bohnsack.com

I went up to Craig's on Wednesday and attended to an IP address change for Perfection Crane & Hoist. On Thursday, we went up the McGregor, MN for Thanksgiving at the Schularick's. I took a number of photos of the Thanksgiving activities.

I visited Mom on Friday afternoon in Mason City. Scanned a bunch more family history photos, while I was there. Among the new family history photos are some of the Rau's Minneapolis Moline UDLX Comfortractor. That machine, one of 125 built, was bought around 1938 by Carl Rau (my grandfather). According to legend, Carl took a bus to Minneapolis and drove the tractor back to Watertown South Dakota with its 40 mph road gear. More info on the MM UDLX can be found here. There's something incredibly noble about a massive small grain operation on the South Dakota prairie at the beginning of the previous century.

Switching gears a bit, here's some geek stuff:
Purdue IBM SP Job Visualization.
wifimaps.com. I have a GPS now, so this is in my future.

Next week, I'll be working in Des Monies at "a major seed company".

You can play a large selection of old text-adventure games online with a java-enabled browser. Zork I and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy bring back some serious memories. Seventh grade, Apple IIc, pirate floppies. Wow!

Unsolicited gut-busting fun from
Quonsar The Magnificent:

I've moved the website out of my basement and onto a box at rackspace.com. If you're reading this, you're looking at the website served from the rackspace machine. Until I turn it off, you can still go to http://old.bohnsack.com/ to see the site served from my Iowa basement. The new rackspace box should be quite a bit faster for everyone and a whole lot faster for those with Internet connections faster than 1 Mb/s. Let me know if you do or don't see an improvement.

Back from the conference in Baltimore. Learned a lot, was exposed to important new trends, and met with a lot of HPC people.

Mark and Bill	Crazy Seahorse	Me checking out Apple's Xserve

Brett sent me a link to this very strange Leonard Nimoy / Bilbo Baggins bit from the even more strange everlasting blort. The title of his email was "Nimoy + Hobbits = Love"

Great stuff at this blog:
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends

Pictures from SC2002 are here.

Live from Baltimore, I'm at
SC2002. Got into town yesterday afternoon.

The DC gig was a bust so I'm back home as of a few hours ago.

Qwest is at it again. DSL performance to my house has been very poor for the past week or so. You may have noticed the lack of download speed. Seems the phone-guy in my backyard last week did an adjustment so that my signal now bleeds to ground. nice. Qwest say it will be fixed tomorrow. We'll see.

Got into Washington Dulles via O'Hare a few hours ago. Work this week in the DC area. For reasons unknown at present, my website is sloooow.

Amazing series of family portraits, taken every year between 1976 and 2002, with the subjects all holding the same expression (via boingboing.net)

First Berta Bohnsack at a high school track meet and then Craig, Owen, and Matt Bohnsack at a high school cross country meet. Both from somewhere around 1990. Click on one of the images for the whole collection of 5 "track-star" photos courtesy of Denise Lea. I look like a kid. Gee, I guess I was.

Playing around with the now huge photo collection last night, I totally borked everything. Three hours later and with much Perl kung-fu, everything's back to normal. exhibit a, exhibit b Overarching lesson: Backups are good. Specific lessons: Large software becomes brittle and difficult to maintain or in this case not-so-large software still needs proper design. Don't edit raw database dumps while periodic processes alter the live state of the database.

Father and brother visited this evening:

We ate at the canonical Ames resturant:

The old team back together?:

New blood?:

xcat.org is now at usc.edu instead of in my basement and has been mandated into something less than it was. My brand is greatly diminished.

I'm going to sc2002 in Baltimore Nov 16 - Nov 22.

I have AOL Instant Messaging connectivity most times. On AOL IM, my id is mpbohnsack

"We live in a world where image has triumphed over substance. Our leaders know the price of everything, but the value of nothing." - Robert Cringely (quoting someone else) in Why Science Needs Us to be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Community Wireless: It's the Organic Internet. The Internet re-born. The Internet the way it should be. It's happening