Near the start of a cycle ride with a friend, we stood 680 feet out over the Mississippi on this bridge. Behind me, the bridge abruptly ends mid-river. The Rock Island Swing Bridge had two decks when it opened in 1894: a railroad above and a road below. We capped off our morning at a friendly coffee shop where we indulged in way too much cake.
Category: Living
Parts for a new machine
These LEGO parts arrived today, while I wait for other parts to be shipped from LEGO in Europe. I feel a new model coming on, or at least a series of prototypes as I figure out the engineering.
Debutantes and the civil rights movement
Walked past the Guthrie, where we’re seeing The Nacirema Society tonight. It’s a comedy set in 1964 Montgomery, Alabama, in the home of a wealthy Black family focused on an upcoming debutante ball. A comedy set during the Freedom Struggle should be interesting. My only experience of Montgomery was on business in 1977, where I witnessed blatant racism and de facto segregation.
Rainy day comfort food
Rained all day, inducing a mild case of cabin fever. Made a mushroom sauce for leftover polenta, heavy on the mushrooms: finally, a task with a beginning, middle, and end that I accomplished today. Finished the sauce with heavy cream, shoyu, and Dijon. An immersion blender and some water revived the polenta.
Walk, lunch, art
Walk along Minnehaha Creek, lunch at Wise Acre Eatery, then the Museum of Russian Art with a visiting friend from the UK. The museum offered a powerful contrast: downstairs, Socialist Realism depicting happy workers; upstairs, nonconformist abstract art suppressed by Soviet authorities.
Exploring AI-driven LEGO design
Installed software from Carnegie Mellon and linked it to their AI Large Language Model for designing LEGO models. It takes text (I requested “Matterhorn”) then designs a LEGO model that’s physically stable and can be built. It lists bricks and their placement in a 3D grid, and produces a CAD drawing that can be digitally disassembled and reassembled, mirroring real-world construction. Currently, it doesn’t support LEGO Technic construction, my primary focus.
Annual data snapshot
Today was the day to complete our annual data snapshot (around 500GB compressed) onto encrypted thumb drives. I keep these drives indefinitely, so if we ever need to recover an old file that we accidentally deleted at some time in the past, we can hopefully recover it from a snapshot.
From flour to art
Artists were setting up displays for a weekend art show in the former Pillsbury A Mill. The front door was unlocked, so I wandered in and headed down into subterranean levels. Eventually I was caught, but they were pleasant about it. The building has been thoughtfully repurposed to a high standard as affordable artist lofts. Here, a mural and a control panel for the former mill face off.
Decompressing over ramen
Compared notes about our day over tonkotsu ramen at the bar counter at Zen Box Izakaya. They do serve Asahi Super Dry and Sapporo on draft, but I prefer a local Minneapolis brew, Surly Furious. In Japan, interesting local craft brews are starting to appear, displacing national brands.
Riding the Orange Line BRT
Tried something new as I went about my day today: rode the Orange Line bus rapid transit, mainly along HOV lanes on Interstate 35W. You can just make out the Downtown skyline in the distance. Getting from there to here was, indeed, rapid.