Twin Cities Cool. Not Just Cause It’s Autumn

When we moved from Chicago almost 5 years ago, I got a lot of snickers and jeers from my co-workers. Completely understandable given that Chicago sees itself as the second city and all the reports of Mayor Daley trying to make it into NY without the bad parts.

It’s the quality of life that separates the Twin Cities from that cross-country rivalry. That’s continually highlighted in the recent WSJ article: The Twin Cities Hit ‘Critical Coolness’.

The quote, “It’s such a get-out-there and do something culture,” reminds me of Rex‘s MSP vs SEA comparison (can’t find the like right now) – everyone in MSP has a side project.

UPDATE: Rex’s comment reminded me that MSP has far more in common with PDX and SEA than ORD. But if you’ve spent anytime in the PNW you already know that. There’s been times that I’ve wondered if there’s some sorta high-speed tunnel between MSP and PDX.

Twitter Bars?

I saw these two tweets side-by-side over the weekend. I read them fast and thought that spin and Calacanis were talking about the same product. It’s a floor cleaner, it’s a desert topping, it’s a publishing channel, it’s a weight loss supplement.

Floored

One of the longer term (i.e. not this year) projects around the house is the basement. Currently, it’s comfortable place to hide from a storm, but not more time than that.

Yesterday we were at IKEA and noticed 2nds of their floating floor are 1/2 off.

After brunch this morning we picked up 25 boxes – 825lbs – of it. To my surprise the Cruiser pulled through. More than I can say for IKEA’s flat carts.

Feel free to start a long bet on how long after the new year it gets installed. 🙂

We Met at a Dunn Bros – But Not the Same Dunn Bros

“We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street from each other.” – Meg Swan, Best in Show

Meeting for coffee at a Dunn Bros. on University this afternoon and just got the call that there’s more than one. We each chose a different one.

Not the first time this has happened this summer (there are also 2 on Washington). They should start putting store numbers on the doors or we should meet at more unique locations – like; Kopplin’s, J & S Bean Factory, 1-on-1, CRC.

Let’s both remember next time. Thanks. 🙂

Remodelling

Despite not having written in a while, I’ve gotten some excellent comments on the look of this site.

“…I don’t know if that’s artsy or what, but I wasn’t all that impressed.”

and the more concise:

“conspicously vacant”

Perhaps suck.com had the same problem 😉

Either way, this site’s role has changed, and it needs to do more than it did when I refreshed it last.

Also, last week kicked off the full kitchen remodel here at HQ. In an effort to minimize stress, anxiety, and any jinxes, I’m holding off writing about it until it’s over.

The Power of Vendor/Gems

Right now, I’m heavily reliant on an unsupported (if not completely abandoned) ruby gem library. Historically, I’ve just gem install bizarro-gem and moved on.

A couple of issues have changed my perspective:

  • My host, textdrive, doesn’t allow installing bizarro gems on their shared servers and I’ve had difficulty freezing them, so I worked around the desired functionality.
  • I needed to make some modification to the library. Not easy to do if it’s installed system wide.

Thankfully, I found Chris Wanstrath’s Vendor Everything , his post makes it trivial to freeze gems in a reliable, testable, hackable way.

The core of Chris’s technique is added this line to your Rails::Initializer.run block:
config.load_paths += Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/**"].map do |dir|
File.directory?(lib = "#{dir}/lib") ? lib : dir
end

And unpack the required gems into vendor/gems

With that, I was able to make the necessary modifications and make a more portable app.

Thanks Chris.

To Do Before I Die: Get 99 Other People to Speak My Made Up Language

While Toki Pona‘s minimalism feels too much like Newspeak for my taste, the notion of creating a new common-use language is an intriguing thought. Especially if the language’s biases were deliberate – and I agreed w/ them 😉 – from the beginning.

Initial thought: a highly technolibertarian version of Dutch.

Thanks to: Hobbies in everything- Tyler Cowen

RE: Rice Lake Cross Country Meet

Back in HS XC, the Rice Lake race was one of a handful of races I always looked forward to. Aside from being a very competitive race, the course had an interesting features – back then, it started out around the Community College’s baseball diamond, as people fought for position and got into their pace around the fencing it was inevitable that people would stumble and fall.

And the crowd would count the fallen runners – 1…..2…..3……4

Thanks to JimmerC for the memories.