It’s been a pretty decent week around here. Not a great week, but definitely not a bad one, either. I’ve been making slow but reasonably steady progress on the projects around the house, and similarly steady progress at work all week. Nothing is getting done ahead of schedule, but nothing seems to be falling behind schedule, either. I think I’ll put this week in the “win” column.
I even took an evening off on Wednesday to hang at the local watering hole, and it was the right night to do that. Jona was in town, and I hung out with her and Chris for the evening, and I always like seeing her, so that was good.
It’s another weekend with few moments of down-time. Tonight and tomorrow night, Cousin Dad is playing at Dulono’s. Margaret’s showing is also tonight. Tomorrow and Sunday there’s a gun show at the Fairgrounds. And I might even try to haul the camera outside if the weather’s decent and take a picture or two. Plenty to do and I just need to figure out how it all fits together. Oh yeah, there’s also the Twin Cities Marathon on Sunday, and I thought I might wander over there to cheer on Seigo, but with the Saints going to Japan, I’m not positive if he’s running on Sunday or not. I guess he probably is, since they don’t leave until Monday.
- While watching No Reservations (warning, sound) the other night, I thought to myself that tunnbrödsrulle sounds pretty darned tasty. I wonder what’s in the
so called shrimp salad
, though. - Wanna make your own Attack of the iPod People? Check out the handy tutorial that will tell you how to do it step-by-step.
- Ooh pretty! I think I want a Photoglow. No idea what picture I’d put in it just yet, but it looks pretty darned neat.
- Joey pointed to 25 Signs That, Sadly, You’ve Grown Up. Sigh. [accordionguy]
Weather in Minneapolis for September 29, 2006 September 29 in History
As Red Green says, Real big week up here at the Lodge this week.
Work has ramped up a bit, and every time the social calendar looks like it might clear, something new comes up to fill the void. It’s not that I’m complaining, since I enjoyed most of it, but there hasn’t been quite as much “unstructured time” (read that as “laying on the couch sucking at the glass teat”) as I might like.
Friday night was our annual debauch at Gasthof. It went well, except for the part where the gal who was going to join us didn’t call me until after I was there, and then called my phone at home, rather than the one in my pants. Drat. Good thing we’re going back in a couple weeks, so maybe I can actually give her all the information she’ll need to be able to join us.
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| Freedom Park, USA |
Saturday was spent trying to clean up things around home enough that I could host the card game that had materialized due to a friend being in town. Nothing major, since the hangover precluded a full-on cleaning spree, and the ucky weather outside kept my energy level low, too, but I did manage to cross a few of the “fall cleaning” items off my list. As for the cards, a good time was had by all, and it was darned good to see Dr. Aaron again.
Sunday: trip to mom’s, lunch & shopping. And then, since I’d noticed that a big chunk of 35W southbound was single-lane (road constriction season isn’t quite done yet), and because it was a beautiful day, I took the long way home, and caught the picture you see over to the right there. I’ve driven past this little park in Braham a few times, but the big poofy clouds that had formed while I was with mom made it a better view than usual, so I stopped and snapped the picture. No pretty pictures of turning leaves. There were chunks of them, but nothing really caught my eye.
- I didn’t know The Physics of Superheroes was written by a prof at the U of M. Cool. [boing boing]
- Got measurements for something, but wanna know how big that really is? sizeasy lets you type in the numbers and compares the size to other real-world things you probably know the size of like a book of matches, or a deck of cards. You can also add your own items to compare to. [boing boing]
- Hmm. I wish I’d held on to the long number from the guy who kept calling my cell-phone. I could punch it into whocalled.us and see if anyone else had gotten hit. [boing boing]
- Hey. There’s some decent news on the Cory Maye front. He’s off death row. Not out of jail yet, but at least he’s not going to be put to death anytime soon. [kirsten]
- Sigma, maker of fine lenses, has launched SigmaUser. Great. Another photography blog to look at in my copious spare time.
Weather in Minneapolis for September 25, 2006 September 25 in History
Not much ranty today. Work is going to keep me busy for the next month or two, but I might be back on a more regular updating schedule around here again too. Guess we’ll see.
- Turly’s been writing Epistles to the Corkonians since the middle of July. Cool! Plus he reminded me that today’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Guess that’s as good an excuse to update as any. [turly]
- At the end of Garrison Keillor’s Coffee, tea or TATP, he asks
where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing?
We’re still here, still objecting, but keeping our heads down because this shit’s getting spooky. [claire] - Speaking of Security Theater, Wired looked at One Million Ways to Die and came up with their own terror-alert-like color-coded rankings.
In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.
They’ve also got a swell graphic. [boing boing] - And from Mark at Boing Boing, a story of how Bad info in background check database nixes apartment application. The fact that this shit is becoming so common, and so frequently is wrong is just one of the reasons I don’t assent to background checks except when absolutely necessary. [boing boing]
Weather in Minneapolis for September 19, 2006 September 19 in History
Rainy and gloomy around here again. There’s bits and pieces of rain in the weather for the forseeable future. Earlier in the week, I thought that might be a good thing, since it would encourage me to stick inside during the time I was home this weekend, and maybe make some progress on one of the dozen or so projects I want to tackle. But as it turns out, it just makes me sneeze and want to take a benadryl and a nap.
I stayed home from work yesterday and Thursday, too. (For which activity, I can’t recommend The Tick vs. Season One enough.) Not sure if it’s an actual cold, or just the allergies getting out of hand, but I felt like crud, and just couldn’t bear going to work.
Backing up even further, on Wednesday night, before I felt cruddy, I was at the local watering hole, and noticed a new gal in the place. Since she’d sat down right next to me, it was hard not to. Turns out she was the sexiest gal I’ve met in a long time.
She had the kind of sexy that reaches out and grabs your crotch, and just when you think it’s going to be one of those sleazy, “bad touch” grabs (which I’ve been on both sides of more than a time or two), turns into the velvet soft stroking of an ex-lover that leaves you aroused and stupid, and meanwhile she hasn’t even touched you, or barely looked at you.
When that didn’t seem to produce the desired effect (which took a major effort), she switched off the sexy, and told me tales of her youth, which were pretty messed up. Not sure if it was supposed to arouse sympathy, but it did. When she called it a night, I gave her a friendly hug, and then sat for another beer to regain my composure before heading home.
The upshot of it all is that I’m vaguely worried about going back and running into her again. I’m pretty sure if she turned her mind-melting lust-ray my way again, I’d be waking up with a white picket fence and boardwalk on the house at the edge of town. And perhaps more worrisome, I’m not sure that’d be a bad thing, even when she ran off with that guitar player who sure could play.
- Want to know how the weather forecasters do for your town? Forecast Advisor compares their historical accuracy. It’s a tool I’ve been wanting for a long time, but never got around to writing since most places throw their forecasts down the memory hole as soon as it becomes “current conditions” instead of a forecast. [kottke]
- Are people with digital cameras really asking Dude! Where’s the Ansel Adams Button? Well, I guess some are.
Weather in Minneapolis for September 16, 2006 September 16 in History
Yesterday was just a dark and gloomy day all around. There’s supposed to be a break in the weather tomorrow, but there’s a definite feel of fall in the air, even if I’m not going to take the air-conditioners out of the windows just yet.
My wireless access point was flaking out last night (or my PowerBook was). The AP’s running the latest firmward available, and I’m wondering if either it’s just getting old (perhaps overheating from being full of cobwebs and dust), or maybe someone moved into the neighborhood with some device that’s interfering. In any case, it would kick me off the wireless about every five minutes, and then wait for long enough before letting me back on that I was getting very frustrated just trying to do my evening web-surfing. I think today will see a trip to the Apple Store for a new base-station.
Work was gloomy, too. Rather than finishing up a longer-term project I’m in the middle of, I spent the day chasing bugs, some of which I wrote, and some of which have been around forever, but which fall on me to fix. Yes, it’s satisfying tackling bugs, but I worry about the longer-term stuff, since that needs to get done, too. I guess it’s a good thing the Saints season is done, since it’s looking like I may have some long days to put in soon.
- After the game on Sunday, some Fort Worth minor leaguers arrested after bar brawl with Saints players. I almost wish we’d gone there instead.
- A bit of good news: Wikipedia defies China’s censors, saying that they’re basically neutral and shouldn’t be censored. The Chinese government is discussing it with Jimmy Wales. [boing boing]
- Claire’s starting a new project, and has an essay on That neurotic beast, the writer. Good luck on the writing. Heck, I have enough trouble putting together a handful of words around here every once in a while. [claire]
Weather in Minneapolis for September 12, 2006 September 12 in History
Well, the Saints, for the first time in their history (at least the modern incarnation) lost the championship at home today. Fort Worth was the better team, and they proved it in the mist at Midway today. I’m sad that the Saints lost, but happy that they made it as far as they did. Looking at the team at the end of the second half, I was surprised they made the playoffs at all, but when they did, I was happy and hopeful that they’d go all the way. Today, reality came crashing back in, and they lost to the Cats.
And that’s the end of baseball for me this year. I hear the Twins are doing okay, but I just can’t get interested in Major League Baseball. I’m still somewhat bitter over the strike in 1994, and that colors my vision of MLB.
The good thing to come out of the end of the season (besides all the free time I’ll have) is that when we were at Ol’ Mexico drowning our sorrows, I noticed that someone was playing trivia as HOSARD, and it turns out that it was Rondo and Reynaud, who were there for the first day of NFL season. If you don’t know them, they’re both MECCies (note, one of you ought to go flesh out that Wikipedia entry), and we had a great time talking about all the people we knew and haven’t seen for umpty-billion years.
Anyway, once I was done with that, I headed home, and took most of the tailgating paraphenalia out of the truck for the year, and here I am, typing at you. It was a darned good season for the Saints, but I’m still sad that they didn’t win it all. There’s a lot more I could type about the season, but I need to save something for the next update, which will hopefully happen sooner than you expect, given my horrible schedule during the summer.
Oh, and to all you spammers hitting here, thank you for telling me what a nice site I have, but please, cordially, fuck off. I now have time to think up new ways to make life more difficult for you, and it seems that needs to be a higher priority than finding new links for my regular readers. 200k of crap in my set of new links, and I know I had two or three things in there that would have made most of you happy, but it was buried in all the crap (not unlike an announcement of a new player at Midway amidst the constant noise from Andy playing with his organ, so I lost all the good linkage I would normally be providing. Sorry folks. Kick a spammer, and make baby Jesus smile!
Weather in Minneapolis for September 10, 2006 September 10 in History
I was outside this afternoon and noticed something new in the yard. My hop plant, planted in the spring of 2004 (given to me at my housewarming by Ci and Kia, if I remember correctly), has started blooming. Woo!
That is all.
Weather in Minneapolis for September 6, 2006 September 6 in History
A long weekend is a very good thing at this point. I’ve been feeling pretty tired and busy lately, and a chance to take a day or two and lounge around and recharge my batteries is pretty welcome. And with an extra day in the weekend, I actually had a chance to do that yesterday, rather than spending all day doing errands around the house. Might even get a chance to be a lazy bum again today, but the list of things I want to get done before the snow flies is already starting to nag at me.
In Saints news, they made the championship. They’ll be playing on Monday and Tuesday down in Fort Worth (which means we won’t see Shreveport in St. Paul at all this year) and then they’ll be back home for games on Thursday, and Friday and Saturday if needed. Which means that next weekend could be busy again. And then on September 22, the Oktoberfest up at Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit begins, which means at least one weekend will be planned with that.
- Now including MSP: Farecast offers airfare predictions, telling you when to buy a ticket for your trip. [kottke]
- In the Story Behind the Picture, Poynter Online looks at Who Owns JonBenet Photos? They’re not in the public domain, and the copyright holder is trying to enforce his rights this time around.
- There will be No Crosstown fix in ’06 — MN-DOT has finally admitted they just couldn’t put together a plan to get it done (for the budget they had) in 2006, and are now hoping to get construction started in spring 2007. [metro mpls]
- The Minneapolis Council rejects bid to restrict alley traffic. It’ll still be legal to walk through alleys. Sheesh. This never should have come up in the first place, and I’ve lost a lot of respect for Robert Lilligren as a result. Also noted in the same article, the city seems to have selected the vendor for deploying city-wide wireless service. [metro mpls]
- In a trio of real-estate-related links, ‘Exotic’ mortgages seen losing their allure, Sellers slow to wake up to the new reality from Dan and Hard Times On The Way, there’s a fair amount of gloom and doom predicted for those of us with ARMs. Yet for me, the same conditions that held when I decided to get an ARM still apply. Yes, the rate will go up. But it can only go up by one percent per year, and only for a maximum of five times. And one result of taking the job I did is that my income has already gone up enough to cover the highest possible interest rate I can end up paying. My point is that not all ARMs are bad, but if you’ve got one, it may be time to look at it again. [claire]
Weather in Minneapolis for September 3, 2006 September 3 in History