…but even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down. And they say her flower is faded now, hard weather and hard booze. But maybe that’s just the price you pay for the chains you refuse…
So many things going on right now – rolling out the new kiosks at work this week, trying to wrap up a bunch of items before I leave town, marathon expo on Friday, family races on Saturday, a wedding reception later that day, the Twin Cities Marathon Sunday morning, a benefit dinner Sunday night and an early morning flight to Vegas on Monday.
I also still have to get the new work website finished, design a new look for the Tapemark Pro-Am site, move my personal server somewhere cheaper, get Halloween items listed on Craigslist and finish cleaning the house. I’m already behind on a bunch of TV shows, but don’t really want to spend the time to catch up – I’d much rather work on relationships with family and friends.
More on that soon…
Tom Beaudry and the Bois Forte Tribal Council, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Drivers are rude, such attitudes. When I show my piece, complaints cease. Something’s odd, I feel like I’m God…
It seems like almost every golf course I play on a regular basis has at least one nemesis hole where I never score well. At this point, screw ups on these holes are almost all mental (although some holes are just plain hard). I imagine the pros have a similar feeling about the seventeenth at TPC Sawgrass – you know it’s coming, you know all the details of the hole, yet it still has the all-too-frequent ability to mushroom into a dreaded “other.”
Today’s lovely round at Willingers Golf Club in Northfield had two current nemesis holes for me: the par three seventh (which I don’t think I’ve hit in years) and the par four sixteenth (pictured above). I doubled both today in different fashions:
Golf for me really isn’t about scoring these days – I play primarily for the social interaction, being outside on a beautiful day and getting in a good walk. There is still the opportunity for a decent score each time I tee it up, though, so it would be nice if these nemesis holes would give up a par every once in a while…
With the new work site about to come online, I’ve been experimenting with various options for displaying photo galleries in WordPress. I’ve used Gallery2 with the WPG2 plugin for quite a long time on many of my sites, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. Gallery3 hasn’t seemed to get a lot of traction yet and I really wasn’t too impressed with the other WordPress gallery options I tried.
There is a Lightbox plugin I’ve been using for a bit on this site called jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries. It works with built-in WordPress galleries, which I also didn’t really like much. After reading more about them, however, I’ve decided to migrate from Gallery2 to native galleries and use the Lightbox plugin for all of my images.
There is another plugin out there that’s supposed to help automate this conversion, but I have so many images and albums, that I really want to do it manually. I’ve already culled some albums and might decide to only repost the best images in some of the larger albums (especially with golf and hockey shots).
I still need to research a way to replicate the random photo in the sub-footer (and not include private photos), reload several photo categories, decide how best to handle URL re-directs and/or 404 issues with the old Gallery2 URLs and decide if I want a better way to deal with titles, captions and EXIF data.
So far, though, I’m pretty happy with how things are working. Here is a sneak peak of the new look – feedback is always welcome.
From R.E.M. HQ today:
“To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.” R.E.M.
After a while, it seemed like the newer R.E.M. albums all blurred together, but Automatic for the People, Life’s Rich Pageant, Document and even Monster played a huge part in my life growing up. I can’t remember how many times we saw them in concert (maybe just once), but I’ll never forget secretly following Stipey around the British Museum while trying not to look too much like a star-struck fan.
Cheers to you, Messrs. Stipe, Buck and Mills!
Employee Recognition Luncheon, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
It’s now been 14 months since I started working at a casino. I just had my first annual review last week and left the meeting feeling pretty good about what I accomplished the first year and the goals I’ve set for year two. Here are some highlights for the upcoming 2012 fiscal year starting October 1st:
Working in a casino resort has been a great experience so far, with so much to learn and experience. Our resort is big enough to be exciting, but small enough for me to get involved in virtually all aspects of the operation. I particularly like helping with some of the marketing and concert promotion activities, along with the golf operations of a top Minnesota course.
The people here are great and it really is like a big family. The restaurant staff automatically brings my favorite drink, the front desk books my favorite rooms each week and the golf course crew knows I won’t be needing a cart.
I’m still working on building the latest “ultimate” office space, but the current setup is comfortable and we have most of the tools needed to get the job done.
Networking with industry contacts and other local casinos should get a boost when I attend the G2E trade expo in Las Vegas next month, along with the 2012 NIGA conference, to be held April 1-4 in San Diego. Can’t wait!
Plans for this fall:
I’d also like to catch Boardwalk Empire and Hung on HBO, depending on when the replays air at the resort. Lots of Showtime series too, but we don’t get that channel here…
Ernest, Brian, DK and Thor, The Wilderness at Fortune Bay, Tower, Minnesota
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