11111001111

New project: Dakota Death Trip. I've been saving weird story ideas since I started writing for...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:19:00 CST

...Dakota Datebook, but these tend to be creepy rather than newsworthy. In the model of Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, I'm putting them online, one a day, with a picture from my collection every Sunday. You can read sample pages from Wisconsin Death Trip here.

Turned turtle: To flip a car onto its top. I've seen this reference several times in...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:24:00 CST

...pre-1930s newspapers and found it amusing. The US apparently stopped using it by the 1950s, but Asian and African newspapers of British ancestry still use the term today.

If you were unsure of how large the scale of oil production in North Dakota has grown, here's...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:10:00 CST

...something to put it into perspective. Ths ISS released a video showing it screaming across the sky over North America, and one person noticed that there were thousands of square miles lit up as bright as any city where there shouldn't be anything so significant. It turns out the worklights from oil-rigs in the Bakken Formation are so numerous and dense that they're visible from 200 miles up, dwarfing metropolitan areas like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

I'm not sure how I missed this, but I love the forward-imagining of Fargo. The city...

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:17:00 CDT

...itself has come up with the Go 2030 program, an open-organized civic planning thinktank designed to brainstorm what Fargo will be in twenty years. Their "Town Hall" is where citizens have offered their suggestions, and while the urban-artism is heartening, a city is more than an advanced recycling program and public arts. If these plans continue to be to eliminate living spaces and increase boutiques, as the current downtown 'planning' did, they're not going to be doing the town any good. Towns are both a place for living and a living place, and the solutions seem too sterile (More)

Sad news today: Tom Keith, aka Jim Ed Poole, passed away due to a heart attack...

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 07:48:00 CDT

...on October 30th. He was the ever-talented sound-effects guy on A Prairie Home Companion, and I remember him more from the Minnesota Public Radio Morning Show he hosted with Dale Connelly. When I was a kid I often started the tape recorder when I left for school, to catch the end of the Morning Show, which included Dr. Science. Destiny and I got to see him perform live -- wearing that same sweater-vest and bowtie as always -- in 2002; here's the old post.

Most of what people call "texting-speak" today really hails from the days of BBSes and Usenet groups; as...

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:20:00 CDT

...long as people have had to convert words to electricity, they've been abbreviating, all the way back to the days of morse code telegraphy. The more 'colorful' abbreviations, like WTF, would seem to hail from a more modern time, but the Old English Dictionary has traced the abbreviation of OMG all the way back to 1917. Source, here.

We're going to be upgrading servers around these parts within the next week, but this part makes...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:49:00 CDT

...me a little sad. One of the servers in the rack has been doing such a good job that nobody has rebooted him in a while:

root@sql:/tmp# uptime
14:37:53 up 927 days, 5:45

Yes, when I installed that SQL server two and a half years ago, I booted him up and didn't look back. Over 900 days is a long time for a server to be online; older versions of Linux would even fail after a point, automatically resetting to zero once they hit their limit. This server might be my personal longest (More)

I've got an article in this week's High Plains Reader, too: North Dakota students and financial literacy. ...

Thu, 19 May 2011 17:15:00 CDT

...

My first story for Prairie Public's Dakota Datebook aired yesterday. It's online now, including audio, all about...

Thu, 19 May 2011 12:47:00 CDT

...the heroism of a teenaged Boy Scout in 1934.

Just because I like to share, a 180-degree panorama of the 2011 Fargo flood, viewed from the...

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:21:00 CDT

...alley behind my house. It's pretty much all water any direction you look. Taken with my celphone camera, which isn't the greatest quality camera to begin with, but you get the gist of it. Just look at everything with a reflection; that's something sticking up from where it's dry the entire rest of the year.