doodledee

We had some people over for dinner tonight. The guest list included John Keller, back from France for the holiday season. It was fun.

On a 'glad I have the day off tomorrow' note, I think I may have broken my personal record for the worst kitchen disaster after cooking one meal. Yes, those are dishes on the floor. Yes, there are still dishes on the table. And yes, that's a blowtorch.

I think 'paint the bathroom' has been on our to-do list since the day we moved into the house. It wasn't ugly or anything, it just needed to be done. Especially after I tore the shower wall down one night trying to find the source of a wet spot on the dining room ceiling. Cowabunga.

Like a lot of things that involve work, however, this task went neglected. This may be because the bathroom didn't really need repainting, or, more likely, because I didn't want to repaint anything, regardless of its need. Oh, we talked a lot about it, and one time we even went as far as going and getting a bunch of those little paint samples to see what we liked, but deep down I knew I was kidding myself thinking it would ever really happen.

Well today we got our act together and got it done. Ceiling, walls, the whole kit and caboodle. What once was green now is blue. What once was white, is still, well, white.

For the most part it went well, yet not unlike those new 7-layer nachos at the Bell, it's a little unsettling to have a different color room in the house. I don't know if it's a feng shui thing or a tai chi thing or a house entropy thing or maybe just some non-related disturbance in the force, but I don't trust the new room. I'm sure I'll grow to love it and all, but for now, I'm keeping it on probation.

The documentary People Like Us - Class in America aired on PBS tonight. Wow was it good.

One section of the show focused on an 'upper class' high school in Texas. They showed kids driving super fancy cars and living the high life at the expense of their parents. It was startling to hear how the kids spoke about their fellow classmates and society in general. I wish they had interviewed the parents so we could have seen what types of values were being taught at home.

Try and catch it on rerun if you can.

A few weeks back, Grossie was 'feeling lucky'. He decided the biggest bang for his luck would be to win the Powerball, which, at the time, was at like $65M.

Grossie is one of the luckiest guys I know. When he gets 'the feeling', you just go with it. Put another way, when he asks you out of nowhere for $5 for lottery tickets, you give it to him without asking questions. Especially irrelevant ones like, "what if we don't win?" or "does this sweater make me look fat?"

Now I know what you're thinking: the Powerball is too big and too hard to win. Millions of rubes play all the time and never hit the jackpot, you're no different than they are. Well it turns out you'd be WRONG. We have Grossie!

We won $3.

So that was lame.

Jump to today. A couple of weeks have gone by and it's nutso crazytime because the jackpot is up to like $300M. And in what must be a true test of faith for millions of people, the drawing is on Christmas day.

Figuring Grossie's luck was maybe just mistimed, I decided to play again. On the way to Rochester, Libby and I stopped and picked up a bunch of tickets. We then passed them out to people we saw over the holiday. Then we kept the extras. Then I saw the drawing. Then I checked our numbers.

We won $0.

Bah humbug.

Did some last minute christmas shopping today.

Shopping so close to christmas day is like being in an episode of the twilight zone. Whereas even a week ago, the stores were festive and fun, full of couples drinking cider and laughing at the season, today, the stores are 95% dudes, and nobody is smiling anymore.

At Target, I saw a guy ask one of his kids if he thought "mommy would like a candle" that was being featured on the end of an isle. He wasn't joking either, he was desperate. When the kid didn't say anything, the dude looked ready to fall to the floor, tuck into a fetal position, and wait for christmas to pass.

"No sympathy!" - Libby, upon hearing the story.

Went to that new Game Works place the other night for a work thing. Two hours of non-stop expensive video game playing. They had a sit down Star Wars pod racer game where you race against your buddies. That was cool. They also had some huge 6 player race car game with graphics from the 80's. That was less cool.

On the food end, the ribs and chicken fingers were good. The wings were crap.

It'd be fun to go back, but I'm in no hurry.

There's a new Missy song out. It's on the radio every 5 minutes. It's kinda fun, even if it is a little raunchy.

There's this one part during the song where she raps something about flipping it down and reversing it. I have no idea what that means, but right after that line, the song kinda stutters and plays back what she just said in reverse. Neat.

Over lunch a week or so ago, we got to talking about the reversing effect. This naturally lead into talking about recording yourself speaking backwards and then playing it reversed and seeing if you could understand it. (Early 90's TV junkies may remember this being done to great effect on Twin Peaks during the Red Room scenes.) Some people said they had tried it themselves and that it was a hoot.

I'm always up for a hoot, so tonight I spent a few minutes trying to say stuff in reverse and then play it back to see if I could understand it. Turns out it's harder to make it sound 'right' than I thought it would be. Especially if you accidentally drop a raisin on the microphone while you're trying to record.

Here it is in reverse, just in case you were wondering.

Oops.

There was a ruling today on an important case involving the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA is a law that makes it a crime to create a technology that circumvents a different technology that protects copyrighted material. In simpler speak, it makes it illegal to create a computer program that breaks the 'security' that protects something that is copyrighted.

As an example, every DVD has some fancy encryption stuff built into it so that it's impossible to make a copy of it. A few years back, some dudes in Europe figured out how to break the copy protection. Because the content of the DVD itself - a movie - is copyrighted, the DMCA says that by creating a technology to circumvent the copy protection, the programmers have broken the law.

Well, you say, what's the big deal? You probably just want to give your friend a copy of your wide-screen Attack of the Clones anyway, right? The big deal is that giving away a copy has always been illegal under existing copyright law. Under that same law, however, making yourself a 'backup' copy isn't illegal, because you own it and that's 'fair use'.

As another example, think about buying a CD. It's considered fair use to take that CD home and copy it as many times as you want (within reason, obviously). Now you can't give those copies away and you can't sell the copies and, in fact, you can't even legally keep a copy and sell the original. While you own it, however, you can use what you purchased in the way you see fit.

So according to copyright law, DVD owners should be able to use the DVD copying program to legally make copies for themselves. Unfortunately, the DMCA makes it a crime to even write the program in the first place. Whaa?

All this upsets a lot of people, especially geeks. Geeks are pissed because it prevents us from learning about how bad existing encryption techniques are or how good new ones can be. It prevents innovation, because we can't look at how something 'really works' and try to improve it. We're also pissed because it's a poorly worded, stupid law.

Non-geeks should be pissed, too. The DMCA is more restrictive in protecting the protector than the laws that protect what is trying to be protected. Glory, that's crazy.

So hey, get mad.

Then go drink some eggnog and chill out. Life's too short to be cranked up all the time.

Over the last week or so, I've gone to more meetings than in any other time in my professional life. They start in the morning and go all through the afternoon. And these aren't just 'meetings', either. They're roll-up your sleeves, argue with your neighbors, and redefine your business processes type meetings. You feel beat-up coming out of them. For a while, I'd wake up in the morning hungry for more, but now I'm starting to get a little fragile. I can't wait 'til I snap, that's usually fun to watch.

Some things I've done to help stay sane:

• After Libby and Molly baked a triple batch of sprtiz cookies tonight, I ate about 20 of them. Rock on, butter lovers.
• While grocery shopping at Cub yesterday, I made the check out girl wear a santa hat while ringing through my groceries. It's probably best not to ask why I had a santa hat with me at the time.
• I say the word 'caw' a lot. Loudly.

That last one might be actually be sign that the sanity preservation techniques I've chosen haven't been as effective as I would have hoped.

Libby and I were talking today and we realized that Eric Clapton annoys both of us. Stranger still, neither one of us really knows why.

I remember being a huge Clapton fan. I loved that scene in Goodfellas where Layla is playing as the screen shows the aftermath of the big heist. I put Wonderful Tonight on countless chick focused mix tapes. I watched the Mtv Unplugged thing when it happened and bought the CD the day it came out.

Now, out of nowhere, he's a drag. So much so that I change the station when he comes on the radio and I never would think to shuffle a Clapton disc into my rotation. Maybe it's because you hear the same 5 songs over and over and over. Or maybe it's overexposure in general. Or maybe it's his beard, who knows.

Unless you were a Weird Al fan, it's strange to realize that you no longer like something you used to really like. I think it's pretty common to 'move on' from something, but in most cases you don't end up 'disliking it' as must as you just become 'tired of it'. In this case, I've concluded I simply dislike Clapton.

Huh.

Three guys beat up Moby after one of his shows the other night. That's so lame on so many levels.

Someday I'll get to wake up and read that somebody who really deserved it got their butt kicked. Somebody like the Menards guy or Trent Lott or Roseanne.

Here's a tip: before moving your CD player a bunch of times, take all the CDs out. If you don't, it may not work when you plug it back in.
Oops.

Here's another one of those stupid, but surprisingly addictive little games.

The sound kinda grew on me.

A geeky reader pointed out that I was wrong when I said yesterday was the 'shortest day of the year'. Fer duh, it's not the solstice, it's just dark outside. What I really should have said was 'earliest sunset', which is indeed the case, and is what I remember hearing on the radio. Strangely, the sun actually sets later on the true shortest day of the year. Who knew?

Today is the shortest day of the year. At least I think it is. I heard something about it on the news a day or two ago. The sunset was at like 4:30 or something. That means a total of like 20 minutes of daylight, which you never get see anyway, because it's dark when you leave for work and it's dark when you come home. I wonder if that's enough sunlight for the tomatoes in my garden? I'd go check on them if it wasn't so dark all the time.

I gotta be honest, though, I don't mind the early nights in the wintertime. In the summer, it's great to be able to go hit balls at 9:00 or whatever, but come winter, it's all about maxin' and relaxin' on the couch. I think it's actually our nature as human beings to sit down once it's dark outside. More specifically, I think it's my nature to sit about 22 hours a day.

On the other hand, maybe early nightfall is stupid. After all, when you're downhill skiing under lights, the snow looks all flat when there are actually tons of bumps for you to catch your ski on and fall down the hill and get all cold because snow goes down your pants. And that's not good for anybody.

Nahh. Even with snow down my pants, I'd still take the early nights.

In what must be a sickening blow to tens - if not hundreds - of fans, Guns N' Roses has cancelled the rest of their comeback tour. In traditional pissed-off fashion, a bunch of dorks started fights and broke stuff. Wee!

When GNR made their big comeback on whatever Mtv award show that was last fall, it was stupid. Axl was old and fat and lame. The music was tired. I was tired. The saddest part was watching Jimmy Fallon freak out like it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. Tool. A funny tool, but a tool nonetheless. How anybody ever thought they could take that circus on the road is beyond me.

On a non-related comeback note, Phish's new album comes out tomorrow. Seeing as I got shut-out for Chicago mail order, I'll have to take solace in blasting some new tunes while I wait for summer tour to be announced.

On a non-related musical note, I finally ordered a stereo rack for - get this - my stereo. My system has been sitting on the floor of our living room for something like 15 months now. I'd been debating about trying to build one, but seeing as I haven't finished the TV stand I started last February, I figured it was probably best to just go ahead and buy one. That's what I like to call 'being honest with yourself about how lazy you sometimes are.'

Libby went to Rochester tonight, so I sat down and cooked myself a bitchin steak, some hash browns, and a big caesar salad for dinner. I uncorked a bottle of red and turned up some Miles, just to round it out.

Later, just to make sure I didn't mature too much in one night, I played Xbox for a couple of hours.

On a non-related note, in the print version of this article in today's Strib, there was a sweet picture that showed Pawlenty and Molnau looking at a new snowplow down at MNDOT headquarters. They were both packed into the cab of the thing. I was hoping to find it online so I could link to it, because I think it might be the only time Pawlenty has ever be seen carpooling.

What's next, a bus? Methinks not.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before about how my favorite temperature is 2. Every year I get excited for the first day it hits 2 degrees. Mostly because then I get to walk around bitching that even though it's 2, it feels like 1. That's always good for a few yucks.

It's been pretty cold recently, so I figured we'd cross the 2 horizon any day now. Think again, jerky. Check out this temperature graph from the U of M's climate group of the last two or so days.

Is this some kind of joke? I'm not ruling out foul play, I know that much.

Minnesota's budget deficit is an unexpectedly large $4.5B. It's so bad that governor Tim "Death Before Taxes" Pawlenty has started to change his tune on education funding. Bizarrely, the Vikings apparently plan on keeping up the good fight for public money to help pay for a new stadium.

Uhhh, no?

On a non-related note, I ate in the GE cafeteria for the first time today. It's got a real 70's corporate feel to it with a harvest gold color scheme and all that. Not a lot of people were eating at the same time we were, so it was almost kind of depressing. They do have a salad bar, so that's kinda fun. No chocolate milk, though.

On another non-related note, two of our dinner plates at home have gone missing. We used to have 8, now we have 6. I've looked everywhere and can't find them. WTF? How do you lose two plates? My working hypothesis is that I threw them away by mistake when cleaning up one night. That'd be pretty dumb, but I've done worse. Like the time I backed out of the garage and ran over our Weber.

We got our Christmas tree last night. There was some semi-serious debate about whether we could even fit a tree into our house. It's not so much a 'size of door' issue as it is a 'size of house' issue.

We initially thought about one of those tabletop trees that are little and cute and quick to decorate. After some discussion, however, we concluded that we didn't really have a good spot for one of those, other than perhaps this one place that's already full of stuff. That means additional work finding a place for the current stuff and then putting it back after the holiday. Nix that option.

Personally, I was all about buying a 10 foot frazier fur and just moving our dining room furniture to the [newly cleaned] basement for a few weeks. The drawback with that plan is that when we have people over for dinner, everyone would have to sit around the tree like human presents. And while I'd certainly agree that some people would look good wearing a big red bow, not all of us are so lucky. Better nix that option, too.

Ok, where to go to get a tree? Libby refuses to even look at the trees at Bachman's, which I want to do only because I worked there for a couple years back in high school. Sure they're over priced, but they usually have free cider for customers. Yum-o.

As a compromise, we head over to Randy's trees in Saint Louis Park. I have a coupon. Randy is a nice guy and he helps us out. We select and fell a 5 foot scotch pine (Pinaceae Pinus sylvestris) and strap it to the roof of the Saturn. Randy gives us a fresh cut, but Randy won't help with the tie down. Randy is not a lawyer, but Randy knows better than that.

The tree now stands proudly in the corner of our dining room. It's a little snug, but it fits. It's not decorated yet, but you can smell it as soon as you walk in. That's the best part.

Tree on.

A story in the Twin Cities edition of The Business Journal makes the startling claim that the Twin Cities sports market is overextended. What a scoop!

Pssst. I also hear there are a lot of Starbucks around.

hb britney!

Went and saw Leo Kottke play his annual post-Thanksgiving show over at the Ordway tonight. It's a great show. Even if you don't like his music, it's worth going to just for the stage banter.

This older couple (mid-40's) sat in front of us at the show. Their near constant PDA can be summarized in one word: icky. Yeah yeah, you love your wife. Now stop necking and start listening, butthead.

In what turned out to be a deceptively busy day, I also got to use Jman's extra Gopher hockey ticket for the 2pm game against Michigan. During the game, an insipid conversation broke out in the row behind us as to the sticker price of a new Zamboni. Various guesses were made and a call was made to a buddy to check the internet for Zamboni prices. I think the result turned out to be between $50k and $75k, which was lower than I had guessed, but still seemed like a lot of money to spend on a single seat vehicle.