For all of us interested in what being/been proposed/planned for Indian Mounds Regional Park here is a link to "City of Saint Paul – Indian Mounds Regional Park Master Plan" page. It includes an overview, meeting agenda, notes, presentation along with the Indian Mounds Master Plan Concept.
My laptop started making a Very Bad Noise on Tuesday morning, the kind of whirring creak
I usually associate with the death throes of a hard drive. It didn't sound exactly like
a hard drive, which often clicks or knocks, and the whir was rather slower paced than
the high RPMs of a hard drive. But as I didn't think this Macbook Pro had a fan, since I had
never heard one, I just assumed the only moving part was the hard drive and so I ordered
a new one online using my wife's computer.
When the drive arrived today, I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive,
and lo! there was a box elder bug caught in one of the two small fans on the logic board.
Yes, my computer had a bug in it. I pulled out the lifeless, hard little black and orange-striped carcass,
and put the cover back on. Started without problem or Very Bad Noise.
I had thought that the term "bug" used to describe a computer glitch was coined after someone
found a moth in an early computer. But according to
the all-knowing Wikipedia I was wrong. Nonetheless, I was relieved to discover this bug
and to fix the problem so easily.
And now I have a spare drive for that time when my hard drive really does die.
I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook.
All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience
of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.
I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple
of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them,
along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been
manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk,
though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the
last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind
of thing.
Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store,
I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a
vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.
The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.
The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than
the bag had originally held.
You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill
of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.
My son and I walked over the next day to visit the ice house and Ari was so intrigued that he snapped one of those
delicate icicles off in his little hand. Chris and I quickly intervened lest any more of his hard work be undone
by a curious three-year-old.
But that is the way with Chris's work: my boys -- most everyone who encounters it -- want to climb inside and animate
the work. Chris's sculpture begs for it. In a good way.
That huffingtonpost article interprets the work in a way I never would. Global climate change? If anything,
works like that will become harder to create as Minnesota gets warmer. Chris had to ice that house two times,
as after the first time it thawed out. That's where the quiet fear is for me: winter is disappearing. I need
winter just like I need summer: it resets my psychic clock.
The comments give me hope. If such a diverse crowd is reading and commenting at the Tiny Revolution these days, the Revolution is not so Tiny after all.
I just renewed my car tabs at www.mndriveinfo.org. It was the most painless checkout process I've ever had. Really.
They did a nice job on that web site.
My dear friend Mike has started a little enterprise crafting beautiful handmade wooden pens and pencil sets in his spare time. They're gorgeous. They'll make you want to write. Buy one. Or three.
Chris Anderson's new book on Free continues to get press. I noted it here when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it for the New Yorker. This is about the 6th time I've seen it reviewed or referenced in the last month.
The wave of open data continues to roll. The National Public Radio API has been out for awhile, but the man responsible is talking next week at OSCON. He gives an
interview
as a preview.
I hang out as karpet on freenode.net in the #swish-e channel, where there is occasionally
meaningful conversation related to the project. I have registered the channel
under my nick, but I often logout and back in and forget how to regain operator status.
Here's the cheatsheet for my own memory:
/msg nickserv identify karpet mypassword
/msg chanserv op #swish-e karpet
Not too complicated but I always have to hunt around to find the right
bots to /msg to.
peknet is Peter E Karman
musing on 
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