Greatest Police Blotter Ever

December 21, 2009

I am currently in Mariposa, CA, a town whose police blotter is so ridiculous that it’s apparently been featured on Leno. The highlights from recent issues:

•There was a horrible odor in a house on Buckeye Road.

•There were rocks on Highway 140.

•A red-tailed hawk was in a house on Yosemite Oaks Road.

•A fence was vandalized in Coulterville.

•A tree was across Triangle Road.

•A lawn was on fire on Red Cloud Mine Road.

•There was a cow problem on Highway 49 South.

•A person was reportedly disoriented on Indian Peak Road.

•Someone found a tent on McMahon Road.

•A burning smell was reported on Coyote Court.

The link to the current issue is here: http://www.mariposagazette.com/current/For_the_Record


Webcomics

November 19, 2009

In case anyone is interested, these are the webcomics I read on a regular basis:

XKCD
Dresden Codak
Mitch Clem
Sluggy Freelance
Nukees
Freefall
SSDD
Penny-arcade
Questionable Content
Overcompensating
Diesel Sweeties
Goats
Ornery Boy
Comet 7
Girl Genius
Buck Godot (yes I know it’s “over”)
Dr. McNinja
The Zombie Hunters
Freak Angels
Everyday Decay
Digger


Migrating…

November 13, 2009

I’m working on migrating my site over to WordPress, it’s going slowly. There might not be much content here for a while, and/or it may be patchy.

Until it’s done, all the old stuff is still at www.saveitforparts.com (and yeah, some of it is totally outdated!)

The hard link, for when I shift the domain, is http://www.tc.umn.edu/~emers089/


Old Updates / Posts

November 11, 2009

The following material is from my previous updates on the old Saveitforparts main page. The internal links all (currently) go to the old page on the UMN server. Once I switch the domain over to this page, the links below may not work anymore, or may point to different parts of this site. Sorry! Maybe I’ll fix that after the switch, maybe not.

News and Updates

*******7-14-09
More homemade boat projects! Click here for my Plywood Kayaks.*******5-26-09
I just got back from some sailing in California. My sister and some friends were taking their boat up the coast to San Francisco, so I went along to help out and get a vacation from the Midwest. We had a lot of fun, I got really sunburned, and we took about twice as long as we though. Overall win! Photos are at My Flickr page.Also the stereo got stolen out of my rustmobile, thus lowering the overall value of the car by 60%. Next stereo is going to have a self destruct mechanism in it!

*******3-23-09
Last weekend I went up to Fargo, ND to help out with some of the flood-relief effort. This website has a bunch of pictures and video, as well as some volunteer info for those in a position to help. http://bluefoxrelief.info/
If you live in the Twin Cities, Near Fargo, or nearby areas, they are asking for volunteers to help fill and place sandbags around homes and vulnerable areas. The terrain up there is even flatter than the Twin Cities, there’s maybe a foot of difference from the uphill side of a field to the downhill, maybe less. Since all the culverts are frozen from the winter and the thunderstorm season is just starting, the fields are now turning into shallow inland seas. The water makes its way to the low end, then across the dirt road berms into the next fields over. Eventually it gets to the rivers, and then overflows due to ice jams and other obstructions. When the warm weather finally gets the rest of the ice to break loose this coming week, there will be even more flooding. The blue fox website will probably have more pictures later in the week, and I’ll post some here or on Flickr if I have time.

*******3-06-09
New small updates on the car.
Click

*******1-06-09
For those of you wondering what I’m up to, I’ve built an online GIS system to interface with UMN’s Mapserver backend. This is mostly a project demonstration to show off some of my professional work, which means we’ll be lucky if everything works right! It’s currently running from a Linux box in the basement. You can check it out by clicking here.

*******9-28-08
I finally did it… I joined the rest of the “real world” of consumerism, fulfilling the one true American dream that has defined the life of 99.99% of this great nation for almost 100 years. That’s right, I bought a car. Sadly I failed to demonstrate my true patriotism in the purchase of a gas-hogging credit-sucking blingmobile, although I may be able “Pimp” my “Ride” with such items as duct tape, cardboard spoilers, and chrome 1950s hood ornaments. While its main purpose is to tow my boat trailer and to keep the driveway coated in 4 different engine fluids, it also occasionally gets me to work. Thanks to something known as “Honda Roulette”, I also stay entertained by guessing which major component will fall off every time I turn the key!
Click here for the new Saveitforparts Rustmobile.

*******8-2-08 or so
A new small project and brief update: Model boat.

*******11-02-07
The only other picture that even sort of came out from Halloween, parties aren’t the ideal climate to photograph your own costume!
The space villains strike again! (this is also on the Projects page).*******10-28-07
Uploaded a bunch of my research papers and linked them from the projects page (scroll down). Now you can see what sort of research I’ve been doing at the U of M and UAF, and marvel at the obsolete technology that existed waaaay back in 2004.

*******10-10-07
I added some new sailboat pictures, and updated my projects page. I also added some new Funter Bay photos.
Still workin on the actual “photos” section, which is a huge mess right now.

*******10-8-07
I’m redesigning the site somewhat and bringing it up-to-date. It was kind of embarassing having stuff from 2000 still trashing up the corners of the site. A few parts of the site are gone, a few things have been added, and most of the main pages have been changed at least somewhat. Expect more changes over the next few weeks!

You can see some of my terrible college videos from the UAF Film Festival over on youtube.
I’m working on uploading more and/or linking them in to this site.

Also, according to the US Forest Service, I’m a “Local Historian” in Southeast Alaska!
http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/tongass/forest_facts/resources/heritage/gunemplacement.shtml
(My research on Alaska WWII history is available here).

While most of the content I removed is currently unavailable, you can see the old updates from the front page here.
If you’re totally lost, you can also check out my new site map.


Old, old updates (they’re really old!)

February 10, 2008

All the really old posts from the old Saveitforparts.com front page. I guess it’s a blog now….   For now I wouldn’t trust internal links in the following text to work on the new site location, although they may still go to content on my old host.

Archived updates (I swear this still isn’t a blog, really!)
*******9-10-07I’m back in the Twin Cities for another year of grad school. I have some pretty exciting classes and a new job at the Borchert Map Library. I have a big backlog of updates for this site, including a lot of photos from the flatlands that need to get updated. Someday I’ll make a real content-filled update, but at the moment this site seems to have devolved into a very inefficient blog (html+ftp FTW!)All the old content from SIFP should be back up! That includes Sitka WWII (which is looking a bit shabby these days).*******7-20-07These were supposed to be linked a long time ago, but I spaced it out after linking it to a few people. Anyway, here’s the link to photos from our New Years trip to Europe:   Europe Photos

In other news, I’m out fishing again, and have only limited access via a Treo cellphone. Occasionally we’re in town (Elfin Cove, Alaska), and I can take advantage of some poor sucker’s satellite uplink and wifi to get content online.

*******4-18-07

Saveitforparts is back online!
The site was down for a quite a while due to my own laziness and ASUAF’s usual incompetance. (Also I would have hassled ASUAF’s sysadmin more, but I don’t want them to realize I’m not a student anymore and have way more than the normal storage quota… heh. We’re now temporarily on UMN’s student webserver until I can get a real host or figure out how to use my housemate’s Apache server. Naturally there are no actual updates, since that would be far too time consuming! (Seriously, I’m so busy I barely have time to do homework!)There are still a few problems and missing files, but I’m working on restoring everything!


I’m also planning on fishing again this summer, I’ll be driving to the West coast (Portland/Seattle) with some friends and flying back to Alaska for midsummer from there. I’ll probably sail around a bit too. I apparently have another semester of grad school left since I’m a slacker or something, it’s becoming really hard to finish college degree programs in the old “standard” time frame! I totally updated the sailboat photos too.

I’ve been doing some caving, boat repair, radio stuff, and other projects over the winter. Hassle me via email and maybe I’ll actually put up some photos!

* * * * * 11-3-06
I need to update this thing more often… but I never got into the whole blog thing. The closest I have is a facebook account that gets neglected almost as much as this website.  It’s now my 2nd year of Grad School in Murderapolis, and I’m living in a sweet house with a bunch of cool people. You should totally check out the pictures and then harrass me to update this website more often.

* * * * * 7-25-06
Another summer of commercial fishing, and a few photos up right here.

* * * * * 8-26-05
I’m off to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. Chosen partly for it’s good tech reputation, partly for the location and community, and partly because I’m too lazy to get a real job. I was almost too lazy to get accepted, since I missed one of the multiple seperate application deadlines and then had to wait around for some other stuff.

I’ve been sailing all summer, and as a consequence there are some more new sailboat pictures. The rest of the site is pretty much the same, because I’m still lazy.

* * * * * 4-24-05
Even more sailboat photos (at the bottom and in the mast raising section), some new dorm room pics in the about page, and morephotos (at the bottom).

* * * * * 4-20-05
A long overdue update, including new sailboat stuff, and some new pictures on the photos page.

* * * * * 10-28-04
Added some photos of a cool homemade submarine on the photos page. Also added some computer pics and photos from home.

* * * * * 9-1-04
Best Buy is retarded.

* * * * * 9-1-04
Updated photos of the sailboat, looking all shiny and much better after a summer of work.

* * * * * 12-1-04
New photos of my computers, including a case mod on my dumpster Dell which confirms my status as a l33t h4x0r loser.

* * * * * 12-23-03
I got a somewhat odd email from a Pakistani highschool trying to buy computers from my site. I started a new page for strange emails, maybe I’ll put up the “icebreaker to the center of the earth” and ” zod the reincarnated rastafarian priest” emails that I get at my work address.