The Daily Diversion Archive for September, 2000

9/28/00

Well, I'm back again and feeling good. I've just about finished yet another project, and I'm currently enjoying some beats courtesy of Beat Radio. I've got the MP3 of E-Tones churning on the player and I'm just grooving myself into a tizzy. A tizzy, I tellya...

We've been busy lately, my wife and I. That is the primary reason this "Daily" column isn't. We don't have children or other such easy and permissible excuses that are causing our occupations. No, we just are really busy people. My wife, the hardest working woman at the University of Minnesota, is trying to do about 50 things at once. She's succeeding nicely, but I'm sure she'd like a night off sometime. I'm just sitting up here in the office, banging away at the keyboard. I'm just doing all kinds of stuff on other peoples' machines; fixing, rebooting, reformatting, installing and you-name-what. I'm pretty happy, really. I'm coming to the realization that I really do like computers. It's hard not to like a box that not only entertains with web content, but provides tunes, a place to edit web pages and all kinds of other stuff. What a deal.

Well, to make our busy lives even more hectic, the Calais is giving us problems. This figures. I've always thought that some machines are stress-sensitive. Computers and cars would certainly qualify in my book as machines that have a greater propensity to break down when their primary user needs them the most.

9/26/00

It's closing in on midnight and I'm really tired. The speakers on the PC are blaring some old club dance stuff and I'm pretty jazzed that the computer overhaul is a success. I was even able to synch my visor. Nice.

The dog's worried about the loud noise, and my eyes are just killing me. Sarah's out of town on business, so there's nobody to tell me to turn the stereo down and go to bed. That's nice, sometimes.

I really don't have much to say except that I'm pretty pleased with myself and Windows 2000 for making this little motherboard and processor swap go as smoothly as it did. Life is good.

9/25/00

I guess I was being a cranky pants kinda guy Friday, but there were a lot of things to be cranky about. I've decided to make amends today with the 10 best reasons to live in North Minneapolis. Enjoy!

THE 10 BEST REASONS TO LIVE IN NORTH MINNEAPOLIS

• 10. It's really darn quiet in the morning. Peaceful, really.
• 9. No golf courses to drive around and get in your way.
• 8. Endless residential neighborhoods.
• 7. Not in a flyover area from the airport.
• 6. Not many apartment buildings.
• 5. The housing stock is largely from the 1920's.
• 4. The only place left in Minneapolis where you can buy a decent house for less than $100,000.
• 3. Big parks, small usage.
• 2. Arterial streets not terribly crowded.
• 1. Thanks to the viaduct over the Warehouse district, it's a 7 minute commute to downtown on I-94.

North Minneapolis has a really bad rap as a "bad neighborhood," and I suppose that's true for a few blocks around Plymouth Ave N and Lyndale Ave N. However, the vast majority of North is full of reasonable people with reasonable houses and reasonable cars. The 10/90 rule is surely in effect here--10% of the people are causing 90% of the problems. Unfortunately for the residents here, the aura of "bad neighborhood" has really impacted the quality of life here in ways that really have not a whole lot to do reality.

The perception of murder and other crime is much worse than the actual statistics have really ever been. Yes, there were riots on Plymouth Ave N in 1968. The impact of that summer's disturbances killed off all the small business on that road and that is quite possibly the reason that area sunk so far down in the subsequent years.

Yes, there were a lot of murders in North a couple of years back. Nobody seems to pay much attention to the fact that murder rates were up all over the city, not just North. People just aren't paying much attention today to the fact that there are many more murders happening on the South side.

In the spirit of equal coverage, I'd like now to present the ten worst things about living in North Minneapolis.

THE 10 WORST THINGS ABOUT LIVING IN NORTH MINNEAPOLIS

• 10. Want food delivered? Hope you like pizza 'cause that's it, Jack. The gourmet express company that serves almost all of Minneapolis, doesn't deliver here and neither do any Oriental restaurants. Cowards.
• 9. Want the Sunday New York Times delivered? They tell us we're "Unroutable." What a bunch of shit.
• 8. Want to shop for groceries? We have a couple of small markets, but that's about it. Forget about the on-line grocery delivery services, too. The last time I checked, we were not in their "zone." Sure, these companies rationalize it by saying that they don't come up here because there's no demand, but we all know what the reason is. We know what time it is. We didn't all just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.
• 7. Noise. Not flyover noise, but the constant barrage of noise from unsupervised children killing each other, boomcars, neglected dogs and people having conversations from the house to the street.
• 6. Nobody can seem to leave their car to pick anyone up in this part of town. You hear horn blasts at all hours of the day and night. Get out of your car and ring the damn doorbell!
• 5. Traffic congestion at the I-94 interchanges. Broadway Ave N and Dowling Ave N are too congested for their design. Let's either widen Dowling or make Broadway connect directly to the viaduct. Better yet, let's have another freeway interchange at Lowry Ave N. There's a bridge across the Mississippi on it, who was the rocket scientist that neglected to put an interchange in when I-94 was built?
• 4. Lowry Ave N between the I-94 underpass and Emerson Ave N. People along this stretch of road really put the retch in stretch. I've seen all kinds of idiocy here. I've seen "mothers" with several children walking out into traffic without tending to the kids. I've seen mobs of angry people chasing very afraid looking people. I've seen obviously wacked individuals literally walk up the hood, over the top and down the trunk of cars waiting for stoplights. Enough, please.
• 3. The silly way people correct me when I say I live in North. "Oh, you must mean Northeast..." No, I mean NORTH Minneapolis. Dammit.
• 2. Being asked "Isn't it dangerous up there?" Yep, we dodge bullets for sport. We can tell who has what gun solely by its sound. Our house looks like Swiss fuckin' cheese. We've armor plated the outside walls. We know which hospitals have level 1 trauma centers from experience.
• 1. "Happy Caps" What are these, you ask? Happy Caps are the rounds that get fired from an idiot's gun when s/he has just had too much joy. Up in the air or into the ground, one can easily tell the difference between gunplay between two parties, the shooting of a pest, and Happy Caps. Happy Caps have a distinct cadence: bang bang bang bang bang bang. There are usually 6 but sometimes there's more. The rate is a little less than two per second. These would be the shot spacings of a moron who just has had enough booze, beer, crack, or other forms of fun and needs to fire their gun into the air "just for the hell of it." I often think of the family settling down to eat dinner and hearing this. Does this make them feel good about living in North? How about the person looking at houses? Is hearing a group of Happy Caps going to make them think that North is a safe place to live? Word to the Happy Capper: Those bullets will eventually come down. One can only hope that one will someday plunge directly into your obviously unused brain.

Yes, we're feeling a bit piqued tonight. Tomorrow's a new day, right?

9/21/00

I expect great things from myself now that I have DSL. What great things, do you ask? Beats me. I think it has pointed out the Achilles' heel of my whole operation. No the 10mb hub isn't it, and neither is the router box. Nope, it's my long suffering PC. I spent a fair bit of time on the internet this evening shopping for the parts of a new box. I've decided on a PIII Coppermine 600Mhz. That should liven things up a bit around here. I'm going to have to build this one from scratch and it may take a while to get the parts. I'm budgeting about $100 every other week to go towards this new project. Of course, the thought of having a fast PC (faster even than the one at work!) makes me all a-tingle inside and that just makes me want to grab the phone and start ordering parts left and right. I can't do that. I was able to decide in a few hours with a little research exactly what configuration this new box will take. This is not how fast the purchase of this wonderbox will happen. Money.

I'm getting on with getting on with the site. I'm planning quite seriously to bring back the COMDIV end of the site. Yes, Consolidated Commercial Diversions will ride and rock again. This is mostly because I'm thinking of another round of Ebay fun. I have a number of things that I just can't hold on to anymore. If these items of clutter can be turned into cash, more's the better for me and my new PC project.

I didn't have any deep and meaningful thoughts today. It's sad, but true. I really want to shake the world with what I write here, but I just can't seem to bring up the bile and bilge that seems to power my artist-thing inside me. I am pretty satisfied and comfortable presently. I am underpaid, but I am the only one to blame for that. A tech guy underpaid in this economy is someone who is just not trying hard enough. So I'm trying. I think I'll be setting some goals around this concept. I need to finish a couple of long-term projects. I need to get at least some kind of certification that says, "Tim knows his shit" and use that to get more dough. I need to get on the stick about the state of affairs in the garage. Holy cow is there a bunch of stuff in there.

So where does this leave me? Typing this column on a Thursday night and listening to our new asshole neighbors' new dog squealing in neglected pain in the back yard. What's with idiots always inflicting their stupid, neglectful lifestyles on others? Neighbors, dogs, children, we seem to be under seige by their yowling, neglected dogs, their wild, inappropriate and criminally unsupervised children, and their intimate conversations that can be heard from a half a block away. Is everybody here deaf? From the amplitude of their "trunk-o-funk" boom cars, this seems to be the case.

OK, I'm pissed I guess. I'm going to go howl with my dog. That makes me feel better.

9/20/00

God has a name, and it's DSL.

I've been prepping the home office for this upgrade for a while now and we're finally on line. No, my modest PC didn't gain huge speed with DSL, but when I've got my browser up, it pretends it's a Pentium II pretty well. My wife's Mac is rippin' fast and this just makes it obvious to me that I need a new computer.

I suppose it's time. I've had the box since 1990. That's 10 years of motherboards, video cards, monitors, peripherals, a power supply, several different hard disk drives, a couple of CD drives and even a couple of floppy drives. The only thing that remains the same is this goofy box.

I've even upgraded everything in it to the point that it's pretty much useless going any further with it. I have pretty much pushed the envelope with this particular AT motherboard. The only thing I could do further short of buying a faster processor is to clock it. That's not going to happen, though because I'm just not going to trade reliability for a bit more speed. Nope. I ditched Windows98 because I had to reinstall about once every quarter and I'm not about to start that crap again. Windows 2000 continues on with the stability of NT and the usability of their DOS-based craptacular OSes. This PC has been running all summer and hasn't crashed once. This is a good thing. But I digress...

I've had a new arrival here at the house. No, not a new child, our friend Ali has that all taken care of presently thankyouverymuch. No, I have acquired YET ANOTHER motorcycle. Yes, I now have a parts bike for my Honda 550. Or, rather, my parts bike now has a good bike. We'll see who gets used for what, but I'm thinking that if I ever get the time to work on these things again, I'll have a dandy middleweight town scoot for commuting or selling. Probably selling, come to think of it. I can't even walk in the garage these days.

I've also sounded the death knell for the Mazda 626. I desparately want the hideously ugly rust scabs on the frame not to be there, but they are. I want the battery to not be a useless chunk of lead (thanks, James). I want the catalytic converter not to be plugged solid. Yes I want a lot of things that this car just can't deliver. Nuts. I had really high hopes for this little beauty. Those missing chunks of frame just make it not possible to drive safely. Unibodies are such a drag when they rust.

I guess that's enough for today. Peace Love and 640kps downlink speeds to you all.

9/14/00

Day 3

Day three dawned bright and clear and my head was mostly clear due to my propholyactically taking my Claritin early last evening. I think I'll do that the rest of the time I'm here because it just worked out nicely.

I stumbled downstairs and someone had already made coffee. Breakfast was served and we went back to the beach. It was about 8:30 when we got there and it was so nice that between walking the beach, swimming and just hanging out under the umbrella, we probably spent 3 hours there. It was VERY relaxing.

Coming back to the cottage, we all hung out for lunch, and then my wife and I skipped before dinner for a quick round of mini-golf. That was fun. We then headed back and had lamb for dinner. The evening was spent just hanging around and talking. Bed came very early, and I thing I was in bed the latest at around 10:00pm.

The rest of our vacation included several visits to Provincetown, the Marconi Site, a quick tour of the Route 6A antique establishments, the Wellfleet Historical Society's Museum, and the Cape Cod Fire Museum.

The Cape was not nearly as campy as I was led to believe. It wasn't non-stop mini-golf and t-shirt shacks. This is a good picture of what most of the more popular areas on the Gulf Coast look like, but Cape Cod has kept it's charm. It's really pretty much "away" from it all. It had a beauty that somehow it extracted from a general look like the pine barrens of New Jersey. New Jersey is similar in spots, but not anywhere near the same.

Something else I noticed was the almost complete lack of people of color. There was also a very big shortage of natives in occupations that brought them in contact with tourists. Almost all of the cafe wait-persons and convenience store clerks had foreign accents. It's like a bunch of people from England and Ireland chartered an ocean liner and floated their kids over to the Cape to work for the summer. It was very odd expecting to hear "Hees ya chowdah..." and actually hearing "Here's your cup of tea, love..." Of course, this may have had something to do with the fact that Sarah's mom is English, but I know I heard all kinds of English accents that were definitely from somewhere in the British Isles.

How's that for weird?

Well, enough of the vacation writing. I've begun to get very serious about the computer thing. We have DSL ordered for installation later this month. I'll probably never stop screaming when I see the bill, but I guess I'll just have to suck it up.

The Linux project is coming along nicely and my Windows 2000 box and it have had a nice chat over telnet. I still have to configure the Samba server so I can hook on to a virtual directory, and I have to figure out how to configure my old sound card on it so that it doesn't crash on reboot. It looks as if I have to pull the cover off of it AGAIN. I'm also having a devil of a time getting Netscape Navigator to work. I just can't seem to get it to talk to computers at the other end of a dialed-out network connection. Drag.

I was also surfing today and found some flippin' killer panoramic shots of Minneapolis downtown circa 1912. They're in the Library of Congress Database and the usage rules are pretty foggy. I may, just for the sake of providing information, make them available to you, dear reader. Look for them sometime in the next week.

9/12/00

Day 2 of our vacation dawned with a stifling sinus headache. This was brought on by a failing in Claritin to be TRULY 24 hours of action between doses, and the fact that my wife's brother has cats. Being allergic to cats this has put me behind the 8 ball for feeling fine on vacation today. Rats.

I had awoken with the sun and so I stumbled around their kitchen at an obscenely early hour and found all the fixin's for coffee. It was black and strong and I like it like that. Once every one was up we piled into the cars for a short trip to Lowell to a great breakfast place. It was called Al's Diner. They cure their own ham there and serve it to you in portions that are as big as a good steak. It was damn good as well. The pancakes were OK, nothing terribly special and the eggs were good.

We returned to Meg and Steve's place and started packing for the trip. Through the various considerations I was put in the back seat of a 2 door Honda. There was ample room for my considerable size, but back seats are never my first choice of seats in a car. The trip to the Cape was uneventful and not even that long. I believe it took just about 3 hours to go from Littleton to North Truro. We arrived exactly at 2PM which was our check-in time at the cottage. Excellent timing!

The cottage is one of two on the site. The smaller one is where the proprietors stay when on the weekends. From the outside the cottage looks like a typical Cape Cod cottage, but it is much bigger than it looks on the inside. The best things about it are that it's on the top of a hill, the bay is visible from the day room and the day room itself. This is a room that's approximately 30' long by about 12' wide with the walls completely covered by windows. It's light and airy and includes about a 10' dining table. There's a day bed on the other end and it is just lovely.

We unpacked and settled in. The only trip we took was to the beach, which just happens to be just about 1/3 of a mile down the road. Nice.

The ocean (bay side) is fairly warm, salty (duh) and a lot of fun to swim in. That night there were an enormous amount of bugs at sundown, so we all went into the water. When we got back we hung out and I think we were all in bed by about 9:00pm.

Nothing will take it out of you like a change in scenery.

9/11/00

As I promised last week, I will be telling all of you people out there about our fabulous vacation. Here is the first installment...

The Friday we were to leave I got up and went to work as per usual. Our flight didn't leave until 7:00 or so in the evening. Sarah was still gut-wrenchingly sick and had been for the previous week, so she stayed home and conducted her business from there.

My belief that computer systems are stress sensitive was reinforced two different ways that day: My Avantgo service was having difficulties. This was the service I was relying on to provide me with the balance of my reading materials on our vacation. I'm not sure why I was having difficulties--it could be that I've installed a butt-load of stuff in preparation for being gone for a week, but I never had a problem with them before. I was finally able to synch, but my favorite on-line mag, Salon wasn't sending any content. Drag. Sarah was also having pre-vacation problems with her email account for work. This was not good because, as I just mentioned, she had been telecommuting for most of that week due to her being sick. Eventually, she just gave up and rested. This was a good thing.

I took no lunch so I was able to cut out about an hour early. It's a good thing, because of the drama that was to unfold. Upon my arrival at home, my lovely Sarah was strung out about packing, about having all the stuff of our lives tied up and about leaving our beloved dog Brutus in the care of our designated and excellent dog-sitter, Kari. Since she was also taking us to the airport, she dropped by about 5PM and we gave her the quick tour of the house and its functions, gave her the stuff she'd be needing, loaded the car and off we sped to the airport. She dropped us off and there we were.

We checked in at ticketing where the nice lady behind the counter gave us a pair of bulkhead seats. Oh, the joys of early check-in. We need these seats because neither Sarah or I would be called smallish human beings by anybody other than someone who had fallen on his head. We were going to head down the concourse to catch a quick bite to eat and get some Dramamine for Lovee, when we realized to our horror when we were going through the metal detectors that we both still had our house keys.

That meant that Kari didn't have a set.

SHIT!!!

There was much panicking and stress for the next 45 minutes. We decided to leave messages for Kari at her house banking on the fact that when she arrived back at our house, she would call here answering machine for a message. We left the keys at the Airport Business Center for a $2.00 charge (!), and proceeded down the concourse. We still had 1/2 hour before the departure, so we were still vainly hoping for a call on our cell phones.

We really needn't have worried. Kari met us at the gate after realizing just as she left the airport that she didn't have the keys. She returned, checked the flight, and proceeded to wait for us at the gate. Man, is she shit together. Would someone please hire this woman and pay her handsomely?

Anyhow, Sarah and Kari went back to the Business Office where the dip behind the counter who had mis-filed the keys, proceeded to scare them both to death. The keys were found, Kari left, we got on the plane and the trip to Boston was safe and uneventful.

Uneventful, except for my annoying realization that airline seats had shrunk yet again. Hey air carriers, when will it stop? When the seat is mere butt-floss and everyone is in agonizing pain for the duration of the flight? I'll be the first to admit I'm not the smallest person on earth, but this is just patently ridiculous that I must PAY to be in PAIN for 3 hours because the seat fits a 30 inch butt and mine and the rest of America's are much larger. What a bunch of shit.

Logan airport in Boston is the most confusing human Habitrail inspired mess of a place I've ever been in. We literally went down one level, outside the building, inside the building again, down a corridor, up an elevator, across a long skyway completely with people movers, and then down a level to get to the car. Then, we went around and down and around and down and left and right to get out of the parking ramp. Upon paying, we went down a ramp way and were unceremoniously dumped at a T intersection with Jersey barriers in front of us. A quick right and a left and we were on the short chute to the tunnel under the bay.

When we exited the tunnel, we were thrust into the most dangerous intersection I've ever seen. It was 5 directions of traffic all convening on the same strip of pavement that led to two egresses. Cars left and right. It made the 394/Lowry Hill Tunnel interchange look well thought out.

Anyway, the trip to our destination for the night was uneventful. We arrived at my wife's brother's place about midnight local time. It was to bed quickly after that.

Stay tuned, more to come.

9/8/00

I can't believe it's already Friday.

Well, as many of you know, this site was down for the better part of last weekend. Why? It seems that the provider I was and still am using had a Spamist using some of their services. A big company a bit further downstream in the internet world took umbrage to the fact that this Spamster was hosted by my provider and pretty much "black holed" them from their servers which essentially "black holed" friggin' everyone from that hosting service. I'm not going to get into a big fray over who did what to whom and why, but suffice to say that an email announcing the intent of the big company to stop providing for the little company went missing/undelivered/unlooked at for the weekend and by the time the person it was addressed to had seen it, my site had already been down for 3 days. Timely.

This weekend will see me acquiring yet another bike, fiddling with the Linux box, helping my stepmom out with a run to the dump and perhaps even having a nice relaxing chat with my wife on our porch.

Seeya Monday

9/7/00

At long last, I'm back. Now that I am back, I can tell you just what it was that I was doing over the past two weeks or so. Well, I wasn't sitting still, that's for sure.

The reason I took the time off from the Daily was that my wife and I went on our first real vacation as a married couple. I think I'm being technical here, because we went on a trip to California just before we were married to see Sarah's brother. At the time, we were just as good as married, so it really is kind of silly to make this distinction, so I'll just drop it. There were several things in common with that lovely trip to California that our trip to Cape Cod had, and one of them was that we had a wonderful time. We also went out there to see Sarah's parents, her brother and his wife who now live in the Boston area, and to just relax. We saw all of those people and had a great time.

Since we don't get to do the "big vacation" thing very often, I keep forgetting that they are very relaxing once they've started. This isn't saying they're relaxing leading up to the event--no I won't even start insinuating that. It was a lot of work getting our ducks in a line so that we might have a pleasant journey. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our dog and house sitter, Kari. I hope I spelled your name correctly. You are the absolute tops. Not only does the dog love you, it's obvious you love the dog. The house looked great when we returned, nothing bad happened to house or dog while we were away, and you managed to keep the various distractions of our neighborhood dealt with. The neighborhood kids didn't have much to say about you, and you can bet they'd be telling us stories about the fire-breathing woman if you didn't handle them in a pleasant manner. Good job on that.

My wife and I would also like to thank Megan and Stephen for their gracious hospitality without which there would have been no big vacation. We love you guys and would dearly love to return the favor someday.

We'd also like to thank Connal for the lovely food you prepared for us. You had the right stuff (thanks again), and the right equipment to serve up some truly memorable food. Please know that you have a place to stay in Minneapolis any time you want and the the coffee will be on its way by Monday. We hope you had a good time in New York.

We'd also like to thank Sarah's parents. Our stay with you was very enjoyable. We're both looking forward to seeing you again very soon.

This week and next, I'll be writing about our trip and the various other experiences I've had since our return. I think I'm finally over the block and I may even have a little time now that we're not totally struggling to get things in order.

Also, look for the new Daily Diversion icon on the front page of the site and the redesign of this end of the site as well. With any luck, I'll have that done on Sunday.