Josh's Not-a-Blog

Our crappy little corner of the world now has Google Street View. It looks like the Googlemobile came through last summer, though I haven't been able to figure out exactly when. The imagery covers at least Houghton and the villages of Laurium and Calumet, but fortunately not all the way out to those of us who live even further in the sticks.

I thought Street View was kind of neat when it was other people's houses I could drive by, but now it just has me feeling...uneasy.

Then I got to Houghton. Dry as a bone. Meh.

By popular demand, here's a compilation of the photos and video of Tom moving snow.

Prior to using this snowthrower (a 30" Poulan Pro), Tom had been snowshoeing to the barn to avoid disturbing the insulating layer of snow over his water line. Here he uses the snowthrower to go around the back of the house, and create a walking path to the barn.

Tom pauses for a quick break. The snow is just as deep as the auger housing is high.

The path is nearly complete. This was snow that hadn't been touched until this point.

He nears the barn. After this run, he went back and doubled the width of the path.

I walked up the path behind Tom to take this short video.

My folks are up visiting for the week. They made it up to my house at around 9:00 PM, and I gave them the $0.05 tour (fee waived). I thought for sure they'd echo the common sentiment: "Holy crap, this is a lot of work." Instead, they got really excited, and saw a lot of the same potential I do. I'm fairly confident this means they're nuts, and that I inherited fully this characteristic.

Dad told me a story about our first motorhome. In the early '80s, my folks wanted to move up from a pick-up camper to a Class C motorhome. Dad found a good deal on an almost-new Starcraft that needed some work. Specifically, it had been in a fire and was gutted.

My Grandpa Vernon (my mom's dad) came along to look at the motorhome. When he saw it, and saw how much work it meant, he just shook his head. Dad said, "I think I'm going to get it."

And we did. Now I know.

Epilogue: Dad and Grandpa rebuilt the motorhome to better than brand-new. And I helped, mostly by playing in the bunk, I think. Pictures to follow.

A (now) humorous and actually pretty interesting Computer Chronicle episode on Unix from 1985.

I'm turning on comments for new posts. I just can't keep ignoring my fans.

Kidding.

(Brr, it's cold out today. At 8:00, the National Weather Service said it was -16° F in Calumet.)

Here in Houghton and Keweenaw counties, we have approximately two official local news sources. One is the Daily Mining Gazette. They're typically pretty slow, and their choices in which stories do and don't get printed are traditionally pretty bizarre.

The other one is WLUC TV6. They're a TV station, not a newspaper, and you can tell. News is published quickly on their website, which is welcome, but sometimes their haste is obvious. It's mostly forgiveable, though, since most of us are grateful for an alternative to the DMG.

James pointed out a good example of this today. An article about a snow plow collision on US-41 had all of the relevant information, but was a little choppy. The best part, however, was the first comment left on the story, which I thought was a good mix of good-natured ribbing and relevance to the story. The good-natured ribbing part must've caught the eye of someone at WLUC, though, since they quickly reformatted the story.