When we started researching the event, there were 2 different dates referenced on web sites. In fact, the Blind Lady mailed out that they had confused the date too.

The tickets cost $25 each, but Mercedes found a $5 off deal. Still, the ordering site added a $2.50 processing fee, so that kinda sucked. For what we got, we think it was over priced by about $10.

Parking was about the same as normal for Adams, so about 5 mins of hunting side streets. The ticket booth was quick, with laser zappers that read the 2D barcodes nicely. Then we got a necklace badge with numbers that some of the vendors punched, I guess so you didnt come back for another whole bite of soy chorizo burrito.

We started at Blind Lady – a slice of nicely spicy margherita pizza. Then we hit Mariposa ice cream and they were very generous with two scoops of whatever they had. The Mexican chocolate was great! Next was Tams Thai which had a line too long to wait for so we skipped it. Next was Gold Donuts. They gave you a piece of a donut or fritter, or 3 donut holes for yer card punch. That was actually a pretty nice portion and fulfills my donut needs for the next year.

Then we met up with our buddies Kay Marie and Gerardo, and headed back in the other direction. Country Kabob Greek had some steam tables on the sidewalk with a tiny piece of pita with really spicy yogurt, and a bite of yummy spanikopita. Portions too small, but very tasty.

Lestats had iced coffee and brownie bites. Elaine liked the coffee, I never touch the stuff. The brownie was fine – kinda dry. Then we ran back across the street to TAO Thai and had some nice spicy tofu and a great chicken in some sweet sauce with mixed wild rice. No skimping on the portions here! They even had a mini dessert with mochi and bean curd. Right next door was Viva Pops! where they make their own Popsicles. The blood orange was yummy, and the girls said the chocolate banana was great too.

Elaine really liked El Zarape – rice, beans, carne, and chicken. Then a nice margarita shot! Well be back! Then we walked all that off and stopped into Incredible Cheesecake where I think they gave us a wafer thin hint of a smell of a taste of some cheese cake. Really chintzy.

Next was Jaynes Gastropub, who did the best job of all of the venues to treat us as more than a bother. We were seated and served bangers and mash. The portion was tiny, but we liked the service and the friendly people. We stayed a bit and ordered some beers to keep our strength up. Senior Mango was next, and I had a berry smoothy that was a nice size. None of the others had been inside AC Lounge before, so we popped in and were greeted very warmly by the bartender. They were serving half off drinks, but we were worried about running out of time, so we pressed on.

We skipped Twiggs because of time and tried Cafe 21. They had some dried out hash on dried out bread crumbs on a tray. Quite meh. Then we jumped on the trolley, which was a really nice part of the event, and went to the Farm House Cafe and had ricotta pancakes in a butter sauce with oranges. Very rich and tasty!

The trolley driver was cool and let us take our food on board so we didnt have to wait another 10 mins for the next bus. One of my main goals was to get to Ponces, someplace Ive heard great things about, so we rode the trolley all the way to the other end of Adams to Kensington. This was about 2:40, so we had 20 mins until the end of the event.

We tried out the Kensington Cafe, which had really nice people staffing sidewalk steam tables, but served up a minuscule bite of the aforementioned soy chorizo. Double meh. Burger Lounge had a 5 minute wait while they whipped up some more food, so we skipped it and hit Bleu Boheme. My old buddy JenBen was hosting and directed us back to a gentleman serving escargot in a rich sauce. Id never had them, and they were kinda like mussels or salty, chewy mushrooms with a slightly grainy texture. Oh, and they were snails… So that was different. I liked the place and the vibe tho.

Finally, with 10 minutes to spare, I get to try out Ponces!!! But no, theyre rejecting people at the door saying they ran out of food. WTF? How the hell do you run out of food? Youre a restaurant! The snails didnt leave a bad taste, but Ponces sure did. What a shitty way to treat people.

So, all in all, it was a nice event but many of the venues didnt do themselves any favors by being cheap on the offerings.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/36057011

Time: 07:22:09
Moving Time: 06:02:09
Elapsed Time: 07:22:11
Avg Speed: 12.9 mph
Avg Moving Speed: 15.8 mph
Max Speed: 32.8 mph

I survived my second century ride, the LA River Ride!

That’s 100 miles on a bike… and I’m feeling all of them today I really should have taken the day off of work, but I didn’t know I was riding before my Monday had already filled up with meetings. I was going to pass on this ride until I remembered that my buddy Tom lives right next to Griffith Park in LA where the ride begins. Tom and Jen just had a new arrival 7 months ago, Charlie:

Charlie’s the pudgy one with short hair… He’s a delightful kid who was a lot of fun to play with. So’s Tom! Sorry, Jen, I didn’t get a good picture of you…

Anyway, they let me crash on their couch on Saturday night after another buddy, Terri, cooked us a wonderful pasta dinner.

Sunday came too soon and I was up at 5am with cool SMSs from work friends wishing me well. I got outside and started putting the bike together:

then waited for Kitchen to show up. Of course, he set his alarm wrong and was way late, so I biked the 2 miles over to the park alone to get my registration materials.

The ride was well organized and I had my bracelet and cue sheet within minutes. On the ride over, I’d noticed that my bike computer was dead, so I borrowed a way-too-big screw driver and got it open in about 20 minutes. It all worked when I shifted the battery around, then promptly died again when I snapped it back into its holder. Damn computers… Kitchen has a fancy pants Garmin bike computer, so I’m counting on him to give me the route and all the stats. Well, I should say he SHOULD have one, but he left it in his car, so when he showed up at 7:30, we picked it up as we started the ride:

Then we were off on this almost totally flat 100 mile ride! Except they forgot to tell us that the first 4 miles was a climb up the big hill in Griffith Park. That got the heart pumping, especially Kitchen’s as he was riding his brand new fixed gear bike! He had to zig zag up the hill, but he make it! Throughout the ride, people were very impressed with his bike and the effort. They didn’t know he had a motor hidden in the tubes… not.

Once we were through the park, we got on the river path:

The LA River is a concrete bank with water running at the bottom. It runs for miles and makes for a great bike path, but man, it’s kinda ugly. In some places, enough silt has backed up to support trees and bushes. I was surprised how much bird life I saw. Sand pipers, some kind of white hawk, kestrels, and ducks. It might be an interesting place to go up and photograph. I’ll have to go learn about why it was built the way it was. At the very least, many parts of it are a lesson in why to think about aesthetics when you design a city.

There are a lot of scary creatures in there too:

I liked these bridges:

As a spoiled San Diegan, I mostly find LA pretty ugly:

but Seal Beach was pretty nice:

Long Beach was the halfway point:

A mess of bikes:

Friggin’ hipster:

More riding:

More posing:

Then finally, after seven hours, it’s over!!!

Time to grab the tshirt and go find a shower!

I got some great support on Twitter and Facebook! Thanks for that!

Bryan’s learning how to count:

We saw Wolverine and didn’t go out for sushi.

I took a lot of pictures as usual. They’re all up on Flicrk, but here are a few I really liked:

Our hotel was right across the street from the Rhode Island State house. I forgot to fix my white balance before I shot it, but I kinda like the effect:

If all of the cars in front were as old as the one in the middle, I could have pretended it was an old slide

Here’s a more “accurate” shot:

We headed over to the local mall’s food court for lunch:

Lotsa folks in that one – Mike Giarlo, Rob Cassion, Ross Singer, Phil Cryer.

I really enjoyed spending a few days with our intrepid Esme:

(He lives in Florida, Mike.)

Here Dan Chudnov does his Bollywood routine in celebration of Slumdog Millionaire’s big Oscar wins:

Jodi Schneider was thrilled to see me, as always:

I finally met Ed Summers, in the middle. It’s good to see him inspiring others as he does me. Bess Sadler is enjoying the fracas as well:

Gabe Farrell, on the right, forgot he owed me $20. Never do that. It gives me WAY too much license…

Mike Park left me waiting to be picked up at the airport:

Well ok, he mailed me 3 weeks before the event asking if I needed a ride and I sent him an itinerary and said I’d confirm closer to the flight. Three hours before the flight takes off doesn’t really count! Mike drove me, Esme, Brad, and Dan all over the place, either because he’s a great dude, or I’m good at making people feel guilty. Either way, I win! Thanks Mike for being a great host.

Actually, I gotta say that the whole Brown Univ (or is that Univ of Providence?) crew kicked ass in prep and execution of this conference. BRAVO Birkin, Jean, Bonnie, and other names I can’t remember because I drink a lot.

I also take a lot of pictures, so I’ll inevitably get something cool like this:

Heehee! I love my Lensbaby!

Pizza is good!

Did you know the lead singer of Saliva is a librarian?

Ross pretends to laugh at something while trying to ignore the fat dude sticking a camera in his face:

Just looking at this costs me 14 points:

Brad, Dan, and I visited the inside of the RI State House before we ran to the airport, and decided that we should hold the next code4lib in the Senate chambers:

Never get on that end of a canon, especially when I am on the other end…

As usual, way too many pictures here:

Awesome seeing you all again!

Especially thanks to you guys for giving me yer moneyz!!!

D

“If you go to the standard technology meet-ups,” says Gabriel Lawrence, director of IT security at UCSD, the glow of the pool reflecting in his glasses, “it’s all a bunch of geeks standing around lecturing each other. But look at this: There’s all kinds of people here. There’s the technology people, so, if you want to talk tech and be like 1, 0, 1-1, 0, 1-1, you can. But then there’s marketing folks, there’s radio personalities, there’s newspaper media—I mean, everybody’s here. Eric Bidwell, a candidate for mayor, is here. I voted for him because I met him at a Tweetup. This is what it should be like—you get to meet lots of people, there’s lots of ideas and it’s a fun environment.”

I wonder how drunk one needs to be to speak in binary…

Great colors:

And library geeks playing games:

They have a neat house in the woods:

Which let me grab some Fall color:

We hadn’t seen each other in 12 years, but we talked like we’d seen each other yesterday. Thanks for a great visit, Maureen!

Thanks to @celerysword for the fix:

I haven’t processed the content yet, but I did take a lot of pictures. What encapsulates a trip better than a grown man in an Anne of Green Gables hat and braids?:

Jim Tuttle is so silly… I wouldn’t be caught dead…

Dang digital cameras…

PEI is famous for its lobster, and there is good reason:

They are served almost everywhere. We had these on Monday night:

We also had a few tasty beverages. Here Grant and Jim listen politely to Mike tell a story. The politeness comes from not understanding a thing he was saying due to a very strong Boston accent:

or a lot of beer.

The University of PEI’s University Librarian, Mark Leggott, took us all on a walk to the red sand beach:

which he said was lovely. We had to take his word for it because there were no lights, the moon was covered in cloud, and we were all dizzy from blood loss to mosquitoes.

Thankfully, there was a bar at the end of the walk, so we could hide from insects and Chris could get a drink:

For lunch on Wednesday, we went to the local farmers market:

where three of the locals – Paul, Peter, and Alex demonstrated the East Coast Canadian habit of stopping and standing in the middle of a walk way. I’m not kidding, these people have getting in my way down to a science.

Then we walked the length of the island on a path:

Ok, not really, but the path does stretch from tip to tip. Maybe someday I’ll bring my bike up there.

The locals bath when the sewers back up and spew what can only be raw sewage 6 feet into the air:

Or it was a clever fountain.

This was a small petting zoo for crabs and lobsters. Notice no one putting their hands in:

Jim was then sent home for “disturbing” the local livestock:

Ok, so the water and boats and beautiful:

But what is prettier than a man sized potato?

I’m talking about the one in the back…

On Weds night, we were sitting at dinner and I got the Lensbaby out and got some nice shots:

Here’s Richard Green from Hull:

Peter Binkley from Canadia:

And Mark Leggott again:

The flowers really add to the scene…

On Thursday night, Grant and his daughter brought us down to see Victoria Bay:

Note the famous, ubiquitous red soil.

I got a little bit of the sunset:

Then the rain rolled in:

On Saturday, Jim and I got a car and drove from Charlottetown as far East as possible and looped back.

PEI has many lighthouses:

And pretty, red cliffs:

And pretty streams:

And more light houses:

That one is on East Point, the farthest we could go East.

Jim was too cool for all this:

And I was eaten alive by mosquitoes:

Then we went to see Pineapple Express. All in all, a pretty good day!

Here are a lot more pictures (Flickr link):

Mark, the man with the meat:

Leah “I hardly KNOW her”:

Jason Hoos:

Mark demonstrates his child care technique:

Chirs Tromboski (I knew I’d spell it wrong, so why not be absurd?):

Dorothy Moe, wasted:

Elizabeth Badrov, hitting on me, as usual:

Super cutie Kate Badrov with Kera in the background:

Some guy:

Liz and Heather do what they do every day, plan to take over the world:

More pictures here:

One of my best buds is Greg, my brother in law. We sneak off and play Trivia, drink beer, and eat chicken wings. Usually before or after 2 or 3 movies. Sweet…

A highlight of a visit to Elaine’s sister Beth is when they start drinking and get caught in a darkly descending spiral of hysterical laughing. It usually ends in someone peeing. This was a bonus year because their other sister, Jean, made the trip up to Chicago. This adds an unstoppable critical mass to the spiral. Enjoy:

Beth has lost it. Now it’s Elaine’s turn:

Jean tips over:

Finally, Beth’s head asplodes:

They hate me now, but someday they will appreciate that I had my camera shipped 2000 miles to capture this. Like I care…

I got some more time to play with my Lensbaby and got some nice shots. Here’s Rebecca:

And Rachael:

Jean’s daughter Candice (not Kelly. Don’t ask.):

Jean’s son Ryan:

A bunch of cousins:

More attitude than I can handle:

Just to be fair:

We had a great time in yet another palatial basement. I wish we could have basements out in California. The lack of humidity, bugs, and lots of heat help… a little.

More pictures:

Elaine and I lived in Shampoo-Banana for nearly 15 years, first as undergrads, then as professionals. I worked at UIUC the whole time, while Elaine went from printing to computer support to airline pilot. The kids were born there, and Nathan still keeps in touch with his daycare buddies. Here are Sam, Nathan, and Hannah:

And their mom, Ellen on the right:

Erin, in the middle, had about hit her limit of being gracious about meeting people she didn’t know as you can see by her thrilled expression. Declan vs a 13 year old girl. Guess who will win…

We had lunch at Papa Del’s with Leslie (I failed to get a picture, we were talking so much), Daver, and b.:

I had a couple deep dish slices because they were fast, but Elaine held out for her favorite:

Papa Del’s thin crust piled with all kinds of good stuff. Fun fact: She LOST half a pound on this trip, whereas I had to buy a whole row of seats to get home. Grumble…

I went walking around campus and surprised Lynnell Lacy:

and shot some buildings. With my camera… Here’s where we got married:

St. Johns church.

This is the main Library:

Geek that I am, I couldn’t resist meeting up with new UIUC buddies Matt Cordial and Tim Donahue from the UIUC libraries. No picture tho, it was too friggin hot!

Here’s the Undergrad Library, which was build underground so as not to cast a shadow over the Morrow Plots, the first something or other AG something.

Obligatory Quad, Alma Mater, and Altgeld Hall shots:

Ok, that’s done. So now we can go drinking and play Bingo with the Wolfs – Megan, Greg (the kids), Penny, and Bob (the old ones):

Yep, that’s Greg in a Marilyn Monroe wig, singing “Happy Birthday” to someone. We were at a bar in downtown Champaign called Boltinis. The owner is a buddy of Greg’s and was having trouble getting much business on a Tuesday night. He asked Greg if he had any ideas, and Bingo night was born. Greg’s a performer (“ham”) and plays lounge lizard “Marv” perfectly.

We had a great time and won a lot of shots.

Which we fed to Elaine. Erin was NOT amused:

Every Wednesday, since I was a pup, there is a crew that meets for BREW (Beer Refreshment Every Wednesday) at Joe’s Brewery (used to meet at Coslows – I’m that old…) in Champaign. Luckily, our trip spanned a Weds, so I dropped in and saw some old friends. Here’s Warner:

And Charley:

And Debbie with kid!

I also ran into an old business partner, Mike Smeltzer:

Elaine’s friend Kim came out to join us:

Megan and Brian were there too. Not sure if they were meeting us, or if they are just at every bar all the time…

We then had to eat, so we hit Monical’s (Jerry, eat yer heart out!):

Then capped the night off with a Black and White from Jarlings:

On the way out of town on Thursday, I had lunch with my old friend Robin:

More pictures:

There was a reception at a restaurant in Bloomington, and here’s where I saw some brothers and sisters I hadn’t seen since 2001.

Here’s Nuala – we’d actually seen her in Belleville, but I didn’t have my real camera yet, just the iPhone’s camera:

Brendan’s sporting the Hell’s Angels look now:

Diardra and Doug were there too:

Some of these pictures are from after mass the next day.

Kevin had also driven up with Brendan:

I was having a little fun with my Lensbaby. His hair doesn’t really look like that.

The “OOO,” Una was also there:

The only sibling missing was Aidan. He and Renia had just given birth to a new boy, so they couldn’t travel. Welcome Jacek Michael Fleming!!!

Here are the bunch of us, with Rich and Judy on the ends:

The Hardys are always gracious hosts and put us up in their palatial basement for 2 days:

Tim Flynn, a buddy from UIUC, joined us at Avantis (mmm, Avanti’s bread…):

And I got to see my grade/high school buddy Jim Taylor:

I hadn’t seen him in 20 years! After lunch, we got to go see his mom, Phyllis. She was one of my mom’s best friends:

Here’s the public housing I grew up in:

Imagine 9 people living in half of that building. Fun times…

This is getting long, so tons more pictures from Bloomington here:

I tried to blog on the fly using the new iPhone, and got some pictures and a little text posted using the WordPress for iPhone app. It did a good job. I’m still not used to the iPhone keyboard (this is short hand for “it sucks”), so I didn’t include much text. I think people like to look at pictures more any way!

The trip started in a very exciting manner. As I’ve blogged earlier, the Stupid Dog has a skunk fetish. After the second run in and subsequent spraying, we hired a skunk trapper. The traps were set up in the backyard for about a week with no real action, so we kind of ignored them. Robert, our house sitter and driver, came over on Weds to take us to the airport. He took Stupid Dog out to the backyard to let him take a pee before we left, and guess what?!? There was a skunk in a trap that we didn’t notice. Stupid Dog noticed…

The trapper had wrapped the traps in garbage bags to contain any spraying, so Stupid Dog ripped through that and got sprayed full in the face. At this point, we’re thinking about finding his embedded chip, cutting it out, and setting him free. Ok, maybe that was just me. Elaine quickly changes clothes and does the dance – peroxide (oh, we’re out – Nathan RUN to the store), vinegar, baking soda (where IS it now?!?) – finally getting the dog into some state of smell that we can lock him up in the house and Robert can still breath over the smell.

This whole time we’re watching the clock because we have a flight to St. Louis at 12:05…

We made the flight, but in the rush to get out the door, I forgot my camera, and we forgot car and house keys – things that we’ll need to actually get back to the house after the trip. Nothing like a little extra stress added to a long trip…

Long story short, Robert shipped my camera with a ton of insurance, and later shipped keys once we got those logistics figured out. Robert kicks ass.

There are already a lot of highlight photos below. I’ll put in a view of all the pictures here, then some specific collections.

Phelan (@imagium), a BarCampSD buddy, had requested a while back that when we declare a BarLunch on Twitter that we pick somewhere in the Kearny Mesa area, closer to him so he could join us. Being a good manager, I put the work back on him and he suggested this great new place.

Here’s Phelan and surprise guest luncher Erika!

Paige was there too, but we kept her under the table.

First, they bring out a big pot of soup (original, spicy, or a split pot with both) and set it to boil on a hot plate in the middle of the table:

Then they bring out a platter of thinly sliced meat, vegetables, tufu, noodles, string mushrooms, and monkey brains.

Ok, maybe not monkey brains – fish balls and meat balls.

Then you cook. Yer own lunch. Why do we have to pay if we’re doing all the work?

Mmm! It was very good! Gabe give’s it a thumbs up:

Even the boy liked it!

I got to see one of my favorite geek librarians, and fellow photographer, Cindi Trainor:

She takes lots of portraits, I’m more of the candid shot guy:

Although, if the light is right, even I can’t resist a pose:

That’s Tombriarian on the left.

Another Harvard buddy I ran into is Kenley Neufeld:

He’s a hoot and gave me a Twitter fix on his iPhone when my Blackberry was giving me trouble.

Dan Suchy from UCSD also came up for a day:

He was in the “special librarians” seminars all day.

More pictures, lots of new librarian twitter friends met:

It’s been a hectic couple of months, and appears to be the same in the near future. Lots of work and personal travel, Nathan graduating high school and getting ready for college, kid management during the no-school summer months, skunks, new toys… The list goes on

Today we’re getting ready for Robert McDonald’s going away party, my trip to the UCCSC, then off to Illinois for 10 days to visit family and celebrate Rich and Judy Koch’s 50th wedding anniversary. We did a blitz house cleaning last week so Robert could house sit without dealing with our mess. Makes for a nice house for the last week

Congrats to Nathan (on the right – his buddy Gerry is on the left)!

Nathan graduated from Westview High School yesterday. Grandma came out to see:

And Diardra and Doug flew out too!

Erin was thrilled to cheer on her brother:

After the ceremony:

(Can you spot Nathan?

We went to Adams Avenue Grill for some nom:

Of course, since I borrowed a killer lens from Patrick (thanks dude!), I got a few nice shots around the restaurant as the sunlight was fading:

Here are lots more:

Here’s the map from Motion Based:

Here we are by the bridge:

Here I am crossing:

I call this one: Find the Bike:

It’s a study in vertical lines and horizontal curves.

Thanks so much to Joe and Lorah!

He succeeded.

Short version: We spent 8 straight hours and won a $200 flashlight each! Thanks Surefire!

Long version: Our team included me, Robert, and Jonathan. We were up against some young punks from #sdcolleges, and I was sure they’d cream us. In fact, it’s a sad shame on them they didn’t. What self respecting protohacker can’t pick a lock in under a minute… There was also a team of people I hadn’t met, and one more team of kids who were around last year.

The challenge started out with a url to 9 subdirectories of starting clues and problems to solve. These included passworded zip files, sound files with hidden messages in the ID3 tags, and many hashes that took John the Ripper quite some time to hash out. We were certainly stymied by the lack of access to ssh to a proper computer to run John, and SOMEone set up my laptop with virus scanning software that wouldn’t let me install John. Damn IT people…

Anyway, after 4 hours of discovering all the places Dan “oopsied” the challenges, we got to the physical box challenge designed by Billy. He’s made a nice couple of movies of the challenge:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Any bad language you hear is all Jonathan.

Here’s more footage of some LOOOOzers:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch for the sad @numist and @djcapelis as they snip the wrong wires… priceless

I’d planned on crowing more about the victory, but after 8 hours of grueling hacking, I was dead tired. I think I put my head on the pillow at 5am that night. But there was so much more going on Sunday morning, that I was back by 10:30!

Thanks to Dan and Billy for a great challenge. Thanks to my teammates for the win!

And thank goodness those punk kids didn’t beat me…

Dan Tentler was on hand to take pictures with his new light boxes:

She decided to wear a geek shirt to match my stylin’ MacVeritas shirt!

I soon ordered one, and it came in yesterday. I took it out with the beer crowd tonight and got some fun shots:

Here’s Cooper, looking way cooler than he oughta, thanks to my lens:

Schell wasn’t amused that Gabe and I were taking so many pictures:

He mocks what he doesn’t understand…

I like that the lens accurately captures a person’s level of drunkenness:

and ugliness:

Man, I’m getting old…

I like how this one looks like Holly is thinking of 3 bright things:

I can pretty much assure you that there isn’t a lot bright going on here:

Huh? Wha?

We weren’t outside for 2 minutes before Patrick started trying to attract the ladies with his sultry poses:

This is the look Gabe gives you when you try to explain why you are too old to go out to the Casbah with him:

And here’s his look when he’s had too much… pesto:

I tried to capture the blue Little Italy sign:

But this abstract is cooler, I think:

Here are the rest of the pictures:

Samba group:

Here’s Victoria, on the right:

Some comic relief:

Victoria works the abs:

Lots more pictures here:

I stole Jenny’s “looking up” technique and got some pretty pictures:

Here’s a panorama of one of the flower fields with a mountain in the background. Click the image to see the full original image. Warning, it is very large!

Here are all of the pictures: