Lincolnite

As a Lincoln Southeast graduate I give a big "Hooray!" to the building's upcoming facelift.

Neal said he would send along one of his sketches if the Journal Star didn't take it. Well, the folks at the LJS thought the cartoon was "too risque". Their loss is our gain. Thanks for sharing this with us, Neal!

I couldn't wait any longer, so right before I went to lunch I decided to open up the new design of Lincolnite to all logged in members. It isn't 100% completed yet, but it's getting there. What do you think? What's that you say? You haven't joined yet, so you can't see the new site? Well then just go right ahead and register now. You want to see the pertty new website, don't you?

Five things you'll never hear the City Council say:

1. "If there's one thing that's true about Lincoln, it's that homeowners just don't pay enough property taxes."
2. "Let's hold hands and sing. Kum bah yah, my Lord. Kum bah yah..."
3. "We ♥ Mike Spadt."
4. "The 'City Council Gone Wild' calendar will be available for $19.95 from many local businesses."
5. "Mayor Seng, you are a brilliant human being. How can we best work with you to address our differences of opinion for the betterment of Lincoln?"

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is still a top 100 school, according to the latest U.S. News and World Reports rankings. UNL's 98th ranking is the same as last year. That's surprising, considering how substantially the University has improved in areas like research. Then again, like all such rankings, they are only meaningful if you buy into the ranking organization's decisions about which data to measure and which to ignore.

No seriously, I swear it's true. The new version of Lincolnite is nearing the point where I'll be ready to unveil it. Sure, I've been talking about it for months. But this time I'm serious. There's a new wiki-fied directory that's a little rough around the edges right now but should be fun to play with. Last night I set up the new Lincolnite forums. Hopefully many of you take advantage of that. And of course there's the spiffy new look. The events calendar will be there, but I'm working behind the scenes on a much (much) more advanced personalizable calendar solution behind the scenes. And the new classifieds aren't quite ready for prime time, but they'll be ready soon enough. Anyway, I want to thank those of you who have hung around here on Lincolnite to see where I take this thing. I can't wait to stop working on the design and really start focusing on putting together some quality content for you.

This Dreamweaver error threw me for a loop just now.

I always used to wonder how in the heck parents knew what their infants wanted when they cried. I would hear parents say "oh, he's hungry", or "he's just tired," or "he's working on a number two". To all of you future parents out there I say this: you'll figure it out. Seriously, don't worry about it. And don't worry if other people think you don't really know what your baby wants. They're probably wrong. We have run into this problem a few times. I'll pick on my parents as an example. A recent conversation between The Missus and my mom went a little like this: Grandma: He has been a little fussy this afternoon. The Missus: Is he hungry? That sounds like a hungry cry. G: No, I don't think so. He pushed the bottle away. TM: He may still be hungry. Here, let me see. G: No, see? [She puts the bottle in his mouth for half a second. Robbie doesn't immediately take it.] He doesn't want it. This continued for a few minutes, with The Missus becoming ever more agitated while her baby cried in grandma's arms. Eventually The Missus got Robbie, held a bottle in his mouth, and he took it. Over the next hour he downed a whopping nine ounces of formula, way more than he would normally eat in that period. Clearly he was, indeed, hungry. Now, I'm not trying to put down my mom here. She knows she goofed. It's not her fault she didn't read Robbie's crying correctly. I'm just passing on this anecdote to remind parents that although grandparents are a great resource and they know a lot about parenting, often maternal/paternal instincts are the best guide. You can't spend that much time around your child without picking up on his unique behaviors and quirks. More often than not your best parenting coach is your own child.

I know it's early, but has anybody had any experiences with Windstream yet? Is it the same old Alltel, or can you tell any differences?

A big congratulations to the Pinnacle Bank American Legion Baseball team from Lincoln Southwest, which made the American Legion World Series. I umpired for some of those guys starting all the way back when they were little squirts. Good job, guys.

Robert cracks me up sometimes. Among my favorite of his actions is his "wazzup!" face. He'll often do it when he hasn't seen me for a while and I enthusiastically say "Hi Robbie!" He'll turn his head toward me, open his eyes really wide, stick his tongue waaaay out, and squeal, as if saying "Wazzzzzzup!" OK, that was a really weak description. But it's cute. Really cute. Trust me. It is absolutely, positively impossible to retain any fragment of a bad mood after he does that.

All you commuters bummed out by the closure of 48th and O Streets can rejoice: 48th and O is reopening sometime today. That means O Street features six lanes of wide-open goodness from Perkins to East Park. Happy lane changing!

Using Speedtest.net I achieved an impressive 4,323 kb/sec download speed and awful 124 kb/sec upload speed on Road Runner from home. (I tested with the Chicago server.) Road Runner advertises up to 5 mb/sec download speeds and 384 kb/sec upload speeds in Lincoln. My upload speed seems pretty slow, but the download speed is about as fast as it's going to get, by the time you take normal internet traffic overhead into account. What's your best speed, and with what provider did you achieve it?

The Wilson house was sprayed with pesticide by the city just a few minutes ago. I don't know whether to be thankful that West Nile-carrying mosquitos aren't likely to thrive near our house, or annoyed that we'll be breathing pesticide all night. Oh well, I suppose the Star Tran buses that pass in front of our house probably belch out more toxic gases every day, so in the big scheme of things, a little pesticide won't make much of a difference. I don't think I should think about these things right before bed.

Lincoln made the national news today. I think you'll agree that an article about local serial criminal Kevin Holder's 226th arrest isn't really the kind of national attention we were looking for, though.