Structured Metadata for Entropy

Somewhere Around 2,000 - Smash

2006-07-28T12:20:03Z

So, I've been tasting different kinds of beer and keeping track with tasting notes (really bad, meaningless notes usually ... like "it has a beery aroma.") I also have been bringing the empty bottles home (when there were bottles involved). I carefully soak the labels off and mount them [non-archivally] in a set of scrapbooks. This all goes back to 1990 or so, and I've tasted something near 2,000 different brews, by my count. In all those staggering-home-on-the-Metro years, I have never broken a single bottle. Tuesday night, at the Wild Goose / Flying Dog beer tasting at the Brickskeller, I broke two ... in the restaurant ... during the stage show. :(
Of course ... I brought the broken bottles home in my bag to try to save the labels anyway. We all must obsess about something. :)

Churrascaria Rocks!

2006-07-10T03:39:08Z

So I decided that for my birthday dinner, it would be a treat to hit the churrascaria,
Green Field in Rockville.
A churrascaria is a style of restaurant that originated in Brazil, and they are starting to become popular here.
My aunt took me to one in Rio de Janeiro when I was thirteen, also for my birthday.

It's all about meat, and lots of it. Apparently the concept originated with the gauchos on the pampas of Brazil.
The meat is served typo rodizio (roughly means "rotation style"). They also have a salad bar / buffet of Brazilian foods, and you could easily skip the meat --- if you're mad! Once you get settled in with a plate of salad or garnishes (you must always have a supply of chimichuri (a relish of onions and tomatoes chopped up in a vinegar dressing) and farofa (manioc flour, fried with raisins and nuts and bits of meat and yummy other mysterious tidbits). Once you get settled, a waiter comes by your table every few minutes with a skewer (or two or three) of meat that has been brought from the grill. Each skewer has a different kind of meat that is offered, and carved to your plate if you want it. The rodizio part is that they manage the skewers in the grill in a certain order, and they are supposed to maintain the same cycle order through out. On this fine night, they offered the following skewers, in order: duck, pork ribs, roast beef, top sirloin, pork, turkey wrapped in bacon, sausages, flank steak, beef ribs (on a cart), top sirloin, chicken, lamb, beef, sirloin steak, and then back to pork, turkey wrapped in bacon, and sausages. By this time, as you can imagine, we were quite stuffed. I'm always at risk of getting a bad case of "meat poisoning" from this glutfest. They also have a fantastic feijoada (black bean stew with pork ... don't ask what parts .. but it all came from some part of a pig), which is the Brazilian national dish. *sigh* I really can't eat like that more than once a year, given how much weight I have to lose.

Finish it off with a caipirinha, an uniquely Brazilian drink consisting of lime smushed up with sugar, mixed up with Cachasa (Brazilian liquor made from sugar cane). I had my first one of those in Guarujà ... also on that trip when I was thirteen. Ahh ... fond memories. I really should take Paula to Brazil some time.

It's my bloody birthday ... why can't someone tell me what I want?

2006-07-08T20:38:50Z

Well, it's my bloody birthday. At some time today (I would have to check my birth certificate), 43 years ago, I completed my expulsion from my mothers womb. It's been all downhill from there. :)

I started the new job on Wednesday. I am still pondering whether to post a regular blow-by-blow description of what "A Day in the Life of an Archivist" is like. On the one hand, I believe that it will be interesting to other people who have made a career as archivists, as well as for students and others who are considering such a career. The day-by-day work of a "Lone Arranger" (the casual term archivists use for one who is the only person responsible for archival collections) is extremely different from that of a professional who works in a big operation (like a state or national archives). It would also be somewhat therapeutic for me to blow off some steam. On the "con" side ... I have some concerns about the level of detail that I can provide in such narratives. I do not want to write something that would jeapordize my future career opportunities, nor do I want to bring shame or bad publicity to the institution where I'm working. I certainly don't want to embarrass anyone with whom I work (staff, volunteer, or patron). However, if I'm self-editing to put a "positive spin" on everything, the educational and cathartic benefits of such a regular column are diluted or lost [although sometimes it helps to put things into perspective].

It has been recommended to me, and is something that I have considered, to use the access-control facilities of LJ
to restrict access only to a select group of friends. However, that dilutes the value of retaining such a journal, in particular because it would be of greatest interest to people who are not on my friends list (e.g., members of the

group, or people who don't use LJ or have an
OpenId identity available to them. Another possibility would be to create another identity and to be careful to maintain plausible deniability about who is doing the writing and about what institutions or localities involved. There are significant layers of political machination involved in the tiny organization I've joined, and the local and state government that is intertwined with the organization. I'm open to comments on this. I don't delude myself about how many people read my journal or whether anyone cares about what I have to say. However, I also don't delude myself about the fact that anyone who knows how to use Google can probably follow the trail of breadcrumbs back to who I am and where I work. Given how much it seems to me that otherwise intelligent and goodhearted people seem to overreact and misinterpret things that are intended to be harmless and turn them into a major issue, I'm not sure whether it's safe to write anything on the Internet any more. Look at how the ignoranti in the press beat up on
WikiPedia
this week about how conflicting information about Ken Lay's death appeared while the rumors were floating around.

On a happier note, Germany is now kicking Portugal's ass 2-0 in the "Loser's Match" for third place. Oops! Make that 3-0!

I can't decide if I want to go somewhere really special for dinner tonight. :(

Packing it all up

2006-07-08T03:41:17Z

So we're going to do so home renovation on our house,and that will mean that we'll have to move to temporary housing for some period of time (perhaps as much as six to nine months). So, although we haven't finalized the architectural plans or the contract documents, nor have we talked to the bank to make sure that they will lend us the money to build, or gotten the permits, or any of that good stuff. However ... we have started packing up the house.

So far, we've packed 52 boxes, weighing 1,409 pounds, and occupying 84.17 cubic feet of space ... and I have just started on my books! Fortunately, emacsen told me about
LibraryThing over beer this week. So I've been cataloging all the books with a tag indicating which box they were packed into.

A meme

2006-07-08T02:09:30Z

The directions go:

1. Pick up a book which is the cl.osest to you at the moment.

2. Open it to page 123.

3. Find the third sentence.

4. Post it in your Live Journal (plus the instructions)

5. Don't choose the book, just pick up the one closest to you.

"This communication path is often implemented via a serial (EIA-232) port on an intelligent CSU."

From Miller, Mark A. Internetworking - A Guide to Network Communications, LAN to LAN; LAN to WAN. New York: M & T Books, 1991. [yawn]

Neologism du Jour

2006-06-08T23:30:07Z

OK, so it's more of a Neo-Synthetic Acronym, and I'll probably be the only person ever to use it, but it's as good an excuse as any to put something in LJ after so many months:

FAQ/NABAQ

=df.

Exxon-Mobil

What am I procrastinating now?

2006-03-14T17:04:03Z

I only seem to be interested in updating my LJ when I'm procrastinating something. Today, it must be finishing [translation from Robspeak: "starting"] my corporate tax return. It's due tomorrow at midnight ... plenty of time, right?

A new learning experience today ... obsessive recycling can be hazardous to your health. I seem to have severed the tip of my finger by trying to separate the metal by pulling the plastic cap off a metal cannister of Szeged Paprika that I had emptied. The little bugger was all sharp inside. I used a bit of Crazy Glue mixed with Bacitracin in hopes of keeping my finger tip. [Joking!]

No news on the search for a job as an archivist ... though I have had a good number of billable/paid hours tutoring someone for the CISSP exam. I'm teaching myself Spanish with the hope of being functional in Latin American reading and speaking by this coming winter. I spend much of my radio time these days listening to Spanish Language radio, writing down the words and phrases that I don't understand to look up later.

I just finished reading Robert Oxnam's A Fractured Mind - a very interesting first-hand account of life with Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). I also read Stamp Investing by Stephen R. Datz. Although this is likely to only be of interest to philatelists, there is an excellent chapter that covers Economics 101 and a trivial history of the U.S. Economy in the 20th Century. I learned a few things about times that I lived through (Nixon/Ford/Carter/Bush 41) but never really understood what happened. It also is a really good book to read if you have a collection and you expect it to behave like other investments, or as a hedge against inflationary or market risk.

OK ... I think it's time to work on taxes for a bit.

Skiing Santa Claus

2006-01-02T01:53:52Z

Only in Washington D.C. do you get Santa Claus on water skis, in the Potomac River, on Christmas Eve. He was accompanied this year by the Grinch on a jet-ski, eight reindeer and Rudolf (although some of the deer were on a jet ski too), a bunch of elves, a panda bear, and Frosty the Snowman acting as lifeguard. We decided to check it out this year, along with a lot of other people. They had mentioned it on WAMU a couple of days in advance, which might have helped the attendance. They were due to start at 1:00 PM on December 24 (2005). We arrived at Lady Bird Johnson Park, at 12:30, and parking was already scarces, with several hundred people lined up on the river bank. People were crossing the George Washington Parkway fairly oblivious to traffic, that was brought to a standstill. Most people had small children with them, but there were a few adults-only groups, like ourselves.

You can see some photos, with notations, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ferthalangur/sets/1721772/.

Shortly after we arrive, a pair of kids is arranged by their father, who sets them up with a music stand and starts to film them with a VCR. The kids are playing Christmas Carols on a trumpet and trombone. Later, when people leave, their case gets filled with money. Perhaps it's not so awful a place to perform for them. :)

A bunch of boats are already floating in the water, but we don't see any activity that indicates they are putting on dry suits and costumes. Perhaps Santa's Entourage suits up further downstream. Multiple Police Boats arrive on the scene, and one patrols the shore to ensure that nobody gets too close to the river bank. It is fairly crowded, with lots of children pushing to see. Nobody fell in, or got run over though. in all, I saw the Grinch, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus, Eight or Nine Reindeer, a bunch of Elves, and a Panda Bear, either on skis, knee-boards, jet-skis, or in boats. I'll upload more pictures as I get the chance to pick them.

Free at Last!

2005-12-21T03:33:57Z

Yes, I'm finished. I handed in the last assignment. Tomorrow night and Thursday morning are commencement ceremonies. At some point after that, I will officially have an MLS to my name.

What happens next? Start looking for a job as an archivist. There is no rush ... I'll probably relax a bit before I start pounding the pavement. I've been on sabbatical for three and a half years, a few more weeks will not make a difference.

The Frustration of Writing

2005-12-11T18:36:41Z

I have a 10-15 page term paper due tomorrow at 13:00. I have had an entire semester to work on it, yet I'm staring at a blank sheet of "paper" at the moment. I've done some research, found a bunch of articles (more than enough for a Masters' Thesis), thought about it, but I have a disjointed muddle of unconnected thoughts and nothing more.

I have been here before. It seems that I am at a similar place before every paper is due. Somehow, from somewhere, I manage to pull something out of the air at the last minute. However, it doesn't seem that I can get the words to flow until I am in such a state of panic that I'm about to blow a blood vessel.

Out of the Blog Closet. :)

2005-09-11T14:24:54Z

I guess more people might start reading this now that I've made mention to my family that I have a blog, and where it is. My original purposes in creating this LJ account were to:

Try out LJ to see if it had some of the privacy features that emacsen told me about. (It does ... they seem to work).
Create an information access point, as poorly maintained as it might be, so that family and friends could keep up with what's going on in my life in a moderately efficient way. That is ... not have to rewrite or copy and paste the same email response to "How is school?" to a myriad of people.

It has, of course, also provided me with some benefits in being able to follow the lives of other friends and classmates who have blogs. At some point (in the near future I hope), I still have to write the canonical article for my friend Heather, in response to her statement "I just don't get blogs." I will share that with another friend, who tells me that she doesn't want to have anything to do with people who blog. I think that's kinda funny, in the context. Is being a blogger like being a clandestine Jew? People who have known me for years suddenly start acting a little differently when they realize that I am Jewish (Definition 11 - ethnic origin). There are some good stories here. However, I have indexing work to do. It seems that I am missing a crucial four pages from the textbook that tells me how to do this assignment due Tuesday. *argh*

I am a Pure Nerd

2005-09-02T13:26:59Z

My family should be so proud! :)

Pure Nerd
78 % Nerd, 34% Geek, 43% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!

Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you're interested in any of the following:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Professional Wrestling

Love & Sexuality

America/Politics

Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 78% on nerdiness
You scored higher than 41% on geekosity
You scored higher than 80% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid

No ... Nobody is Gouging Gas Prices

2005-09-01T23:18:37Z

Driving along a section of Greenbelt Road in Langley Park, the price of regular gas ranges from $2.97 a gallon to $3.65 a gallon. Now, I am fully aware that some stations set their prices based on what the current wholesale price is, and others set their prices based on the wholesale price of what they put into their holding tanks. I also realize that prices are highly volatile and rising constantly. However, a 68-cent per gallon range is very suspicious.
Somebody is making a butt-load of money off this disaster (other than fuel commodities traders), and hopefully Shrub will be ready to prosecute his oil-company buddies when the facts emerge about price-gouging practices.

The Places I've Lived Meme

2005-08-30T13:09:43Z

New York City, NY
Tarrytown, NY
Chappaqua, NY
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Hopedale, MA
Hopkinton, MA
Framingham, MA
Westport, CT
Bridgeport, CT
Troy, NY
Falls Church, VA
Alexandria, VA
Washington, DC
Greenbelt, MD
Bethesda, MD

Fifteen homes (at least eighteen addresses) in forty-two years is a lot. Given the fact that I've been
in the same place now for twelve, that would be an average of less than two years per home in my first thirty years. Ick!

The Forbidden Zone on DVD

2005-08-24T12:39:56Z

OK, so everyone knows that I am not up-to-date on anything pop-culturally, like movies. However, while browsing Amazon for my textbooks, I found out that
The Forbidden Zone
is now available on DVD. The world will never be the same again. :)

What Did We Do Before the Internet?

2005-08-24T01:17:14Z

So, a good friend sent me some disk drives and a NIC. This seemed like a good time to go through my boxes of random computer parts and figure out what I've got. There is nothing more annoying than needing a SCSI adaptor, running out to the store to buy one, and then realizing that I had one in the "spare parts" boxes all along.

So ... I have a bunch of cards ... what are these things? Hello Friend Internet ... help me identify my hardware please. Google for "hardware identification" and voìla! http://www.idhw.com has a front end to a bunch of different hardware ID databases, including the FCC ID. Now that is useful, and I didn't have to go to a library or order a book or anything.

I've decided to drop "Principles of Records and Information Management" and take "Construction of Index Languages and Thesauri" instead. I've sent a list of things that interest me and know something about as candidates for the group projects, including beer, philately, egg coddlers, international rail public transportation systems, CVE/NVD, information research resources, and Holocaust information repositories. If any of my friends out there have any other suggestions for things that I would be interested in and know something about to create an indexing language and thesaurus for, please let me know! :)

Public Service Announcement / First Day Back

2005-08-23T01:07:56Z

Someone forwarded a message to me that had been forwarded to all his/her cow-orkers:

Maybe, all of you know this, but I had forgotten until someone sent it to me. I thought it was helpful. As you may know, effective September 15, 2005, telemarketers will be able to have access to cell phones. If you want to be on the do not call list, call 888-382-1222 from the phone that you do not want called. This is mostly an Urban Legend, so don't facilitate ignorance by forwarding it to your friends and family. See:

There is no harm in registering your mobile and land-line telephone numbers with the National Do Not Call Registry (NDNCR). The phone number provided in the message above is genuine. However, there will not any sudden flood of telemarketing calls to mobile phones on September 15, 2005 (or any other date) if you don't register. The telephone number provided works, but you can also easily register your numbers on the web site. There you will also find a list of Frequently Asked Questions about what telemarketers can and can't do, and other steps you can take to prevent unwanted telephone calls.

The net damage in "The Big Easy" (which will be forever known as "The Big Chubby" for me) was a gain of five pounds in weight. Oh, but it was delicious! The cats were glad to see us. Pyewacket caught a bug while she was at the kennel. I really need to find a good catsitter (=df. someone who returns phone calls within a month or two about sitting jobs!).

Last Day in the "Big Easy"

2005-08-21T16:46:40Z

All good things must come to an end. Alas, we must check out of this fine room and head off to the airport. Our flight is not until 5:07, but we really would rather check our bags and then hang out at the airport instead of having to worry about gettting back on time to catch our shuttle. That's just us. Most people don't head for the airport to arrive three hours before a domestic flight.

That is about it for NOLA.Some friends took the plantation tours yesterday and really enjoyed it. I suppose if I lived here, I would be used to the constant shipping traffic on the river. To them (the crew on the ships and the docks) it's just a job, and a perfectly natural one that people ahve been doing for several hundred years. The novelty would eventually wear off, as does the thrill of riding a subway train after you've done it every day for a few weeks. There are many things we didn't do because we didn't have the time (or energy or stamina to withstand the heat outside), and there are quite a few opportunities at the conference that I missed because I was doing touristy things (or napping). that is how it goes. I enjoyed the trip, and the conference. Hopefully I made a few good contacts and impressions here, and if not ... there is always next year, when the conference will be in D.C., and I won't be distracted by sightseeing! Hopefully, I will also be working by then in something connected to the field.

Classes start up again next week ... woo ... *cough* *cough* frogging hoo!

New Orleans - Day Four (Sat)

2005-08-20T18:51:30Z

One of the interesting aspects to being in New Orleans is that I really never know what to expect from moment to moment, but I'm not surprised by much any more. Case and point, I am sitting here in my hotel room (I was going to take a nap, but the maids decided to clean the room at that moment), looking out over the Mississippi River, and pondering what, if anything, about today needs mention. All of a sudden, in the distance, but growing closer, I hear calliope music. I looked all around, and finally found the source. The music was coming from an approaching steamboat, the Natchez that docks near here. At the bow were, what appeared from a distance, to be two crew members dancing around to the music. On the top of the ship was a console keyboard, with a woman playing it, next to a steam calliope, going at it, if you'll pardon the pun, full steam. There aren't a lot of working steam calliopes around any more, and to see one in use on a riverboat was a treat. Perhaps we chose the wrong riverboat tour this week!

Last night we wandered over to the French Quarter for supper after our reception in the Audubon Aquarium of America. If you get a chance to come to NOLA, you must make time for the Aquarium. It was quite spectacular. We had a light supper at Felix's Restaurant and Oyster Bar. Felix's is a non-pretentious place with really good food. If you want the cloth tablecloth and formally attired staff with impeccable service (and drop $200 for dinner), go to Brennan's or the Commander's Palace. If you want to save yourself $150 for drinks later, try Felix's. Very informal, but really good food.

The most notable session I've attended today so far was the briefing on the status of the Archivist's Toolkit project. They have got the specifications down and are starting to work on an implementation. The nice part is that they will be developing it as an Open Source project on SourceForge. After the Alpha release, they hope to bring in more developers from the archives community to contribute code and modules to the project. So far, so good.

New Orleans - Day Three (Fri)

2005-08-20T00:18:41Z

So there was no entry for yesterday as most of the day was filled with the
SAA conference. I don't really feel like doing
a session-by-session review. Things like that in public could come back to haunt me, regardless. :)

Breakfast was at Mother's on Poydras St. This was one of the recommended stops for lunch, but we decided to do breakfast there instead. I had a crawfish etouffè omelette. Mmm, mmmm, mmmmmm! Served with grits and biscuits that flaked apart on contact, and of course, Cafè au lait. Absolutely sinful and delicious. Then we went up to look at some of the old cemeteries. Naturally, it started to pour as soon as we got out there. The forecast for every day this week has been "hot" and "rain likely" ... I guess that is what to expect in NOLA in August.

Yesterday we took the ferry boat across to Algiers Point. Just after we got there, it started to pour. We stuck our heads into the old courthouse, inquiring about whether they would remarry us without a big hassle (you can't get married too many times to someone you really love, and it just makes divorce inconceivably complex ... so you'll just have to work things out). However, they were done there at 3 PM. We wandered about a bit, and then, it started to pour. So we wandered back to the ferry boat like drenched rats and headed back.

I went to sessions during the day yesterday, and the UMd mixer in the evening. Lunch was at Anthony's in the Riverwalk, dinner was at the Crazy Lobster, right next to the Riverwalk.The food here is so good ... I am afraid that the fifteen pounds I've struggled to lose over the past three months is going to be flying back with me on Sunday. :( Hopefully, my back will have healed enough that I can work myself down again in the yard before classes start up again.

It takes a lot of self-will to introduce myself to strangers, but that is what mixers are all about ... conferences too, for that matter. So, I do my best, try to accumulate a larger number of familiar faces with names attached for next time. I keep running into some of the nice folks I met last year, and also local people I know, such as my practicum advisor. I have not yet bumped into the man from New York who was kind enough to review the paper I'm working on (with hopes of maybe getting it published). All in all, archivists at a conference are a lot like sysadmins ... perhaps dressed a bit better, and even a bit more friendly toward strangers.

The view from the room is just great. I can't say that enough ... watching the maritime traffic on the Mississippi flowing past your window all day and all night long.

Server Down

2005-08-19T14:01:23Z

It is truly the Ghost of Murphy acting when my server, which is usually up and happy without any attention for months at a time, only crashes when I'm out of town and can't physically restart it. Such is the situation now. If you need to email me before Sunday night, email me @umd.edu
or phone me on my mobile. Please don't email/call to tell me that my mail is bouncing or one of my web servers are down ... I know it, thanks!

New Orleans - Day One (Wed)

2005-08-18T03:14:29Z

OK, this is also a test of building up a LJ entry in LochJournal 2.2 over the course of a day without remaining connected constantly. I don't wanna spend $10 per day for wireless Internet when I can use my mobile WWAN for "free" ... and it makes me reminisce to the days when a 1200 Baud Modem was really really fast!

To compensate for all the good eats, we're going to try to do at least an hour of walking in the morning, in addition to any walking we do to get around. The city in the early morning (7 AM) is very different from the NOLA we see when all the businesses are open and the tourists are out. We walked up Poydras north to Rampart, the upper edge of the French Quarter, then across Rampart and down a few blocks to Royal, and then across to Canal. Many many many antiques shops on Royal. I later learned that the antiques shops on Royal are mostly European objects. For American stuff (like the elusive Mardi Gras Krewe
egg coddlers) we should wander down Magazine St.

Breakfast at Brennan's ... oh my goodness, what a treat. An expensive treat, no doubt, but worth every penny. I had Eggs Hussard the turtle soup and and Bananas Foster for dessert. Paula had a crabmeat omelette. Some of us were feeling kinda funny about snapping pictures in a fancy restaurant, but they are used to it ... the waiter gave us fair warning when he was about to ignite the dessert, and was happy to snap our pictures at tableside. As fancy and famous as it is, they are funded by tourist curiosity, and they're happy to oblige we ruffians with our cameras. :)

Then, stuffed to the gills, we wandered around Royal Street for a while looking in some of the shops, then headed over to Jackson Square. Crossed the river side terrace of the former Jackson Brewery (now a mall) and caught the streetcar back to the hotel. The
Jackson Brewery had been a big commercial brewery in it's day. I noticed that a separate building was labeled the "mill house" or something like that, and connected to the "brewing house." A big brewery. The label (Jax Beer) was sold to Pearl Brewing, and apparently (at least, according to one

web site, the name originated in Jacksonville, FL. Who knows?

Maybe what I should try to do is to find an archives / special library job that is involved with preserving the history of beer?

Met some archives students from UCLA and Michigan at the student mixer. Then we went out to hit the city again. We took the streetcar all the way out the St. Charles line and on the way back in. This is a streetcar line that has been running for 165 years. The streetcars are old. How old? I took a glance at the throttle control gear at one end of our car, and it was labeled: Refurbished: 1 1891 ... that is impressive. They are noisy and bumpy, air conditioning is all the windows open, but they still work.
Here is
a page about them.

When we got back to Canal Street (where we had started), we noticed that the street, and the streetcar tracks, were swarming with
Shriners, as if there was going to be a parade.
We rode the Canal Street streetcar
toward the hotel, and it was moving in fits. I wondered if we could ride the streetcar West (away from the river) whether we'd be able to watch the parade. Yes, I wanted very much to see the grown men driving little tiny cars! Paula was willing to suffer this indulgence as long as I fed her at some point. So we hopped off the streetcar, and headed on one in the opposite direction, on the assumption that we'd pass the head of the parade and be able to turn around, and do that until the streetcar got stopped by the crowds, at which point we'd hop out and watch the parade. Good plan, badly executed ... we went on past the top of the parade (staging area) and kept heading out. We finally hopped off at a place where there were few trains heading back down. I figured that we would miss the whole thing, but not so. We had been told the parade was supposed to start at 6 PM. We headed back downtown. At 7:15, at Bourbon Street, we got tossed off the streetcar because of the crowds. Still no parade, big crowds. So, we hopped off, and wandered to an address where Paula remembered there was some dinner she wanted to try. Cuban Food. Fantastic. Very quiet, only one other couple dining there. The food was great, service impeccable, and very reasonable, even with a Mojito and a couple of glasses of wine. I liked the Mojito ... I think that it has to be made with fresh mint to work so nicely.

After a leisurely dinner, we looked down Magazine Street, and saw that there were still crowds on Canal, so we ambled over. The parade was still going, in full strength, and we were now a block away from the reviewing stand, where we could hear announced all the groups marching. I took pictures until my camera batteries went dead, including a few floats and a few tiny cars. One of the floats going by was throwing strings of beads (like Mardi Gras), and we caught a string.

End of another day, very interesting and exciting. I know that we'll never get bumped from our positions as editor and editor-in-chief of Boring magazine, but I'm off to bed.

New Orleans - Day Zero (Part Two)

2005-08-17T11:41:37Z

Did I forget to mention this awesome hotel room? We have a room overlooking the Mississippi River. We can just sit here and watch the ships go by all day. Yesterday evening, a fireboat sat outside our window for a half an hour spraying water in all directions. Were they flushing the system, aereating the river, practicing their aim, or just playing for the tourists? Who knows ... it was fun to watch.

The Shriners are having a conference in this hotel too, which has made wandering the neighborhood very interesting too.

New Orleans - Day Zero

2005-08-17T04:31:03Z

So we got up at 5 AM to catch 8:07 non-stop to New Orleans (NOLA) from Dulles. The plane was delayed almost two hours. We had an incoherent gate attendant who gave us virtually no warning that the plane had moved to a different gate. At least we'd have a different gate attendant, no? No! He moved along with us and continued to be incomprehensible until the plane door closed.

The choices from MSY (= Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport ... you figure out where they got MSY from ... maybe the MS in the middle of "Armstrong?") to downtown were a taxi ($28 for one or two people, +$13 per person above that), the shuttle ($45 roundtrip for two people), a city bus ($1.60 per person each way), or a limo (too dear for me). We opted for the airport shuttle, which meant they packed as many people as could fit into the van and then off we were, for downtown. That is where the difference in price comes in ... for $11 more we would have had our own cab instead of being crammed in with five other people. No matter, they got us to our hotel plenty fast.

After checking in at the SAA conference hotel (Hilton at Riverwalk) we went for lunch in the Riverwalk (a long, enclosed, air-conditioned mall running along the river) Food Court. Always remember that you can often get a sample of something that interests you from a food court, rather than buying on faith that you'll like it. I had a crawfish stew in a bread bowl with rice and potato salad (vegetables ... not pushed hard here). Paula had a crawfish and corn chowder and a small salad. Yum. Not cheap for lunch, but very very tasty. Portions are huge here. I joked with the guy ringing me up: "I am in no danger of losing any weight in this city, am I?" He said: "No, not at all. Typically, if you get out of town within 5% of your weight when you arrived in NOLA, you did very well!"

After lunch, we hopped on the paddlewheeler ship "Creole Queen" and traveled up river to the Chalmette Battlefield where we got a great description of the battle from an NPS guide. Chatting with him afterwards, it turns out that he is from Fredericksburg VA. Thanks Hank! Great tour. Pictures later!

After we got back, we went out in search of soft drinks and snacks. We had to wait for a freight train which was rumbling across the street. We found the drinks, no snacks of interest to us, in a store that caleld itself an "Everything Store" (they did have a little of everything, mostly beer wine and booze). The neighborhood we were in looked a bit more run down and seedy as we wandered out ... We were on the wrong side of Canal Street, which defines the southern boundary of the French Quarter. It wasn't really a bad neighborhood, but we definitely seemed to be heading out of the sanitized tourist area.

Finally, after a short break to connect with classmates, we headed out for dinner. Paula found an African restaurant in the phone book: Bennachin, at 1212 Royal Street in the French Quarter. The food is just perfect, the decor is lovely, and the owner/manager/waiter treated us with wonderful cordiality and friendliness. The cuisine is mostly from Gambia and Cameroun, and delcious, and very inexpensive and tasty. We will go back for at least one more meal there before we leave town.

The streetcars are very useful (and mostly air conditioned) except when they break. We ended up walking along the railroad tracks between Canal St. and Poydras to get back to our hotel.

And now, dear friends, as I am falling asleep at the keyboard, I must close. Tomorrow we will be having Breakfast at Brennan's. Yum!

"Catching Up With Terry Gilliam"

2005-08-08T13:17:16Z

Sometimes, one is fortunate enough to have a life or career that brings you into contact with celebrities or "important" people. The rest of us have to live our lives vicariously through them. :) Fortunately for me, my brother has one of those careers. He recently had the opportunity to interview Terry Gilliam for ComingSoon.Net. The interview is the feature article this week, but for the sake of link transitoriousnessity (not a word), the static link is at: http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=10710