I was back home this last weekend and while at my old high school’s football game I was lucky enough to spot an actual pair of Zubaz alive and running free. It’s a beautiful thing seeing this majestic creature roam the lands.

See for yourself…

Now as you can see this the official pair not the generic Zubaz that I was proud to rock out from the 4th grade, all the way through the 6th grade (yeah, I was that cool).

To top it all off, this specific breed was Minnesota Vikings themed. Would you believe that just a mere 2 days after this siting the Vikings were able to be victorious for the first time this year? Coincidence? I think not!

P.S. If you’re suspicious about the true migration of Zubaz north, just check out the “Shop” at zubaz.com and you’ll see where the only retail location to purchase your original, official Zubaz apparel is.

A few days back (September 8th) a news article in the archive a Florida newspaper started getting an unexpectedly large amount of hits for some reason. This would usually not be a big deal, however it was an article about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy from a couple months back. So now it’s a big deal.

The large amount of hits caused it to go the the “Popular News” section of the web site. Because of that, it was picked up by the Google News crawler. The news crawler puts the article on the Google News site with the current date on it and the article itself doesn’t have a date with it.

This eventually got itself onto the financial news service of a stock research firm that publishes reports on the Bloomberg L.P. Now we’ve really got a problem.

Here is an excerpt from an informative writeup by Steven J Klein @ mac.com:

8. On Monday, September 8, at approximately 10:45AM, a headline from the report flashed across Bloomberg screens.

9. In the next 15 minutes, UAL shares in UAL dropped from almost $12.50/share to just $3, before trading was halted. At least one block of 100 shares traded at 1 cent per share, though that trade was later voided.

He also brings up a good point that this could very easily be a form of market manipulation. All spammers would have to do is send out millions of e-mails with the link to a story like this in the body, if just a small fraction clicks on the story, bam…it’s on the front page and everyone freaks.

After seeing that, I’m pretty sure they better make sure that first safety is on, because I don’t there is much there in that “second safety”. I think my favorite part of this are some of the comments on it, especially this one:

sheracj:

Oh no, this is terrible.

She added WAY too much mayonnaise.

I’ve been reading Herbert Schildt’s complete reference to C# and I am currently in inheritance where you learn about method virtualization/abstraction and they were quickly explaining how boxing/unboxing allows C#’s type system to be fully unified and to do so they gave this quick example as part of it:

using System;

class MethOnValue
{
public static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine(10.ToString());
}
}

Maybe have never thought about the use of objects in C# deep enough, or maybe I’m thinking about the complexity of it way too much now, but that really just made me step back and say, “what the…?”  I could be making it more complex than what it is, but it just seems crazy that you can take a value and make it an object out of the blue.

By the way - The comment here refers to the fact I had “fiance” mispelled as “finance” originally.

No, I’m not a member of Sarah Palin’s former Pentecostal church…(ok, I’ll admit, I deleted that line a few times before I figured, what the heck with it, I’ll leave it in)

Apparently, they are planning on turning on the LHC tomorrow. I’m not going to even try to explain what it’s for, but the basics of what I could collect is that they are going to try to collide a couple of atoms to try to find what has been dubbed a “God Particle” a piece of matter that can create matter…or at least that is what Stephen Hawking said.

Colliding these particles will recreate the instant milliseconds after the big bang…this is freaking out some scientists. They feel it could create a black hole and eventually implode the world in on itself into this black hole. Oops. Don’t worry though…it takes a while to get these atoms up to speed, so we have a little while before they hit.

I just think it’s amazing that us humans could do something as powerful as this…that someone could even bring that up. That is awesome!

UPDATE: Deane just forwarded this to the entire team.  It is another website along the same lines as isitchristmas.com.  This site is, http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/.  Deane brings up a good point, I wonder what the logic is for it?

• 1 part innocent kids thinking they are just there to see a concert
• 2 parts innocent cops thinking they are defending the peace
• 1 part media

First start by heating up the cops and aggitating them for long periods of time at high temperature. Next, stir your children and media into an overly excited state. Finally, throw all of your ingredients into the same bowl and stir vigorously.

Ok, now in all seriousness…

No, you didn’t read that title incorrectly and this isn’t a post by some punk kid with a chip on his shoulder. I’m just writing about what I witnessed first hand.

Now stick with me on this post as it will most likely become long, drawn out, and possibly off track at times.

Background:

Around a month ago Josh alerted me to the fact that Rage Against The Machine (RATM) was going to be playing at the Target Center on September 3rd. I follow politics enough that I knew right away what was going on, September 3rd was the 3rd day of the Republican National Convention (RNC). RATM is a political band, they try to point out the hypocrisies and injustices done every day by the government around the world. Granted it’s most likely 50-50 on what they are really all about and what sells records, but either way, it’s something that needs to be done. So on this side we have the people who genuinely believe that the people attending the RNC are in control of some of the most insane injustices done to the human race daily.

On the other side of the coin, my brother-in-law is a state patrolman with the state of Minnesota. He was hired (or possibly volunteered) to be a riot control policeman during the RNC. This is something they of course had to line up years in advance as part of the $50 million that was given to each national convention for security. (that’s $100 million total from taxes you paid in your taxes for security at these events) As part of this each officer had to pass close to a weeks worth of riot training in order to work the event. The sad thing in all of this is, during this time that they were dishing out money for the security and lining up training, no one bothered to reserve places to stay for the police that were going to be brought in from out of town. So all of the policeman had the choice of A) sleeping at a host family’s house B) finding their own place to sleep (at friend’s, family’s, etc.) or C) sleeping on a cot in a fire hall. Even though these people are genuinely doing their best to keep the peace in the city, their strings are being pulled by people way above their heads.

This is really the first ingredient of the riot.

The week of:

The week of the RNC was nothing short of a police state. Before I witnessed it myself, I thought this was understandable. This was a large political event by a party that is known for murdering millions of people throughout the world in the name of “Democracy”. This is of course done in order to keep the money flowing to the senior members of this politically correct mafia. The wars are started, for whatever reason they want to name and the final outcome is always the same: innocent American kids die in the name of their country, innocent foreign troops/civilians die defending their homeland and a hand full of companies turn a better profit because of it. So with that being said, I can understand why people would be on the edge of violence and the police would need to subdue them.

Again, on the other side of the coin, there are riot police, many of which have had to sleep on cots in fire halls before putting on hot black riot gear and standing in the elements for 17 hours straight. As one of my friends put it, “if I were in that situation, I’d be violent too”. Granted these men and women are professionally trained, but they are still only human.

The setup:

I arrived a couple hours before the concert started in order to find Josh and his friends before we went to the concert. On the way around the Target Center I noticed they had already placed police in the light swat gear (just the helmets and the big wooden sticks) on both the east and west side of the stadium, so you will see them when you come out of the parking garage and again when you go to enter the Target Center. This is enough to put anyone on edge, cause you know why they are there. The only thing that is going on around the Target Center is the RATM concert inside the Target Center, everything else is over in St. Paul.

After meeting up with Josh and his friends we were walking down from the walkway east of the Target Center and we noticed that it was already coming together for the police as they had planned.

I’m not sure who started it but this is what we witnessed the end of from the walkway.

(picture from Josh’s phone)

You can’t see the detail but the guy is behind that cop car with blood running down his face and all those impressionable minds are staring from the Target Center entrance across the street at these cops with their batons…ready to get something started. It looked like he had been punched or stomped multiple times at least and that’s what we could see as far away as we were, so imagine what the kids in line for the concert could see.

Here is some video of the same thing before they hauled him away…

After that everyone filed into the concert and I have to give credit to the security and workers in the Target Center, the tension inside the concert venue was non-existent. The security took care of everyone and the crowd was about as laid back of a crowd as I’ve seen.

At the end of the concert the lead singer of RATM warned everyone to control themselves out there and be peaceful because the police are ready to start something. Sadly enough, he wasn’t just putting fear into the kids…he was serious and knew what he was talking about.

The Strike:

The last scene of this choreographed atrocity was so blatant I was able to put it together immediately and luckily get out of there. It also helped that my brother in law had told my sister that I should “Get the F* out of town” after the concert, so I knew they had planned something ahead of time for the Rage concert.

The concert ends and everyone is dead tired as usual after the concert. People calmly file out the door. Of all of the people exiting the concert, I saw one irate person who was upset with the security guards because they wouldn’t let him into the restaurant on the main level so that he could get some water. Other than that one person, everyone else seemed just as calm and normal as any other concert I had left…that was until I got to the front doors of the Target Center.

At the front door I was greeted with a hundred or so people bunched up around a group of media cameras including TV Cameras chanting “F*&% you, I won’t do what you tell me!” (which are lyrics to one of the songs). I was a little caught of guard by two things. One, no one has ever (in the 10 years and probably 30+ concerts that I’ve been to) congregated outside of an entrance. Everyone is so tired they just head directly for their cars and get out of there. Two, in that same amount of concerts that I’ve been to, I have never seen a media camera or TV camera outside of the exit of a concert. There is no reason they should be recording people leaving an event, it was especially odd that there were at least 3 or 4 cameras recording this when the RNC is right down the street, the biggest media magnet in hundreds of miles.

That’s when I saw the reason…the riot police were there formed neatly into two rows DIRECTLY in front of the exit. The riot police wanted a riot…and what better way to get a bunch of kids riled up than to give them something to perform to and someone to riot against. The ingredients were all in place and now it was time to for the police to throw this into the pot and start stirring.

Here is a photo that Josh took again from his camera phone…

Here is another person telling about their experience from the media point of view.

As stated, the media was TOLD BY THE POLICE that there was going to be a riot outside the Target Center. The riot was planned by the police and they put all the ingredients together to make it just right.

The Conclusion:

This is sad. So many people being used. The kids, the cops, the media. For what? To make a dollar. Do you think the police in charge were going to get this $50 Million check and not want to show off how they put it to use? Do you think they would get additional funding for next year’s budget if it doesn’t look like the streets of Minneapolis / St. Paul are on the verge of an explosion by these “violent youth”. If they really wanted all of this to go down peacefully they could have put every single one of these officers in the back end of the Target Center geared up ready to go with lookouts on the roofs or lookouts dressed under cover on the street and no one would have caused a peep. If the police wouldn’t have been visible, there would have been no reason for the people to get riled up. As it were they opted to place themselves directly in the line of site of every person walking out that Target Center door along with calling in the local media to help stir the pot. If this isn’t a setup perhaps someone can explain to me the reasoning behind the way they handled this in the manner in which it was handled.

So tonight is the Rage Against The Machine concert (as long as they weren’t arrested for leading any “unpermitted” marches yesterday). Should be a blast!

I would just like to thank the Bush figure head and the real powers behind him that have kept the autrocity going for these last 8 years. Thousands upon thousands of dead innocent kids isn’t too big of a price to pay for you to fill your pockets and me to get an awesome concert during your National Convention, is it?

(oh, did I take it too far there?….I’ll blame it on Rage…)

Update: just got a call from my sister who wanted to pass along the message from my brother-in-law to “Get the F’ out of town after the concert”. My brother-in-law is one of the riot cops that they brought in from the state patrol.

Saturday is Brook’s bachelor party.  The plan is to get all the paintball guys along with a couple other guys in the bachelor party group over to “Paint the Farm” near Bridgewater for their annual “Farm Wars”.

I haven’t played much paintball after getting excessive with it last year.  Actually in total this will be the third time this year I’ve played.  That’s less than I used to do in a weekend.  I’m actually thinking that this may be the last time that I play paintball for quite a while, I may sell my gear after this weekend.  I think it would be a good way to end it.  I started playing paintball around 8 years ago and started really getting into it about 6 years ago when a good friend from back home in Warroad got me addicted to it.   I’ve been able to travel around the U.S. doing it and have had a great time, but I think it’s a good time to step back a bit from it.

Anyways, back to this weekend.  Farm Wars is a big scenario game that they do every year.  They’ll come up with some big plot that you follow and do some themed “missions” that keep people doing something all day and keep things moving.  It is on a huge old farm with plenty of different landscape to play around throughout the day.   We plan on doing that for 3 or 4 hours in the morning and then heading to the next gun themed event, sporting clays!

Even though I really never get a chance to do it (I think the last time my Shotgon has fired was at Ruppert’s bachelor party) I have a great time shooting shotguns.  Sporting clays is especially fun.  You pay your X amount of dollars and that pays for your clays along with the ammunition you use.  Then your group goes from location to location shooting clays set up in different scenes.  One setup will have a sporting clay coming over a tree at you slowly before dropping, the next will have one coming out of the reeds while you’re standing in a boat and another coming from behind you over your shoulder.  All of them are set up on automatic throwers that you just hit a button on them and send them flying.  You’ll shoot one round off to see where they go and then you take turns shooting them and keeping track of your score.  It’s a lot like golf…except for with guns!  Infinitely better!  There are tons of “holes” that you shoot your way through and they are all a blast.

After that we’ll most likely head up to Brookings (our old stomping grounds) and finish the night off right.  Should make for a great end to a great week.  (also, Sunday I’ll get to go back to Rochester and see my girl that I haven’t seen since Wednesday morning, so that will for sure put a smile on my face)

Traditionally throughout history, the first time someone “owns land” is when the civilization that killed off the last civilization was organized enough to do some type of surveying to lay claims on the land. For example, North America. Indians follow the mammoth in, kill them off. Europeans run into the side of the continent and kill the Indians off. Europeans survey it and lay claim. After that it can really all be summed up with this great excerpt from Eddie Izzard.

Now this brings me back to a thought I had a while ago…who owns Antarctica? I can’t remember how I found out back then if I just asked someone or what, but my good friends Google and Wikipedia can give some answers to that. Apparently somewhere in the early 1900’s countries started laying claim to territories on Antarctica up until the 50’s when they started signing treaties on it. What I find interesting is this:

In 1991, 24 nations approved a protocol (addition) to the treaty that would ban oil and other mineral exploration for at least 50 years.

So I’m going to go ahead and make the call…I’ll give it 10 years before the US starts drilling there (5 before they start exploring for it).

But all of this still doesn’t answer the question….who owns the moon?

Ok, I just wanted to put that out there before we got started. Last Friday I went up to the Irish Festival in St. Paul, thanks to Ross for letting me know about it. The whole reason that I went up there was not for a Guinness. Which by the way, I found out that they didn’t have on tap there…anywhere…I’m pretty sure that is the reason why it rained a little after I got there…God was crying!

Anyways, the reason I went was because the headliner of the nights Irish music was the best Irish band ever (and best punk band ever) Flogging Molly. If you disagree, it’s ok, you’re wrong. If you haven’t heard Flogging Molly before, do yourself a favor, go to Itunes and download a song. Any song will do, I really can’t think of a song I don’t like.

So yeah, I headed up there Friday night…met up with Chris McMacken and we started to check out the festivities. There were tons of people there selling everything they could Irish, a few cool entertainers including a couple soccer teams playing in the center of the park, a few guys boxing in an old style boxing setup, plenty of kids doing their little irish dances and finally a large assortment of great Irish music.

The best of course was Flogging Molly.  This was the second time I got to watch them live and they have just as much energy and excitement as they did 6 years ago.  There is something awe inspiring with seeing 7 people on the stage making music with a such soul that it literally grabs you by the neck and forces you to sing along.  They played a fairly long set which was nice, being that I only was able to see their Friday show and they were going to do it all again the next night.

Here’s to Irish Punk.

This all boils down to what drives businesses to be better, if the customer doesn’t spend their money with you, they’ll spend it somewhere else.

Somewhere where this is turned on its ear is government.  It really started to annoy me for the first time when I sat in a line of about 15 people at the DMV waiting for 2 totally incompetent and lifeless individuals to “help me”.  I watched as the most mundane tasks, which a mentally handicap chimpanzee with a limp could have completed in record, took them forever to complete.  After sitting in line for entirely too long while the line moved 1 person, I decided I could not wait another 3 hours for this, I needed to go back to work, for a real company that had real customers.

The next place that I saw this was the licensing center.  This was a much shorter wait due to the fact that no one was in there however I had to deal with the same quality of individuals.  I sat there listening to how Sally had talked to Edna and oh my goodness… yada yada yada….not work appropriate and someone shoot me in the face this wait is painful!

The painful truth that is evident in both of these locations was that their pay checks are not dependent on their company surviving.  Their paychecks are depending on the fact that everyone doesn’t want to get arrested for breaking the laws of proper licensing.  They do something that all of us have to pay for both in taxes and in the fees we pay for these “services”.  If these were services that were done in the general business world they would have been automated years ago to streamline the process but they do not need to be, because of the lack of competition.

Moral of the story….there is no moral to this story, I’m just ranting.

Oh and…maybe lick your drivers license before you hand it to them so that they might catch a cold tomorrow….making their day horrible tomorrow in return for making your day horrible today!

Yesterday I went through and updated all of my Ticketmaster account information. This morning I got up to an alarm at 9:45 (it was a late night last night, I’ll write about that later). I had to set up my laptops down stairs, right next to my modem so that I could restart it if need be being that my qwest for internet that doesn’t suck is still on going. I had both of them loaded up onto the ticketmaster page and starting at 9:58 I started refreshing both browsers….back and forth. Right at 10:00 the page loaded allowing me to purchase tickets, I picked my preferences, quickly deciphered the CAPTCHA and made a sprint for the finish line. At 10:01 I had 4 tickets for the floor!

I win!

After 5 minutes I checked things out again and all the floor tickets were sold out already. Just out of curiosity I looked around to see if I could see what Minnesota’s scalping laws were and apparently just last year they made it legal again (after close to 100 years of it being illegal apparently). So I think next time a big show comes through I may have to try out my game plan again to see if I can make a couple bucks on craigslist.

He was making a right hand turn on one of the few roads in Sioux Falls where a right on red is illegal, but instead of the usual position of the sign (on the vertical light pole above or below the signal you are watching), this sign directing you “No right on red” is placed on the horizontal beam towards the center of the street.  Not so convenient to see.  This is all done of course to improve the amount of tickets and there for revenue created by these lights for both the company that installed them and the SFPD.

Heck, even after knowing about the lights they were still able to trick me.

About a week after Ross had his run in with the traffic light, I was heading back to my hotel from a Blend gathering and for some unkown reason I decided to take a route which brought me past the afore mentioned light.  Bad choice.  I was also going to take a right and even took the time to track down the sign that Ross has complained about and noticed that it was awkwardly positioned.   However, I knew the trap was set on this light so I patiently waited as no one drove by (it was around 11:30 or so at night).  Right then I noticed a drunkerd stumbling down the sidewalk and eyeing the crosswalk signal he started across as the light turned green and the crosswalk signal read “Walk”.  So I waited for him to scurry across the sidewalk and then I proceeded to take a right turn once the crosswalk was clear.

Just as I started to roll forward I saw a bright white flash.  I knew there wasn’t any traffic coming, so I ruled out the possibility of being struck by a semi and getting a direct shot into heaven.  That and I was raised Catholic…so I have to make a pit stop in pergatory first.  So I assumed it was the traffic light and slammed on the breaks.

At this time I would like to take a short break to give kudos to all of the engineering, R&D, production line members, test team and salesmen at the company who makes the breaks for Nissan’s Altima.  You saved me a ticket.

Now back to the story.  So I hold on my breaks, look up at the right arrow and at that instant it flips to green.  I had forgot that the turn arrows stay red for another 5 seconds or so after the light turns green.  After it turns green, I continued on and recieved the next 2 flashes which of course “Busted” me going through a green light!

So for now, I haven’t recieved a ticket yet and this occured a little under a month ago.  So I’ll keep my fingers crossed that they aren’t sending anything out.

Oh and what reminded me of all of this was a picture in the daily WTF of a van being busted for speeding (while getting towed).

Josh told me about this yesterday and I’m definitely thinking I need to go.  First of all, it’s Rage Against The Machine…I have never seen them live but love their music and think they would would make an ear bleeding set to say the least.  Josh is probably the biggest fan of RATM that I’ve met and so that combination will make it even better.  Add to that it’s going to be on the third day of the RNC and you’ve got a recipe for greatness!

Just as long as I don’t end up running into my brother in law who will be down there on riot control!

I went for a fun little bike ride on the local trail here by my house. Got in about 15 or so miles and finally passed 100 total miles on my bikes odometer! I was originally planning on doing that a few weeks ago, but I’ve been more busy (or perhaps more lazy) than I would like to be.

I was thinking that I need to take some pictures out on the bike trails some time and post them online. The trail is extremely scenic, especially early in the morning when the sun is still low in the sky.

However, I really want a good book that I can read, just for entertainment purposes.  I figured I would make a request out to my few readers that I’ve started to acquire (along with directing a few other good friends to the site) and see what everyone out there has to offer.

As a reference, some of the books that I can remember reading just for entertainment value include the following (in no specific order):

Ender’s Game - Probably one of my favorite books ever.  I’ve thought about finding that book again and reading it just because it was such a good book.  From what I can remember it is about a boy who is sent off to a military themed boarding school where they learn to fight and lead in this futuristic space station.

(Unknown Title) - A book about the 82nd Airborne Division during WW2, written by a man who was in my Grandfather’s company, so it is basically a story of what my grandpa went through in the war through another person’s perspective.

The Raft - A true story about 3 guys who’s bomber had crashed off of the Japanese coastline during WW2, recounting their survival story while floating across the Pacific in their life raft.

(Unknown Title) - A book about travelers going through time and space following worm holes.  I forget what the entire theme of the book was, but I just remember it really made you sit back and think about everything.

The Hatchet - This may of been assigned when I was in 5th grade, but I remember it made a big impact on me, so I figured I would include it.  I’m fairly certain it is required reading of all kids that age but it’s a book about a young guy who goes down in a bush plane and ends up stranded in the wilderness with nothing but his hatchet.

So that is the quick list of the books I’ve read for entertainment purposes.  As you can probably tell, I prefer either true stories or books that really make you question things or at least think about things again.  Here is a list from Kevin Kelly that I ran across in my RSS feed a while ago.  If you have read any of those and have opinions on them, I’d love to hear it.

Thank you in advance.

Along with that the resort looks like it has a descent amount of trails along with EIGHT, count ‘em 8 chair lifts (which is 7 more then what we had at “Great Bump” in Sioux Falls).   Of course, it’s not as close of a drive as Great Bear was, but I think I can deal with it.

Hopefully this will give me a good amount of practice before my annual snowboard trip with Reid and it’s one one step closer to Reid and I’s big trip to Alaska to go Heli-Boarding.

(Note: I figured since us “Minnesotans” get hassled for supposedly calling every puddle a lake, I’ll go ahead and call this hill a mountain)

So imagine yourself an average tourist driving across the country and halfway across Minnesota you see a sign for Wall Drug. You may scratch your head a bit and figure, whatever. You keep driving and as soon as you hit SD you start seeing these signs everywhere. Granted, you’re driving across South Dakota, so there really isn’t much to see in the first place, but the amount of signs are getting annoying at best. So naturally you’re thinking, dang…there might actually be something worth seeing in this state (beyond four dead heads on a hill). So you start wondering what this monstrosity may be….and then when you’re almost all the way across the second most boring drive in the lower 48 (taking I-29 from Sioux Falls to the Canadian border is the worst) you come to your newly found destination.

A crappy souvenir shop in a town of 800. (queue sad trombone)

Well, apparently the mechanics may disagree. There have been a couple cases so far including this latest one caught on video that demonstrate the danger of large amounts of energy held in the form of electricity and predominantly what happens when it goes bad.

Now kids, sharpen up those #2 pencils, grab your favorite college ruled note book from your transformers trapper keeper and lets learn about conductors and insulators. (here’s a hint mechanic=conductor)

video via YouTube/story via Auto-Blog

This is a blog by one of my friends.  I’ve helped them out with a little bit of css/html work on the site and while I was there I read some of the posts and have decided to add it to my RSS feed.  The blog has only been around for about a month but the work is impressive.

News on another blogs, Carla Kay White has changed from random posts focusing more on web development tools and tricks to a theme of Health, Wealth & Happiness.