Last Saturday, I took some portraits for Steve Mueske. I haven't done much in the way of portraiture, but I'm working on it. Between what I've learned at Strobist and what I already know, I managed to produce some pretty good shots. It was fun experimenting with light and color and Steve was a good sport when I said things like "Let me try this nose-enhancing wide-angle lens for one".

He also showed me to this really cool location at an abandoned munitions plant on the University of Minnesota's Rosemount Research facility. There were rows of these huge concrete structures that must have been either mounts for heavy equipment or blast protection for/from explosives. I'm definitely going to head back there sometime for more pictures and there's a lot more land and ruins to explore.

I heard from a guy at my local coffee shop yesterday that some local groups go down there to do war re-enactment. I suppose all the open land and interesting ruins could be good for that. I think I had my fill of re-enactments in my 11 years at the Rennaissance festival though.

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I know this is getting blogged in higher places than here, but it needs to be seen. So for my reader, if you haven't seen this, take a look. It sucks that there's no Daily Show for the duration of the writer's strike, but that's a little perspective on why there's a writer's strike.

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Last week, I mentioned that upgrading to Leopard caused considerable slowness on my Quicksilver Mac. I also mentioned that I couldn't even successfully install without removing my third-party SCSI card. As it turns out, the two were related.

I got curious yesterday about the slowness and checked to see what my CPU was doing, wondering if it was processor related or I/O related, and found that my CPU was running at 100% solidly. Well that meant there was something taking up a lot of CPU and I was pretty sure I wasn't running it. Top showed me a process named kernel_task that was using anywhere from 80% to 95% of the cpu, basically whatever I wasn't using elsewhere.

A quick google showed some forum entries from when Tiger was released indicating that the kernel_task process could take up CPU time on some PowerBooks with a bad trackpad driver and that replacing the driver with a third-party utility did the trick. Now these folks were complaining about 16% CPU going to kernel_task and that was nothing like what I was seeing, but it made me think about the fact that I hadn't installed any drivers for my SCSI card and hadn't needed to since 10.1 came out.

I don't really use my SCSI card. It's only there for my back catalog of Zip disks, and I can't remember the last time I put one in. My G3 Wallstreet has SCSI built in, so if I ever want to get rid of the old Zips I can copy them off and stick all the contents on a CD some time. One less SCSI card later, and my Quicksilver is running about as well as it was before the upgrade.

I'm still looking at the new Xeons though. 

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Earlier this week, I heard on Penny-Arcade that MC Frontalot was coming to Minneapolis for his third show on 11-15-2007 at the Triple Rock Social Club. Last time I heard he was coming to town, it was the same day as the show and I already had something going that night. So this time I was damned if I was going to miss it.

I had never heard of his opener on the tour Shäffer the Darklord (STD), but he was great even if he does have an unfortunate stage acronym (his joke, not mine) and his interactions with the crowd and with his partner The Black Box were brilliant.

I've liked MC Fontalot's music on my iPod, but I've got to say that it's much better in person, even my wife liked it once she could watch the band interacting and playing to the crowd. They really made this an interactive show too. The first thing he said when he came out was "We're throwing out the set-list tonight and making this an all-request show. Who's got an MC Frontalot song they want to hear?". The request was made and then "Okay, but you've got to roll at least a three.". She rolled a six and the show started. The one person who rolled a natural 20 was invited to dance on stage but, being nerdcore, elected to choose a second song.

The final song was Nerdcore Rising and was prefaced by the crowd yelling "The time we are having is acceptable!" in unison and the keyboardist prompting us to sing the chorus "Nerdcore could rise up" to start the song.

More photos on flickr

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Hey, just a quick note to everyone who wants to read my blog on google homepage or feedburner or whatever. I got a full content rss feed going this morning at RSS.

Now to get the permalinks working...

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When I stepped out the door this morning to walk to work, I'd swear somehting cold drifed down and fell on my nose. My wife looked at the confused look on my face and said "Yes, it's snowing". So I continued in my task of picking some Nepali Orange peppers for a co-worker (there weren't enough to do anything spectacular this year) and continued on to work.

After I stopped for coffee the snow picked up in earnest and turned into big, fluffy flakes of snowy goodness. I might have to grab my camera when I take off this afternoon.

Oops... It looks like it stopped.

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If you have an 866MHz quicksilver G4 and you're thinking about upgrading to Leopard, I have one word for you: "it's time for a new computer". (Why do you still have a quicksilver anyway?)

I just went through the process of upgrading and it wasn't what I might call smooth. I ended up removing my third-party SCSI card and realizing after the fact that i should have put my old graphics card back in too. That probably would have solved most of my problems. I was hoping that Leopard wasn't silently complaining about the 1.5GB of third-party RAM I installed or the lack of space on my 3 internal hard drives because those things would have been a pain to get over. It took me a file and a chassis nibbler to get one of those HDDs installed.

Don't get me wrong, i like Leopard. it's got great features and hundreds of tiny improvements. Time Machine is quite possibly the most user-friendly disaster recovery tool I have ever used, it's about time Apple implemented a multiple desktop tool, and the new dock is soooo pretty and shiny... But this is the first time since OS X 10.0 came out in 1999 that I have experienced a decrease in performance after an upgrade. Admittedly, except for RAM, my computer is the very definition of the minimum requirements.

So if you've got an older Mac, take the hundred dollars you'd spend on Leopard and put it toward something newer. You'll still get Leopard. I'm thinking it's time for one of the 3GHz dual quad-core Xeons, but that's just me.

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Looks like I've got some catching up to do with my blog. I suppose all those times that I thought "I should blog this" would have been good opportunities for posts.

Let's see... what's happened lately. Well, Minnesota decided to have an "Early Antlerless Deer" hunt this year on October 13 and 14. So I went to my traditional hunting spot in Bemidji with my wife's aunt and unkle. The three of us came out of the weekend with two deer. Two of us did not get any deer. I saw several fast-moving deer-shaped objects and a few deer that were doing an excelent job of hiding behind brush and trees. Unfortunately, none of them were cooperating enough to be shot.

The week after that, I had a meetup with some photographers I met on line through strobist.com. We had several people confirm and four actually show up. Still, it was quite a bit of fun, and we're planning to do it again, just not very quickly. Not that we're not planning to do it soon, just that we're not planning very quickly. Later that afternoon, I decided that we were out of Coke. We still have several cans in the 'fridge left over from this fall's Tai-Chi picnic, but it's that American stuff, made with corn syrup. So at around 17:00, we piled into the Outback and headed north to Thunder Bay. We didn't make it until early Sunday morning. It was late enough when we hit Grand Marais, that it made sense to just stay the night on US soil, since we weren't sure if the Grand Portage border crossing was open 24 hours. It was a safe assumption, but we were tired.

It turns out there was another reason to drive to Canada; iTunes gift cards. The Canadian iTunes store has different music because the record companies think it's a good idea to limit their markets when they produce albums rather than allowing the whole world an opportunity to purchase them. If you are paying for music on the iTunes music store with a US credit card or other form of payment from the US, the only music available to you is from the US version of the iTunes store. But a gift card counts as a form of payment from the country it was purchased (or intended to be purchased) in. That works for the UK and Japan and all other countries as well.

I think that one of the more entertaining parts of the trip to Canada was our interactions with the border patrol:

"What is the purpose of your visit"

"To buy Coca-Cola"

"You can't get Coca-Cola in the States?"

"Yeah, but it's not made with sugar, it's made with corn syrup"

"Oh... Does it taste different?"

"I think so" (Duh)

This coming weekend, I'm making the trip up to Bemidji again for more deer hunting. I've been skunked on the last two trips and I'd really like to get me a deer this year. I'd rather not be one of the 50% of hunters who come home empty handed.

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I was at the grocery store yesterday and ran into this wonderful pair of books in the Complete Idiots Guide series. It seems that they are doing a great job hitting the complete idiot square in the wallet.

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Two sporting items of interest:

I went to a Twins game with my mom on Tuesday. They lost. Not a big surprise, but as my wife pointed out the next morning, It's amazing how many people go to games to see the Twins win. Most of the crowd had cleared out by the end of the seventh inning. What fickle fans we are...

I actually enjoyed the game. They actually had decent beer; Summit was the same price as Budwiser. The Mariners played some pretty good ball, I thought. I still prefer Midway park because you can get much closer to the action. A bad seat there is still better than most of the seats at the Dome.

The second item is that I've re-taken-up cycling. In the last few weeks, I've put on over 100 miles and quite enjoyed most of them. The 90°+ days sucked, but that was also at the beginning of my "season". I think I've gotten better since then. Since the power was out for part of the morning here at the office, I had some time to work up a Google Map on the subject while I was waiting to connect to all of our servers.

I've been taking most of my rides in the early morning since the "hot days". So far I've found very few things that will get me up that early. Hunting and road trips are a couple others. This morning, I might as well have been biking in the mountains for all I could see of the landscape around me. There was a bike path, then a walking path, then nothing. It was quite pretty when I could see it, which wasn't often due to the dew on my glasses.

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