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| Wine Barrels |
It’s almost Halloween, and that’s had me thinking about snow, remembering the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. So I’ve been working a little more than usual to get everything battened down for the winter. Not sure why, but this year I’ve been thinking about snow more than most years. And some forecasters are saying we’re going to have more snow than normal. In any case, I broke down and bought a snowblower, so if there’s not enough snow to bother shovelling, you can blame me.
The week? Well, it started out rough. There was a panic at work over some bugs that were being talked about. But it turned out the guy making all the noise hadn’t even installed the version that was supposed to fix those bugs, and was griping about problems we already knew about. Then there’s a long-term project we’ve started planning, and one of the cowboys on the team was ready to go off and solve the problem. But I’ve been slowly grinding along methodically, fixing over a decade of patches made to some of the same code, so I questioned whether or not it would actually “help” me to have this person working on the project. Apparently criticizing this person is Just Not Done, since when I spoke up in the meeting, things suddenly got very quiet. But I seriously think that his “two weeks for stage one” will mean six or more months work from other members of the team who will have to go back and clean up the quick and dirty hacks that will let him get the job done so quickly.
By Wednesday, I’d mostly put all that frustration behind me. I wrote up some documentation of the problems I think we’ll have to consider that will make it more than a two-week project, pointed out that the bugs that had people worried were actually all fixed, and had gone back to what I’d been planning to work on Monday morning. Two days lost, but I guess I learned something about team dynamics if nothing else. And I managed to hold off on the complete course of self-medication until Friday, when I knew I’d have time to recover from the side-effects.
I’m still posting pictures from the Hastings trip last weekend to flickr. Haven’t gotten out with the camera since then, even though the weather’s been pretty darned nice, and there were probably lots of becostumed gals running around last night that would have made interesting photographic fodder. And I haven’t started unpacking the books yet, because I’m waiting for the floor in the library-to-be to finish curing after the third coat went on on Monday. I think I’ll wait until next weekend before I start tackling that project.
- Donncha has an explanation of Why you need the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter on your site. [holy schmoly]
- The C++ FQA Lite is a collection of frequently questioned answers about C++. An example section on defective C++ covers major shortcomings in the language, and the author states:
I believe that for any new project, there’s a much better language than C++.
It’s a darned good read while waiting for a compile or six. On a similar note, this “tutorial” on How To Write Unmaintainable Code gave me a chuckle. [flutterby] - The GeekWithA.45 points out An Excruciating Truth… to Ron Paul and others who don’t understand that
Whether America remains free and prosperous will be determined by whoever controls The Lightning; which is some critical portion of war suitable energy resources.
I’m with him in thinking that it’s damned good we’ve got Ron Paul in Congress, but the good doctor is not presidential material. [kim] - At work we discussed Stephen Green’s I Was a Card-Carrying Libertarian: Confessions of a Black Sheep Republican. One of the things that really saddens me is that (as pointed out in the Geek’s article) libertarians are outnumbered by vegans 3 to 1.
- Back in my high school days, I considered building the equivalent of The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron. But the other day I found something almost as annoying left for me by the people I bought my house from (almost four years ago). Turns out they’d put a fresh 9V battery in a smoke detector, but rather than putting it somewhere obvious, it was tucked in the rafters in the basement. When the battery got low on Tuesday this week, it started chirping. About once a minute or so. Took me until Wednesday evening to track the damned thing down. It got me wondering why somebody doesn’t make a smoke detector that’s easier to deal with when the battery is going dead.
Weather in Minneapolis for October 28, 2007 October 28 in History
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| Under The Bridge |
Yesterday was a beautiful day out. And since I’d planned a photowalk with the flickr group for the day, I was in a darned good mood. We headed down to Hastings, stopping first at Alexis Bailly Vineyard for some wine-tasting and photography there, then went into downtown Hastings, parking right down by the river. After walking around for a couple hours, we took a little break, and then went back to the river front to see if it was going to be a pretty sunset or not. At that point, I was tired, and it wasn’t looking good, so we all headed home. And got to see a pretty sunset on the drive back. Oh well. It was good to meet a few new folks, and see others again, and I really couldn’t have picked a better day, especially with all the gray and rainy days we’ve had this month.
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| Bookcases |
This morning, I’ve already been pretty productive. I started posting my photos from yesterday, as has everyone else. I’ve also done dishes and gotten one of the two or three loads of laundry I need to do started. I still need to get my library ready for Dick, from Prime Hardwood Floors who’s stopping by tomorrow to put the final coat of poly on the floor in there. Chad put in the bookcases on Monday and Tuesday last week, and the room is just about ready for me to start piling stuff into it. I think next weekend will see me starting to haul the boxes of books up from the basement.
I’m really happy about having that room almost finished. I’ve been working on it all summer. Or rather, waiting on a different contractor to deliver the bookcases, and having him go bankrupt, screwing me out of my down payment (I’ll get about 5% back), so I was really happy when Chad came through quickly, and delivered beautiful shelves to boot. I’m going to find other projects for Chad to do around here. He’s fun to work with, and does great work. Highly recommended.
And I think that’s going to do it for today. Have a swell week!
- Kim has a post that starts out about his friend Dickie and ends up being about work. I think it’s worth reading, but don’t want to give away the ending. [kim]
- Slate Magazine has a series on American Lawbreaking and explains why bad laws remain on the books.
…tolerance of lawbreaking constitutes one of the nation’s other major—yet most poorly understood—ways of creating social and legal policy.
[boing boing] - Here’s a note from the guy whose request got the Amazon One-Click Patent Rejected By The US Patent Office. Nice work. [boing boing]
- Last Thursday, Major League Baseball pisse[d] off entire nation with spim (instant messaging spam). [scottk]
Weather in Minneapolis for October 21, 2007 October 21 in History
I spent most of the weekend around home. But first there was Friday night. The Auto Body Experience played down at the Eagle’s Club, and I headed down to see the show. Went down by myself, thinking that I might run into some folks I know, and I did. But mostly I sat by myself, enjoying the music. Kent made me laugh with sound effects that caused Scott to completely fumble the lyrics at the start of Cave and bought me a Jägermeister that made my brain fuzzy between sets (Thanks for both of those, Kent!). Once they’d finished a much looser (and fun) second set, and I’d had a chance to chat with all the guys, I headed towards home.
Getting to and from The Eagle’s Club is a lot more challenging nowadays than it was the first time I headed down there, what with the 35W bridge missing and all. The extra drive-time while trying to get home convinced me that it would be a good idea to swing by the Sporty for a couple more beers. Talked to a few folks there, and then eventually headed home.
As I slowly woke up on Saturday morning, and pondered the work I needed to get done around the house, the wisdom of those “couple more beers” seemed doubtful. Chad is going to be delivering and installing my built-in bookcases on Monday morning, and there are a few things I need to finish up in the room before he arrives. I got partway done on Saturday, but there’s still work to be done today. I also got the lumber from the garden chopped into short enough pieces that the trash guys will take it away (I hope) and mowed the lawn again.
Today, I need to finish getting the bedroom ready for Chad, make a run up to visit mom, and do a bunch of laundry. Not an overwhelming load by any means, but I’m wishing I’d gotten a little more done yesterday so I could be lazier today.
- Looking for some fun? The “Blog” Of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks has some. [scottk]
- I got a smile from this pair of craigslist posts On female beauty as a depreciating asset. [flutterby]
- Josh Olson’s The Life and Death of Jesse James made me immediately think of Odin Soli / Layne and shake my head. [boing boing]
- George Siamandas’ Winnipeg Time Machine is a pretty big collection of history of that city up in the Great White North. There are some biases in his work, but I couldn’t find any outright errors. [metafilter]
Weather in Minneapolis for October 14, 2007 October 14 in History
I got woke up around 5:30 this morning by thunder and lightning again. Seems we're in a stormy time of year here in Minnesota, and most of the weekend is going to be spent with a front parked across the state. 80s in the south, and 40s in the north, so there's probably a good chance of more weather over the weekend. Which is just fine by me. I got the lawn mowed on Thursday evening, and most of what I need/want to do for the weekend is inside.
- Dr. Henry Farid is Proving That Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing, putting together automated ways to detect digitally altered photographs. Of course, he has to try various methods of altering photos to know what people might get up to. Like maybe this fake involving James Purnell, the Culture Secretary of the UK, who had recently made a fuss over the BBC fixing a phone-in contest. [photoshop news]
- It’s no surprise to anyone that’s done any programming that Software Is Hard, but sometimes it’s nice to have someone else say it eloquently.
- Hmm. Is this list of the Top 5 Things Every Extrovert Should Know About Introverts useful? I think so, but I could probably be convinced otherwise. [jr]
- I finished typing up Day 3 of my road trip. All that remains is maybe going back and inserting some more pictures for day 1, drawing some maps and some general rambling about the state of small-town America. So maybe it’ll be done done by the end of the year.
Weather in Minneapolis for October 6, 2007 October 6 in History