First off, say hi to our new backyard. It’s not big - quite the opposite really. Just a patch of concrete, a Weber grill, then forest - but it’s nice.

Secondly, with a gag purchase I’m now more then ever aware of my wedding, just 2 months away!

Pink & Black Bride & Groom Can Koozies

Thirdly, yesterday Mishka surprised me with my very own PSP: God of War edition! Yay!

PlayStation Portable: God of War Edition

And lastly - if you’d like to volunteer somewhere, the State Fair is a great place to do it. And the MN chapter of the ACLU is looking for people to staff their booth. I’ll be there, will you join me?

Just really really busy. I’ll get back on track soon, I promise. In the meantime here’s a time-lapse video of us moving out of the old place on the 18th. No music, no fancy editing, just quick & dirty.

What did I do this weekend. Well, first off I replace the front brakes on the ole ‘Woo. I had new rotors for her to, but the caliper mounting bracket bolts weren’t budging and considering I was on an incline, I felt it not wise to attempt to use too much force.
Also, I learned how important it is to ensure the jack you bought will fit under your car.
And also, I learned that the previous owners of the vehicle stole the lug nut wrench and the jack handle.
Which meant I had to use the only tool left, a screwdriver, to raise the car’s own jack. No, it wasn’t really fun.
I was actually disappointed the brake pads had as much left on them as they did. I was hoping my soft brakes were the cause of next-to-no pad left. I was wrong - but in a week or two I’ll tackle the rear brake pads and rotors - hopefully those are the ones causing the issue. The guy at Napa, in a super casual glance through a hole in the rim assured me that “Yeah, they’re shot”. So if you can’t trust that, who can you trust?

Then, on Sunday, I went through all of my computer parts and electronic packratting. I managed to go from 4 large plastic bins down to 2. I threw away a lot of things, some of which were:

• 17 computer power supplies (Out of 19, I kept the 2 AT ones for use as bench power supplies)
• 5 cell phones of varying age, the newest being about 5 years old
• 11 hard drives, with a combined storage total of 9GB!
• Batteries for a laptop I don’t have any more
• Batteries for several cameras I don’t have any more
• Easily 300 feet of coax cable alone - plus about 200 feet of misc cable
• A ginormous box of obsolete electronic devices from a local school district. A lot of Mac gear.
• 2 complete PCs, not anywhere near powerful enough to do anything of much use these days.

I also have something like 35 12 foot long brown extension cords.

All of this is part of my “One Project, One Trip” mentality. If I have a project to complete, I’ll buy the main parts of it and anything else I think I need but don’t know if I have.

So I think I’ll start making a home inventory system for the office. Keep all my cables tagged and organized. Same with the tools. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well make it web enabled, so I can query it from Home Depot and see that yes, I do have a 25 foot long S-Video cable. And if I’m going to do all that, I might as well throw my barcode scanner into it, so I can just scan things when I get them and know what they are right away.

Ain’t technology great?

I’ll have some pictures of the brake action later, but forgot to take some of the cable action. However, I will be taking timed pictures of the move out date, so I can make a neat little time-lapse movie about it.

Anyway - big move happens this Friday. And I think we’ll be ready.

It’s that time of the year again, when the Solstice Film Festival descends upon downtown St. Paul, turning the Fitzgerald theater and the surrounding area into a hub of entertainment, showcasing films from the up and coming film makers from all over the world!

And, even more importantly, it’s a great time to drink! Yes, I missed it last year but I won’t this - it’s the 2nd annual SFF pub crawl and look-a-like contest! Starting Saturday, June 14th, 5:00pm at Moose Country Press and ending… well, who knows - it’s bound to be the most incredible evening you won’t remember. A lowly $30 buys you an SFF All Access Pass, transportation to all the pubs and specials on the drinks!

The only bad part? It’s limited to 180 spots. So hurry up and sign up for it, come see me, Mishka and friends get stupid drunk and talk about films! Click on the Google calendar link to be whisked away to a GCal event all filled out and ready for you to click ‘Save’ - it couldn’t be easier!

Well another Story Slam goes off without a hitch. And they are seriously getting better and better with every iteration. The audience is larger and louder, the orators are more confident and the lines get delivered at the right time. It was absolutely great! This was seriously the best one to date, and gets me salivating when I think about when the next one will be. Talked to some of the regulars, met some amazing new Slammers and possibly made a connection that could get me into an underground I’ve been trying to get into for years - as a photographer of course.

If you aren’t coming to this thing, what in the hell is wrong with you? It’s awesome! I better see you at the next one; eat, drink, laugh, cry and have your fill of some of the best¹ slammers the TC has to offer!

And speaking of art and what not - starting Friday and going on all weekend it’s the St. Paul Art Crawl!! Hundreds of artists located throughout lowertown St. Paul will be swinging open their doors and letting you in to peek at their wares - and liberate you of any extra Franklins you might be carrying around. So go ahead and print out the map and start marking off where you’d like to go. And if you plan on stopping by the Rossmor building², be sure to let me know. We can have a few beers and play Super Smash Brothers on the Wii. I might throw out a few things this time, but it’s doubtful - both my neighbors are photographers and both of them are also exhibiting. Too many cooks and all that jazz. Besides, my website isn’t fully done yet and I’m busy getting right for a gallery exhibition I have all next month at the Black Dog.

Hoping to see you there! (Or here, even)

1. And, yes, some of the not-so-best [↩]
2. Link doesn’t go to the real website, because for some reason it isn’t coming up for me. WTF? [↩]

I was messing around with code this week and a thought hit me - wouldn’t it be cool if someone animated the MN DOT traffic map? Hell yeah it would be! So I wrote a bot, called SnapShot, that sucks images off websites at a regular interval. Aimed it at the DOT website, and waited 24 hours. Then I took the 2100+ images and some Nekromantix and pow, there you have it - a neat little video. Check it out below!

It starts out slow and ends slow - but it’s traffic from Midnight to Midnight, so what did you expect? Also, you’ll notice occasional ‘glitches’ - this is when I’d be downloading a picture at the same time their system was generating one, so I’d receive half an image or less. Opps. I have ideas for another one, which might be a little neater looking.

Additionally, I’ll be have a small exhibition at the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar in downtown St. Paul starting April 29th - come check it out

The first real snow a few days ago - and there’s more on the way.

In the loft looking out:

A shot out the window:

So it truly did snow. Right smack downtown we received about 5 glorious inches of it - and there’s more scheduled for tomorrow.
I did take some pictures looking out of the loft, which I forgot to upload and will do so when I get home. I was going to walk around taking photos, but it was cold and windy and the snow was falling pretty heavily so I said pffft, screw it - back to Team Fortress 2!

But yes, terribly sorry about not uploading a picture. Sometimes it can seem like such a pain - download to my PC, upload to my Flickr account, blah blah blah - I just wish something would do it automagically. Oh wait, there is - Eye-Fi is a recent innovation and one people have been singing the praises of. It combines a 2GB Secure-Digital flash storage card and a WiFi connection all in one wonderfully orange package. You can upload the photos to your PC or you can send them to 1 of 15 photo sharing sites - such as Flickr. The card holds onto new photos until it senses that the WiFi connection you’ve setup is available, and then sends just the newest untransferred photos on over. Don’t want the world seeing all your photos? Configure them to upload as ‘private’ and there you go. Convenience on go! I could really use it and *gasp* don’t ya know, it sells on Amazon and is conveniently on my Wish List! Oh, and with it I’ll need an SD to Compact Flash adapter too. Now get going - Christmas is only a few weeks away!

The St. Paul Winter Carnival is selling shares of stock this year. No, not stock like you’d see on NASDAQ, but a stock in the festival. It’s called the Stock in a Block program and for just $122 “the public can help keep the Carnival “cool” by buying stock in a block of ice. Five dollars from each stock sale will go to the Dorothy Day Center in Saint Paul to help provide warm meals for fellow community members in need.”¹

1. See http://www.winter-carnival.com/stock_in_a_block/ [↩]

If you’ve never heard of ALDI, you should read up on it. Basically, it’s an ultra-low priced supermarket. You can come out with an entire shopping cart full for $50. They can charge such low prices because their whole chain is based on keeping operating costs low. You have to ‘rent’ your shopping cart for .25, which you get back when you’re done. They don’t accept any form of credit card (only recently allowing debit cards), they charge you for bags, and the aisles are literally pallets full of food set on the ground. Low low costs!

Now, it makes for some really interesting people watching. You get the entire gambit there, from the folks in their Porsche SUV to the people who can’t even afford a working bicycle. And you get to watch them interact.

We go there for a lot of the staples - like cereal, canned vegetables, ramen, noodles, etc - stuff we end up keeping on hand. A lot of their store brand items are just as good, but insanely cheaper. Instead of $2 for a box of Mac N Cheese, it’s 10 for a $1. How do they do it? Low overhead. There’s probably questionable purchases where they get their food supply from but I don’t want to even think about it.

Anyway, we were there on Sunday picking up a few things and a new line opened up. Well, the line we were in was quite long, it must have been a good 12-14 people deep, stretching around a few pallets. Of course, a fairly large opinionated woman who was at the very end of the line rushed to the new one.

Or tried to, until the armed guard stopped her.

Seems it’s a new policy at that Aldi that when a new line opens up, the people waiting longest in the old line get to go to the new one. Sounds like a good policy right? Very fair, the people waiting the longest get helped first. Oh, well not according to this woman - she made such a ruckus, cursing the guard, calling him a racist (She was black, but the person who was grabbed from the old line and sent to the new line was black too - so I don’t think race was really an issue), stating this was never like this before - to which he kept saying it’s a new policy, and to live with it. The entire time she waited in line, she was muttering under her breath - as I and my fellow shoppers just smirked slightly and shrugged at the guard in the Minnesota typical “Some people, what can ya do?” fashion.

Pointless story, but then this is a blog right?

This weeks topic at In The Loop was Charity: What Gives? Did you know that the US is #1 when it comes to donating money, but only #8 when it comes to donating time? Listen to this weeks show Sunday 6pm on MPR (91.1FM for those of us in the Twin Cities - Find your station). There are only 3 more episodes left this season - don’t miss what’s being called “The Prairie Home Companion for Generation X”! We’re taking next week off, so the next taping will be on November 29th. Then it’s December 6th and December 13th. Sign up and come give us your opinion. Curious as to what an episode of In The Loop is like? Listen to last weeks show, Bullying for Grown-Ups - the most packed show we’ve had to date!