I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

Having finished grading for the semester, I spent last night finishing another DVD of Lost -- I am seriously a junkie for the show, sad, sad, sad -- and then going off to toast Adam on his new adventure to Estonia. Adam is a former Geog 3161 student of mine who after the semester finished became a good friend and Russian informant. (I say this because he knows Russian and is often giving me insight into the inner workings of Kremlin via Putin's media releases.) He also had similar tastes in music -- Russian ska and electronica -- which gave us an impetus to meet up after the semester and swap music. He took his last final at 6 p.m. yesterday, is now officially a UMN alumnus, and today I am driving him to the airport so that he can hop his one-way flight to Estonia and become an illegal immigrant over there. Absolutely brilliant! He doesn't have a job, he has an apartment reserved without a mattress, and he has no way to get home if things don't work out. But things will work out, because it is Central Europe! That's how things work out over there -- chaos theory. He'll probably start the first Starbucks over there and use his millions to buy himself the Estonian presidency in 30 years. That's just my prediction. If all else fails and he gets deported, he can always buy a Russian visa and go there for a spell. At least, that was his logic last night after three or four pints. Brilliant!

Last night he and his groupies took over the Town Hall Brewery -- there must have been 50 people there, including the bar staff celebrating with him -- and, though I left at around 11, I think they all moved over to Bullwinkle's later on. It was pretty impressive. I met a bunch of cool peeps that knew Adam from various venues, including one who had driven all the way from Spooner, Wisconsin, for the send off. A bunch of Russian and Estonian women were there too, which doesn't surprise me knowing Adam... It was a great time!

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Today the proverbial end-of-the-semester illness struck. Birgit has been sick for about five days, and I have been playing a difficult game of keep-away from her, which has been driving her mad. When she coughs I run the opposite direction, and when she is passing through the room, I scurry and cling to the walls to avoid any passing germs. At first it was kind of a joke, but then after two days it became second nature. By the third day she was shouting at me to knock it off and just give her a hug. I caved. And now... I'm sick! Damnit!

I was really hoping to have just one winter break where I don't fall ill at the end of the semester, and I was almost home free... but this morning I woke up with a nascent head cold of sorts that I can tell is merely in the early stages and will strike with its full fury tomorrow. So my goal is to get shit done today, before I become a bed-ridden, Economist reading vegetable over the weekend.

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Vikings-Redskins
Friends departing and tales of illness aside... what is crucial is that I get well before the game on Sunday! I have a terrible feeling about the outcome, but the Vikings are such an unpredictable team, I still maintain a sliver of hope that they can win it and perhaps even catch the Giants for the number one Wild Card spot. But since ESPN has probably analyzed this to death already, I will stop here.

My new favorite radio show -- Jet Set Planet -- was just written up in the Rake. Though I heard the interview was surreal and that there are some glaring errors in the final copy -- i.e., Glen never went to the University of Southern Maryland, which as far as I am aware, does not exist -- it is pretty excellent. Check out the article here and tune in on Monday nights from 10:30 until midnight on KFAI.org or listen to the Jet Set Planet's archives online here.

Labels: Fab Fourth Dimension, Jet Set Planet, KFAI

//Football Speak
Yesterday was a complete waste, because no matter how many football games I watched, all I really wanted to see was the Vikings-Bears game, and it isn't on until tonight. It was really frustrating to see the Patriots, the Packers, and even the Giants play... I couldn't tear my eyes away from these games, but I also couldn't stop craving to see Tarvaris Jackson. I am worried about this game. I feel like the Vikings are getting a little cocky, a little too over confident for a team that only five weeks ago lost 34-0 to a division rival. I have this hunch that tonight they will be shown up, which makes me sad. All I can do is hope that I am wrong. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Regardless, the biggest game comes next week -- a must win against the Redskins coming on a short week... I think I am going to pull my hair out with anticipation! And then, I have to remind myself: it doesn't really matter. The Vikings were annihilated by both the Cowboys and the Packers during the regular season, so even if they make the playoffs, I will only be more disappointed when they are crushed in January. I might as well start thinking about the baseball season -- sans Matt Garza, which still bums me out.

//Lost in Season Three
But at least there is football to keep me on the edge of my IKEA seat, as the third season of Lost certainly is not. Birgit and I watched two more episodes last night while she was finalizing her cartography final exam. The show has degenerated quickly. It was always hokey, but it is now stooping to the level of Heroes. Question: why does every network show have to have a doctor main character? It's like they have invested so much in ER props that they figure if they have a doctor character they can make use of the props for free. So we're on a weird, mystical island, and suddenly, out of the blue, Doc is doing spinal surgery... right, right... Oh, and because the show 24 is popular, we should throw in a lot of gratuitous violence and torture too. Yeah, surgery and torture, those are some real original plot devices. And finally, for good measure, because Heroes came out on a competing network, we better give people some super powers like time travel and seeing into the future. Yeah, cool. Don't forget the Desperate Housewives village -- looks like exactly the same set, actually -- the Gray's Anatomy love scenes and bad triangles... yeah, basically we have a mash up of every current television drama (most of them terrible) with a season of CBS's Survivor. I'm just so disappointed, I guess, as the first season hooked me, the second season at least intrigued me, and the third season, like that of Arrested Development, just sucks to all get out. But no doubt I will trudge through all of the episodes and then, for some inexplicable reason, be bummed when Season 4 is delayed due to the writers' strike. Yes, I am pathetic that way.

//Proposals Roasting
I heard back from one of my committee members already on my proposal and he dug it! This is rare. I am thrilled! I think it was the most positive piece of feedback I have ever received. Normally in academia one is provided lukewarm responses, but this committee member was anything but. It was amazing... I kept rereading the email looking for the proverbial "nice but..." There wasn't one! It has given me more confidence to move full-steam ahead.

//Course Preparation
I'm in the process of preparing three courses right now. At first I was a little intimidated, but now I'm just excited. I've got every textbook I've ever read or put off reading spread out on my office table and I'm outlining and finding readings like mad. I organized and created a schedule for the Human Geography course yesterday. Today I am working on my Post-Soviet Europe course. I have a tentative outline for content that came to me while Mette dragged me onto a golf course chasing a stray goose this morning. And I just found out that my friend Ben is likely going to be the TA for my cart class, which thrills me beyond explanation! Life is good right now. Surely something must knock me out of this string of good luck. (Note: I am eternally pessimistic to a fault.)

//Please, Call Me U.N.C.L.E.
My sister had a baby boy this morning. His name is Elliot. I am stoked!

The semester is over and the third season of Lost just came out on DVD; so life is pretty damn good. I finished up the map last night and Birgit and I got through the second disc of Lost in three days. It's getting really whacked out! I'm not even sure I can follow it anymore, but I remain devotedly hooked. (I guess that means addicted?)

It was probably the best Friday of my life, as I finished two big projects in one day -- the dissertation draft and the map. Tonight is the department Christmas Party, or holiday party, I suppose, though I think most of the other religious holidays are over, so Christmas is really what it is all about. Hell with the politically correct stuff. They sing carols at this thing for a reason...

I'm feeling the urge to write up the CIA interrogation story soon...

Getting down with Oasis and the Smiths at Espresso Royale in Dinkytown right now. Just finished my dissertation proposal revision -- the LP. Feels good. I attached it to a couple of emails and sent it off and now it is out of sight, out of mind, and I can get on with making maps. Yes, maps, maps, maps! But map what?

Well, luckily our client wants me to add the name of North American Indian reservations to every dot on the map that is in a reservation. It's not exactly what I would call cream of the crop mapping. More like mopping up. So I told Birgit to let them know that I would be willing to make those changes at $65/hour. That's our standard rate right now, and I figured they would balk, since they have already paid quite a bit for the map -- though considering the hours I put in, they have been way undercharged for this. I wasn't about to spend four more unpaid hours typing up new text files for the 50 or so communities on reservations. Particularly since we asked them many times before the project began what they wanted on the map and the first mention they made of this was upon looking at the final draft. I realized that I would also have to recode some things in Flash to rearrange textboxes when someone selects particular buttons but not others. While waiting for their response, I decided to see if I could figure out the recoding, and unbelievably... I did it! Last night, after returning from a departmental dinner at Macalester, I figured it out. It's getting easier! Yippee...

Then they responded that they were willing to pay our rate over and beyond what we have done already. I was thrilled! These might be the best clients Birgit and I have, simply because they are willing to pay us what we're worth. Yes! A lot of people want custom maps these days for $50 or something outrageous... I tell you, GoogleMaps is making it look too easy. It's not. You can get a reference map for dirt cheap, but if you want a map that looks clean, professional, and has data that is only relevant to you, it costs money. Oh well... I digress. Our current clients are wonderful. That's the point.

Playing with some XML tutorials, realizing that maybe I should have never given up on learning Basic on my old Commodore 64C back in the day. Programming is really fun!

In other news... well, that's it. There is no other news. Signing off from Dinkytown... ciao!

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(I think someone named SMAB took this picture. I didn't. Is it in Minneapolis? Only SMAB knows. But she's somewhere else right now... I think NYC or Paris or Montreal or something. What?)

That last entry was a whopper! I was just testing whether or not you could really publish right to your blog from Office 2007 and the answer was... yes! And without length restrictions apparently. But none of the map images came through, so that kind of defeats the purpose. I'll take it down. Looking at it kind of whacks me out.

But I digress... it is the last day of the semester here, and I should be excited, but I'm actually kind of ornery. I like my class this semester. It will be a bummer not to see them again -- except for the final, of course, but that is always about as stiff as reading a book in a Belarussian police station. It's been a fun semester. It was the first one where I ran out of time to cover all of the material I wanted to cover. And the reason was because the students go so into their presentations! It blew me away. It was positively marvelous! (Note: I've wanted to use that line for months now. Not sure why... I imagine a sports announcer saying it or something.)

Went to the dog park twice with Mette yesterday. I'm not sure who is more tired. Man, she ran and ran and ran, through the snow, up the hills, down the hills, through the trees... I'm knackered. She woke me up by hopping on the bed this morning and immediately forcing me off my pillow, which tells me she is ready to rumble again today. Boundless energy that damn muppet!

Hung out with Adam on Monday night. Dropped off the Mad Dog DVD burner. It's off to Estonia with him for... how long? Sounds like forever. Some good Russian political gossip was exchanged that evening. He is not only living in interesting times, he is off to an interesting place. If only he can shake the Russian marriage... ha, ha, ha. Stay tuned for that by checking out his blog up on the right (or here) under Russk Adam. He leaves in a week!

Self-portrait above from a walk in the local park. Mette went ape after a bunny and we both wound up stuck and entangled in snow bank. Rabbit left unscathed. Snapped this in the blinding sun with my cell phone. Wasn't sure if I got anything until now...

I'm currently snowed in, sitting in the reference section of the Science & Engineering Library looking at a bunch of studious types work on mathematical formulas I can't even decipher. It is a strange trip indeed.

Spent the day cafe hopping in Dinkytown. This is my new favorite thing to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, dog permitting. I start out at the Espresso Royale -- often I'm the second person in there. I gulp down a huge coffee there and normally have to pee by 10a.m. So I pack up my computer, go to the loo, and then head somewhere else. Today it was the used bookstore, where I picked up a lame book on maps with the eight-bucks of store credit I still had left from selling books there way back in 2003. Then I went on to the new and improved Purple Onion Cafe. I kind of miss the ambiance of the old one, but this new one is comfortable and sleek. In fact, it beats the old one hands down on comfort and quality of coffee. So good riddance, I say.

From there I meandered over to a Mexican burrito shop that I had never been to before. It is essentially a Chipotle ripoff as far as I can tell. Not terrible, not great. Not really anything... just beans and rice with a dabble of cheese. Then to Coffman Hall. Where I found a spot on the floor to work on my dissertation yet again. I never realized how many basements that place has, nor that it has a bowling alley. Pretty cool. Went and saw a doctor. I don't have cancer after all... what a relief. I guess I didn't really think I did, but I've got this weird growth on my face that isn't going away. He said it was a swollen gland or something and that it should just go away. It's been two months... but whatever. On my way out, I saw that they were giving people free shots of some vaccine. I didn't ask what it was for, in hindsight, but I filled out a form because the line was short and I love free stuff... shot in the arm and a warning that I may feel like dying tomorrow but everything will really be alright as long as I don't feel any paralysis setting on. Then I finally wandered over here... to the library, where I continued working on my dissertation proposal, which my advisor wanted to be no more than 12 pages but is now 28. Merde!

That pretty much sums up my lame ass day. God, I can't wait until I graduate and get a job where I don't have to share an office with 37 other people someday. Of course, this gives me an incentive to finish my dissertation, though; so I guess I can't complain.


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As for the picture above... if only Austria-Hungary had been so lucky. The French were really over predicting the German-Hungarian capabilities here!

Wow, it's already tomorrow, and I'm still not quite done touching this sonuvagun up. But it's not a bad first draft. I hacked my way through this one, teaching myself ActionScript along the way. It was incredibly fun! No time to deal with all the errors made way back when I was still figuring stuff out -- Vancouver Island is really warped. I thinned the coastline a bit to lessen its magnitude, but it sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I'm still putzing with how to arrange the legend, data-text box, and supplemental information buttons too, but overall, I am pretty stoked with this. It is loading the data from 210 individual html text files that I created. Even the altTag boxes are created from reading a single line of code from a single text file. It is pretty damn amazing what Flash can do with a couple of lines of code.

I still have to get the PDF files from Birgit so that there is actually something to print, as for right now I just have some gibberish code pop up.

I'm not making sense. I must go to bed... I just realized that I don't even know where the hell my phone is. I think it is still on my nightstand... Sorry to anyone who has called. Today I was oblivious to the world around me. I heard it snowed, though.

Link to functioning draft version: here.