Convergence is over, we made the long drive home, I am now ready to flop down and pass out…except I’ve got to get organized for field work tomorrow.

I’m at Convergence, which definitely does not suck and has been enjoyable so far, but I’m also becoming untethered from the Internet, which sucks horrendously. There are two problems so far.

One: I can’t connect to the hotel internet. Have you ever noticed how even the cheapest little hole in the wall motel will just give you free wireless that works, while every upscale hotel insists that you enroll in their special program to get the slowest possible internet connection, and then offers you faster connections at a price? All the extra layers and attempts to squeeze more money from you reduces reliability. I’m at a Hilton. Hate it.

Two: Fucking Apple. Speaking of high priced screwups, I HATE APPLE’S WEIRD CABLES. The charging cable for my iPhone/iPad, which is an official Apple cable, is disintegrating and has stopped working. Their computing devices will keep going for decades — my laptop is getting up there, and is fine and functional — but you’re going to have to get a new power brick every year, because the thin cable immovably attached to it will crack and fray. The charging cable for my iWidgets is even worse, and woe unto you if you buy a third party cable, because they have to be Apple-certified, and half the time they don’t work.

Their machines have code in them to sense some secret handshake from the cable, because I get messages when I plug them in to the effect that this is not an Apple approved “device”. This one nuisance is about to drive me out of Apple’s ecosystem, after 35 years of loyalty.

Anyway, it all means I have a laptop that won’t connect to the Internet, and a phone and tablet with batteries slowly dying because I can’t recharge them.

My god, I might have to interact with a purely physical world at the biggest SF conference in the upper Midwest. Will there be things to do? How will I survive?

This is quite a title: Aggressive Goats Addicted to Human Urine Airlifted Out of Olympic National Park, WA.

Hundreds of mountain goats in Olympic National Park, WA have become so addicted to the salt found in human urine and sweat that they are an aggressive menace to national park visitors, charging at hikers and trampling vegetation. They have a taste for salt and minerals in human urine, and sweat on clothes and backpacks, according to officials.

See also:

Park officials urged walkers not to urinate along trails, to avoid turning paths into “long, linear salt licks” and attracting goats.

Now I don’t know which are more disgusting, humans or goats.

It’s almost like a cartoon, how the whale neatly strips off the tasty bits leaving only the head for the fisherhuman.

At least, you can make soup from the head, and the cheeks are very tasty.

In shortest commutes, that is.

Add it all up and the best place for commuters in Minnesota is Morris, where the overwhelming majority of those going to work spend 10 minutes or less on the roads, according UnitedStatesZipCodes.org which used data from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine the cities with the best and worst commutes in all 50 states.

The farming community in western Minnesota came in at No. 1 on the list of shortest one-way commute times followed by International Falls, where the average commute time is 11.7 minutes. Coming in third was Marshall at 12.4 minutes, with Wheaton at 12.8 minutes and Duluth at 13.3 minutes rounding out the top five.

I might skew the data a bit. I’d have to amble slowly, sniff the flowers, and catch a few spiders for it to take ten minutes to cross the street to the university. Some of our faculty live “way out” on the opposite side of town, about as far as you can get and still claim residence in Morris, and they walk or bicycle in about that amount of time to get to work.

I moved here from the Philadelphia suburbs where my commute to work was about an hour and a half each way. That move was about the most pleasant shock I could imagine.