The weekend wrap up: Friday, a reasonably productive morning — not great, but pretty good. Then lunch with a friend. Tried to stop at Kramarczuk’s on the way home, but the place was completely jammed with people picking up their Easter Hams, so I went just left. Stopped by Let’s Cook for a pizza cutter while waiting on the bus. Then complete apathy all afternoon.
Saturday, a trip to mom’s, which was capped off by a flat tire on the way home (caused perhaps by a monster pothole), then cleaning up around the house for the evening’s poker game. It was fun, but one of the guys may not be back, as he’s moved out of town, and just recently quit working for the Twin Cities company that would fly him back periodically.
Sunday: sometimes I think I should get out of the house more. I woke up and it was a beautiful day outside. Thought that it would be a good time to break the trike out for the first ride of the season, and then remembered that I have over a dozen boxes of mom’s stuff piled around it in the garage, and I need to deal with those first. That sapped my motivation, and my only trip out was to go buy some breakfast fixins for this morning (and the boxes are still in the way). But maybe sitting at home is better than walking around in public with a cosmic bullseye on my forehead anyhow. Sunday evening I watched Alien Apocalypse. As BC said, think Spartacus with aliens.
It’s not a great movie, but then I wasn’t looking for greatness this weekend.
- Pat Reusse says there’s No joy in baseball: Casey’s gone. Bob Casey, the Twins longtime P.A. announcer, died over the weekend. Those are going to be some big shoes to fill at the Metrodome. [strib]
- Secure Flight is just CAPPS by Any Other Name, and probably won’t actually make flying any safer. Plus I have no idea why we should trust the TSA anyhow. [wired]
- Am I ready for The Coming War on Blogs? Well, I’m not so sure about the campaign finance reform stuff, but I’ve generally been pretty careful about copyright and libel around here. Yeah, I could get all worked up about it, but I think a continued policy of keeping my head down is probably simplest. [instapundit]
- In a website beginning back in 2001, and wrapped up in 2003, Hank Mishkoff says Taubman Sucks!, registers the domain name for their new mall, saying it doesn’t suck, and basically wanting to post fannish pictures and raves about how cool it is without making a profit on it. So naturally, they sued him for trademark infringement. Hank documented how he fought the case and won. It’s an interesting look at how a lawyer got a ton of negative publicity for their client from someone who was wanting to promote that client, free of charge. I also found it interesting that every letter from the lawyer was threatening, and when Hank agreed to settle, the lawyers added new conditions, driving him to continue the fight. Thoroughly documented and useful. I’m betting if you found yourself in a similar situation, a day spent reading this whole site and cutting and pasting legal documents would help you resolve things quicker than Hank did. As an added bonus, you can get a bad taste in your mouth about the tactics employed by the plaintiffs attorneys. Or if you don’t have at least half a day to plow through all the documents, you could try the condensed version, or maybe watch the movie. [boing boing]
- Jeff Veen has a nice rant on State-of-the-art interactivity. There are a lot of websites I don’t go to because of the problems he cites. And I agree that not all such sites are bad. Flickr uses flash in such a way that I didn’t even notice it until I wondered how they were doing some of the things they did. And then I was amazed that they’d made a site that relied heavily on flash, and I hadn’t noticed. [kottke]