I didn't even realize I had a limited allowance

I think eventually, this will cause untold number of literal headaches.

Ironman 2007

Ironman 2007 was today. I did the 62 miler instead of the 30 miler I do most other years. While that may seem very confident given my semi-daily rides of 6 miles to work and 6 miles home, and even that not all the time, I did take a book with me in case I bonked. I didn't bonk - but I think it was close. I feel like I've been pummeled with a sledge hammer - my knees hurt, my thighs hurt, my legs (top) hurt, my hair is numb, and my balls are numb (4 hours later). An important lesson learned is that I wouldn't be a good professional racer.

"Announcer: Scooter is going for the finish line. It's only a mile away. He's struggled the last fourteen miles against wind, rain (sprinkles), hills and himself. He's almost there! He just has to give one last push!"

"Scooter: hey, that's the Quick Mart that f-ed me over for a candy bar when I lost my keys. I'm going to buy a jug of water from them and nothing else, and I'm going to use sweaty money."

Yep...stopped 1 mile from the finish line for a water break. In retrospect, it was probably the wise move, as I'd been biking near this couple, and she was biking around the Quick Mart in circles trying to figure out if the bonk he'd been working on for the last hour had caused him to pass out somewhere nearby. I didn't have anyone willing to do an area search of Quick Mart for my body.

And I did better than the guy that was coming out of the highschool at the end, escorted by cops and paramedics and looking like he'd been tasered.

"Cops: we need you to keep talking. We want to make sure you're ok. What ride option did you take?"

"Guy: the 66 miler."

Um...nope...he needs some oxygen. 30, 62 or 100, dude. 66 just makes you sound like you need that ambulance ride.

The place was packed because it was so nice out. The day-of lines, many of them, were twenty people deep. Here's the beginning of the ride. Notice all the people coming down the hill in the background. And this is early. About 6:45 a.m. I think I officially started about 7:10.



Here's the first stop at Lonsdale. They have a butcher store that says something like, "Meating you is our business." Creepy. Just before I pulled into the rest stop, the woman next to me looked at all the riders ahead of us and said, "Seeing people from this angle always reminds me that I want a tattoo on my calf." That alone was funny, and then her friend added, "Your ass?" It was windy.

Six miles from Webster we got to go up an exceptionally large hill and another woman yelled loudly, "I'm freakin forty!" This bodes ill for my hill climbing next year.

The first rest stop was 29 miles into the ride. That's a haul without access to more water. At that point I was averaging about 15 miles per hour.


By the time I got to the second rest stop (had to come back to it after bypassing it by a mile - cop was blocking the sign), I was averaging even faster. The wind was at our backs on that run, and I think it took barely over an hour to go 19 miles. Here are some of the TCBC women hanging out and eating pasta. Apparently that was new this year.

Did you know that in southern Minnesota they sell "puppy goats"? I didn't either. But there was a sign. Guess it solves any inbreeding issues if you just cross species.


This is the third leg. Fourteen miles. Tiny bit of rain. But you could feel the wind sloughing across the prairie from the storm and pushing you anywhere that wasn't toward the finish line. It took me 1.75 hours (not including the Kwik Mart rest) to go that fourteen miles. That's not because I stopped a lot. I stopped once at 30 minutes, and once at 1.6 hours. I just kept pedaling in 2x4 to 2x1 the whole time. Ouch. So this is all the 62 mile people who've gone 54 miles or so. They all look like they're happy in this picture - but many of them were just as tired as I was. Except that brunette with the red tint to her hair and the excellent ass. She blew by me like I was standing still. Getting dropped by a hottie at 7 mph is freaking embarrassing. I think she was schooling me just for looking.


And here's some bobber guy from when I did stop. There was a lot of new scenery on the 62 miler, for me.

Sleepy Head

Sometimes you just can't finish the book before bedtime.

Chalk Time

Ming, Julie and Logan bought Eryn a chalk dispenser for her birthday. Not just a little plastic holder for clamping around hand-sized pieces, but a rolling dispenser that takes powdered chalk, much like a surveyer might use. There's chalk all over the driveway. Chalk across the street. It's everywhere. When I biked home last Monday, I got to run around a chalk racing loop.

Ah...the ride home is over, I can relax.


Who's been in my driveway? I can't tell. Who's the culprit? I'll deduce the evil perpetrator by some means.


I found her...she makes a break for it. She intends to escape!


But I'm fast. So fast. I'm zero pounds wasted. And after three laps, she's a little slow.

The Host

Kyle and I went to the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis last night to see the Korean movie The Host, about a big monster created by dumping leftover chemicals in the sewer. The monster itself was pretty scary, but the movie, overall, was a bit peculiar, as the director kept insinuating that things might be happening that you'd expect in a horror movie, that were then just tossed aside as non-issues. On top of that, the government didn't seem that interested in catching the monster, although they talked about it a lot, but was more concerned with just driving around in private contractor fumigation trucks and letting some family worry about the issue on their own.

The Riverview Theater, however...very nice. I had never been there. It's huge. It shows second run films. And it costs $3 for the 11 p.m. show, and a medium popcorn and soda, which are the size of a large at my theater, cost $5...not each, just $5. $8 for the show and so much popcorn and soda I thought I was going to be sick. Bargain. Except for the guy behind us laughing uproariously through parts of the movie, just a great experience.

And Mean Mr. Mustard might be excited to learn that on June 1st and 2nd, at midnight, they'll be having a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sing-A-Long, tickets available now. There will be 1.) singing, 2.) interactive audience participation, 3.) Buffy-oke, 4.) a trivia contest and 5.) evil bunnies. He's not big on audience participation I bet, but evil bunnies and Buffy musicals are certainly his thing. Tickets are only $10, and it's not that far from his place. "Once more with feeling!" Mean Mr. Mustard, "Once more with feeling!"

Lucky Numbers

Ming's parents sent me a book to help me figure out my lucky lottery numbers so I don't have to chop up any tourists. I'm supposed to figure out what I dream about, or what I'm doing that day, and correlate it to the appropriate picture in the book so I have a series of numbers. There's a handy index in the front with English translations so I'm not too confused. Unfortunately, there are two numbers on every picture, which confuses me. Am I supposed to pick the big obvious number, or the smaller number in parentheses? Do I have to do something special like chop up a tourist to use the bracketed numbers? And I seem to end up on this page with the biking and the beer drinking every time. There's some sort of sexy snuggling in the upper right corner, and that picture in the middle isn't a blowjob, but tailoring - so don't assume my life is more exciting than it really is.

By the way, if you're ever playing badminton by yourself with a ping pong ball in your panties while husking coconuts, make sure to play these numbers: 891, 345, 901, 809, 798 (although if your lottery doesn't use numbers that high, try using the page numbers: 45 18 46 41 40). And if you hang yourself, there's a number to pick as well. Which is confusing, because it would seem to come after picking your numbers.

A big thanks to Ming's parents - I'm enjoying the book!

Retro - Order of the Arrow

I had a very long stint where I did Order of the Arrow ceremonies for Scouts all over the Wright County area, and a bit beyond. Every weekend or two for about six years I'd dress up and do either a ceremony for new Order of the Arrow members (an extension of the Boy Scouts, populated by members voted in by the other boys and run by boys - sort of like a Scouting honor roll outside of the normal path to being an Eagle Scout) or for the Cub Scouts or Webelos as they transitioned between levels of Scouting. Once we even did a ceremony for a Girl Scout troop - my sister's troop - who in turn did a Cabbage Patch Doll Hand Motion ceremony for us. I think they got the better end of that trade. If you had any doubts that OA was populated by older, wiser kids, watching a number of 14-16 year old kids sitting around patiently observing Cabbage Patch dolls dance and sing, and commenting politely on how nice it was and were the girls having a great time camping, would have dispelled them.

Being on the ceremonial team was a lot of work - we had to haul costumes and six Scouts up to 120 miles away and memorize lines for a 30 minute (or significantly longer) ceremony, often for multiple parts in case someone wasn't available that evening. There were multiple ceremonies, so multiple roles to memorize, and once in a while it was necessary to ad hoc if it was a weekend-long event, or a non-standard event. The stage was never the same, varying from gymnasium, to local park, to Scout or local campground, sometimes with a firebowl, sometimes in the woods, sometimes on a river edge or lake edge, and almost never free of woodticks. And the circumstances were never the same. Once I set fire to my headdress with a torch, causing my Scoutmaster/English teacher to come sprinting down the firebowl with a speed I'd never seen him attain in years of Scouting. Those feathers are extremely flammable. Once we had to change clothes in the middle of a group of mothers. Not just down to our skiivies, but full nudity. We had our theatrical standards, and they included not having underwear showing during the ceremony - less a problem when we had the full suits you see in the picture below, rather than the simple loin clothes that were worn in the earlier ceremonies. The mothers assured us they were all there for their sons' Scout ceremony, so we didn't have anything that hadn't seen before. And once we had the cops called on us for having Satanic ceremonies and scarificing a horse in the city park. No horse was sacrificed - I simply rode it into the ceremony to add some show. The accusation was due to a teenager bringing home her parents' SUV and running over the other family car. Literally driving up on the side of it and grinding it into the driveway. Our ceremony stopped for a good five minutes while she drove the SUV back and forth over the car trying to separate the crunched metal on both vehicles, each time lifting the SUV wheel two to three feet off the ground, as the wheels locked and ripped fenders and bumpers and hub caps off with a horrific screech. I think she was trying to blame us for distracting her. Unfortunately for her, almost every cop in Wright County, and certainly many of the sherrifs, had either been in Scouts, OA, or Explorer Scouts (Scouts attached to cops, firefighters, a radio station, or some other career-related group). The sherrifs who arrived waited until the ceremony was over and then had a good laugh, although expressing some sympathy for the teen. Our town was small enough that everyone knew everyone else, and knew all the similar situations every other teen had encountered (or at least their sibling). A bit of empathy was a given.

This is actually a very late picture when I was training in a new group. I was about twenty (OA leadership as a "boy" lasts through 21 - if you read any of that, I was a Vigil OA member). Most of my early days had been done with the older brothers of the boys in this picture, and even the Scouts who had trained the older brothers of the boys in the picture. There are several future Eagle Scouts pictured. If you can't pick me out, I'm the one in white.

My Favorite Quote of the Evening

A director from work, "Hey...buy my sister."

Two For Monday

I haven't linked to Tom at Sky Blue Waters in a while again, but he has a post up with a link to Minnesota Grown, the MN directory to finding farm fresh food close to your home. I keep meaning to catch a few farms and find a source or two of local honey. Supposedly it's great for your allergies (I guess you build up some tolerance for the pollen they use to make their honey, which works best if it's actually the pollen in your area) and it makes good mead.

Adventures in Reading has a link to 75 questions/rules to observe when writing a fantasy novel. I like #57 - "Does your main character have a magic axe, hammer, spear, or other weapon that returns to him when he throws it?", but I think it needs a handy name, like The Krull Gambit. I wonder if you have to do a 180 on that list if you're playing D&D?

4th Birthday Party

Update: I'm not sure why YouTube doesn't like the phrase "hogpiled", but it simply refused to finish processing my video of Dan'l and the kids wrestling. So I reuploaded it and named it "pig piled" and it finished in about 5 seconds. Oh well. Early today, the video of Eryn on the ATV was showing up for me as some sort of block editing video, so I don't know what they're up to over there. It's a peculiar way to make sure I'm not violating any copying laws.

Today we had a party for 12 three and four year old children at our house. That's only 2/3 of the number that were invited, and the house was mad with activity, particularly after it started raining and everyone moved inside. Our house is four levels, so fully 1/2 the house is sort of unusable for any sort of partying, so it gets a little crowded. Eryn's guests played games (some haphazard participation in pin the lightning bolt on Lightning McQueen), ate cake and ice cream, took turns trying to break the Lightning McQueen pinata (and each other), and just generally caroused with all of Eryn's stuff for two hours. For the most part, while noisy, they were perfect guests.

Most disturbing moment? Preparty when Pooteewheet noted that because Eryn was starting all of the balloons for us, and we had to finish them off, that made her the "fluffer". And people call me warped. Logan took home a whole trunk full of fluffed balloons at the end of the party. We handed out Cars cars to all the kids so they'd have something to take away, but I think the balloons were the best gift he could have received.

Here's Dan'l wrestling all the children. This continued downstairs, and was rather raucous. He brings it on himself.


Everybody singing happy birthday.


Eryn navigating the party balloons on her ATV just prior to the party. She and I spent quite a while playing navigate the balloons, kick the balloons, and baseball, with the balloons. That's probably why she was a little weak on the pinata later, she was all worn out from swinging a few hundred times at a fast pitch balloon.


Thanks to everyone who showed up. We loved having everyone over, and Eryn loves the gifts. She was playing with them right up to 30 minutes past her bedtime.

Invisibility

I've been reading Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web at work for the last month, whenever I've been in the office for more than 8 hours. Some parts of it are repetitive, intuitive, and boring, but other sections are really worth the read. One part near the end actually gave me an idea for improving the corporate centralized data-publishing service from a search engine optimization perspective. While that means squat unless someone is willing to pay for the development, it's great to be able to pitch an idea that facilitates partner interaction internationally, and to be able to grab at something that's so low-hanging that I can demonstrate it with two simple SQL queries.

Unrelated, but something I found particularly interesting, was a paragraph near the end (p. 391-393) where the authors discuss how the web, and putting out something new on the web, is starting to be a non-issue for making your fortune.

"As all companies come to embrace Internet technology, the Internet itself will be neutralized as a source of advantage. Basic Internet applications will become table stakes--companies will not be able to survive without them, but they will not gain any advantage from them." [from Michael Porter, "Strategy and the Internet", Harvard Business Review, March 2001].

I paraphrase, and add some value, but basically they're stating that technology, web technology, and particularly, visible, intuitable, technology, isn't something that can sustain your business, because anyone can reproduce it and they will. However, there are architectures and behaviors (users, content, context) that can be harnessed that even a dedicated competitor might not be able to ferret out or duplicate (or afford). So in that context, embracing open standards lowers costs and increases sustainability, and eventually doesn't matter from a competitive standpoint, because what drives your business are the things that aren't visible to those with access to the same open standards, but rather the things they can't see, or can't reproduce. Sounds damn similar to O'Reilly's line.

And this (p. 391)...this is just damn funny: "So while you might not work at ExxonMobil, Thomson, or the UN, it's likely that you're dealing with enterprise-class IA challenges." I don't work for the UN.

Recent Movies

Movies...I've seen a few lately, although I don't blog about them much. If I blogged about everything I watched via Netflix, I'd never have time to do anything else. Eryn and I watched 15 minutes of Netflix streaming today, a Korean movie called "Doggy Poo". Which is about Dog Poo. Whiny dog poo. Seriously, whiny, crying, pissy, sad, morose, angst-laden, I'd slap you around if I wouldn't get you on my fingers, dog poo. Even Eryn was annoyed with this stop motion feature. Which is why we watched fifteen minutes, not the full thirty, and then she demanded to play Desktop Defender instead. The only good part was when I told her that when she farted, that was her poop trying to talk to her.

So movies. Pooteewheet and I saw Shooter. It is not a good movie. But it is what it purports to be. Classic 80's, Rambo-style "you drew first blood" escapism. Not "in the spirit of" 80's style escapism, but literally Reagan-era posturing, except there's a weird liberal anti-government twist in there that seems to be an attempt to update it (which was very strange, because you'd expect it from a conservative pic...let's say Red Dawn...but not so much from something that seems to have a liberal twist). We both loved it. It was lame...yet pleasing.

Saw 300. Yeah...war mongering, Persian-hating, blah blah blah blah blah (is that insensitive? I mean blah blah blah blah in the sense that it doesn't matter who the enemy was, there had to be one). It's a comic book that was turned into a movie, that looks like the comic book, and acts like a comic book in that it appeals visually and viscerally to some select senses. If you're going to complain about it, read the comic book first so you know how close it is to the media it was derived from. We both loved it. If only for the reason that all the Persians have abs that look like J-Money's abs. Come on now, J - you complain about not getting enough exercise and being a couch potato, and yet doing shots off your stomach would mean chasing the vodka around while you twitched it back and forth just to show off and deprive a person of their buzz. Um....congrats on the 1/2 marathon! The South Park episode spoofing the slow mo 300 does to achieve their comic book feel...also excellent.

Saw Grindhouse last night. "Loved it" would be a bit strong as a modifier, but I really liked it, and for prime time rates, the 3+ hours at the theater made sure I got my money's worth. Tarantino's Death Proof was the more interesting of the two movies. Not that it was better. I liked Rodriquez's zombie movie more just because it felt so drive in. But Tarantino made me watch 75 minutes of chick talk to get to 15 minutes of action. That's crazy. I could hear the two teenage boys behind me fidgeting away. They were almost incapable of dealing with women talking and relating to each other in something that approached how men interact, but wasn't, rather than getting naked or just damn well doing something so they'd shut up. Which is why it reminded me of The Descent. But not as good. Because The Descent also has women talking. Women getting drunk [ever notice that when someone really digs in and has women talking in a movie...really talking, lots of talking, and not "girl talk", but just hanging-out, relating, being friends, talk, there's serious alcohol? It's proof men don't talk like that - because we'd need three to ten times the alcohol, so we'd be dead]. Women getting drunk and talking, talking, talking. But it just moves so much faster. And Alex Reid, the British (Cornwall, if you care...I do, they have a history of being rebellious, which is sexy, and I majored in British rebellion, so I know) actress, is so much hotter than anyone in Death Proof (here's a cast photo from The Descent, she's middle back...here's another - who knows why they're wet, who cares, and here's yet another where Alex is front and center.) So, I guess what I'm saying is I liked Grindhouse, but maybe I should have just watched The Descent again.

But Grindhouse was so Altmanish, it was scary. Zoe the stunt woman. A real stunt woman. Sydney Poitier, Sidney Poitier's daughter. Tom Savini, Udo Kier, Sybil Danning, Sheri Moon (Zombie) - if you're not familiar with them, you don't watch horror movies (or pay attention to who's in them, or care at all about how horror movies have evolved over the years, and it's worth knowing how they've evolved, because what they portray as scary, and what they spoof, is American culture as it exists in the moment. The scariest thing you can imagine is living right now and right here, you just might not realize it). And that made it fun, because you knew that despite the violence, the weirdness, and the grindhouse motif, a lot of people had signed on to do the project because this was something they understood, and they shared an idea and a sense of what was fun cinema. While that might not be contagious if you don't recognize all the actors, if you do, it's great.

Rocks

Sorry about the lack of posting - it really has been rather light for me. But between commuting to work (and back) on the bike and pulling the burley, being borderline narcoleptic from the exercise, guitar lessons, guitar practice, extra work requiring a few hours of at home time, broken rental unit garage door openers, etc., my dance card has been full. I can tell that all those things are crossing strange lines, because today I opened up the extra work folder and a bunch of rocks fell out, covered with road tar. Seems that the bike kicks them up into the Burley and into my work folder. Glad I opened it at my desk and not in a meeting.

Speaking of bikes. Eryn got a new bike for her fourth birthday. The training wheel sort. I can't tell what she thinks of it yet. We're going to get better training wheels so it stands up in a sturdier way. And yesterday, on her birthday, I forgot a dress shirt when I biked to work. So, at 7:00 a.m. I called Pooteewheet and asked her if she might bring me a shirt so I didn't have to sit through meetings in a sweaty t-shirt (I usually try to keep an extra at work, but it's early in the season, so I wasn't prepared, and at least if I had to sit around in a t-shirt, it was a tasteful t-shirt with a bike on it and not the "I'm the Irishman Your Mother Warned You About" one I was wearing today). She obliged, and called me to tell me she was five minutes from the office. I walked down to the back entrance and outside to the lunch tables, and sat in the cold for five minutes. Then ten. Then fifteen. Then twenty. By then my internal exercise heat had worn off and figured I better find my phone and see what was going on. While I was crossing the skyway, I saw the car, so I walked back out. Eryn's most interesting 4th birthday present? She was in a car accident. Some guy hit the back of the Focus hard enough to push it four feet into a controlled intersection and leave two punctures in the bumper from his license plate bolts. Apparently the sun was in his eyes - which begs questions like, "Why didn't you pull over?" "Where are your sunglasses?" And, "Do you know if there had been cross traffic, you might have killed a four year old on her birthday?" But hey, not being able to see is no excuse for not getting to work on time.

Eryn had a great birthday. Grandpa and Grandma got her all sorts of art supplies, and we got her a ball and truck, and her aunt and uncle (and cousins) bought her magnetic animals that can exchange their body parts, just like real animals, had they been designed by a creator with a better sense of humor. She spent more time Macaroni Grill opening gifts than eating her food. You know she's interested in gifts if she doesn't want cake.

Addiction!

I may have to stop reading TechCrunch if they give me links to games like Desktop Tower Defense. That is seriously addicting. Wasn't I just saying how much I liked Scorched Earth back in the day? Flash - so platform doesn't matter.

I biked to work today. Ouch. Yeah, it's only 6 miles one way, but I'm not used to it. Nor am I used to pulling a burley behind my trainer. Or riding into the wind. Or the road. Damn. I'm not fall down tired or anything, I was just surprised at how much work it was. Pulling Eryn home after daycare tomorrow up the hill should be trippy.

Mostly Just a Picture

Mean Mr. Mustard seems intent to bring me down with his comments, so I'm posting a picture where I'm way up high. You can't see me, because I'm taking the picture, but if you look really carefully you might see an alligator or two. I bet Kyle knows where this is from. Quiet day - the coffee shop, the park, gymnastics, a new bike for Eryn (the two wheel sort -her early birthday present), bike construction, bike riding, getting mine out for a spin around the block in a hurry just to make sure I get to ride it, new big solar system puzzle ("The sun is bigger than any of the planets!" [Eryn]. "Did you fix the hole in Uranus?" [Me]. "You're a child." [Jen...I assume to both Eryn and me]), stories, guitar practice, bedtime (for Eryn). If Kyle would have called me, there'd be an almost midnight showing of The Host and some sushi as well, but I'll have to find an alternative plan.

The Collector Collector

I don't know why Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector ended up in a list of dystopic literature, and I don't know why I added it to things I wanted from the Interlibrary Loan system, particularly given that some of the reviews I read noted it was smut (but hey, I'm watching Shortbus, and that's pretty much porn - although I'm more offended that RottenTomatoes lists it, but won't let you find it in a search), but sometimes the stars align and you end up reading something that's just wonderful that you might never otherwise have picked up, especially given it has a woman's legs in a pot on the cover, which is sort of offensive.

The reviews are correct in that the story is not particularly linear or well flushed out. It's simply not even close to the best narrative I've ever read. But I didn't care, because Fischer's writing is wonderful, and some of the individual bits are top notch: Christopher Moore-ian, and then some. I bet Moore wishes he had a book narrated by a pot capable of changing it's shape to be any other pot, vase, pitcher - the pot lists like 50 different variations on thing you put something else in - that holds a grudge against posers. I appreciate an author who doesn't go back, 100 pages later, to explain why something is included in the text, but lets you remember what is so funny about the situation based on what's already been revealed. That's trusting in the ability of what you wrote to stick in someone's memory, and it's trusting in your reader.

I'll quote two bits. The first one I liked because I think it's a perfect description of the stupid white-elephant sleeping Mexican in a sombrero ashtray that gets passed around at my in-law's Christmas every year. This is the pot speaking (p. 36):

"I am placed next to a velvet giraffe carrying almost as much life as a real giraffe, a helter-skelter of mechanical penguins that don't work, and a ceramic badger wearing cricket flannels. This is a unique artifact. It cannot have been owned by anyone. It is unownable, it is constantly in search of appreciation, appreciation it will not get. To look on it is to despair. It is a pariah, passed from hand to hand, though oddly enough not to a bin. Made to be rejected. It will have been left here, not bought."

And this one is mildly offensive and needs some set up. The pot is telling a story about a mad priest and a captain sailing for Cathay (this isn't even the funniest bit - the exchanges between the captain and the cook are overboard - literally). Sometime during the trip the priest develops the ability to paint the ocean as it will be the next day. Except better, because he makes his clouds more realistic than God. The captain is not as impressed as the amazed crew and responds to the mad priest (Lucas) with this (p. 191):

"I went to an old wise woman in Portugal who was blind and toothless but who'd suck you and tell you your fortune. She was famed for her accuracy," the Captain reminisced.

"What did she say, 'Mmmmmggg, mmgghhh, mmmmbbb-gggg'?" suggested Lucas.

"No, she told me my fortune afterward."

"So what did she say?"

"I don't know. I don't speak Portuguese. I did get something about going on a long voyage."

Post-pourri (oh yeah...just a little bit different)

So...I was wondering if work might move me to a cube without a pole, if they knew that sometimes, like yesterday, when I sit down, I tend to bump into the pole and drag my blackberry down the thing. Not a little bump, but a long, drawn out, scrape down the side of the pole, just short of leaving behind one of those rubber streaks a tire leaves behind when you suddenly become aware that someone's grabbed your steering wheel, you know, "dinged" it because they're immitating some other idiot, and you're going to go off the road and into a 30' tall street light...because a green car ran you off the road. Seriously officer, a green car ran me off the road. Don't act like you've never been there.

I suppose the answer is some sort of smart ass engineering fix like, "move it to your other hip", but I have a tendency to bounce it off completely when it's on that side and I'm doing something, like walking (not quite, but almost - getting out of the car has done it) . Of course, that explains why they put my desk in backwards so the cable groove is toward the front - it's sort of like a roundabout for the blackberry if it were on the correct (left) hip.

Postpourri

MNteractive is right, this is a pretty cool author site. It's always surprising to find something that's still simple, yet original, on the web.

This information about bagels was in one of the health program presentations I was listening to that work puts out. The claim is backed up here. That's frightening, and it doesn't even address the fact that the ones we get for treat day from Panera have no calorie-saving hole, and are soaked in cinnamon and sugar.
There's a link you can use to catch all the comments on your blog, if you're using new Blogger's comment system (sorry Haloscan people), just modify this link: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000

MNSpeak posts about the Minneapolis/St. Paul lurking ordinances. Apparently the definition of lurking is, well...to lurk. “No person, in any public or private place, shall lurk, lie in wait or be concealed with intent to commit any crime or unlawful act.”

Geocaching - Blackhawk Park Style

Pooteewheet wasn't feeling well today, so I stayed home to run interference on a non-daycare day while she took a (long) nap. To get Eryn far away, I took her down to Blackhawk park to play at the playground and look for a few geocaching sites around the lake. Walking around the lake turned out to be two miles, part of it up very large hills in the woods. I wore her out good. But we found all three caches. One was disguised as a branch. An enteprising cacher had hollowed it out and set it over the (small) cache which had been screwed to a tree. Tricky! Another was disguised with green, plastic fishtank weeds, and the last one was just in the woods, squirreled away in a big hollow tree. Eryn was excited that we got rid of the little plastic slacker guy she doesn't like, and that we left behind a glow in the dark zombie. She also a.) played on a big cement pipe that fed the lake, although she didn't want to see the fish that had been caught in the worn away cement that lined the pipe, b.) learned about pussywillows and that they feel like a cat's tail and c.) learned to use a walking stick so she could walk up muddy hills easier. When we were standing on the top of the hill, she almost looked like Yoda. She decided to keep the stick and it's currently in the dining room. I hope it doesn't have bugs. She claims it's clean. Eryn also learned that a walking stick is useful for poking holes in the mud, which greatly extended our time outdoors to two hours of just walking, not including playground time.

Good bird watching. The (male) cardinals were out in force. A very good day given I was covering for an unwell wife.

Bondage a Go Go

A week or so ago I walked into daycare, and one of the pre-K girls had two of the boys on brightly colored plastic chains. She was walking them like dogs, they were on all fours and barking, while she gave them orders and made them drink dirty water out of a plastic side-by-side dog dish (to which the teacher put a stop).

Kids are so cute.

Easter Weekend

Good weekend. Friday I bought a new bike at Freewheel. A Trek 7300 hybrid. It's a little embarrassing that it has a bell on it, but I guess that'll be useful if I bike the lake trails to a burrito (my favorite ride) at the north end of Calhoun. I tricked it out with a rack, clips, and wireless odometer, and I think it'll be a perfect RAGBRAI ride. It is seriously strange being that straight on a bike, but I have a road bike for when I want to mix things up a little. The weather is really rather disheartening for someone with a new bike, however. It was 17 degrees out when I got up yesterday.

Saturday was gaming. We added some new blood this time (S. and P.) and about ten people played at Kyle's place. I had a pretty good time playing Arkham Horror, although the lack of a winner outside either a.) the group or b.) the big monster, was a little strange. I guess you can really be a loser if you get eaten. I took Borat with me and it was playing when Adam's wife, Annie, showed up to pick him up. She came in and asked if we were watching gay porn. Nice!

And Easter was small, but successful. We had family over for a turkey dinner (26# bird...I should really look at the weight rather than just grabbing whatever is on top at the store). Eryn went egg searching this morning and found a dozen eggs the Easter Bunny had hidden, a chocolate bunny (she ate the ears herself, Mom), and ten Cars (the movie) cars that she played with all day. She's just obsessed with them. She also got a copy of Kiki's delivery service from the Easter Bunny, which you can watch while playing with your cars. It was a very healthy alternative to candy.

Postpourri - Human Pole Position and Library 2.0

This link from Information Aesthetics using people in an auditorium to imitate video games is pretty cool: Pole Position, Space Invaders and Pong.

Out of the Jungle had a piece on Library 2.0 today. The Squidoo page on Library 2.0 is very nice. Much better than many other Squidoo pages (many of which suck). Librarians certainly know how to design their information in some cases. Not a lot about services. Library 2.0 is about feedback loops, libraries without walls, and the intersection of Library 1.0 (0.0) and 2.0. They seem to have a better grasp of 2.0 than some technology evangelists. I think I need to work on Beer 2.0. I'm not sure how I could create a bar that functions best on feedback loops and beer anywhere...but it would be a valiant use of my time.

I'm going to add Brit Blog to the blog roll. Should have done it weeks ago, but I'm always a slacker when it comes to updating my template. I appreciate his 2.0 and REST links. No one at work talks to me about Web 2.0 or tech lately (except Erik, the Hairy Swede), so I'm forced to listen over my wall while the company lawyer discusses ajax implementation GPL licenses with the local developers. I remember fondly the days when he filed my patent applications. I guess Mean Mr. Mustard talks about ajax as well, but he's from the other side of the skyway and is only using ajax for gambling purposes, so it doesn't count. Hmm....Brit Blog and beer 2.0. That reminds me, I bought one of the company architects a six pack of beer while I was in Chicago. The six pack, Longshot, contained three kinds of beer, two bottles each, each brewed to a recipe that won at the American Homebrew Association competition. Did he like the Old Ale? Yes. Did he like the Dortmunder? Yes. But what was his favorite? Boysenberry Wheat. I still have one of my two in the fridge. I told him next time I'd just buy him wine coolers.

Oh yeah. MinneBar, April 21.
Twin Cities Code Camp, April 28. (personally, I think this one looks more interesting)

O'Reilly

I forgot to mention that I found the Tim O’Reilly presentation on the intraweb at work last week. If you’re a coworker and you’re interested in his presentation, I have the location of the file and a link to the player. It’s voice plus slideshow, so if you’re one of those people who don’t function well if you can’t see the speaker, maybe it’s not for you. If that’s the case, I can summarize:

O’Reilly’s talk was on Web 2.0 and Asymmetric Competition (“rivals whose different business model transforms the nature of the conflict”). He brought up these points (though my numbering doesn’t match his precisely):

• Users add value


• Only a few people will bother with your application, so harness their self-interest and make sure your defaults aren’t limiting you or your user interaction. Watch your architecture – the design of the system drives its use (an IA plug…sweet)
  Create code where people can share. Participation is valuable. Web 2.0 systems get better via user contributions. Harness the network effect.


• There’s now a perpetual beta and the move from artifact to service – the idea that you’re constantly putting new features in front of your users (or a slice of your audience) and are engaging your users in constant dialog. Don’t be afraid to remove features.


• Think of software beyond the level of a single device. I don’t want to reiterate what O’Reilly says, but if you’re interested read Morville’s Ambient Findability, as he devotes many pages to the ways new devices change everything. Watch for patterns. Watch for disruptive technologies. The move from artifact to service allows you to shorten the distance to harnessing a disruptive technology (he didn’t come right out and say that…but it’s implied).


• Owning a unique, hard to recreate source of data is a competitive advantage. That’s a database you may own now, or one you can create by harnessing users’ self-interest to create that database for you. The harder it is to recreate the better, because the software industry and information industry (database industry and publishing industry) are on a collision course and you don’t want something they can replicate inexpensively.


• A platform beats an application every time. There are companies with platform aspirations out there who want to create a programmable web.

Other bits:

• This is probably Tim O’Reilly’s daughter, showing you how to open a beer bottle the Scandanavian way.


• A cool presentation (with realtime) on how a page in Wikipedia evolves by John Udell.


• O’Reilly likes Kathy Sierra’s blog at Headrush. I’ve linked there before for the types of applications personified as users.


• O’Reilly’s own blog resides at O’Reilly Radar, which includes a number of individuals, but you can narrow it down to just him by slapping on /Tim.

Scorched Earth

While looking for Scorch the book on Wikipedia, just to add a link, I instead found Scorched Earth, the PC game (I suppose that means I should contribute to Wikipedia, but I'm not really a wiki sort of guy. I like the idea...I just don't like the idea of me trying to maintain a page). I loved that game. Such a simple idea - take turns shooting at each other with the biggest weapons you can afford - and so addictive. I remember the satisfaction of creating a hole under another tank with a digger, and then lobbing a napalm round over to fill up the hole and drown the enemy in fire. The sizzling was very soothing.

It doesn't surprise me that Hogs of War and Scorched Earth are considered similar, or even direct relatives. Pooteewheet and I still play that once and a while on the PS2, although it's not as much fun since we got rid of the PS1 with the multitap for four.

"Let us not romanticise these battles though brave hogs. There will be slaughter and butchery. Your job will be to bring victory to your chosen nation, to save your own bacon and make a meal of your enemies. With victory comes great reward. SO great in fact that your brave boars will be as happy as pigs in... well, you get the idea. With any luck, we'll all be home in time for Christmas. So what are you waiting for? Chop, chop! "

Dystopic Corner - Scorch and Brave New World

A.D. Nauman's Scorch was much more dystopic than Imprint. There's no escape in this novel. Arel Ashe, the main character, is surrounded by advertising and libertarianism, both taken to the extreme. There's no where she can turn that she isn't confronted with in-your-face ads. In her car. At her job. In every t.v. show. In her apartment. Likewise, libertarianism has been taken to the extreme, and good citizens complain about the big brother government of the past, the unproductiveness of the homeless, and that everything is simply better unregulated, although the effects on individual freedom are in many cases the reverse of what might be expected. When society starts to fracture, one side embracing libertarianism coupled with Christianity, the other side embracing compassionate housing for the homeless, the result isn't what you'd expect, and Arel finds herself in the middle of two extremist camps that seem strikingly similar, both willing to kill, neither fixing what's wrong with their society. It's a good dystopia when the description of the problems don't sound that much different from your own society.

Nauman has some clever bits in her writing, although I swear she's oversexed. But sex is a prominent feature in most dystopic works as it tends to take everyone's mind off of rebellion. Both Brave New World and 1984 feature their share of bonking. Nauman pokes some fun at Orwell's 1984, noting that in her society they keep turning it into new remakes for television all the time, but her book more closely resembles Huxley's Brave New World in tone. Both have mommy attachments - Arel to her mother, the Savage in BNW to Linda (although her attachment to him is questionable in the same way you question a meth mom's attachment to her child). Both have a character who learns something about opposition to the current society via books. Arel from the backroom, discarded waste in a library that is now devoted to videos, all commercial in nature; the Savage from his copy of Shakespeare. Both have a character that seems at first to be against their society, but at points seems more frustrated that they don't fully belong and can't get all the things they truly want. When Arel gets a taste of respect after her successful screenplay, her non-mainstream boyfriend and book-learned ideals temporarily disappear. Likewise in BNW, Bernard Marx for a while becomes the conduit between the populace and the Savage and finds contentment in having a bit of superiority and fame. They embrace what is easy when it is offered. Revolution is too hard.

I read a sizeable part of Readings on Aldous Huxley Brave New World (Literary Companion Series) while donating platelets and finished up early this week. The book is a number of critiques on aspects of Brave New World, and because there are more than a dozen, suffers from a bit of repetition. But there were some good ideas once you cut through the boring bits, and it's enlightening to see the criticism change over 80 years, from complaints about how bolshevism and atheism make BNW a reality, to 50's and 60's concerns that BNW is here, to later essays which aren't as alarmist and are content to examine the characters, their relation to other literature, and the role of love in this particular dystopia. I was particuarly interested in David Sisk's excerpt from Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias, but at $108.00+, it had better be in the interlibrary system, because at that price my interest in dystopias starts to seem like a soma habit. Transformations examines one of my favorite topics, namely that stripping characters of their names is a dystopic tradition (Logan's Run, THX 1138, etc.), and it's interesting to ponder why so many authors find this to be so central toword dehumanizing an individual.

I can't remember which author used it, but I was particularly enamored of the idea of the zero horizon dystopia. I've never been convinced that any other type is a true dystopia. After all, if there's any sort of hope, any sort of escape, even for the reader, then how dystopic can it be? True dystopic heroes are doomed. Like Arel burning to death at the end of Scorch. Winston Smith being tortured in 1984. 503 being surgically altered in We. Or the main character going insane at the end of Brazil (which treads the liminal - did he escape, or didn't he?)

I flushed out my wishlist on Amazon with all the dystopic works listed so that the Amazon recommendation engine is almost reset in what it perceives to be my preferences, spitting up all sorts of dystopic options in addition to information architecture and search engine optimization. I wonder if the government will look at that combination and offer me a job designing new web sites?

Two Items of Interest

I was reading Fray...yep, the graphic novel about a slayer in Joss Whedon's Buffy universe, I read everything - pretty good as far as a graphic novel goes, by the by...and when I got to the end, there was an advertisement for an Angel comic book. Um...ish. I have limits, and I'm pretty sure that those limits occur well short of David Boreanaz looking all sultry at me from the cover of a comic book. Anyway, I guess Mean Mr. Mustard had checked out Fray before I had. You can see he left a few notes for fellow readers. If your cursive decoding isn't so great, it says simply, "Yummy."

Did you ever notice that in Escape To Witch Mountain, when the boy (Tony) uses a harmonica to animate a raincoat on a broom to scare the cop (Sheriff Perdy) who's got them locked up, the cop has a file drawer topped by West Reporters? That's a different use for them than in most of the movies where you catch them behind lawyers and politicians. You have to wonder what he was doing with oh, four or five of them. Maybe those are the only ones that apply to Podunk, Nowhere, which is somewhere near Witch Mountain. Or maybe he stole them from the law library when he burned out at William Mitchell Law School.

If you haven't seen the movie, I suggest you skip right to the sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, because how can you not want to watch a movie with this plot: "Their trip is interrupted by a vision of a falling man. Tony leaves Tia in their taxi while he goes to investigate, and ultimately saves the man's life. His intervention is witnessed by an evil scientist, who kidnaps him and uses drugs and a mind-control device to make Tony his slave for a robbery heist. Tia befriends a Disneyfied pre-teen LA "gang" whose members help her search for Tony. In the end, Tia must free Tony and prevent both a major gold robbery and a nuclear power plant incident."

Chicago, My Kind of Town - If I want to be bitten by a snake

If I ever got downtown, that is. But we stayed in the northern suburbs...sort of Milwaukee-ish burbish, but not in Wisconsin, if you can picture it. It was my nephew's third birthday, so we hit the Windy City for the weekend. I have to say, sticking around for Christopher Moore (courtesy of Mean Mr. Mustard), and then leaving at 9:00 p.m. for Chicago, is sort of fool's errand. I was seriously tired by the time we pulled into the hotel at almost 4:00 a.m., even with Pooteewheet taking a shift.

Not that it wasn't worth it. It was interesting to listen to Moore talk. Now I know I could a.) be an author and b.) go on a speaking tour. I could just pull sort of a "best of" NodToNothing on the road and be fine. He was funny, I'll give him that. And I appreciated that he wasn't just doing a reading, but trying to be amusing and different. I just wish I had actually brought the copy of You Suck I had purchased that I'd been so uptight about not getting here in time. I was much more relaxed once I'd forgotten it. I particularly liked his story about the lady who liberated her bunnies, and then subsequently managed to kill a number of them. Pooteewheet and I speculated about various cars on the way to Chicago as to whether they were full of dead bunnies. And my food at Jewel of India was delicious, and the beer at Town Hall was tasty, so that always makes me happy.

Anyway...I was in Chicago...or to the slightly northern area thereabouts. Third birthday party and all. It was at my nephew's cookie factory. Seriously, he's got a cookie factory. So the kids got to decorate cookies, and bake them. And meet The Cookie Monster. You can't go wrong with that sort of action.

Here's my nephew decorating cookies. You can never have too many sprinkles. Hell, you might as well just eat baked sprinkles, because that's the only good part.


Here's the final product. It tastes better because you baked it yourself in an industrial, rotating oven crewed by employees. That's not sarcasm. I'm serious. It's a cookie, you decorated it yourself, and someone else did the work of cooking it - delish.


And Cookie Monster - he's the bomb.


Apparently you got to be Cookie Monster is you place first in the mini-chocoloate chip cookie eating contest. Fortunately for me, I took second. I couldn't mentally picture the milk to cookie to time ratio, so I had over half a cup of milk left at the end. That's foolish. I could have poured cookies into my milk and drank them with that much left. And then puked. Puked hard and long and in a way that would have shamed my wife and child. WAY too many cookies, even taking second place.


Now for the snake bite. We all went geocaching. We had Bongo the travelbug monkey with us, who was trying to get to Namibia, and we thought, "Hey, he's only traveled 10 miles so far, maybe we could get him 400 miles closer to his destination." So I collected a number of caches, and we went looking for two that were in memory of a lawyer/motorcyclist son who had passed away. Unfortunately for us, he was a practical joker. Fortunately for us, the joke was damn funny. The thing was disguised as a drain. Once you really thought about it, you wondered about that drain in the field. And when you opened it up, you wondered why there was a faucet of some sort out there. But then common sense took over and you yank it out of the ground in an act of blatant vandalism, and it is the cache. The dad of the lawyer the cache was dedicated to showed up while we were there and gave us some good hints about how to find the next one (and how to avoid being up to our eyeballs in water), so that was neat.

Here we are putting Bongo in the cache. Eryn was very sad to see him go, but we added a watch to him so we can see where he goes on Google Earth, which is very cool. Pooteewheet kicked it up today so Eryn could see how far he'd gone compared to his zoo to northern Minnesota back to the zoo trip he'd previously engaged upon.

Oh yeah...the snake! So after the two caches we found in honor of David the lawyer, Pooteewheet and Eryn went back to the hotel to swim, while I hit the local park for some exercise and to look for a few more. I have to tell you, being a late 30-something guy wandering around a big park alone in off season and holding a cache shaped like a skull and knowing cops are in the park...I was expecting to be hauled in at any minute. I found a few caches and missed one (too much water), but the highlight was when I realized that it's all well and good that they mark on the website that there might be ticks, but they don't just come out and say, "If you're from an area without many snakes, maybe you should be careful if you're out of state, because not all states have a freeze, and they might have poisonous animals." Fortunately, I was in northern Illinois in March, so the animal that brushed against my pantleg because it was striking and coiling back up was just a < Garter Snake, but it made me realize that perhaps I should actually be watching where I was stepping. That's my advice to geocachers from Minnesota. Everywhere else is potentially much more dangerous than here.

This picture has nothing to do with snakes. It's Eryn and my niece Sofie at Michael's hot dog place. My recommendation, don't order the double char burger, it is much bigger than a double at Culver's. I thought I was going to be sick. And don't take care of Sofie if you don't have a pacifier/nook...that's asking for trouble.

Unicorn Fun

I miss out on all sorts of things by not being management. I know the Mikes that might have sent this: I may have done a project for one of them...and a project for the other one (I was recently given a nice compliment when an executive admin told me it was about time they were going to retire my Blackberry scripts after five years because MS was releasing equivalent technology in Office 2007). Nevertheless, this is really funny in an Aqua Teen Hungerforce sort of way.

Brit Blog Loves Unicorn Humor

Dissed!

I was in Chicago this weekend, and on our way out of town, we stopped so I could scope out the beer selection which always differs from state to state. I bought Kyle and myself some Dogfish (90), which I can never seem to find anywhere hereabouts, even at Blue Max Liquor and it just so good. While grabbing it, I noticed a pack of Longshot. Longshot is a mixed six pack (three varieties) of Homebrewing Association winners bottled up together by Samuel Adams. It was around a long time ago without Samuel Adams and disappeared, but Sam has been nice enough to bring it back, which is a real treat because homebrewers make some distinctive beers. It was a bygone memory of hazelnut beer that convinced me that I needed to buy Skippy the AppTech architect some Longshot. I had tried to find it here in Minnesota, but had no success. Kyle had already bought me a six pack, so I knew four of them were delicious, even though two of them were way too much berry-infusion for my taste. Then Pooteewheet decided she needed a six pack of Black Dog berry beer. She's sure you can't find it in Minnesota, even though the stuff is contract brewed by Schell's in New Ulm, but whatever.

So I get to the checkout line, and the cashier says, "Longshot and Black Dog. That's a lot of berry beer..." I start to mumble something about it being my wife's six pack, when he adds, "Are you going to pour it on your ice cream?"

Damn. Emasculated at the beer store. That is cold.