in transit, mark danielson2005 march
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What a week. There's not much I can say now, but let's check back in a month or so.

~ ~ ~

Tomorrow I'm off to Madison to be with Lisa and to catch a few movies at the Wisconsin Film Festival. In all likeliness, it'll be the first of three weeks in a row I'll be spending away from home. In addition to Madison this weekend, I'll probably be in Northeastern Wisconsin next weekend and Chicago the weekend after that.

As it happens, my car has been making monthly visits to the Saturn dealer in Bloomington for scheduled maintenance. I've been doing way too much driving lately.

Items Noted Elsewhere

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  • The National Trust for Historic Preservation Sells Out St. Louis - "For 108 years the neo-Classical style Century Building, with its 10-story marble facades accented by ornate friezes and pilasters, graced half a block in downtown St. Louis. But after 15 years of fighting by local preservationists it was razed in February to make way for a garage, [with] an unusual twist: for the first time anyone involved can remember, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the country's most powerful preservation group, sided with the wreckers."

Journal

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Today brought one mild thunderstorm, one freaked cat, one rain-soaked commute, two fire alarms, three _________s, a lease renewal, and a number of headaches. It's only 10:30 as I write this, but I'm wiped.

~ ~ ~

In slightly gross discovery I made last night, the toothache I've been battling for the past couple of days was not actually a toothache but instead an ingrown hair buried deep within my beard.

Nerves are kind of weird that way.

Items Noted Elsewhere: Terri Schiavo Edition, Part II

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  • Twin Cities neurologist takes on cable news - "The CAT scans are out there, distributed to other people. You have got to look at the facts. The CAT scan is out there. It shows severe atrophy of the brain. The autopsy is going to show severe atrophy of the brain. And you're asking me if a CAT scan was done? How could you possibly be so stupid?"

Journal

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Man, did everything need to be closed today?

Items Noted Elsewhere: Terri Schiavo Edition

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Rational people can disagree on the events playing out down in Florida, but the hypocritical grandstanding in Washington is completely uncalled for.

  • DeLay agreed with withholding treatment for injured father - "House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who has helped lead a congressional effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive, joined members of his own family nearly 17 years ago in allowing doctors not to take extraordinary measures to extend his father's life."
  • Even as Doctors Say Enough, Families Fight to Prolong Life - "The Texas law, signed in 1999 by Gov. George W. Bush, allows doctors to remove life-sustaining treatment over the objections of families, provided an ethics committee agrees and the hospital gives the family 10 days to see if another facility will accept the patient."

Journal

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Today's entry is not about complete and total physical and mental exhaustion, although I could've gone that route if I wanted to do so.

This Wednesday brings a kind of resurfacing, the first kinda-normal day since I left for SXSW. The past two weeks have been incredibly busy, not just with all the traveling and the conference, but with the unusually high levels of insanity preceding and following it. Much of it I can't talk about right now, but that may change in a few weeks, or maybe a few months.

As March rolls to an end, I find myself at one of those strange points where I have little idea where I'll be or what I'll be doing only a few months from now. Despite this being my 30th year, the only real comparison I have to my current situation comes from those borderline-destitute days I spent following my graduation from UW-RF. While at one level it's very exciting, at another it's stressful and disorientating. I want it to end, but not enough to risk doing something stupid.

We'll see what happens, just not as quickly as I'd like.

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The trip entries have turned into a bit of a mess, as the USB drive I had the SXSW HTML on is MIA. (IOW, I'm SOL.) At least I know about the <ABBR> tag through the WAI at the W3C.

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Last weekend brought a trip to the Twin Cities 2005 Auto Show. It was Lisa's first trip to such an event, and she enjoyed it despite not having any prior context to how large it was going to be. (Despite a general lack of dawdling, we were there for over six hours.) We generally avoided the SUVs, although I got her to sit in a couple of Hummers to help her get a better understanding of how completely ridiculous they are. Visiting the Honda display may have been a mistake, but only because Lisa didn't have much knowledge about them before she got her new Toyota.

For what it's worth, the BMWs completely stole ths show. There was no contest whatsoever, and that was both good and bad: It was good as they were a lot of fun for Lisa and I to sit in and dream about, but bad as they were pretty close to the start of the show and hence made most of the following manufacturers look really bad. A half-hour after the BMWs we went as far as to take a dinner break to try to reset our expectations, but it didn't work. Even the cars from Lexus and Mercedes didn't stand a chance. (And the Jaguars? Pfft.) The only vehicles that really grabbed our attention after the BMWs were those from Maserati, and, well, they didn't let anyone sit in those.

I somehow managed to forget my camera, so no photos this year.

Items Noted Elsewhere

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Journal

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Well, I'm back from SXSW. The trip was fabulous, although I'm still recovering from going five days in a row with less than 4 1/2 hours of sleep each night. I have a bunch of entries from the trip, but they're hiding on a USB drive packed away somewhere. (Ah, the life of the wireless non-enabled.) I should be able to get them up sometime this weekend.

For now, though, my bed is calling me.

Journal

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Well, I'm off to Texas. I may put in one or two entries while I'm at SXSW, but in all likeliness there won't be any new posts here until later next week.

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After the road trip to California last year, 1173 miles doesn't seem as long of a drive as it once did. Heck, if could get myself on the road by 7:00 tomorrow morning, I'd probably be in Austin by midnight.

Not that I'm going to try that.

Journal

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"You are such a hipster."

"Me? No I'm not."

"Oh yes you are."

"Hold on, let me count something." I walked into my closet. "Huh. I have 17 shirts and one hat that are either dot-com or computer related. That's more geek than hipster."

"You are such a nerd with the shirts that you have. Blogger. Nerve..."

"Shut up."

~ ~ ~

"You're blogging about blogging," she said.

"That's so meta."

"SHUT UP."

Journal

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"You know that bookstore in San Francisco that allowed some artist to rearrange all the books in the store on the basis of color?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm thinking about doing that to my closet."

~ ~ ~

Two days from now I'll be on my way to SXSW Interactive. By no reasonable measure can I consider myself ready for the trip.

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"I just came up with the ultimate hipster clothing product."

"What's that?"

"Blue jeans that have been ripped up by ferrets."

"What?"

"Well, ripped jeans still seem to be in, and you mix that with ferrets, the super-trendy pet to have these days, and you have a product that's cooler than either ripped jeans or ferrets are on their own."

"Right."

"They'd definitely be more trendy than jeans ripped up by a slave worker in some Guatemalan sweatshop."

"Did I do anything to encourage this?"

"No. Why?"

"I'm entitled to half of whatever profits you make."

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One week from now I'll be on my way to South By Southwest. It still hasn't hit me yet.

~ ~ ~

On deck for this weekend: Downtown Madison, guinea pigs, hamburgers and lots of driving.

Pedro Offers You His Protection

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Two Napoleon Dynamite soundboards worthy of note:

Journal

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"If you add up the math it says 'problem.'"

-George W. Bush, attempting to talk about Social Security, 2 March 2005.
(As heard on Marketplace.)

Journal

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Let me see if I have this straight: My doctor is convinced my headaches are due to environmental reasons at work—bad air in the building, mold in the vents, that kind of thing. (There's no empirical evidence that the air where I work actually sucks, but that doesn't stop him from saying the same thing every time I go in for a checkup.) My dentist is convinced they're caused by uneven jaw alignment and the resulting tooth wear. (He referred me to the U of M Orofacial Pain and Oral Medicine Clinic.) And now, as of today, my optometrist believes they're caused by the misalignment of my left eye.

I'm working on the vision and dental issues. There's not much I can do about the first issue, assuming it actually exists.

~ ~ ~

In other news, the stylist who cut my hair this evening told me my kind of hair loss is often due to prolonged stress.

Items Noted Elsewhere

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  • Ann Coulter: "Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president." - I wish I could dismiss Coulter as a troll. Unfortunately, she has enough followers that it would probably be dangerous for us to do so.

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