Gen, mia_mcdavid‘s mother, arrived yesterday for a visit. She will be staying until next Saturday. This is good. I get along with her very well. last night she took us to a great dinner at a well known (to foodies) restaurant in St. Paul. A rare visit to the culinary stratosphere.
Gen is a political junkie, so we have had the Democratic presidential debate on for the last couple hours. Very low signal-to-noise ratio.
Trouble at work all afternoon, and through dinner. I had to drive into downtown Minneapolis three times. Not fun. Very obscure issues with SQL Server connectivity. We seem to have ended up with something that works, but there are still some unexplained issues.
After my computer class finished today I went to the local Woodcraft store, which is in the same part of the Metro. wolfsword was working there and was in at the time. I had a discount card, so I did something I have been wanting to do for a long time: I bought a Lie Nielsen block plane. Lie-Nielsen makes some of the best hand tools for woodworking available today. Perhaps some day I will be able to get one of their larger planes as well. Meanwhile, a good block plane is a very useful thing to have in a shop, and I expect this one will serve me well.
I spend the last three days at an excellent class on SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft’s latest and greatest database system). I am not an enthusiastic M’soft fan, but it is what we use at work, and I have enough battles to fight there already.
Anyway, a couple side notes: Continue reading
I spent the day at a SQL Server Class in Edina, on the other side of Minneapolis. The commute actually was not too bad. That area of the Metro is notorious for bad traffic, but coming from the Northeast I avoided the worst both morning and evening. The really bad traffic was all going the other direction. Still, it was a lot of driving. I would really hate to live in that area and need to drive through it routinely every day. There is something fundamentally wrong about how modern American urban areas are constructed, and at a deeper level, the decision processes by which we got there. We, or our children, are going to pay for it.
… The Roseville Civic Center has wi-fi! I was able to check e-mail and LJ on my Nokia 770 while waiting for my son’s annual school banquet to begin there.
I spent much of the morning working on colgaffneyis newsletter. The hard copy is printed and almost ready to mail. All I have to do tomorrow is buy stamps and mail it.
After finishing that I went by the graves of my grandparents. I took the wrong exit from the expressway and corrected myself, to my surprise, by reconstructing the directions from their old house, rather than from our home in Roseville. I cleared the grass and debris from the grave stones, and afterwards I drove by their house in NE Minneapolis, not far away. The house is being well kept up. Sometime in the past decades one of the owners repainted the trim brown. The contrast with the stucco looks good. Two houses on the block had For Sale signs. I hope that does not mean there is a problem with the neighborhood. Everything I could see looked OK.
I came home and had a sandwich for lunch. Then mia_mcdavid, our son James, and I went to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. I carefully avoided every temptation to make sense of the plot and just sat back to enjoy the action and the scenes. Of course, I noticed the gear and clothing ranged from c. 1600 (e.g. a helmet similar to the one I am wearing in this userpic) to the mid 1700’s (the infantry uniforms). Some of the wigs were typical of the latter period, but others were more suited to 1690. One of the firearms was quite similar to colgaffneyis grenade launcher (if you imagine it being upgraded to a flintlock) and there was a boarding axe quite similar to one I own. So it actually was rather amusing :-)>
After lunch today (possibly the best hamburger I have ever eaten in my life) mia_mcdavid and I went home. We both took a much needed nap, but not before I filled the dishwasher with beer bottles and started it.
When I got up I bottled the dry stout that I brewed back on St. Patrick’s Day. Final gravity was 1.013–higher than I would like, so it may not be as dry as all that. Still, it smelled good, and I expect it will be OK.
Brewed on St. Patrick’s Day and bottled on Pentecost, a very ecclesiastical beer.
mia_mcdavid and I went to the St. Paul Farmer’s market in the morning. A pleasant outing.
We spent the afternoon at a clothing workshop (“camp drill”) for colgaffneyis. It was held at the home of c_nocturnum. A lot of patterns by kass_rants were being used there. I spent most of the time working on a pair of period shoes that I had made last year–just maintenance, repairing some seams. I have a very similar pair of shoes I purchased, but I realized at last weekend’s Scottish Fair that while the workmanship on the commercial pair was better, the homemade shoes were perfectly useable, looked OK, and were more comfortable.
Cosmologists Predict A Static Universe In 3 Trillion Years
“When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time.”
Via Slashdot.
The de Sitter universe was one of the first cosmological models devised using General Relativity, and is widely discussed in Gen Rel textbooks–I have several in the basement. Nice to see the classics are still relevant :-)>
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 
