of personal liberty, and he's worried about the direction of "The War On Terror". Hell, even the ACLU agrees that he's right in this case, and when the ACLU is agreeing with Dick Armey, you ought to be paying attention. - 50 in January? Enjoy or curse it while it lasts. What little snow there was in MN will probably be gone by tomorrow. [strib]
- It's time for the Third Annual Weblog Awards (the bloggies) again. Feel free to nominate me for "sucks less than last year". Er. Or maybe a category that actually exists, like "best non-weblog content of a weblog site" which actually describes all the bits of Dave's Picks that people only seem to get to via google. Of course, you should only do that if you think the rest of Dave's Picks is actually interesting, but I think it's the category in which I have the best shot. I'm probably confused, but even if I am, I might pick up the prize for "Best Meme" which will fall back to the best non-blog content winner. [accordionguy]
- Project: Shutterbug is pictures of people taking pictures.
Point. Click. You're next.
- Huh. There's a minneapolis / st paul craigslist. Why wasn't I informed? According to their fact sheet, it's been running since October 2002. I'd heard about craigslist a few years ago when it was more of a bay-area-only thing, and again when it hit New York, and it's good to see it here in Minneapolis, but the postings there are still a little thin. Then again, considering it took me a couple months to find out about it, I don't think they've made a lot of noise about coming to the Twin Cities.
- The LazyWeb is an interesting idea. Post an idea you think someone else should do, and then point the lazyweb at your posting. People look there, and sometimes they'll implement ideas. It's an idea-repository and a couple of the ideas look like things I might decide to put some time into.
- Wanna see some funky food? Go check out Steve's Foreign Groceries. It's in there. And it's spooky.
- The first documented spam on the 'net was sent by DEC in 1978. The Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 is interesting, especially, RMS, who said:
I didn't receive the DEC message, but I can't imagine I would have been bothered if I have. I get tons of uninteresting mail, and system announcements about babies born, etc. At least a demo MIGHT have been interesting.
There's also a comment thatAPPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.
Apparently they're still working on that....[boing boing] - Inauguration day: Pawlentys brace for new life. The incoming governor starts his new work-year today, too. We'll see how he turns out. [strib]
- So how does the Bush administration handle bad economic news? They kill the department of labor program that reports on layoffs [warning: popup]. Bad news? What bad news? [boing boing]
- Hollywood fights for its digital rights, leaving customers screwed. Among other news I've seen lately, apparently all the major studios are planning to release most of their CDs with copy protection this year (so they won't actually be CDs). Guess it'll be another year of only buying old used pressings of things. [some guy]
- Also on the customer dissatisfaction front, QuickBooks 5 for Mac is out, but I can't upgrade to it. It won't let me exchange data with my accountant, who uses Windows. Sigh. Guess I'll be looking into other accounting software to see if there's something else I can use on Mac OS X.
- Dan Burden is reclaiming America for pedestrians, one town at a time. Specifically, he's trying to make towns more pedestrian friendly, and help the ones that aleady are stay that way. [strib]
- The GeoURL ICBM Address Server is another service that tracks websites geographically. They seem to have the simplest solution, so I've added Dave's Picks to their database. And you can see who's near me in space. Spiffy. If you add yourself, just be prepared to wait about 10 minutes for it to check your site and add you to the database. Patience is a virtue.
- I didn't know about The U of M's Compleat Scholar program, but it sounds like there are some interesting classes available. [strib]
- Bloodhound handler's credentials questioned in search for missing men. The bloodhound that pointed to St. John's Abbey as a possible location for Chris Jenkins and Josh Guimond isn't certified, and his handler may not be very good at her job, either. I was wondering a little how a bloodhound could track a scent that was over two months old, and the answer is that most people think they can't. [strib]
- Undercover Fort Worth officer shot during bust in a convenience store. The store owner's son saw the first cop come running in with a ski-mask (or hood) and gun drawn, thought it was a robbery and shot the cop. He was released after questioning. Nobody bothered to tell him they were police and were chasing a suspect into his store until it was too late. [fark!]
- Penn Gillette is apparently now a Federal VIP when going through federal airport security checkpoints (at least the one in Las Vegas). Why? Because when the federal leather-sniffer grabbed his crotch without asking permission first, Penn patiently explained that was assault, and asked for a cop to come and file a complaint. Suddenly the security people are very concerned he might miss his flight and should move on. Penn stood his ground. The followup is that he didn't press charges, and wasn't given any noticeable special treatment next time through the airport. [boing boing]
- In many airports people are asked to take a picture to prove their camera isn't a bomb. The Insecurities Project collects those photos. [boing boing]
- In race for money, counties to list local terror groups. Minnesota's attack on civil rights. And of course those counties who have the most threats will get the most money, so they're encouraged to list as many "potential terrorist groups" as possible. [strib]
- Finally, Do tinfoil helmets provide adequate protection against mind control rays? They're
Every bit as effective as homeopathic pills.
Heh. [fark!] - I'm not quite sure what to make of Girls Are Pretty, but I think I like it.
- Even 'Vodka-Free' Vodka and Tonics Impair Memory, as long as you think there's vodka in there. Sheesh. If you're too drunk to notice that your drink doesn't have any booze in it, maybe it's time to slow down a little.
- More Americans Are Fat and Binge Drink, Studies Say. Burp.
- Why RIAA Keeps Getting Hacked - because they don't get computers. Their website has been hacked a half-dozen times in the past six months, usually due to complete rookie mistakes.
The RIAA and MPAA are Internet disasters of potentially epic proportions just waiting to happen, and while I don't ordinarily side with defacers and script kiddies, in this case I'll make an exception.
[boing boing] - Google may have yanked their direct links to anti-Scientology sites, but this Google Directory has a list of links to stories about Google dropping the links. It's quite a resource since most of the stories provide all of the dropped links. [Jim]
- MN Green Party gets two more years of major party status. Me, I think it's wrong that any of the parties are getting money. I just don't think it's right for my tax money to go to subsidize people who are trying to convince me that they're going to take more of my tax money
for a good cause
. But maybe the Greens can use the extra two years to continue the work that Jesse did with the MN Independence Party to try and loosen the grip of the Demopublicans. - Another Drug War in Alabama. Feeling lonely? When a helicopter hovers over your house, just pull out a video camera and you'll have a whole bunch of visitors in no time. [endwar]
- Feeling Blue? This Robot Knows It
By processing information sent from physiological sensors the human counterpart wears, the Vanderbilt robot can detect when its master is having a bad day and approach with the query:
Of course that sort of thing would just make me more anxious.I sense that you are anxious. Is there anything I can do to help?
- Wired has their Vaporware 2002 list up. [scripting]
- In a nice bit of recursion, Eric Meyer gives us "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful.
- In his own 435-part way, he's traveling to see America. It sounds like a fascinating trip. I wonder if there are any places he went to twice because of redistricting.
- 'Wife Wanted' sign nets man first date in 8 years. So I figure I'll be getting my sign any time now. [fark!]
- The start of a new year is often a time to ask What Should I Do With My Life? Many people think if they just can figure out a way to make enough money, they'll be able to live out their dreams. And in doing so, they might well be killing those very dreams. Another solution (the one I try to pick) is to cut down the expenses and work-obligations to the point where I have time and money to do as I please once in a while. I'm not completely there, but I've got nearly four years of running Polaschek Computing and it feels like I'm on the right track most of the time. Especially when I have a day like yesterday, when I slept a fair part of the day away. [boing boing]
- Yesterday, after waking up too late to even get to one of the New Year's Day hangover-special breakfasts (they all ended at 2pm), I had a bit of a Audrey Hepburn film fest, watching Sabrina (1954), Charade (1963), and Roman Holiday (1953) (again). Beautiful woman. Fun to watch her movies. And it was interesting to watch the leading men, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and Gregory Peck all acting very suave. Peck and Grant have some great comic moments, too. But then the real attraction was the beautiful woman. My TiVo's already set to catch How to Steal a Million (1966) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) when they come in the next few days. Yeah, I've got a crush on a dead actress (or the characters she played) who'd be about as old as my mom, but she's in her 20s and 30s in these movies, most of which were made before I was born.
- Speaking of TiVo, Tivo's 30 Second Skip Easter Egg really isn't as handy as I'd hoped. You still have to stop after every 30 seconds to see if you're back to the show, because the networks vary the number of commercials, and sometimes throw a 15-second spot in, too. [boing boing]
- Steve-o's Top 10 Web Things I Hate of 2002 actually matches the things I hate, too. I suspect most of us hate the same things that are listed here.
- My editor wish list for features I want in an editor for editing code. Something that implemented all these features would be worth as much to me as Photoshop is for my friends who do a lot of graphics work.
- Last Month
Weather in Minneapolis for January 31, 2003 January 31 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 30, 2003 January 30 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 29, 2003 January 29 in History
I've got a partial solution to Dave Winer's query about the table on weblogs.com. Apparently he's just concerned about the inner bits, so that's all I'm tackling. But I don't see a need for three colums. He's got two columns of ordered data, with a number out front. Sounds like an ordered-list in HTML:
first try (works in IEMac)
But I noticed that that's ill-behaved in Mozilla on the Mac:
so some more tinkering is needed. By adding a div with a style of clear, I can get Moz to display each item on its own line, but there's extra whitespace in between the lines:
second try (closer?)
Okay, this is kludgy, using an almost-empty div with a style of clear:left to force each list item to stand on its own, but there's something wacky about Moz's handling of float that I don't think I quite understand (if you look closely at the picture above, you'll see that the time for each blog is on the line of the blog after it). I've seen this problem before. My permalinks do the same thing in IE6Win.
Well, drat. I had an idea to try one table per line, and that didn't work reliably. I don't know if I can make one that works right in all cases, due to the different handling of float in IE and Moz (I have no idea which is "Correct", and iCab's CSS support isn't up to the job, and I can't run Safari right now because I'm in Mac OS 9).
I need to get some breakfast and head off to a client meeting soon. Hopefully my idea will inspire someone else to come up with a complete solution. Suggestions welcomed.
Y'know, one thing that would make this all easier would be for the browser people to publish a list of what they think the default styles for each element are. I remember seeing one that described the HTML 4 elements with a style for each element. It let you change the doctype from HTML to XML+CSS, and by including the style-sheet, you'd have the same rendering as HTML 4 in whatever browser. Publishing that sort of information for all the browsers might help people like me understand why various browsers handle style differently. Consider that my lazyweb contribution for the day.
Followup: 16:30CST
third time's the charm?
Stéphane Volet suggests the following via email:
which seems to work just fine. Dave Winer also has a fix, and is using it on weblogs.com. Yay! Dave managed to use the LazyWeb to solve his problem. And I get a fix that seems to work for my permalinks so they end up looking right in both IE and Moz.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 28, 2003 January 28 in History
Short list today. The twin perils of that SQL worm and the Stupor Bowl are past, but they're still dominating the news.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 27, 2003 January 27 in History
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I don't really have much to say or link to today. Yesterday's Microsoft bug not only slowed the net while it was running amok, but also seems to have silenced a number of people (probably busy reconfiguring routers and such). Add to that the fact that most of the "news" this weekend seems to be about a football game I don't care about (I didn't even know who was playing in it until Friday) except to note that it was number XXXVII. Well, it's all just made me feel pretty lazy. Add to that a return of brutally cold weather last night, and rather than driving to St. Cloud to see the ABE, I just stayed home and went to bed early, it's all left me with little energy for making new content here for you.
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I did manage to write a short essay about why I'm self-employed yesterday. It ain't perfect, but it's done and out there, and that's something, I guess. And I realized that I had some pictures that had been sitting in my digital camera for a while. I don't know exactly how long, since the clock in the camera goes back to January 1, 2002 when I take it outside in the winter. But I do remember that the picture of Cedar Square West was taken on December 23, when I was heading over to the Triple Rock to drink to Joe Strummer, and I'm pretty sure the last of them (the river) was taken on January 8th.
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| The Mississippi (downriver, Washington Ave bridge) |
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Weather in Minneapolis for January 26, 2003 January 26 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 25, 2003 January 25 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 24, 2003 January 24 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 23, 2003 January 23 in History
It was an evening at the bar. And then walking home with a fahrenheit deficit. But I'm having some fun. And I was smart enough to dress warmly, so even though it was a cold walk home from the bar, no damage was done. It helps me feel a little superior, this not-freezing-to-death thing.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 22, 2003 January 22 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 21, 2003 January 21 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 20, 2003 January 20 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 19, 2003 January 19 in History
In which I wonder if I'm channeling Walter Sobchak.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 18, 2003 January 18 in History
Well, I fully expected to have nothing at all today. It's a good thing I managed to find a few links from the laptop so you'll have something to look at besides my griping. The back's feeling better, but if I hadn't had a 500 count bottle of ibuprofen on hand, it could have gotten ugly. This is the same muscle group I injured a few years back by slipping on the ice on the front steps of our house and wrenching my back by catching myself with the handrail. Then I reinjured it last September. Being a computer-nerd who can't spend hours in front of the computer is no fun. I haven't been getting paying work done, and one of my major recreations has been taken from me, too. Instead, for the past couple days I've been mostly horizontal, and that's meant a lot of TV watching. My brain feels pretty mushy now, and I'm basically just a grumpy gus. Let's hope tomorrow brings a brighter mood. If not, I probably won't bother posting an update.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 17, 2003 January 17 in History
My back is still unhappy. Better, but still unhappy. Bleh.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 16, 2003 January 16 in History
Well, I didn't get back to update yesterday's post at all (except to change the 2002 to a 2003). My back's still not very happy, and I'm moving around like an old man. Which means that today will probably have fairly light linkage, too. I've still got a few links in the holding-pen, but I'm behind on both my linking and the paying work after having spent a day horizontal. Ugh. Today's goal? Being able to sit upright long enough to at least get through all the email that needs to be answered.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 15, 2003 January 15 in History
I screwed up my back yesterday afternoon. Can't sit upright for more than about ten or fifteen minutes at a time, so I'm going to try and cobble something together here. I hope to update later in the day.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 14, 2003 January 14 in History
In general, monday's not my favorite day of the week. Even though I work from home, I mostly stick to a monday to friday work-week, and monday is administrivia day. It's the day to balance the checkbook after whatever shopping I did over the weekend. It's the day to catch up on work-related email. It's the day to plan out the rest of the week, and make adjustments for last week's plans which went sadly awry. There are a bunch of things that don't contribute directly to the bottom line, but still have to be done. I've decided to do these things on Mondays because it's a way of easing back into the work-week, but I sometimes wonder if it doesn't slow me down by putting off the "real work" for part of a day. It's easy to lose all motivation and momentum after spending a morning on administrivia and just call it a day at lunchtime.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 13, 2003 January 13 in History
Today, Jim provides a few political links. I'm feeling lazy and basically farming out the Picks for the day. Appears weblogs.com isn't listening to my pings either, but I also can't see Dave Winer's site, so I expect there's something busted out there.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 12, 2003 January 12 in History
As I write this (at 2:30am), NOAA thinks we've still got some fahrenheits (well, at least one) left, but according to both the thermometer here at home and the bank-sign I saw on the way home, we're overdrawn on our fahrenheit account. It's almost like winter. Heck, I even dug out the smartwool socks to walk to the bar last night.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 11, 2003 January 11 in History
What should I see when looking out my window this morning but some snow. Not much, but suddenly it feels like winter again (the temperature being 40 degrees F cooler than it was Wednesday afternoon doesn't hurt that perception, either).
Weather in Minneapolis for January 10, 2003 January 10 in History
Yesterday was unseasonably warm again. 55 degrees out in mid-afternoon, breaking another record, and the big chill didn't get here as quickly as predicted. When the cold weather does hit this weekend, it's going to seem all the more cruel for the couple days of late spring we had in the middle of January.
Has anyone else out there noticed that weblogs.com doesn't always respond to pings? This morning at 7:50 CST I updated. Weblogs.com fetched my page to see if it had changed, and then apparently decided it hadn't. And since there are a ton of other services that depend on that information, none of them noticed that I'd updated for the day. So here it is almost two hours later, and I'm adding this gripe and going to update again, in hopes that it'll notice I've updated. Services like weblogs are good things for the community. When they start being flaky, that's not so good. Is there a good alternative out there? I'd like to know.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 9, 2003 January 9 in History
Yep. It sure was warm yesterday. People in shorts. People in T-shirts standing around outside. A high of 52F (around 10C for you metric types) in January in Minnesota. But the weather guys are saying the jet stream's going to wobble back to a more normal pattern around noon today. Today's high might brush 50 by noon (46F at 11AM, according to NOAA), but then it's back into the deep-freeze. Low temps below 0F by the weekend, and highs in the single digits. But still no snow. Bleagh.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 8, 2003 January 8 in History
I vaguely remember promising that 2003 would be more interesting than 2002 was. How'm I doing so far? Probably not as well as I'd hoped. Odd habits are hard to break. Erm. Old. That's what I meant. Yeah.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 7, 2003 January 7 in History
Well, it's the start of a new work year for me. I've been doing some small amounts of "work" since the calendar flipped over, but I've been consciously avoiding putting in time for the client who gets most of my hours. Today that changes, and I'll be spending a lot less time on things that aren't for that client. There are still a lot of scripts I'd like to put together for Dave's Picks (I'm thinking of turning it into a full-on blogging system that other folks might be able to use) and plenty of other things I should get done, but they're all secondary to the main job of keeping the cash-flow flowing. Well, time to get to it....
Weather in Minneapolis for January 6, 2003 January 6 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 5, 2003 January 5 in History
Whoops. Just realised that I'd typed yesterday as 3. January, 2002. I thought I'd gotten the year sorted out already, but apparently it's going to take me more than a couple days to get it right.
It was also pointed out to me last night that while it may be convenient to take my asshole boss out for drinks so he won't bitch at me about not getting work done, when I do so, I'm drinking for two. D'Ohh!
Weather in Minneapolis for January 4, 2003 January 4 in History
Yesterday was spent trying to wrap up 2002. I sent out the paychecks and invoices dated 12/31/2002. I mailed off the bills that needed to be paid, and generally just took care of bookkeeping. But there's still plenty to do. I've gotta file my MN Use Tax return. I still need to turn the books over to my accountant. I need to send a bunch of information to the lawyer so the other corporate records can get updated. And probably a few other things I'm forgetting. But I want to be in 2003-mode when it's time to go back to work next week, and I'm running out of time to get there.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 3, 2003 January 3 in History
Weather in Minneapolis for January 2, 2003 January 2 in History
I spent last night wishing people a "better new year" rather than a happy new year. It seemed to fit the general mood that 2002 hadn't been all that good, and all we're expecting for 2003 is something that sucks less (which fits with my response when asked about Christmas this year: Well, at least no one was killed.
). So here's hoping 2003 sucks less for you, too. Set your expectations appropriately low, and you won't be disappointed.
I realize I'm link-short again today. Sorry. I'll try and come back and fill things in later today, but there's a distinct chance I'm going to be less linky for a while. I think it may take a while to get the taste of 2002 out of my system. And for what it's worth, I only missed 22 days in all of 2002 while attempting to do an everyday blog, and I was on vacation for almost three weeks in there. I don't think I'll do that well in 2003, but I'm hoping to make the days when I do say something more interesting. Wish me luck.
Oh, and my "free" new year's eve kiss? Gave it to a friend who also had nobody else to kiss.
Weather in Minneapolis for January 1, 2003 January 1 in History