2004
Public Radio does RSS
I stumbled across this on the Internet tonight. Guess I just never thought to check, but National Public Radio exposes a lot of content via RSS. Also, Minnesota Public Radio also has an RSS feed through them. Go get some good news feeds!
Labor Day!
Labor day is such a bittersweet holiday. It is always a fun time, but for those of us in the Northern climates it signals the end of the summer and the coming of fall. This year it comes with even more bitterness since we have had such a sad excuse for a summer this year. It feels like fall is in full swing. As we were traveling this weekend it was obvious that the leaves were about to change. I bet it will be full fall color season in a week or two.
Tammy and I went to Lanesboro for much of the holiday weekend. We went to explore the Root River & Harmony-Preston Valley Sate Trail. Lanesboro is the perfect place to explore this more than 50 miles of wonderfully paved bike trails. Out of here we had three days of great riding. We started Friday night with a short ride from Lanesboro to Fountain for 22.4 miles round trip. Then on Saturday we did a longer ride from Lanesboro to Houston which was 62.2 miles round trip and finished on Sunday with a ride to Harmony and back for 45 miles total. We got around 130 miles in for the three days and had some really great trails.
We stayed at the Habberstad House Bed & Breakfast. This is a great B&B! It was at the top of the list with our favorite B&Bs that we have ever stayed in. The owners, Nancy and Dave, are fabulous. The rooms are great, and breakfast was wonderful. We will definitely revisit upon a return to Lanesboro.
In addition to cycling in Lanesboro we also added a piece to our art collection. We stopped by the Cornucopia Art Center while we were there and saw some work by a Superior, WI artist named Erik Pearson that we really liked. We can’t wait for it to arrive. It’s unique and different than our other art and I think it’s going to be great fun.
We returned to the cities and a lot of rain. Due to the rain we ended up not going to the Jack Johnson concert we had tickets to and instead went to see Collateral. Good movie, lots of action. It was a bit predictable though.
On Labor Day Tammy ran the MDRA Victory 10k. I got up early and rode my bike up there to get some miles in and watch her do the run. I really don’t like getting up at 6:30 am on a holiday, but it also lets you get so much done in the day! I had a nice ride to the run and then cheered on runners as they went by. I saw a shirt for this movement called Run Against Bush. Pretty amazing how motivated our current president has made people, myself included.
All in all, a great, relaxing holiday! I put up some miscellaneous photos if you’re interested.
Site Tuning
I’ve been having a lot of fun lately tuning up our site. I’ve been able to “stand on the shoulders of giants” leveraging a lot of open source stuff and cut & paste hacking and slashing. Newest addition is linking to our photo albums with picture highlights. Huge thanks to Edo van Vliet for posting code to do this.
Satellite Radio
We’ve decided that before we go on our next big road trip we are going to take the jump to satellite radio. I’ve spent some time this evening doing searches on the two providers in this market – XM and Sirius. This is so similar to the Dish Network v. DirecTV. Aargh!
It seems like XM is better if you want premium content and more repeaters, but concerns about commercials and Clear Channel has an ownership interest. Sirius is supposed to have much better music quality (both in programming and quality of encoding), fewer commercials and importantly they have an exclusive with NPR.
Oh the horrors of making these consumer electronics decisions. Any suggestions?
Renaissance Festival
We made our 2nd trip of the year to the Renaissance Festival, this time with Tracy and Jeff. The RenFest is like a one day vacation. Great time to laze around in the afternoon, have some cheap wine and enjoy some relaxation.
Manchurian [Haliburton] Candidate
Tammy and I went to see the new version of the Manchurian Candidate last night. Much more suspenseful than the original, however lacking Frank Sinatra. Maybe it’s just my particular political views but the concept of the movie seemed a little closer to home than I would like.
Is fear of flying contagious?
I’ve flown many times. In fact, at one point I was flying about 50% of the time for work. Week in the office, week on the road. I’ve never thought that much about flying, it’s just something that you need to do. No big deal.
When Tammy told me that she didn’t like to fly I didn’t really think that much about it. That is, until we flew together the first time. As she stomped her feet and told me to stop the plane from shaking in the turbulence I realized that she wasn’t joking, she really is scared of flying. After hearing her go on about going down in burning flames and how nobody survives I find myself sitting on the plane watching the wing and wondering, is it really supposed to bend that much?
Flights I’ve been on since being exposed to her phobia have me on pins and needles. I watch the wing. I watch the cabin. Have you ever noticed how the cabin and fuselage of the plane move independently? On a recent international flight there was a good three inches of movement between the two structures. How much can it move? As I descended on a recent flight into Chicago through the clouds I couldn’t help but wonder if there were other planes out there. Is it really safe to be going 250 mph when you can’t see anything?
Cleary I need to regain my innocence and ignorance about flying and stop listening to her.
Garden State
Tonight Tammy and I took it easy and went to a movie. We decided to check out Garden State. I really liked the movie. If you enjoyed movies like Lost in Translation or Niagara, Niagara, I’m almost positive that you will like Garden State. I left the movie also thinking that it reminded me a lot of The Graduate, even though I couldn’t figure out why.
It took me a moment to get over Zach Braff. Braff wrote, directed and starred in this. I’m not that big of a fan of Scrubs, and while this movie has nothing to do with Scrubs I kept on thinking about it with him on the screen in front of me. However, given the quality of this movie and that it was his deal, I left with much more respect for him.
I’m tempted to get the soundtrack. The music in the film was perfect.
Vacation Recap
It’s a week later and we finally finished putting up everything from our trip. It takes a while to sort through over 2,200 pictures!
We were thinking of having some family over to go through some of our selected shots but decided against that in favor of putting up our photos with worthwhile captions of what you are looking at. You can make us feel good for spending the time to write all those captions by clicking through the pictures individually. They are divided into pictures from the Tour de France, shots in Paris and last from the hiking trip (Tammy wrote the captions for the hiking trip as her form of a ‘blog’ of that part of our trip).
I also got the data downloaded from my GPS and put up maps of each day of our hikes. I put them inline in the blog posts so you can see where we were hiking on the map.
The photo albums for our Europe 2004 trip referenced here are no longer online, and sadly the database that hosted them is lost so I cannot restore the curated captions that Tammy added to various photos. ☹️
Thunderbird
I’ve really not cared for Outlook Express for quite a while now so I’m giving Mozilla Thunderbird a shot. So far, it’s pretty good. Have to change some of my habits around keyboard shortcuts and the like. The news reader is much better than the Outlook one, but that isn’t saying much. We’ll see how this goes.