Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

I am writing this on a crappy kiosk in the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Very cool place...more to come soon.

Sorry about the outage but I think we are back in business now. We went through a round of consolidating servers with Apache's mod_proxy and ran into some configuration fits. We also upgraded to Apache 2.0 and found out our install didn't have PHP included so we installed that as well. Hopefully everything will be static for awhile. We made the classic mistake of upgrading to many things at once. Thanks to Billy for getting everything straightened out.

Angela and I had the pleasure of attending her sister's wedding several weeks ago and here are the pictures. Lots of merriment was had by all who attended and the couple had a great time too (except for the part where US Airways lost their luggage on the way home). As an aside, if you get called in the middle of the night to come pick up your sister-in-law at the Cincinnati airport, (because her keys were in the said luggage) don't you dare get out of your car to briefly look around the curb for her and her new husband. The airport police will stop you and run your plates and license (which took forever)!

Of course, more pics are available.

A weeks ago, Angela and I attended Keith's wedding in Philadelphia. Keith was my roommate back in college. It was a stunning wedding with every detail meticulously planned and executed flawlessly.

Here are more pics.

This Rachel Ray recipe for French Bread Pizza Rustica has never failed me. Its also very easy to use this to work with whatever ingrediants you have lying around. Just throw it all together in a bowl, mix it up, stuff the French bread and bake. Absolutely incredible.

Update: I have tried the recipe again with different igredients and took a picture this time.

While in town for Keith and Tracy's wedding, Angela and I had a few hours to explore Philadelphia before catching our flight. It was new to both of us. Although I was in town for Keith's bachelor party, I didn't see too much of the city because Keith was quite under the weather on Sunday.

We started off with Sunday brunch at Fork. I think I read about it the New York Times several months ago when I was keeping an eye out on things to do, see and eat while in Philly. Let me say that it did not disappoint. Angela had a goat cheese and spinach omelet with home fries and I had the brioche french toast with brown sugar baked apples. Both of our dishes were baked to perfection with my french toast achieving the ethereal culinary dichotomy that is a crisp outside and creamy soft inside. To finish off, we had coconut creme brulee. It was a little on the runny side for my taste but had excellent flavor. I will be experimenting with adding coconut the next time I make that at home.

Next, we walked over to the Indendepence Visitors Center for a brief introduction to what was available and then onto the National Constitution Center. Tickets to the musuem were $6 per adult and starts with a novel, multimedia presentation about the constitution throughout our nation's history. The theater is in the round with the patrons sitting in wedge shaped sections arranged in a circle. The theater looks much like the set of "Who wants to be a Millionaire?". Adding to the multimedia display was a live actor who did some of the narration. I'm surprised they went to the expense of having a real person do this. After the presentation (which was excellent by the way), everyone climbs the steps to the top of the theater an exits. The permanent collection of the musuem is arranged around the circular theater. Along the outer wall of this ring is a timeline of events in our nations history that starts before the Declaration of Indepenence and goes to present day. Aboce the timeline, parts of the constution are written out with anotations showing which parts have been superceeded by admendments. On the inner wall, a series of small kiosks are available which such "fascinating" things as "What Bob Dole thinks is important about being a Senator?". In between the two walls are most of the interactive exhibits, such as voting booths (to show the imprtance of voting), a gigantic threeway teetertoter with the White House, Supreme Court and Congress buildings on each end (to show the checks and balances present in the Constitution) and aestheticly neat "living tree" which showed the faces and bios of prominent Americans. The best in the bunch was a video of Ben Stein reading and responding to postcards containing Constutional questions. It was done in a coffee shop and he interacts with staff who are mostly off camera. It feels very off the cuft and real without a lot of heavy handed scripting. It works real well. After the circular tour of the musuem, you enter a room with lifesize bronzes of all the signers of the Constitution. That's about it. I did note that there is a temporary exhibits space that is available but it isn't hosting anything just yet.

All in all, I was a bit dissapointed with the musuem since it was hyped to me beforehand. The multimedia presentation was very good, but the core of the musuem was lacking. The timeline was very detailed but overwelming. There is no way you could read all that information. I didn't see any good way for one to easily browse the timeline. The displays in the center were a bit on the childish side and didn't add a lot of value to me (except the aforementione Ben Stein video). In short, I think this is a great place for kids and those not extremely familiar with history but otherwise you might consider skipping it if you need the time for something else.

Next on our brief tour was a stop at the Liberty Bell. Its housed in a small building on the Mall just south of the musuem, so its an easy walk. Its housed in a small building with a few exhibits explaining its history and significance. I was really unaware of a lot of it. Also, I don't know what I was thinking, but somehow I pictured the Liberty Bell as being much larger. In any case, as long as there aren't too many people trying to get through the security checkpoint (they were extremely slow), this is a quick and easy thing to visit.

There are some pictures available for the trip.

I got this error message today when firing up MS Outlook:

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either their are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance.

I thought I had seen every which way of building a project but yesterday, I saw a first. While most people use Ant, or Make or a shell script or an IDE's built in suport, I had never seen anyone use the copy and paste technique. This person had a text file of all the commands needed to compile his application, one per class. For example:

javac com/foo/bar/One.java
javac com/foo/bar/Two.java
javac com/foo/bar/Three.java
And so on...

1. Open a command prompt.



2. Find the command in the text file that changes directories to the proper one and copy it.



3. Paste said command into the command prompt and execute it.



4. Next find the classpath statement in the text file and copy it.



5. Paste that comamnd into the command prompt and execute it.



6. Next find the javac command for the file that you are editing and copy it.



7. Paste that in the command prompt and execute it.

This past weekend, Angela and I went back to West Virgina. She attended my sister's bidal shower and I went to visit with out of town relatives who came in for Amy's party. It was certainly a good time but it definitely had an unexpected side effect. All of my relatives noticed my recent weight loss. This is the first time any of them had seen me since Christmas. This is the same group of relatives that I will see in 4 weeks at our annual family reunion in South Carolina. That is definitely some positive peer pressure to stay on the weight loss track.

More pictures are available.

Saw this on the way home from Wheeling. That must come in handy during traffic stops.

When I was at my parent's house last weekend, the inevitable topic of what to do with my room came up. Ever since I moved out permantly over8 years ago,,, my mother has been talking about what to do with my old room. Even before I had left for college in 1994, she had talked about doing some remodeling. After all, besides a new bedspread and curtains, the room was pretty much unchanged since we moved there in 1980. Well now that my parents are finally redoing their room (it also was exactly the same since we moved in), she has steped up her seriousness of her plans for my old room. While talking about her plans with me she let on that she felt bad because it took so long to finally get started with doing something with my room. She also said she felt bad about the choice of curtains because she said that I strongly liked a different set that she didn't choose way back when. This completely floored me: a.) because I can't imagine having that strong of an opinion over a window treatment and b.) if she is feeling guilt about this minor thing that happened over 10 years ago, then what other seemingly innocuous things have I done to bring her grief over the years.

Saw Ralphie May with opening act Lahna Turner (surprisingly enough his girlfriend) at the Funny Bone on the Levee last night. I wouldn't see them if you offend easily but if you don't you will laugh out loud all night. I was a bit hesitant before the show started since I had seen him on Colin Quinn's Tough Crowd and hadn't liked him a whole lot. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Ralphie also let people onto something that I should have known instinctively but hadn't crossed my mind. If you want to see more comedy for the same price, go see the last show of the night. If the comedian is good and enjoying themselves, they will do more material. He said that he did 50 minutes during the first show. He did almost 2 hours during the show I saw. From now on, I will be going to the second show if I can.