Beach Observations

Eryn and I went to Schultz Beach yesterday for a few hours because she'd missed a big chunk of water day at school (and just because the beach is nice). I offer some observations:

1. If you have a fleur de lis tattoo where it's not normally visible except when you're in your bikini, it doesn't look like your French, or royalty. It simply makes it look like you've been nailed by a Boy Scout.
2. Immigrants who bring their children to the beach and all the boys go in the water and the women have to sit on shore in their full length outfits...that's just strange. I haven't quite figured out how you rationalize to your daughters all the other girls swimming with their brothers, or to the boys all the girls who get to swim while their sisters do not. I expect it's just "that's the way it is" because of religion or culture, but damn if that doesn't seem like it's going to bite you by the time they're teenagers.
3. Board shorts for girls. As the father of a daughter who's rapidly getting older do I ever approve. When the grab-assing starts, it seems a bit more constrained. And it looks just fine with a bikini top.
4. Young lady on the beach closest to my chair. That was less of a lotioning and more of a one-woman show, what with the arching of the back and the hands in all sorts of risque' places, although perhaps you're just really unself-conscious and extremely thorough. I'm happy for you that your nipples won't burn through the fabric.
   

Hometown News

Seems my hometown is in the news:

From Minnesota Independent: “What Would Jesus Do” if he owed money to a collection agency? That’s one of several questions raised by a lawsuit filed in a Minnesota court. A Monticello debt collection company is facing a federal class action lawsuit because it sent out collections notices with a WWJD header. The case pits the religious rights of a small business against the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which prohibits harassing, oppressive or abusive communication in debt collection procedures. (Via Secrets of the City)

Strange Children's Books

The Furry News as a children's book title made me laugh. I'm obviously too old to think that furries are harmless little animals creating a newspaper. They're more likely to create their own wiki.

Duck Slide

Dan'l and Cookie Queen canceled their backyard water park today, so we set up the slip and slide in the back yard for the second day in a row while I mowed. I was in a good mood. The girls made me pancakes for breakfast, including a unicorn pancake. After Kyle referencing Legend yesterday, I got to feel like an evil overlord demon while pouring on my syrup and devouring the unicorn's head. Which reminds me, Eryn got a unicorn from build a bear she really likes, and I told her about how unicorns are actually somewhat mean and use their horns to poke little girls just so they can drink their tears. She wasn't amused until a day last week when it was raining and I pointed out that the unicorns must be poking the angels. Other people getting poked, that's funny.

Slip and slide preparation. Papi and Diego will soon need rescuing from the lake at the bottom.


Here comes the lifeguard. If you squint, you can see the figures from Dora drowning in the pool, in need of rescue. Poor Diego should have sent out a message to his dolphin friends.


For Ellen. The ducks are unperturbed by the whole mess of nonsense.

Back to Brewing

Last weekend, when I felt it was far enough past the software release that I could travel outside Eagan city limits, the family and I met Kyle for breakfast at the Uptown Diner (four egg greek omelets are two damn big, and I use the word two purposefully in reference to the eggs) and then went over to the brewery store to ponder a homebrew kit to make for the first time in many years.

This week, Kyle came over and I broke out my Father's Day present from 3+ years ago - a deep frying kit - to cook up the Cream Stout kit I purchased last weekend. It's happily burbling away behind me as I type. It's a very healthy noise for a carboy full of proto-beer.

Here's Kyle. He was in charge of the gas flow. The outdoor cooker is excellent for fine tuning the heat. On the flat top stove in the kitchen I can barely get a boil. It was one of the reasons I quit brewing, because nothing would cook right.


Here it is, boiling energetically. When I state I couldn't get a good boil on the flat top stove, I mean I couldn't get a good boil with half this much liquid. Being able to boil up several gallons makes for a better tasting beer because you don't have to add (much) water on top of the mixture, it all gets cooked up together.


And this was my makeshift cooler. I have a copper cooling coil, but dropping it in the pot makes a huge mess. This seemed like a great way to cool it down and water the yard at the same time. I know - there's some dirt, but it never came near the pot. It's the fastest I've ever cooled a pot, and it was twice the usual liquid.


So in two weeks I should have something I can bottle or keg. I'm looking forward to my first drinkable production in many years.

NSFWPL = Not Safe For the Work Parking Lot

You were warned in the title. On the way out of work today, I went the wrong way and headed toward the back lot, where I usually park my car, despite the fact that I had purchased donuts on my way into work for the treat list, resulting in the unusual situation that I was parked in the front lot. Therefore, I had no business being in the back lot. Except the lord led me there so I could find this little gem that a coworker had dropped. I can't tell if it's an eraser, a novelty pencil end, or a strap on for Dingle the TR Parking Lot Gnome...

DP and 9 Other Things

It's a bit between posts lately. I think it's mostly because I'm not doing much that's exciting. Although I did buy a beer kit with Kyle last weekend. I intend to boil it up this weekend. The She Says are coming to town in two weekends. Eryn's been at soccer camp. And I made it through my first big release weekend where I had some sort of managerial input.

Seems like a lot, but it wasn't all that blogable. I'll tackle a few other things.

1.) Eryn has taken an interest in Pokemon. She's watching something called Pokemon DP in the mornings. All I can think of is Pokemon Double Penetration. I know. Wrong. But WTF? I cleared out one of my old Magic the Gathering collector card books so she can store some Pokemon cards. I know...laugh it up. But I think I still have a few thousand dollars worth of collectible cards sitting around that I won a few tournaments with, so maybe they'll help pay for books when she goes to college.

2.) My first big release cycle is behind me. I should have ten more months. This is good. I can get back to a normal life.

3.) I have a Proof of Concept for an ADABAS to distributed system (Oracle) week-long event next week. So it's not quite life as normal, but it's an excuse to cancel almost every meeting I have, so that's sort of a positve.

4.) NOM has called their new program against gay marriage 2M4M. I don't watch or read nearly enough news lately. They might as well have called themselves NOM DP.

5.) I was told at work today by another manager that she had contacted me because I was "the Agile guy" for my group. I come from one of the few groups where there's a preexisting piece of software that must match, as closely as possible, the resulting piece of software. We are the posterchildren for not using Agile. So it's interesting that the wandering around and talking to people I've been doing lately generates so much visibilty. I should point out that it also impacts my fun blogging, because the Agile blog I do at work sort of saps some of my usual blogging energy.

6.) I shared the soccer/manager meeting/ripped pants story with a few people at work and a few others found it. It makes people happy, so in the end (heh) it was a good thing.

7.) My father sent me a post about a koala bears that were too hot and were approaching people for water. I don't know if it's snopes-able or not, but the bath part seems real and is a serious cute overload.

8.) Fimoculous links to Hunch's Which Sci-fi Movie Should I Watch?

9.) Secrets of Six-Figure Women is on the shelf at work. The title made me laugh. I thought it was just me being juvenile until I went to Amazon and the contextual advertisement was for Olga Women's Secret Hug Nylon Scoop Brief #873 (from $8.99).

10.) If you're not from the cities, then you probably didn't see the Michele Bachmann comic in the City Pages. It's not gold, but you might enjoy it.

Work Related Discomfort

I understand that as part of my current role there's the necessary evil of overseeing (vaguely) the installation of software over the odd weekend in order to avoid, as much as possible, issues for customers and downtime resulting in potential loss of revenue. What I don't understand is why I have to do it in the dark without any air conditioning in a space where the ambient temperature is 10 to 20 degrees above what's comfortable because of all the running desktops. If the goal is to have all the players who control the moving pieces in one location to avoid unnecessary searching for distributed resources, couldn't we just redistribute ourselves to someplace co-located with beer or ice cream, sandwiches, bright lighting and at the very least a fan?

I Find it Disturbing

I find it disturbing to use the urinal while they loudly pipe in music where some guy is proclaiming, "I'll taste every moment." I'm uncomfortable with the thought of anyone tasting me while I'm using a bar urinal.

In Which I Tell the Embarrassing Story

Yesterday and half of the day before I was at my very first management offsite. This used to be a big deal where they bussed the managers and directors and vp's and a few assorted other titles up north, but over the last few years has been a more subdued event with locations like scenic downtown Eagan (e.g. the community center).

All in all, it was enjoyable. I don't get to talk to many of the managers outside my immediate area on a regular basis, and there's quite a few of them. It was good to hear them addressing some of the same concerns I have so I know my issues aren't limited only to me.

After the talking/roundtables, a presentation on new projects, a presentation on finance, and a management expert, there was a management picnic at the local park, Trapp Farm. There was food and fun (I learned to play Kubb), despite it being a bit cool and sprinkling on and off.

Later in the picnic, a volleyball game started, and despite having dressed a little too formally in Dockers and a long sleeve dress shirt, I joined in. Many of the management guys (no women were playing) are damn good volleyball players, playing in volleyball and soccer leagues a few days during the week. It wasn't my usual experience with volleyball at work which generally entails a dozen out of shape individuals pushing the ball back and forth and out of bounds over the course of sixty seconds (although this is getting to be less the norm with all the young 'uns in development - e.g. as I get older). Instead, there was setting and spiking, and setting and spiking, and blocking, and spiking and only overhand serves, and almost no out of bounds plays. I think the first point lasted five minutes. I was working up a good sweat after the first game and was wondering why I had ever bothered to grab my jacket from the car before play started.

The second game started, and we were on about the third point and the ball was slammed toward my feet. I dived. And missed. Hard. No injuries, not to my person. But there was a very quiet rustling sound. I threw the ball under the net, and pondered the sound. I reached behind myself and felt a bit of, for lack of a better word, "leg". This wasn't a small pants rip. It was big. Although I wasn't sure how big because I didn't want to go rooting around while standing there in the sand. One of the guys on the team looked at me as I started taking off my dress shirt and stripping down to my t-shirt, waiting patiently for me to finish so play could resume, assuming I was too hot. I wrapped it around my waist, held up my finger, and moseyed over to where my jacket was and repeated the maneuver. He asked if I was ok and I replied that I had to go. He said, "Why?" And I replied, with honesty, "Ripped my pants."

"That's not bad," he said, not having a line of sight to the hole. "You can still play."

"No. No, I don't think I can. You'll have to find a sub."

I skirted the court, and came up behind a few managers and a director who were finishing up a game of horseshoes, putting my back to an area of the park without visibility to my backside. I followed them up the hill, chatting cheerfully while one of them commented on my "Rambo" look in just a white t-shirt, and slowly circled to the far side of the path and the pavilion, keeping my butt to the trees. I probably looked like the moon (heh), always presenting one side. I got in my car, and went home to check out the damage and find some new pants, vowing never to go to a picnic again without a pair of shorts or jeans in the back of the car.

So...how big was this hole that another manager thought I could continue to play volleyball with at my very first management offsite/picnic with peers and bosses and bosses' bosses from several cities and India? The fact that he didn't know how bad it was and was the only one in a position to notice gives me a good feeling about how closely I avoided the title "the manager whose ass was hanging out at the 2009 picnic".

Here's the hole, in no way altered from it's picnic state.


For some perspective, I could have passed my wife's head.


I'm fortunate it was an odd year so we weren't at Blackhawk where the volleyball court is closer to the action and not on the far end next to a lake. And that it wasn't our department picnic where people gather around to watch volleyball tournament style. And that I was in the serving position with no one behind me because there were only five people on each team. I'm unfortunate in that I will no longer subject Mean Mr. Mustard to work-related volleyball jibes.

Graduation Videos

Eryn graduated from Kindergarten last week. Pooteewheet posted plenty of pictures on her Facebook account and I don't want to do double duty, so I'm just going to post the videos. I believe they're a bit long. My mother in law just let the camera run, but these are mostly for grandparents and family anyway.

Zipedee Doo Dah


Presentation


Diplomas

Caponi Art Park

I've lived in Eagan for over 6 years and never been to Caponi Art Park, despite it lying between me and work. So last week after Eryn got out of school, we headed over there to check it out. No picnic or anything, just a visit to see what it was I was passing every day. It's not as interesting as the Franconia Sculpture Park, which changes sculptures yearly, but I was excited to see they have a Shakespeare Festival and I fully intend on going. Ming, do you want to go to The Tempest with me? Hmmm? It might be as good as the version you saw at the Theatre in the Round...

I've been missing out on giant rock mushrooms...


What may amount to child pornography. Originally this was a statue of Caponi's children, the younger being carried on the shoulders of the older, but it fell over and was used as part of the retaining wall. It gained a bit of obscenity during the transformation process I think.


I've been missing out on big green phallic plants, of the sort you see in The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.


I've been missing Pooteewheet telling off trees. Get thee to an arborist! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of twigs!?


And I didn't know Naga, the giant snake from Harry Potter, lived there. The digesting animals that are visible is a nice touch. Someone I was listening to on Monday compared a particular project to a pig in a snake. Maybe she'd been to the art park recently.


BRAINS!!! BRAINS!!!!!!! And finger food.


You can assume this is an accidental photo if you like.

The Most Embarrassing

One of the most embarrassing things that could have possibly happened to me happened today. It will amuse Mean Mr. Mustard to no end. Remember that sentence, it's important. I almost decided not to blog about it, but I will. Tomorrow.

In Which I May be at Odds with 95% of the World

I've been thinking about this carefully, and perhaps I'm not at odds with the rest of the world quite as much as I think. My contention is about the 2009 Star Trek movie. I don't think I like it as much as everyone else. That's not to say it isn't worth watching, and I would recommend it, but that whole 95% approval on RottenTomatoes makes me feel like I should rate it about 95% as good as a movie can possibly be, whereas I'm more of the opinion it was about 65-70% on my movie meter. But in RottenTomato parlance, that makes me part of the 95%. So it's difficult to say where that puts me.

I've held off for a while so that I'm not spoiling it for anyone (HUGE spoilers warning), and hopefully it's been out long enough that geeks won't harass me for my opinions, because I'm just not the sort to argue science fiction obsessively. I have watched more than my share of it - way more. But my interest is always in the macro, the themes and how they're being handled, and how their treatment compares to other similar treatments and the era in which the story was told and the story itself, whether it's good and compelling and consistent thought is given to the whole weave and weft. Not the micro. I could care less if someone f's up a minor consistency issue as long as they tell a compelling story and don't engage in enough inconsistency to yank me out of the story. And I don't particularly care about those little "aha" momments that are supposed to make me feel good because I obsessively watched the previous episodes/series. I want an incredibly good and cohesive story with strong, unique characters.

So...I can clarify. I felt the care given to the main characters ranks about a 95%. That's pretty much par for the course with Abrams. However, I felt the plot and science ranked more around a 20%.

I'll iterate my issues:

1. I hated the villain. HATED HIM. Why even have him? They'd have been better off forgoing a villain altogether. If Kiki's Delivery Service can get by without one, so can Star Trek 2009. I get it that his part is to come back in time and rewrite the present in order to rewrite the future, allowing the characters to have different personalities among other things. But he was so damn lame. I was listening to MPR or some other radio station (see, I'm not attuned to specifics) and one of the directors or writers noted that they wanted the villain from this Star Trek to be a villain on par with Khan. That appealed to me. But that's certainly not what was delivered. He was a miner. The sort that crushes rocks. And any depth he was supposed to have was poorly delivered, poorly conceived, and unbelievable. I'm pretty sure I could do a better job feigning angst about the death of my wife and child. You know what other movie has a bitter, villainous miner? My Bloody Valentine. I didn't believe his motivation for pursuing Spock, for blowing up one planet, for trying to blow up another planet, for destroying a star ship...nada. Give me Ricardo Montalban any day of the week.
2. Simon Pegg as Scotty. Actually, very good. But several times I found myself thinking, "Hey, it's Simon Pegg as Scotty!" That's incredibly distracting and yanked me out of the story. I was thinking zombies and sillly cop buddy movies. Maybe that's a deficiency on the part of my imagination. At least I wasn't picturing him as he was in Run, Fatboy, Run, because I've been fortunate enough not to see it.
   
3. Let's go back to the villain. How is that a mining ship...IT'S A MINING SHIP...and I don't care that it's a mining ship from the future, they haven't added jamming weapons and cannons to anything we've developed in the way of mining tools so far, and given the premium the Federation puts on tricking out their warships, no one goes willy nilly militarizing their ships, they just wait for them to get attacked before sending help, or dispatch an escort...can drop it's drilling wang through the atmosphere of two home worlds without so much as a "how do you do?" Are there ground based lasers attacking this miner? Particle weapons? Sattelites? Numerous layers of defense? Defense systems acrete outward and you'd expect them to be strongest at your home planet. Why the hell was anyone ever at war with the Klingons if the only thing the Klingons or the Federation needed to do was drive up next to the other's home planet and calmly get down to business? Maybe I'm out of line? Maybe they did? We win! No, WE win! No, we do! What? We're here, we win! We win back! As near as I can tell, defense of earth involves a bunch of cadets running out of Earth Federation Central, pointing at the sky and going OOOOOO.... There wasn't even an intraatmospheric attack on the drilling dong.
4. Why did Spock need a gigantic ball of red matter when only an eyedropper was necessary to create a black hole and eat up a planet? How many black holes was he going to create? And it's a black hole, so telling me he needed enough to create a "bigger" black hole is idiotic and you know it. And why did it have to be injected into the center of the planet by the mining ship's gleaming love sword? Stability issues so it doesn't hop off and go somewhere else? You need a nice even eating from the center for aesthetics? It didn't consume Vulcan evenly if that was the intent. Consuming the atmosphere and everything around and working centerward isn't enough of a planet shattering event?
5. Why do you need to dig a hole to the center of the planet when the center of a planet is just a big ocean of molten rock? WTF? Even if the intent isn't that it has to be injected at the core, but rather just below the mantle, we're back on #4.
   
6. And why did Spock allow them to capture the red matter in the first place instead of just imploding his ship? I'm pretty sure they weren't sporting red matter trapping equipment on their mining ship, or they'd have had their own red matter in the first place and could have just stopped the super nova. And they didn't seem to be near a planet in the opening that would have been in danger of a big ball of red matter. And screw you if you think a logical Vulcan (the old Spock, not the kissy new one) wouldn't sacrifice a star ship to prevent a lunatic from getting his mitts on enough red matter to eat up a few thousand planets. The needs of the many outweigh the few, or the one - that was him, remember?
   
7. Why did they drop Spock off close enough to Vulcan to watch it get sucked up (I'm sorry, that just didn't seem as villainous to me as I think it was supposed to)? And as he was on such a close moon/planet (Vulcan was huge in the sky, much larger than our own moon), why wasn't the planet he (and Kirk) were on affected by the total destruction of a nearby world. I don't believe that the shredding of a planet, despite its mass being subsumed by a black hole and theoretically still there, would fail to have an affect on another planet/moon close enough to watch the event.
8. Back to the red matter. Spock was going to stop a supernova with it by introducing a singularlity. This I believed was possible. Until they decided to use the red matter to stop the wave front, not the actual star pre-supernova. No. You cannot throw a rock at Lake Superior and expect the waves to stop, or at a tidal wave and have it turn back. Doesn't work.
   
9. Spock and Uhuru. What? Kirk's father's death had nothing to do with Spock or his timeline. Butterflies are limited to the world in which they reside, their wing fluttering does not carry over into other atmospheres. Kirk's father's death would not make Spock randier. I admit that the new Uhuru is hot and any humanity in Spock should respond, but presumably she's the same Uhuru as in the old Trek universe, so he should have been all over her in the old series. Maybe he was but they were concerned about the interracial issues?
10. Kirk was in Iowa...I think there should have been a gay wedding. I joke. But I saw blatantly hetero characters throughout the movie. I'm sad that future Iowa/Federation doesn't include any blatantly homo characters. If you're going to mix it up, go for broke.
11. Mean Mr. Mustard convinced me my issue with Kirk was off a little. I was bit disappointed that he (Kirk, not MMM) spent most of the movie getting choked, getting saved, or getting fortunate in some life-saving way. MMM noted that this is the "new" Kirk and he can have a different personality, and holding on by his fingertips is an integral part of that personality. Fair enough. I buy that. But luck is finite. And he seemed to have a lot of it, and that can only be interesting for so long if the character isn't actively resolving his/her own problems. So maybe there will be a change by the next movie. But if there's no growth there, I'll be disappointed. I think back to some of my favorite sci fi, and there are incredibly deep characters who do layer upon layer of planning, only to find out that fortune is a harsh mistress and with all those lasers and diseases and aliens and all that red matter sitting around, even having a full proof plan plus luck can't save you. If you've got luck and no plan/issue resolution skills, you're SOL.
    
12. I don't know what Kirk's rank was prior to his promotion, but it all seemed incredibly dubious to me. Field promotion to first officer of a star ship? Before anyone is dead? Despite what must be officers with seniority on the ship - considering his father was on a star ship before he was born so it's not like it's the first star ship ever? Despite all the trouble he was in prior to his field promotion? I believe this was probably a jumpstep promotion and I imagine they don't happen much now when there isn't a multi-trillion+ star ship involved.
13. There's other bad science, which I leave up to Phil Plait.
    

Hard to believe I enjoyed it, eh? I'm just hoping that they tighten it up by the time they get to the next one.

$1.38 Million in Lap Dances

I read this blurb in Secrets of the City this afternoon.

The former executive director of a school for American Indian children is accused of spending the $1 million-plus he allegedly stole on cars, houses and nights at strip clubs. "This is just about as bad as it gets," says the sheriff. Obscure Store via Strib.

I think perhaps he was paying for more than dances. Someone needs to do the math to determine how long it would take to spend $1.38 million if it was only dancing. I'll lay out my best attempt.

He was keeping his day job, obviously. He needs sleep and food. Commute. Chores. Max he was spending 6 hours a day at the club. 10 minute dance, $20? The internet seems to bear me out on that estimate, although perhaps I'm low given they estimate $20 for a single song. $120 an hour x 6 hours = $720 not including gratuity and beer. Let’s say it’s a phase 0 estimate, off by 100%, so $1440. The aforementioned Google links note that it could be up to $500 an hour if it involved a private room and cheap champagne, putting us somewhere between $700-$3000 for a six hour period. Let's go with the $1440. Multiply x 365 days a year = approx. half a million annual if you don’t add extra time for weekends. He stole it over 2003 to 2008 and included houses and cars. So I guess that’s reasonable. Spread over 5 years, he was only spending about half of what he could have if he had really applied himself, or spent all his time drinking cheap champagne in the champagne room, or enjoyed two girls dancing at once like Tall Brad does. I bet two women quadruples the cost in the champagne room.

So, by my logic, I am incorrect. He could have been paying for only dances and still managed to need to embezzle that much money. Good to know.

Geocaching Humor - Courtesy of the Dakota County Sheriff

Addendum: Oh my. It seems Bart is getting grief from Dakota County for the coffin. I think the sheriff should find something better to do. Geocaching is definitely not a criminal activity in Dakota County. How traumatic could it be if a bunch of 4th grade Girl Scouts were scouting it out only a little over a month earlier.

Klund sent me this, although why he's reading the Dakota County Sheriff's newsletter, I don't know. But it made my day. Very funny stuff given Eryn and I struggled to find it as the end of the Halloween 2008 series last fall. I remember the coffin fondly because of the beautiful snow followed by the pizza challenge and subsequent surgery.

PNS

After apheresis today, I was walking into work from the far lot and there was a guy walking a few paces in front of me with his programming book tucked under his arm. He had his initials scrawled across the pages in big letters: P N S.

Dude. No. Even if it's the name your parents gave you and you're proud. Could you not use your first name or last name because they're equally embarrassing? Perhaps you go by the name Penis N. "For Nuts" Scrotum, and there's simply no middle ground short of calling yourself Pen? You must stop. Stop writing PNS all over everything. I'd give you the same advice if your initials were VAG. Or BJ.

The only positive remark I can offer if they're your initials is that at least you didn't borrow a book with PNS written on it.

Little Mermaid (Continued), et al.

I'm pretty sure none of these is safe for work. You'll have to send yourself the link at home.

For Erik. You have to see it through to the end so you know why it's for you.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

For LissyJo. I listened to this song about 10,000x when she was a kid. She was obsessed. How come John never got you this version of the song?

Watch Kiss the Girl... Continued and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

A funny song "We Didn't Start the Flame Wars". Not by Billy Joel.

Watch We Didnt Start the Flame War and more funny videos on CollegeHumor