368MB of Ads

It has been a really long time since I used the Wired application on my iPad, but I recently fired it up and bought an issue to peruse. The experience could not have been more frustrating!

First, after I paid for the content, I wasn’t able to download it because my iPad’s storage was full. I use the option in iTunes to fill empty space with music. I had to go delete a movie to make room for a magazine. Somehow a magazine is as big as a movie?

After deleting, the download starts. 368 MB of data. This takes forever. Even on a good, fast Internet connection. About 15 minutes later I still see the bar filling up.

Still waiting. Finally it finishes, and I think I can now finally take a look at what I bought. Oh wait, I guess we have to “Install” this too?

About 20 minutes after I started I could browse through far too many advertisements. Don’t think I’ll be repeating this process any time soon.

Driveway Avalanche

Our driveway provides almost no opportunity for me to get snow out of the way. I blow a lot of it over the fence into the backyard, but also blow a lot of it against my neighbors garage. There is a limit to how high you can go though.

I’ve debated next fall creating a series of wood shelves to set next to the neighbors garage. I could then blow the snow vertically into the shelves and I could get it 10 or 12 feet in the air. It would work as a form of snow fence.

We got snowed in again. The weather says we got 14 inches of snow on Sunday. Happily it was a long weekend so we just stayed inside and let it come down.

New Standards Pano at Lantern Festival Gala

Here is a shot of the scene while the New Standards performed at the Lantern Festival.

This was taken with You Gotta See This! on my iPhone 4.

New Standards at Lantern Festival Gala

One of our favorite bands, The New Standards, announced they were playing at the Lantern Festival Gala for Yinghua Academy.

Yinghua is a Chinese immersion school in Minneapolis and we have a few friends that send their kids to the school. We’ve heard nothing but good things. Tammy picked up tickets so we could support a good school and get to see a relatively small and intimate performance by The New Standards.

It was a really good show.

See list of The New Standards shows.

I 💚 Unix

Maybe this should be titled “I [Heart] Shell”, but it seems more fitting to lay praise at Unix. Sometimes you do something on the prompt and you just look and think “Wow, that would be crazy hard on any other platform!”.

while true; do 
  (date; netstat -n | grep 1.2.3.4 | awk '{print $6}' | sort | uniq -c; sleep 300;);
done

I was debugging a problem with leaking network connections to a host and needed to see what was going on, checking in every 5 minutes.

I was at Ambrosia Espresso for a coffee yesterday. I got my typical macchiato. They got it right on the demitasse, but what is with the giant plate?

Tammy surprised me with a Chemex Coffeemaker for Valentine’s Day. I brewed a batch of coffee with it for the first time today and it was great. So smooth, nearly no acidity. This is a great option for occasions where I want a cup of coffee instead of an espresso.

Minnehaha Creek caught my attention this morning, and it did again this evening on the way home.

Minnehaha Creek was picturesque this morning coming through Minnehaha Creek West Park with a light fog from the snow melt. The creek appears thawed when still frozen. An entire stream of ice melt is flowing on top of the frozen creek.