Lincolnite

"This restaurant allows smoking. If this offends you, please feel free to visit one of our competitors," the sign reads. "If you choose to come in, then you enter at your own risk. Thank You."

I'm a little disappointed that no restaurants in Lincoln tried this technique after the fascist, nanny state, paternalistic "I know what's good for you and you don't" ordinance smoking ban went into effect.

Take care the next time you take a walk through the woods. Or through your yard, for that matter. An acquaintance's child was recently diagnosed with lyme disease. Normally that would just be a reminder to the rest of us to be careful. But this story is a little different; this child has not spent any time recently in any of the risk areas identified by the CDC. As far as she can tell, the tick came from right here in Lincoln. That's something worth thinking about. In an odd coincidence, shortly after my dad heard about the child he discovered a tick on himself. Fortunately it was not yet embedded. The tick likely came either from the Abbott Sports Complex or from my father's own yard. Neither matches most notions of ideal tick habitat. The grassy and wooded areas near Beal Slough, on the other hand, do strike me as prime tick habitat. Daisy and I walk along the creek all the time. You can bet I'll be checking both her and I for ticks after our walks from now on. If you do happen to find a tick on yourself, remove it immediately and make a note of when you removed it, and when and where you may have acquired it. If you become ill shortly thereafter, that information will help your physician determine whether or not the tick caused the illness.

Here's an interesting idea hopping around the internet:

The idea is that you store the word " I C E " in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted "In Case of Emergency". In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It's so simple that everyone can do it. Please do. Please will you also forward this to everybody in your address book, it won't take too many 'forwards' before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

Snopes has the whole scoop. Snopes is a bit pessimistic toward the idea, but I happen to think it's not a bad idea at all. Creating a standard way to store emergency contact information certainly won't hurt anything, and its potential benefits are definitely worthwhile. One could also use ICE contacts to help return a lost cell phone to its rightful owner. It is very frustrating to find a cell phone and not have any idea which of the myriad contacts could help you get the phone back to its owner.

Tonight are my final two baseball games of the season. There are more games to be umpired, but I have decided to stop after tonight's double-header in Pleasant Dale. This season has been a difficult one for our umpiring organization. To say that the association's management has royally screwed up would be a substantial understatement. Many, many bridges have been burned, and the future of the organization is uncertain. I'm looking forward to polishing off the season tonight. With any luck after tonight I will have, for the first time, completed a season without having to eject a single coach or player. For that matter, it will be the first time I have ever completed a season without having been verbally abused to any significant degree. That may not sound like much, but when you consider how many people I have interacted with over the season, and how many of those people were in less-than-perfect moods during our interaction, it's actually pretty remarkable. In fact, I think I really matured as an umpire this year. I'm even considering, if only a tiny bit, attending a professional umpires camp some day. (Not to become a professional umpire, but to learn from them.) My own personal successes this year make our association's all-but-imminent demise all the more unpleasant. On the plus side, not having any more games means that I can dedicate more of my time to Lincolnite. Hopefully it also means more garden time and more friend time. And, of course, more time with The Missus and Daisy. We spend a goodly amount of time together already, but a little more wouldn't hurt. Besides, I have to rest up for soccer season. Did I tell you? I'll be reffing college games this fall. I can't wait.

After many -- too many -- hours in front of the computer this weekend, I'm happy to give you an early peek at the changes I'm making to Lincolnite. I have a long, long ways to go, but I wanted to prove to you that I really have been up to something this weekend. What you are able to see here -- that is, the few pieces that actually work -- is just a tiny fraction of what I accomplished these past couple days. A whole lot of behind-the-scenes work went on as well. As you can see, I am completely rebranding Lincolnite. It has a new logo, new colors, and a new underlying structure. And most importantly, I have a renewed interest in "re-finishing" this thing. For those of you aren't aware, Lincolnite was finished a couple years ago, until a devastating database accident wiped out everything. Everything. Data, design ... all of it, gone in a flash. I spent several months in a bit of a depression, and I have spent the past couple years fiddling rather aimlessly, trying to figure out how to bring Lincolnite back from the dead -- or if I even wanted to try. I now know that I do. In fact, I am putting a business plan in place that might even make me a few bucks. I'm not talking big bucks. Just enough to pay the bills to keep this site going, and maybe a little extra so that I can take the Missus out to dinner one extra night each month. I believe there is a market for a community-oriented website in Lincoln. I intend to tap into that market. All of that aside, I hope you will take the time to let me know what you think of the new look -- or at least the early incarnation of the new look. Don't be surprised if you see some goofy goings-on on the site over the next several weeks as I play with the design and implement new features. If you hang around and toss me some suggestions now and then, I promise you'll like what I have to offer in return.

What a beautiful morning. Well, ok, it's pretty humid out there, but not obnoxiously so. Daisy and I took a walk to Lamar's this morning for a donut and milk. Do you realize how difficult it is to eat a donut and drink milk while trying to walk a dog? It's very tricky. Especially when you're also trying to carry a poop sack. That's a juggling act you just don't want to see. The Missus comes home today. She has been in Albuquerque these past few days visiting her parents. It was a quick trip, but it was sort of a now-or-never sort of deal. She probably won't see them again until Thanksgiving. They have come up here the past two Thanksgivings; hopefully we can keep that tradition going this year. Despite our wildly different food preferences, The Missus, the in-laws, and I manage to have a really dang tasty Thanksgiving meal each year. My plan for the rest of the day, save for an hour or so to pick up The Missus, is to get as much of Lincolnite's redesign finished as possible. Wish me luck!

Lincolnite is receiving the first pieces of a long-overdue renovation this weekend. It's not yet clear to me how much I'll get done this weekend. I have a good amount of the homepage redesigned, but far more than that needs to be done. I hope to have a reasonable prototype ready for you to see by tomorrow night, but that depends on a lot of factors. Cross your fingers.

I am a frequent reader of the FOX News website, not so much because I agree with its conservative-slanted take on news, but because I check it regularly along with my usual routine of getting perspectives from all the usual US mainstream media suspects (i.e. the big 5: CNN, FOX, WaPo, NYT, LA Times). This time consuming habit grew out of my days in grad school when I used to channel surf cable TV btw CNN, FOX and (ugh) MSNBC to get the daily take on what are arguably the most popular sources of news for the majority of americans. Anyway, I've noticed recently that Eric Margolis has become a more frequent contributor to FOX on global affairs. Margolis is a controversial figure for a number of reasons, most notably for his criticism directed at Israel and Russia (the latter being how I discovered him in my research in the Chechnya situation). I think he may be Canadian but not sure. I no longer have the benefit of watching FOX regularly as I once did since i have the basic Time Warner cable package (surprise surprise - CNN only). Margolis and FOX seem like an odd couple - FOX being mainly an uncomprimising pro-Bushite neo-con forum. Margolis' addition may be an effort by FOX by to add an "old conservative" voice to their line-up, such as CNN has Novak and MSNBC has Pat Buchanan.

Today I had a tasty meal at one of Lincoln's newest restaurants, Great Wraps!, which opened earlier this week. The wraps part of their name is a bit deceiving; their menu includes not only wraps, but a whole variety of sandwich-like items. The overall experience was very pleasant. The restaurant is clean and freshly remodeled (it's in the old Harmann's Camera location), and the staff were friendly, if a bit inexperienced. I witnessed a few kinks -- two orders were switched, the ketchup pump was a bit explosive, some of the seating is too "cozy" -- but the problems should be easily fixable. My dining companions enjoyed their food, with reactions ranging from "It was good" to "I love it." My garlic mushroom philly cheesesteak was very tasty. Not exceptionally authentic, but tasty. Their fries were not very memorable, but I'm not a huge fry fan, so you may wish to judge that for yourself. Great Wraps! gets bonus points for having Mello Yello in their pop machine. Schlotzsky's is the only other restaurant in town (as far as I know) that offers Mello Yello. It will be interesting to watch Great Wraps! duke it out with Pita Pit, its closest competitor food- and style-wise in the Downtown market. My money is on Great Wraps!; my dining companions had inconclusive feelings, but most were either neutral ("I don't really eat at Pita Pit") to pro-Great Wraps! ("I'm not a big Pita Pit fan"). Pita Pit just seems to lack that je ne sais quois that is so crucial to surviving in the crowded Downtown restaurant market. That's not to say that Great Wraps! has it. It's far too early to say for certain. The difference, in my opinion, is that while Pita Pit felt like a goner from day one, Great Wraps! appears to have some momentum. In any event, Gr eat Wraps! is worth a visit. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

I just updated the software that runs this site. I haven't noticed any glitches so far, but let me know if you see anything goofy going on.

Free speech takes another beating. I really want to say "There's no way this will be upheld on appeal." Unfortunately, reality forces me to say something more along the lines of "There's a chance this will be overturned on appeal."

I dislike Morgan Spurlock for pretty much the same reason I dislike Michael Moore: he intentionally misleads and lies to the public while passing himself as an impartial documentarian. Fortunately, Radley Balko is willing to pick apart his claims.

The ol' Lincoln Journal Star is always good for a laugh, and today's edition is no exception. Don Walton -- a man who is to journalism what hot dogs are to fine cuisine -- wrote a simple article about a local man who discovered postcards from William Jennings Bryan sitting in an antique shop. The man bought the postcards for $1.00 apiece. Sounds like a pretty harmless story, right? Well it would have been, save for these few paragraphs stuffed needlessly into the article:

Even today, Larrick's eyes light up as he recalls the moment of discovery. "I was emotionally distraught at the time," Larrick said, agonizing over the Bush administration's steady march to war in Iraq. "Out of the blue," he said, "here were these cards from Bryan" mailed to Lincoln a century ago in the midst of a journey seeking peace around the globe. Larrick was the Green Party's congressional nominee in the 1st District last November. Through all the debates about health care, farm policy and Social Security reform, he made the case for peace and argued passionately against the war.

Talk about a non sequitur! I can actually hear the woeful background music as Larrick weeps about how he was "emotionally distraught." And that last paragraph, where the hell did it come from? Who cares about Larrick's opinions about the war in the middle of an article about a few postcards? Neither the LJS nor Don Walton will ever be taken seriously if they continue to publish this crap (and on the front page!).

On this date two years ago The Missus and I were married in a small ceremony at a beautiful pond-side outdoor setting. At times it hardly even seems that a year has passed, much less two. Time flies when you're having fun, right?

On Thursday I saw War of the Worlds. It has received pretty good reviews, including four stars from the Lincoln Journal Star's L. Kent Wolgamott. On average, the critics seem to be giving WotW a B to B+. I have to give it a C+ or B-. It's a good movie and it was certainly worth the 6 bucks I paid to get in, but in the end my first reaction was: Eh. In part that's because the film ends fairly abruptly and not very convincingly. [Implied spoiler!] The ending is about as convincing as if Apollo Creed had had a heart attack to end the fight at the end of Rocky.[/end spoiler] Most of the film's biggest problems are pretty small. But that's what makes them so annoying; they would have been very easy to fix. In a post-9/11 world, why in the heck would everybody in Tom Cruise's neighborhood run toward obvious danger? Why would a bunch of people run up a very steep hill to watch the goings-on on the other side when they know that doing so will substantially increase the likelihood that harm will come to them? Why does the aliens' "fertilization" process require so many steps and inefficiencies? I could go on, but I'd need too many spoiler warnings. One thing I loved about the movie was Spielberg's minimal guilt of CGI abuse. Too many directors these days think that every effect has to be computer generated. Spielberg did a good job of using CGI only where necessary, and then to good effect. The story itself is very good, and it has been updated to modern times very effectively. Folks will try to read various political messages into the movie, but it's not a very explicit political film in and of itself. The biggest weakness in the story, in my opinion, is the par t involving Tom Cruise's son. The character isn't terrible (although his zeal is unnecessarily exaggerated), but as the movie progresses that story line becomes less satisfying. You'll probably figure out what I mean after you've seen the movie. In short, WotW is worth a visit to your local cinema. It may even deserve a place in your DVD collection. But I have to disagree with Mr. Wolgamott -- it's no four star film. There are far too many fixable flaws to deserve that rating.