Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 Don't worry.  I'm not going to go through every top news story. I mean, yes, I am horrified and disgusted that yet another hurricane is hitting Louisiana.  I can state, with absolute honesty, that while I am certain that New Orleans is a beautiful city with remarkable history, I shall never set foot in that state, or in New Orleans.  Why not?  I am generally opposed to humidity, I've seen the Mississippi where I care to see it, and I've come to know and love it's upper reaches.  You know, the part that's considered non-navigable.   And as to the news from Afghanistan, horrible, yes.  Unexpected?  Not really.  The Afghans are a people that are apparently too apathetic to rule themselves.  Anyone with a particular collective, view, and the ability to attract and mobilize idiots can certainly run that country.  Which is unfortunate.  But clearly, nearly a generation of occupation managed to accomplish absolutely nothing...

So today was my first visit this year to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival.  Like an old friend, it was waiting for me.  Like a bit of a dork, I needed to get there to reset a number of items personally.  I mean, the Renfest Grounds are big .  If you take a look at that image, it contains more than a few changes, in addition to the entire grounds. For starters, the entrance has moved south on 169. If you pull that image up in another window, right below where it says "Bryan Rock Products Shakopee/Hwy 169" you see a grey line that stops short of the line representing 169 South. That horizontal line is the old entrance. For some reason, they decided to move the entrance down the road to what is identified on this image as W 150th St. If you zoom in a little further , you'll see where what is Red Rock Road meets with 145th St. W, also known, at least to me and a few other folks, as the old entrance. And you'll note that Red Rock Road parallels another vertical sor...

Tomorrow, after 17 months of working from home, I go into my office. I pick up my personal things, and come back home. Because effective Wednesday, my office - a building which was undergoing renovation 17 months ago and was boasting a number of newly painted walls and a newly built receptionist desk - will no longer be ours. I expect that there's been a heck of a lot done to remove the servers and other proprietary equipment we had in the building to do the job we do.  And while I am pleased at being able to continue to work from home for a further amount of time, the tension is still there.  There was a statement made during the announcement of this change that there may be a new office being placed in another suburb.   Now, I will freely admit I may be just a little bit spoiled after the last few years.  I mean, let's be honest.  My job prior to this one had literally a ten minute commute if I hit every single stoplight.  But to be fair, it was a...

 Yeah, I know.   A few weeks ago I was wandering through one of the local home improvement stores.  The owner is a right dick, and I use that term with great precision, as he is one of the few retailers who stands by that jackwad who sells his own pillows - and won't advertise on Faux Noise because they aren't as far out of the mainstream as he is.   Fortunately, that dick has moved quite a bit out of the sane lane, so I'm not particularly worried if he decides he wants to put himself up as a candidate for Gubbiner.  It takes a real solid case of mental illness to complain about a system, then stick your head into the same system you say cheated a friend of yours - but it'll treat you right.  Riiiiiiiiight. Anywho, as in the background here roars Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons with one of my all-time favorites - "Who Loves You".  I'm a sucker for tight harmonies and songs that build from a quiet opening.  That is, songs like Come Sail A...

 I can't really tell you the details about some of the patients I deal with, but I can tell you that while I've been close to there, I have been blessed not to have stepped on those ... terrible moments. Back in 1996, I dipped my toes into web design because I had a baby who was born three weeks before we had expected him to show up.  And When you're handed that sort of messy situation, you ... well, you deal.   I will never forget the sound of my wife's voice.  I had a frozen pizza in the oven for the young lady and my wife, and I, and it was to be done soon.  My wife had gone into the master bedroom of our two-bedroom apartment, and there was this tone in her voice when she hollered my name.  It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Her water had broken.  There we were, one of the snowiest Novembers we'd encountered, and it was November 15th.  Halfway through the month, and it was ... raining.  Yeah.  So I got my wife and...

 I know, right?  It's so rare I need to post a warning.   Yes, you can laugh.  But then we'll take this off the beaten path, and right down into the clobbered idiot road. That'd be me.   Now, as much as I would love to have some sort of faster-than-light-speed computer (yes, I know that science has not yet managed to agree that might be possible, but I'm not much of one for limits - and since light cannot escape black holes, obviously there are other capabilities and possibilities we're not aware of just yet.  Bear with me), I've got a bit of a ... crate.  Now, to be fair, I spent the whopping $40 on this machine a couple of years ago, and it was a bit of an upgrade beyond the previous one.  I mean, this one has 4 gigs of RAM.  Yes, that was an upgrade.   And beyond that, it's still Windows 7.  It runs, it runs ok most of the time, but then late yesterday, I noticed a few problems.  The biggest was that, as it oc...

 I do try to avoid behaving like a sexist boor when possible, but clearly, the half-wit governor of one state over - that is, South Dakota - needs to have a few moments of reality injected into her little fantasy world. It seems that Kristine Noem, the Gubbiner of Sodak, thinks that modern diseases can be defeated by just acting like nothing was wrong. The problem with Noem is that she is an idiot.  If she truly cared about the people of her state, she would listen to the experts, rather than flaunting her ignorance as something that did someone a favor.   Now, to be fair, here, I have a bit of skin in this little dust-up.  My wife has a much bigger list of on-line friends than I do, but that's because she's an extrovert, and I'm ... well, a troll hiding under a bridge, trying to be a decent human being when the opportunity arises.  Something this halfwit Noem might do well to emulate. One of those on-line friends of my wife has a daughter.  I know, it...