I am filthy...

Oh nos, some of my posts have been reported.  One of them for simply using the phrase "glory hole". Another for bad language.  Another for a link to a site that someone felt wasn't an ok link despite the fact that nothing about that link is really obvious in the post and there's a warning it's adult oriented.

I cannot fathom who is going back to 2007, reading posts, and reporting them.  That is a level of time wasting that is beyond my understanding.  If you're reading this, are you some GOP "every little bit helps" sort?  Cause you're not helping.

 

Postpourri

Some links I don't want to lose, but don't want to track in my inbox...

• 11 Highest paying tech jobs in America in 2016 - proof that your title sort of matters.  I should always go by Application Development Manager.  It pays more and is just as valid - perhaps more so - for my job as IT Manager.
• Kyle's link he sent for the best burgers in Philly, link only so I don't have to look at the overalls.  No burgers in overalls.  Nasty.
• How to do a Magic draft round - watch these while on vacation so I'm prepped for draft rounds at work.
• The animation tooling behind Ghibli and Futurama is going open source.
• Career Advice No One Tells You - I thought this was actually pretty solid and matched up with Dan Pink's career advice.
• Make a Living as a Writer - upbeat, but it seems to be implying you should keep your day job.
• 7 standalone novels for fantasy lovers - they mean people who like fantasy.  It's not a vaginal book club.  Some things I haven't checked out.

jne

It has a been a long time since I did a postpourri, but I wanted to capture a few links:

• Required Javascript Reading - a very good list.
• 30 Nerdy Coffee Mugs
• MAKE weekend projects Google+ entry: the actual link to the projects is here
• YoYo Games Framework - don't know if I'll try this out.  Was looking for something Eryn might like to use.
• Eryn tried out a Johnson Telecaster and liked it while she was buying her oboe for band next year.  I see they just came out with a Wilko Johnson Telecaster, but I don't think that's it.  My wife said it was fairly inexpensive and Eryn liked the sound.  Might have to ask the oboe salesman what he showed her.

Miscellaneous Photo Montage

I have a lot of pictures left over on my camera.  This is Eryn and I at Ring Mountain enjoying ice cream and sending Wali a picture to prove we were there within moments of his visit.



Better if you go to Flickr to see it in full size.  A panoramic of Eryn at the Day By Day Cafe for breakfast.


In addition to Sign Makers, Kyle and I went to see Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan, involving a militia, a lot of guys with beards and mustaches, a very old Grizzly Adams, a violent Paul Bunyan with three times the average life span of a human, the grave of Babe the Blue Ox, and a Minnesota camp for juvenile offenders.  Worthy of Trash Film Debauchery, but put on as a private showing with the help of Twin Cities Beard and Mustache Club.


Our first round of The Farm Game, a gift from Kyle.  Our cows seemed to be committing hari kari.  Death by dog.  Death by car.  Death by lightning.  It was endless.


Allison on the Amtrak train on the way back from Grandma Madeline's funeral preparation.  We shared a sleeper car.  I bunked it.


A photo I sent my wife from Sidney, Montana, that Allison photobombed.



This was in the hotel in Sidney, Montana.  This is amazing and should be sold for $50 so everyone could make pancakes with the push of a button whenever they want.  My happiness at food in Montana was only superseded by a piece of rhubarb pie ala mode.  If there was a machine that could make instant rhubarb pie and pancakes, I'd be 80 pounds heavier again.


From Eryn's tenth birthday party!  We had a late party, post ballet season, so we could invite her friends and family to hang at grandpa's studio, drink root beer, eat fruit snacks and cake, and listen to The Sudden Lovelys, Paige and Danny.  Eryn played their song Waxwing Birds with them which made her very happy.  She dropped her pick at one point but recovered nicely.


I hope she felt hip having her party in an art studio warehouse with live music.  It was a lot of fun.  Hopefully made up for a bit of the annoyance from last year when I was laid up.

Hide and Seek

I think between blogging about RAGBRAI and my additional job as corporate Agile blogger, I worse myself out last week. Blogging about burn up and burn down charts, spikes and backlogs is fun, but it wears me out after a while because it's not second nature to me yet. It does make me wonder exactly how much text I produce in a year.

Today, after blogging about ten recommendations for readable code, I was driving home from work and saw a woman mowing her yard. Then I saw this guy, behind a telephone pole, with his head poking out around the pole obviously spying on her. But he was only about 40' away and not even across the road. He didn't jump out to get her or anything, and he was on an incredibly busy road so there was no danger of grabbing her and dragging her away, so I figure it was her husband being a tool. But it was seriously creepy to watch.

Wabi Sabi and Baxter Black

I've spending some time at the moment looking at the idea of Wabi-Sabi as it applies to Agile programming. Among the items that popped up was this 9 minute video about Baxter Black, a poet cowboy in Benson, Arizona. He has a series of videos on YouTube that are actual storytelling/poetry. I guess I should have heard of him, being an intermittant (several times a week) listener of MPR, but he was unfamiliar to me. I'm interested in whether my parents have met him, having hung out in Benson all these years.

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.

Wordle

My coworker Alex (I'll get a link out here for him soon now that his blog is public - I haven't sent the address home yet) sent me a link to Wordle and a word cloud he made from my blog. I've looked at Wordle before and there's a tag cloud somewhere on the blog in the past, but it's always fun to rerun those things to see if it looks different than the last time.

Here's the image Alex generated. I looked at it for a while and decided it only really captured the last month of my blog. It looks like I'm obsessed with Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, instead of obsessed with alcohol, sex, and bicycling, which is really the case.


So I ran it again trying to tag the last 100 posts by using a parameterized blogger url. This seemed a little more accurate. I do talk a lot about Eryn. I do put a lot of photos and pictures on my blog. But Christmas is limited to a single month. And surgery was the topic du jour for December, but otherwise it's not a consistent blog topic. And Sparky and Hannigan were one-post topics. So clearly, this wasn't capturing the essence of my blog either.


Wordle is cool. It's just not accurate. Fortunately, I remembered that Technorati does a word cloud that focuses on your tags, not your words from the last # posts. This seems more accurate, although less aesthetically pleasing. I'm willing to believe that bicycling, geocaching, friends, humor, eryn, memes and "postpourri" occupy quite a bit of my writing. I'm disappointed "Mean Mr. Mustard's Sister" doesn't make the cut.

Strange Sitings

On the way to work this morning, I saw a girl hunched over her cellphone, obviously being very careful that no one could see or hear her. Ten feet away were two boys, obviously oblivious, talking and gesturing toward the oncoming cars. I'm not sure what you have to talk about at twelve or thirteen that's so crushingly important and secretive that it requires huddling in your own little bit of wet grass despite the fact that no one is paying any attention to you whatsoever, but if I see Eryn doing it, we're going to have a talk. If you're going to scheme, plot and whisper secrets, figure out a way to do it that makes it look like you're up to something else.

On the way home from work, I saw the unicyclist I often see commuting in Eagan. Except it's pitch black out this time of year at 5:30. And it was raining, and icing over on the roads and sidewalks. As a result he was in a raincoat and carrying a flashlight in one hand so he could see where he was going. I think that's a level of dedication I shall never exhibit.

Oof - Diarrhea of the Fingers

Yeah...that was three days without blogging, and then a massive pile (metaphorically) of text, and it didn't even include the story I scribbled front to back, the story I had typed and heavily edited, the three pages of top to bottom notes I wrote for a third, the notes I took for a blog post on Spolsky's best writing on programming, or the documentation I've been generating at work for undocumented features. You can blame it on writing fiction during lunch. I've been trying to fill up the notebook I started a year ago by expanding out a few of the three-dozen fiction stories I wrote short notes for, and it's got me on a binge and purge mentality as far as producing text.

I ordered new wireless headphones for bike trainer purposes, after my old ones gave up the batteries again and don't seem to have available replacement batteries (hence the short life on the last ones, despite the $36 - they had probably been on the warehouse shelf for four years) - so maybe after those show up, I'll exercise more and bibble less. Hope is free, folks.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Manic, Monty-Python or Benny Hill-like Eryn:


Ghost Eryn:

I'm back! Vacation and A Line from a Recent Story

What was that, twelve days without blogging? That may be my longest absence since I started. I did better than that while I was on RAGBRAI. I apologize. The family took grandma (or great-grandma, depending on whether you're GenX or Gen...Z+, to Tucson for her annual snowbirding. I looked at my Blackberry a few times just so I could thank the coworker who was covering for me, and otherwise I avoided the internet with the exception of updating my parents' computer (by the way, f-you Realplayer and your shitty "I don't want to upgrade because you had a previous version and you manually uninstalled it without installing a new version and now I won't play nice except to leave hoofprints all over your registry." And no, it's not Microsoft's fault for having the registry in the first place. Real Player 6 footprints and Real Player 9 and 10's refusal to install if there's a manual uninstall of 6 is utter garbage. One of the stupider things I've ever seen in installation, as well as the refusal to offer a fix even though it's obviously a Real-related problem despite that some users have bemoaned the problem for over a year).

Anyway - I have hundreds of pictures. So, so, so many pictures. I shall subject you to only the more interesting and amusing ones, and just a few scenic ones over the next several days. Why not all at once right now? Because I'm too lazy to upload them all at once, let alone comment on them all at once.

On to the story...I've been writing a short story based on the ride Ming, Kyle and I took through Wisconsin. The characters aren't based on us, but I needed a name for a main character I could wrap my head around easily and he shared a few qualities with Ming, so Ming it was. My favorite line so far..."and Ming wondered if strippers biked."