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Beaver Island Arts Redesign
My mom’s been visiting for the holidays, and we’ve spent some our time together redesigning her website. I’m not good with graphics, but I like the result of following Mom’s directions to the best of my ability. We stuck with TYPO3 as the back-end content management system. We considered ditching it for something simpler, but…
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Movie: Travellers & Magicians (2003)
I didn’t know what to expect from a movie directed by a Buddhist lama, and was surprised how entertaining this was. A modern story of a Tibetan enamored with visions of America while isolated in a tiny village parallels a monk’s mythic tale of a man seduced into isolation, where he encounters the dangers behind…
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Movie: Come Early Morning (2006)
There are lots of movies about beautiful, damaged people trying to have relationships. It usually works. The beautiful people are fun to look at, and we can relate to the relationship troubles. This film plays the theme even more effectively by downplaying the beautifulness of the characters a bit, and putting them in a palpably…
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Geo Mashup Plugin Release 1.0.6
This small release is a fix for the “Automatically Open the Center Info Window” option. Finding the marker in the center became unreliable in recent versions of the Google Maps API, so I changed it to open a specified post marker instead, even if it’s not exactly centered. Download it, or read more. The same…
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Movie: Lonesome Jim (2005)
We liked Trees Lounge enough that we put Steve Buscemi’s next, less well-reviewed film on the queue. Buscemi shows his talent again for finding humor in the most pathetic recesses of life, but it’s missing some of the spark I found in Trees. It’s also a bit too much like You Can Count On Me.…
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Book: Geek Love / Katherine Dunn
The powerful symbol of the carnival freak is put to some new uses in an original novel. Instead of presenting the freaks as suffering from exploitation, they form a fairly shocking value system of their own that holds our surrounding cultural values in contempt. It’s completely believable, because the characters depend on their freakishness for…
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Movie: Notes on a Scandal (2006)
A nice disturbing twist to the standard student/teacher affair story. Judi Dench is great as usual. The only downside is that I didn’t find the student character entirely believable. Otherwise it’s done well. That’s about all I can say without spoiling it.
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Mount Falcon Park Hike
We finish our long weekend in Mount Falcon Park, hiking with Dad and Jezze. It’s still a little chilly out, but the sun feels great. The trails here have expansive views of Denver and the surrounding canyons, and even a few flat rocks for outdoor yoga.
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Garden of the Gods
We wake up parked next to highway 115 under clear, cold skies. Climbing still seems unlikely. We drive north to Colorado Springs, and follow many many signs to Garden of the Gods. We’ve both been here before, but never really taken a close look at it. It’s a nice place to hike around, we find,…
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Dakota Hot Springs
Our battery is low after a day running the heater without any appreciable sun for solar charging. The furnace requires electricity for ignition and running the fan, so if we drain the battery there’s no heat. To avoid this we decide to drive for a while to the Dakota Hot Springs, which are open until…