Last year was a disappointment for hop growing, but this season we were blessed with a single very active hop vine that produced some HUGE hops! Michael cut it down this afternoon:
Maybe making some beer this weekend?
EDIT: This is more hops than we’ve ever gotten from 3 vines, just from one! Michael just brought me this photo:
Anyone who has been reading my blog of late knows I’ve been doing the local touristy thing this year. My latest conquest? Coal Mines.
I knew Pennsylvania was a big coal state, but didn’t really think about the fact that there would be retired coal mines open for tours to the public, and was only clued into their existence by a Radio Times broadcast on July 2nd about fun things to do on less than one tank of gas in eastern Pennsylvania.
The drive up to Pioneer Tunnel took a little under 2 hours, and was a pleasant drive the whole way. We arrived to the surprise of an entire Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine Pioneer Day festival being in full swing! Parking was a bit tricky, but once we found some we walked up toward the festival, got our combo tickets for train and coal rides, and hopped on a train.
If not for the completeness of experience factor I’d say skip the train ride. It’s a very short ride, was crowded (ok, maybe that was partially due to the festival!) and probably the least exciting part of the day. But it was nice seeing the top of what the strip mining operation did, and learning about the history of the area and nearby Centralia, where a coal fire has been burning for over 40 years under the town, that was pretty fascinating.
…the view was nothing to sneeze at either, and the weather was amazing. Oh and Michael snapped a photo of me on the train that I not only don’t loathe – I actually Like! Score!
After the outdoor train ride, it was onto the carts for a trip down into the coal mine! Once inside we were in for quite a treat, a fantastic tour where, among other things we got to see a portion of a petrified tree – most of which was removed for display in the Smithsonian.
And what coal mine tour is complete without some explosives and a canary?
A shot of Michael standing in front of the huge pile of equipment the miners were expected to haul up the shafts with them each day, and a photo of one of the still-working escape shafts – yikes!
In all, the tour was well worth the ticket price and the drive all the way up to Ashland – even if there isn’t much else up there.
Back up topside the festival was winding down by around 5PM. I snagged some of the last Funnel Cake of the day, yum yum!
..but what is that down the hill? Michael spotted them before I did…
LLAMAS!!! Aaaah :) I love llamas, they were available for petting!
Also, some cute goats :)
The last stop on our adventure for the weekend? Yuengling Brewery. It was unplanned, there is no brewpub (boo!), we knew they would be closed for tours by that time of the day, but we were in the area and decided to swing by to snap a photo before heading home. To be honest, Yuengling is sorta my slumming beer, I’ll go for a Black and Tan if nothing else reasonable is on the menu, or their Lager in a real social pinch, but it is a famous brewery with all kinds of history, so it’s worth a real visit at some point.
That weekend I also finally got to meet Nick and Karen over at Sly Fox in Phoenixville. It was cool to finally meet up – hurrah for more friends in the area!
What are my grand plans for the long Labor Day weekend? Well, I’m on call and have to work for a couple hours on Sunday(!). But our friend Ian is in town for the weekend! So we’ll be hanging out, probably have a fire outside. Shooting for a pretty mellow holiday weekend. Michael took a few days off of work this week too, so I think talked him into taking some of recipes I marked in Eating Well and giving them a go. Yum. Oh and I think I’ll get some sleep too, haven’t been doing that enough lately.
On July 26th Michael, Bob, Mike and I attend the first Brew at the Zoo at the Philadelphia Zoo! In the years past it was held at the Norristown Zoo, which was fun but they have much cooler animals at the Philly Zoo – when I heard it would be held in Philly I had to go.
We arrived toward the beginning, hit a couple beer booths and then went to explore the zoo. It was quite a treat to be at a 21+ event in the evening, the crowd was pretty mellow, the weather was beautiful and the animals were awake! The $40 ticket price was worth it just for such a great visit to the zoo.
Bald eagle and prairie dogs – not near each other, luckily ;)
Elephants! They are leaving to zoo soon because they can’t afford to keep them and upgrade their habitat for an appropriate happy lifestyle. Sad sad, I loved seeing the elephants at the zoo. The other photo is a fishing cat that looked a bit like Caligula :)
Puma! Too bad the action shots didn’t come out, it was evening and the pumas were all creeping up on each other and attacking each other. And a photo of the red pandas. Love red pandas…!
There were peacocks wandering around the zoo. The first photo has a picture of a baby peacock too, the other showed how really wandering around they were – access to dippin’ dots and m&ms if they so wish! ;)
The last time I was at the zoo all the big cats were gone off to other zoos while Big Cat Falls, their new habitat, was being built. The biggest treat to this trip was Big Cat Falls being open and being able to see all the big cats. The tigers were my favorite, it was a warm day and the tigers were really into being playful and jumping in the water.
Biggest treat was the cats and not the beer? OK, the company was great too, aside from the friends we went with we met up with with a bunch of other people we’ve gone to other beer events with. The food was good too, they had a lot of free food this time around, it lasted throughout the festival. The beer? Microbrews rock, but the lines didn’t, and neither did the breweries running out of beer. You’d end up spending a half hour in line for a taste of beer, and when it came down to it I’d much rather be wandering through the reptile house with a bottle of water than standing in line – so we did. Not even a buzz by the end of the night, but I had a great time anyway. Hopefully next year they’ll sort out the issues and the event can go better overall.
When I moved back into the house we decided to give me my own network (along with my own external IP address) – yippee! First thing I had to get? A spiffy reversal, as seen on R2D2’s hostname:
-!- R2D2 [~astromech@alderaan.princessleia.com] has joined #rainwreck
From there I built my network.
R2A6: Laptop (Ubuntu Hardy)
R2D2: Primary desktop (Xubuntu Hardy)
HAN-S: Secondary desktop, mostly a movie player (Kubuntu Hardy)
..wait, Xubuntu, Kubuntu AND Ubuntu? Yeah, I kept finding it was useful to have one of each around between what I prefer, what I support at work and what I support in the community. Or I might just be insane, the jury is out.
R2Q5: Backups and IRC Bots (Debian Sparc Etch)
R2B1: Firewall (Debian i386 Etch)
R21U: 1U Testing server (Debian i386 Sid)
Hey look, Debian and Ubuntu tie!
Plus my Linodes, a printer and a VoIP phone. On Monday evening I got Nagios2 configured for all the machines it made sense to monitor.
Nice.
DNS, DHCP, all looking spiffy. I still lack a good backups infrastructure, which really bit me Tuesday evening – oops. Must get this online…!
elizabeth@r2d2:~$ ping r2q5
PING r2q5.alderaan.princessleia.com (192.168.42.3) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from r2q5.alderaan.princessleia.com (192.168.42.3): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=8.02 ms
Yahoo!!!
Simcoe helped with none of this.
Oh, and for those of you keeping up, I released the Debian package of LedgerSMB 1.2.14 on Alioth this evening along with a better README file (thanks for your help jadoba), so far tests well – have at it! The LedgerSMB folks are close to a 1.2.15 release with some big fixes, so if you’re interested in testing be sure to hop on over there and pitch in.
I love mini-golf, lousy at it, but love it. It had been years since I’ve gone, but this year my friend Stephen and I were able to hit a few courses through the spring. The first was Village Greens in Strasburg on a day that was a bit too cold to be playing mini-golf, a fun course – not too fancy or expensive, not too run down. Very fun, and there were cute little waterfalls, I’ll have to go back.
The next was Dutch Gardens in Ephrata. It was run down and quite old, but it was very inexpensive (especially since we went on a day when they were doing a $1.50/game promotion!). And hey, mini-golf of all kinds is fun, even when old.
Then there was Garden Golf and Go Karts in North Wales. This is one of those really nice, expensive places that I’ve only been to a few times. It was crowded, but the weather was beautiful and the course was very nice.
Finally there was Dinosaur Park Mini Golf in Niagara Falls! It’s no secret that I love this kind of campy attraction. And after a sunset ride on the SkyWheel this was the perfect late evening thing to do.
Not sure where my next mini-golf adventure will be, but I really did love the campy-ness that was dino golf. Themed mini golf wins!
Last month I attended The Last HOPE with my friend Mike from New Jersey. It was a really fun weekend during which I took no pictures – so I sorted through Mike’s photos and am posting them to pass them off as my own.
In spite of waiting years to go (Mike’s bugged me last time around to go), one of the most exciting things about the weekend was meeting people I’d known online but had never met in real life. Shortly after arriving I met up with Dan Christensen, who I know through some of the Linode guys, we’ve chatted on IRC some. Soon after Mackenzie Morgan and I found each other through txt-o-location, I’ve known her for quite some time through work with Ubuntu. After the first panel I attended was “attacked” in the hallway by Leigh Honeywell and invited to a party Saturday evening, unfortunately that was the only time we bumped into each other that weekend, I’ve worked with her a lot in Ubuntu Women and it would have been cool to talk more off-IRC.
The AMD Project was pretty cool, people who pre-registered had the option of getting badges with RFID transmitters that would track you through the conference. The released the metadata last week, so I was able to snag info about where I was from I arrived Saturday afternoon through closing ceremonies Sunday. They also synced up the locations with some of the talks, so you can also see talks I attended. Neat… except for when my cellphone turns into a transmitter …or maybe that’ll be the twitter of web 3.0.
Friday night a bunch of us got together for a sort of LinuxChix dinner at Ninja New York that Katie organized. The restaurant was more than a little campy, but the sushi was fresh and the place was a real treat. I got to meet Jennifer and her husband for the first time as we navigated through the subways of NYC, and was also able to see Laura (and her talk at HOPE!) and meet her new husband. Surprisingly I also got to finally meet Simon Law as well. We’ve known each other through Ubuntu stuff for a couple years (he used to work for Canonical) but never crossed paths until that night. It was a pleasure to meet, we got to thank each other for our Ubuntu work ;)
Sunday was all talks for me. I got up early and lurked in the 18th floor hallway with my laptop until the talks started, when I migrated into the Hopper room and camped out all day.
Things wrapped up Sunday evening. So I stole Mike’s camera and took his picture, he returned the favor by snapping a lousy picture of me, hah!
Then we needed some dinner so Dan, Mike and I met up with Mike’s friend dedsysop who lived in the area and I’d only known vaguely through IRC and stories until then. He’s a New York local and took us to a good nearby pizzeria before we took the 10:30PM train back to New Jersey, and then from there I drove back to Philly, not getting home until past 1AM. Long weekend, but loads of fun – I’m certainly planning on going to The Next HOPE.
My cellphone contract runs out in November. I currently have a boring, basic old pink Razr that can make phone calls and do text messaging. My next phone will be smart!
Requirements:
Desirables:
Anyone have a phone that satisfies these requirements and is on the market right now? There is a lot of buzz around future smartphones, open source smartphones, Google smartphones – but I need something serious that works right now, so when November rolls around I know I’m making a solid professional investment and not throwing cash at a lousy first generation toy. Cost isn’t a serious issue, but I’d like to keep the cost of the phone under $400 and the monthly agreement under $100.
A few years ago I was watching an episode of History Detectives titled Prison Plaque which researched the history of a discarded plaque found during some restoration of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Immediately this made it on my mental list of places to check out. Trouble with mental lists is that they are forgettable, and it wasn’t until I was riding down to a PLUG meeting with mukidohime recently that I remembered it, he was picking up a friend of his for the meeting and we passed the Penitentiary. I finally got my opportunity to go last month while my friend MJ was in town, Nita and I headed down there with him on a Sunday evening for a couple tours.
I’ll have to go again when I have more time to explore, the museum closes at 5PM and we got there pretty late in the afternoon. It was a lot of fun, and there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore, complete with self-guided audio tours you get with the price of your ticket.
So, I still have the following things to blog about: Visiting the museum that is Eastern State Penn in Philly, HOPE (plus meta-data from rfids was released this week!), the Phildelphia Brew at the Zoo, all the minigolfing I’ve done this year. I’ll try to catch up some today. But I want to talk about stuff happening Now for a bit!
My ToDo list is huge. I’m starting to think I should come up with a system of recording all the stuff I do for various volunteer things so I have a better handle on where I’m spending my time – but then I remember that creating such a system would end up on my ToDo list and be more work. Oh well, I’ll just continue working away at it until everything is done.
The plan today is to tackle a bunch of things on said ToDo list. And then this evening I’m going out to finally meet the_karen_show at Sly Fox in Phoenixville!
This week was a long one. A lot of maintenance stuff to handle at work before a herd of new projects comes in. Bright side – by Thursday I was feeling considerably better sinus infection wise, this morning I woke up feeling almost completely normal (cough is lingering, but that’s normal). On Friday I spent my lunch break mowing the lawn – and got stung by a yellow jacket. I’d never been stung by anything before and it was highly unpleasant, I don’t want it to happen again.
Friday evening Michael went out with a couple friends and I got tickets to see The Dark Knight again – but this time in the IMAX with my friend Mike from NJ. Unfortunately on my way out to the theater while driving on 422 my car started bleeding coolant all over the expressway – eek! I didn’t realize until my engine was in the overheat zone (and I got a beep notification from my car). I quickly got to the nearest exit and hit Wawa for some coolant. Unfortunately my car takes special orange coolant, not the green stuff I put in – and mixing the two is bad. Doh. Anyway, the green stuff cooled my engine enough to get me home, and then Mike came to “rescue” me at the house so we could still make it to the movies. We arrived at the theater just in time for the movie to begin – but had to suffer with front row seats in the sold out theater. So we missed dinner, but when coming back to Schwenksville after the movie around 1:30 AM we stopped at the Collegeville Diner for some pancakes. Michael and I have affectionately called that the Zombie Diner, since there is a very good sushi place next door that we frequent which shares a parking lot – and people coming out of the diner tend to look somewhat zombieish. Imagine my surprise when Mike and I pulled into the parking lot and there was an old style HEARSE in the parking lot. For real it’s the zombie diner!
Yesterday morning I called the local Pontiac dealership to see if I could get Blinker in to check out her leak (I don’t know a local mechanic I can trust, so I always go to dealerships for repairs). I ended up spending the whole day there. Luckily they had (crappy) wifi, so I was able to complain on IRC the whole time ;) but there wasn’t bandwidth to do much else. Turns out that the thermostat was going bad, it let my engine overheat and caused all the coolant to boil out. They did a flush of the system and replaced the thermostat. $350 and 5 hours later I finally was able to go home with fixed Blinker. She also needs her breaks looked at and new tires before winter, maybe next month. Ah cars.
Last month Michael and I headed out to East Stroudsburg for a day trip. We had planned on going to an Amish farm tour, but upon arrival found it to be a bit of a tourist trap (hah!). So we ended up going over to the train museum. I knew about it because I’d been there earlier in the year, but with summertime came the opening of the train yard – which I had yet to see!
We stayed at the museum until it closed, being surprised at how many fatalities befell the early railroad workers, that was a rough time in our history.
Ater the museum we then headed to Isaac’s, a local chain, for a small dinner. What was on the menu? Hot sandwiches on soft pretzel bread. We both ordered the roast beef sandwich and enjoyed immensely. Craving another now.
Following dinner we headed to the East Stroudsburg Railroad for a wine and cheese railroad ride! It was a very nice time, they had a local red and white. I stuck with the red and it was nothing to write home about, but it wasn’t bad. The cheese was a pretty standard assortment of gouda, cheddar, a jalepeno spiced cheese and another mild cheese. There was also fruit, but the hot day made for that being eaten up pretty quickly. The train ride itself was about 45 minutes long, a straight ride through corn fields and the countryside and back. I’d do it again.
On the way out of the area, we took a quick detour to Dutch Haven. Dutch Haven is a pretty campy looking place, and full of touristy knick-knacks – and the “place that made shoo-fly pie famous. Huh, I’ve never had shoo-fly pie before! So we enjoyed the free samples and picked up a pie to bring home. Sooo sugary, but I enjoyed it :) Hurrah for exploring Pennsylvania! I’ve since heard of another cool local thing to do – coal mine tours. Pennsylvania is a huge coal area and there are now whole attractions built around these tours, sounds fun :) Maybe next weekend.
