New Stuff

3/22/02

I've been out sick for two days with some kind of flu fungo. Sucks to be me. In between bouts of dizziness and dreck I've managed to put a hurt on some of the long standing issues around the site.

First is the stats pages. If you want to see the stats for tholt.com and consolidateddiversions.com (they're one and the same), try here. If you want to see the stats for coin-o.com, try here. Nick, over at mendota-bridge.com has a stats page as well, but I'll be darned if I can remember where it is.

The Minneapolis wing of the site has needed a re-do for some time. It's been re-done. The front page is kind of boring, but it finally lays out the entire wing as a table and not as a click-through "tour." The tour wasn't working at all, so I finally scrapped it. This should be a hell of a lot less confusing to all visitors. All pages in the wing were touched and that should reflect on the dates at the bottom. I also wrote a bunch of new content for the natural attractions page. I also changed the layout a bit, scrapping the info page as redundant, and moving the historical information from the main page to the new info page.

I wrote a bit on the Toyota Camry page, the Toshiba Tecrapage and I updated the Northome page to reflect the fact that we no longer live there.

I brought the old Tim of Nasereth page back on-line to showcase the NCAA Men's Division I Hockey bracket that my buddy Illya was generous enough to make. I threw our picks in the lower brackets to see how we'd both do at picking the winners. I'll smoke him, as usual. I also put my MLB picks for the 2002 season up as well.

3/3/02

The web server is up and running fine. We're running virtual hosts and although it was a pain to set up, it works nicely. We've also created stats pages for each domain we're hosting. And I got my job back.

1/16/02

Happy New Year!

Well, I'm finally back up with my DSL connection. In a burst of creative energy, I re-did some stuff on the Hardware Hell page. I've also added a listing for my new laptop. I've updated my resume because I've just been laid off. I've added a couple more listing to my favorite things and I've removed a couple of listings from my page.

12/3/01

Lots of changes recently. I'm using off-site hosting at Visi.com until I can get hooked up with DSL again at the new place. I guess I won't have any downtime. I have recieved a few reports of 404 errors, but I haven't been able to replicate them. DNS entries take a while to propogate worldwide, and that could be the reason for this. It also could have been the fact that I had my DNS server pointing here while having a couple of others pointing at visi. Such as it is.

I've been offloading projects like mad lately. The T-Bird is gone. We donated it this last weekend. It sucks to have had to get rid of a running car, but we just didn't have room for it. I've gotten rid of several motorcycles this weekend. The pair of Honda CB550s are gone as well as the Suzuki Titan. My buddy came up and loaded up all 3 in his truck. So long project bikes.

Focus. It's going to be about focus from now on, right? Riiiight.

Some PC stuff to tell about. I upgraded processors in both the dual Pentium Pro box and the dual socket 7 box. They will be running different OSes now and will be swapping duties. Fun.

11/22/01

The move has been taking a toll on what can and can't be done with our stuff. To date, the garage clearing project has seen the pair of Suzuki GS850Gs go away as well as the Suzuki Titan. I've also had to make temporary accommodations for the website as there will definitely be an interruption in DSL service during the move. I'm going to have my ISP host my site for at least the month of December, 2001 and probably a bit of January, 2002 as well. Nothing should change as far as the address to enter to get to my site, however, the .wav file of us howling with Brutus will have to go away due to storage considerations. It's huge.

10/21/01

With all the hubbub around packing to move, trying to get the house in shape and dealing with the weirdness of September 11th and various biological scares, I haven't had time to do much to the site except to add to the pretty nearly Daily Diversion. Several things have gone down in the past month and several more will go down in the future. One of the things to perhaps be aware of is that the site will be down for however long it takes to move the server from one place to another when and if we decide to actually move. I guess it depends on how I want to handle it. I could host somewhere else for a bit, or I could not bother with it and just be down for a day. Whatever tack I take will be announced in great and excruciating detail long in advance of its actual date.

9/3/01

I have a bunch of new stuff, but it's mostly small. I have new Daily Diversion archive .pdb files up for July and August. I also have these same files up in .html format on the Archive page. Go check them out if you like.

I sold the Kawasaki 440LTD and so that's now moved to the "Bikes I Have Owned" column on the Motorcycle page.

Beyond all this, we've decided to move out of our house, so I won't have a lot of time to do much of anything further with the site until we've moved to the new place. There won't be too much updating going on for a while, but I will be doing Dailies. They may end up being weeklies, but that's OK by me.

8/5/01

Nothing much today except a couple of pictures of my Kawasaki 440LTD which is for sale. Go take a look.

7/8/01

Gotta ton o'stuff for y'all today. A bunch slang as well...

Seriously, I did a ton of work on bikes this last week and have updated the Kawasaki 440LTD page with all the progress made on that bike recently. By the way, it's up and running and doing just fine. I've also updated the Gold Wing work journal page with the tale of its recent oil change. Not gripping reading, I assure you.

I've also done the June Archive of the Daily as well as the palm .pdb file. The pdb file can be found on the Archive page.

I've really been getting into the blog-style updating of the page, so now updates aren't going to be done at night any more. Well, I'll still do some then, but mostly they'll be done whenever the mood strikes.

6/19/01

The new May archive of the Daily is out. I've added some stuff to the CB550 page and that's about it.

6/15/01

There's been about 4 different iterations of the The Daily Diversion this week. I think I finally have a winner, but there's still much tweaking to do.

I added a bunch of too-large images to the CB550 page in hopes of getting rid of them. I have nothing against these bikes, except for the fact they're taking up space in my garage.

6/5/01

Lots of new stuff here today. We got a car from Sarah's parents and its new page is here. I updated my personal page as well as the Daily Diversion page. I made it look more like a blog, and I must say it looks better. I need to do some tweaking on it, but it seems to be working OK. I've also laid down some reading list action so now everyone can learn be like me by reading what I read. Yeah, riiiight.

5/21/01

I've been bad. I've done a bunch of stuff, and I've not updated the NEW page. I've added a couple more links on the links page, I've created a second page of pictures of my dog, Brutus. I've posted a bunch of technical links and even a picture on the Toshiba T2400CS Laptop page, and now Nick Ryberg has his own page on my site. It consists of all the posts he's posted. I think that's about it.

5/14/01

OK, so it looks as if it's been over a month since I've updated the site. That's not entirely correct. There are new archives for March and April posted, but I did the March one about a month ago. There are also .PDB files, for both months as well. I have been keeping up. There's been a couple of updates to the motorcycle page to reflect the fact that I have a couple of bikes up for sale and also the fact that I've sold a couple. Yay. I've been updating the statistics page every week on Sunday. Check it out.

3/25/01

I have a few new things for you today. I've added a stats page to the site. I'm using Analog and although it seems, like everything having to do with Linux, infinitely configurable, the stock setup proved to be pretty extensive. It's nice to know all you folks out there care enough to have a look around.

I finally updated the Tim of Nazareth page with the results of last year's Baseball season. I'll be adding this year's picks sometime this week, so stay tuned.

The T-Bird page has been updated with the latest bit of maintenance.

3/8/01

I've tweaked the links page again. I've added a few and took a few down. I bet you can't tell the difference. I've also added the latest installment to the T-Bird saga. Don't miss the paranoid screed in today's Daily!

2/25/01

I have an important announcement to make. I have now thoroughly consolidated my content to this site and this site alone. My other free-hosting proxies out on the internet now contain a simple and small redirection page complete with a clickable link and a JavaScript redirector. This brings to a close the days of offsite hosting. It also brings to a close my index page hit counter. For those of you that care, the last hit was number 2114. If you subtract my personal hits to the front page of my site, we're probably talking about 1400 hits and if we're talking about new hits, that number is probably around 500. However, this number only deals with the number of hits to the front page. There were approximately 3 times that many hits to each of the webringed pages.

For those of you who have linked either the crosswinds.net site or the stas.net site, please adjust your links or your favorites to this site. I thank you.

2/13/01

Boy, have I been busy and not with this site. I'm sorry for my lack of voom of late. I seem to have tons of stuff to do and try of late, and I just can't seem to get any of it done. I hope nobody out there knows what I'm talking about, because if they did, they'd be as strung-out as I am.

There's a bunch of new links on the links page, and two new post-card pictures on the Bell Building and University Mall pages. The University page makes it one less picture that I'm relying on the Historical Society for. Happiness.

The web server may also be moving soon to a different machine. I want to build a new kernel for Northome, and I want to see if a Pentium 233 MMX-based machine can handle the load from the web. I guess we'll see.

1/14/01

There's a few more new things out there for the new year. I've added some pictures to the West Side Milling District pages, and I've added an update to the '87 Ford F250 page. I've added an link to my Daily page so you can now download my page to your PDA of choice. I'm still tweaking on the webserver and getting stuff done so I may get back on the daily update train again.

1/3/01

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

There's much new around the site. First and foremost in my mind is that I'm now doing the hosting for this website. The hardware geek page is now up to date, rewritten, and somewhat factual. I'm happy to say that I was able to get the dual Pro box up and running before the end of the year. Before I start writing regularly again, I'm going to be tweaking the web server. This usually takes god-awful amounts of time as I have to learn new things every time I want to implement some new feature. I'm shooting for resuming regular daily postings by the end of January.

There's also a new vehicle in the junkyard. It's an enormous '87 Ford F250 Full-Size 1/2 ton pickup truck. Unfortunately for Freetruck, this is its replacement. Freetruck has deteriorated to the point that it's difficult to drive and very hard to use. It's not completely immobilized, but there's only so much you can do in the winter with a truck who's doors do not close. No, it's time to say "goodbye" to my long serving and long suffering pal. I'm just beside myself with grief and guilt, but I just no longer have room or patience. I haven't yet divested myself of it, but the time is coming soon.

You may have also noticed that the counter on the front page of the website is now gone. I no longer need it as I'm now keeping stats on my own web server. I could go on at length about how silly the front page counter is, but I think anyone who knows how many beans make 5 could have figured this out for themselves already. Of course, this means I need to update my privacy statement, but that's already happened as well.

12/7/00

My thanks to everyone who's written lately. I've had about 5 people write me some feedback on the site and it's really been fun replying to your mails. Keep them coming.

There's plenty of updates today. I feel like a schmuck mentioning that I updated the Daily column in the "NEW" area. It is indicative of just how often I've been writing updates lately. I'd like to get back on the horse, and I soon will. I can see the flurry of computer activity slowing down in the near future. The hardware phase is almost completed, now it's time for the software phase.

There's been much activity around the rest of the site. I've had a couple of car happenings lately. The Calais blew up and is now DOA. The 626 has been donated. This leaves us with only two cars. Suddenly I feel kinda anxious about our vehicle situation.

I've also made a couple of moves in the motorcycle area. I've acquired a rather beat-up old Suzuki GS1000L, and I sold off (gave away) to a nice young man my old Honda Mini-Trail. He was happy to get it and I was happy to have it out of my garage. I think that's about all. I can't wait to get back and mess around with this site again. Hosting from home will afford me the chance to mess around with some back-end stuff that may make my life easier and make the updates more frequent.

11/25/00

I've finally added the hardware geek page I've been wanting to add for a while. In it I come clean about my new server and my strategies for hosting my own site from my house. It's a little bit too up to date as I've not yet installed anything, but I wanted to get it up and on the web. It's a little long, but that's how it goes.

I've added another building to the architecture page. It's the lovely Champion Building in the Warehouse District. The pictures are from the 4 roll extravaganza shoot-out back in May. New as well is yet another member of my fleet of bikes. This time it's a nice little Kawasaki 440LTD. I'm also sewing up the end of the month of September and sticking the dailies in a file. I've also eliminated a page in the Minneapolis history section. Gone is the "General Street Information" page. The section was headed up by a menu and what I've done is just stuck the menu at the bottom of the General Street Information page. I'm still hunting around for a suitable map to tie the Geography sites together with, so there's no improvements there. I'll also add a couple more links to the pile in the back as well. That's all for now.

Well, that's not quite true. I also updated the Technical Log on the Calais page.

I redesigned the Daily Diversion column area so that the Daily is the first thing that comes up. The old rants have been moved to the classic rant area, and the rest of the pages have been hooked onto the bottom of the page. I also created a new, separate page for the Minneapolis links. You can still access the other links from the main page, but now there's also a Minneapolis link page. I also edited the opening Minneapolis page a bit because I realized the writing was a bit muddled there. I don't think I fixed it, but it reads a little better.

I caught a second wind this evening and stuck a few more things up. Brutus has a new picture on his site, and a new link from the Favorite Things page. Yes, I'm doing my level best at interconnectedness. I've also added yet another motorcycle to the motorcycle page. It's a Honda CB550 and you can read all about it on that brand new page.

There's also been about 5 or 6 inconsequential changes made to various pages.

I received formal permission by Eric Hopp to use his excellent image of the Como-Harriet Streetcar, so I've added that notation to that page. I've also archived all of July's Dailies in both HTML and PDB for PalmOS devices. Once again, Qvadis is the software I'm using to make those files and the reader I recommend for Palm devices. I've added a bunch of new links to the links page with most of them being either Minneapolis or computer based. I acquired a couple of new bikes recently and a page for those will be coming soon. I also still need to create a boat and motor page and a Champion Building page. I have a ton more West Side Milling District stuff and I'll have to buckle down and put those files down in digits. That's all for now.

The image project is finished and I've succeeded in turning almost 13 megabytes of .jpg files into just under 6 megabytes. What this means to you out there in webland is that my pages will now load much faster and there shouldn't be that much impact on image quality t'boot. Lovely!

I've also added a new page to the site. Since I've done quite a bit of work to the Gold Wing this summer, the maintenance log has become quite ungainly. Enter the new maintenance log page. It's pretty much the dated entries cut out of the original page and pasted into a new one. There's also a new entry for a couple of days ago when I bodged a new set of rear turn signals onto the bike.

I'm also starting to think a bit about archiving some of the other logs on the site. This page being one of them. I'll probably do the usual HTML and PALM formats so that one either cut and paste them for later use or download them to a PDA. Look for updates on this project soon.

I've been doing quite a lot lately with resizing and editing some if the images on this site. Since I've moved the operations to the home PC, I've been getting very annoyed that it takes forever to load them up. I've now found a program that has a good image size reduction regime so the images on this site will get smaller in size. Quicker download times rule. The Popular Mechanics magazine large .jpgs will not change all that much so they can still be read. Most other over K'ed images will be reduced.

Due to watching my pal Pete mess with his bike over the past few weeks, I've added a couple of entries to the the Suzuki GS series technical tips page.

I've been working pretty consistently on the daily for a month now and I've just finished my first real archive page. I have an HTML page and a .pdb page for PDA users out there. Check out the archive page under RANTS. I've added a review of a riverboat cruise my wife and I took on the Harriet Bishop. I've also added a couple of installments of happenings on the Gold Wing page, the Calais page, and I've fixed a couple of errors here and there. Thanks for checking in!

There's a new entry on the Gold Wing page--just a maintenance update, so it's really no big deal. If you're looking for new content, I have continued the Daily Diversion column for about 2 weeks now and that's fresh daily. In the future, look for a book page, look for a PDA/Palm/Visor page and a separate site for PDA content downloads through AvantGo, and perhaps an architectural investigation/tour of our lovely neighborhood.

Happy Birthday, MOM!

Today I updated the Calais page, and I've started the The Daily Diversion. The Daily Diversion will be a daily column that I hope to get to on a daily basis. To get to it through the front page, go to the RANTS section and you'll see the heading for the Daily at the top of the page. Wish me luck!

The slow conversion to XML is continuing. Why? Why not?

Project Ratbike has made its debut. Follow along as I create the ratbike of my dreams. I've also readdressed all the mailto buttons on the site to point to my domain mail box. You can do this when you have a domain all your own. I've also added some Palm/Visor links on the links page. Go figure.

5/18/00
After a long hiatus in which I've had a hot tub party, bought a Handspring Visor PDA, and done a lot of cleaning the house, I finally have some updates to report. Not many, mind you, but some. I documented some work I did on the Calais, added a link to John's Auto Parts on the links page, and cleaned up some stuff over on COMDIV. New today is a RANT about lightbulbs as well. Coming soon will be a books page which will include the last book I've read, and some other gorp.

4/26/00
What didn't I mess with today? I was out sick and I was going nuts so I decided to take advantage of the pile of photographs I took last weekend. I shot 4 rolls of film and got about 40 or so usable images. Most of these images went to replace the images from the Minnesota Historical Society that I've been using. They still haven't gotten back to me on whether or not it's OK to use their stuff, so I was forced to use my own images. All it took was a ton of time.

On the Minneapolis Architecture page, there are many changes. I added a new page about Leroy S. Buffington linked to his name on the page. I also replaced MHS images with my own on the Pillsbury Hall page and added quite a few detail shots. There's a new image on the Nicholson Hall page along with some new text. I also revamped the Pillsbury "A" Mill page and fooled around with images there, too.

I replaced single images and not much else on the Cathedral Church of Saint Mark page, the Young, Quinlan Building, the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church page, the Safe Storage Warehouse page, the Reliastar Building page, the Foshay Tower page, and the Loring Park Office Building page.

Receiving a couple of new images and some text was the Lindsay Warehouse page. There are completely new pages for the West Side Milling District, Saint Anthony Main, the Humboldt Mill, the Washburn-Crosby "A" Mill, the Washburn-Crosby Utility Mill, the Upton Block/Aster Cafe, Relistar II, and the Civil Engineering Building at the University of Minnesota.

Many other menu pages and text pages received updates today and there's just too much to list. Essentially, almost everything in the Minneapolis branch changed again, so I now deem it v1.1.

Whew!

4/21/00
I've been doing a lot of spring cleaning around the house, so I've not had a lot of extra time to do much with the site. Today's various adjustments include getting rid of the blotchy picture of the Gold Wing in Seattle and replacing it with one of my favorites of it in Florida. I also made some adjustments to the text on that page as well. After finding a coding error on the Suzuki GS Tech Tip page I touched that up as well. Due to keeping a local and a remote copy of this site and occasionally editing online, the base target command leached back into the Who's Who page. It's fixed now and I've added a couple of well known Minneapolitans to the site.

Consolidated Commercial Diversions has been launched as a separate site. It's just barely up and running, so this site may get some well-needed neglect in the coming weeks. "E" commerce, here I come! Naturally, NEW site was updated and I added some more links to the links page. I also credited some more folks who have taken pictures that have landed on my site. Thanks to all of you.
I've also added one more picture to the Who Am I? page. It's Sarah's favorite.

4/13/00
Well, since things do change from time to time, I have been given the motivation to change a few things around the site. Most of the changes have to do with the Movers and Shakers page and with the Minneapolis Architecture pages. Since this represents something of a paradigm shift, I'm calling the Minneapolis site v1.0. This means absolutely nothing to anyone but me, but that's OK.

All the changes had to do with images that belong to the Minnesota Historical Society. I've made all those pictures their own pages and added what I hope will be the correct crediting to all the images. I needed to do this because I'm not sure the old way of linking was the right way. It certainly wasn't a very stable way. I'm looking into what the MNHS wants as far as permission and credit for their images, and I'm hoping that since I'm not a commercial site (yet), I'll not have to pay too much green for those images. If this is the case, then I'll either have to do some heavy photography, and blow a bunch of dough on developing, or just shut down those links altogether. Since money is kinda tight and will remain so for a while, I'm hoping that the eventual solution to this problem is a cheap one.

4/11/00
I found an old photo album last night and plucked a few of my favorite pictures from it. I've added a second page to the Oddities From The Road collection and shortened up the first page. I've found additional pictures of the Fury and the Virago. I added a nice image to the Virago Tech Tips page, and another artful picture has found its way into the Gallery page. I've also added a new page to the places I've been. It's a page about the Jefferson Davis Monument.

4/6/00
I've started to add pages to backup linked single images on the site. I started with me, naturally and hope to have all the pages written very soon. I've modified the hypertext links on the Who Am I? page and now they all lead to pages instead of single images. Our dog Brutus now has his own page and there's now a page that details my opinions on my hair, or lack of it. My drinking habits are now detailed on a new page. Sarah and my wedding picture has its own page and I've also cleaned up the rant on the Tim of Nazareth page. I've also added some to the Thunderbird page to reflect the work I've recently had done to it. That's all for now.

4/3/00
I added yet another entry in the GL1000 page. I did some work on the bike this weekend and detailed it on the site. I also put up a better picture of my Wing.

There are new images on many of the pages today. The Water Buffalo got a much better picture, and there are now pictures on the XS400 page, the Titan 500 page, and the Mazda 626 page. Freetruck also got a new image, and I put a picture of the Quad4 engine on the Cutlass Calais page. That's enough work for today.

3/30/00
Today is the day I finally buckled down and put a "NEW" page up on the site. It's a good idea, and since I'm updating the site about 3 times a week, it really is a needed sort of thing. I created and added to the index page, added this page, and started thinking about a Branch branch. Those of you in the know will know what I'm talking about. To the rest of you, I apologize for an inside joke. It's not on you, I promise.

I'm also pondering adding a couple more webrings to the site. I'm very seriously considering dumping the hitcounter at the gate because of the trouble I've had with others that prevent the site from loading. I'm also postponing any thoughts of a frame-enabled page. I may do one later, but not here at Consolidated Diversions. I now have a boat and 4 motors--instant hobby!!--and I'm thinking of doing a series documenting the boat's return to the water.

So, welcome to the "NEW" page, and check back often.