Last weekend my wife and I went to see our favorite comedic group make a triumphant return to Minneapolis. The Kids in the Hall 2008 Tour stopped Saturday night at the Orpheum Theater (after previously appearing at the State last time they were here). Watching the gang in person - Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson - is like hanging out with old friends.

The show was fairly short (maybe 90 minutes), but included one very funny NSFW video, chicken lady phone sex, Cathy tweeking, a Gavin sketch, The Salesmen, a Buddy Cole rant (”Twin Cities men - nothing mini or saintly about them!”) and an encore with the headcrusher. Those guys are such a funny and talented group - Canadian entertainment at it’s finest!

Before the show, we stopped at Ristorante Luci in St. Paul for dinner. Their food is as good as the Kids are funny. We both started out with the Insalata Cesare, followed by a shared order of housemade fettuccine with peas, chicken and prosciutto. That pasta was awesome - the first outside of Alfredo’s I’ve had that is worthy of the name. For the final course, my wife had the pork chop, while I had “American Kobe” beef with mashed potatoes. We had early reservations, but had to leave for the show before we could try the pretty mini-bundt cake desert.

Oh yeah, one last note on the show. I read about the tour on one of my newsfeeds and went to Ticketmaster to search for more info. I saw the Minnesota date listed, but general public sales hadn’t started yet. There was a link for a presale, but I didn’t know the code (or who was sponsoring the presale). On a whim, I tried “KITH” and damn if it didn’t let me in. As you can see from the ticket above, row N on the main floor was a pretty good reward for this old hacker…

As I near forty, I’ve been thinking more and more about the great things I’ve been able to do in my life and what things I’d still like to do. The box on each page of 7 Minute Miles lists a number of these things, but when I rode a train across the rockies (item#25), I realized that’s the first one I’ve actually completed since I made the list.

Two events have led to more serious family discussions about our future plans: the afore-mentioned train trip out west and my weekend trip to the North Shore this winter to see Richard Thompson. What these trips pointed out to me was that I really like the outdoors and places like Schweitzer and the North Shore of Lake Superior are much prettier than where I live now. If I can find a way to make a living, why not live where it’s pretty?

I’ve wanted a cabin on Lake Superior for a long time. The frequent trips to Grand Marais while growing up often led to thoughts of “what could I do for a job to live here all the time?” I never could find a good answer to that, especially with the opportunities available in the Twin Cities. But with telecommuting and air travel options, where you physically live is becoming less and less important.

Here are some of my goals and desires as part of this plan:

• Five acres on Lake Superior somewhere between Duluth and Lutsen with 300 feet of lake shore
• Architect-designed, chalet-style, log and stone home built using “Not-So-Big” philosophies
• Home features: large windows towards lake, stone fireplace, heated floors, satellite TV, high-speed internet, audio/video room, green building techniques, Kohler Bodyspray shower
• Small, two-bedroom guest cottage for my parents (and other visitors)
• Good schools for the kids (Two Harbors High School?)
• School technology consulting/remote management and MN Publishing Company website publishing for me, Duluth health care and consulting options for Colleen
• Northland Country Club membership for golf and swimming; Lutsen Mountain season pass for skiing
• Other quality of life activities: running, biking, hiking, kayaking, skating, dining, travel

There are great restaurants in Duluth and along the North Shore, the Twin Cities would still be close (as would Canada), air travel would be easy enough and I’d even tolerate the winters better thanks to the skiing and overall beauty we experienced there in March. I’d miss Wild games at the X, but I could still drive down for a few games now and then.

I need to stop drooling and make it happen–the clock is ticking!

The next website in my Minnesota media empire launched today, Run in Minnesota.

Inspired by yesterday’s Boston Marathon, I registered for the 2008 Twin Cities Marathon today and decided to finally launch run.mn. Just like Golfing in Minnesota and Hockey in Minnesota, posts about running topics that used to appear here will now appear on the Run in Minnesota site.

This will be my 11th marathon and I’m very excited to get back into shape. I’m pledging now to be more serious about training this time and have set a goal of beating my personal best time of 4:42. You can track my training via the Runner’s World widget in the sidebar.

Ran a 5K tonight, so I’m off to a decent start.

Last night my wife and I went to see Mary Lucia of the Current interview Chuck D and Slug from Atmosphere and hear Brother Ali perform during their season-ending Fakebook series event at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it was a very entertaining evening. Brother Ali performed two songs at the start (including an awesome version of Letter from the Government with added verses at the end), followed by about an hour interview of Chuck D.

There was a short intermission, then Slug performed a few songs (including Guarantees from the new album When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold). Slug joined Chuck D on the couch and Mary interviewed both of them. Brother Ali came out again at the end and performed one song solo, followed by a free-style jam with Slug (no old school rap from Mr. Ridenhour though, dammit).

Chuck D talked about the early history of hip-hop, including stories about Rick Rubin at Def-Jam, Flavor Flav, Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys. There were a lot of great quotes and references–hopefully MPR posts the audio somewhere so I can go back and write them down. Not much talk about the future of the music business like I wanted, but it would still be great for the students at HSRA to hear the whole interview. Ironically, he said he visited my high school, St. Paul Central, earlier in the day (”Dave Winfield and Charles Schultz–how can you go wrong?”).

If the Fakebook series comes back again, check it out–great format at a decent price.

After a very crowded flight on Sun Country, I rented a car and drove to Digital Forest in Seattle to pay a visit to my co-located servers. There were several tasks I’ve been waiting a while to complete:

• Install and configure a new HP ProCurve switch within our half rack to better manage bandwidth between servers.
• Re-configure a hardware RAID and upgrade to Leopard Server on Xserve 3.
• Configure the firewall, mail server and iCal server on Xserve 3.
• Clean the tape backup device and re-configure to auto-clean in the future.
• Install a demo version of BRU backup software on all four servers.

I’ve finished most of the on-site stuff and plan to work on the configuration tweaking while watching the Wild game on Versus tonight. If it weren’t for the cold I think I’m catching, this would have been a near perfect trip.

Oh yeah, also had lunch with Digital Forest geek wrangler Chuck Goolsbee at a place called New Teriyaki & Wok. We both had the chicken and beef combo, which I thought was very good. Always nice to visit with Chuck, keeper of the Mac Managers mailing list.

One night in the Seattle rain, then back to spring in Minnesota.

I was saddened to learn that Rick Wolf, the part-time school psychologist at HSRA Minnesota, passed away this week. Rick was a great guy to work with and was a tremendous asset to the students of HSRA.

Rick and I had talked about doing a web project together for the past few months using a product he developed on his own called the Team Empowerment Assessment. He had created a printed version of the assessment several years ago and had boxes of them left in his garage (I could totally relate to that feeling with my own golf CD project from 1999). He wanted to create a web version of the assessment and attempt to salvage some of his previous investment in the project.

Here is the obituary from the Star Tribune:

Wolf, Rick Age 64 of Eden Prairie. School Psychologist and past member of the Eden Prairie School Board. Preceded in death by his father, Fred Wolf. Survived by his loving wife, Kate; children, Jeff (Trish), Erick (Page) Wolf, Heather (Kevin) Cook, and Abbey Wolf; grandchildren, Alexis, Amber, Jeremy, Jordan, Macy, Freddy, Tori, and Lindsay; mother, Lorana Wolf; brothers, Randy (Prudy) and Roger (Gail) Wolf; nephews, Tad and Brad Wolf; niece, Becky Nuell. Memorial service Thursday, April 10 at 7 PM with visitation beginning 5 PM at the Washburn- McReavy Eden Prairie Chapel, 7625 Mitchell Road (1 blk N of Hwy 5), Eden Prairie. Memorials preferred to the Intermountain Children’s Home, Helena, Montana, www.intermountain.org Washburn-McReavy Eden Prairie Chapel 952-975-0400

My thoughts go out to his family in their time of loss.

Last fall, I attempted my first ever do-it-yourself car repair job, replacing the front brake pads on my 2005 MINI Cooper. The brake light indicator didn’t go off, so I decided I’d replace the rear brake pads as well. I got the pads for Christmas, but was waiting until nicer weather (as they didn’t appear to be that thin on inspection–turns out it was the interior-side pad that was worn way down).

With sunny skies and temps in the low 60s, today was the day.

I started on the rear right tire, as that is the one that has the extra step of replacing the brake pad sensor cable. Got the wheel off and did the cable first. It was much easier than the front one for me, but still involved some painful laying on my back on the cement floor while twisting my arms around in weird angles.

Following the wonderful instructions at North American Motoring, I took the tool I purchased from Harbor Freight to get the piston pushed in. It went about half-way in and wouldn’t go any farther. I checked in with my friend (and car expert) Chuck Goolsbee, who suggested taking off the brake fluid cap. I did that (along with putting on thicker gloves) and was able to get it much further in. This was accompanied by a pop of the rubber sleeve curling back on itself, which scared the hell out of me. It didn’t rip, though, and I was able to reverse it back into position. Hopefully that isn’t a major issue down the road.

The other rear tire was rusted on and didn’t want to come off. I applied some WD-40 and got a rubber mallet from a neighbor and eventually got it off after following the advice of my wife (”hit it from the other side” - duh). Once it was off, the install process went smoothly. I did have to remove the brake fluid cap again and some spilled out, but the piston tool worked perfectly.

Everything is back together and the test drive around the block went fine. The brake pedal going all the way to floor at first still freaks me out a little, but it pumped right back to normal. The car goes into the dealer on Tuesday for a scheduled oil change, so I’m curious to see if they say anything about me messing things up. The damn indicator light is still on too, so maybe they can fix that for me.

One less thing on my procrastination list!

MINI Photo Gallery