Software Links III

Get the idea that I spend a lot of time reading about software lately? The iPad helps immensely. If you have one, I recommend Zite, the programming category is great, particularly after it starts to get a read on what you're interested in. Not perfect, but still good.

• How to Create a Killer Ignite presentation - our submission of how to do your own stick figure comic was denied, although we're pulling together better art. Some other options are CMSes and Dytopias. We're going to queue up a few of our ideas and make sure we're ready to go next time with some options. I should speak in front of audiences a bit more - I'm not known for being a stand up commedian.  If you haven't heard of Ignite! there are plenty of videos at that link, plus some at the YouTube tag.  The videos from the most recent event (#3/2011) aren't out there yet.
• I didn't know until I bought a PDF book from them that Pragmatic Programming had a magazine (online).  There are really good articles out there on Agile at 10, Refactoring Your Job, HTML 5, Writing a Book for Pragmatic, and a slew of other great content.
• Work is Fascinating: the Metagame - speaking of "refactoring your job" (nice...I have transitions in my links, they're like an iTunes playlist), Mark O'Connor talks about optimizing his job to keep himself interested and only busy with the most enjoyable things.  In the spirit of Peter Drucker's books, he recommends aggressively eliminating all repetitive tasks so that you can focus on what's innovative and makes your brain work.  How he specifically goes about it might not be everyone's cup of tea (I'm still not going to use Vim), but the basic ideas speak to find tools to eliminate wasted time, find opportunity to do what's fun in new ways ("Write in all the fun languages you can’t use at work"), measure it, and do it immediately.  That most of the advice you need to make your job tolerable (the other bit being, in my experience, just take it easy, relax, enjoy the change and enjoy the people).
• Moshidora - a graphic novelized application of Drucker (see, transitions...told you so).  I'm looking forward to getting my hands on an English version some day.  Reminds me of Dan Pink's Johnny Bunko: the Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need which is one of the few management books sitting on my shelf at work (signed copy, thank you Dan).  I just recently recommended it to two high school students I'm mentoring via BestPrep.  If I'd have been planning better, I'd have had two copies available when they came to visit.  I'll be better prepared next year.
• Speaking of Dan, he recommended Leadership is Dead some time ago on Twitter.  I'd like to skim it, despite at least one assertion that there's nothing new involved in the work.  My stint as a Large Database Partner Consultant for our corporate proprietary database involved leading by influence and it's my experience that in a large company, on any large project, there's almost always a lack of leadership somewhere that can be filled indirectly by someone with the skill.  While looking at Amazon's Leadership is Dead page, it was recommended that I read Poke the Box, which has a Q&A section that includes: "Question: What does it mean to Poke the Box?"  Nice.  I like the part where it says Poke the Box may be the kick in the pants I need.  I bet if I poke enough boxes, I'd get a whole bunch of kicks in the pants.  Just not the back side.
• And, speaking of things that made me laugh in the management/career space, this article about Leveling Up: Career Advancement for Software Developers by Peter Lyons has an amusing first bit of "Duh" advice, "Don't Annoy Management."  I enjoyed the bit about "watch your language."  I used a bit of profanity at work twice last week.  It's not going to be a habit, but I had two people I wanted to break out of their normal perception of me.  One I've known to use swearing before and I think he thinks I'm a bit of a conundrum, not showing enough urgency on the one hand and a little too straight laced and traditional management on the other.  In that case, the swearing was to convince him, a.) I was passionate about our software, and b.) definitely not tied to management protocol in all situations.  In the second case, it was with someone down chain (how's that for management speak) who I think perceives me as the typical manager to be avoided and who will avoid you if you avoid him, and who doesn't care about what you're working on as long as some things get done for appearances sake.  That time it was for a bit of shock value.  Hopefully I won't be writing about getting called into HR in my next post. And this advice is golden, "Make sure management hears your name in a positive light." I've been telling my new team for months that it doesn't just apply to management.  The department (and beyond) needs to hear your name in a good light, and if that means pimping your own name, filling out your own award forms, telling your manager when s/he doesn't understand your contribution, or even finding a buddy so that you can promote each other, then that's what it takes if you're aiming for something inside the company.  It's advice I wish I had understood more completely when I was an MTS2.  Anyway - I think Peter overdoes it a bit, but his core message is solid, if you want to level up, there are ways to go about it, particularly in a large corporate culture, and you if understand where to apply that effort without appearing mercenary, unless you run afoul of management (speaking from experience), the path upward is in your own hands.

Downhill Bike Race in Chile

Kyle sent me this link from Gadling quite some time ago.  It's worth posting because it's insane.  I think it would take m about 2 hours to do this ride, not 3 minutes.

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

Adam Savage and Tesla Coils

Eryn really liked the movie The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  She's watched it a few times - in the theater, via Red Box in Montana when we were staying in the trailer, and on Netflix streaming.  She's also a big fan of Mythbusters (she's still mad Pooteewheet got to see them in person, albeit from a distance, in Washington, D.C.), so as soon as she'd first watched Sorcerer's Apprentice, we talked about whether you could really make a tesla coil sing and whether that might be a question for the guys on Mythbusters.  The question is now moot as not only is there a video of tesla coils playing the theme from Doctor Who, but Adam Savage is dead center in the Faraday Cage, dancing along.

Software Links II

• A guide to mobile blogging - a light dig into a few CMS platforms to discuss what blogging options they support via mobile.
• Software Craftsmanship 2011 - interesting that it has content similar to Code Camp.  I primarily like the post for the pub metaphor, "To me, "software craftsmanship" is a pub where a certain crowd of talented, brilliant and passionate programmers hang out. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, they hung out in the "Object Oriented Arms", which had great real ale and comfy chairs. But the OO Arms got overrun by consultants and salesmen in suits who all stood around drinking expensive cocktails and talking ignorant crap in very loud voices, so the crowd started drinking in the "Patterns Bar" a few hundred yards down the high street. That too soon became overrun by the suits, so they moved to the "Agile Lion" (briefly stopping off at the "UML & Firkin" for what turned out to be a very heavy, stodgy meal that made them feel slightly sick). In recent years, the Agile Lion has started to fill up with suits - indeed, it's more of a wine bar these days. So a bunch of us have decided to open our own pub, called "Software Craftsmanship" - a traditional, no-frills boozer where all that matters is quality beer and good conversation."
• Calipso - a NodeJS and MongoDB based CMS that claims to support 180 hits/second (that's 648,000 per hour.  Makes me wonder what other CMS platforms support).  Can you tell I have an interest in CMS platforms lately?  You can see a demo here, and a further write up here at the DailyJS.
• Scott Hanselman giving an MVC tutorial (for .NET) from Channel 9 and Dev Days.  Over an hour long video.  Very nice way to dig into the .NET MVC space.
• 10 free wireframing tools from SpeckyBoy -  I've heard of Cacoo and Pencil Project (for Firefox).
• 15 best wireframing tools via Tripwire Magazine (note, note necessarily free) - I've heard of Basalmiq and Creately.  Looking forward to giving a few of them a try.
• Ultimate Guide to Wireframing - nice definitions of wireframe, mockup, prototype, low-fidelity, high-fidelity, and considerations about what tools and resources.  Reminds me of the horrible paper-wireframing presentation I went to at Code Freeze that involved watching people use Facebook.  Ugh.  The real value was a single statement and then they could have skipped the whole presentation, "If you're wireframing, it works just as well to use a sheet of paper and a pencil, or cut out pieces of paper you can move around."  We did real paper wireframing in Scrummaster class (I'm a certified Scrummaster - quite the trick as I've never led a truly Agile project) using Post-It (tm) notes to create a pet services brochure.  Worked very well.
• Is There a Peak Age for Entrepreneurs from TechCrunch - it should be noted that Mean Mr. Mustard will have to identify with Arianna Huffington.  "the majority of the sustainable businesses created in the 90′s were founded or run by older entrepreneurs...The research shows that an older age is actually a better predictor of entrepreneurial success, and that three other traits also correlate strongly to success: strong fluid intelligence, high openness, and moderate agreeableness."

Jailpants

I was watching a few minutes of "Jail" as I was headed out the door, and one of the police asked a woman who had been detained, "Do you want your pants back?"  The detainee replied, "I never want those pants back.  They remind me of this night and that I'm here (at the jail)."  Because orange, jail-issued pants don't remind you of your night in jail?

Planking

"The lying down game is an activity consisting of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location. The hands must touch the sides of the body, and having a photograph of the participant taken and posted on the internet is an integral part of the game.  Players compete to find the most unusual and original location in which to play. The location should also be as public as possible, and as many people as possible should be involved. It is known as "Planking" in Australia and New Zealand."

A friend and coworker asked me one day last week if I'd go planking with him.  He was just being stupid, but knowing that he's out during a half day each week, I took the opportunity to plank without him.  In his cube.  It was surprisingly uncomfortable, but I didn't fall to my death like a Kiwi, and I think the developers in his area were highly amused.

So many great software links to read lately...

Some interesting links from lately:

• A book review of WROX's Professional Mobile Web Development with Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal by James Pearce. "Chapter 5, "The Mobile Toolbox," will probably be of more interest to web developers than the earlier chapters, because it surveys the mobile development techniques, server-side technologies, and development tools that are most often used for creating mobile-ready websites. For nondevelopers, the section that describes the key components of a CMS, can be valuable as an introduction to CMSs." And from Amazon: "I really wish Pearce had written 4 books. One on mobile web development and design in general, and one each for Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. If you are new to Drupal, give this book a pass for right now. But if you want an introduction to design and development for the mobile web along with a bit of guidance to get you started with mobile Drupal, this may be a good place to start."
• 15 Criteria for Evaluating Software - I don't think this is a definitive list, but I like that they ask if you can promote it cost effectively.
• The Line interviews Dan Grigsby, who I saw speak at MHTA Spring Conference.  His live discussion with a Microsoft evangelist got down into the nitty gritty of MVC, Mono, and specific language preferences, and half the audience seemed to wander off, but for a techy at a conference with more of a managerial feel, it was Nirvana.  "Say you're a technologist and you have a kind of entrepreneurial bent to you. You go from having a job to setting up a consultancy that works with several firms. You do essentially the same kind of thing you would do with a job--write code--but you're your own boss. You pick a technology that's emerging, like mobile, so you get a higher rate. That higher rate gives you a surplus of income, so now you have extra time, and if you organize things right you also get the intellectual property rights to what you develop--and soon you go from having this income-replacement business to having what I call a cash-cow business. You build up a portfolio of intellectual property in an emerging space like mobile and ultimately this leads you to product."
• The Myth of the Flat Fee, by 80Beans - "We then try to explain that we can't give an estimate, let alone a price, based on the supplied information. We'll invite you to first work with us so we know exactly what you want to achieve. Talk to us, join us in making wireframes/click demo's and writing user stories. You'll be surprised at the advancing insight you will develop while going through this process. There will be things you didn't think about, while some other essential features seem to be redundant. We can use the outcome of this process to base an estimate on, and it can be used by you to obtain more accurate proposals from others....Every project consists of three attributes, also known as the "project triangle" or "triple constraint". There's scope: the features your app has. There's time: how long will it take to build your app. Finally there's cost...During the initial phase of the project — when it becomes clear what you really want — they will say that's not how they interpreted the scope for some feature. Now you're faced with a few options. You can alter the scope so the cost remains exactly the same: the feature will be dropped, it will not be developed the way you wanted or you need to slim down the scope later on. Or you can decide to pay more to get what you wanted in the first place. There the flat fee goes out of the window. A few weeks later the same situation occurs. First there's a conflict, then there's choosing between building something you don't really want, or paying more."
• How to write a game in GWT - not pretty, but an interesting exercise.
• I should make Eryn do an exercise where she doubles pennies on a sheet of paper.  Not because it's a learning experience, but because I think it would be funny to have her count one hundred million+ pennies.  I wish I had a million dollars to bring home the lesson in style.  Maybe if I win the last Powerball of the month for the corporate powerball pool.
• BigDubb pointed me at The Curve of Talent - "The more that you manage people in your career, the more you’ll find that it is very hard to find people who can execute well on what they are asked to do... It was a very candid moment of talent assessment in which the bar of performance wasn’t innovation, but simply competently executing the expected job."  That describes my whole career arc from contractor to manager.  I am competent.  If I don't feel I'm competent, I make myself competent, no matter what it takes in terms of personal time.  If there's something that needs to happen, I try to make it happen, and in an informed manner.  Everything else is extra.  I very much like the reference in the article to The Peter Principle, which The Hairy Swede and I recently used for a Snrky.
• Getting Real by 37 Signals - if for nothing else, the chapter on uninterrupted alone time (f - I almost typed interrupted) sums up 99% of what's wrong with software development in a large corporation.
• Don't Plug Your Leaks When You Got No [Fucking] Boat - points you back at Getting Real by 37 Signals and 15 Criteria - don't build shit that fulfills what you think is important but doesn't fulfill a sizable customer need.  This applies to software products and software developer stickfigure cartoons.

Babes in Bikeland

Saw this via Facebook this morning. I didn't even know Babes in Bikeland existed. I may have to volunteer if they'll let me bring Eryn with me.

Babes In Bikeland from Vadim Gershman on Vimeo.

Embarrassing....

This is a shout out to Tall Brad and Mike who told me a story about a woman at work who had dual colored pants. On second look (or fourth, knowing Tall Brad), it seemed like she was also possibly sporting a thong, which was obvious via the split in her pants that Tall Brad had to inform her about.

This morning I was riding the elevator to the fourth floor with two contractor representatives. As we're heading up to up to talk at the corporate cafe, someone on the elevator taps me on the shoulder. "Excuse me," says the woman tapping my shoulder, "but did you know your shirt is inside out?"

And it was. When I noticed my t-shirt under my shirt was longer than the sleeves of the outer shirt this morning, I flipped it off and put on a shorter-sleeved undershirt, and then put the shirt back on without turning on the lights. Inside out. I'm sure that made a great impression on the folks who wanted to place contractors with us. They seemed genuinely amused that I needed to stop at the first restroom to resolve the issue.

Viva and Jerry

Wow...Viva and Jerry are still producing their show? Pooteewheet and I used to watch them when we were dating, along with Klingon Theater which took place in the basement of some guy's house in Minneapolis. I think it was that long ago, and we're working on 18 years of marriage. We saw them once at a Kathy Mattea Christmas concert so far in the distant past I can't remember what the occasion was. Our favorite story from their show was one where Jerry talked about locking himself in the car. Not to mention the garage sale on the show where everything was "Two bucks! Two bucks! Two bucks!" I didn't realize they were ever on the Jon Stewart show. It's funny Jerry is throwing his signature thumb so often Stewart comments on it.



Here's an example of what we used to watch:

In Which I Collect Bike Art

Maybe I need to stop doing doing like "In Which I..." Sounds a bit too much like an episode of Friends. I'm more of a Coupling guy. I could do The Bike Art Man Commeth, sort of like The Melty Man Commeth...let's use that instead.

So this is a repository post where I will keep websites for local artists I'm interested in. It won't just be bicycle art, but that will definitely be the preponderance. And it isn't necessarily artists I like - but that I'm interested in something about their art.

• Altered Aesthetics - frequent bicycling art displays, generally some very good work. Bike Art VI is June 3, 7-10 p.m. next to my father-in-law's studio.
• Bicycle Theory - all sorts of web design and art in Minneapolis.
• Nick DeVries Pottery: does sake sets?
• FAS Custom Bicycles: bicycles as art.
• Pedalr - bicycle art/etc sales site.
• Rolf Hagberg, Motivity: lots of pictures of moving wheels.

Artist...

I am looking for an artist. The job is small - just cleaning up cartoons. So it doesn't pay on an ongoing basis, just piece work. But then again, the commitment is also small, and what I want is very concrete. I have a request out with MCAD, but I thought I'd leave a note here as well in case someone has a friend of a friend who might be interested.

Dark Floors

It's been raining here quite a bit (during today's Art o' Whirl, I believe we were within 10 miles of a tornado), so I've been doing my bicycling inside on the trainer.  That means 70-80 minutes of Netflix which, despite the joys of being able to stream, means finding something worth watching.  Sometimes, a difficult proposition.  Netflix recommended a horror movie to me the other day, Dark Floors, so I thought I'd pedal with it.

What I didn't realize, was that Dark Floors is built around a Finnish metal band, Lordi.  When I think of Scandinavia heavy metal, I think death metal (the extreme metal article on Wikipedia is more descriptive).  What I don't think about is glam rock.  And if you draw the lines.  Glam rock.  Finnish.  Movie.  You get an idea about  how bad we're talking.  Sort of like if Kiss made a horror movie.  Wait...they did.  Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. But they were supposed to be the good guys, not the monsters.


I'd like to a share a bit of their music so you can get a feeling for how creepy the movie wasn't. This is the theme song to Dark Floors. Beast Loose in Paradise. If you can get as far as the chorus, and you're like me, you'll wonder why it sounds like something out of Footloose.


So I looked up some of their other videos. Here the scary band member, Mr. Lordi, terrorizes cheerleaders. Hardrock Hallelujah seems to be taking the Michael Jackson Thriller path, but with an Asian, because there are only about 2 neekeri (that's the derogatory term I learned in class at school. We were told we should frown at people who said it and use "tummaihoinen" instead) in all of Finland. Fun fact, there was a mini explosion of dual-raced people in Finland after they hosted the Olympics in '52, at least according to my Finnish teacher.

And here is Lordi in a song about loving a Monsterman. You know it's super scary because they're terrorizing a little girl who turns out to be a monster herself! That's new...


Apparently Lordi had a Renaissance after playing on Eurovision. Their performance must have been spectacular because they had the best scores ever until Alexander Rybak (no relation to Mayor R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis that I can discern) came along with his song Fairytale. So Lordi...as scary as they are supposed to be in their movie...scares Europeans less than Alexander Rybak's eyebrows.

Calories

Since January 10, my diet calendar says I have:

Ingested 255,073 calories
Burned 397,313 calories
For a net of...-142,240 calories

/3500 = 40.64 pounds.

Actual weight loss, if I was right about my starting weight, is between 39 and 41 pounds.  Obviously my tracking system is working fine.  I slowed a bit in April, partially due to a vacation full of beer drinking, bbq, manicotti, and tacos (I recommend not eating patty melts - no matter how you factor it, they're Satan's calorie delivery system of choice), but May has seen about x2 the calories chewed up per day on average.  Partially because of bicycling.  Partially because of better eating.  I did buy a quart of chocolate chili ice cream today and I'm tempted to put the calories for the whole quart in today, just so they're a non-issue for counting purposes, but I suspect that's the kind of accounting that got Enron in trouble.

How you can tell a team is on an agile project where I work...

Like Poetry

I think there's something vaguely poetic about using the Google translate button on a foreign language blog. I quote from Zeta Blas's Blog, The Abstruse Gusarapa below.   I can't decide if my favorite line is "But back to the breast" or "But lately, I started to creak more than the bed of my neighbors nymphomaniac."

"A sweet mustard txunami fell from the breast, frozen in the air, and exploded at the plate creating a striking pictorial effect, and even art ... if it were not for the couch, table and pitcher also received his own. Copilot says my couch that this mustard has the texture of vomit around Madrid tripe and a flavor that does not lag behind its appearance. But back to the breast. Why fork froze in mid-bite? It will not be for lack of appetite for a server, which has never suffered from such terrible evils. The cause is Telecinco and in particular its nightly newscast. Always had this information as a news esputadero drinking moderately distantly impartial and serious. But lately I started to creak more than the bed of my neighbors nymphomaniac. What puzzled me yesterday, stunned ojiplático. The theme was the Sheikha. We fucked up, now it seems that there are Sheikha, what was once a discreet package stuffed into a black scarf that barely peeked eyes on official travel, now emerges as if from a cocoon and plant their ovaries compared to actual respectable : Sheikha, with capital letters. Beside it a shapeless, predictable and expendable: The check, say the sheik, with tiny, but with candied fingers to sign contracts and promissory notes."

http://blaszeta.blogspot.com/2011/04/vuelve-jequesa-vuelve.html

MS60

Unlike last week's Ironman, which was the first one I'd missed since 1998 because this year I was a single dad and I didn't want to make Eryn wear snow pants to bike, I made it to the MS60 yesterday and it was beautiful.  I told Ming I'm pretty sure I could have done two 60s.

I don't think Ming was quite as up to the distance.  But the general rule is, this year I'm on, this year you're off.  And then next year, you just reverse it.  He asked if losing 40# was having any sort of affect on me.  I'm pretty sure by the end of the ride he noticed it was.  But it was a huge difference this year not having a 4 mph rider with us, and that it wasn't 33 degrees and exceptionally windy.

Ming pumps.


Ming tires to get Logan to take a pre-ride picture.


Logan! What the heck is going on here?!!!  Someone left a message for you on the rider board.  3rd place!?  Ouch...I hope you take your dad back there and erase it.  It's probably still out there at the 3rd rest stop.  How embarrassing!

(While we were there, the guy on the bus said, "Hey, hey...what are you writing sir?"  To which I had to reply, "I'm writing a message to a kid who's not on the ride.  It's funny, not profane.  And I'm going to erase it as soon as I take a picture."  He warned me to be careful of standing where the SAG wagon would drive, just so he could chastise me for something.)

Hot Springs - Mammoths!

While we were taking Grandma north, we stopped at Hot Springs in South Dakota.  I'd never been to the Mammoth exhibit, so we made time to get there early in the morning.  Off season, it's pretty empty.  Except for the mammoth bones.  There are a ton of them.  Note to self if I ever get reincarnated as an elephant/mammoth, stay away from drinking holes with steep and slippery sides.

Eryn in a picture we used for her school report about vacation.  You can see some of the mammoth skulls behind her.


A lesson that perhaps the Minnesota Dome could have used.  Maybe they should put a banner on the wall like the mammoth center does.


Looks like feet.  But they're teeth.  Molars to be precise.


Little girl with a mammoth bone.  (that's funny - two meanings right there.  Very Shakespearian).l


She decided she wanted to mimic the little girl on the wall in the last picture.


All Flintstones with my bone guitar.


What's this?  It's not just a guitar, it's a gun???  A bit of El Mariachi on your ass!


People used to live in wigwams made out of elephants.  Guess that solves the mystery about why they went extinct.  We should all make our homes out of cats.


Eryn imitating a Columbian Mammoth.


For a bit of perspective, here's her vs. the mammoth from the side.


They can actually tell where the mammoths stepped because of depressions in the surface of the sinkhole.


Zombie/Skeletor mammoth!!!

Roll a D6

Felicia Day recommended this post.  I found it particularly amusing as Eryn was creating a game that involved rolling a d6, so I booted it up for her...

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

Great Divide - Denver

I cajoled my family into going to two breweries while we were in Denver. The second day we went downtown to Great Divide. If a cop asks, I'll say it's just a story, but I was angling to eliminate three generations of my family downtown that day. Five people in the car, four of them talking while I was driving in a circle trying to zero in on the brewery. I sort of forgot there were things like stoplights. A few other drivers were keen to remind me they existed.

You'd think it would have been easier to find with a big beer bottle hanging off the corner of the building.


And an amusing beer truck out front.


My grandma and mother were enjoying the sun.  Keep in mind we were in the mile high city, and it was relatively toasty out, even with the snowy mountains nearby.  Compare that to a few days later when it snowed 7" in Sidney, or when it was 30 degrees for the Ironman here in Minnesota.  Grandma looks great for 95.


The bottling room.  Can you tell I spent some time in the taproom prior to the tour?  I was enjoying some of their casked beer which was running closer to the 10% alcohol range.  A few of those on top of the tasting glasses, and it was definitely having an effect.  Eryn LOVED the bottling machine.  They were loading a palate of bottles into it while we were there.  It just picks them off one row at a time and feeds them into the line.  Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!  John from work told me there's a name for it - something like "the paletizer."  For obvious reasons.  There were also kegs - whiskey kegs - in the brewery for making the casked beer (delicious).  I asked the tour guide about them, and she said they were a local brewery, Stranahans.  Kyle said he though Stranahans and Great Divide traded in kind - casks for mash to distill.  They have a tour as well, so when I go back, that's a definite destination.  Apparently they do limited bottlings (140) of whiskeys with names like "SCW Triplewood Snowflake".  If it tastes as good as the name, I bet it's wonderful.

Reexamining this picture, I really do look soused.  It doesn't help that my pants don't actually fit and I look like I need a rope belt with them sort of sticking out the top of my leather belt.


Eryn wasn't so sure she wanted me to take this picture, although she thought it was pretty funny.


She drank so much she was dancing on street poles afterwards.  I like this picture because she's smiling and cute, and there's a hidden brewery in the background as well as a bike.  Beer, bike, Eryn...definitely things that make vacation enjoyable.

You are my clone...

I know you are, because we all love...

Casa Bonita - Denver

I'm not sure I liked Casa Bonita.  It seemed a bit cheesy, which is never my favorite motif.  But Eryn loved it and had a great time, and that's what counts.  I can handle a bit of cheesy if it keeps the kid happy.  Casa Bonita is this restaurant in a somewhat rundown part of Denver that has a big tower out front, serves food reminiscent of Don Pablo's, and features entertainment, the highlight of which is local divers from the college who dive off faux cliffs into a deep pool.  There are also western gun fights, a game room, a haunted tunnel (which Eryn refused to traverse after noticing there was a strobe light.  She hates strobe lights), and dancing monkeys, which were actually a dancing ape if you want to be precise in your nomenclature.

Grandma and great grandma walking up to the restaurant.  What you're not seeing is the run down strip mall with almost no one in the cracked parking lot or the couple fighting about lost keys before going to work. But they do a good job of maintaining the tower and fountain area - they looked nice.


The entry area fountain.  Eryn getting a happy picture taken.


Me doing what I do at fountains.  Can't go to lunch half full.


Inside the restaurant watching the divers.  Obviously enjoying herself.


We didn't notice this until later, but there was a very nice area behind the falls in the restaurant (at the back side of the pool) where there were fake rock walls and some booths.  It looked like a good place to have dinner, except I can't imagine Casa Bonita being the place for a romantic evening (lots of kids, and Don Pablo's food factored in).


They had a gift shop, although you could also buy toys on the floor and a waitress was wandering around with toys from table to table. Eryn wanted a "flasher" (her words and Casa Bonita's words, not mine), and got my usual "are you sure?" when confronted with cheap toys. But Grandma was easier to convince and got her this nice laser gun. I include a video so you can appreciate exactly how annoying it was whenever she got it in her head to shoot it for 5 or 10 minutes in the van during the drive.


We took this picture for Eryn's cousin who loves My Little Pony.  I don't think LissyJo would like Casa Bonita, so I'm doing my part to ensure she ends up there.


If there's already a driver, why are you also driving?  Who wins?  The painted guy who's been practicing forever or the kid in the sunroof?  The hole in the wall is fake derelict so you can imagine you're driving through a slum.


A fun time, despite my snarky comments.

Things I learned on my trip from Denver to Montana

LissyJo, my sister, is afraid of "Grandma's Fireworks" and hides under the dash when she is confronted with them.  Apparently she was afraid of lightning as a child.

Drew, my brother, is a little tyke who was obsessed with dollar pancakes as a child and would demand them from waitresses.

My father used to call any horse with more than one color a "two pieces".  This link on equine coat color at wikipedia is for him so he knows whether he's looking at a piebald or pinto.

Firehouse Brewing in Rapid City is not as exciting the second time round.  Perhaps it was my starvation the first time, or the lack of 3/4 of the beers I asked for the second time.  My food and beer were good, they just weren't as good as what I had in Denver.

I like the print "Dakota Nation" by JoAnne Bird.  I also like Paul Goble's prints.

Riding in a closed environment with grandma for 3 days after she's been sick makes everyone else sick.

Eating with strangers on the train is the best.  I got to talk Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, hear a story about a dead body, and meet two very fun travelers (both female and neither with a ring, in case Kyle is looking for a singles opportunity).

I'm very very lucky.  How else to account for missing so much hail it looked like a snow storm in the 30 miles leading up to Hot Springs, SD, and missing the 7 inches of snow at Sidney and Williston?

Eryn says "All Star Grill and Pub" in Hot Springs has her favorite wings of the trip.  I learned that it's possible to survive on a long tip on just wings and Shirley Temples.

All Star Grill and Pub was advertising Monte Criscos.  I assumed this was wrong.  It's a Monte Cristo.  However, the Crisco message board implies that if you go the recipe from them, it might just be referred to as a Monte Crisco.  By the way, if you eat Monte Cristos, I dare you to look up the calories.  That's some serious food.

In Hot Springs, it is not outside the realm of reason to tour the Mammoth Museum during the morning, and then go to "The Flood and Fossils: Record of the Lost World" at the 7th Day Adventist church in the evening.  I missed a practical theologian debating evolution with a scientist and presenting "evidence you cannot miss!" by just a day.

It is possible to find a geocache without a GPS if you just search the rest stops.

"Wild horse sanctuary" seems like an oxymoron.

You can be a friend of E470 on Facebook.

The Fall River County Republicans are illiterate, otherwise they wouldn't refer to the "Fall River County Republican's Lincoln Day Dinner."

Mammoth Springs has a merit badge program for scouts.  That's for Ming's benefit, should he ever find himself near Hot Springs.