September 2009 Archives

First, the soreness. Elissa and I are getting around to doing our fall tree planting. Every year, we try to add a few trees to the yard. Our goal is to have a fully wooded lot by the time our grandchildren inherit the house. ;-P We both love seeing trees, and that's the one downside to the area we built the house in. It used to be a corn field, so there's very little structure around.

This is the first time in my life I've actually bought a tree. I usually go out to the woods and dig them up. A lot less expensive, and a lot more work. But the survival rate of the transplants are usually about 50%. So this year, we decided would be our one year to get "real" trees, and we can go back to transplants next year. So we bought a weeping willow for the low spot in the yard (I suspect that willow will become sentient within a year, that's how fast it will grow). We also got a 2.5" autumn blaze maple tree, and a 6' blue spruce tree.

So I've been digging holes most of the week, and that's why I am sore. We have a vein of clay that runs under our yard in various spots, and where I dug the hole for the willow was dead-on. It took me almost 2.5 hours to dig that hole. The hole for the pine tree took forever because I had to move a sprinkler head about 15 feet, as well as dig a monster-sized hole. The maple tree was the only hole that wasn't horrible to dig.

The reason I'm so excited is because Fall is here! This is my favorite time of year, and the chief reason I wanted to move back to MN in the first place. Fall here is absolutely stunning, with all the trees changing colors, the farm harvests, the weather getting colder and winter just around the corner. Football season is starting up (please don't suck this year Vikes!), and baseball season is winding down (go Twins, go!) with hockey coming up quickly (wahoo Wild!).

So life around here is going pretty well!

So the internet broke up with me today. Thankfully, it was only a short divorce. It got about as far as Fargo, then turned around and came back to me. We've reconciled our differences and will be resuming our happy marriage with fervor. However, during our brief hiatus, I caught a glimpse of what life is like without the internet. Here's a sample:

I was in the middle of composing a fairly involved email to a coworker of mine when I lost connectivity. My email is actually an Outlook account which requires a VPN connection to hit the server -- so when the network goes down, I get these lovely modal dialogs that say "cannot connect to blah blah blah." Since the net appeared to be gone forever, and I was tired of seeing these stupid dialogs, I wanted to close my email client down. However, I didn't want to lose my long email. So I tried to save a draft.

And then I found out that for my case, drafts are saved on the server and only on the server. Not locally.

I can understand saving drafts on the server. It's kind of handy to be able to write a draft at home on the desktop, then go to the airport and continue the draft from the laptop. However, what I can't understand is Thunderbird's incredibly stupid behavior when there's no connection to the Outlook server. Not everyone has stable network connections, and failing to save data when the internet is down is a horrible user experience. To a normal user (aka, not a computer geek like myself), the two don't even correlate!

Hopefully, since the net and I have resolved our differences, I won't ever have to run into this situation again. But it'd be nicer still if I never ran into it because Mozilla implemented a fall-back mechanism for saving drafts.

Life has been both busy and bucolic as of late. Work keeps the majority of my time quite busy. Most things I do at work I can't really talk about in public because they've not been released yet. But once that changes, I'll be able to start babbling about work-related geek topics again. But in the meantime, I mostly just get to say "work is busy." :-P

When I'm not working, that's when all the crazy stuff happens. Take yesterday as an example. I was out gardening, trimming the irises back for the winter. And I almost cut my pinky finger off with the pruning shears. I wasn't watching very carefully, and I managed to do some pretty neat damage to my finger. So far, it's looking like I won't require stitches -- but just barely. And had I been paying even less attention than the little I was, I'd be fingerless because those shears are sharp!

In other crazy news, we had a party last weekend to celebrate our moving back to MN. It went really well. About 15-20 people showed up, and we played games (beanbag toss, badminton, boccie ball), drank beers and caught up. I had friends from college come up from the cities, cousins come up from Mankato, as well as friends local to the St Cloud area show up. It was awesome! Makes me want to have more parties. :-D

My work trip to France went alright, up until I got the flu. Let me tell you, international travel sucks to begin with. But it sucks harder when not feeling well!

So that's the past few weeks. What's on the horizon?

I've started doing some programming for fun again. I started a little side project this week to make a small video game. Once it gets a bit further along, I'll probably talk about it more. Right now there's not much to discuss as I've been working on the game engine, but not really the display functionality. I don't want to bore you unless I'm actually going to finish the game. :-P

Both Elissa and I are super excited the Fall is approaching. It's always been my favorite time of year, and I've talked it up to Lis so much during our relationship, I think my excitement has caught on. Her dad is coming up in a week or so to visit, and they're going up north to view the colors. It should be a blast, but I won't be able to join them -- saving up my vacation time for around Christmas.