1. 19 May 2004

    Felicitations, Timberwolves

    1570 days ago

    We did it!

    There can only more to come. We won in seven games, and now get to play the Lakers. On the anniversary of both Kevin Garnett’s birth and the tragic death of Garnett’s former temmate and best friend, Malik Sealy.

    KG l’Incroyable

    Playing 46 minutes (of 48) Kevin Garnett scored, rebounded, stole, and assisted. We love the MVP!

    Wolves Win, will play in the Western Conference Finals.

    Au Revoir Sacramento, Bonjour LA. For the first time this year the Wolves made it out of the first round in the playoffs. In this, their eighth year having made the playoffs they look to make a run at the title.

    I called the wolves to win the league even before Sports Illustrated did in their mid-season report on the NBA.

    But then again I do for every Minnesota team every year. This time around the Wolves have a little something behind them, they are not the ‘98 Vikings.

  2. 15 May 2004

    U of M PSEO

    1574 days ago

    It’s incredible to me that next year I’m going to be a senior and the year after I will be entering college. All the years I remember awkwardly anticipating my emancipation, being timid enough that just imagining being out on my own would turn my stomach just as much as it would raise the hairs on the back of my neck, have come and are quickly going.

    But I got my acceptance letter from the U of M PSEO department today, and next year I don’t think I’m going to be taking too many high school courses. So how should I do it? How can I balance my friends, sports, and my old school while taking more challenging courses? Some of my courses next year will be at “South:http://south.mpls.k12.mn.us/, but not enough. I haven’t been able to stand most of my classes this year – and next year the poor school is having a tenth of it’s budget cut.

    Options

    I do have plenty of options though. There are College in the Schools classes I could take, I am planning to take French CIS for sure. There is the option of taking a half load of classes at the U, but I don’t think that I really want to take the job I would need to pay for transportation. I could also take classes online with genedweb, a program at the University of Minnesota Morris.

    Decisions

    At this point I’m not crazy about driving downtown for classes. It’s not more then five minutes, but parking at the U is incredibly expensive and I would probably have to take an evening class, which makes it even worse.
    I have thought about picking up a second language next year though, in which case I would want to do that at the U. Spanish or Danish, maybe Chinese are the languages I might choose.

    I think that if I took classes online I could have an Independent Project through one of the social studies teachers to help me out and broaden my learning, not to mention dupe everyone for quadruple the credits (taking a pseo course gives you college credits plus double high school credits and the IP would give me high school credit too).

    Overall at this point I’m really looking to take very few courses next year and work real hard in all of them. Plus I should have extra time to maybe take on a job, or just do whatever I want.

  3. 14 May 2004

    More Chinese, More Cookies

    1575 days ago

    Dinner tonight brought me three fortunes (I just with chinese places would give out more fortune cookies):

    You can resist everything except temptation.

    You will have a change of heart.

    You should instinctively know the right thing to say.

    Not to take these fortunes too seriously, I won’t draw any immediate conclusions as to their meaning…

  4. 01 May 2004

    Heed the Fortune

    1588 days ago

    Two Somewhat poignant fortunes I got tonight (yes, Chinese is my favorite takeout).

    To love and to win is the best thing but to love and lose is a close second.

    Yes, go ahead with confidence.

    Maybe tonight I should give her a call?

  5. The Wolves Dunnit!

    1588 days ago

    Congrats to my team, go wolves. I’ll leave you to the details.
    Here’s to the future NBA Champions (knock on wood)!

  6. 28 April 2004

    Apple Software Updates

    1591 days ago

    I woke up this morning to the tune of iTunes 4.5 and iPod Software 2.2, and quickly installed both as I ate breakfast. I never wait to install the latest Software Updates from Apple, but might have to begin to rethink my habit as in the last week I have been noticing a few more problems.
    The Airport Update 3.4 has been accused of drastically reducing airport range, and people weren’t happy. But apple quickly pulled it and fixed the problem.
    Tonight I tried to download Franz Ferdinand’s album and have had lots of trouble.

    First I couldn’t log into the music store – it told me to try again later because of an error.
    After two tries at logging in I got in, and bought the album. But as it was downloading I got an error disconnecting me from the store, error 402 or 405. I did what the error dielog recommended me – do Advanced -> Check for Purchased Music…, but just got the same error again about ten seconds later.
    Now whenever I try to check I just get an error -50, “an unknown error has occurred.”
    I think iTunes even caused a kernel panic on my machine earlier today! Hopefully Apple gets this together, and I get the next seven tracks on my album.
    I’m gonna try again in the morning.

  7. 20 April 2004

    Digital Media

    1599 days ago

    Boy do I wish right now that everything was digital, computerized. The effect it would have on my would be amazing! As I sit here and write a paper for english class, I can’t believe how hard it is to find quotes I had indexed earlier.
    It probably doesn’t help that I haven’t read the book I am writing on, ”Sweet and Sour Milk” by Nuruddin Farah.

    But just imagine it – you could google for almost unlimited articles relating a published work, and also it could be available to you in a digital, lexical medium. I could have the book in pdf format and search for keywords until a good quote popped up and would have a dynamite paper in no time.
    But one of the things that always worries me about digital media is that it is so new, nobody knows how well it will age. I currently have about 500 photos from my trip to France – all digital. I want to be able to ensure that 50 years from now I still have those photos and am able to view them. Will there still be mp3’s in 40 years? Because my entire music collection is digital and stored on my computer. I really hope that I won’t ever be lost.

  8. 18 April 2004

    Of a Fortune

    1601 days ago

    Fortune cookies are beginning to become real fun for me. Three which I saw tonight at dinner:

    Beauty in it’s various forms appeals to you.

    True, both physical beauty and a beauty which is harder to define appeal very much to me.

    Grand adventures await those who are willing to turn the corner.

    Have I even been willing to turn the ephemeral corner, I never was the greatest of risk takers.

    Find release from your cares, have a good time.

    The solution I have found for nearly everything that I have needed to find a solution for. Relax, Settle down.

  9. Vignettes

    1601 days ago

    One of the things which has always amazed me the most: the sheer scale of everything that exists in the world today. Think of something so elementary that it is something everyone has. It could be their blood, their brain, something as simple as their live in general.

    Now imagine how utterly complex everything we can think of is. Composed of billions of atoms, even the simplest physical objects are complex to an unnerving degree.

    But that thing which has always amazed me the most is the sheer amount of engineering which must be held within each and every of the simplest thoughts which go through each and every persons mind at every moment of every day.

    A thought is infinitely more complex then some sort of physical object, thought is just a notion hinted at within the scepter of our minds. I find it so much more amazing that not only can people think incredibly, remember their thoughts, form ideas and theories which turn out to be terribly complex.

    I recently visited the Eiffel tower in Paris, and the metalwork of the tower is just amazing. There must be millions of bolts, screws and pieces of iron in that tower. Please think of how complex each piece itself is before you think anything else. Then just imagine how intricate all the joints between each of the separate pieces is, and then of how well all the miniscule pieces are able to orchestrate such a symphony of constructivism and beauty.

    Now just imagine that each piece of la tour as a separate thought. The thoughts are all so intricate. And the junctions between one thought and another, two independent phrases flowing seamlessly into each other by the means of a simple joint, just a screw or bolt.

    Now the connections of wrought iron, the coarse and thick feet of the tower ebbing and surging always upwards. Towards the point, the top always being refined.

  10. 14 April 2004

    Best in the West

    1605 days ago

    With their victory tonight over the Memphis Grizzlies, my team, the Timberwolves have clinched the first seed in the western conference playoffs and home court advantage throughout.
    Congratulations, and good luck to Kevin Garnett and his assembly of stars, they are riding a tall wave into the playoffs. Having won nine straight games after tonight, hopefully their run will continue against their first round opponent, the Denver Nuggets.

  11. 10 April 2004

    Returned From France

    1609 days ago

    Last night I got back in from France around 9pm. I couldn’t say how great a time I had, and hope to be able to sit down and actually write about the trip soon. Before I forget everything.

    The trip was arranged through an exchange program. I stayed four days with a family in Rennes, immersed in the country. I spent time in Normandy and Paris. The first three days we stayed at a hotel in Caen, visiting all a new war memorial there the first day, the city of Rouen the second, and seeing various parts of normandy the third on the way to our homestay.
    The homestay was great. Having studied French for under 3 three years I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. The family I stayed with was amazing – and I didn’t have trouble communicating like I thought I would.

    I wish high school in America was similar to lyceé in France. Boy do I wish.

    After the homestay the group stayed five days in Paris, and as amazing as certain things there are, it surprised me how much Paris is just another big and dirty city, like Minneapolis on a grand scale.

    What amazed me most about France was the age of everything. From 3300 year old Egyptian obelisks to middle aged vielle maisons, everything is just so much older then aux états-unis.

    I can’t wait to get back to France, and hopefully I will be able to in a year or two after studing more French. I don’t think there will really be a way to learn the language without spending a chunk of time in France, and hope that I will be able to do so sometime.

    A larger summary with photos and more talk is hopefully to come.

  12. 23 March 2004

    Home Court Advantage

    1627 days ago

    Gophers 80, Kansas State 61.

    The Gophers absolutely manhandled the Wildcats. This game was incredible, although it was virtually wrapped up well before half time.

    The Gophers staunch defense held Kansas to a 17 point first half, and earned the Gophers a 26 point halftime lead. In her second game back, Lindsay Whalen again played great ball with a plastic brace on her shooting hand.

    In her final game at Williams arena, Lindsay Whalen scored a modest 15 points, but she managed to do what really matters – earn her team the win. As the game ended the chant’s of “Lindsay Whalen” were all that could be heard from the crowd except for deafening applause for Gophers starters leaving the game in favor of the reserves.

    The Gophers took their lead early in the game and never relinquished it. After ten minutes their lead was 14 points, and with about 15 minutes left it had ballooned to 29.

    Again, Williams Arena is probably the best arena for women’s ball in the country. Not that it’s new and fancy, but like the metrodome, there are so many people cramped into a smaller space. Not to mention that Minnesota has some of the best fans in the game! The crowd support at Williams is absolutely amazing, the crowd was probably on it’s feet seventy percent of the game tonight. And nobody even thought to leave before Whalen had finished her interview for ESPN and left the crowd drowning in applause.

  13. 22 March 2004

    HTML Brown

    1628 days ago

    I just can’t seem to get brown to work on the web. It is real hard to hex encode a good brown color – the one currently on my homepage, #55441c, is fairly contrived – and I’m sure that it isn’t a web safe color.
    On my [trip to France](http://kao.sytes.net/log/2004/03/20/france_prepation) I will have my digital camera with me, and two new 64mb CF cards. I hope to be quite liberal snapping photos, and will especially look out for beautiful scenes to inspire my use of brown, because for some reason or another it is the color I want to design this weblog around.

  14. Markdown Has Got Me.

    1628 days ago

    I will admit that when John Gruber’s Markdown plugin came out I was a little skeptical of it. But I downloaded it anyway and installed it, and as I began to use it I began to think that it might have been more my nerdy ego keeping me coding my entries in raw html; html coding is really a pain when you are just trying to write.

    Writing simple html anchors is fairly tedious, you have to think ahead and find the url of the link before you decide what you want the text of the link to be, and writing html lists is just a pain.

    Add in the time it takes to go back over everything and check your syntax and hope that you won’t bring down your otherwise valid application/xhtml+xml, and Markdown begins to look like a nice guy.

    I had always flirted with routing all my post drafts through the W3C HTML Validator, but it would have been real complicated to do and I didn’t want to sit down and take the time ever. I also wanted to use MTValidate to require all my comments to be valid html, but it also was just a pain to setup.

    But with the Markdown with SmartyPants option set as the new default for both posting and commenting here on station11, I ensure valid html and escaped entries withough having to do anything! And it all comes so naturally. Writing in plaintext is something that I know how to do, and markdown for the most part uses simple routines that I have always used to convey meaning in text to convert it into html.

    And now plus, as you might have noticed in my most recent ticker link, markdown works in any cocoa app textbox!

    I love it, yes I do.

  15. 21 March 2004

    A Thriller at the Barn

    1629 days ago

    Gohpers 92, UCLA Bruins 81.

    Lindsay Whalen scored 31 points in her first game since hurting herself in a loss seven games ago. She played magnificently, leading the Gophers final run with about two minutes on the clock.

    Again, Williams arena is a great venue. It was packed today, and instead of sitting up above we got seats just behind the basket and just under the balcony. It was great. The crowd was pumped to see Whalen at work again, and didn’t sit down for the last three minutes of the game.

    As good as it would be for the Vikings and Twins to get new stadiums, I don’t think that any of them will be able to beat The Barn. They might be neat, but the Barn is just so nostalgic, I like it more each time I go there.

    The game was played almost flawlessly. The Gophers earned an eleven point lead early in the second half, but it was quickly nullified by an 18-5 Bruins run. The game was neck and neck in the final minutes, but after Janel Mcarville pulled a rebound down and was fouled, the UCLA coach blew and got a technical.

    The three free throws that Whalen and Mcarville made gave the gophers a six point lead which UCLA just couldn’t beat.

    The Gophers are going to be a team to be reckoned with, and with Whalen back and a very inspiring first round win under their belts I think they are a team with incredible momentum and talent. Their abilities were showcased in one of the other games I went to this year, their 18 point win over Penn State.

    Penn State looks to be the team to beat in this years tournament, and I just think that the Gophers can do it.

  16. 20 March 2004

    France - Prepation

    1630 days ago

    Preparing myself for a trip to France.

  17. 08 March 2004

    Keeping to Date

    1642 days ago

    Boy has my life been busy this semester. I don’t know if I’m doing more then I have previously, or I am getting less and less efficient at doing what I always have done, but it feels like both are happening at a rate which I just can’t keep up with.
    I’ve noticed that NetNewsWire and somewhat actively blogging can be a real drain on productivity, upped my soccer and tennis playing quite a bit, and took on a college english class, and compensated by just forgoing my nightly math homework – which has started to catch up to me in a bit of basic algebra amnesia.

  18. 29 February 2004

    Happy Leap Day

    1650 days ago

    Leap Year Day and Super Tuesday

  19. 16 February 2004

    Testing

    1663 days ago

    I am in the process of hammering out some low configurations…

  20. 12 February 2004

    Study Said the Aspiring Architect

    1667 days ago

    Architecture, Women’s College Ball, bliss, terrible agony, so be it.

  21. 08 February 2004

    It's Better in Person

    1671 days ago

    I went to the Gophers Women basketball game this evening, and boy was it good.

  22. 30 January 2004

    College Prep

    1680 days ago

    I have been doing more college searching, and trying to sort out what I really want to do and what I need to do to get it done…

  23. 29 January 2004

    Back Pain and I

    1681 days ago

    Today I went to the chiropractor to find out what was wrong with my back. The news I got was fairly bad, and plus I was x-rayed in my lower back with no, what would a doctor call it, “scrotum protection.”

  24. 26 January 2004

    Folklore - Tales of the Early Mac

    1684 days ago

    A few great stories from a great site – folklore.

  25. 10 January 2004

    Relative Stupidity

    1700 days ago

    Does anybody else always have the urge to just some do really stupid things? The other day at tennis I was thinking ”Hmmm, I wonder if I could serve into the scorecard,” so I didn’t even think about it and fired from behind the base line straight into the scorecard, knocking it off the netpost and sending it flying over the next court…

    Then there are the eternal battles I fight against stupid things I do to keep myself occupied. Biting the tips of pens (one of these days the top is just gonna blow off and I’m gonna have black lips and teeth), and seeing how close I can get to stapling myself without actually doing it (I just fell victim to that one).
    I just wonder how it will serve me in life that I am almost constantly trying to push the limits and doing somewhat stupid, careless things. Maybe I will just turn out incredibly brilliant and I will only push limits when it is acceptable, but I will probably just end up getting myself into trouble.

  26. 01 January 2004

    A Few Upgrades

    1709 days ago

    I had a great time last night at new years, although at about 3:30 I left and just crashed when I got home. I woke up to a tennis match, the semifinal and woke myself up at ten just to lose a tough three set match. But I’m getting better – I don’t just freeze up all the time now when I get under pressure, I more tense up.

    But I’ve been working a little on the site since I posted last about it, and implemented a cute little ticker weblog which I make quick little posts to throughout the day and use a few great plugins (let me just go check the ticker archives…) Global Listings, which allows you to list posts from one weblog in another one within your mt installation, and Rebuild, which lets you rebuild one template when another is being rebuilt. I also had to fudge in OtherBlog. I don’t have all the bugs worked out yet, but it’s relitavely close. I thought I would post about how I set the system up, and then not let anyone read it (I did warn you!).
    But it basically works that when I post to the kao ticker weblog the monthly archive is rebuilt which triggers a rebuild of my main index via Rebuild. Then kao ticker is included in the main index of kao and given a specific template by Global Listings and then hooked into the main page. Really rockin’ system, and I will try to write up a full how to at some point.

  27. 31 December 2003

    Getting Back

    1710 days ago

    The holidays got me tired out and all I can do is watch tv and play computer and I have to rest up for the New Years party tonight. Happy New Year!

  28. 20 December 2003

    The Premier

    1721 days ago

    Having always felt like a weblog would be a fun thing for me to do, I have gone ahead and started one up. I don’t need to go to everyones site and start posting comments with the url of the site, I think that I might even lock out search engine robots until I decide if I can really keep the weblog going. There’s nothing I hate more then a weblog that stops posting unexpectedly, although sometimes it’s great when one that didn’t get weeded out of my aggregator comes back fresh.

    but anyway I intend to keep the log hidden, and will be designing a shell for it crawl up into as I find the time. This is gonna be like writing software in the alpha stages, so don’t get mad if something doesn’t work or you don’t like it, your the one who found this site, I sure didn’t tell you about it.

    I’m planning on slowly working this piece into a highly regarded a-list blog (I really hate that word), and might decide that it would be fun to document it’s process of evolution, which is something that I had contemplated. But don’t count on it, and most of all, don’t start to read what I have to say until I decide to actually launch the site. You’ve been warned.

  29. Also somewhat recently

      |