All that said, I love the Flying Saucer. It's everything I'd hoped it would be, and much more. The staff is friendly, easy on the eyes, and I always run into someone I know when I'm there. I'm about to leave the office on this lovely Friday afternoon to meet Geoff there.

I have in store a completely unallocated weekend to spend in Kansas City. I am ecstatic about this. See you on the boring end of it!

1 Comment(s)

After we arrived in Louisville, we parked in a fantastic spot right on Fourth Street and walked over to "Fourth Street Live!" which is an all-at-once development in downtown Louisville that was planned, assembled, and constructed by the Cordish company in Baltimore. It was kind of eerie seeing all the bars and restaurants, because many of them are also in Kansas City's brand new Power and Light District. But along with some less impressive names like Wendy's and the US Post Office, Fourth Street Live! also had an excellent British-styled beer bar called, simply, The Pub.

Erp, Amber and I sat down in The Pub and enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine and warmth coming through the opened front windows, along with some of their well-poured beers. After we finished there we walked back down the street to the patio at Bluegrass Brewing Company, or BBC as it is locally known. We greedily clutched some beers as we waited for Michael and Liana to arrive, and confirm my status that weekend as a fifth wheel.

After a couple of beers and catching up at the BBC, we all agreed it was time to move on. Prior to leaving Kansas City, I consulted Beerfly, as I always do when I travel, to find a good beer bar in Louisville. The place that seemed to have the best aggregate review was a place called Flanagan's Ale House, which was about a mile from the BBC over on a diagonal street that points away from downtown called Baxter. On the map it looked to be a simple five or six minute trip. Unfortunately though, there was a parade just getting out, so the traffic was horrendous. On top of the fact that we were sitting in parking lot traffic, the police had most of the streets blocked off, specifically designed to direct the thousands of cars back to the highway so they could all go back to their far-flung homes.

So, getting to Flanagan's took over an hour. We literally could have walked faster, there and back, but we were parked on the street, and feeding the meter would have been highly unpleasant from a mile away. When we got reasonably close we kind of threw our hands into the air and just grabbed a curb parking spot and walked the remaining three or four blocks past the stopped cars with drivers agitated as we had been or more.

Flanagan's is a great bar, and they have a lot of beer available in bottles, but the tap selection is pretty austere. We grabbed a table on the back patio, and the other four people lit up all at the same time. I think it's great that they were able to relax, but the smoke got to me after a while. I probably should have said something. We stopped at one more place on the way back, and went back to the hotel for deep sleep and breathe-right strips for me.

Everybody was up and about by about 9am, and helped themselves to free breakfast. Erp and Amber slipped away for some private time in Louisville, leaving me with nothing to do in particular. So, I went with Liana and her mother to find and choose adornments for the hat that she'd be wearing for the derby the next day. It was a hoot. For real, I actually had a good time.

After that, Michael and Liana and I went to the White Castle that was fortuitously located next to our hotel, and ate many many teeny tiny burgers. We retired to the hotel lobby after that, where I taught them how to play Maui. But Maui is really hard to play with only three people. Craig and Amber came back late in the afternoon, and we spread a map out in front of us to decide where to go for leisure time that night. It showed all of Shelby County, Kentucky, which seemed to extend for about ten miles in all directions from Shelbyville. My suggestion was that we just drive the twenty miles to Frankfort and find something downtown. This opinion was brushed off by everyone else though even though nobody would think twice about driving 45 miles to Louisville.

Anyway, we wound up just piling into the rental and driving down the main drag of Shelbyville. We were about to turn around, and Criag was indeed in the process thereof, when we spotted a bar in an unexciting building on the side of the road. We figured it'd be as nice a place as any, and wandered in. Liana lost her footing in a frantic attempt to get inside out of the slightly-drizzling rain. Her tumble was apparently watched in full by the bar's patrons inside. No matter, we thought. It was time for a beer, and possibly some food.

Sergio's, as the place turned out to be called, features about fifteen taps of carefully selected beer, and as of the day of our visit, six hundred and fourteen different bottles of beer. As I always enjoy, Liana, Michael, and Amber for the most part deferred to my judgement for beer selections, and were pleased with the choices I made for them. Sergio himself, a Brazilian immigrant who had to tell us he was not actually from the US, served the beers and was happy to fill us in about any beer-related knowledge he had. The beer was fresh, delicious, and served in chalice-like glasses. When we finished our beers, our bottles were not picked up, much to our confusion. But it allowed for a feeling of accomplishment as the table was quickly and completely covered with dead soldiers.

All payment is made at the register on the way out. Sergio advised us that if we had forgotten the number or nature of the beers we drank, to just bring up our bottles as we paid. So that was why. We made it back to the hotel in time for Letterman and a deep and heavy sleep. I was awakened seven hours later by the sound of the Angry German Kid that I set as the wake-up ringer on my phone. We got hastily dressed, and by 7am we were standing out in the gloom and drizzle, ready to go. Liana's aunt was in a very big hurry to get going, but once we reached them on the highway in front of us, we found that they were driving at ten miles below the limit in open traffic. "Oh well," we thought. "We're on vacation."

We arrived at Churchill Downs about 40 minutes later, and found a free parking spot on the street in a nearby neighborhood. Apparently the folks in the other car were approached by a large man when they parked who offered to "watch their car," for twenty dollars. When they told him that they weren't worried about it, he rebuked them with, "this place is ghetto. Your car isn't safe here." Near where we parked there were lots of piece of the curb that were blocked off with milk crates and garbage cans, so that the local residents could try to charge people to park there. Everybody's trying to make a buck.

The pictures can speak better of the Derby itself, and this entry is getting long, so I'll just say that though it was the first Kentucky Derby I've attended, it certainly won't be the last. It was extremely fun, and the weather cleared completely within an hour of our arrival. We never even got wet. Beautiful women beyond count were all around, dressed better than I'm used to seeing women dress for weddings. The sun became kind of oppressive, though it never got hot out. I lost about $175 in wagers and won about eight dollars. As far as I'm concerned, the 2009 Derby is a go.

I spent Wednesday night doing long overdue laundry, in preparation for the impending trip, and for the overall long-term goal of having clean clothes. I stayed up questing with Nick until after midnight, and still didn't get to bed until after 1am.

My alarm clock screeched to life at 4:26am. I don't know why I picked 4:26 for a 5am pickup. I know it sounds arbitrary and I can't explain it. We got on the road closer to 6am though, as there were some delayys about which I didn't ask questions. We stopped in Boonville a while later for some breakfast.

We rolled into Louisville at about 3pm, and wasted no time in finding a place to get a drink. We checked out Louisville's older and smaller version of the Power and Light District. Keeping with Cordish's modus operandi cheesily called, "Fourth Street Live!"

I don't really have time to go over much more, except to say that we had a great time in Louisville last night. More to come.

So now, I have fluxbox installed and working beautifully. I still have a couple more customizations to make, but it's now in really excellent shape for a laptop of mine. I've gotten a couple of keyboard shortcuts set up, and the precious screen real estate is preserved in a much more efficient manner now.

In other, possibly more consequential news, I've been elected to the board of my building's homeowners' association. There's not much more to tell than that, though. I'll brief you when more developments arise.

I the course of my normal daily routine, I kept turning my attention to my new little laptop, and set about customizing it until it became clear to me that the default graphical user interface was not going to cut it for me. On a Linux-powered laptop, I require 7 relatively simple things: a web browser(firefox), console access(xterm), ssh(openssh), instant messaging(pidgin), perl, image processing(imagemagick), and the ability to play media(SMPlayer). These things are all arranged in difficult separated-out places in the default simple configuration, so I decided to start reading some of the startlingly abundant resources out there for hacking/customizing an Eee PC.

I quickly decided that I wished to use fluxbox instead of the default interface, and found a pretty detailed page on how to make this happen. I followed it closely, rebooted, and found that somehow, the setup I had followed caused my X server to break. On a normal Linux machine, if the configuration is broken, it tries a couple times and then stops, informing you that there much be something wrong, and that it's been disabled until you fix the problem. Not so on the Eee. It just kept trying and flickering and restarting X until I got tired of waiting for it to quit.

The Eee ships without the ability to have virtual consoles, so there was nothing I could have done even if it had disabled X. I had an unusable machine. Through a labored process, I finally managed to get a System Rescue CD loaded onto a USB thumb drive. I was able to get in, mount the root filesystem, and undo the changes that had been made.

Through some actions that are definitely not within the scope of novice computing, for which the Eee is targeted, I was able to restore operability on my computer. That said, most novices aren't going to mess with the system's settings either. There are lots and lots of resources out there for customizing Eee PCs, so I'll have to be more careful when I read them, at least now I have a bootable rescue disk on USB.

It's remarkable how fast the system boots. Except for one slow spot when my debbie-downer cube neighbor, Wayne, was watching, it takes literally under fifteen seconds to go from powered off to ready to use. Shutting down takes about five or six seconds. The system has a sleep/suspend capability, but it takes about ten or fifteen seconds to recover from it. With that in mind, I think it makes more sense to just shut down when I'm done using it, and turn it back on when I'm ready to use it again. It's a total difference of perhaps ten seconds between going to low battery consumption and just turning it off.

From my experience of using it for the last ten hours or so, I would highly recommend it. The solid-state drive is whisper-quiet. The fan, when it eventually kicks on, is imperceptably quiet. All that indicates to me that a fan is even running is a slight warmth on the left side of the keyboard.

Anyway, give one a try. I think it's great.

1 Comment(s)

1 Comment(s)

1. Bars: Pizza 51, Mike's Tavern, Crosstown Station, John's Big Deck

2. Route: The #25 bus

3. No Plaza bars

4. No Westport bars

5. No Midtown bars

6. No Power & Light bars

It's always great to expand the horizons of an annual pubcrawl, and it's good to see that without going to the most likely bar areas, new and exciting places can be found and enjoyed. The bars we visited that had been visited in previous iterations were Waldo Pizza, 75th Street Brewery, Charlie Hooper's, Grinders, Zoo Bar, Harry's Country Club, and the Red Front.

After leaving the Red Front, some of the few that remained gave the rest of the few that remained a ride to Town Topic. It was far too full, so said people(myself included) went to YJ's for coffee and breakfast food. At the end of the night, only Alex, Geoff, and I remained. Faced with the reality of not being able to catch a cab at 3:30am("I've got a two-hour wait." CLICK), we walked from 18th to my place on 7th before shaking hands and calling it a night.

Here is a selection of pictures from the event.

1. Flashman (Easiest level, easiest boss.)

2. Metalman (The metal blade was absolutely critical.)

3. Woodman (First victim of the metal blade.)

4. Airman (Easily my least favorite boss.)

5. Bubbleman (The underwater level was awesome. Watch out for the spikes!)

6. Heatman (The slow-moving bubble lead made mincemeat of the human Zippo.)

7. Quickman (Some of the best music in the game, and easily the hardest level in the game.)

8. Crashman (My favorite music in the game, and the only good use that ever came of Woodman's stupid spinning Leaf-shield.)

What's your order? Accusations of nerdery will not be recognized.

3 Comment(s)

So I snapped a picture. It sure wasn't letting me sleep.

2 Comment(s)

Work on Friday was work. Whatever. The joy gets sucked out of life when I'm on call, and I'm on call. fortunately, a lot of really great stuff is coming up, so it'll take a lot of sucking to get me joyless right now. I will outline the various reasons why.

1) I had an extremely painful tongue sore for the last week or so, and finally looks to be clearing up. It hurt to do anything: eat, talk, sleep, sit still, think, argue on the internet, anything. Now that it's feeling much better, I feel like going out and seeing the world.

2) I am on call, as I said, and the worst of it is most likely behind me. The weekend included a maintenance window, and James, who did the maintenance work, said that there were lots of fires to put out. It was almost an hour after the window officially ended before he switched the pager back over to me. I got paged about once every 45 minutes until 9am. Last night however, was hunky-dory.

3) The long winter appears to have finally subsided, and given way to a glorious green spring. Though it's about six weeks late in coming, Spring is here, complete with verdant green grass, blossom-plumed trees, and omnipresent emerging leaves. It's difficult to be in a bad mood in such surroundings. Plus, I still have like a month before flowering plants start to incite me into unstoppable fits of sneezing, and leprosy of the eyes.

4) This weekend is the third annual KCATA Pubcrawl. Along with several irresponsible friends, I will work my way from bar to bar between Waldo and downtown, using only my feet and the trusty bus to do it. It isn't forecasted to be as warm as it was in the previous two years, but it'll still be fine. I can't wait.

5) The weekend after that, I'm hopping in a car with Erp and Amber, and we'll be driving five hundred miles to Louisville, where we will attend the Kentucky Derby. I haven't been to Kentucky since Bart's wedding in 2006, and have been itching to get back. I just can't wait!

1 Comment(s)

On Saturday I received some excellent news that was slightly sullied, but excellent nonetheless. The ridiculous crap with my 2003 federal tax return appears to have been resolved, as I received a letter from my bank notifying me of a recent deposit to my checking account from the Internal Revenue Service. I logged into my bank's website and saw that I finally received my 2007 refund. Unfortunately, owing to the typically governmental stance of charging others for their own mistakes, the IRS helped themselves to a couple hundred dollars of my refund. I suppose I'll get a piece of mail sometime soon accounting for this discrepancy, and I'm certain that there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

That said, I still got about ninety percent of my refund, and immediately used it to pay my American Express bill, as I had planned on doing in February, when I was expecting it. The remainder of the refund has padded my checking account to a comfortable level, so that for the present, things are A-OK. I celebrated the fresh solvency by playing video games with Nick online, and then meeting him out for a quick beer.

That "quick beer" turned into a multicity jump from Grinders to Paci's to the Peanut to JP Wine Bar. Jim joined us after we left Grinders. We were driving up Oak, and when we reached 12th, we thought, "maybe Jim'd like to join us!" So I turned left on 11th and Nick called Jim to ask if he was up for some beer right now. He was, and good times were consequently had. Even with all this, I still got home by 1am that night, and slept like a log until long after sunrise.

I spent Sunday sitting around the house, doing nothing in particular.

Note: Few, if any, of these applications are specific to Linux, but since Linux is free and easy, and I've been using it for years, I'm qualifying them as Linux apps.

#1, by far: Perl It wasn't until I started writing a lot of code in Perl that I really realized the true potential of computers. The same could be said of any programming language, really, but Perl is free, easy, elegant, fun, and simple enough for even a programming novice like myself. Perl powers this entire website. I use Perl every day at work, and have subsequently saved my employers uncounted thousands of dollars in saved time and organization.

#2: Samba My first system administration job was at a small software company in Dubuque, IA, where I was brought in to manage a Redhat Linux server they'd leased from Dell, to host their excruciatingly inelegant code repository. They used no code versioning system of any kind. Instead, their highly modular source code, which by the way was really outstanding software, was hopelessly hosted on the Linux server and shared out to the office network using Samba. So, when someone needed to compile, the development software on their Windows PC would compile the tens of thousands of discrete files out on the network, and bring the server to its knees. Samba allows unix-like machines to host and connect to windows networking shares. This inelegant setup however, helped me like nothing else in learning it for my own use, and taught me well what not to do. Today, I keep all of my important data(media files, sensitive information, odds and ends) on a separate machine at home, and my Windows machine only has program files installed, so if it fails, I experience no data loss. This must all be a little confusing to the nontechnical reader, and I maintain that Samba has to be experienced to be understood and appreciated.

#3: Imagemagick As of this entry, I have 4330 pictures on this website. Every single one of them has been resized. You better believe I didn't go into Photoshop and resize them all. Actually, I don't even have Photoshop, as I have no need for it, no desire to pay for it, and would rather be as legal as possible with the software I use. Using the raw power of the command line, Imagemagick allows me to make batch updates to all the images that ever get uploaded to this website.

#4: Apache httpd As a platform for Perl development, having access to an apache server has been invaluable. Half or more of the programming I do is for web applications, or for this website. It's always extremely handy to have access to a world-accessible web server, if I need to move files around.

Without these four pieces of software, I would be sunk.

3 Comment(s)

That said, I think we're going to see a couple of bars disappear within the next year or two. I have prepared a list of the ones I like.

1. Chez Charlie's It's not often that I love a bar that has nothing on tap, but Chez Charlie's makes the cut. I can't often go though, because most of my friends aren't tolerant enough of smoke to brave it. It is easily the smokiest bar that I have seen in Kansas City. From what I've seen when I've been there, the smokiness is a big reason why many of the people like to go there. I could take or leave the smoke, but I think with the ban in place, they'll be hurting for customers.

2. Dave's Stagecoach Inn Ah, Dave's. A welcome retreat from the douchebaggery and ambitious pricing of the main part of Westport, only a block away. The beer is on tap, fresh, and cheap. The tiny space guarantees that unless you're there to stand in a circle, you're going to have to move on. They used to sell t-shirts that said something to the tune of, "Dave's: Your first stop after parole."

3. Fitz's Blarney Stone Fitz's is like Dave's, but without the crowd, and with more available seating. There's always an imbalance between the actual setting of the hair-blowing throat-drying HVAC system and the level at which comfort may be reached. But like so many dive bars, the staff and regulars couldn't be happier to see you. Some have complained that they won't go because it's in a terrifying neighborhood, but I don't buy it.

4. The Peanut on Main Easily the smallest seating area of any bar in Kansas City. I don't know how they get drinks and food served there, honestly. There's an ancient payphone on the wall with a taped-on sign that warns you not to use it, but that rings on occasion, causing a desperate but humorous gait by one of the staff to answer it. The Pale Ale is cheap and comes in pitchers so you'll leave the bartender the hell alone.

5. Gilhouly's It wasn't until some of my friends moved to the West 39th area that I ever really gave this place a serious try. But man, it is a great bar. I rang in 2008 here. The booths are disgusting, and there are various articles of debris crammed into the wall's many fissures and gaps, and the smoke will make you wish you didn't have eyes, but I always have a good time at Gilhouly's. The music is great, the service is fast and attentive, and I always run into someone I haven't seen in years. That's odd too, considering I have only lived in KC for seven.

6. Harling's This gigantic bar somehow still manages to have a visible cloud of smoke from about four feet off the floor all the way up to its 20-foot ceilings by about 9pm on any night that it's reasonably busy. The beer is on tap, cheap, and delicious. The men's room smells more like urine than urine, which stands to reason because flushing the handleless urinal is a pretty drawn-out and painful process. The bartender can often be found playing the Ms Pacman table instead of pouring drinks, and you'd better make sure to bring cash, unless you want to pay their shady ATM fee. The clientele is a mix of bohemian hotties, UMKC/KCAI no-budget students, lifers, and a very light load of urban professionals.

All of these great bars are now at serious risk, and there's really not much that can be done about it. None of them are in places where a patio is both desirable and feasible, though of all these, I think Harling's probably has the best chance of making it, seeing as they have a back porch where customers can take their beer and smoke.

We'll see how it all plays out.

11 Comment(s)

The network people for a moment removed one of their boxes of crap from the top of the vacant cube across from me, and for the briefest of moments, I could see the window from my seat.

I had a fun but typical Kansas City weekend. I met up with about twenty people I know on Friday night, over the course of about six hours. Nick and Josh turned thirty on that day, and combined the celebration of their shared birthday with Angela and Anna, who shortly before and after turned thirty and twenty-six, respectively. Everyone convened at Grinders and scoffed at Spring taking its sweet-ass time in arriving.

I was late and slow in beginning my Saturday, due to carelessness on Friday night. I joined up with remnants of the same group to drink more beer and grill various meats in Roanoke Park before heading home to do a quick change, and head to the P&L to meet Callie, who was in town from San Francisco to visit some friends and family. It was my first big Saturday night since the P&L more or less opened. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was blown away. Thousands of people were there, and it wasn't even that nice out. It was amazing to see such a thing in a place that only a couple years ago was a derelict area of poorly paved surface lots and crumbling ready-to-condemn buildings.

Now, I'm in the office for quarter end monitoring, working the graveyard shift until 5am. I have plenty of time this week to get some programming done, and enjoy the peace of not having to deal with requesters' phone calls.

Stay fresh!

1 Comment(s)