My holiday weekend grew by an extra day when I received a last minute invitation from my friend to join a foursome at Hazeltine National yesterday. After a “Hazelburger” and fries for lunch, we teed off on the back side first. I learned right away that U.S. Open length rough is nothing to mess around with. My tee shot on ten cleared the bunkers at the dogleg and was only three feet from the fairway, but was buried in grass about 7 inches long. I don’t know how the pros do it, but I could barely advance the ball at all–let alone in the right direction. Double bogey to open.

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Sunday was one hot day to pick for 36 holes of golf. The temperature hit 97 degrees and the wind was howling out of the south. My regular Saturday morning golf buddy grew up in Hayfield, Minnesota, and I wanted to get down there and play the course where he worked during school. I had visited both The Oaks and Maple Valley during the Golden Links days, but this was the first time playing both.

The Oaks is not what I anticipated at all. Based on the few holes I had photographed near the clubhouse, it looked like your typical wide-open Minnesota farm course. The reality was a course with several narrow, tree-lined holes, a meandering stream that comes into play on multiple holes and small, severely sloped greens that, when combined with the constantly blowing wind, made for a challenging start to the day. Despite the double bogey on one and triple bogey on two, I managed to string together a number of pars and shot an 89.

After a great lunch at the Miller ranch, we drove from Hayfield to Maple Valley–located just south of Rochester. Designed and built by Wayne Idso in 1964, Maple Valley is a shorter course that sits in the Root River valley. The course has craggy rock cliffs, large elevation changes and beautiful views of the Root River itself. It has a very low rating (67.2/106), but I find it hard to believe that the average high handicap golfer would find the course that easy. There are way too many places to get in trouble if you aren’t hitting the ball straight…DK

It amazes me that there are so many online communities that I’ve never heard of before. Today I came across the Live Music Archive and found a huge source of free, legal music downloads by a number of artists I like. It’s important to read through the audio FAQ to figure out the format issues, but I was impressed with what I’ve found so far:

• G. Love and Special Sauce
• Kristin Hersh
• Mike Doughty
• Soul Coughing
• Tenacious D
• Tom Tom Club
• Ween
• Warren Zevon

I’m sure this is all old news to the music traders out there, but I was very happy today…DK

Limited Edition Disneyland Enchanted Tiki Room Figurines…DK

On Sunday evening we took the family to the 5pm performance of Pippi Longstocking at the Children’s Theater in Minneapolis. This was the last of our season ticket package for the 2005-06 season, which included 4-ISH and Sleeping Beauty. There a number of good shows coming up next season, but we haven’t decided to renew yet.

Pippi was a fun show and the kids enjoyed it. Reed Sigmund has appeared in many of the shows we’ve seen over the years and he just knows how to make children laugh–very, very talented. Jessie Shelton was energetic in the title role and her style suited the role well.

The only disappointing thing about the night was CTC’s policy of not letting parents take pictures of their kids in their seats before the show and during intermission. It’s a public theater with no copyright issues during non-performance periods–how about some relief from the threatening P.A. warnings? Better yet, make it more fun for the kids by allowing pictures with the cast afterwards…DK

We played The Summit Golf Club in Cannon Falls yesterday for the first time this year. It’s been one of my favorites the past few years, as there are a number of interesting holes, no houses on the course and all bentgrass tees, fairways and greens. It’s usually not very crowded and that was the case yesterday on an otherwise beautiful Saturday morning.

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The weather has been nice and new things keep appearing on the deck…DK

Today was the 2006 Eagan Fun Run. I was signed up for the 5-mile run, but I got my schedule mixed up and ran the earlier 2-mile run so I could still make my tee time. I’ve never ran a 2-mile race before, so it was a nice change of pace. Finished in 16:02, my new 2-mile PR.

This year’s shirt pictured above…DK

I’ve added two quick links in the sidebar under the Random Photo section. One goes directly to my golf scores database and the other links to the new first day cover database I’m building. I have a huge backlog of first day covers to photograph and catalog, so that project will take a while. There is also a new fetish page for those, in case you are wondering what the heck first day covers are…DK

Last night we went to see the new Cirque du Soleil musical travelling show, Delirium, at the Xcel Energy Center in downtown Saint Paul. As my Cirque fetish page implies, we are big fans of their other shows. This one was a little different, though, so we didn’t know what to expect.

It started right on time at 7:30 with something unusual–an opening act. Nitza, described by Variety as “Eva Longoria channeling Enya,” has performed with other Cirque shows (KÀ in Las Vegas) and sang during the main show as well. My three-word review of Nitza: better than clowns.

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This site uses Gallery2 for the photos section and I recently set up something similar for a client. They had an additional request to include EPS, PDF, Photoshop and Illustrator files in the gallery, which I was sure it could handle. Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t so smooth.

Gallery2 supports several different graphics libraries, including GD, NetPBM and ImageMagick. I already had GD installed and supported by my webserver, so that was what I had been using. Each one has it’s own advantages and disadvantages, but GD does not support the file types I needed to add. After comparing the other two, I decided on installing ImageMagick (IM).

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The premise sounds so simple: get someone’s email address and you can send them a note. Just like traditional mail, there’s never been an absolute guarantee your email will get to its destination, but lately it’s felt like email is being lost more and more. Everybody hates junk mail, but the anti-spam methods being utilized today are impacting the delivery of legitimate email.

Case in point: about two weeks ago I tried sending a note from my personal Comcast account to my wife’s work account. I was on my work network at HSRA, so according to Comcast’s rules for sending mail on non-Comcast networks, I need to use different, secure port numbers to connect to them (SSL using port 465 for outgoing SMTP mail and port 995 for receiving mail via POP). Read more…

2006 U.S. Open, Winged Foot Golf Club, Mamaroneck, New York, June 12-18, 2006.

The planning begins…DK

This weekend I drove down Highway 169 to North Mankato to play North Links Golf Course. Built in 1992 by Wyss Associates of Rapid City for the City of North Mankato, North Links is a 6,110 yard, par 72 course. I’m not sure of the history of the course since it opened, but it’s now owned by the Wilson Golf Group (who also own Oak Glen in Stillwater, among others).

The course rating and slope from the tips are only 69.4 and 117, respectively, but there are quite a few challenging holes on the course. The tee box complexes were very nice and the man-made wetlands around holes 1, 2, 10, 11, 17 and 18 added a lot of visual appeal to an otherwise wide-open layout. The greens didn’t look fast, but they putted that way and most had a lot of conturing (especially 18). The suspension bridge over the ravine between the third and fourth holes was impressive, but also loud when carts went across. Too bad the ravine couldn’t come into play more on some of the holes.

With such a low slope, I was hoping to shoot better than 89. I did have two birdies, though: hit a SW to 4 feet on the par 3 eighth and my third shot on the 497-yard par 5 fifteenth hit the stick and dropped down for a ten-inch birdie putt. The pace of play was a little slow, but for $26, it was a good value…DK

After what seemed like weeks of rain, the sun finally came out this week and buds just started exploding everywhere. Even had to dust off the lawnmower…DK

Today 7 Minute Miles was named the “Minnesota Blog of the Day” by City Pages newspaper. I don’t publish this site with an intent to have a large audience, but it’s always nice to get recognized. For the record, my goal is not to run the Boston Marathon–that’s more of a wish. My times are so slow that I’d have to be about 70 years old to qualify, but I’ll keep trying to get better.

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