Tech Debt 101

A good article on Tech Debt. I had no idea what a puxadinho or a favela was before this article.

"The puxadinho is the standard pattern that builts up whole “favelas”, the brazilian slums."

Flooding

We drove to downtown St. Paul today to take the car for an open air ride, see the flooding at the Mississippi, have stomach-churning amounts of ice cream at the new Nelson's in St. Paul on Snelling (we shared two child sizes between the three of us and still couldn't finish), and do a bit of antiquing at the nearby stores on Snelling.

The Mississippi was wild, particularly as we were at the Showboat only 8 days ago.  At that time, you could walk out to the steamboat.  Today there was at least a block of water between the shore and the boat and the ticket office was deep in water.  You can see where the walkway down to the shoreline is in this photo - those flags mark the top of the stairs.


The Mississippi was actually down a little from where it must have crested.  Hopefully it will go down a bit more before all the water from later today kicks in. It looked like someone was dumping a bucket of water on the neighborhood.


There's the Showboat and the tickethouse.  Understandable why the U of MN is putting Jekyll and Hyde off for a while.


The playground.  We could see the St. Paul Yacht Club on the way to the park and it was way out into the water.  That's not unusual as it tends to go under with even a little bit of flooding, but it seemed excessive even for their location.  I usually ride down into St. Paul along the cliffs which come out at the Club.  There must be a mile or more of water along the trail which would stop passage even if the trail wasn't closed because the cliffs were loose.


This is the picture they're showing on the news. Now it's on my blog too.  They have receptions there.  I hear they moved a lot of weddings and receptions to lower town St. Paul to sooth the tears of upset brides to be.


It's the apocalypse.  Wildlife reclaiming what was previously a human area.  I'm surprised lions didn't start chasing us like something out of Will Smith in I Am Legend.  Swimming lions.


Not our footprints.  Going in the water is a no-no.  These are the footprints of two people who were yelled at by the mounted police.  Eryn was excited to see the police on horses.  She had no sympathy for the barefoot waders.  We left after talking to Kuz's cousin for a while, who was undoubtedly taking much better pictures with his 7200 than I was with my iPhone, to go find ice cream and an antique cat key hanger.  We pulled into the garage just as the rain came down.  Good timing to a good afternoon outing.

Good review

I'm disappointed Ming couldn’t do RAGBRAI this year, because I would have MUCH rather sat through Transformers Age of Extinction than the buddy female cop movie - The Heat - or Grown Ups 2 (there’s going to be a Grown Ups 3, Adam!).  All things equal on Rotten Tomatoes (Transformers is still 10% higher than Grown Ups 2, and despite not liking The Heat, it was magnitudes better than Grown Ups 2), I would have gotten an extra 45 minutes of air conditioning and time for an extra box of popcorn watching Age of Extinction.

My favorite review so far:
http://www.themarysue.com/transformers-age-of-extinction-review/

Ka-boom goes the bike

I went out for a ride in Eagan two days ago.  I was on the highline, a very hilly trail, and came across this sign.  We've had a lot of rain, I knew the routes along the cliffs at the Mississippi were closed, but I didn't expect to see a sign in Eagan, let alone on the highline.  But given how hilly it is, it's not all high, there are lows.  And it's named after the powerlines, not its general elevation.


I biked down the hill to take a look.  One of the ponds near Thomas Lake is overflowing.


I almost thought I'd dare the water to see how deep it got, after all it's not rushing water, and then I heard several people talk from the other side of the water.  They seemed a long, long way away.  And the trail still goes down a bit from here, so I suspect it gets pretty deep.


Back up the hill and around Eagan.  I was almost home, on the last little super-steep hill, when I had to turn down the hill because the two kids ahead of me stopped in the middle of the trail (and hill).  I gave the pedals one turn, clicked the gear which didn't even make a noise, and suddenly the chain is off and wrapping itself so tightly around something that I had a hard time dismounting on the hill.  I worked on it for a while, but then had to call my wife to come get me while I hauled the bike, front wheel only on the ground, to a known place to meet.  Here it is...hard to tell anything is wrong, but if it were a horse, it wouldn't be running any races.


Here's a close up - you can see where the chain slid inside the gears.  It's not coming out without dismantling the rings.  I thought about doing it myself, but there were some scrapes across the spokes, deeper than just a scratch, and I was worried about what it had done to the chain.  And the shifting, on inspection, was done for, and I'm not keen on fixing that.  So into the shop it went.  I get it back next week.  Probably just in time to take my car in for a repair (minor - I think a piece of metal is loose under it somewhere).


Here's my attempt to extricate the chain.


And the other hand.  Probably means it was overdue for a cleaning.

More Musical Theater - Little Shop of Horrors by The 7th House Theater

My father in law posted elsewhere that he was going to see Little Shop of Horrors performed by 7th House Theater (Facebook link) at the Open Eye Figure Theatre (not too far from MIA).  Open Eye does a lot of puppet shows - they have a driveway series - and there's a cool bicycle-pulled puppet theater in their entry way (below).  7th House doesn't have a permanent location - there are only 7 members - so Open Eye was providing the venue.

I didn't know what to expect, but from the very first note it was amazing (I think that was Liz Hawkinson who kicked it off).  Everyone was an exceptional singer, and that was the focus of the play.  Some of the details were left to the imagination with some small visual aids (I don't want to spoil those parts) and it worked amazingly well.  The three background singers played many of the parts and when a part was minor, like Mr. Mushnik, players swapped the role with a small overlap in delivery to indicate ownership was passing to someone else (as well as handing around a mustache).  There was live piano and guitar and the pianist (Robert Frost) and guitarist (David Darrow) joined in the play.  David Darrow played a convincing psychopath DDS.

Maeve Moynihan did an amazing Audrey, and in the small Open Eye venue, her voice was everywhere.  Eryn (not in the play) got a treat in that Catherine W Noble was her teacher at the Children's Theater Company Percy Jackson acting class.  We had no idea she would be there and she remembered Eryn when we caught up with her after the play.  If I had any thought that Eryn might not be a theater geek despite initial interest, this weekend probably seals the deal for her between 7th House and the Centennial Showboat.

Grant Sorenson was Seymour (I really hadn't realized until last night that the character from Little Shop of Horrors might have something to do with the Krelborns from Malcolm in the Middle) and Gracie Kay Anderson was one of the three Ronette's with Catherine and Liz.  Both were just as solid as the rest of the cast.  I'm looking forward to seeing more of them in the future.

The bicycle puppet trailer.


Waiting for Little Shop to start.  The props and scenery didn't get much more elaborate than what you see, a plastic mustache on a stick, a plastic tarp, and a clever Audrey 2.  This should give you some idea of how close we were to the actors when they were down stage (I got that right - from the audience perspective, down stage is closest to me, upstage is back by the screen).

Pride and Prejudice

I was tempted to take it as part of my Litterati collection.  It was obviously abandoned outside Kowalski's.  Maybe the possibility of being an old maid and not having a good dowry hit too close to home for a reader.  But I hope someone has the sense, maybe even the sensibility, to come back for it later.  Obviously, that's only good manners.

It's a happy bunny life - semantic analysis?

I always see this book on the shelf as I walk through the R&D department, which I'm doing a lot more again since I switched back to the team I was on 2.5 years ago.  It's a recent change, only the last week, and it's been a challenge trying to transition and get things cleaned up as I move between teams.  There's always a lot in the air I don't want to leave for the next person to get my role.  Fortunately, the new team is in better shape now than when I was last there.  Seems like that pesky 1.5 FTEs of support with a hard push down is gone (and any extenuating issues), as well as offshore coordination and one of the teams that was fun, but not a good fit (resulted in a lot of context switching).

My first task has been getting new contractors interviewed.  Keeping your capacity where it should be is always right near the top of any list at work.  We're still date driven despite being agile, so every time you're short a resource, it's muddling up your existing resource load (I know - demand should fit capacity within an iteration and delivery is reduced to meet capacity, in theory -  but you don't need to have a debate with me about why that doesn't always hold true).  One of the very few externals we brought in for a quick onsite interview couldn't even explain MVC.  Another wasn't familiar with Using.  And just in case you feel that's esoteric language keyword knowledge, that's just an example, not the only question.  I sometimes get the impression they're pulled into consulting for a very VERY specific purpose - such as practical implementation of existing MVC, or because the actual developer left for a better job - and never make the effort to go back and learn any of the language basics, or even their framework or pattern basics.  Don't believe me?  Then I'll let you interview the one who couldn't differentiate between abstract and interface next time.  I'd have accepted a rant about why you can have multiple interfaces but there isn't multiple inheritance in C#, despite it not being completely the point. Anything to show you were interested in your language of choice and were thinking about your craft.  Particularly at contractor rates.

Back to it's happy bunny Life.  Get One.  I've always thought it was there for semantic analysis purposes.  After all, it's in the R&D space and we do a lot of work with content.  I've been to presentations by co-workers where someone talks through million by million citation grids, groupings, big data, and RDF.  And happy bunny is sitting there right next to the anti patterns book and two shelves of books and academic journals with stern warnings that it's not your library; don't take the books.  I pictured one of the R&D folks I know running their algorithms and big data analysis vs. a content set where happy bunny was one of a million items, and then opening the book to validate the search worked against happy bunny as an edge case (yes, the edge case is the happy bunny path in this case  - my love of irony has influenced my perception about why the book is there).  But given all the five star reviews on Amazon for happy bunny, I'm now of the opinion that someone in R&D probably just really likes happy bunny and it cheers them up after a day full of algorithms and comparing elastic engines.

Minnesota Centennial Show Boat - Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde

Last night we went to Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Showboat near Harriet Island in St. Paul.  It was the opening night of the show, put on by University of Minnesota students.  My wife and I had been to the showboat before, to see Dracula but I believe our last visit was in something like 1992, before we were married.  We both remember it being closer to the Minneapolis campus and infested with spiders.

Jekyll and Hyde was performed as a melodrama with olios inbetween.  I'd never heard of an olio, but was pleasantly surprised.  They were hilarious.  The show itself was full of great humor, but the olios really stole the show and "The Calendar Parade" and "The Saga of Two Little Sausages" had me laughing.  All of them were amusing.  I highly recommend the show, but after their opening night they're on hiatus for nine days while the Mississippi River crests.

I was joking with Kyle on Facebook that I sort of felt like I was in Bioshock Infinite.  There was even a barbershop quartet as part of the olio "Marriage a Cinq"  He said if I had to throw a ball at a minority I should get out my skyhook and go to town.


This view, more than most, made me think of Bioshock.  It's like all the empty decks where you're looking for trashcans to pilfer.


Panorama of the river.  The water was speeding along.  At one point, just as it was getting dark, a large tree was going past me as I was standing at the rail, with a noise that sounded like a monster had breeched, the whole thing sudden vanished.  A few minutes later, one limb popped back up above the water.  I would not want to be in the water right now, or in the next week as it crests.


It's a little less Bioshock when Eryn is posing with her umbrella, although if she'd had a dress and could manipulate dimensional barriers, it might have been a different story.


There were two boats on the river pulling in as we went to the play.  I wonder if Tall Brad is up on that bridge somewhere...


Nice picture from the showboat of downtown St. Paul.


The stage before the show.  Almost all the scenery was painted.  There were amusing scenes where someone would pretend like a painting was a 3-dimensional prop.


Intermission.  The cathedral in the dark from the showboat.


There were a number of informational displays about Jekyll and Hyde.  One was about how Hyde was portrayed through the years.  It included Doofenshmirtz's failed attempt to make himself a monster.


The title painting which came down between scenes and after the Monty Python-esque ending.  Wonderful vaudeville and a lot of energy.

Daddy Daughter Work Week

Eryn is at work this week for an Eagan TV class in the basement. We hang out in the morning and eat donuts from the treat list box, drink coffee and coffee-like cooler drinks, and she reads while I try to make it through the 80 pieces of email I get between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.  She also drew me this parade of cats on one of my white boards.

During standup, one of my leads told me he saw her in the entry way and said hi.  And then he added, and Diane's daughter.  And then he added, well not just her, all the little girls, together.  And then he stopped to ponder what he was saying and said, "Now I sound like some sort of predator.  I'm just going to shut up."

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

I enjoyed New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula Guran.  She made a very good selection of stories. None of them was out and out bad, which is usually the case with Cthulhu fiction.

"Lesser Demons" by Norman Partridge wasn't the best, but I reference it because as a short story, it was much better than the whole The Strain trilogy that's coming out as a t.v. series soon and was analogous.  Evil stuff shows up, guy has to fight it.  Pretty straight forward.  Except for once it's not vampires or zombies, but Cthulu-esque monsters and infection.  I read The Strain series back in 2012 just before I got hurt.  The idea that it might have been the last thing I ever read still bothers me.  It read like it was set up for a tv show or movie.  Apparently I'm not the only one who thought so.

I liked Steve Duffy's "The Oram County Whoosit" which read like a western tall tale.  And I'd read "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman before, a mash up of Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu where the royal families are the monsters returned.  It belongs in any good collection. I was startled to see references that were in the first episode of BBCs Sherlock, meaning I obviously have not been a particularly voracious Holmes reader during my life.  "The Essayist in the Wilderness" by William Browning Spencer was my favorite.  The idea that a pretentious English major would know so little about nature that he'd leave strings for himself to find his way home and would have no idea that crayfish would strip off their shells to dance while appendages wobbled on their backs is amusing.  That they'd snap each other together and apart like jigsaw puzzles to make bigger crayfish and then hunt frog sacrifices in order to share the organs, the best crayfish getting the frog skin to wear like a little cloak...well, that's pretty creepy.  And when they start to dance in the pest control spray, they definitely have a Cthulhu quality.

Mieville's "Details" was interesting in that echoed a very specific HP Lovecraft theme about cracks and corners being dangerous entry points into the beyond.  However, Kim Newman's "Another Fish Story" struck me as more like his writing, coming right after "Details" in the collection.  "Another Fish Story" involved a sort of Cthulhu anti-Christ who was angling (ha - fishy) for a slow death for humanity by all the ills afflicting modern society.  Because of his desire for a particular lingering hell for humanity, he was making deals to derail other possible hells, like a merfolk/Ia flooding of the West Coast.  Charlie Manson makes an appearance, as does Lon Chaney, Jr., who I knew almost nothing about, but the details of his personality are spelled out pretty well after looking at the Wikipedia biography.  The story definitely had aspects of Perdido Street Station or The Scar.

"Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette was science fiction where there was bleed over from the Cthulhu dimensions.  Enjoyable.  And "A Colder War" by Charles Stross posited an alternate cold war/history where the great powers had discovered the great powers from beyond and were trying to harness forces they didn't understand and couldn't possibly control.  Analogous to the real cold war and nuclear weapons.

A good diversion, but I'm excited to get back to something with more substance.  As an addendum, here's an amusing story I saw from Fail Blog today about a book store (Waterstones on Oxford Street) with a Necronomicon problem.  [Waterstones' Twitter Feed].

I wonder if he's looking for a place to hide out while he's on the lamb.  It reminds me that I remember Uncle Raccoon!  He used to come play poker at our house in Klammath Falls.  Or maybe those were just shifty cousins my folks were feeding playing cards to.  (picture from The Chive)

Wall

I took Eryn over to the David Tennant narrated BBC documentary in 3D, Earthflight.  After we sat down, I realized I didn't have our 3D glasses, so I hurried back out to get them.  But the screen went completely dark, so I took a quick right and slammed right into the 3/4 wall over the hallway out of the theater.  My toes still hurt.  I'm glad it was 3/4 high and not 1/2 high so I didn't have to worry about just tumbling over the edge of the wall and falling to injury.  Serious injury in a theater is very low on my list off ways to go.

The movie was good.  I'd never seen devil rays leaping out of the water as a school, or dolphins hunting by driving fish onto the shore and then beaching themselves to get the fish.  I've seen footage of orcas doing that, but not dolphins.  Despite being about birds, there was a lot of footage of great white sharks eating seals in slow motion.  If you bite a seal nearly in half, all the water in its body shoots out its nose.  Something I didn't need to see in 3D.  I was more impressed with how high a wildebeast can jump when confronted with a crocodile.

Uncle Raccoon on the Lamb!

Ut oh, Dad.  Looks like Uncle Raccoon is on the lamb! Apparently he didn't die in a freak pot of boiling water accident.  He faked his own deatth so he could skip town (via The Chive).

The inevitable annoying post about a dream I had

Amusingly, if Pooteewheet vacates the bedroom, I dream.  I've been trying to correlate why, and I haven't gotten a good look at the Fitbit-type activity/sleep tracker she got for Mother's Day, but I suspect it has to do with how often my sleep is disturbed if she's thrashing around in bed.  Now, it could be that the thrashing is a result of my restless sleep.  After all, I don't have a Fitbit to watch for counter thrashing.  But given I sleep more deeply when she's not there - last night because my snoring potential was high due to grass cutting in the neighborhood - I'm going to blame her.

End result?  I don't dream much - at least nothing I remember - 99.5% of the time.  Last night, however, I had a dream I was in a castle.  It looked like something out of Spirited Away.  And like Spirited Away, it was full of lots of spirits, each of them in charge of something like the garden, the doorway, small animals, the wind, a graveyard, a garden.  Each of them was bemoaning the fact that human beliefs were changing and they no longer believed in animal spirits and spirits associated with non-human things.  Humans only believed in the ghosts of dead relatives.  After bumping into a number of them who were slowly changing into human ghosts, one of them approached me excitedly and said, "We figured it out!"  It explained to me that in addition to believing in the ghosts of dead people, which was incredibly boring to embody, modern people also believed in dire warnings.  That is, you could be sort of a ghost/oracular warning hybrid, ala Hamlet, if you made the warning part seem like they were having a premonition that fit with their belief that they "knew it was going to happen!" e.g. if there was just a small aspect of the haunting that made it seem light it might be arising from their own mind, leaving them an element of doubt about whether they were really seeing a ghost.  After that, all the spirits I'd bumped into became incredibly annoying ghosts warning me about how I might trip, I might take the wrong turn at the end of the hallway, I might eat the wrong food, I might open the wrong window (I was opening the wrong window), I shouldn't touch that lamp...thousands of inconsequential things.  And once they realized I could see them giving me advice, they would pop up more frequently, until I couldn't walk more than a few steps without getting a warning.  Spirits of the wood and walls and gardens who minded their own business for the most part.

That part was interesting.  The part where there was a computerized, automated wood lathing shop three stories tall powered by what looked like a few 286 computers, and Godzilla showing up to attack my castle so I had to move into a hotel room where the only access was through the kitchen. More confusing, less cohesive.

Feel free to psychoanalyze.  It's not about getting back to nature.  It's not about switching jobs.  Could be because I'm reading short stories based on Cthulu mythos, but there weren't any tentacled creatures haunting the edges prepared to turn it into a nightmare.

Pride and Prejudice and Paintball

Ming and I headed out to Wisconsin yesterday to play some paintball on Ron's personal island.  Last time we went, two years ago, it was raining and the turnout was about six people and I couldn't play.  This time, it threatened to rain, the power even lurched at breakfast in Minnesota, but we went anyway.  The day was beautiful for the most part on the island, cool and only a small amount of sprinkling.  Back in Minnesota they got storms and 68 mph winds.  I think about 14 people showed up, so it was even good playing.



I bought a new paintball gun, so it was fun to try it out.  Eryn played with it outside last night and today and had a lot of fun.  It worked well except for when I ran out of CO2 and the bullets were sort of lobbing toward the target, and one of the canisters Fleet Farm filled up for me in Menomonie (the 20 oz one) broke its seal in the car and we had to pull over to make sure we wouldn't pass out.  I was also shot by my own team member as I fell back once because he thought my red gun looked too much like an orange arm band.  That, or he just wanted to shoot me.


My paintball skillz are not exceptional.  I managed to shoot two people, but was in turn shot by many (including my own team, as mentioned).  Two different times I managed to get myself into a crossfire where I was taking paintballs from two different directions.  A tree is less useful cover at that point.  That I took so many of my shots to the extremities attests to that.  The second time it happened, there was so much paint hitting the tree and spraying all over with little pings, that I thought I'd been hit.  But when I reached up and brushed my mask I was surprisingly injury free.  Moments later, like in Elder Scrolls, I took an arrow to the knee.  It doesn't look so bad here.


It looks much worse here.  I had four of these.  Three on my right leg.  One near my left armpit that was the worst and is bruising up nicely.


Here's Ming, camo-ed up.  The paintballs he took to the back bruised and he was out there for a few more games than I was, so more paint was flying.  Highlights of the day included some excellent grilled chicken, one of my co-workers (Jeff) losing his shoe in the swamp, and another co-worker (Stuart) wearing an ugly Christmas sweater to the event.  He'd meant to give the ugly sweater to his girlfriend, but they had broken up and his new intent was to get shot a lot and then burn it.


Today, Eryn, Pooteewheet, and I pursued less violent activities, but no less cuthroat.  We learned how to play the basic version of Marrying Mr. Darcy, the Pride and Prejudice card game.  It was very fun, even if you don't know the plot to Pride and Prejudice.  Each of you is one of the women from the book and your goal is to marry the optimal suitor.  This entails balancing your personal traits to get them to propose.  But just because you're worthy of proposing to, doesn't mean they will propose.  And along the way your competitors pick away at your traits, random events cause scandal and elopement, and you store up cards to get first crack at the suitors before someone else steals the best ones.


You can pin all your hopes on one suitor, as Eryn did, but he still may not propose (e.g. you roll a 1 or 2) leaving the random points of spinsterhood in your future.  Eryn ended up a spinster governess.  My wife ended up a spinster supported by her uncle and cheered by her cousins.  I was in a good place to score a pile of points with Mr. Darcy, but only needed 10 points to win, so played my odds and took the proposal from  my second best option, Mr. Denny, rather than chance being an old maid.  Here are the glowering old maids (Caroline is a really bad pianoforte player, by the way, and Mary decidedly lacks wit) tut tutting during our wedding.  Perhaps their fathers will support them with their dowries.  Oh, that's right, Mary has no dowry.  She's happy but poor.  No room of her own for her.

There are about half a dozen variations and an undead version we intend to try.  A good choice of games to back on Kickstarter.

Litterati - 2500

I made it to 2500 pieces of trash for Litterati earlier this week.  I was aiming for 2500 by the time they reached 50,000, but I only made 2000 by that mark.  I made 2500 by the time they hit 55,000.  A miss, but still impressive, and it's good to have goals.  Here's some of what I've learned picking up trash.

• The dark corner in the neighborhood near the park that dead ends without much light gets a lot of condoms (and even a special condom collection decorated box), alcohol containers, smoking-related garbage, drug trash, and fast food trash.  These all seem related and are refreshed on a regular basis.

• Near the movie theater is very dirty.  It’s a bad idea to have a park next to a movie theater if you want to keep your park clean.
• There’s always new trash.
• There’s always new trash.
• You can make a difference in your neighborhood even cleaning every few days.
• You don’t have to pick an area to trash-free as you go; you can clean in iterations and get some exercise while an area gradually gets trash free.
• There’s always more trash.
• There’s a lot you can recycle if you really think about it: paper, cans (I separate them so I can sell them and use the proceeds for charity), plastic.  Recycling tech is improving all the time.
• Small booze containers are a big source of trash: Svedka, hotel/airplane size.  You learn things about the drinking habits in your neighborhood you might not rather know.
• There’s a disturbing amount of empty alcohol containers near interstate and state highway on ramps and off ramps.

• Instagram is not always up.  That doesn’t mean you should just pick up trash and not take a picture.
• The park and ride gets strange trash: tires, booze, lots of cigarettes, lost gloves (things that fall out of cars), toilet paper, diapers – it seems to be a place to congregate and lose things.
• Cops will drive by to slowly check you out if you’re picking up trash at the park and ride or simply photographing a cigarette box or plastic cup in an unusual place.  Neighbors will stop to watch and frown at you, wondering what you’re doing with a camera in the street. The world is suspicious of your trash collecting.
• Some people will stop to ask you what you’re doing and get excited about geotagging trash and want to know all the details.  These people are usually a.) walking a dog or b.) holding someone’s hand.  Perhaps happiness offsets suspicion.  Perhaps cops should hold hands more often.
• Straws are everywhere.  They seem almost as common as cigarette stubs.
• Be careful – some trash is medical waste.  I picked up a plastic container in the dark only to discover it was for STD swaps: like HPV and Chlamydia.  It was well baked and rained on, but I made sure to wash up right away anyway.

• If you don’t use gloves to pick trash, make sure you know where your closest hand washing facilities are.
• Bring a few wipes if you don’t have access to a place to wash your hands.
• Dirty hands are hard on your smart phone and can live small scratches and pits in the glass.  Make sure to wash your smart phone as well as your hands after picking up trash.

• For some reason, a lot of people drink half a container of Gatorade/Powerade and then throw it out.  This is a subject of consternation at our house.  If the Gatorade is yellow, it might not be Gatorade.  Biggest lesson here is don’t open bottles.  You don’t know what’s in them.
• There are an inordinate number of gloves that are trash in MN.  We are the land of 10,000 lost gloves.
• Snow removal results in many plastic brush bristles left behind.  A green-minded northerner would do well to invent a better bristle or a more biodegradable bristle.
• People on Instagram will Like anything.
• Companies on Instagram will Like their product before realizing you’re tagging them for being waste producers.
• Taco Bell (in my neighborhood) produces a lot of trash.  Marlboro produces a lot of trash.  Svedka produces a lot of trash.  You start to recognize patterns if you pick enough trash.  You start to develop stories about the folks in your neighborhood and why some trash is so prevalent.
• Did I mention, there’s always new trash?

• Some trash is funny (greeting cards, homework, toy cars, Green Bay Packer helmet magnets).  Some trash is not (dirty diapers, urine bombs, STD swabs, alcohol near the on ramp).
• I like to remove alcohol and smoke containers first so my neighbors/kids don’t have to look at it.  This is a made up rationalization, but it adds purpose to collecting trash.
• Drainage ditches collect a lot of trash.  Sometimes one picture of a lot of trash is ok.
• It’s not that hard to just take a small bag with you if you walk a lot to the grocery store, movies, coffee, and ice cream, and just pick a few things.  Wash your hands at your destination.
• Snow leaves a lot of trash in the spring, but it’s also a good time to pick it up because there are no weeds, no stickers/pricklies, and best of all no ticks or mosquitos.
• I learned what Beezing is because of picking up trash [http://gothamist.com/2014/04/25/beezin_aint_e-zee_a_minty_recovery.php#.].  It could be a fake meme, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot of Burt’s Bee’s containers in my neighborhood.
• Small handouts/magnets might seem like a good business idea (in mailboxes/doors), but they’re incredibly bad for the environment (I’ll end up tagging the same advert many times).
• There are a lot of people interested in picking up trash – there’s a good online community.  And if I’m picking up trash along the paths near my house, some people will opine that they’ll bring a bag to collect trash on their next walk.  It has a positive impact.
• There are SO many sources/businesses that produce disposable waste – obvious when you think about it, but it’s surprising when faced with a street corner containing dozens, if not hundreds, of brands.
• You end up looking at trash, your phone, and the ground a lot more than you did before you started Litterati.  This isn’t good if you like to bicycle a lot and it’s a problem when there are trees.  Wear a hat if you’re collecting trash in the trees for some added protection.  Bleeding once because you were tagging trash is more than enough.
• There are obvious places that would benefit from a trash can based on the geotagging of the trash in my neighborhood.
• There are obvious companies that would benefit from greener packaging.The dark corner in the neighborhood near the park that dead ends without much light gets a lot of condoms (and even a special condom collection decorated box), alcohol containers, smoking-related garbage, drug trash, and fast food trash.  These all seem related and are refreshed on a regular basis.
• Near the movie theater is very dirty.  It’s a bad idea to have a park next to a movie theater if you want to keep your park clean.
• There’s always new trash.
• There’s always new trash.
• You can make a difference in your neighborhood even cleaning every few days.
• You don’t have to pick an area to trash-free as you go; you can clean in iterations and get some exercise while an area gradually gets trash free.
• There’s always more trash.
• There’s a lot you can recycle if you really think about it: paper, cans (I separate them so I can sell them and use the proceeds for charity), plastic.  Recycling tech is improving all the time.
• Small booze containers are a big source of trash: Svedka, hotel/airplane size.  You learn things about the drinking habits in your neighborhood you might not rather know.
• There’s a disturbing amount of empty alcohol containers near interstate and state highway on ramps and off ramps.
• Instagram is not always up.  That doesn’t mean you should just pick up trash and not take a picture.
• The park and ride gets strange trash: tires, booze, lots of cigarettes, lost gloves (things that fall out of cars), toilet paper, diapers – it seems to be a place to congregate and lose things.

• Cops will drive by to slowly check you out if you’re picking up trash at the park and ride or simply photographing a cigarette box or plastic cup in an unusual place.  Neighbors will stop to watch and frown at you, wondering what you’re doing with a camera in the street. The world is suspicious of your trash collecting.
• Some people will stop to ask you what you’re doing and get excited about geotagging trash and want to know all the details.  These people are usually a.) walking a dog or b.) holding someone’s hand.  Perhaps happiness offsets suspicion.  Perhaps cops should hold hands more often.
• Straws are everywhere.  They seem almost as common as cigarette stubs.
• Be careful – some trash is medical waste.  I picked up a plastic container in the dark only to discover it was for STD swaps: like HPV and Chlamydia.  It was well baked and rained on, but I made sure to wash up right away anyway.
• If you don’t use gloves to pick trash, make sure you know where your closest hand washing facilities are.
• Bring a few wipes if you don’t have access to a place to wash your hands.
• Dirty hands are hard on your smart phone and can live small scratches and pits in the glass.  Make sure to wash your smart phone as well as your hands after picking up trash.
• For some reason, a lot of people drink half a container of Gatorade/Powerade and then throw it out.  This is a subject of consternation at our house.  If the Gatorade is yellow, it might not be Gatorade.  Biggest lesson here is don’t open bottles.  You don’t know what’s in them.
• There are an inordinate number of gloves that are trash in MN.  We are the land of 10,000 lost gloves.
• Snow removal results in many plastic brush bristles left behind.  A green-minded northerner would do well to invent a better bristle or a more biodegradable bristle.
• People on Instagram will Like anything.
• Companies on Instagram will Like their product before realizing you’re tagging them for being waste producers.
• Taco Bell (in my neighborhood) produces a lot of trash.  Marlboro produces a lot of trash.  Svedka produces a lot of trash.  You start to recognize patterns if you pick enough trash.  You start to develop stories about the folks in your neighborhood and why some trash is so prevalent.
• Did I mention, there’s always new trash?
• Some trash is funny (greeting cards, homework, toy cars, Green Bay Packer helmet magnets).  Some trash is not (dirty diapers, urine bombs, STD swabs, alcohol near the on ramp).
• I like to remove alcohol and smoke containers first so my neighbors/kids don’t have to look at it.  This is a made up rationalization, but it adds purpose to collecting trash.
• Drainage ditches collect a lot of trash.  Sometimes one picture of a lot of trash is ok.
• It’s not that hard to just take a small bag with you if you walk a lot to the grocery store, movies, coffee, and ice cream, and just pick a few things.  Wash your hands at your destination.
• Snow leaves a lot of trash in the spring, but it’s also a good time to pick it up because there are no weeds, no stickers/pricklies, and best of all no ticks or mosquitos.
• I learned what Beezing is because of picking up trash [http://gothamist.com/2014/04/25/beezin_aint_e-zee_a_minty_recovery.php#.].  It could be a fake meme, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot of Burt’s Bee’s containers in my neighborhood.
• Small handouts/magnets might seem like a good business idea (in mailboxes/doors), but they’re incredibly bad for the environment (I’ll end up tagging the same advert many times).
• There are a lot of people interested in picking up trash – there’s a good online community.  And if I’m picking up trash along the paths near my house, some people will opine that they’ll bring a bag to collect trash on their next walk.  It has a positive impact.
• There are SO many sources/businesses that produce disposable waste – obvious when you think about it, but it’s surprising when faced with a street corner containing dozens, if not hundreds, of brands.
• You end up looking at trash, your phone, and the ground a lot more than you did before you started Litterati.  This isn’t good if you like to bicycle a lot and it’s a problem when there are trees.  Wear a hat if you’re collecting trash in the trees for some added protection.  Bleeding once because you were tagging trash is more than enough.
• There are obvious places that would benefit from a trash can based on the geotagging of the trash in my neighborhood.
• There are obvious companies that would benefit from greener packaging.

Burt's Bees

Kyle, my wife, Eryn, and I went to see Burt's Buzz at the Trylon tonight.  It's a documentary about Burt Shavitz, who was co-founder of Burt's Bees, and the face on their products.  He lives a simple life close to nature in Maine and wasn't part of the almost billion dollar sale of the company based on his original sales of honey.  As he says during the movie - and as others say of him - he only really needs some land, his dog, and not much else.  He's definitely an interesting character who lives life at his own pace.

I enjoyed the movie, which really focused on Burt's character and how it has (not) changed over his life.  The end of the movie really captures the pace with which he lives his life, a pace my wife found excruciating, and the son of the woman who sold Burt's Bees and had him sign over his share talks about how Burt finds more in a short walk than anybody he knows and that it's contagious.

It is also NOT this documentary: Burt Talks to the Bees

Dystopic Diversion

I'm in a mood to read some dystopias again soon.  I need to add a few of these options to my list (mixed with some other dystopia-related reading).

• Shortlist: 20 Dystopian Novels - I haven't read The Windup Girl, The Chyrsalids, The Iron Heel (high on my list), Article 5, The Drowned World (also high on my list), or Uglies (Eryn just got the whole series).
• Wired UK - 10 Best and Worst Dystopian Works - I haven't read (or watched) The Trial by Kafka, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and I will never read the Divergent Trilogy (good lord does it sound awful).
• On Such a Full Sea by Change-rae Lee.  Definitely need to add to my library list.
• 1984 on stage 
• Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and the End of the World - interesting differentiation between the words.

Recent Board Gaming

It's a gaming month at the Scooter household.  Eryn wanted to learn how to play Settlers of Catan, so we had it out.  She has a serious sci fi bent (hence the t-shirt) so as an elementary graduation, I agreed to get her Star Trek of Catan, even though it's almost exactly the same game with the exception of the look and feel and the officer cards.  I want to make my own officer cards.  I know they're all supposed to be Starfleet officers, but there should really be a Khan card. And the crazy officer from the the planet-killing unicorn horn episode...um...Decker.  Doomsday Machine.  Him.  Maybe he'd destroy one starship.



We also have been playing King of Tokyo with the Panda Kai expansion.  I like playing The King (Kong), although Panda Kai is fun too.  I don't seem to get the mini-evolutions much and they who taught me how to play taught me it was either-or when you got three hearts, but it's really both (healing plus evolution).  A big difference.


And Kyle got Eryn Takenoko for her birthday.  A great game that's a lot like Catan, but with a hungry panda, a frustrated farmer, and an emperor.  This one deserves an expansion, but I'm not sure what.  It seems like it would be simple to add one more character with a deck of goal cards.  Princess?  Samurai?  Philosopher - he could add rocks that limit bamboo growth, all Tai Hu style.  Or perhaps a governmental worker who taxed the bamboo.  A sage?  Perhaps that's pretty much a philosopher.  The goal could be to get # sages to a particular color of bamboo grove.  That would be very Japanese.


Another picture of Takenoko, well into the game.

Sunday Morning Ride

Yesterday, Kyle and I went to Cook in St. Paul to try out their breakfast.  It was raining mightily, so I drove up there instead of pedaling.  I don't do lightning and/or thunder.  Wet is fine.  Electrocuted is not.  Great breakfast.  I had a Frenchcake which was part hashbrown, part pancake, and topped with poached eggs and served with a side of french toast and duroc bacon.  Way better than I expected.  Kyle had the Korean pancakes which set off some Facebook exchange with my sister about things that look like breasts.  Fortunately, before the cops came in to eat, Kyle pointed out to me that I was bleeding.  Not a little, a lot.  I think the barber nicked my neck the day before and I'd scratched it.  The result was blood all the way down the back of my neck and washing across the left front side of my neck.  I looked like Dexter.

So today, I tried to make up for my lack of bicycling breakfast by pedaling to Colossal in south Minneapolis.  Unfortunately, it was perhaps the first time in two years I didn't have cash with me and Colossal only accepts cash or local check.  So that was a no go and I'll have to try again.  The Hot Plate didn't open until 8:00, fully 45 minutes later, and although I started to hoof it up to Longfellow, I changed my mind and decided just to go home instead.  A bowl of Trader Joe's pseudo Cherrios was not a great alternative to breakfast at a new place, but I fixed it by making buckwheat and blueberry pancakes and banana and mango pancakes for lunch and storing a bunch for the week.

It is WET out there.  Hmm...I think I mushed my pictures a big.  Flickr doesn't link the same way it used to (well, the navigation is different) so I'm still ironing out some news kinks.  Fair trade for it being free.  So here's what I saw on the trail near the Mendota Bridge.  Enough rain that the cliffs are starting to be unstable.  You could hear it yelling about what a bastard the cliff on the other bank was and that it was going to throw all it's shit out the window and that was my sister for f*ucks sake! and more.  I'm sure they're finding it a competent therapist.

It doesn't surprise me it's unstable.  Last time I went down into St. Paul there were a few large rocks next to the trail and one on the trail.  It's obviously getting a bit wet and dangerous.


This is near Lake Nokomis and Lake Hiawatha.  That garbage in the near part of the frame is everywhere along the walking trail.  It's like it cleaned up everywhere, and then dumped it on the tar.


Here's a better picture and you can see all the flotsam and jetsam.  No Ariel though.


And here it is on the trail at Lake Hiawatha.  I went offroad at that point.


I forgot to mention it was darn cold as well.  A nice cold front rolled in on Saturday, so at 5:45 a.m. there was a ton of fog and it was chilly enough to make my hands ache and the dew bead up on my track suit (just the top - I'm not a wise guy).  This was much later; closer to 8:15.  At least at this point I could see the cars coming about the time I heard them.  Earlier I'd hear noise and not see anything until it was on top of the intersection.  I find it difficult to believe anyone drives around in pea soup fog without lights on.


I zoomed in a bit to catch the church on the far side of Mendota Bridge.  Downright Cotswolds in nature.


So a nice ride.  We rounded out our weekend with Edge of Tomorrow: Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day, which both Eryn and I really enjoyed. Eryn caught The Fault In Our Stars, which I managed to avoid, with mom.  We played Settlers of Catan and Compounded at Ring Mountain (and found a quart of reserved Chocolate Chili Pepper Gelato for me!).  And today, as a graduation gift, I got Eryn Star Trek of Catan which she spent hours mulling over and playing with, despite only having one family game.  I'm getting a reputation as a bit of a pain in the ass when it comes to gaming because I win so much in our family games.  I got lucky in Star Trek of Catan because I used Nurse Chapel to steal a resource from Pooteewheet, which resulted in stealing longest road, and then I couldn't get rid of Nurse Chapel (you have to use it against someone with more points, and that act put me in the lead).  But it worked out well because it locked her down and no one was taking the excellent resource distribution I was getting late in the game.  On the bad side of things, I discovered the drive on my lawnmower isn't working appropriately anymore and I had to push mow the hill that is the back yard.  So I'm feeling fully exercised.