The Daily Diversion Archive For June, 2001

Friday, June 29, 2001

Just to let you all know, I'll be bringing the servers to the basement sometime on Saturday. If I have some downtime, this is the reason. I'm hoping for late morning, but it could be early afternoon, or even late tonight.

Welcome home, Sarah! I hope you like the new LAN line.

Sarah's been out of town and I've been working like a dog on my projects. The primary project this week is the server relocation project. Having so many hard drives and processors spinning in our office upstairs creates quite a din, plus a ton of heat. My poor old air conditioner is just not up to the task here. The room gets a lot of sun, gets very warm in the afternoon, and the room, even with a window air conditioner going full blast, just doesn't cool very well. There's also a bit of a problem with the load distribution on our second story. There's only two breakers covering the upstairs receptacles. This means I had to do some extension cord gymnastics to get the load balanced so that my UPS didn't spend the day clicking on and off.

Anyway, boring though it is, I'm not typing on a LAN line that originates at a switch in the basement. I brought a LAN cord down through the duct work (I know, bush league...) and strung it over to the new home of the server farm. It's live, it works well and I'm pleased.

Yes, duct work is very sharp.

Thursday, June 28, 2001

Let's give a cheer, Aidan Stephen is here!

Congratulations to Meg and Steve. Proud parents of my first nephew.

It's been hot as heck here this week. Darned uncomfortable. Due to the stifling heat, I've not felt that creative and that's why there's been a lull in my posts. I'm feeling a bit more hope now that I'm going to be moving the servers out of the hotbox that is my office at home to the basement. It should be cooler, which is good for them, and it should be cooler in the office due to their absence. Wins all around, then.

Because of this move, this site will be down for a while sometime between Thursday night and Saturday night. I'll let everyone know how the move went just as soon as it's over.

Stay cool.

I promised you more on the neighborhood cleanup, so here it goes...

Even though property values have doubled in this neighborhood in the past couple or three years, property tax values can only go up by 8% by law. This is a two- edged sword. It's great, because your home may be worth tons more than it's taxable value, and because of this, you get off not paying too much for property taxes. It sucks because most banks will only loan on your tax value. There's lots of houses on the eastern edge of our neighborhood that are worth twice what the owners paid for them if they sold the property, but they could only see a fraction of that number because no bank will loan these folks money to fix the place up to sell it.

I also happen to think that there are quite a few people in my neighborhood who have a very different notion of what it is to be a good neighbor.

Okay, that could very well be the stupidest thing I've ever said in this space.

Self loathing aside, when the lawn needs mowing, I'm there mowing it. Granted, it's about 2 or 3 days later than when I originally had the notion to mow it, but it gets mowed. My shrubs and trees aren't growing through anyone's fences, there isn't tall grass against my fence. I even mow down the pesky grass that inhabits the 1/2" strip of dirt between my garage and the alley. Yes, I have a car out back, but if you check it, the tabs are current and it's insured.

I think that there are some folks around here whom it would kill to tend their property. I'm not asking the world, I'm just asking for grass on the lawn and junk in the trash. My quick trip through the neighborhood pretty much proves that that isn't going to happen any time soon.

6/25/01

It was a big weekend. They're all big weekends these days, but this one was far bigger than the usual mega-size weekend by a long shot.

Sorry for no Daily on Thursday. Our softball team was bathed in glory from our win and I didn't get home until late.

Friday was an odd one. Due to the fact that Saturday was going to be jam-packed with stuff to do, Sarah, Brutus and I went for a walk across the Stone Arch Bridge, in downtown. I guess I'd realized that it was the solstice somewhere in the back of my head, but I hadn't expected to walk right into the middle of a solstice celebration. So there we were, on the Stone Arch Bridge with about a thousand other people. It was odd. Everyone but us was there to see this dance/celebration and there were radios chained to the railings simulcasting the soundtrack to the interpretive dance thing that was going on. I would have loved to have seen more and perhaps even taken part, but my wife and I were being constantly run into by unsupervised children and pestered by only moderately controlled dogs. It got to be a drag, so we beat it.

Saturday dawned easily the most perfect day of the Summer so far. It was dry, cool and sunny. My wife and I took part in our neighborhood's Clean Sweep program. This is a program in which the neighborhood leaders, a few dozen volunteers and a bunch of vouchers for the solid waste dropoff site get together and clean the garbage out of the alleys of our neighborhood. There was a sort of early announcement that we were going to be picking up tires, construction waste, metal, wood and excess garbage that folks might have wanted to get rid of.

Confusion reigned at the beginning, but once we got out on the roads (alleys?) of the neighborhood, we started encountering the stuff we were picking up. My truck, my wife and I were assigned to pick up metals. We picked up three truck loads of the stuff (over 3000lbs) over the course of the day. Unfortunately, we didn't quite make it through our own neighborhood, let alone the one that was helping us.

The extra trash trucks and whatnot really got a bunch of stuff. There had to be 300 tires in the tire truck. It was amazing. I wish we had more trucks and such, but it just didn't click this time around.

Anyway, I got to see my neighborhood from the inside. I must say that you can really tell the difference between a house where somebody gives a shit and someone who doesn't. On the eastern edge of our neighborhood, there were trees overgrowing into the alley, piles of junk everywhere, many derelict cars, badly maintained garages and houses and a general state of disrepair. On the western edge of our neighborhood, there were nicely maintained garages, almost manicured lawns and a noticeable absence of trash heaps. The difference was striking.

More tomorrow.

6/21/01

Paid bills tonight. Since we'd been in Boston, we hadn't done much of this. I hate paying bills. If I were to strike it big, I'd have a secretary take care of all this stuff. There's just so much to keep track of. I can't deal.

I was talking to my pal Terry via email the way we do this evening. He told me my resume kills. I wish more people would tell me this. Thanks, dude.

He reminded me that I used to be a driver for the Minneapolis River City Trolley. I'd hyperlink that name, but they've moved the page AGAIN, and I'm just not that interested in going and finding it. Anyway, I drove for two seasons, May 1 through Halloween. The first year I did three days a week--Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I started the first trolley season with that as my only gig. However, I picked up my current job after the first of June. I did three days a week there as well. It was a busy Summer.

Anyway, I only did weekends the following year and it worked out better. The job could be bliss or it could be the toughest thing I ever did. It largely depended on my mood and the weather. The trolleys have air conditioning, but not for the driver. Our mechanic made several attempts at fixing that little problem, and made it a good deal better, but for the most part, if the weather was warm, we roasted.

We did a whole day without too many stops for personal breaks. Rare was the day when you'd do a circuit alone. Not too rare, I guess, but they didn't happen too often. The tips were nice, but infrequent. We would drive and narrate an historical tour at the same time. I would have to say that this job, to this day, was the most involving job I've ever done. It was almost like drugs when it was good. The street would open up before me, the traffic would do it's thing, I'd do my tour and when I was on, I'd look up and it would be the end of the day. Just like that. The potential for that kind of flow was one of the reasons I loved that job.

I was pretty good at it, too. I once had a woman ask me to move to Memphis and work for her as a tour guide at Graceland. I took that, and her big tip, as one of the best compliments I ever received. I could probably go 3 times around the loop and not repeat a topic. I could do a whole day without repeating large parts of the tour. Sure, there were things I said every time around the loop, but there were often times when someone was just riding around for the fun of it and I'd get to drag out some of the more arcane details I knew. It was a blast. I loved it when people asked me questions. There were the annoying, off-topic or political queries from time to time, but most people take a historical tour to get some semblance of the history of a place, not to make some daft political statement to a bunch of people who don't want to hear it.

The best part of the tour for me was the Stone Arch Bridge. The trolley is the only vehicle that gets to cross it except for police and such. The trolleys creep across it at barely more than walking speed. There was always something going on. From the Great Blue Heron who would make an appearance from time to time, to idiots who would slap the trolley as it went past. I even had some fool rollerblader pretend to fall in front of me just to inconvenience my passengers. The joke was on him. He actually did fall. I thought he'd shit his floppy pants. He had the good grace to leave quickly. That area just drips history and it's paradise for someone who has poured over old pictures of the place. There are bridges that aren't there anymore, factories, industries, and power stations that have just vanished over time. Heck, the falls themselves today look nothing like what they used to. It was great fun.

I have to say thanks for bringing it up, dude.

6/20/01

I went out and put in a weeknight in the garage tonight. I had a good time. I just don't get to do this too often anymore. There's too many distractions and not much motivation. Well I have something motivating me. I want space, and to get space, I need to act on the projects I have. So act I must.

It was a productive night. I fiddled around with the '77 Honda CB550K and got it charging. At least I hope it's charging. I'm hoping it is because the fix didn't cost me anything. I have a parts bike. Good for me.

I rode it to the gas station and got some gas. It rides nicely for a bike that hasn't had much going on with it for a couple of years. It has good snort as well. And when it snorts, the whole neighborhood can hear it. The pipes are a little holey.

I had fun at work today as well. I got a box of business cards, and that pleased me. However, I didn't get a chance to enjoy them much because we had bad problems in the server room. Our uninterruptible power supply proved very interruptible. Not good. Not much damage was done aside from a drive going down in one of our RAID arrays. It took a while to fix, though. Nothing like downtime to make a techie sweat. The boss just happens to be out of town, too. Nice. These things hardly ever happen when he's in town. Well, at least we don't need to reboot the servers any time soon.

We got another shock this afternoon. The tab for fixing this power unit will be half the price of a new one.

WHAT THE HELL?!?

It really costs a lot to be a business, I figure. It's not the cost of the servers that kills a company, it's the licensing fees, the maintenance contracts, the consumables like backup tape and toner cartridges, and don't forget the overtime for guys like me who have to deal with all this stuff.

Big Bucks.

6/19/01

I never liked my hair. That's a good thing, because my hair and I parted company about 6 years ago. I was looking through some old photo albums tonight and found that it looked as if my hair started doing its own thing about the time I turned 6 or so. It always stood up on my temple, as if to say, "Hey, look under here!"

Needless to say, I never came to terms with it. I combed it which ever way I thought appropriate, and then started growing it out when I felt that it was the right time to do so.

Of course, just when I had settled on a hair style that I was comfortable with, it started to fall out. Damn hair. I have very little hair left on my noggin presently. It could probably be represented with a squiggly line if I was Homer Simpson. I have these straggly arm-hair width things sticking out of the top of my head, but for the most part, people probably refer to me as the big bald guy with the funny little beard. Suits me.

6/18/01

It's not often I'm reminded what the difference 100Mb of RAM can make to a system that's running 24Mb, but today was one of those happy days. Man, Folwell is really ripping now.

I had a relaxing weekend. The weather for the most part cooperated and I managed to get the things that needed getting done done. Unfortunately, I'm starting to feel kinda punk. I really don't need to get ill for the coming week.

6/15/01

I've got the hood up on the site yet again tonight. I'll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say that this site is a work in progress and that a stupid "Under Construction" label or banner would be redundant. The way my content changes (and GROWS!) around here, it should be of no surprise to anyone that the site changes from time to time.

A half-assed job was done this week. I didn't do it, but someone I know did. It was a disappointment. Because of this I'm going to have to work doubly hard tomorrow. Why was this half-assedness committed? Dunno. All I can say is that was annoying as all hell to have to clean it up. Actually, I'm not the one doing the cleaning, but I will be covering for the cleaner. Instead of getting my stuff done tomorrow, I'll be doing my job and somebody else's as well. Thanks a lot, Half-Assed Man!

Boy I'm just kinda tapped out tonight. I had thought I wouldn't even be doing an update tonight, but my two sets of plans BOTH fell through. That's OK, my wife loves me. My dog needs me and this site requires me.

It's kinda nice, really.

6/14/01

Happy Belated Birthday to Jane, Sharon and Claus.

I have seen the enemy and he is my ass.

I was further reflecting on the trip home with my wife and it sparked a memory from my driving around Boston. The new car has what I call a "Ball Chiller." That's an air conditioner vent below the steering wheel. Anyway, this is an item of particular comfort for the fellas out there, but it does have a downside.

There I was driving down some crowded highway in Boston and I have to fart. So I fart. The air conditioning is blasting away while I do it and I'm instantaneously met with fetid cold fart. I can't imagine much worse, really. Ish doesn't really go halfway to describing it. It was nasty. Memo to self: Do NOT fart in the Toyota with the air on.

So I've started to look for ark plans. We've been averaging about an inch of rain a week here for the last, oh 2 months or so. That's a lot of rain--or at least it feels like it. I'm wondering when the whole house will slide into the alley. We're right at the top of a hill here and the alley is a good 5' lower than the back yard. It would probably take quite a bit more rain, but I really don't want to find out.

Yes, I'm still playing with formats for the Daily. I'd like to put it in the 3 column format, but I think I need to play with it a bit more. Stay tuned.

6/13/01

I've had a chance to digest the events of the past week and I must say that the trip out to Boston was a good and productive time. I had a blast, but I always do when I go out of town.

We stayed in the Mariott in Kendall Square. For those of you who don't know much about Boston, Kendall Square is a stop on the Red Line and it pretty much sits right on the edge of MIT. School was out, so there weren't too many students around, but there were plenty of the graduate level, thick spectacled, labrat types milling about during the day. It reminded me of the East Bank here at the U. That's the University of Minnesota, by the way.

Anyway, it was nice to have a few days to sit around and not work. I didn't obsess about computer stuff, however, I did log in a couple of times and sync the Visor and other such. I get a kick that I can keep up with current technology with a laptop that, if it were a PC, would be in a landfill by now.

I did some Boston things while I was there. I ate donuts. I ate a lot of seafood. I drove like a madman. I got off of Storrow Drive in the wrong place and managed to dead reckon myself back to Sarah's folks' place without too much trouble. I win. I also rode the Subway--the Red Line to be exact--both into downtown Boston and way out to Alewife to the big transit garage there. It was much fun to ride the rails again. Sarah and I also went up to the top of the Prudential Tower to the observation deck. It was really neat. We got the aerial view of Boston we wanted, and I was able to get a nice aerial view of the city to integrate with the maps I'd seen. It really helps to have a long view of a place you have to navigate around in.

The trip back was, for the most part, uneventful. Thankfully. We left Lexington, Mass. at about a quarter to eleven on Sunday morning. We drove west on the Mass Pike (I-90) until we left the state. Before we left Mass. We drove through 2 thunderstorms. I hadn't done that in a while and it was kinda fun.

We changed drivers just past Albany, New York and Sarah did the driving until the western suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. She's a real trooper. We stopped for dinner, swapped drivers again and pulled into Toledo, Ohio about eleven PM. We got a hotel, had a beer and hit the rack.

The next morning, we were up at about 7 and hit the road around 8. I drove for a while and then I gave the wheel to Sarah. She drove until the middle of Indiana. We changed drivers again and I drove through Chicago. We hit the city around 11 due to the time zone change. We had completely forgotten about that, so it put us way ahead of schedule. In Chicago, we took the express lanes, thinking we'd just be able to zoom through traffic. Wrong. Some idiot road crew were replacing a light standard at the very end of the express lane zone. These morons had traffic backed up for a good 3 miles through the downtown loop. Thanks, jerks. Couldn't you have done that on a weekend or perhaps at night?!?

After Chicago, we swapped spots again and Sarah did the part of the drive I hate. Wisconsin. It's not that the state sucks, it's just that I've driven this particular stretch of road a hundred times and it's really boring to me. It's long, it's straight and there's just not much to see. There's also State Police.

Both our records are clean and we had enough money to get out of most jams, but I will have to say that we easily saw 3 times as many cops in Wisconsin as we saw in all the other states combined. What's up with that? The stretch between the Illinois state line and Madison was especially bad.

We switched drivers before Eau Claire and I drove the rest of the way in. We got home at about 5:30 on Monday afternoon. I'd say we made pretty good time on this trip.

Not to brag or even condone unsafe driving, but the horizon just jumps towards you when you're going 80mph. The fact is, most folks were doing between 75-80mph out on the Interstates. It just makes sense.

6/11/01

I started this evening thinking I'd write a ton, but I've run out of steam. I still have a ton of stuff to talk about as well. Nuts.

I guess I'd have to say I had a pretty nice weekend. I got a ton of stuff done that really needed to get done. I went shopping, I did errands and I took pictures that I promised to take many moons ago. Look for those pics to show up later this week. I was going to do it tonight, but there's just no way. I'm tired.

I've also changed the look of the Daily again. I've added the third column, added a link to cool tunes and I think I'll try to link this once a day.  I'll let you all know. In the meantime, I'm going to try to get this format thing down so that I don't have to reformat this site every freakin' week.

6/7/01

Wow, what a trip. I've been sorting through my personal papers and correspondence, trying to chalk up a win in the never fucking ending battle against clutter here at Northome. I can't tell you how weird it is reading all the letters people have sent to me in the past 20 odd years or so. I probably have an equal number of letters I wrote but didn't send as well. Those paint a pretty unflattering picture of a really messed up kid. I probably freaked out a bunch of people in the late '80s and early '90s. Sorry.

I'm going to have to sit and digest a few of these so that I may write about them more clearly. By the way, if you ever sent me any type of handwritten correspondence, I still have it or I just today threw it out. Yes, I'm a pack rat, but I always thought some or all of my friends would be great at one time or other. You all are.

I found a bunch of ticket stubs from events I went to long ago. I found nametags from just about every ass-raping job I had when I was young and dumb. Particular of these in my mind was the nametag I had from a certain large retail chain based in Chicago. They took it upon themselves to redefine the word "courtesy." It no longer meant "behavior appropriate of the court" or even "respectful conduct." No, to the giant megachain in the sky, the slogan, "courtesy is caring" redefined courtesy into something else: The notion that when one of their underpaid wage slaves didn't cut your head clean off with sarcasm or didn't infuriate you with sullen apathy towards all you stood for, that somehow meant the whole fuckin' franchise "cared." Wow, now that's some semantic manipulation.

Courtesy is caring. We used to say that it was some sort of corporate "newspeak." This=that. Not that this and that had anything at all to do with each other. No, we could very well have said, "apathy is empathy" or "greed is love" or perhaps "conformity is liberty." What a bunch of shit.

Pete, your letters are still killer funny.

6/6/01

Well, I'm back. It was a not-so-well kept secret that my wife and I had left town, but now we're back. We had a fun time in Boston. Sarah went there to visit her folks and go to a conference and I went there to kick around Boston and secure our return trip conveyance. What I mean is, we got a car while we were out there.

Sarah's parents were kind enough to give us their '86 Toyota Camry and it was my job to make sure it would make it the 1400-odd miles back to Minneapolis. It had sat for a while, so I really didn't know what I was in for. I shouldn't have worried. The car was very well maintained. I threw a distributor cap, rotor and plugs at it and that was it for mechanical stuff. I cleaned it up a bit. It had been sitting under a tree for a while and there was no shortage of tree stuff in the vents, in the rain-rails and around the hood and hatchback openings. Once the gunk was removed and the whole car washed, it looked very nice. I must say it looks even nicer out in front of our house.

I did have one hitch, though. I tried to buy tires at CostCo and couldn't. They had four tires, they had a guy waiting to put them on the car, and they had a salesman write up the ticket for me. However, my payment instrument wasn't good enough for them. It wasn't that my credit card was declined, the reason I didn't get the tires I wanted was that CostCo has discontinued taking Visa, MasterCard or Discover. They only take American Express, which I could have signed up for not 30' from the cashier's stand this whole debacle took place. Well, I must say that I don't want American Express. I don't want credit cards in the first place and a charge card, however many manifold benefits there may be from using such a payment instrument, interests me even less. I do not want this thing. Because of this and because my debit card didn't work as a debit card in their system, I could not buy tires that day. I could have used their little highway robbery cash machine to get cash to buy the tires, but that wouldn't have worked, either. Cash machines only give out $250/day. The set of tires and work were more. I also didn't have any loose cash, so covering the rest was out of the question.

So there I was, with my mother-in-law, stuck. I just said forget it and we left. I guess I could have tried somewhere else, but the only thing wrong with the tires on the car is that they were old. I had already driven with them in the rain and they did a nice job of not hydroplaning, so I figured (correctly it turned out) that they would do a fine job of transporting us back home.

CostCo, your idiot policies cost you a $270.00 sale. I hope you're saving a lot of money.