The Daily Diversion Archive For February, 2002

Monday February 25, 2002

A guy in Tennessee contacted me via email yesterday and offered me a chance to buy one of my dream cars. A 1969 Plymouth Fury III convertible. I want it. Baaad. It's not that I need it, or that I have gobs of empty garage space that needs to be taken up by a car that's only going to be run on nice days. I just want it. I would have to say that this type of thing is one of the very best things about having a website. I can put things out there, talk about stuff and meta tag stuff and sooner or later, some search engine is going to pick it up, index it, and serve it to someone else searching for that particular thing. I do this sort of searching all the time. I'm an info junkie.

I use Windows Update quite a lot. I'm pretty careful about getting IE patched and it's my responsibility to keep our IIS boxes safe at work. I was using it today on a laptop that I just replaced an HDD on, and when I hit Windows Update, it asked me to install the package control manager. You need this to have WU work, so I said yes. The thing I'm wondering about is this: There's a box at the bottom of the dialog window that says, "Always trust content from Microsoft Corporation. How many people check that box? Do you trust M$? Have you ever downloaded something from WU that either broke or restricted features on programs you run? I'd like to see a percentage of people who check that box.

I got my first piece of mail addressed from the coin-o address. That was special. I see from viewing my logs that I have lost a lot of you daily readers. That's not surprising seeing that I don't update much daily anymore. I seem to have a creative brown-out right around January or so. Seasonal disorder thing? Perhaps, but not documented by anyone with any kind of paper on the wall. Suffice to say that during the days of no light, I don't have much to say.

Last week at work was tough. It was a full week and it was very different from the old job search thing. Yes, it was much easier getting up when I did and doing what I wanted to do, but having a job makes a body feel much better.

I brought Frankenputer out of storage last night. It started up right away without any fuss. So, now everything's up and working and I don't have any project boxes laying about. What to do now?

Wireless, that's what.

Friday February 22, 2002

No, I'm not dead.

I restarted my old job on Monday. I got the callup on Friday afternoon and was happy to get it. I will admit that between my wife being out of town and adjusting to a new schedule, I've been pretty disinclined to do much writing. I'm starting to get the notion again, and that's a good thing. Life is returning to normalcy now Sarah's back and I'm again gainfully employed.

I've been watching a lot of Olympic Hockey lately. It's a good game to watch. It's fast, it doesn't stop very often, and it's a far more open game with the wider rink. No, you don't get the heavy stickwork/thuggery, nor do you get much fighting, but I think that these things take away from the enjoyability of the game. I'll be watching tonight when the US takes on Russia. It will be a good game.

I went to a Gopher hockey game last Friday. That was a ton of fun. I got some tickets from a pal after he couldn't go. I kinda wish Sarah could have gone with, but she was in Florida and I only got about an hour's notice to go. So I went.

Mariucchi (sp?) Arena is a lovely place to watch hockey. The game was a quick one with a final score of 6-5. The Gophs lost, and that was a drag. However, almost all the goals scored were scored on the end of the rink I was sitting on. That was pretty cool. It was a busy net.

Last Saturday my buddy Paul and I went to the Supercross at the Metrodome. This too was a bunch of fun. We were sitting in the smallest seats in the dome and that sucked. My thighs are still sore from the armrests. The action was great, we were 4 rows off the floor in a corner and we saw a bunch of people to our left get roosted. McGrath didn't win, nor did he do very well that night. He led the first 5 laps or so, but ended up having his rear wheel wash out on him in a turn and that let a couple of riders through. He went backwards in the standings the rest of the night. I think he finished 6th. Ricky Carmichael won the thing as has been his habit of late.

I'm not sure why, but I just don't care for the kid. Sure, he's immensely talented and young, but I just couldn't care less about him. I would have to say that as long as he's around, McGrath won't easily win another race. That's a drag, but perhaps a sign to him that he might start thinking about retiring. He has a long career in product endorsement, team ownership, skill school teaching and perhaps even acting. He's got the looks to be an action star.

As for the Supercross show, the National Anthem was overdone to the point of being cynical. I hate that "Proud To Be An American" song. It's a Country song. I don't like Country music. It's sappy and cloying and it has stupid lyrics. It invokes God. Why must people who write these songs always invoke God? It's like they can't find another justification for our great nation. "We're great 'cause God is on our side," seems to be what that song is saying. It's a bit capricious to assume that just because we're doing well as a country God is on our side. Anyway, it's a dumb, pedantic song and I'd be a happy man if I never had to hear it again. This doesn't mean I'm not proud of our country, it just means that I think it lacks class to brag about it to the rest of the world. The rest of the world knows what we are, and bragging about it doesn't do us any favors overseas. Should we care what everyone else thinks of us? No. But I would say that we may be making our lives difficult by whooping it up so much about how we're number one. Everyone knows it and nobody else wants to hear it.

As for the other spectators, I was amazed at how the idiot factor seemed to have been turned down somewhat that night. Sure, there were scads of drunk kids in the mezzanine and there was a constant rain of paper airplanes from the upper deck, but that's to be expected when you get that many young people in a building. What was missing was the obnoxious group of drunks in my vicinity who howl obscenities at the riders and at each other and pay no real attention to the races. They weren't missed.

Friday February 15, 2002

Yesterday was my 5th anniversary. Happy anniversary, honey.

My stay in Chicago was eventful. I don't usually have wheels in Chicago, so I had a somewhat different agenda this time. I didn't even bother getting the truck out on Tuesday. Instead, I met a friend for lunch and then walked around downtown near the Merchandise Mart looking for antique stores. I was wrong about Chicago being reasonable with their pricing. Downtown, prices are completely nuts. Further out, such as on Lincoln St., prices are far more reasonable.

We ended up bagging IKEA on Tuesday, opting instead to go to one of our Chicago favorites. The Chicago Pizza Oven and Grindery. Notable for its food and the fact that it sits across the street from the location of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, it's been one of our favorite joints since we first started coming to Chicago. Good eats.

Wednesday was quite a day. We bailed out of the hotel early and I was off to hit some more antique shops. I had the luggage with, so it was kinda cramped in the cab, but I dealt with it. I hit a couple of places on the north end and I was unimpressed with the stuff I saw. I tried to hit a third place in Andersonville, but there was just no place to park and I wasn't going to park my truck and all our belongings a zillion blocks off the beaten path. I just don't trust the locks that much. So instead of going to that particular store, I drove Clark Ave all the way back downtown. I looked for a parking spot for about 20 minutes and, finding one, finally parked the truck.

I happened to be parked on the northern most cross street to the shopping district on Michigan Ave, right out in front of The Drake. I took advantage of this situation and walked down to the Sony store. I spent some time oogling the enormogihugic TVs. I noted that they're still making high-end Walkmans like the one I have. I noted that the Clie's color screen looks very nice. I got the hell out of there before I wrote a check I couldn't cash.

On the way back to the truck, I grabbed a magazine and then sat in the truck until my wife called to be picked up.

She had decided to drive back with me and so we hit the road about 1:30 or so. Our first stop was IKEA. We bought a bunch of shelving stuff and a couple pieces of furniture. Nothing we bought was super-fancy. Serviceable furniture was all we were there for. Having spent a wad o'cash, we left about a quarter to 4.

We tried to get back on the tollway by heading down to the next exit, but found that the Illinois Tollway didn't have convenience in mind when they laid out that freeway. We ended up covering about 6 miles overland until we finally got back on to the Tollway. I had wanted to find a fast food place to eat, but ironically, there were none to be found. Six miles in suburbia without a fast food joint. That must be some kind of record. We ended up hitting the tollway and stopping at one of those Oasis things with a fast food joint and gas pumps. I filled the truck and my stomach and we were off again.

Although central Illinois is as flat as a board and even less interesting, northwestern Illinois is quite pretty with rolling hills and cute little towns. It reminded me of southeastern Minnesota. No surprise, because we were probably less than 100 miles from there when the scenery changed. I have decided that I will get back to Galena, Illinois because it was so pretty. We hit it right at sundown, but you could tell that it would be a good place to spend a weekend. It had that little town tucked into a little valley thing going on like a thousand places in Appalachia.

We crossed the Mississippi river into Dubuque and rode back up the hill and on to the prairie. Flat. Iowa is flat. U.S. 20 is smooth. We made stunning time, but 85mph will do that. We made it to Cedar Falls by about 8:30. My aunt and uncle served us a snack and we picked up a bookcase they bought for us at an antique store. With the truck loaded, we took off at 9:30 up U.S. 63.

Since a new route through this part of the country opened up several miles to the west, there wasn't near the amount of truck traffic on this road as there used to be. Trucks still outnumbered cars by about 5-1. It was also odd that even though this road is a two laner from just outside Waterloo to just before Rochester, I didn't have to pass anyone. We had the northbound road all to ourselves. It was odd. We made good time, but the pucker factor of meeting semis on a two lane road kept speeds well below the U.S. 20 speeds. We still made great time and made it to Rochester just before 11. U.S. 52 is a 4 laner and it gets into Saint Paul about 2 miles from our house. We made it home at about 12:15.

I had to unload the truck, but it went quickly. I hit the sack and was sleeping in minutes. I was totally wrecked the next day. Driving like that will take a bunch out of a guy, especially if he's not used to it. And I'm not.

Wednesday February 13, 2002

I have a nice view of the back of the Westin Hotel in Chicago. That doesn't sound all that great, except for the fact that the Westin is on Michigan Ave and across the street from the John Hancock Tower. I can just see a tiny slice of it far off to the left, but the pool room promises a much better view.

The trip down was uneventful. I saw a couple of Wisconsin's finest tax collectors, but fortunately for me, they must not have had their radar on. I averaged about 75mph down to Milwaukee and I made it in just under 5 hours. I have done some experimenting with using my laptop as a mp3 jukebox in the car/truck and I found that it worked very, very well. I bought one of those cassette shaped adaptors for my not that well functioning tape deck, and a cheap power inverter that converts cigarette lighter jack current to regular outlet plug current. It worked exceptionally well, as I said.

I was happy that my laptop's battery had come back to life. I figured that if I had a bad connection in the cigarette lighter connection, I could just rely on battery power until I saw the problem. I had to do no such thing as the power inverter sounds an alarm when it is turned on and off. I never heard the alarm, so I had a good connection the whole way down.

Another neat feature of this setup is that when I got to Milwaukee to have lunch with an old pal, I didn't have to shut the laptop all the way down. I just suspended it by punching the off button. The music stopped, the laptop shut down and I put it in it's case. When I was done with my visit, I set it back up, punched the power button and within a minute, it was playing the same song I was listening to when I shut it down. Slick, slick, slick.

The trip down was very windy and it seemed that whatever direction I was driving, the wind was coming side-on. The trip from Saint Paul to Milwaukee is generally south-east in direction. The wind seemed as if it was from the southwest. This made for interesting driving. Interesting, as in busy and not terribly smooth. The truck, with all the holes in the floor and non-sealing doors, was still nice and warm in the cab. The heater blower only works on full on, so I got dried like fruit in a fruit dryer. Once I got going south on the trip from Milwaukee to Chicago, I was able to use the wind for the blower and the trip was somewhat less dehydrating.

The truck is loud. There is lots of wind noise and the squeaks and scrapes from rusted body parts can really wear a person out. I used earplugs the whole way down. They hurt my ears a little bit, but the relative quiet was worth it. I've found that on long motorcycle trips, I have far better endurance when I'm wearing earplugs. Motorcycle helmets are very loud inside and earplugs soften the blow quite a bit. By the way, helmets are probably less loud than wearing no helmet at all.

So, I made it down to Chicago. On my way in, I stopped at an antique shop that I wanted to hit that day, because they were closed on Tuesday. It worked fine. I was able to find a good parking space for my monstrous truck and I went in. The place I went to was big and seemed to specialize in large items. The place was full of dining room sets with chairs. There were also many bureaus. Their downstairs was full of chair sets, orphaned chairs and side tables. I found a couple of bureaus that I really liked. They were probably from the twenties or thirties and had bakelite accented pulls on the drawers. The nicest one had a many-bevelled mirror on the back that must have been 6' tall at it's tallest point. This particular piece was about half what it would be selling for in Minneapolis.

After my stop at the antique store, I drove the truck down to the hotel. I tried to find "self-park" facilities that were close by, but the ones that were close, were also very expensive. I used the valet parking instead. It was an arm and a leg, but the look on the valet's face when it dawned on him that he would be driving the large, blue truck to the parking area was worth any money I'd be spending. I really felt bad for the guy. The truck's not an easy driver--not because the steering is overly hard or it doesn't shift well. It steers very easily for such a big truck and the gearbox is nice and smooth. No, it's more that the truck is such a departure from other vehicles. It's far larger than the largest sedan. One has to step up into the cab as it's almost 3' off the ground. Once you're up there, it's like driving a building. You have a grand view of everything around you, but no view of anything up close. It can be disconcerting if you're not ready for it. Bundle all this with the fact that you start off in 2nd gear and you may be getting the picture that this is a very different animal to drive.

I got the "key," a little charge-card thingy, and went up to the room. I sat down on the bed and realized that I was pretty exhausted. I'd spent the majority of the day on the road, fighting the wind and I was shagged. I sat and watched TV for about a half-hour until Sarah got back from her meeting. We decided to go out for something quick.

The little Italian restaurant we went to was fab-dabulous. Papa Marino's. I took a picture of their nice neon sign a couple of years back when I had the big camera with, and it was nice to see that the restuarant behind the neon was worthy of the sign. I had an enormous manicotta and Sarah had lasagne. The sauce was sweet with coarse tomato bits in it. It was very good. The meal didn't put too big a dent in our wallets, either. We were in and out in 1/2 hour. No wine with dinner tends to speed stuff up. Anyway, we left and walked back to the hotel. I got the truck back from the valet and we were on our way to IKEA.

IKEA is not a short trip from downtown Chicago. It probably took 35-40 minutes. It's a fair bit past O'Scare on I-90. It's easily visible from the tollway, but an incredible bear to get to. The closest exit to the south is better than a mile down the road and there's a rather large mall sitting between the exit and IKEA. The other exit on the tollway to the west is about 2 miles down the road. To backtrack through the deserted big-box industrial park with curvy roads that don't lead directly back was a bit much to ask. We did take that way out, but it was a bit disconcerting.

Anyway, after dead-reconing back to the store, we went in. They have you take escalators to the third floor and then you work down to ground floor where the cashiers are. I have some observations: The store was crisp. There wasn't a lot of clutter, and what there was, was generally contained by a large, light green cardboard boxes sitting on pallates. The place was clean. The staff was nice and accomidating, but there were some difficulties. Even IKEA isn't immune from my trait of wanting the thing that's sold out. IKEA doesn't say, "sold out," though. If an item is missing from the stock shelf, up goes a red tag that states that the item is "Temporarily Oversold." Whatever. It's just another corporate-speak euphamism that means less than the term it replaces. This phrase is particularly enraging because it's so damn indefinate that it ends up meaning nothing. I understand the temporarily part, but that's kind of implied when you say an item is "sold out," or "out of stock." If there's a spot on the shelf for the item, I assume that it will be there again. If not, there's usually a note that says, "close out" or "clearance." The whole "oversold" thing is just nonsense. What does it mean? Does it mean they sold too many of them and now they owe people items they already paid for? Does it mean they've issued rain-checks? Does it mean that it's out of stock? Does it mean that somebody's getting their kneecaps busted in the back room for not ordering enough of this item? The oversold thing implies that there's a defecit somewhere. Is it like being overdrawn? Did they have to pay a large fee to the supplier for not having enough of this item in stock? I can see them taking a hit from not having enough product in stock to meet the demand for it, but that's between IKEA and their warehouse. Not us. I don't want to know. Anyway, there was a nice clock with big numbers in a pleasing font that was in the clock section and although there were tons and tons of all the other kinds of clocks, this particualr design (PUGG) was nowhere to be found on the racks. Typical.I also found out that we were "guests," another of my pet peeves.

We looked around at the dressers and found one we really liked. My wife also found a plant stand that she wants. I found a couple of reading lights I wouldn't mind having and we both found some spot lighting for our underlit kitchen. There were other things we liked as well and we'll be going back tonight to purchase the items we picked. It was wise to get some distance from that place, because I could see some people there going into some kind of shopping fugue state. There was blank-faces buying up everything in sight. There was also the cute scene when a nasty-looking teenage girl was giving the business to a couple of obviously outgunned parents over whether or not she was going to be getting the completely useless bed screen for her bedroom at home. The bed screen is something that you might use in the tropics to cover your bed so that you wouldn't get sucked dry by various air-mobile, voracious insects. One needs one of these things in Illinois like one needs a safari hat and machete. Which is to say, not at all except for some kind of contrived and not-too-clever fashion statement. Mom was already past the whatever threshhold, but dad was doing battle and getting his ass kicked. Poor parents. Literally.

We were primarily there to look at chairs. We find ourselves at least two chairs short back home and we were hoping to find a cheap solution to our defecit. We sat in a lot of chairs and I must say that although the price was right on some, there was always something not quite right on all. My first beef is that most of them were too small. I'm big. I admit. I shouldn't expect consumer-grade furniture to be built to accomidate me. Fine. The chairs that we liked were either too expensive for us to buy more than one, or they felt cheap. Now, granted, I'm comparing them to our nice couch at home, but still, I feel that when I'm getting out of a chair, I shouldn't be able to determine the exact shape of the piece of wood that makes up the arm of the chair. There just wasn't enough padding. It also makes me wonder what the chair's seat will feel like in a couple of years. Am I asking too much of a $300.00 chair? Perhaps.

I felt tired when we were there. Very tired. I couldn't stop yawning. I felt like I was walking through mud. When we left, we bought some bottles of pop from a vending machine and the first one I bought was the wrong one. I had pressed the wrong button. Instead of Root Beer, we got a bottle of Code Red. That's not something I can drink at night if I expect to sleep. I was super careful on the way back to the hotel. I was driving into the loop with extreme fatigue. It's something I've done before. I blew through Chicago at about 10:30 one night a few years ago after starting my day on my motorcycle in Panama City, Florida. I was going to Milwaukee and I was beat as all hell. Anyway, I wasn't as tired as that time, but I was pretty beat. I was tired. Did I mention I was tired?

When we got up to the room, I was so exhausted, I didn't know what to do with myself. I wanted to watch some TV. I wanted to read a magazine. I wanted to do some work on the laptop. I ended up going straight to bed and I fell asleep nearly instantly. Day one, over.

Monday February 11, 2002

So I'm getting ready to hit the road. I can't find half the stuff I need because it's still all packed away in boxes in the basement. It's frustrating, and yet it's not a huge deal because there's relatively little stuff in the basement. We've unpacked enough stuff to live with, and all the other stuff is just stuff.

In looking for my swimming suit yesterday, I found a trove of bath towels that had been packed away. Score. We had been rotating 4 up and down since we moved and they were starting to look a bit beaten up. Of course, I didn't find my suit, but I didn't think I would anyway.

We won a beautiful old mantel clock on ebay yesterday. It's way cool. It's a big, horizontally orientated one with a black face and gold numbers. It's an 8-day winder and it reminds me of the one my grandparents had up on their mantel all those years ago. I'm totally jazzed that we won it. We even have a mantel to put it on.

Upon looking back at the three paragraphs above, I realize that I need to get a real life and start writing about good stuff. I'll be thinking about this on the long trip to Chicago and back. I can certainly do better than this. The new domain name demands it.

Friday February 8, 2002

Sorry for the long time between updates. It's not been time wasted, I must say. I've won another interview. This one's going to happen in a week and a half. Wish me luck.

I cleaned and re-ordered the garage. I have only a couple things to get rid of and I'll be able to get my bikes in from out in the cold. This is important. Bikes don't do well covered in snow.

The thing that took the most energy and time in this last week was configuring Apache on my BSD box to serve Virtual Hosts. What a pain in the ass. It's working now, and it seems to be very stable. I've found that Coin-O.com, the site that serves this page, is coming off my server as well as ConsolidatedDiversions.com. Tholt.com, the old front door is still having DNS problems and will take another couple of days to get the change propagated. No biggie. There will be other domains served off the site in the future, so watch for more fun.

Another thing you may have noticed is that the Daily is now officially on it's own Domain. If you got here via the re-direct, please update your bookmark. I promise to not do this to you again. Here is where we stay. There may be some funkyness in the switchover, but I'm watching the error log closely and I've already fixed a bunch of stuff. By the way, all the Daily archives are over on Coin-O as well.

I must say that when I finally got Apache to work correctly, I let out a hoop and a holler. Big fun. It's fun to finally post a win that isn't going to turn into a loss via circumstances beyond our control. I was also just high off it for hours. Hooray for me.

The last bit o'news is that I'm going to go to Chicago for a couple of days next week. I have some business to do there and I'll be back very soon. I'm pondering updating from the road as I will be taking my old, somewhat reliable laptop along with. The dial-up speed sucks--28.8 with it's internal, controller-based modem, but I really rarely ever get better speed than that with a dial-up. I'll be taking my LAN card with, so if I stumble into an Ethernet-enabled coffee shop, I'll be good to go.

Monday February 4, 2002

I applied for a ton of jobs online this weekend. Nothing but the sound of crickets today.

I also have some observational data on Windows Music Player and Music Match. WMP seems to take more processing power. It also won't play certain MP3 files. Not good. Music Match, on the other hand, seems to take far less processing power. I'm editing the site while there's music playing in the background on my tinny laptop speakers. Being that the laptop is a Pentium 133, having a music program that doesn't suck up the processor cycles is a good thing. There's my observational data.

Played with the BSD box again today. Did some tweaking and figuring on how to configure it. This is the big hanging point of Linux/Unix boxes: They're too configurable. With the right config file, you can toast a slice of bread with a Linux/UNIX box. Unfortunately, these boxes don't configure themselves with any accuracy or security to speak of and until that can happen as effortlessly as breathing, Linux/UNIX will not make many inroads to the common user's desktop. It's too easy to break and it takes way too much of an investment on the part of the operator to configure.

Yes, I went to a Stupor Bowl party on Sunday. No, I didn't know who was playing, nor did I care that much. I was there for the ads and for my pals. It was a good game, the food was good at the party (Thanks Mel!), and we had a good time.

Earlier in the day, my wife and I drove down to Rochester to help my Grandparents celebrate their 64th wedding anniversary. Yes, 64 years. I can only hope our marriage is as durable as theirs is. I talked quite a bit with my Grandpa about debt, maturity and selling houses. We also talked about the origination of the dining room set we now own. I must say, they didn't pay nearly as much as it's worth today.

We love them dearly.