Archive for February 26th, 2009

Snowmageddon

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It’s snowing in Minnesota. Sounds like a sort of “No duh” situation, doesn’t it? But it’s really, really snowing. It has been dubbed Snowmageddon, and watching the tweets roll in is actually kind of fun.

When it comes to snow, a lot of Minnesotans are of the hearty, so what variety. They do not mind driving in this kind of nonsense and go about their day without giving the weather a second thought.

There are others, like your fairweather blogger, who freak out and head for home as soon as the flakes start flying. It is a shameful burden that we carry and await being shunned by the Hearty Minnesotans and being forced to move to Wisconsin or Iowa.

Then there are still others, like our friendly neighborhood Bravocino machine, who revel in the weather:

Profiles in Nerdery: Brian Litzinger, artist turned programmer

• Astrological Sign: I honestly don’t know. Never really looked into it.
• Time at the Nerdery: Since September 2008.
• Area of expertise: Front end development mostly (HTML, CSS, JS), but I can knock around PHP pretty well, and recently did my first Rails project. I started off as a designer . . . who knew an Art degree would lead to programming?
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I make websites. Any details further than that and people kind of nod their heads and pretend they know what I’m talking about, but the “I make websites” usually brings an “oh, cool” response.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Ones that I can focus on for an extended period of time. I can juggle multiple projects, but its much more fun to have one or two projects that I can devote time to, but if they last for more than 2-3 months I start to burn out.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That I bring my dog to work. Also when I tell people it’s doubled in size in the last year.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) The IE 6 Box Model; 2) Name that CSS bug!; 3)Definition Lists or Unordered Lists; 4) IE 6 CSS hacks; 5) Bathroom tile removal tools; 6) Ways to annoy my wife; 7) World of Warcraft (pre marital bliss).
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Hiro, from Heroes, but he lost his powers recently and kind of sucks at the moment. There was a foreshadowing scene in the first season where he was a ninja and didn’t talk like a nerd, so I’m eagerly awaiting the episode when he becomes a kick ass ninja, but I guess he wouldn’t be a nerd anymore.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That question is too long. Can I pass?