I have a common name. When I was in grade school, my orthodontist had another patient with my name so they had to be very careful to verify I was the right Michael.

Today I found out that there is another Michael with the same last name in Pennsylvania, whose birthday is one day later than mine. But this Michael has a problem with his driver’s license. When I went to the Illinois DMV to get my license changed from Virginia, they told me I have to get the problem sorted out. They asked if I ever lived in Pennsylvania, and I said ‘no.’ They gave me his driver’s license number, which clearly isn’t mine and told me to call the PA authorities to have them send a letter stating I’m not that Michael.

Despite the fact that my driver’s license number doesn’t match the one in question and my DOB doesn’t match the one in question, the computer is telling the person that I need to fix the problem.

And of course the person at the DMV counter says that it is *my* responsibility to sort out the problem.

Is there any wonder why the DMV gets a bum wrap!?

I’ve been focusing a lot on a backpacking trip to Utah the first week in September. I’m going with a good friend Luke. He’s gone there several years in a row and has wanted to get into the canyon we’re trekking into this year. In fact, this is a picture of him staring, longingly, into the canyon we’re going to this year.

What’s different this year is he’s purchased an ATV to go along with his father’s (who is also going). So we’ll have two ATV’s to haul gear and bodies into the canyon. Once we reach base camp, we’re going to take day hikes here and there looking for water, indian ruins, avoiding sidewinder rattlers, and catching lizards (yeah, catching lizards).

Here is a network linked Google Earth file of our routes, camp positions, etc. It’s still being developed so if you’re curious you can refresh it periodically. You might have to rename the downloaded file to ‘basecamp.kmz’. It gets a .txt extension from some browsers for some reason.

I sent this IM to Luke this morning, after getting myself all psyched-up about going:

BTW, no more bullshit talk about ‘if we can’t make it into Mike’s Canyon’. We’ll have 2 ATV’s, 100+ pounds of water (hopefully) and an ass-load of testosterone. We’re making it into that crack like it was the backside of a cheap hooker on a Friday night.

I’ve been completely absorbed in planning for a backpacking trip to Utah at the end of August. You can see our route plan here (Google Earth place-mark file, right-click and save to desktop).

I’m going with a good friend and his father. They’ve been going for three or four years now but this is my first year and I’m really excited. I got rid of all my camping gear six years ago and so I have to get everything new again, which is expensive and time consuming (researching everything).

Once I have more time on my hands I’ll get back to my regular droning about security stuff…

Poking around the web I found a sight running Lightbox

It creates a cool overlay in the browser that opens the picture. Just click on the picture below to check it out.

I’m hunting for apartments in Chicago and looked at one today that boasted a ‘sun-room’ off the master bedroom.

What exactly does one do with a sun-room? Its too small for real furniture and too big to leave empty. I guess I could put my life-sized replica of the elephant man’s bones in there. Or maybe I could put my gun cabinet in there and rename it the gun-room.

Decisions, decisions.