fnokd!

Today, I took the wife on a lunch date to the newly opened restaurant Nine Mile in Asheville. I’d give a link, but their web designer is apparently slack. The restaurant is run by Aaron, husband of my web-designer friend June.
The atmosphere was excellent, mellow with some reggae music. We got an [...]

Did you know that November 14th is GIS Day?
I’ve experimented with PostGIS some, so I’m interested to see what’s going on. Here in Asheville, we apparently observe GIS Day on the 9th, with some stuff going on at AB-Tech.
There’s a talk on open-source GIS, so I’m curious to see if GeoTools or uDig are [...]

I volunteer each week at my son’s school, where he’s in a gifted class. Lately, they’ve been working with Lego Mindstorms, as part of a unit on robotics. I’m helping with the “programming” parts. The kids assemble the robot according to the directions, and then we connect them to a Windows machine [...]

My friend Lance, here in Asheville, hacks for Electric Sheep Company during the day, and by night is actor extraordinaire.

Starting next week, the immediate theatre project will be presenting Copenhagen, with Lance playing the physicist Werner Heisenberg. The play centers around a meeting (in Copenhagen) that occurred between the seemingly at-odds scientists during the [...]

As a child, a friend of mine (my Attorney) and I were in the local paper for building a sprawling Lego city across my rumpus room.
This morning, my son continued the legacy, by winning a bring-your-own-Lego(tm) Transformer(tm)-construction competition.
The Asheville Citizen-Times wrote it up nicely.
HENDERSONVILLE – For Noah McWhirter, building Lego figures just comes natural.
“I just [...]

This week I’m dropping by the recording studio where my friend Sean is recording an album for his local Asheville band The Propheteers. He, Joe and Mason are cranking it out. I, a man who spends his daylight hours leveraging synergies as an engineering manager, hanging with the band helps me reclaim some [...]

While doing some work around my house, I found our old coal chute, which had been boarded over and backfilled with coal.
I now have a barrow full of coal.
How does one dispose of a barrow full of coal? Google only leads me to methods and facilities for recycling coal ash. Converting coal into [...]

Rebecca and I have a habit of standing around, talking about all the things we could do to our house.
Some of our talk has centered around the ugly “patio” of poorly-laid bricks and easy-to-trip-over landscaping timbers.

This morning it was a brisk 65 degrees, perfect for some manual labor, so up came the patio.
Thankfully the people [...]

My friends Trish and Pete have been thinking about home-ownership lately.
This made me ponder my own abode, and went surfing around. My little village here has nicely digitized quite a bit of their real-estate records, and made them easily searchable. I was able to come up with the original plat describing my street [...]

Went out for a Venti(tm) dirty chai tea latte, and decided to scope out the Cingular/AT&T store that will be carrying iPhones tomorrow. Asheville is not a very large town, so we don’t expect many phones to come in.
But these two guys will definitely get one.

The lucky First Guy In Line is Greg Mayer [...]