Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.
The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…
On the drive back from Savannah, Charles and I quickly stopped in to visit the Robins Air Force Base Museum of Aviation. Didn’t spend very long there, but it wasn’t too much out of the way for the drive back and had a chance to take a few pics. There were some more unusual planes there that I’d meant to go back and look up info on, but obviously hadn’t since I only just pulled the photos off my camera a few days ago with the rest of the photos from Savannah.
Took a trip for work back in December to provide cluster training for some of the engineers at Gulfstream. Seems like we also did some very minor maintenance on the cluster we administer there. Anyway, I brought the camera along and had a chance to take a few pics while wandering around the riverfront. Only got around to pulling them off my camera today, so here they are:
Ran across this site recently, and I’m not sure I could describe it any better than the site itself does:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
Check it out!
An occasion like Hallowe’en, April Fool’s, or Father’s/Mother’s Day. Though not categorized as an official holiday, is often used as a good occasion to get a good drunk on with friends.
“Shit dude! It’s Hallowe’en, my favorite alcoholiday! Let’s get done up as Zombies and get druuuuunk!!!”
[Source]
We were in CU this past weekend to close on the sale of our old house (yay!). Seems we hadn’t realized it was “Unofficial” St. Patrick’s Day at the UofI. If you aren’t from the CU area, you’re probably not aware of this particular alcoholiday. Seems several years back, Cochrane (the beer baron of campus, owning 10 of the major campus bars) decided he was missing out on a lot of income since St. Patrick’s Day typically fell during spring break and thus students weren’t taking that opportunity to drink heavily in his establishments. So he instituted “Unofficial”, which comes a couple of weeks before spring break so that students can ditch class on a Friday and get trashed all day long.
In some sense, stuff like this just seems like it’s part of the college experience, but it makes campus a little crazy for those that aren’t choosing to partake. For example, Amanda and I wanted to go to Papa Del’s while we were in town because you just can’t get anything resembling good Chicago-style deep dish pizza in Huntsville. I’d talked to some folks about meeting there on Friday night, only to find out it was Unofficial. Since we didn’t really want to fight our way through all that, we figured we’d go to Pasha for some Mediterranean and hit Papa Del’s up on Saturday night. Talking to some friends, we found out Cochrane realized he was still not making enough money, so he went ahead and extended it a two day party starting this year. So Saturday was out too. Fortunately Sunday night worked out though, so we did get our pizza fix. I’m waiting for the day I hear they’ve extended Unofficial to be a week-long thing like Mardi Gras.
Sample coverage of this year’s activities: Not everyone celebrates alcoholiday… (News-Gazette)
To be honest, this isn’t the first college-wide booze party I’ve come into contact with. While I was at the University of Rochester, there was a day-long party known as Dandelion Day, or more commonly D-Day. Another example of students getting up earlier than they normally would in order to get thoroughly trashed by 10am. Managed to dig up a History of D-Day that gives a bit more background than I can. Talks about how things were substantially toned down during the 90’s with stuff about no open containers. As things typically work, this translated into “you can’t walk around the quad with an open beer bottle in your hand, but if you pour your beer/hard liquor into a plastic cup, you’re good to go.”
