We've been up here on vacation for half a week now and I've really been enjoying the time off for sleeping.

I've made progress in some video games, we watched Super Bowl XL and swore at the referees' bad calls. I've even done some work-like things with a wireless router and some cat 5 cable.

One of the things I was introduced to recently was the PhotoStitch software that comes with Canon digital cameras. Since I bought a used 10D from my uncle-in-law last summer, and he's organized enough to still have the original box and documentation, I now have a Canon CD with all of the software I usually think is just junk since it's free and I have Photoshop. The PhotoStitch package is great though. Here's a sample QTVR of the place we're staying this week.

The Back Deck of The Lodge. 832KB QTVR. You will need Quick Time from Apple to view this image properly

We just got out of the hot tub after watching several deer wander in across the lake to munch on the corn tossed out by the neighbor for them. I got a real appreciation for they way they'll look at you as long as you're not moving or making a sound and then run away as soon as they figure out you're not part of the terrain. Of course these particular deer ran away only as far as the pile of corn they new was their duty to eliminate from the terrain.

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I have received some suggestions as to the real meaning of the radar-enforced no-parking zone and I thought they needed sharing:

1. The cop beats you over the head with his radar gun to keep you from doing it again. If your head is not availble, he beats on your car.
2. Your car gets microwaved because of all the radars pointed at the area.

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09/22/05

Wow. I haven't written any notes in my Treo in a couple of days. Usually I've tossed something to write about in here every day even if it doesn't make it to the 'blog for a while. Well, let's see (holy crap, my treo just added an apostrophe to my "lets". That's creepy)...

I am still enjoying the photography gig. I had a chance to walk down to the breakwater at the Duluth lift bridge and take some pictures of my own this afternoon and I'm sitting in the Pizza Luce right now drinking a Stella and waiting for my pizza. It's a little odd to be the only table of one in the place but last time I was here It was me and my fellow fisherman at a table for two. It wouldn't be any different in the bar and It's smokey in there so...

My waitress gave her name as PK and reminds me a little of Lojo Russo. I suppose PK could stand for something like "Patricia Konig", but I prefer "Player Killer".

It's ironic, I think, that the night I don't have Internet access to tie up my laptop is the night I won't watch a DVD because House is on.

09/26/05: Final notes from this wisconsin trip.

On the subject of Canada: What he said. I brought back two 12-packs of beer and four 12-packs of Coke (with sugar) from the Great White North. I'll have more info on the two beers later and I hope to do a blind taste test of the Coca-Cola as well.

Canadian television is different. The Food Network has many more shows from Canada so the schedule is completely different. They show The Surreal Gourmet far more frequently there than here and The Thirsty Traveler is on Food TV in Canada when it's on Fine Living here. I did get to see a show called Christine Cushing Live which is aparently a Canadian exclusive programme. The episode that I saw was The Brewery where they got Kevin Brauch of The Thirsty Traveler to help Christine host a party with a whole tonne of Beer Brewers from throughout Canada. One of the beers they highlighted on the show was Mill Street Coffee Porter which sounded yummy, but I had already bought two cases of beer and wasn't about to go out and try to find some. I just hope that they export the stuff.

Why yes, now that you mention it, there were a couple of odd signs. The first one was just a road sign for a road named "15th Side Road" which didn't seem to be at the side of anything. It was even perpendicular to the highway. The other one gets its own paragraph and even a photo.

While driving around Thunder Bay, I saw several signs for no parking zones, but this one takes the cake. I could have understood "Radar Patrolled" but "Radar Enforced?" I can just see the cop getting a bead on the car sitting at the side of the road and carefuly clocking it at 0 Kph just to make sure that it's really parked and not just being driven by an old person.

Anyway, now that I'm back for a little while, What he said again.

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All of the king beds in all of the hotels I've stayed in have had three pillows as if they're secretly expecting three "users". To me, a king bed seems kind of lonely for one person, especially if it's set up for three. But, just for variety, I used all three pillows.

I have officially moved north enough to be solidly in the start of fall colors. The ferns are all dead, the leaves are drying up. Anyway, it's kind of nice. On my way here, I drove through the town of Hazelhurst "Quiet Side of the North Woods". I laughed out loud because there's a huge motorcycle ride in the area here. Lots of Harleys, not so much with the quiet.

This morning I saw a guy mowing the lawn. Not so weird really until you see that he's only got one leg: One hand for the mower, one hand for the crutch and one leg for the ground. Push ... crutch ... hop ... push ... crutch ... hop ...

As per usual, this post is full of things I saw today because I can't make interesting things up from scratch. Here are a couple more signs I saw.

Beware Dust over Road: The road was clean and dry, no dust in sight. But then a huge cloud of dust descended over the road, darkening the sky. It settled down on the car in front of me and stripped the paint right off the metal, found a slightly lowered window and seeped into the passenger compartment, scouring it clean. Truly: Beware Dust over Road

That one was closely followed by WARNING! Watch for Low Flying Planes: OK fine...I don't see any...can I go back to watching the road now? What would I do if I saw a low flying plane anyway? Duck? Swerve? There aren't any airports around so if there's a low flying plane it's below the legal minimum altitude (by definition). I would think that the more maneuverable craft should be the one to look out: Watch for High Flying Cars.

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My new MiPod has been working fine, I charge it every night and it sits and grows warm next to my laptop. Today I listened to some more Talk of the Nation Science Friday. The same place I heard about the most insane laser physics experiment ever.

I saw a Pizza Hut today. Not just any ordinary Pizza Hut, but a "Pizza Hut Italian Bistro". What's that about? By no stretch of the imagination has any Pizza Hut I've been in or near counted as a Bistro of any sort, Italian or otherwise. I think what it means is that not only are they a Pizza Hut, but they're a Pizza Hut with awnings.

I passed 30,000 clicks on our Nikon CoolpiX 5400 a couple of days ago. I think that's more pictures than most people will take in a lifetime. I'm well on my way to 40,000 clicks and should easily reach that pitiful number by the end of my current trip. So far the camera has been working fine for me. I'd echo the reviews I've read that say that it has trouble focusing in low light conditions. I don't know if it's just low light or not, but low contrast surfaces like, say, the blank wall of a hotel room when taking a photo at f/4 and 1/4s for proper exposure are definitely things that it has some trouble with sometimes. I've thought of bringing along a laser pointer to give the surface some contrast, but it seems to be sufficient just to tip the tripod to give the camera a good view of the wall / floor interface. The only real complaint I have is the speed at which it accesses the CF card. The write speed seems to be somewhere around 500KB/s for writing (including file compression) which sounds like a lot until you start taking full resolution 5Mpx .tiff pictures and have to wait 25 - 30 seconds to write one to the card. Even the 300k .jpg files take a couple of seconds to compress and write. A full 1GB CF card takes around 20 minutes to copy, compared to 4 minutes using a FireWire card reader. That's under 1MB/s for the camera and 4MB/s for the reader (Though the camera is limited to the speed of its 10Mb/s USB interface and the reader to its 400Mb/s FireWire interface). Oh well, the Canon EOS-1D Mark II N and 1Ds Mark II are both a smidge out of my price range at the moment so the CoolpiX and the EOS-10D will have to do for now.

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This morning, after waking to a cool, 64 degree morning, while driving through northeastern Wisconsin, along the border with Michigan, listening to a track from a mix disk made by one of my favorite techno groups, as I tipped my head back to drink from my caramel mocha and saw a bright blue sky through the open sunroof, the thought came to me; "this could be a good day."

Overall, despite the company I'm working for dicking with my schedule and not having a cell phone signal to call home with tonight, it wasn't a bad day. The sky stayed mostly blue, the weather stayed mostly cool and I stayed mostly on schedule. I did notice one thing though; Northeastern Wisconsin has decided on a price for unleaded gasoline: $2.899. I've seen a total of two variations in this price since yesterday morning: One place had the eight upside down and one place had gas for two cents cheaper.

I knew that Minnesota had an Embarrass, but I didn't know that Wisconsin had one. It turns out Illinois has one too.

So, anyway... This place I was filming yesterday had the TV on while I was there. There was an ad detailing how one could get information on why it was crucial to invest in gold right now by calling 1-800-949-GOLD. This ad was wrong on so many levels. First of all, they just told you that you needed to "buy gold now", then they offer to give you a leaflet that says the same thing? OK, obviously the leaflet tells you to buy gold from them because they have a bunch that they're not using. Which is not only obvious, but leads me to the next thing that's wrong with this ad: Gold always goes up in value when the rest of the economy is crappy and goes down when the economy gets better. Basically, they're telling people to "buy gold now (quick before the price goes down so we can reap our profits because we bought it at the right time years ago)". The bastards.

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A store named Gene's Beaver Floral.

That's all I got.

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A couple of odd signs I've seen over the last few days:

"Good Clean Fun Tattoo and Piercing: Behind Liquor Store". Tattooing and Piercing should be clean. If they're not, go somewhere else. I wonder if the liquor store is clean too.

There was a small sewing shop selling sewing machines but the sign said "Sewing Mechs". Now there's an idea: My pants need hemming, so I'll give them to this 20 foot robot with lots of thread

So, I'm driving down the road and I see a train. No big deal. The train was half full of Bradley Fighting Vehicles though. I wonder where they're headed. Do we need them in Louisiana?

Lastly: while driving down another road I saw a truck carrying boats. I had a sudden urge to perform a Truck Torpedo takedown but, as usual, there were no rivals close enough. (Burnout - Revenge is out this month! )

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My mother sent me this link to an article discussing the future of FEMA as proposed by President Bush. 'Nuff said.

It turns out that I did not make it to both Lucas and Davenport, Iowa. I-80 was under construction through that area so I took I-280, the bypass around Davenport. Actually, the whole Lucas Davenport thing might have been screwed from the start since I really just saw Lucas, Iowa from across the train tracks. I'm pretty sure I was in Lucas, but maybe not. Anyway, no Lucas Davenport for me.

When I was in Iowa, after being in Missouri, I came up with a theory. I think that there is something fundamentally different between the infrared radiation given off by nuclear fusion and the infrared radiation given off by the combustion of carbohydrate material such as cellulose or natural gas. I came to this conclusion based on the fact that the sun was terribly bright, hot and annoying for much of my trip but when I was filming a hotel room that had a fireplace running for effect when the room was already quite hot, I didn't mind it at all. I actually enjoyed it.

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Hurricane Katrina, Part Deux

I guess what really gets me about the situation is who will suffer because of it. The people who are really going to take the hit down where it happened are the poor people; the ones without insurance, without transportation, and currently, without income. The rich and the middle class will mostly be OK and they'll be educated enough to know where to go to get money for the damage. The people who will be hurt in the rest of the country as a result are also the poor. Sure gas prices are higher for everyone, but the poor pay a higher percentage of their earnings for essentials and essentials are about to get more expensive.

One oil pipeline is down right now because of a power outage the oil companies couldn't be bothered to plan for. That pipeline goes to the east coast and will likely affect the delivery schedule there. I'm in the midwest but I just paid $2.999 per gallon for gas. So, since the east coast can't get fresh oil, Iowa has higher gas prices? I know they're also going to have to repair quite a bit of damage to some off-shore rigs and that means that they are going to raise prices to make up for it but I think they're glad to profit from something like this. What it means to the rest of the country is that the higher fuel costs will result in higher transportation costs for everything we buy and that's going to hurt the people who can least afford it the most.

I know that New Orleans wasn't hit directly by the hurricane, and I know they just had a little flooding really. I've also been to New Orleans, and It's a really neat place. I don't want to live there or be there during a tropical storm of any kind, but it's a neat place to visit. I know I sounded harsh when I said that it was a bad idea to move to where tropical storms ravish the countryside every year, but it's true. The people who were born there on the other hand have less of a say in the matter. I can spare a little sympathy for people who are having their entire life history flattened.

There is a culture and a feel to those regions that would be completely lost if everyone moved out and I think that it would be missed. I know that many places have bans on building new buildings in areas that have been flooded in recent history. I don't know if these areas have them, but I think it's something to think about. I would still feel bad that people who have lived there all their lives had to move farther out and we'd loose a lot of very valuable land to flooding but it would make a nice park. We'd also loose a lot of farmland to forced sprawl, but a lot of farmers are going to have a hard time this year because of higher fuel costs, so maybe they'll be looking for a new job anyway. I don't mean that to sound harsh, I just want to think it could be made convenient for everyone concerned.

Anyway, I said I was tired of hearing about Katrina and here I go with more about Katrina. Let's try something else shall we?

As I said earlier, I filled my tank at $2.999 per gallon today. The regular unleaded (87 octane) was going for $3.099 at the same station. What's interesting about many of the places I've filled my tank is that the 10% ethanol blend fuels have been the middle grade fuels and been cheaper. It makes sense that ethanol fortified fuel would have a higher octane rating because ethanol has a higher octane rating than octane. What I find unique is that it's almost always 10 cents cheaper per gallon. I'm guessing that it's subsidized because it's an earth-friendly fuel additive that's made domestically and they're trying to get people to buy more of it, but I'm thrilled because, living in Minnesota, all my gasoline contains 10% ethanol anyway so, while the prices are pretty bad, I still get a little break.

Since MiPod has been dead for most of this trip, I've been listing to a lot of radio. I haven't been able to find a lot of college radio, but I've found the occasional NPR affiliate, and there's almost always some sort of hard rock station within range. The best part about hard rock is that, because I have to switch stations frequently due to my rate of travel, even if I'm starting to get a weak signal and getting some static, it's OK because it sounds a lot like the music they're playing. I mean with hard rock, it's not so much a mater of signal-to-noise as it is noise-to-other-noise.

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