Guess we don’t quite get to spring just yet. They’re forecasting serious snow for just a little north of here, and a sloppy mix of snow and rain for here in the Cities.
Oh well. It’s Minnesota, and we’re far enough into spring that it shouldn’t last long.
- Amen! AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We’re Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right, A fine rant talking about the AIG
retention bonuses.
[fark!] - It’s not surprising that Spokane residents smuggle suds over green brands. Washington’s banned phosphates in dishwasher detergent. Minnesota has too, and I haven’t found a replacement that doesn’t make me wash dishes twice sometimes. I miss the old, nearly straight TSP Electrasol. [fark!]
- New is bad: Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Draw Quality Complaints because cheap components mean they’re junk, or because people put them in fixtures that make them get too hot. I’ve had mixed experiences with ’em. Some places I’m using them at home, and some I’m just not. And probably never will.
- Here’s a news story I’m not entirely happy about: Saints looking for a new home in St. Paul . They locations they’re talking about are all going to be more difficult to get to and from.
- As Turly and I suspected, Heineken calls time on Beamish abroad. It’ll be for Ireland only until they kill it off entirely. Fargin’ bastages. [turly]
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| Photos from Southern Utah |
Still waiting to turn the corner into spring. I thought we were there about a week ago, and then it snowed. But it sounds like the chillier weather helped out in Fargo. Or at least postponed the worst of the flooding. I feel bad for the folks losing their houses, but find myself wondering why more wasn’t done earlier. The storm-track most of this winter was going a bit north of here, and I can’t be the only one who thought that most of that snow was going to melt and run into the Red River, can I? Well, I guess a guy can hope that once things get dried out this time around they’ll do some more preparation to avoid this problem in the future.
Meanwhile, I’m still processing photos from the trip to Utah. I’m up to 47 in the set as of this morning, and just might reach 60 by the time I’m done. It was a pretty productive trip, photography-wise. Aside from the photos in my computer, I spent some time yesterday cleaning out my cameras. I think I finally got the last of the red dust off the sensors. That part was considerably less fun than the shooting photos part. Kudos to the Rocket-Air. It’s a pretty good tool for cleaning out the insides of a camera.
I’m not the only one with some beautiful photos from the southwest. Ben has a post about Climbing as Metaphor which includes a whole bunch of pretty photos. It’ll be worth your time to check it out.
- Shiny! This set of Hardware store chessmen looks pretty easy to make if you have a decent hardware store near you to get all the pieces. [boing boing]
- This 80s Hits Medley, played on the Stylophone made me smile. [scalzi]
- I hadn’t heard about the Alabama Shooting, but once it had happened, it seems someone called in the army. Posse Comeagain? has a discussion, along with a long chain of comments about police misconduct in general. There’s more at Samson Alabama, Active Duty MP’s.
- Wondering what The Meaning of Sarah Palin is? The article thinks it has the answer.
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| Photos from Southern Utah |
Yes, It’s been a while since I updated. Sorry about that. I was out of town last weekend, and have been playing catch-up since I got back on Tuesday. Out of town? Yes. I spent some time running around southern Utah with some co-workers shooting photos. The results (which I’m still sorting through and uploading to flickr) are in the set linked to on the left. I’ve got over a dozen that I’m happy with, and the moonset pictured left is my favorite.
And that trip took most of my attention. Between that and work, I haven’t really done much else that’s worth typing about, so I’ll just get to the links.
Oops. I guess I lied. I do have one request. If you’re familiar with the national parks in southern Utah, there are a few photos I have that I’m not exactly sure about the captions. You should be able to spot them pretty easily in the set. If you can help me caption them correctly, I’d sure appreciate the help. Having a GPS on your camera may help tell you where you are, but it doesn’t always tell you what you’re pointing the camera at. Thanks.
- As Dan says in the comments to his link to Change We Can Believe In: How About the End of Farmers Markets? Say Hello to H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, this is the government applying more of what doesn’t work to the system. [flutterby]
- Into movies? Take a look at Dan Meth’s Trilogy Meter. I mostly agree with him, and yeah, the third movie is never the best. [accordionguy]
- I’m a firm believer in The power of naps, but I’m a little upset that nobody told me that the day after the beginning of DST is National Napping Day.
- The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist is a pretty darned good story. Not sure how much is factual, but it’d make a pretty good caper movie. [boing boing]
- In Big Cliffs, Small World, Ben Warde, an ex-co-worker, describes running into us in Utah. Strange, but true. And Ben’s got a pretty good blog that I suggest you take a look at.
- Grr. A Mom Lets Her Son Walk to Soccer ….And The Police Come Calling because neighbors were wetting themselves at seeing a 10-year-old walking to the park by himself. [boing boing]
- From Rolling Stone, The Big Takeover takes a look at the financial crisis, and determines that it’s all about power and wall street types who feel they deserve tons more money for having screwed the pooch. Why aren’t more of them going to jail? [accordionguy]
I spent most of the past week, either with a cold or recovering from it. I suspect that attending the ice ball game last weekend knocked my immune system down enough that it gave the virus that’s been going around work since about the first of the year a chance to catch me.
But on the plus side, being sick through the middle of the week gave me a chance to tackle a lot of the little things around home that I just haven’t gotten to for far too long. I finally moved my recliner up into the library. I finally hauled a bunch of stuff that I’ve been shuffling from room to room out to the trash (or at least into the garage to be put out with the trash next week). And I realized yesterday that I’ve almost got the downstairs clean enough to let a Roomba roam around down here now. Not bad progress for being sick and spending most of my time napping.
And yeah, after two months of having a Roomba 560, I’ve decided I like it enough that I’ll get a second one for the ground floor. It’s not perfect (my biggest complaint is that I still need to pay some attention to it every day, if for no other reason than to empty the bin on it), but it’s made a huge difference upstairs. Things are much cleaner than can be accounted for by my normal bachelor slob tendencies. And I’m better about keeping the clutter picked up because clutter confuses the robot (used drier sheets on the other hand, choke it something fierce). Might not be for everyone, but highly recommended for the single male geek / slob.
- Speaking of Roombæ (is that the correct plural? It seems like it ought to be), a Hamster-Controlled Roomba Lets Your Hamster Decide What Gets Cleaned. Not sure how effective it would be, but it sounds pretty cool.
- Stephen Haynes has put together An Index to the 2257 Posts (with a NSFW photo) he’s written over the past few weeks. If you’re a photographer who takes pictures of naked people, or a model who may work without clothes, you want to read it. If you’re a photographer who takes pictures of people at all, you might want to take a look. This regulation may turn out to have some unintended consequences (inconceivable, I know), and all of it goes into effect on March 18th (parts took effect in July of 1995).
- In Wall Street on the Tundra, Vanity Fair takes a look at the Icelandic financial collapse. Why does this matter? Well, there’s an awful lot of parallels to what went wrong with the financial system in this country, but in Iceland it was so over-the-top that it almost feels like A Modest Proposal. [flutterby]
- The Financial Times has a look at The travails of Detroit, and says that it may be the future of American cities, rather than an outlier. But with the cheap real estate, and the state ranking 14th on the the list of most free states, I wonder if there wouldn’t be some way to put together a gulch in the midst of the mess. [boing boing]
- Here’s an interesting study of Freedom in the 50 States (from which I got the fact that Michigan’s 14th on the scale). It’s a 1.2M PDF, but worth taking a peek at. [vinnie]
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| Ice Ball Game |
I was out at the base ball game yesterday and took a few photos, one of which is linked to the right. That particular photo is a five shot panorama. The rest are in this set on flickr. It was a fun day, and I got to see some of my summertime family. I probably should have taken more photos out in the parking lot both before and after the game, but I was thinking that I’d conserve batteries for the actual game.
And speaking of conserving batteries, that’s going to be the plan for today. Spending five hours sitting out in the cold really drained me, and I almost feel like I’m coming down with a cold. I know that cold weather doesn’t cause colds, but I’m going to play it safe and rest up today. Sometime next week, I’ll finish posting photos from last Tuesday’s photowalk at the Cathedral of St. Paul. And get back to scanning old photos of me & my family. It’s been interesting seeing some of the old photos and reading stories like this one about my mom complaining that her slippers hurt when she was four.
- Yesterday, Beloved Radio Broadcaster Paul Harvey Dies at 90. I always liked the rest of the story. Good day. [boing boing]
- Interested in helping to keep a San Francisco live music venue open and fighting City Hall? The DNA Lounge: Legal Defense Fund is accepting donations. [flutterby]
- A recently Declassified NSA Document Reveals the Secret History of TEMPEST. Cool stuff. I worked next to a TEMPEST box during my year at Honeywell (a room shielded to prevent TEMPEST snooping, that is). Been interested in remote snooping since, and it’s interesting to see how long ago the technology was actually discovered. [schneier]
- The Top 11 Reasons Why Top 10 (or Top 25) Lists Don’t Work is informative, and concentrates on security. Finding and fixing bugs is important, but it usually won’t help with design flaws, which can be a much bigger source of insecurity. [schneier]
- It will probably be a while before a Wall Street quant will get a Nobel in economics: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street tells how math, and people believing that their math was right in all cases (or equating correlation with causation, or believing that because two variables correlate well today, they will continue to do so forever), helped contribute to the financial meltdown. It wasn’t math itself that caused the problem, it was bad math. Or good math, inappropriately applied. As Li himself said of his own model:
The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it.
[boing boing] - Well, here it comes: Obama to Seek New Assault Weapons Ban. Holder uses all the keywords:
gun show loophole,
cop-killer bullets
andassault weapons
for the trifecta. I actually had thought for a while that Obama wouldn’t want to spend his political capital on this sort of thing, but I guess I was being overly optimistic. Then again, sometimes help comes from strange quarters: Pelosi throws cold water on weapons ban. Strange things are afoot in the fever swamps. [vinnie]