For what it’s worth, I’m getting closer to being back on a normal schedule. I’d say I’ve made it to MDT. And attending last night’s game with Steph put me in a better mood, too.
- Tonight is the Saint Paul Saints Independence Day fireworks. Should be a good show, and I wouldn’t be surprised if tickets are still available.
- Minneapolis’ last gun shop moves — with sidearms sidelined. In fact it won’t be a gun shop at all, but rather a gun-accessories shop, which also offers training, but Mark Koscielski will reopen on Friday, despite all the attempts to chase him out of Minneapolis. [strib]
- Citywide 2 a.m. last call OK’d in St. Paul. It’ll begin August 1.
- A cool wind blows through Userland Hell — the XML-RPC spec clarified XML-RPC, one of the original ‘webservice’ transport specifications is beautiful in its simplicity and has seen wide adoption as a result. However, it has nevertheless been mired in confusion for years, which has discouraged its use over more verbose mechanisms like SOAP. The cause? A reference to ‘ASCII’ encoding for strings—not good for those looking to encode international characters in XML. The spec’s author, Dave Winer, has relented and unfrozen the spec to make a key clarification, possibly in response to this or the effort to launch a new weblog syndication format that is not controlled by Winer, called Echo. In any case, the future is smiling upon XML-RPC. This bodes well for one of Reed’s projects. [reed]
- Man Turns Tables on Telemarketer. Minnesota Auto Glass was calling the guy up to three times a day. So he started calling back, and it actually worked. [fark!]
- Even when not on a phone, cell phone users are more distracted when driving. See, it turns out the people who can’t talk on a cellphone and drive at the same time are just shitty drivers whether they’re on the phone or not.