The Daily Diversion Archive For October, 2003

Saturday October 10, 2003

Oof dah. It's been a while.

Sports looked so good back on 9/30. The Gopher Football team was undefeated, the Vikings were rolling, The Twins had beaten the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, there was high hopes for Gopher Hockey. Today, the Twins are out of it after dropping the next three games to the Yankees. The Gophers were stunned by a 31 point fourth quarter Michigan rally and the Gopher hockey squad were trounced 4-0 by Maine. What a difference a week makes. The only thing that keeps this from being a blowout of biblical proportions is that the Vikes are on their bye week this week. I fully suspect them to come out and kick a bunch of ass next week, but we Minnesotan sports fans need to take a break for a bit.

It's time to rake leaves, clean chimneys and gutters, prepare backyard pools for winter and make sure the snow blowers work.

Other than getting ready for the baby, all is pretty smooth. We just bought a digital camera. We bought a Canon G5. It was pricey, but I fully suspect that it will save us money in the long run over regular film. This isn't saying that we're going to dump the SLR. I haven't done much with photography of late, but that will have to change soon.

It's going to be a busy weekend, so I'd better pack it in and get on with it.

Thursday October 23, 2003

I've been getting a ton of stuff done at the house. The crib is assembled, we have a plan for the TV room and the "nursery." The truck is back on the road, more albums are recorded, I've moved to XP on a couple of my boxes and I've sewed up more loose ends recently than I've created.

And I got to go shootin'.

We also got a spiffy new digital camera. This was one of the other benefits of having a kid. New toys for Dad. I took it out to the shoot and captured some funny stuff. I have a movie of me shooting an AK-47 knockoff and it's just priceless. No, I'm not going to post it as it's freakin' huge, but if you're interested, let me know.

The baby is coming along nicely. Sarah wants it to come very soon and it may just do that. All signs are pointing to us not making it to our due date of November 9th. That would be cool. I want to meet my son, but all I really want is a healthy baby. Anything else is just a bonus.

So what's with these numbskulls out there that think rush hour traffic is an obstacle course for their car? You've seen the type. They carry about 20mph more speed than anyone else and they weave trough cars as if they were plastic cones. I saw one this morning in a Grand Cherokee who must have been doing 80 when the rest of traffic was doing 60. One lane to the other he weaved and bobbed. Yesterday it was a blond in a big Lexus that thought that just because there was a car-length in front of me that there was room for her there. I drive a Nissan Maxima and she buried the front of her car so close to mine that her headlights disappeared under my trunk.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that's appropriate for a parking lot, not an Interstate Highway going 60mph. I would have moved over, but as it was, the left lane where we both were was going faster than the center lane and the center lane was full of cars so there really was nowhere for me to go. The lady continued tailgating me until I flashed the brake lights a couple of times. She backed off precisely 3 feet and started making moves like she would go around me to one side then the other. Finally I shook my wheel back and forth a couple of times and that seemed to rouse her from her parasitic driving fugue state. She backed off a couple of car lengths and cut off someone as she merged into the center lane.

Idiot.

They're almost done with the street out in front of our house. We now have curbs! We didn't before they started tearing up the street and that was part of the program--to give us curbs, new streetlights, sewer improvements and, of course, new streets. There has been two big surprises so far. The first surprise is how long it's taken. They started digging holes in our street back in April. It now looks as if they might not finish until late November. They may even have to finish next spring. They've already scaled back the amount of blocks they're going to try to get done this year and it pretty much still looks like they bit off more than they can chew.

The other big surprise is that when they put in our curbs, they gave us about 6' of boulevard. We might have had 3' before. That's pretty cool.

By the way, you're now getting this site and all the other related sites from a new machine. It's name is High and it's happy as hell to be here. The old machine will hang around for a while as a hot-swap backup, but I'll eventually pull it down and reinstall it with something fun. The new machine is just as much of a pieced together pile o'parts as the last one, but this one is running a single CPU at 1.3GHz as opposed to running two CPUs at 200MHz. Big difference.

This should mean pretty much nil to everyone else out there, but it's sure been fun and easy to play with it here on the back end. There's been a couple of glitches in the changeover. Pretty much everything that wasn't a static piece of html has been broken inadvertantly at one time or another. This hasn't been too much of a problem, but if you've been looking for the gallery, this was one of the casualties. We'll have it up and running again very soon.

I've also tried out iTunes for Windows on a couple of machines. I must say that it is pretty cool. The cool parts are, of course, the design, the visualizations are pretty neat and the way it works pretty much takes the configuration out of it.

All is not so rosy, though. On one of the installs, the song title field is broken and only displays 10 characters. That's really frustrating as that's the machine that I sync my iPod with. I really miss the AutoDJ feature of Music Match as well as the ability to collapse all the songs into just artist headings. Music Match also has a far superior track tag editor.

Another of the neat things about iTunes is that it also has ratings and play counts. Those are a couple of features I wished MusicMatch had.

Finally, there is one big bummer about iTunes. It takes loads of resources. To my laptop, it takes up twice the RAM and I have to be careful of what I run with it going as it doesn't take too many other programs to make it start to skip. With Visualizations on, it's almost guaranteed that if I'm browsing my favorites list in Opera (my web browser of choice), the music will start to hitch. This happens with Opera, Outlook and iTunes open on a PIII 650MHz laptop with 320Mb of RAM and 8Mb of video RAM. If one thing brings me back to MusicMatch, it will be this little issue.

Tuesday October 28, 2003

At 2:30 AM this morning August Stanley Holtan was born. He is healthy and weighed 8 pounds 1.6 ounces. He is 20" long. He had all nines on his tests. Sarah delivered him without pain medication. It was a fairly short labor. She was induced about 7pm or so and began laboring about 9pm last night.

Right now, as of about 10AM, Sarah and August are resting at the hospital and I'm home with Brutus. I'm going to take a nap, as it was a very long night.

Thank you all for the support you've given us through these last 9 months. Special thanks go to all of you who were at the shower, gave us something for the baby or were just there for us. Extra special thanks go to Ali and Noelle.

Our son, August.