Competitive Burrito Eating

Topics for this post include the following subjects (itemized). I'm sorry if they seem to have nothing to do with each other other than me. But I am saving you the discussion with Tall Brad today about sexual fish metaphors involving his fiance in Japan that ended with Klund talking about playing with his large mouth bass. I don't blog everything.

• Mermaid Muff


• Book Fairs


• Evicting Renters


• Burrito Competitions


• Representational State Transfer (REST)

This is just for my sister. I heard they were releasing The Little Mermaid: The Platinum Edition. Do you suppose the curtains will still match the drapes?

If you like to hear about mermaids, I notice there will be a whole talk on them at the Twin Cities Book Fair (hey...she's kind of cute. Ah...she was a fashion model. Why is it a fashion model can transition to author and I can't. I find it disturbing I'm significantly lazier than a fashion model). I'm disappointed I won't be around. Larry Sutin is reading. He is the recipient of several thousand drug company pens my mother has procured for me over the years. I currently have a grocery bag full of them I keep meaning to hoof over to Hamline University so he can sort through the odds and ends. I don't think when he mentioned his collection during class so many years ago that he thought anyone would stalk him with bags full of the things.

So...on to competitive burrito eating. Pooteewheet and I (and Eryn) drove down to the rental in Apple Valley this evening to show the house to a prospective renter...the one who would be replacing the renter that's currently being evicted for not paying her rent. Damn uncomfortable. But at least the evictee vacated long enough for me to show the place (I believe the vacating was just one in a series of truck hauls as she removed her stuff. She better not take my ladder and mower. Maybe she's leaving the country so she can't give us back the big pile of back rent she owes us...hard to say).

After the showing, we (Pooteewheet, Eryn and me, not the potential renter or evictee) went over to Chipotle for dinner. When we pulled up, there was a line out the door. So we wandered around Half Price books for a while and came back, only to find the line longer than when we left. Assuming it had to do with the football games at the local high school getting over (right near where I was doing the rental showing), we packed it up and headed for the Chipotle in Eagan, assuming it would have a shorter line. It didn't. Pooteewheet found out while in line that the issue was that Eagan and Apple Valley are having a high school competition. The Chipotle that sells the most burritos (to high schoolers) during the week will be giving away free burritos to the winning high school. You'd think teenagers would inhabit Chipotle without incentive, it being a relatively cheap source of bulk food for growing, athletic, young pages...oop, I meant boys. Giving them the opportunity to earn free foodstuffs is just asking for so many of them you might as well be back at high school yourself (ugh). Have no fear - we did get our burritos, although we didn't finish until after Eryn's bedtime. Priorities you know.

Switching gears, Luke Francl has to be one of my favorite bloggers lately because he blogs about geek subjects almost post for post in relation to what I'm interested in on a day to day basis. Today he discusses REST (Representational State Transfer...think of the internet as a series of just a few verbs that should be applied to everything that smells like a noun, although it really has more to do with states and transitions) and offers some links to the Ajax/REST connection.

I do wish articles would quit stating things like "Although the World Wide Web was built upon decades of related research, its effective birth date was December 1990" just to get their word count up. No one who is reading your article about REST needs that piece of information, they already know it. If they didn't know it, they haven't read the other 80-some million articles about web technologies that say the same damn thing.

I'd like to add that the Wikipedia page on REST is a great source of basic information about REST and How I Explained REST to My Wife by Ryan Tomayko is a classic piece of geek web text. The developerWorks site at IBM Luke references has great articles, particularly on SOA-related topics, regardless of your language of choice.