Things I like about moving to the city in bullet point format

We are about to come to agreement on a house in Minneapolis. My wife and I have been suburbanite dwellers for the last 7 years in Eagan. We're not terribly far from anything, about a 20-30 minute drive with no traffic to both downtowns. But we've been looking at doing something different.

So here goes:

• no sprawl
  
• Walking distance to coffee shops, bars, restaurants, other shopping establishments
• City Wifi
• Less driving to the places I go normally
• Public Transit within a few blocks that runs til late at night
• Closer to my friends that live in the city (most of them)
• being able to potentially own one car
• diversity
• city has better web site, with more public access
• save money on gas, still viable at higher gas prices
  
• don't feel as isolated
• houses/neighborhoods have way more charm/character
• near one of the best urban bike trail systems in the country
• a short bus ride to downtown or light rail

I'm sure I could go on and on.

Infinite What?

So I'm going to try and play catchup with Infinite Jest this weekend. I'm about 200-300 pages behind but I've got a weekend relatively free of obligation.

It's mostly been moving, looking at houses and activities supporting those things which have occupied my time the last few weeks. But I also have another time waster.

I've been a fan of Big Brother for a number of years, I watched bits and pieces of it the first few years it was on, but really got into it starting in Season 8. I've been an avid watcher of the TV show and followed along with various blogs about the goings on of the show. I decided to take the plunge a week and half in and get the live feeds for the season. It was only 40 bucks for the whole season, about 2 months, and honestly, not that expensive comparatively speaking.

So, I'm coming clean about the fact that there's some nights I'd rather watch a bunch of strangers locked up in a mock house on a studio lot in Los Angeles then read. And that has also contributed to my lackluster showing in #infsum.

I'd been reading accounts of the live feeds and people kept saying that it was a completely different experience to watch them in conjunction with the TV show, and that is an accurate assertion. This year they also have added the flashback functionality which allows you to go back into the archives and watch old footage. This is useful particularly when there's not a whole lot going on live. There's also a whole host of web sites that provide minute by minute blows and summaries of what's been going on, so you can go back and watch.

It sounds really crazy, but it's strangely addictive, and you get to know the people. There's this theory of them being edited in certain ways for the TV show and it's totally true - there are sides to these people that they don't show too much on TV. It's hard to compress 100+ hours of house time per week into 3 hours.

All in all, it's a highly enjoyable activity and one that I'm not regretting. There's a constant source of entertainment that rarely gets boring, and can be done while doing other activities on the computer, etc.

The little things in life

I am in serious denial about Infinite Summer. I've been an average of 100 pages off the pace for some time. My first writeup is probably also going to be my last. See, this is why blogging is bad for me sometimes, I lack consistency. Maybe that's why Twitter is so much more popular in my mind.

Anyway instead I will bring you commentary about the little things in life that I'm enjoying, in bullet point format:

• My fixed coffee maker. I own a Cuisinart Grind and Brew coffee maker. It costs an absurd amount of money for such a device, but I owned a series of sub-par coffee makers prior including a couple of hand-me-downs. My requirements were a coffee maker where I could reliable set a timer, and one that was industrial enough to not start breaking or leaking water all over the place (I've owned a lot of cheap coffee makers). At any rate, the Cusinart Grind and Brew fit the bill and then some. It has a bean hopper that fits a half pound of beans and it grinds them to an exact quantity every time. This is the greatest coffee maker I've ever owned, and a few months ago it started breaking down on me. It would shut off about half way through brewing and require me to keep resetting it. It took a call to the Cusinart customer service people to realize that I hadn't ever de-scaled it with vinegar. Why it didn't occur to me sooner is beyond me (I've de-scaled plenty of coffee makers). So, I did this for the better part of a Saturday afternoon, watching limey junk shoot out of the thing for a good hour and about 6 cycles. But it's working great again. My wallet and my stomach thank me.

• Horse Racing - I've been out to the track 3 times this season and I've had a great time every time. Last Saturday was especially fun - it was the claiming crown at Canterbury Downs - lots of good horses and great jockeys. Russel Baze was there, he's the jockey with the most wins in the history of the sport (I don't think Kevin Gorg went 20 minutes without mentioning it the entire day). He was also riding a bunch of middle of the pack horses that were not favorites. Still, he managed to win two races in which we had Win/Place/Show bets and we also hit the Exacta on one of the races. (totally on a whim, I decided to bet on his horse and the exacta at the last minute). Total winnings of 140 bucks from these 2 races. Not too shabby - we basically ate and drank for free and had a good time while doing so.

• Lazy Sundays - Katie and I drank coffee, played bejeweled blitz and watched the Big Brother feeds yesterday morning and it was pretty perfect. After the storm of work on the house to get it market ready, it's nice to have some lazy weekends where we do whatever we want.

• Big Brother Feeds - as mentioned in the prior item, I got the live feeds for Big Brother this year. Totally worth it. They have a flashback option which is killer, and it's totally fun to see the whole picture. I'd been reading bloggers who were talking about all the stuff you were missing if you didn't watch the live feeds and they are totally right. They edit the show in ways they want to edit it and it's not always totally accurate as to what is really going on. My habit is to go home and watch the salient points from the prior night for an hour or two based on the various guides out there, then flip on the live feeds and watch them while doing other things.

• Podcasting: I've always been a fan, but now more than ever, I'm hooked. My favorites in no particular order are The Bill Simmons Report (ESPN), This Week in Tech, and various Public Radio shows (This American Life, Car Talk, Fresh Air, Marketplace). My only grip is that I wish my Ipod touch had an option to synch all new episodes over wifi versus always having to sync with Itunes. You can download individual shows directly on the touch, but you have to manually go in and find them.
  

It's been a great summer so far and these are just a few of the things that are contributing to that.

Infinite Summer Week 1 (and a half)

I decided that I'm going to do these updates every week. This one is a little late because I got engrossed in another Wallace novel, The Broom in the System, which I've now completed.

Status: Page 66 (slightly behind the pace)

Most interesting thing I read this week:the scene where Erdedy is waiting for his drug dealer to show up (chapter 2- pages 17-27). DFW really captures the frantic essence of the character and situation.

To be explored in more detail: Scene with Wardine. I'm told it comes together later.

Laugh Out Loud Moment: Filmography of James Incandenza:

"Various Small Flames. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove, Watt, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop for automatic replay; color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero Control Corp. adult videos. Parody of neconceptual structuralist films of Godbout and Vodriard, n-frame images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ingnited by sunlight through a magnifying glass, alternated with anti-narritive sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION BY 1960S US CONCEPTUAL DIRECTOR OF VARIOUS SMALL FIRES ED RUSCHA - INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RELEASE #330-54-94 (Y.T.-S.D.B)"

So, how did I get here? Count me in among those that had barely ever heard of David Foster Wallace until his passing. I don't roll in those literary circles usually (though I have several friends that do). I'm mostly a non-fiction reader these days, I read a lot of business books and biographies. I've (somewhat ridiculously) limited my fiction reading to brain candy type stuff, like Vince Flynn and John Grisham - mass market stuff that's entertaining, but lacking any kind of interesting depth and meaning. Things that I can plow through in a few days without really thinking much. The reading equivalent of reality television (versus watching something of more substance, if it exisits these days, which one could argue).

Up till now, my experience with DFW has been a random essay in a magazine - I also read some of the Harper's stuff that they neatly collected after his death. He's right up my alley though, and I found Broom utterly enjoyable with many poignant and funny moments, yet mixed with a serious tone at points. He really does a fabulous job at character creation and conveyance of the character's thoughts and emotions.

I first heard about Infinite Summer nearly simultaneously on my Twitter account from my hombres Lauren Jumi and Jenni. Lauren's co-running the Infinite Summer Community on livejournal, and between that, the discussion boards on goodreads, and infinite summer site's discussion board, there's plenty of online outlets to discuss the book. I've picked up some clues from these areas. I also purchased a copy of Elegant Complexity to supplement, and it's already come in handy a few times to examine the overall narrative structure and some of the particular scenes of interest.

I'd been meaning to pick up more books of substance and read, and this gets me well on my way.

More to come...

Musings on Social Interaction on the Web

Man, like other blog endeavors that I've had over the last bunch of years, this one's not going much better in terms of timeliness of posting. It's been almost 2 months since I last joined ye, loyal readers (all four of you, judging from my stats, if my shit doesn't get buried in your google readers anyway).

At any rate, I'll leave this up as my long form forum for all things Willis/Billhelm/W/whatever you wanna call me. No harm, no foul, right?

I think Twitter consumes most of my daily posting mojo. Sadly, it's in a somewhat restrictive format.

I follow a lot of technology crazy internet celebrities on there like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer over on Twitter. These guys are constantly talking about things like Twitter and new technologies. I've been follwing both of them (and some others) for a while, both always had good blogs, and Winer was heavily involved in podcasting in the early days, which I followed closely at the time.

Scoble's always going on and on about friendfeed. He loves the service and is probably their biggest evangelist. I joined it a long time ago but found it to be not terribly useful. You can follow your friends from other services, but you only see their posts on it. If you mostly follow people that only have twitter, then there's almost no point - particuarly when you check Twitter several times a day.

Last week, I decided to make my feed public, and start following some other people. It's working. I like the stuff that comes up, and unlike Twitter, where I have this strange, insatiable need to view just about every tweet, I can just sample friendfeed when I have some time. I follow enough of a critical mass that there's always new things, and it shows friend of a friend entries.

Another thing came along this week, also courtesy of Scoble, that of feedly. It's a plugin for firefox that combined with the site, provides another way to view google reader feeds. And man, it's pretty sweet. It also integrates with friendfeed so you can see conversations that might already be going on. It has a twitter sidebar, and lots of goodies. I like the digest format when I only have a few minutes to read because it bubbles up things that I'm more interested in to the surface.

Finally, I'm giving foursquare a go again. I had deleted it a few months back because I didn't really like how it integrated with Twitter. But this time, I've scaled it back, and they've also added features to their mobile web and Iphone client to send to Twitter or not, which is helpful. A few of my friends are very big fans of the service and use it quite a bit. It's what dodgeball could have been and then some.

Comments on the Star Trek Franchise

I'm a nerd in many respects - mostly with regard to technology, but I've always lived on the fringes of sci-fi, fantasy popular culture. For example, I'm on the edge of the Trekkie Kingdom. Not quite hardcore enough to have consumed every episode ever made, though I have seen most episodes of next gen, many of the original series, and briefly watched Voyager (I lost interest after the first season). Haven't read more than one or two of the books, and that was back in high school when I worked at a bookstore and got them for free. I have, however, seen all of the movies multiple times - I owned the original cast movies on VHS, all 6 of them in the pretty mid-90s box set seen below (that clearly came out after 5, but hey, we have to add 6 to the set, so there's that extra space.
Exhibit a:
So yeah, that was a great set of films. Of course, the old fan adage holds true for me, more or less, that the even numbered movies were the best ones, and the odd numbered ones, somewhat lackluster. ST IV is my favorite one still to this day.

More recently, I was hankering for the DVD set, so I actually went out and purchased the full 10 DVD set, though I've only watched the first couple thus far.

My fandom with the movies has been less devout more recently, for example, I can't remember if I even bothered with Star Trek:Nemesis. By then, they had totally run the Next Gen shit into the ground. I don't really think Next Gen ever really hit it's stride in the movies.

So, when I started hearing that JJ Abrams and crew were going to be making a prequel of sorts, my interest perked up again. Sounds like something that could breathe some life into the corpse that the thing had mostly become. I've been following the goings on of the "prequel" from a distance, hearing a lot of great things, the reviews that have come out have been favorable, and the Trekkie Kingdom seems to be giving a thumbs up.

I'm going to see the film on opening night, I didn't go to a midnight showing, because damn, I'm not that harcore and I had to work. Plus, the last midnight showing I went to was Star Wars ep I, and that was the biggest disappointment in the world, considering that me and my friends camped out in the parking lot of the theather. But I will brave the crowds tonight for Star Trek, and hopefully it will be worth it. (I hate opening weekends for movies normally, I like room to spread out!!)

I don't know where the franchise goes from here, I suppose more movies. I wonder if they'll ever get a successful TV show off the ground again - I do sort of miss the weekly ins and outs of a Trek-centered show. I gave Enterprise a whirl for a few episodes but just was not my thing.

Urban/Suburban Sprawl

I am starting to have more concern about this topic then I had in the past. Maybe slightly ironically, because I live in your typical suburban condo development and have for 7 years. All the stores I regularly shop at are sprawled about within a few miles of my home. But there's nothing within reasonable walking distance from my house.

I live in an inner ring or second tier suburb, if you drive out another 10-15 miles on a major freeway, it's just like this all over. It really makes me wonder about the sustainability of it all. Can we continue to develop every last square inch of land for strip malls and spread out, cookie cutter style housing developments?

It really hit me on a recent trip to visit my Grandma in Naples, Florida. Naples is your typical Florida retirement community - it has achieved absurd growth over the last 20 years. Since the 1980s, the West Coast of Florida has been a viable alternative for some looking to avoid the more populus Miami/West Palm/Ft Lauderdale complex. My grandparents first moved to the area in the early to mid 1990s as snowbirds. Upon first visiting you got the impression that it was certainly on the way up population wise. They moved to a well known development called Pelican Bay and it was pretty clear that there was still room for this development to grow. Not any longer - Pelican Bay seems nearly fully developed, as do most of the coastal development in that area. The development of housing communities in that area now extends 10 to 15 miles east of I-75 with no signs of stopping (maybe slowing a bit due to current economic conditions).

What really struck me was the strip malls, they've continued to multiply in somewhat of a willy nilly fashion in that area, and the saturation of businesses is pretty crazy - you have every type of restaurant imaginable, what seems like a grocery store at every major intersection, stores of all sizes and shapes plugged into themed strip malls. Naples has virtually no high density areas, it has a downtown that's 8 or 9 square blocks, but the rest of it exists in this massive strip mall sprawl along US 41 and other east/west and north/south coridores, and the massive-mega acreage developmens with fancy names. There is a good mix of density in many of these developments, but most of them still require you to get in your car to dine, shop or run errands.

I'd imagine that, eventually, it will hit a critical mass, where new development will slow down, but there's no sign of that occuring as of yet, and there's more and more baby boomers retiring every day.

I'd like to see a more thoughtful approach to community design in this country, and we have to do more than building poorly desgined "city center" type developments that end up being a bust. But I wonder where that's going to come from or when it will ever happen. I have hope that higher fuel prices will spurn people to think about this more, and I think it might be one of the only things that does so. Otherwise, cheap land and developer greed seem to be winning this battle - in the short term it's beneficial, but the long run damage that we are doing seems to be too great to ignore anymore.