I’m leaving, on a jet plane…

*mutter*

I just realized that since I packed light enough to carry everything on, I’ve either got to have someone else carry my pocket knives or go without.

Me. Without a pocket knife. That’s gotta be a sign of armageddon.

2nd and 4th amendments? What’re those? At least I’ll be carrying my copy of the Bill of Rights, Security Edition. We’ll see if they let me keep it.

It doesn’t help that I’m in a bad mood. I’m a bit tired and I’d really rather be staying here than leaving town. Actually, I’d rather be at home, in bed.

(btw, miss you too)

Pretty lazy day today. Zero last night went pretty easy. Lots of drunks, but no real problems. A bit of drama here and there, but it is pretty easy to surf above that.

I met up with Joy, went to a party for a little while, then home, sleep, wake, sleep, eat, walk, and here I am.

Tomorrow I have to go to Seattle for work. *sigh* Seattle is probably cool, but for whatever reason, I’ve never liked business travel.

mm..

sleep good.

ack. time to go to work.

For the record, 26 degrees, 20mph winds and a mixture of snow and rain does not combine to make good motorcycling weather.

I had to head down to Burnsville to have the tailor measure me for adjustments to the suit.

On the way down, I had to flip the bike over to the reserve tank. I stopped at a gas station, and not only had my choke frozen, my gas tank lock had frozen over. I tried to open it and bent the key badly. The deicer seemed to kind of work, but the key is now shot, so I couldn’t get more gas. Suck.

So, I crossed my fingers and headed into the mall. (btw, for anyone needing a suit, the place to go is the Rack and the tailor is Joe – charismatic grumpy old guy with an accent). Joe was really quick at reading what I wanted to do with the suit, but was concerned about the pants – generally, a 40 jacket comes with 34 pants (which is what the label on the suit said). I have somewhere around a 32 inch waist, so they’d need some adjusting.

For some reason, though, the pants (based on their tag) were actually 36. Um. no.

He was concerned because the tailoring was going to be a significant added cost at that point, so he asked one of the sales people to spend some time helping me find something else. I was a bit hesitant about changing suits w/o my “fashion consultants”, and although there were a couple cool 4 buttons, nothing touched what we picked out yesterday, so the pants are getting pretty much completely de- and re- constructed.

What made me feel kind of good is he, in his grumpy old man kind of way, nodded with approval that I had stuck with my original choice rather than going with the options the sales guy showed me. Hm.

Anyway, checked for a shirt to no avail and headed out. Since I wasn’t sure I had enough gas to get home and couldn’t fill the tank, I decided to take the highways where there would be less stop and go. COLD! especially after my jeans got soaked through. I can’t describe the relief I had when I got to within about 2 miles of home and realized I would be able to easily push the bike home if it came down to it.

Fortunately, it didn’t. The only remaining problem was that when I got home, ignition was frozen and I couldn’t turn the key to the off position. I don’t really like lock deicer, so I wrapped my hands around it until it warmed up enough to turn.

Oi. Not my worst ride ever, but in the bottom 50. I forgot how bad the knees hurt in cold air at highway speed when wet.

Anyway, reading Joy’s post cheered me back up for whatever reason. Time to do dishes, laundry and get ready for work at zero.

Oh. From Venik

Reviewing ground operations [in Iraq] analysts conclude that the desert terrain and the resulting inability of the Iraqis to fight outside of towns and villages provide the coalition with its main strategic advantage. Complete air dominance allows [the coalition troops] locating and engaging Iraqi positions and armor at maximum distance using precision-guided munitions not available to the Iraqis, while remaining outside of the range of the Iraqi weapons. Considering the course of this war and the tactics used by the coalition, [Russian military] analysts find this tactics to be far removed from the realities of modern warfare and designed exclusively against a technologically much weaker opponent. Such tactics is unimaginable on the European theater of combat with its woodlands and cross-country terrain. Foreseeing the possibility of a future military standoff between the US and North Korea the analysts are certain that the US cannot hope for a military victory on the Korean Peninsula without the use of nuclear weapons.

(Side note: I’m assuming that is based on the theory that we won’t accept massive losses of US soldiers.)

YES!

Small victories do happen. Minneapolis passed the Resolution Defending the Bill of Rights. While this is largely a symbolic opposition to portions of the “PATRIOT” act, “Homeland Security” act, various Executive and Military orders, and various Justice Department Directives, it prevents city resources and personell from cooperating with federal agencies in violating civil rights and requires them to report violations whenever possible.

It is a small victory, but it is a ray of light during dark times.

Minimal political commentary today, stolen from get your war on just because it struck my funnybone (not the funny-ha-ha one though):

All I have to say is, Once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.

Anyway, busy night last night…

Joy picked me up with Jo and Greg and we headed over to Mitzi’s to get some touch up done on her tattoo. Greg had his touched up as well. Chrissy (who designed Joy’s tatt) met us there.

After that, it was clothes shopping time. Since I’m accompanying Joy to a Viennese ball, I need a nice suit. I have a couple ok ones, but they’ve never been tailored to me and they need a bit of spiffing up here and there (it can be fun to wear a suit dancing in driving rain to a swing band at fest, but it is a bit hard on the suit).

I don’t know that much about suits, so I spent some time during the day asking people for advice and tips. Niel, a coworker, armed me with a lot of tips, and the overwhelming consensus was that Nordstroms Rack at the Mall of America is the place to go. As much as I hate the Mall, that’s where we headed.

I didn’t actually know my size, so I started off checking suits that were too large. No wonder they all looked kind of dumpy. Since I didn’t think they had anything I liked, I headed to the regular Nordstroms. The sales guy was not overly eager to help. He did tell me my proper size, but really didn’t seem to want to sell me something. His loss.

Armed with new info, we went back up to the Rack and started honing in on the right look. Chrissy finally found the winner. The funny thing is that the sales person at the Rack was MUCH more helpful than the guy at the non-discount version of the store.

Well, according to intel reports, the Department of Homeland Security has quarantined the Star Wars Holiday Special as a potential Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD), so viewings will have to be delayed until a future date.

In other news, according to the Guardian, al-Jazeera has pulled their correspondents out of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul after Iraqi officials expelled one of their reporters and barred another from reporting.

Does anyone have any idea if http://www.aljazeerah.info/ is connected in any way to al-Jazeera?

UPDATE: Al-Jazeerah Information Center is not related to Al-Jazeera Arabic TV

If anyone out there is looking for a new web browser…

My personal favorite is Opera – partially because it isn’t Netscape (bloated and clunky, although allegedly improving) or Microsoft IE (because as a corporation, they’re scum buckets that should be ground into dirt and left to rot). Actually, I’d be quite pleased if they’d evacuate the Microsoft campus and hit IT with a Daisy Cutter or a MOAB.

Opera has nice features, it is faster than Netscape or IE, and it has a smaller footprint. The free version does have banner ads. If (like me) you can’t stand ads, the “for pay version” is $39.

You can download it here:
http://www.opera.com/download/

If I were to make a second choice, it’d be Mozilla which is basically Netscape but without the company and with a legion of open source folks behind it. I’ve heard there are a couple others up and coming, but I don’t know much about them.

According to traffic logs, someone’s been viewing this site in Netscape 4.04 using Windows NT.

Do these pages even come close to working in that browser? (yes, I am a web developer, but I haven’t used 4.04 in years and don’t even have access to anything below 4.79 for testing)

In 4.79, it is almost readable other than some parts overlapping each other and all the stuff on the right being shoved to the bottom.

The 42 “snowflakes” listed sequentially at the end of the page are rather humorous.

If you see something similar, is this level of site degredation acceptable to you or not?

Well, due to job situations driven by our economic situation, my friend Chris will not be able to make it up at the end of the month.

Since I partially blame George the Second for the economic situation, it follows that it is at least in part George Bush’s fault that my friend can’t come visit. See, in my world, everything is political.

Practice went pretty well last night. Didn’t practice much of our old stuff, but my friend Stacey said she’s on official protest until we start playing some of the new songs we’ve been working on but haven’t finished.

We got one pretty close to done – current working title is dialate. Only problem with that is that it reminds me of Ani Difranco’s album, but perhaps we won’t have too many crossover fans since we’re punkish pissed off social/political commentary and she’s folkish pissed off social/political commentary. We’ve got another one that had some good progress, but it has a bit further to go.

Joy has agreed to brave the Star Wars Holiday Special. Hopefully the psychic scars won’t be too deep and maybe someday she will forgive me. Those who have seen it know, those who have not can not possibly comprehend.

Hopefully everyone’s having a good week! Oh yeah, should I buy this bus?