Friday night we met up with Michael’s friend from work Juliana and her boyfriend at Triumph Brewing in New Hope for a late (9PM) dinner. I’d never been to Triumph before, it’s pretty far for us to drive (almost an hour) and the only time Michael had gone was on his way home from an event he attended in New Jersey with Bob.
The atmosphere was pretty typical for a hip, modern, brewpub. The clientele was almost exclusively 20-30-somethings, and they ID us at the door (which later struck me as odd, in the table area there was a family with kids – hmmm). They had a band, which playing pretty typical “rock” stuff, it was pretty awful ;) Luckily after finishing a beer at the bar we got a table outside under the stars, the evening was cool and beautiful. We enjoyed their Bengal Gold IPA, which was a pretty average IPA, hoppy and a bit citrusy. We hung out until around 11:30, they talked about going to another bar/club in the area, but I was pretty tired from yet another long week at work and was TOTALLY A PARTY POOPER and said I was tired and wanted to go home. So we got growler of the Bengal Gold IPA and headed home.
We now have 7 growlers, this is our first clear one.
Yum yum, growlers.
Yesterday was a pretty mellow, lazy day. I worked on some tutorials for a while. I also did my first fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper. The LiveCD+Installer thing is a very interesting idea. A pretty fully functioning Gnome session comes up, you click on the Install icon on the desktop to start the install, then you can play games, surf the web, do whatever. Of course having gnome running is pretty heavy overhead if you have an older machine, the install went pretty slow on my 450mhz P3 with 256M ram – and there is no option on that disk to do a text-based install, boo. Apparently you have to download the “Alternate install CD” if you want the text-based install or to do anything special. I wasn’t about to download and burn another ISO for that, so I just went through the typical install.
My main reason for doing this fresh install was Ubuntu-Women support related stuff, I want to be as helpful as I can to people who drop by with more typical installs than what I have on my laptop. Plus, one of the tutorials I’m working on will work best if I have directions and screenshots from a basic Ubuntu install. I also wanted a list of all the default packages installed on a pretty typical Ubuntu install – everyone I asked for such a list would point me to the list of all packages in Ubuntu, or would try to teach me how to install packages(!). So now I have a list (returned by dpkg -l after the install was completed).
Yesterday I also aquired the Pimsleur Spanish Levels 1-3. I’ve been playing with the idea of brushing up on my terrible spanish since we considered a trip to Peru earlier this year. I took spanish from 4th grade – 11th grade in school, but it wasn’t taught well, there was no organization to it, so we learned the same grammatical rules several years in a row, had teachers that were from Mexico, Columbia, Spain… very different spanishes in those different places. Living in Maine we had no exposure to real spanish speakers, at the time there wasn’t even a spanish television station in the area. It’s amazing that I took spanish for so long and still can rarely follow a conversation in spanish, let alone speak it myself.
Anyway, I figure it’s about time I get back to learning that. It’d be nice to visit Peru and have a clue what the signs say and how to get directions from natives. Plus, it’ll be really useful when we finally make it over to Europe, spanish is so similiar to Italian and Portuguese that getting around in much of southern Europe would be greatly aided by knowing how to speak spanish. Pimsleur is an audio-only method, but I did learn plenty about pronunciation of letters and words in spanish at school so reading it won’t be a problem once I gain the ability to speak conversationally. I’ll be tossing a few lessons on my mp3 player.
Today we don’t have plans, but it’s beautiful out so I’ll be spending some of the day outside.