doodledee

We've had some snow accumulation here in the metro area over the last 24 hours so I'd like to take a minute to remind everyone of proper snow clearing etiquette. Sit up straight and pay attention.

• First and foremost, if the snow has not accumulated to a dept of at least 6 inches, it is NOT appropriate to use mechanical assistance when clearing your sidewalk and/or driveway. And by 'mechanical assistance' I mean "anything that makes noise and ruins my otherwise peaceful snow shoveling experience". This includes snow blowers, power shovels, leaf blowers, hair dryers, or any other type of stupid tool that destroys nature's perfect tranquility after a snow storm. I know, I know, you *really* want to use your new 25-horsepower riding snowblower with a heated cab and a CD player to clear your 15 foot driveway, but I'm sorry, you'll have to wait until it's justified, which, if you're lucky, is maybe once or twice a year. Have fun with that cost benefit analysis, then. Doofs.
• No matter how tempting, do NOT shovel or blow your snow into an area of your neighbor's property that they have to keep clear of snow and/or use as a dumping ground for their own snow. (Duh.) Furthermore, do not assault your neighbor's house with the snow blasting out of your snowblower. (Duh again.) Put another way: winter etiquette dictates it is fine to throw reasonable amounts of snow into your neighbor's yard, just not onto their sidewalk, driveway, or house. That may seem counterintuitive at first, so read it again to make sure you understand it. (Your neighbors probably won't.)
• If you park your car outside and it gets snowed on, it should be brushed off thoroughly before you take to the roads. This is in contrast to the less common but still popular technique of clearing off just the driver's side half of the windshield and then hitting the streets to let the wind handle the rest. Doing so creates a thundercloud sized mobile blizzard on the freeway that effectively blinds everyone behind you. You may think you're a genius, but trust me, you're not. Brush it off next time.

There may be others, but I can't think of any right now. And remember, I don't make the rules, I just abide by them. You should, too. Hooray for winter.

When we woke up on Saturday morning we realized there wasn't any coffee in the house. Being a great guy, I naturally volunteered to down to Dunn Bros and get some. (I'm a coffee snob, and I like their beans best, so I'm happy to fork over the big bucks to get the good stuff.) (I also like the beans over at Coffee and Tea Ltd., but they're not open at 7:15 on a Saturday morning. Sucks to be them.)

I pulled on a pair of bitch pants and put on a stocking cap and drive over there, teeth unbrushed, half awake, all the while counting the minutes until I'd be home grinding and brewing. When I walked in, I noticed that the front of place had been taken over by a medium sized group of your typical fourtysomething Linden Hills elitists. (Good thing I drove the Saab.) Knowing how stupidly slow the lines move at Dunn Bros, a burst of panic set in that the line would horrible even at this early hour. I caught a break, though, as the last couple appeared to have ordered already and there was no waiting at the register.

I put in my order and waited for the girl to bag my beans. I'm just standing there, in my own little foggy world. It's quiet, it smells nice, I'm starting to wake up, everything is going swell. I watch the dude making drinks and he finishes up the last of the ones he's making and puts it down on the counter.

"Medium latte," he says as he turns to punch something into the computer display.

Then, out of nowhere, the woman waiting for her drink explodes with a "WELL COULD I HAVE A LARGE BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I PAID FOR!"

The whole place kind of goes quiet. The coffee dude turns to look at his computer thing.

"It says medium on the screen, you only paid for a medium."

"WELL THEN YOU SCREWED UP MY ORDER, BECAUSE I ORDERED A LARGE!"

More awkward silence.

Finally the kid says, "I could make you a small to make up the difference, maybe?"

The lady repeats, "WELL I PAID FOR A LARGE".

And that's when I snapped. Now keep in mind it's like 7:15. And I haven't had coffee yet. And I don't really like people to begin with. Especially jerks.

"No no no no no no no no no", I said, though I didn't look at her, I just keep staring straight ahead. "Why do you have to be a bitch so early in the morning?"

Coffee dude looks at me. More awkward silence. Finally the bitch lady just gives up and turns to walk away, apparently now satisfied with her previously inadequate medium latte. As she did she turned to the dude she was with and stage-whispered "I PAID FOR A LARGE". And I just laughed, because she was so lame.

And then I got my beans and went home. And even though it cheapens the story, I'll admit that after I said something I kinda hoped the kid would give me a free drink or something. But he didn't. Oh well.

One of my favorite parts about Black Friday is how neatly it divides all of society into two distinct groups. I like to call them The Idiots and The Smugs.

The first group, The Idiots, includes the people who buy into the hype and the hope and the hysteria. They're the people pouring over the ads, reading the internet sites, and developing game plans about where they'll go and what they'll buy and talking-up how they'll be done and home before 8am. The most extreme of this group are the wackos who drive over to Best Buy at 9pm on Thanksgiving night with their lunchboxes and lawn chairs, totally at peace with their decision to camp out in a parking lot in the name of saving a couple of hundred bucks on a crappy laptop. Have fun with that, then.

The second group, The Smugs, includes the people who refuse to go out at all. They hide in their homes and laugh at the television footage of the The Idiots trampling each other down at the Megalomart. The Smugs can be further subdivided into those who a) bury their self-righteousness behind the classic "I don't like crowds" excuse or b) wear it proudly on their sleeve. Subdivision aside, it goes without saying that all Smugs think they're better than Idiots. ("That's me!" - Libby).

I personally don't really fit into either group. On one hand I can totally see how getting up at 3am to chase after a $17 DVD player is certifiably loony, but on the other hand, there's no way I'm going to miss out on a social spectacle of this magnitude. Put another way: I don't want the DVD player, I just want to see the doofs who do. So that's why I go out. To soak it all in. To see the chaos. To see the insanity. To watch grown adults basically have tantrums. How can you *not* want to see that? And hey, if you pick up a $2.77 snow shovel while you're out, well then kudos to you. And by "you" I mean "me".

Unfortunately, I now realize I don't have too much to report from BF05. It was a little snowy and I think more people than usual got scared and stayed home. I also didn't hit the streets until like 7:30, so the hardcore frenzy was long since over. It was still a madhouse everywhere I went, though, and the stress levels were up enough that I got to witness a couple of good screaming meltdowns. I also saw one of those surreal "only on Black Friday" moments where an employee dude at Menard's came out with a pallet full of $2 fleece blankets and customers swarmed him like starving refugees attacking a UN food truck. Awesome.

I also got some free hot cocoa at CompUSA to go with my bitchin' new wireless mouse. Can't argue with that.

I can't speak for what's his name, but from my perspective the show went quite a bit better than our first outing. I'm going to attribute that fact to a couple of things. First, I seriously didn't care; I was just there to have fun, and if I went down in flames it wasn't going to be a big deal. (I'm not even sure why it was a big deal the first time, but at the time it sure seemed like it was.) Second, I didn't prepare as much. From what I remember - although I've never actually listened to the recording - the most awkward parts of our first outing were the parts where we kinda read a screenplay. Screenplays make for crappy talk radio. Improv and goofing is more better. So that's what we went with. And lastly, I thought having Rex come by for an interview gave us something more substantive to talk about. Nobody called, but hey, I thought it went great and it was cool that he did it for us.

Thanks if you listened. Feel free to write to the station and beg for them to put us back on if you didn't.

Meta Media Plaudits - audio of the interview with Rex [mnspeak]
please return to your regularly scheduled programming [doodledee]
am1500 [am1500]

Evidence that the first cold snap of the season may have extended deep, deep into the underworld:

• There are serious rumors that the Wolves are trying to make a move to get Stephon Marbury back on the team. Last time I checked, he still gets boo'd every time he touches the ball when his team du jour visits the Target center. Nostradoodle predicts all will be quickly forgiven if he turns out to be The Missing Piece.

• Me and what's his name will be back on am1500 on Sunday afternoon for two more hours of insanely awkward talk radio. The station called us this week and asked if we could go on this weekend. I'm busy with the bathroom remodel so the prep will be light and the 'wing-it' factor will be high. Tune in and hear the train wreck live. Choo-choo! [earlier]
• All other evidence pretty much pales in comparison.

Up until this point I haven't been documenting my bathroom remodel project online. It's probably stupid that I haven't been, as I'm sure someday I'll want to look back on all the insanity and laugh and laugh about how stupid I was to think that replacing some old wall tiles with some new wall tiles could be anything but a walk in the park. (It sure sounds easy, doesn't it? "Remove old tile, install new tile". What could go wrong? It's not like it's the only bathroom in the house or anything. Oh wait, it is.) But in reality I think I've been avoiding it because I want to pretend it just... isn't... happening.

So anyway, the bathroom has needed new tile since way back when we first moved in. The prior owners did some goofy half ass remodeling work and instead of replacing the sections of tile they removed, they just hung up these ugly "decorative" filler boards. (keyword: ugly.) Add in the serious wall damage I did during Operation New Plumbing and you've got yourself a crappy status quo. The time had come for something to be done.

Obsessed with my theory that "bartering is the future and the future is now", I jumped on craigslist and attempted to barter for some tile work. Within a day or two I had found a guy and he came over and everything seemed cool. At least it did right up until the point where he decided to sleep in on the day we were supposed to start working. I tried to be cool about it, but after he was four hours late and still "on his way", I just got fed up and I fired him. Yay me. All I do is stand up for the little guy. Who cares that I rented one of those TUBS dumpsters and now they were going ot take it back empty. It was worth it to teach Mr. No Show a lesson. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. And I'm sure he felt bad right up until he started on a new gig 40 minutes I fired him. Funny how that works.

Back to square one. First step: bitch about my situation at work. Lucky for me one of the guys in the office has a cousin who does tile work. Apparently he's some kind of tile ninja or something. Jackpot. I give him a call and he comes over and is super nice and really flexible about work schedule so I go ahead and hire him. Then I make a few calls and get a couple of bids for the tear out and prep work. I end up going with this one dude who lives way out of town but does a lot of work here in the cities. He built neighbor.commie.mike's deck last summer and he seemed to do a bang up job. He also lets homeowners work with him, which is cool if you're looking to save a few bucks. Which I always am. Duh.

Last Monday morning the destruction began. Since then we've been working 08:00 - 21:00 every day, with no breaks. (Seriously, today was the first day since Monday that I ate lunch. Who works like that?) Bash out the old walls, put up the new walls. Carry heavy tubs of debris downstairs, bag it for disposal, haul to garage. It's all very honest stuff. I even drove a truck to go to home depot for supplies. Watch out. The only surprise so far has been the mess. It's worse than I expected. I try and keep up but it's of no use. On Tuesday the dude I'm working with looks at me and says "are you some kind of neat freak or something?" Yeah, that must be it.

We're basically done with the prep work now. New durock and/or sheetrock is in and the first coat of mud and tape is on the wall. The door and window trim go back up tomorrow and then the rock star tile guy comes on Friday afternoon to begin his weekend tilefest. With luck he's happy with the prep job and it all goes well. Fingers.crossed(). I need my shower back.

I also need a 45 minute soak in a hot tub. Too bad I don't have one. Hint.

There's been a lot of talk in the media lately - like yesterday, I think - about huge companies and web logs (or "blogs") and how the companies sometimes read blogs to see what people are saying about them. I guess we're all supposed to be shocked to learn that giant multinational corporations who spend billions of dollars carefully constructing a brand would go so far as to care about how it's perceived. Put me down for a "duh".

Over the years I've also read blog entries stories from the web-savvy dork crowd bemoaning the fact that more companies don't blog for themselves or at least provide news feeds or some such similar public persona. And in a way, I guess I can kinda agree with them, because hey, who doesn't want to read about how things are going down at the scotch tape factory and/or the SUPER funny thing Guidant's cat did that afternoon in the stent lab. Oh wait. What I meant to say was that consuming PR dronespeak via RSS holds no more appeal to me than it does when it's delivered via 'traditional' channels - hint: no appeal - and I honestly don't get why anyone would say otherwise. Forcefeed much?

I guess there are some cases where a company might have a valid reason to publish or syndicate information to the public, though they're not immediately obvious and they're certainly not without risk. I bring this up because the other day I was browsing IBM's website looking for information on how they were re-tooling their latest product stack to be buzzword compliant and I saw a link titled something like "Blog With the SOA Rock Stars". Being a fan of service oriented architectures, rock stars, and banner ads, I naturally clicked on it without hesitation. This is gonna be gooooood!

So up comes a page full of Rock Stars with little bios and links to their blogs. I was happy to see that most were actual geeks, not just marketing doofs. "Neat," I think, "maybe this particular giant company has figured out a good blogging strategy, I'll read a few and see what they have to say". So I start to dig in and OF COURSE the content is mostly "weeee! this blogging stuff is gonna be fun!" followed by maybe an insightful entry or two followed by a few months of nothing followed by a cliche post about not posting much. Now I'm not ripping the people who write them - especially the dude who's a Fellow, they don't just give that title away - because I'm sure they weren't given any free time to write or whatever, but how bad does it look when a company FEATURES a bunch of blogs and then they turn out to be worthless? Can you say way worse than if they had never blogged in the first place? I thought you could.

In conclusion, until notified otherwise, all blogs everywhere remain stupid.

Blog With The SOA Rock Stars [websphere]
Businesses Get Blogged [strib]
Blogging for Business [mnteractive] - covered better in a different entry, but I couldn't find it.

Everyone's favorite deconstructionist art rock alt country singer songwriter Jeff Tweedy came to town last night for a sold out solo acoustic gig down at First Avenue. Hells yeah you know I'd be there for that. The show ended up being just shy of 2 hours and from the 'Sunken Treasure' opener to the 'Spiders' encore basically everything was working for me. He even brought his kid up on stage to play drums for one song. It was like a family campfire sing-a-long or something. Perfect for a Sunday night.

I'll admit I was expecting a couple of surprise local guests, but other than a nice 'Pecan Pie' duet with Kraig Johnson it wasn't meant to be. Ah, well, maybe next time.

Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche was the opener. He did maybe 30 minutes of vocal-less spaced out polyrhythmic percussion. I thought it was mint. A lot of people talked through his set, though, so maybe I was wrong and it actually sucked.

Jeff Tweedy – 11/6/2005 [wilcobase]

Well, this was the first time I've seen Trey since he decided to break-up the band so he could hang out with Dave Matthews and try and be a radio star and it was pretty much what I expected. Nutshell: 1/3 melt-your-face-off mint, 1/3 good, and 1/3 good-god-when-will-this-be-over. The newer stuff wasn't super familiar to me but for the most part I didn't find it as horrible as people are saying it is (some of it was, just not all of it). Maybe the album will sound like crap, who knows. The older stuff has clearly matured and grown - 'Push On' has been reworked into some crazy big band type of arrangement, for example - but I think a lot of it has gotten even better with age (Mr. C, Money Love). And even though he stumbled through them, the all-Phish acoustic mini set he played mid-show was fan-effing-tastic from where I stood.

I kept my expectations low and they were more or less exceeded. Can't argue with that.

Trey Anastasio - 11/2/05 [phantasytour]