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This morning when I walked the dog, the temperature was -8°F and the windchill was -25°F. To make matters even worse, Madison has a had an unfortunate weather pattern so far this year. We get freezing rain to make all the streets and sidewalks icy. Then, before the ice even has a chance to melt, we immediately are treated to frigid temperatures and a good coating of snow. All of this combines to produce less than ideal biking weather.

The low-rider, hip-hugging blue jeans trend has gone far enough. Why must I be subjected to large quantities of gratuitous ass crack in public places?Sarah and I were at the Ani DiFranco concert last night. We generally like to sit on the aisle so that we can come and go as we please. This means standing up periodically to let those seated farther down the row of seats pass, but there are tradeoffs for everything in life so standing up periodically doesn’t bother me.

Well, as we were sitting on the aisle, so were the people sitting in front of us. And, if we had to stand up reasonably often, so did the people in front of us.

Normally, that wouldn’t bother me in the least. Like I said, there is a price to be paid for sitting on the aisle. However, one of the girls in front of us was in no way slender and she was wearing the ever-so-fashionable hip-hugging, low-rider jeans with a too-short shirt.

Everytime this wonderful person stood up to let people pass, my field of view was filled with gratuitous ass crack as her jeans were riding too low and the back of her shirt was riding too high.

Yikes! I paid over $35 to listen to Ani sing and play guitar, not to see some random girl’s pasty white, flabby, unattractive, exposed posterior. Where is the justice here?

If I walked around with the top half of butt crack hanging out for all the world to see, wouldn’t people be more than a bit offended?

So, if you find yourself wearing hip-hugger, low-rider jeans, experiment at home with a friend or significant other before wearing the jeans out in public. If you’re flashing tail bone and the Grand Butt Cheek Canyon when you stand up, those jeans are not you. If you insist on wearing such jeans, please, please, please, wear a shirt long enough to be tucked in for everyone else’s sake.

From Friday through Sunday, I played in six curling matches and won all but one. The two games we played on Thursday night were league games at the Madison Curling Club. The matches in which I played on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were part of the annual Arlington (WI) Men’s Bonspiel. My team took second place overall in the bonspiel. We had a chance to win the whole tournament on the last shot, but we missed it, and ended up in second place.The bonspiel was a fun event. We got to play against teams from other towns, which was a nice change of pace.

On Saturday night, there was a banquet and a raffle. Tickets were ten dollars for “a wingspan.” Since tall people have longer wingspans than shorter people, tall people naturally got a better chance to win.

The Arlington bonspiel is famous for giving away toilets during the raffle and this year was no exception. The toilets are a sought after prize, even more so than box seats to a Brewers game, golf outings, or leather jackets. That reflects the down-home, blue-collar nature of the people there. Most people even had a plan to either add a toilet to their home or replace one of their existing toilets if they won.

Unfortunately, I did not win a toilet. Nor did I win one of the many bottles of booze given away. Fortunately, I didn’t win any of the golf balls, golf outings, or Brewers box seats, either. What I did win was a homemade clock with a curling theme. Sarah immediately hung it in our kitchen, declaring that we didn’t “have enough kitschy curling stuff” around the house and that the clock would go a long way towards filling that void.

OSNews.com has published an article I wrote describing OpenVPN.

Bob Keeshan, the man who played Captain Kangaroo on television, died today.

Ironically enough, Sarah and I were talking about Captain Kangaroo a couple of days ago. For all that we watched the show, neither one of us ever remembers seeing Captain Kangaroo hop, jump, or otherwise move like his namesake.

Nearly everyone seems to be buying in to the idea that Howard Dean hurt his presidential candidacy by showing actual, unvarnished emotion in his Iowa concession speech.

A candidate who shows some sign of life? Some sign of personality? Some sign of actually giving a damn? Where do we get more like him?

I’m not on the Howard Dean bandwagon, nor do I expect to find myself there on Election Day. However, I’d rather vote for people with personality, with some spark of life, then for people who don’t give me any reason to suspect they have the same.

I’d rather vote for someone who acts like he is, and thinks his own thoughts, than someone who has emotions and thoughts but doesn’t dare let on to the fact in public. Those gray men and women, of which the world has plenty, are the truly dangerous ones.

After hearing about http://www.repentantnadervoter.com and http://www.unrepentantnadervoter.com, it is clear that many Americans still don’t understand how a democracy is supposed to function.The idea that Nader cost Gore the 2000 election is an idea so stupid that it could only have originated with one of the two major US political parties.

Let’s examine the underlying logic to the “Nader Cost Gore the Election” idea. The only leg on which this argument stands is that the people who voted for Nader would have, without a doubt, voted Democratic if Nader hadn’t run. So, if we can somehow knock that leg out from underneath the argument, we can prove the argument is wrong.

Can anyone conclusively demonstrate the number of Green Party voters in 2000 who would have:

1. Gone to the polls even if Nader hadn’t been running
2. Voted blindly for the Democratic nominee once they got there

Of course not. No one talks about the number of people who may not have voted at all if they hadn’t been energized by Nader’s campaign. It is blind supposition to assume those same voters would have been otherwise energized by Gore’s campaign.

As Nader said many times during his campaign, “Only Al Gore can beat Al Gore.” What Nader was communicating was that if Al Gore could sufficiently mobilize Democrats and moderate Republicans to vote for him, Nader’s candidacy could not hurt him. However, as we now know, Gore was a terribly unexciting candidate and he failed to excite voters.

It is therefore extermely difficult to believe that everyone who voted for Nader would have, without question, voted for Gore. Heck, how many registered Democratic voters did not even go to the polls in 2000? Only 51% of all registered voters bothered to vote in the 2000 election. Given the close results, we can safely assume that somewhere in the range of 50% of all registered Democratic voters turned out to vote (for anyone, not necessarily Gore). If Gore really wanted to win, he needed to get more people who tend to vote Democratic to not only show up at the polls, but to vote for him. The Democratic Party’s claims that Nader stole Gore’s votes were simply a sign of weakness.

Having said that, what do we make of the, um, people who start web site like repentantnadervoter.com? The obvious charactertistics:

• They gladly line up to have their dignity soiled at airline security counters
• They pay attention when the Homeland Security Department changes the terror alert color
• They have a six-month supply of food, water, plastic sheeting, and duck tape in their basement
• They feel safer knowing that no one is flying with pool cues and hockey sticks in their carry-on luggage
• They lock the doors on their rusting Dodge Neon when they go to the grocery store, even if there is nothing in the car worth stealing

I could go on and on, but the point is clear. These are people who live in fear. As such, their fear votes for them. They may want the Green Party candidate to win, but they fear the Republican candiate, so they vote Democratic. That’s like going to a restaurant, yearning for the steak. But you fear the fish and as a result you order the chicken.

Does that make any sense?!?

The only way America will ever have viable third/fourth/fifth parties, is if people stop voting with their fear and start voting with their minds and hearts. This advice isn’t just for those on the left side of the political spectrum, either. If you truly believe in Libertarian ideals, and if the Libertarian party best represents those ideals, vote Libertarian.

Americans ought to stop voting against what they fear, and start voting for what they desire.

Having spent the better part of two days insulating the skylight wells in our home, and having found little information on-line regarding the process of insulating skylight wells, I will share my experience below so that others may benefit.The biggest problem that I encountered while insulating our wells was that the pitch of the roof on our house is very shallow. As such, it was impossible for me to stand up in the attic, so I spent all my time on my hands and knees. This meant that all my movements from the ladder up to the attic to each individual well had to be carefully planned and slowly executed so that I didn’t put a foot through the ceiling of the rooms downstairs. The very small space also meant that I was not able to reach what we call the "front" of each well. The front of each well will have to be insulated by blown-in cellulose insulation.

I used 2" thick rigid foam insulation on our wells. Each 2" of thickness gave us an R-value of 10. So, by applying two layers of 2" insulation, I was able to get an R-value of 20 on the well walls. This is less than what our attic will ultimately possess, but it is a better R-value than the rest of the attic currently has.

If your skylight wells are all the same size, and in the same position relative to the roofline, you can save yourself some time by making a few template or pattern pieces. Then, you can cut all the pieces you need at once without trekking up and down the ladder between pieces every time.

Make measurements of the pieces you’ll need before installing the wells, if possible. This means making measurements of what is, essentially, empty space bounded by framing materials for the well walls. However, it will be easier to make these measurments while standing on a ladder inside the wells (before the well walls are installed), than it will be to make these measurements while crouched over in the attic.

Use rigid foam insulation on the well walls unless you have a fully framed structure into which you can put traditional, rolled fiberglass insulation.

Use a foamboard adhesive to affix the foam insulation to the well walls. Don’t just use Liquid Nails or another construction adhesive. These will eat away at the insulation.

Use a respirator while crawling around an attic filled with loose fiberglass insulation of unknown vintage. Using a respirator will also prevent the adhesive fumes from scrambling your brain.

If you are insulating the wells in the dark heart of winter, keep the adhesive warm (60-70F) until you are ready to use it. Warm adhesive is easier to squeeze out of the canister with a caulking gun.

Buy more adhesive than you expect to need.

Buy more wood to lay down in the attic that you expect to need. The more wood you put down in the attic to support your weight, the easier it will be to move around.

Sarah and I watched the movie NorthFork over the weekend.

It was sold to audiences as a story of a town about to be innundated by the lake created behind a new dam. A group of state workers were charged with getting the people out of the town and on to higher ground, even if the residents did not want to leave of their own accord.

The movie’s actual plot can be found by reading on.

The actual plot of Northfork is very different. Rather than portray a relatively conventional series of cause and effect actions, the movie veers sharply into religious and surrealistic territory, almost from the opening credits.

Angels, devils, and government agents somewhere in between dominate the list of characters. Surrealistic images and beasts dominate the visual landscape. Rather than occuring serially, events happen at random. Even when events do happen, they happen at such a slow pace that reading the newspaper while watching the movie is not only possible, it is advisable.

The opening of the dam is almost completely irrelevant to the story. Tearing down an apartment building or tearing down houses to build a freeway would have provided the same framework to the movie.

All of this makes “Northfork” a movie that is best experienced while asleep or while under general anestheia.

My last day in my current job is Monday, 19 Jan 04. Why am I leaving a stable, if not extraordinarily well paying or interesting job? Mostly because the job was not very interesting, I didn’t have enough work to do, and the pay wasn’t so extraordinary that I couldn’t walk away from it without regrets.

So, what am I going to do with my time now? The current plan is for me to try my hand at freelance writing and computer consulting. Most likely I’ll have to form a limited liability corporation and perform my work under its auspices. That company already has a name (in my head, anyway), and a domain name, now it just needs to be formed officially.

If neither of those avenues lead me where I want to go, I’ll try something different. If worst comes to worst, I can always go back to be an IT worker in the corporate world. The corporate world certainly isn’t going anywhere.

Two Wisconsin malls have cut back the hours they are open for so-called mall walkers as a “terror precaution.”

One mall spokeswoman noted “that a full complement of security guards is not in place until 9 a.m. to protect the walkers, should a terrorist attack occur.”

Let’s examine just where, exactly, the malls in Fond du Lac and Green Bay are on the terrorist strike list.

Fond du Lac is a city of approximately 42,000 people. Green Bay is a city of approximately 102,000 people. It is safe to say that there are many larger, symbolically more important cities in America against which a terrorist could choose to strike.

Now, let’s try to guess just how many people show up at a mall at 8 a.m. to walk. Remember, all the stores are closed, so the only people showing up are people who open stores at 9 a.m. and mall walkers. Even if these were really big malls, the number of mall walkers couldn’t possibly be more than a hundred.

Beyond that, those hundred people aren’t walking around the mall in a tightly packed group. Rather, they are quite spread out as individuals and groups walk at slightly different paces. And, of course, the larger the mall, the more spread out these walker most likely are.

So, would it make sense for a terrorist to strike a very large building that contains a small, disbursed population in the relative middle of nowhere?

Wouldn’t a terrorist trying to make a statement rather strike a building packed with a large number of people? Something like a concert hall or a football game?

Of course they would. Even if a terrorist wanted to strike a mall, wouldn’t it make more sense to do so when the mall is packed with people? Like, in the middle of the day on a Saturday or Sunday (when both malls remain open)?

This is most likely just a way for the malls in question to cut the hours their buildings are open without simply saying, “Look. We’re opening one hour later because it will save us $1000/day. Sorry folks, but that’s the way it is.”

It aggravates me to read how businesses and politicians take action to cut costs, reduce freedom, destroy privacy, and increase inconvenience to their customers and constituents, all the while claiming that the changes are for our own safety and security against terrorism. Do they think we are stupid?

Nadine Strossen, ACLU President recently said, “Too many provisions of that law are, in fact, the worst of both worlds. They do demonstrably make all of us less free without demonstrably making any of us more safe.” She was speaking about the Patriot Act, but the thought behind the message could be applied to many situations in our daily lives.

Are we any safer because a pair of malls in Wisconsin have reduced the hours that they are open for mall walkers to use?

The homes in our neighborhood were, by and large, built around 1960. Many of our neighbors are the original owners of their homes and have lived in the neighborhood since it was transformed from farmland to houses.

However, the character and population of the neighborhood is clearly changing and the 2000 Census figures clearly bear this out.

In 2000, there were 5,037 residents in our census tract (roughly coincidental with what we would consider our neighborhood). Of those 5,037 people, 31%, or 1,560, were over the age of 60. That would neatly represent the folks who are the original owners of many homes (obviously, that is something of a generalization, but stay with me here).

The age grouping used by the census with the second largest population in our tract was the 25-34 year old group. That group had 801 members in 2000.

Since 2000, the number of 25-34 year-olds has only increased, while the number of 60+ year-olds has decreased as they sell their homes and move out of the neighborhood.

Our little block is a prime example of this trend. The man who lives four doors north of us is an original owner. He plans on moving out of his home when a new block of condos is completed three blocks to our north. The man who lives three doors north is an original owner. The people who live two doors north are relatively young. They purchased their home last summer. The family directly to our north is also young. They purchased their home last year from the original owner, as well.

The folks directly to our south are young. Their southern neighbors are young. The folks three doors south from us are our age. They purchased their home in the last year.

The man across the street is an original owner, retired, and well into his sixties. His neighbors to both sides are younger. They purchased their homes relatively recently.

Gentrification is a process that I often hear about, but never associate with my own actions. It is always something taking place in cities, most likely far away. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that Sarah and I were gentrifying a neighborhood as surely as if we had moved into a trendy loft in some big city’s warehouse district.

If you haven’t visited http://www.bushin30seconds.org/ yet, I encourage you to do so. The winners of their TV AD contest have been announced.

After watching all twenty-six finalist ads, my favorite ad is “Bring It On,” which was named the Best Youth Ad. The overall winner, “Child’s Pay” is good, but it doesn’t speak to me the same way “Bring It On” does. Of course, if you watch the ads, and if you know me, it will immediately become clear why the style and substance of “Bring It On” appeals to me so much.

Yes, that was a UW-Madison professor who discovered how to cut cheese with a laser. Let’s face it, didn’t we all get up every morning wondering, “When are those smarty-pants scientists going to figure out how to cut cheese with a laser already?!?”

Did the world reallyl need this sort of research? Did this do anything to dispel Wisconsin’s reputation as a state full of cheeseheads. Other scientists are out there trying to cure cancer, make cars and trucks more efficient, and use plants to reclaim toxic waste sites. Heck, even research into Dick Cheney’s pet, clean coal, sounds like a better use of research time. But no, Wisconsin scientists are out there busily trying to figure out how to cut cheese with lasers.

What big breakthrough will they discover next? How to operate a grill full of bratwurst by remote control?

I’m sure the new look isn’t exactly flying under the rader. After years of creating a web log using tools I developed myself, I decided to move to a more complete web log/content management system.

Why the change?

Well, numerous reasons, really. Before moving to this new system, I was maintaining my own content and tools. In the techology world, this is known as “rolling your own.” Of course, this is also known as “reinventing the wheel.”

There are advantages to rolling your own solution. You always have complete control of the form and format of your data, for one. The tools always do what you tell them do, for another. However, there are also downsides. Your tools never advance any farther or faster than the amount of time you invest in to them. So, if you aren’t investing much time your tools, like I was, you remain stuck with a relatively primitive tool set.

Beyond getting new tools, I had some other goals. I wanted to make it possible for Sarah to write and post ideas and stories of her own on the site. Using my tools, she would first have to learn HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and Unix (all of which combined is a veritable mountain of data to digest) before she could post a single sentence on-line. I also wanted to get a database on the site’s backend to simplify data storage and the like. I wanted an easier, more reliable way to generate RSS/RDF feeds. Finally, I wanted to expand the number of places (geographically) on the planet from which I (or Sarah) could post with ease. My old system was almost 100% geared towards posting from my home or office.

So, I decided to look around for a better way to get my content on-line. Research led me to believe that modern “content management” systems had matured to the point where many people were using them.

Hours later, the new site is born. The old information is still lurking in the background, and still in its old form. I decided to bring all my posts from 2004 into the new system and leave everything from before 2004 in the old form. There were several reasons for doing this (the primary one being that there are several links around the Internet that point to various pages/images in the old files), so the old files remain.

There are numerous advantages for you, the reader, in this new system. The first is that each individual story or blurb can be formatted for easy printing. It can also be easily e-mailed to a friend. You can leave comments on the site about what we write. You can even search the text of our writings for particular words and phrases.

Hopefully, you will all enjoy the new site. Let us know what you think of it.

The season for one of my curling teams (Thursday night) is halfway over and we have lost far more games than we have won. The best way I can explain our dismal record is to discuss how airplane accidents are almost always caused by a chain of events.

Each link in the chain, when viewed in isolation, does not appear to be an eggregiously bad decision or action. However the cumulative effects of the individual decisions or actions generally lead to one horrible, catastrophic moment (i.e., the airplane crash). If just one link in the chain of events were to be broken, the theory goes, the catastropic moment could be avoided.

Such is the case with nearly every curling game in which our team has competed this year. In each end we miss maybe one or two shots. Each missed shot appears to be less than catastrophic at the time. However, each missed shot builds up, until, like last night, we find ourselves on the short end of a 8-2 score in the eigth end with only five stones remaining to be played. Hopefully, my Sunday night team (which starts play this
week) will do a bit better.

A Fond Du Lac, WI man blames Charter Communications for “his television addiction, his wife’s 50-pound weight gain and his children being ‘lazy channel surfers.’”

What will make this man happy? “$5,000 or three computers, and a lifetime supply of free Internet service.”

The complete story includes more absurd details guaranteed to make you cringe at the thought that this man has the right to vote.

The newest book to find its way into my bag is “The Cruelest Miles” by Gay and Laney Salisbury. It’s the true story of how diptheria syrum to combat a diptheria epidemic was delivered by dog sled teams across 674 milesof wilderness through the dark heart of Alaskan winter to Nome, Alaska in1925. The book is full of wonderful characters, classic moments, andsome great writing.

I love the following excerpt:

“Lanky and fair-haired, Will Bill was a jack-of-all-trades, and like so many other men in the territory, master of quite a few of them. He was a mail driver, miner, trapper, and fearless dog driver, who was known to have the fastest dog team in the area. His skills as a driver, combined with a combustible mixture of hot temper, sharp wit, andwillingness to take risks on the trail, no doubt accounted for his nickname. Not coincidentally, he had also become a scholar of the deep freeze. Tonight, his hard-earned knowledge and skills would be tested, perhaps as never before….[I]n these parts, a man did not carry the name ‘Wild Bill’ without having earned it, and he was prepared to risk all.”

It was the middle of July, 2001 when I read Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. It was often hard to imagine snow and cold when I sitting in the sun on a 100+ degree day. This didn’t make the book any less interesting or well written, but it just didn’t seem as real as it might have.

When I walked the dog this morning, the temperature was -7F and the wind chill was -20F. Somehow that brings the story of a dog team run in -50F weather (not including wind chill) just that much closer to real. Of course, I do not wear a long bearskin jacket, mukluks, and caribou pants and shirt when I walk the dog around the neighborhood, but at least the weather feels right to read a book about deep winter.

If you missed Baxter Black’s commentary on the 31 Dec 2003 version of Morning Edition, you missed some truly funny moments. The segment is titled ‘I Can Fix Your Cow’