Don’t go mental, just head for Central
Lexington Avenue will show you the way
Your spirits won’t sag when you see the big flag
Into the trees you want to stray
Well I’ll be…
Don’t turn up your noses at the city of roses
The home of the park that you seek
It’s just north of town so come on down
Our hunt is not for the meek
I’m dumbfounded. 
A famous singer and a diamond dinger
Might put you oh so close to the spot
With the whites of your eyes you should look for the prize
Within this convenient plot
Over hill and dale hit the trail
With a handy locating device
Fulfill your wishes like loaves and fishes
And put your victory on ice
A walk in the park can be a lark
If cell phones are left at home
Heed the siren of your desirin’
And do not revolt against this poem
Success on the third clue will never do
We had to stash a second
Round you go if you seek to know
Where swatters of orbs are beckoned
Look, a new clue!
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
If you’re thinking big you’re sure to dig
Near flora with growing pain
Winter or summer is never a bummer
A menagerie of fun wild or tame
So, by the Third clue, a past hunting peer of mine named Jake had pulled a $10,000 chunk of ice out of Hidden Falls. Absolutely fantastic work, Jake! I usually don’t even leave the house to look until the Thursday of the hunt!
http://www.twincities.com/…./treasure_hunt/16529938.htm
With this record breaking feat of skill, zeal, and a little luck, a flustered Par Ridder announced to the mob during the awarding of the giant check to Jake Ingebrigston:
“In 1953, that was the second year of the Treasure Hunt, and the clues were written by my great-uncle Dan and my great-uncle Robbie,” said Ridder, holding the same small weathered chest his uncles once used to stash their prize. “What they did in 1953 is what we’ll do this year.”
At that precise moment the second medallion was being tucked away safely somewhere. They must have known I hadn’t taken the opportunity to look yet and felt bad.
Congrats to the finder, to all a reminder
To hunt hard from first to last clues
Medallion I is history. Now a new mystery
Begins — strap on your hunting shoes
To some its demented, for all unprecedented
But hunters’ thirst must be quenched
Tell sister and brother we’ve hidden another
In a park where a body can be benched
Our 2nd prize? Don’t laugh — 10-thou cut in half
So get out there even if it’s snowy
And as a special bonus — some might say an onus –
A meal with our own Clueless Joey
Good hunting to you, let this be the first clue
Think of a woodsy retreat
It won’t be so hard if you channel the bard
You’ll get warm and smell pretty sweet
Hunters can be surly but in clue-time it’s early
Be safe, friends, and in the hunt revel
Near land that is high the treasure is nigh
Vagueness rules and that’s on the level
The dangerous clue #3! Let’s take a peek inside!
Boreas’ vast realm can overwhelm
Even diggers used to the long haul
So here’s advice to put your hunt on ice:
Look no farther than good old St. Paul
Well this analysis comes a little late (page updated after clue 3!) but it’s early, I’d been working for 12 hours, and I thought I’d get the site’s neat tag system functioning especially for this hunt before I start trying to think about what I should write. On the right column and at the bottom you’ll see “tags”. Tags are the newfangled way of indexing articles on the Internet, if you haven’t seen them yet, and apart from some of the features which I may tone down a bit, like the resized/colored text, it’s a really neat idea. Take this next lnk:
http://www.matthewanderson.com/tag/medallion-hunt-2007
You can bookmark the above link and any posts I make which I ‘tag’ appropriately will be listed when you visit it. However, http://www.matthewanderson.com/tag/medallion-hunt will catch all posts involving the medallion hunt (both links would show the same stuff until next year or other non-relevant medallion hunt information surfaces). Tagging improves with use (incentive to keep writing!) so over time it will provide an interesting index where simple ‘categories’ end up massively cluttered and difficult to search.
Enough of that mumbo jumbo. however. On with the hunt!
Welcome ice and snow and temperatures low
There’s no time for cold feet!
For searchers’ pleasure we’ve parked the treasure
Where nature lovers each other greet
…here we go…
Corryn, Wek + Mrs. Wek, Ron, Keith, James, and I all froze to death for the midnight Burning Crusade launch at the Richfield Best Buy. It got to a blistering 1 degree F in line.
Shortly after we got home and posted our complimentary maps of Azeroth on the wall, my super awesome paladin with his super awesome blues from BRD has conquered the dark portal along with everyone else!
Over the winter I’ve finally taken the plunge to overthrow the Blizzard interface entirely in favor of community addons. Before this site existed I mused about how neat some addons could get if some good project organization were to occur. This seems to have come true as the valuable and well made addons are organized very well, most using a nice code repository, like SVN. What this means for the enthusiast is that addons authored in such a way are presented in a fashion where they can be aggregated automatically whenever a new release has been prepared– no waiting for the author to upload the package somewhere. Let’s face it, most programmers aren’t the best publishers and in a world where it’s usually one or two people working on an addon it’s a pretty Good Thing to have such technology at one’s disposal.
Cue my personal mix of Addons:
Hit the photo above to get at the fullsize image along with a gallery with other images.
I figure I’ll keep populating the blog with some brain candy. This is for Windows users, who can often find themselves in trouble when dealing with their mysterious DNS client.
If you’ve been testing out a new domain or subdomain and have somehow queried it (by ping, using a browser, or some other method) before it comes active on the master nameserver, your system’s DNS client will cache the “nope, no host by that name” response it gets until its default expiration time passes, which is usually five minutes. Even if you use nslookup to check the result, and it comes back favorably, the Windows DNS client will cache the NXDOMAIN answer and none of your applications will be able to access it. Assuming the host should be working at the current time, flushing your system’s DNS is a good step you can take towards checking for problems or saving that five minutes so you can continue work right away. To do so on Windows XP:
If after this attempt you’re still having problems, you’ve eliminated your workstation’s cache from the problem and can use nslookup or other tools to check your resolving DNS directly.
Another way around this, though usually not recommended, is to shut off the caching system entirely:
I’m just adding a few things to the site that might provoke me to use it more often. This latest addition lets me insert Google Maps information anywhere and everywhere. See, here’s the House of skark:
Well, since I’d recently assembled a Wordpress site for a friend, I figured I ought to upgrade my installation as well since it was quite old. Interestingly enough there seems to be a rather robust spam protection plugin included that I’ve switched on. Hopefully it works well and I can turn off comment moderation!
I’ll restate my mission statement for this site by saying, “I’m one of those guys who generally hates blogs but has one anyway.” This is to say that I think I have some neat stuff to talk about and if there were more people that followed my interests that kept a site like this, I’d probably hate blogs less. Thing is, I’m lazy when it comes down to keeping a log of my activities and so are most others that follow my interests. I’ll continue trying to be a part of the solution, not the problem. 
With that, here’s one of those items that I said I was going to publish for the kind visitors last summer. I give you the skark poker table.
