Category: random

So this blog has become one of those that only gets updated once or twice a month, I’m really sorry about that, it annoys me too. But life has, yet again, been very busy. August is the month of birthdays around here with 5 in 2 weeks, so there were many birthday festivities recently which made for quite a bit of fun, and full weekends. This holiday weekend is the big Rock and Roll Half-Marathon in Virginia Beach that Jim and I have been training for for the past four months. We have the hotel down there the whole holiday weekend (the race is on Sunday) so it’ll also be a mini beach vacation as well. I’m so excited to run it, not sure if I’ll end up running every mile but I’m definitely gonna finish it, no question on that! It’s pretty awesome to go from hating running and “only running when someone chases me” to actually enjoying running in the mornings. It’s true what they say, at some point you transition from “Ugh, this is work” to “Oh, this is nice” when you’re running and once you (finally) get past that barrier it’s really quite pleasant. Running is a good time to think about nothing I’ve found, if I try to think about something too intense (some task at work or something) I lose concentration on running and always end up tripping or something. So I’ll stick with chatting with Jim, listening to music or audio books. I’ll post pics from the race once I’m back from….my trip to Europe!

So Jeremy is going to a conference for work next week in Germany and we figured, don’t get to go to Europe very often, why not turn this into a vacation as well? So I’m meeting him out there next week and we’re going to go to Florence and Paris for a week, riding the overnight train between the two. I’ve travelled to Florence before, but have only been there during the day, and never stayed overnight, so I’m excited to (hopefully) get to see a less touristy side of Florence. I’ve never been to Paris, that’s sort of the last “big city” in western Europe that I haven’t been to so I’m really looking forward to it. If you have any suggestions of places to go, things to see, food to eat, whatever, leave me a comment and lemme know! I’m sure there will be many, many, many pictures from this trip up on Flickr when I get back. Until then, ciao and au revior!

Ok, so it’s been a bit too long between posts, sorry about that, I’ve been crazy busy lately

Went up to Pennsylvania for the Fourth of July weekend for lots of family visiting (both sides actually, which is a rarity). Went to a family picnic with my dad’s side of the family on the 4th then saw my mom’s side of the family at my cousin’s high school graduation party. In between the various family gatherings there was a visit and tour of the Lackawanna Coal Mine, which was actually really cool. Hard to believe people made (and still make) their living doing such dangerous work underground. There was a lot of old coal mining equipment around outside the mine at the visitors center so I got a lot of cool machinery shots while we were there too, all the pics from the weekend are up on Flickr.

I’ve also gone to see quite a few movies in the past few weeks, Hellboy 2, Incredible Hulk, WALL-E, and on Thursday a group of us went down to Hampton to the midnight showing (dumb New Town theatre wasn’t doing a showing) of The Dark Knight. Wow is that movie amazing. Very epic in it’s scope and pretty intense in a lot of parts. Another thing I really enjoyed about it was they managed to mix in quite a bit of humor, yes the Joker (played masterfully by Heath Ledger) had a lot of good one liners but other characters had some good quips too. They also integrated the CG stuff into the movie very well, it was hard to tell where they used CG stuff rather than live action, which is something I think quite a few movies have lost the past few years, the technology is definitely getting better every year, but knowing when and where and how much to use it is by far a better effect.

Another thing I encountered this week is the web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. It’s created by Joss Whedon who did Buffy, Angel and Firefly and it’s fantastic, he describes it as a “supervillain musical” (think his musical episode of Buffy). It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion (the lead from Firefly) as his archnemesis Captain Hammer with Felicia Day as the love interest Penny (she also stars in the web series The Guild, which I went off a tangent on and watched all 10 episodes of, also very good. If you’re fan of WoW or know someone who is, you should definitely check it out). The three part series is free until Sunday and then it will be only available on iTunes, there are some fantastic one-liners in it and is very entertaining.

Ok, time for me to clean house, one of my friends from college is coming to visit this week and I need to get the cat hair tumbleweeds that manage to appear less than a day after vacuuming corraled up.

So with summer comes the fun of the local fairs and carnivals, and the James City County Fair was held this past weekend at Chickahominy Riverfront Park. This was the first time I’d been to a “real” county fair, with a petting zoo, vegetable, fruit, jam, <insert name of any baked good here> judging, tractor pulls and lawn mower races, and it was a lot of fun. A bunch of us rode our bikes to the fair because 1) good exercise and 2) didn’t have to pay for parking. We watched the tractor pull for a while then wandered around the various booths, had some fair food, watched a few lawn mower races and finished off the afternoon with a funnel cake. A most excellent way to spend a summer afternoon.

On a similar train of thought with fairs and carnivals, I remember that it was at the Dalton, Pennsylvania carnival that I rode my first “real” roller-coaster (albeit a very small one) with my grandfather when I was 5 or 6 (he loved riding roller coasters, even into his 70s). Of course I’ve been addicted to roller-coasters ever since (Busch Gardens season pass anyone?) but some of the other rides at carnivals are really great too. Anyone remember (and I think they still have) the ride that’s one big open cylinder that spins around really fast and it’s just centrifugal force that holds you in place while the ride tilts around, that one’s pretty fun especially when you try to lift your arm or leg against all the force. They used to have a similar ride at Kings Dominion years ago called Time Shaft that was indoors and as it was spinning the floor would drop from underneath your feet and you’d just be kinda suspended in midair, pretty cool (apparently the technical name of that kind of ride is a rotor ride), but it’s long gone unfortunately.

Man, now I want to go ride roller coasters…maybe this weekend.

Ah yes, the title for this post (provided automatically by wordpress for the first post, btw) is the age-old default text used by computer scientists when writing a new program. Whenever I would learn a new language, or was trying to test out something, the first thing was always to make a program that printed “Hello world!” to the screen. So here it is, first foray into the blogging world, might as well follow tradition…Hello (blogging) World! 🙂