Happy Birthday !

is my sister, she just got a LiveJournal about a week ago after the nagging of family members. It’s amusing to me that having an online journal has become popular enough that family members encourage each other to have them. I still think about how funny it is for me to go to family reunions and learn that several people in my family read my journal – and I didn’t even know they knew about it!

Now for some photos from last week I never got to post. Between crawling around our basement crawlspace on the hottest day of the year, Michael took some pictures while the Verizon guys were here installing the FiOS.

One of the two Verizon trucks in our driveway

They didn’t have a ladder truck, so used a rope contraption to string the FiOS line from the street to our house.

Junction box! This is where the magic happens. It’s mounted in our basement and has hookups for internet, television (coming soon) and some sort of digital telephone service they’ll be offering.

Battery backup and primary internet FiOS box (I’m pretty sure…).

And the FiOS connection has been going strong all weekend, I’m delighted. I spent some time downloading some MST3K episodes this weekend, and was happy to learn that there are a few on YouTube.com, just search for Mystery Science Theater 3000. They come in 10 parts, so you can watch them one at a time. I used the Video Downloader extension to Firefox to actually download the youtube videos (probably broke TOS for YouTube). It downloads them as .flv files, which mplayer played with no problem, but it didn’t work when I catted all 10 of the files together, d’oh. The quality isn’t the best either, but it’s tolerable, especially since you can’t get these episodes on DVD yet, so it’s still old tape trading.

The weekend was nice. Saturday we spent with Michael’s family, a nice outdoor event that I managed to enjoy, even if everyone in the family wants us to have babies ASAP (“Ooooh you’re getting married? When are the kids coming along?” *smile, nod, chuckle, screaming inside*)

First off, we got the FiOS installed yesterday. Michael worked from home all day so he was able to meet the Verizon techs and stick around for the 3-4 hours the install took. The install was pretty labor intensive, they had to run a cable from the FiOS box on the utility pole to our house, into the basement, mount the equipment in the basement (3 boxes, we’ll have to take pictures, Michael can identify them all), get an Ethernet wire run from the basement to our computer room on the second floor (Michael crawled around in the basement to fully acomplish this). Michael said he was bombarding the techs with questions and they were able to answer them all, either they knew the answer or knew how to obtain it – quite a difference from the Comcast techs Michael had to deal with this month.

The speed? We confirmed that it is 15/2mbps. It is fast. Big sites (Livejournal, Yahoo!…) pop up immediately – no noticeable image loading lag. We’re now pretty much at the mercy of the upload speed of the servers serving us, which is a pretty cool feeling. And since we’re still hosting our websites from home they’re much faster now too – yay! I’ve been pining for faster speeds for my websites for a while and was seriously considering paying for hosting again, now there is no need. Unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy the new found speed for very long last night, we had a nasty thunderstorm and after the power flickered a few times I decided it was best to turn off my computer and chill out in my bedroom with a book instead.

Monday was a busy day. I took it off from work to run a bunch of errands. In the morning I was on a Secret Mission, which will not be discussed until a later date!

I came home around 11AM to meet Michael and headed to Norristown to get our MD marriage license application notarized. This was a surprisingly pleasant experience aside from the typical downtown Norristown traffic. The security guard at the courthouse door was nice, the women we asked for directions from in the courthouse were delightful, the woman who notarized our application was efficient and friendly, even the toll-taker at the parking garage was in a pleasant mood. It feels so good to have such an experience on a hot day, especially when I expected the process to be much more difficult and time-consuming.

From the courthouse we headed to Montgomeryville, grabbed some lunch, and then Michael dropped me off at the Montgomery Mall so I could go to LensCrafters, he headed into the office for a bit. I’ve needed new glasses for a couple months now, and finally got tired of squinting. I got an eye exam and got a new pair of glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses. The new glasses are very similar to my old ones, a bit smaller. The sunglasses are a great thing, no more sun glare headaches while driving! The world is much nicer when the sun isn’t burning out my eyes.

My glasses were finished around 5, Michael picked me up and we went home to feed Caligula and then went out again – this time to Sly Fox for the MontcoLUG meeting. Michael was able to get a projector from work to use for the meeting (yay!) and 9 people showed up, which is not bad for one of our meetings. The presentation on SVN went well and it was a great meeting. It was really nice to see , he lives in the area but it had been at least 3 years since we’ve actually met up. The meeting wrapped up around 9:45 (Sly Fox closes at 10 on Mondays).

Monday and Tuesday were plagued with highs in the upper 90s, the humidity was terrible. The thunderstorm last night seemed to take all the super hot weather with it when it left. They are saying the high today will “only be 86” phew. There is some stuff I need to do around the house that really didn’t feel like doing in the super hot weather, we haven’t even eaten at home in a few days.

The Skippack Strut on Sunday was fun.

It began at Road House Grille at 1:30 in the afternoon. The temperature was hovering around 90, but there wasn’t too much humidity so it was decent in the shade and generally tolerable in the sun.

First course:

Road House Grille

Assorted hors d’oeuvres paired with McWilliams Riesling

The food served included little potato pancakes, meatballs in a pastry, little cheese and spinach quiche, and hummus on pita – all were good. The Riesling was a nice summer wine that I enjoyed. We sat out on the porch of Road House for this, but we were mostly able to get into the shade.

Second course:

Black Dog Cafe

Honey Walnut Shrimp-Toasted Honeyed Walnuts tossed with Shrimp and Cantaloupe paired with Red Bicyclette Rose

This dish was a bit much. It was battered and fried shrimp put into half a cantaloupe (insides scooped out and some little balls put back in) with the honeyed walnuts and coconut milk. The sweetness of it all caused me not to be able to finish mine. The Black Dog Cafe is an Asian fusion restaurant, not really my thing anyway, I don’t think I’ll be going back. The wine was not bad though, it was pretty mellow compared to many others I’ve had at wine tastings, but it was a red that was surprisingly decent to drink on a hot day. Again we were outside for this course, this time unable to avoid the sun! I was pretty hot when we left.

Third course:

Parc Bistro

Spicy Grilled Smoked Quail on Summer Melon Salad, with Heirloom Tomatoes, Red Onion, Ricotta Salada Cheese, Lime Essence, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and Fig Balsalmic Vinegar paired with Writers Block Grenache

This was the first time I ever had quail, it was a lot like chicken, perhaps a bit more tender. It was nicely prepared and the portions were small. The wine was not my favorite, it had that wood barrel conditioned flavor but not enough other flavor to balance it properly – and it was a pretty heavy red for a summer afternoon. They brought us inside an air conditioned room for this course, which I think was a mistake since it was *so loud* with everyone talking in the small room and the air conditioning made us feel so much worse when we had to go outside again.

This was a nice restaurant though, we’ll be going back.

Fourth course:

Brasserie 73

Baked Salmon Roulade stuffed with Tarragon and Roasted Pepper Compound Butter, served over Lobster Mashed Potatoes with Arugula Salad and Saffron Hollandaise pared with Red Rock Merlot some Zinfandel

The salmon was GREAT, pretty obvious that the same chef works here as at our beloved Road House Grille (the restaurants are separate establishments but owned by the same guy and sort of connected). we’ll certainly be visiting this restaurant again. Apparently they were going to pair it with a Merlot (I like Merlot, but with fish on a hot day?), but ended up bringing out a boring Zinfandel instead (I’m not much of a Zin fan), I wonder if the heat had something to do with the change in choice. The fantasticness of the salmon made up for the less than perfect wine pairing. We sat outside for this too, Michael had a bit of sun for about half the meal, but I was able to hide in the shade.

Fifth course:

Basta Pasta

Sweet Zabaglione with Wild Berries and Vanilla Essence, topped with Biscotti and Fresh Whipped Cream paired with II Moscato

The dessert was fantastic. Light, fruity, refreshing. The wine was less so, I know dessert wines are supposed to be sweet, but this one went overboard, it was like I was drinking juice. The restaurant itself was less formal than a sit down Italian restaurant where you are served but more formal than a generic pizzeria, not really our kind of place.

The company we had throughout the day was amusing. They were a family consisting of a mother (who was absolutely mad) and her three daughters (mid to late 30s, two of them were parents) and a couple of their husbands. They were the “loud group” of the whole production, gaining snears from the snobby people on the tour and laughter from the organizers who could tell they were having a blast. As Michael and I are very quiet it may seem odd that we’d wind up staying with these people, but they really were fun. We even got our first wedding gift, while leaving they handed us a napkin that turned out to contain salt and pepper shakers that they had lifted from one of the restaurants – AHAHAHA! Terrible.

The Strut ended around 5:30. Somehow, after finishing 5 glasses of wine, I felt fine. I think it had something to do with the heat, I drank at least one glass of water at each place we stopped at.

I’m glad we had the experience, but I don’t think we’ll be doing this again next year. July is too hot a month to have such an event, and although some of the food really hit the spot, I really wasn’t impressed with the wine selection. There are always plenty of wine and beer events throughout the summer, so on to checking out more!

I hate summer. I seem to forget every year how miserable and exhausted prolonged humid, hot weather makes me (although, I’m pretty sure people close to me don’t forget how cranky I get!). This is even true when I can hop from air conditioned place to air conditioned place, being stuck inside sucks. I hate avoiding the outdoors and I miss hugging trees when the air feels like hot soup. We are going to have to move north or to the mountains someday. I’m such a Mainer.

This weekend the forecast is showing highs in the upper 90s that will last at least through Monday – UGH!

Heat aside, we do have some plans for this weekend.

Saturday: Hide from heat in air conditioned rooms. We’ll probably go to the gym too. I was planning on going to the gym this morning but wasn’t feeling so great when I woke up :\

Sunday: Skippack Strut – “Progressive dinner involving some of the great restaurants in Skippack Village” – I am kicking myself now for not grabbing a copy of the menu when we got our tickets, it’s not online anywhere! It’s 5 or 6 courses at 5 or 6 different restaurants in the Skippack Village, food and a glass of wine at each place. Hopefully I’ll be too full of fantastic wine and food to mind the 97 degree weather we have to endure while walking to each restaurant.

Monday: I took this day off from work, I have a lot of errands to run, including getting to the courthouse in Norristown to get our marriage license application notarized (the courthouse is only open during normal business hours, of course). In the evening we’re having the MontcoLUG meeting at Sly Fox Brewery (So local people come along! There will be BEER!).

I keep blabbering about how much I love listening to podcasts at work, I’m so much happier now. Below is a list of what I am enjoying these days:

Speaking of Faith
Security Now
This Week in Tech
Planetary Radio
Quirks and Quarks (great archives in mp3 format too!)
Escapepod (Science fiction short stories)
Penn Radio
Science Magazine Podcast

Most of these I got via recommendations from people (thanks again!). Sorry , I know you love the SubGenius Hour of Slack but the whole “Church of the SubGenius” is not my thing.

I also regularly listen live to the stream for WHYY that has good programs throughout the day. But I’m listening to it less than I used to, there is so much political blabber that is annoying me (I mostly can’t stand Talk of the Nation these days unless it’s Science Friday). And when I’m in the mood for music I tap into the library of ripped music on my computer or hook up to the stream for XPN.

So, anyone have other recommendations?

Archaeologists: Ancient Brewery Tended By Elite, Female Brewmasters

Outfitted with fire pits and large stones that supported huge ceramic vats, it had the capacity to churn out weekly batches of hundreds of gallons of brew – a highly impractical alcoholic delicacy, given the city’s perch thousands of feet above the nearest water source.

“There’s a lot of equality in terms of how men and women drink in the highlands of Andes,” she said. “Women will get as rip-roaring drunk, if not more so, than men.”

Hee.

Quite different than today. There are only a few female brewers in the industry, the only one that comes to mind is Hildegard van Osta of Urthel Brewery in Belgium.

Sunday afternoon we ended up at Michael’s brother’s house for a BBQ celebration following the Christening of Michael’s niece. We had a nice time in spite of the heat. When the heat got too bad we went inside where there was AC and the overtime bit of the final game of the World Cup. I was in a house full of Michael’s Italian family – who do you think we were rooting for?

As Michael posted the fun news for us this week is that we’re getting FiOS put in next week. Perhaps as an omen, our DCA.net connection went out last night – along with what they claim is ALL DCA.net ADSL customers:

We are currently experiencing a problem with the Verizon ADSL platform. This affects all DCANet/Verizon ADSL endusers. DCANet engineers are on site and investigating the cause. We believe it is a problem with Verizon's ATM network. We will follow up with more information as soon as it is available.

UPDATE: Verizon has confirmed that it is a fiber cut and they are working out in the street to repair the problem.

Ouch. This is especially unfortunate because Michael needs that internet connection to work from home, he’s stuck working at the office until it’s fixed. And all our sites are down until this is fixed, when Michael called this morning they were hoping to have the repairs completed by tonight.

Mmmm, I’m now enjoying a yummie roast beef and brie sandwich on fresh baked rosemary bread that Michael made me for lunch.

Yesterday morning we had a Verizon tech come out and check our line. There wasn’t anything drastically wrong with it, but I guess he just did some poking and tightening and now our connection is being much more well-behaved. Lets hope it stays this way.

…but we may not need that line to be stable afterall. The Verizon website now tells us we can get FiOS. Michael is calling tomorrow to ge the details on getting a business line to our house with a static IP (and confirming that port 80 is open on such static IP business accounts as this site says). They may be the evil empire, but we already have our land line and cellphones through Verizon. Come to think of it, if we get FiOS we won’t need the land line anymore, so a business FiOS line to our house will only actually cost us $40 more per month and it’ll be a hell of lot faster than what we have now %o

The time window for the tech showing up was any time between 8AM and 7PM (absurd huh?) so we didn’t make any plans for the day. The tech showed up in the late morning so our afternoon opened up. Michael ended up going into work for a little bit and I just decided to chill out at home. I spent a bunch of time fixing 13thHour.net, the profiles had been a bit broken since the upgrade to WP2 and once I got them back to pristine condition I decided not to mess with them further and haven’t re-added the fields for adding your own photo or birthday, I’ll add them to the MySQL table manually when people need me to.

In the evening we thought about heading out to Valley Forge for the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers Public Star Party but the sky had clouded up. We decided to hang in.

First we watched the final two episodes of the latest season of Doctor Who. Daleks vs Cybermen!!! AHKLDSFS!!! And the ending was sad, I was a bit tearful. I’m so in love with these new Doctor Who episodes, it’s really some of the best scifi television I’ve ever seen.

After watching Dr Who we went outside to enjoy the evening by a fire in our back yard, and had a nice discussion about our favorite scifi stuff.

And toasted marshmallows.

It was a good night.

Today I decided to switch from using firefox to using Opera on my laptop. My laptop is 500mhz, which is perfectly fine for most things, but firefox loves to eat up the entire CPU when it does things like, say, load a page. This is pretty annoying. I remember when firefox first came out, as that fantastic lightweight answer to mozilla, but now it’s gotten pretty big. SO I installed Opera, and although it eats up my entire CPU sometimes (like when loading a lot of images or flash page) it does it much less often than firefox did, normal browsing only takes up about half of my resources.

Michael’s birthday was this week. We went out to Greater India for his birthday meal. It was a great dinner, and I asked the owner if she knew of any places to purchase indian dresses in the area – of course she said Iselin was the best place but then gave me a card for a woman in Harleysville who sells dresses, I emailed her this weekend and with any luck I’ll be able to meet up with her and find a dress I like without driving all the way out to NJ.

And a lot of other #13thHour birthdays were this week too.

Ash – July 5th
Michael – July 6th (this is also the birthday of my mother’s boyfriend)
(colin_) and Etudes – July 7th
Barenjager – July 8th

Unfortunately with our internet connection being so goofy lately R2D2 wasn’t running to give ops to the BirthdayBot that comes in to change the topic. Ack! Slacking off on the busiest week of the year! The next channel birthday is , it should be all working better by then.

And now it’s just after noon and it’s a very pretty day out.

It’s Michael’s birthday today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MYN!!! %)

Last night he ended up working quite late and I decided to head down to the PLUG meeting with . The presentation at the meeting was about InfiniBand. I wasn’t familiar with the technology and so the talk, giving an overview of the history of the technology and its capabilities, was nice. The turnout for the meeting was relatively small, maybe 20 people, but I guess that’s how it gets in the summer.

After the meeting I got to finally meet , who lives doesn’t live too far from where the PLUG meetings are held. We all headed down the street to The Best House to get some pizza and beer. I stuck with a ginger ale and couple slices of pizza, no caffeine and no alcohol! We spent until about 10:30 talking about our latest projects.

On my way home I got to listen to Echoes on XPN, it was a nice end to my day.

Oh and Verizon is coming out Saturday to check out our phone line. Hopefully it’ll be something that can be fixed relatively quickly and my internet connection will get better, right now it’s getting worse each day.

I had a nice day yesterday.

Michael headed to the gym in the morning and I stayed home because 1) there were a zillion things I wanted to get done around the house and had been too lazy/hot to do all weekend 2) my gym clothes were dirty

So I spent the morning cleaning the house. I got to more of it than I expected considering the heat and then spent the early afternoon hiding in the air-conditioned computer room trying to keep cool while Michael made some food for our afternoon activities. Unfortunately our internet connection has been terrible lately (anyone I’m with on IRC with probably knows this!) and I spent more time doing writing than actually doing stuff online. We’re going to need to call Verizon and get them to look at our line, even the land line phone itself is starting to sound bad.

We headed over to the Malvern Sweat Lodge around 1:30 for a get-together Jim was having there. I had a nice time, lots of food, plenty of people I knew to talk to. We attended a sweat in the late afternoon, the first two rounds were for kids and I came in for the second two, more tough, rounds. Then there was the final round, a “warrior round” that was not led by Jim (he was too hot by then) but rather this other fellow who reminded me more of a Baptist preacher than a Native American shaman. Now there is nothing wrong with being excitable like a Baptist preacher, but because of the association it just doesn’t sit well with me, and their type of excitement has never been terribly appealing to me anyway. I made it through about 5 minutes of it before I had to get out because he made it so hot and I couldn’t breathe.

After the lodge I swam in the pool for a while. I don’t want a pool of my own right now, but someday when I am rich and have a castle and someone to take care of it for me – absolutely. I’d be in the pool all day.

We had some BBQ and left Jim’s around 7. I was pretty tired when I got home, sweat lodges do that to me. We watched some TV and went to bed.

I wish this morning had been similarly good. As I was packing up my gym bag this morning I realized that my purse was still in Michael’s car. Luckily I had my car keys so I could actually get to the gym and work but I didn’t have my pass to get in the work building this morning (had to call a co-worker to let me in). Michael had to take time out of his crazy busy day to drop off my purse to me at work. At the gym the hair driers were missing – when I asked at the front desk about them the woman said “They haven’t fixed those yet?! I’m so sorry!” AND THEN I got into work and learned that one of my favorite people here at work put in her notice. #$@$U#)9(D!! Actually I’m happy for her, but it’s sad to see her go.

Happy Monday – er – Wednesday! Oh goodie it’s already Wednesday!