Category: Personal

Stadium Woes

Reasons I hate the downtown stadiums (now plural):

  • They were paid for with tax dollars, so they represent the worst kind of corporate welfare—welfare for billionaire team owners and millionaire employees.
  • They have killed off the restaurants I actually went to downtown (no, of course I don’t know if they were the actual cause; but given my changes in behavior it seems quite possible).
  • They cause parking rates to be randomly sky-high throughout downtown.
  • They cause random horrible traffic jams.
  • They caused extra taxes to be imposed on customers of downtown businesses.  (For these three reasons, I’ve stopped going downtown as much as possible. )
  • The whole American obsession with professional sports (which seems to be mostly gambling-based) pisses me off.
  • The obsession trickles down to university and highschool sports, where it does severe damage (wasting resources, sending the wrong messages about what’s important, dividing students).

Today, for the first time, both stadiums have a game at about the same time. They’re warning people to leave work early if they can, and predicting bad traffic problems. Gosh, somebody should have thought of this earlier!

I’m especially pissed off at MPR who gave the warning, but gave no indication of what game time was or when the actual traffic jams were likely to happen.

New Taco Bell Entrée

Taco Hell has been my preferred national fast-food since Zantigos closed, these many years ago. Mostly I have a chilito (that being an item they carried over from the Zantigos menu) and something else.

I ran into a new special item (which means, I think, that it’s being considered for a permanent place on the menu, but that’s far from certain). They’re calling them “Cantina Tacos”, and they are really quite close to the tacos we got at Tacos Blass on the corner here when they were in business.  I’d rate the Taco Hell versions as about 75% as good; which for a national fast-food chain is doing pretty well.

They come in three fillings, steak, chicken, and carnitas. And currently you can get a set of three of them (any fillings) plus a large drink for $5.19.

They even come with wedges of fresh lime (neatly wrapped into the foil so they don’t touch the food).  I squeezed one into my drink and the other two over the food.

The actual dish looks more real than the photos on the web site; in particular, the web photos show the tortillas looking half like crisp corn tortillas, but they’re not, they’re soft (and hence not as yellow).

All the fillings were pretty good.  The carnitas lacked much juniper flavor, but had no serious false notes.

They’re served with onion and cilantro, no cheese or lettuce or whatever, just like the ones at Tacos Blass were.

File Server Down

Well that’s annoying. When I finally got to my computer last night (after cooking dinner, cleaning up, and running around looking for an HTC EVO phone), I found the fileserver was powered down.

Then I tried to power it up, and got no response at all.

So I guess my first errand this morning involves taking this extremely large and heavy carcass (it’s a 5U rackmount system; much longer than a normal tower) down off the shelf over my desk and over to General Nanosystems (where it came from).  My first guess would be power supply, though of course other things can produce the same symptoms.

(This thing contains all my regular working files as well as my archives. The files are on mirrored disks, and I have external hard drive backups that are pretty current, and external optical disk backups of the photos that are now a couple of years old. So even if the server were hit by a meteor I wouldn’t lose that much.)

Sliderules

I’ve regained possession of the sliderules I used in highschool, plus some others (all were my father’s).  And was testing out a new “light cube” for providing even illumination for photographing smaller objects.

So here is the Aristo Multilog; click through for another good linear, a good circular, and a very bad linear (free giveaway).

Aristo Multilog