The past few weeks I’ve been inspired by the TV show (and the ad campaign) that talk about things to do before you die. I’ve been very privileged to do the things I’ve done up to this point and would die a happy man right now, but it’s been fun thinking up new things to do.

I’ve added a new box to the top of the home page that displays a random list item each time the page is loaded. Also, the sidebar now lists my personal best times at various running distances. I plan to work on lowering these in the next few years as I pursue the list item “Qualify for Boston.”

Maybe I’ll make that namesake goal of seven minutes miles after all…

On our way back from Fortune Bay, we drove through Eveleth past the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. With all of the talk about it closing or moving, we weren’t sure if it was still open. Their website says it’s closed and the parking lot only had one car in it. Good thing we actually stopped to check–they are open and will apparently stay in that location.

We paid our admission fees ($8 for adults?) and had the place to ourselves. There was a ton of great stuff to see there for hockey fans–I’ve uploaded some pictures to the photo gallery here.

My favorite thing was the mock rink and goal they had on the third floor with real sticks and pucks. I’m pretty sure I’ve never shot a real puck before–makes me want to take skating lessons all the more now.

If you are in the area and like hockey, stop in and support this great museum.

Almost forgot to post this picture…

When I was at Izatys a few weeks ago to cover the state golf tournament, I saw this guy buzz my head a few times. He was hiding behind this tree branch and flew away when I tried to get a better view.

My wife decided it was a red-headed woodpecker, which appear to be somewhat rare in these parts now.

Fun to see–very vibrant and distinct colors…

This afternoon we took the girls to tour the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in northern Minnesota. We took both tours offered: the historic tour and the physics tour.

Both involve taking a cage tram down a half-mile shaft (2341 feet down, 689 feet below sea level) at a top speed of 10mph (that felt much faster). You could fit about ten people in each cage and I was a bit claustrophobic during all four rides.

The mine was in operation from the late 1800s until 1962, when it was donated to the State of Minnesota. The historical tour was fun–it reminded me of all those childhood trips to Knott’s Berry Farm and the Mine Train Ride. The reality of working in a mine during this period must have truly been awful. Makes my work issues seem easy by comparison.

The physics tour had my head spinning. The University of Minnesota has a $150 million laboratory on that same level of the mine as the historical tour–one of several labs that have been used over the years.

The large one we got to see (pictured above) houses an experiment called Minos (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search). This thing is basically a gigantic magnet that tries to capture neutrinos sent from Fermilab outside of Chicago (450 miles away). You can watch the live data capture here (screen explanation here). They only get one or two successful captures a day.

They also have another lab with an experiment called CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) that maintains an environment near absolute zero, but we did not get to see that area. It amazes me that everything in those labs had to be brought down the same narrow mine shafts that we took to get down there.

Very, very cool nerd toys set among old steel history…

Yesterday we drove the twisty Minnesota state highway 1 from the north shore through Ely to Tower and the Fortune Bay Resort on Lake Vermilion. I had a 2pm tee time on the Wilderness course, while the girls spent most of the evening in the swimming pool. We had dinner in the casino cafe, which makes a mean batch of cheese curds.

The hotel is adding 58 rooms and we had an older room right next to the action. We moved rooms today, so hopefully this one will be better. I played another round this morning at 8am, the girls are at the Heritage Center now and we leave for two different Soudan Mine tours in an hour. More video poker action tonight (I’m down $8) and then we head home tomorrow.

Here are the items I submitted to Apple this year as feedback on the conference:

Good Stuff

• Access to Apple engineers
• Some strong speakers
• Meeting other attendees
• Being in SFO
• Beer bash here worked well
• Wireless access and power were much better this year
• Happy to see more web development focus

Suggestions

• Don’t sell so many tickets when there isn’t capacity (or pre-poll attendees on what sessions they want to attend and plan accordingly).
• Better train the center staff on crowd management–lines and arbitrary rules suck.
• Create in and out doors for each room to better move people around.
• Bring more Apple Company Store stuff here (where were those developer people? O’Reilly?).
• More drink options at lunch time (Brisk and Lemonade only are really lame).
• Food in general at lunch is poor–give us an option to pay less and just eat out every day (which is what we do anyway).
• Get session information online faster.
• Overflow rooms without video of the speaker are not the same as being there.
• Free iPhones! Seriously, though, it would be nice to offer us the chance to at least order one earlier than the general population (same goes for new hardware that may coincide with WWDC).
• Need more conference hotel space.
• Get more tech “superstars” here to speak and promote the hell out of it beforehand.
• Expand on the session descriptions so I can better plan my time.
• Would like to see more sessions on things like optimizing PHP, Apache, MySQL on OS X Server–preferably by the people who wrote them.
• Bring back the piles of junk food and Mt. Dew/Jolt from the San Jose days.
• Ozomatli was fun, but I’d never heard of them before. With the power Apple has in the music world, it would nice to be “wowed” next year–bring us Bono or Peter Gabriel or any of the other big names that like Apple.
• In a similar vein–why didn’t we get to see the new Pixar movie early? Get some more of the big entertainment houses using Apple gear to speak.

Overall, I was happy by the end of the week (after a not-so-great start). The keynote may have been a candidate for “Worst-Keynote-Ever,” but mostly it just lacked the wow factor so common in Steve’s best. Leopard will be great, but the timing of the new release for education is just plain awful. And I tend to agree with those who are still looking for a real iPhone SDK (although we should be able to do some cool things until iPhone 2).

Made it to Grand Marais yesterday to pick up the girls. I skipped out on covering the Nationwide event outside of Rochester when I found out there was a rain delay, so we basically drove non-stop to see the girls.

We ate at Sven and Ole’s for dinner, although in hindsight, I would have gone to Chez Jude (from my seven in ‘07 dining list). Turns out they are only open Tuesdays through Saturdays, so I missed my window there. Pizza at Sven and Ole’s is always good though.

For Father’s Day, I wanted to sleep in, eat chocolate-covered donuts from the World’s Best Donut Shop, eat at Chez Jude (oh well), play nine holes of golf with the kids at the Grand Marais nine-hole course, then head to the Grand Portage casino with my dad. It rained most of the day, so golf was also out.

The girls got me a couple of books–one on Everest and one on Isle Royale. We ended up eating lunch at the Angry Trout Cafe, where I tried something other than fish for the first time. The grilled chicken sandwich was very sloppy, but tasted good. Not sure where we are headed for dinner tonight…