• Lunch at Mexico Lindo in Lake City

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    So, I was on a ride… hrm… this actually was a longer ride than usual, and requires that I start at the beginning.

    So, Friday evening I decided that I was going to go to a gun show at the American Legion post in Trenton, because I had never been to a gun show and it somewhat interested me. Get up nice and early and start heading out there. On the way an older classic plated car pulls out right in front of me, to which I had to brake pretty heavily. You would think that the owner of a classic vehicle would be more concerned with what they are doing and not pull out in front of traffic like that. Kept heading down the road, and eventually reached Trenton only to find that the main street of Trenton is completely blocked off for an arts and crafts festival.

    So I park the bike and take a walk around. Lots of quilts and stuff floating around, which I took a couple of pictures of. The pictures are in the camera still, so they won’t get posted here at the moment.

    Turns out the car that pulled out in front of me earlier was heading for this show as well, to be an exhibit in the street. I considered accosting the driver, but decided to pass on it… if they get into an accident, serves their own damned fault!

    So, finish with walking around and get on the bike to start heading out, only to find that in order to start heading towards Bell, where the Legion hall is actually at (despite the name), I have to go through a bunch of side streets and stuff because the main street is blocked off and there is no easy way around. Oh well… not that big a deal on the Intruder.

    Get to the hall, and pay my entrance fee. Looked at the guns for a while, but it just didn’t interest me all that much. Left pretty quickly after that and started to realize that I was getting hungry, and I really didn’t want anything back in Trenton, so I kept heading north on SR 129 until I got to Branford, which had…. NOTHING. Little po-dunk town with a gas station and nothing else.

    Eventually I got to Live Oak, which I know has food. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything that I really wanted at the time. I am somewhat picky when it comes to barbecue, and I really wasn’t in the mood for it in the first place. They also had a mexican place there that did look somewhat interesting, but I also wasn’t in the mood for that. I was really looking for a bistro, somewhat fancy, and it just wasn’t happening. I guess I need to learn to lower my standards a bit. There was a diner there that I checked out, but walking in it felt too commercial, so I walked out of there after perusing the menu and confirming my suspicions that it would be your typical american fair.

    Headed east out of Live Oak heading towards Lake City, and of course skipped all of the fast food joints that were along the main drag near the interstate. Got into the main part of town, and went up and down the main street. There were two places in there that looked semi-interesting, but one of them was closed for the day (apparently only serves dinner) and the other looked like they weren’t serving either.

    By this time I was bloody hungry, and just about anything would do, which is why I then went to Mexico Lindo. It is in the south part of town, between route 41 and 441. I was the only one there when I walked in, and was greeted by a very nice little mexican girl.

    She initially came out with the standard chips and salsa. The chips were standard, but I found the salsa to be a bit too wet. Some sort of thickener needed to be added to it to make it actually stick to the chips a bit more.

    I ordered a burrito thing, and I took pictures that are still on my phone, but it appears that my phone is currently having issues sending anything anywhere, so that will have to wait. I found it to be quite tasty, with a sauce added to it that I could not quite identify. Somewhat salty (the sauce), with a sort of weak caper taste. Very interesting and a nice flavor.

    Only one other patron walked in while I was sitting there having my meal… a family who looked as if they had just come back from soccer practice or something.

    So, the meal was quite nice and I would recommend them again to others.


    📂This entry was posted in Biking Food 📎and tagged

  • Lunch at the Copper Monkey

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    This past Friday I went to the Copper Monkey in Gainesville for lunch. It is a restaurant that is highly recommended by my work mates, so we went there.

    This is basically a burger sports grill. The offerings are what you would typically find. One of my coworkers calls it the best burger in Gainesville… I disagree, but that is probably a matter of taste.

    We were a group of six, three of us having never been there before. Those three were also from China and had not really been to the typical American sports bar, so that was interesting and kind of fun to share.

    We all ordered burgers, and the host of the meal also ordered an appetizer of twenty wings… I think they did pretty well with these. I feel that they were baked as apposed to being deep fried, which I consider to be a superior method. The sauce was applied just right… not too weak, and not so much that the wings were swimming in it. They were ordered with a medium hot sauce, which I consider way too weak, but the taste was good regardless.

    Moving on to the burger, I ordered the “University Avenue Burger”. This is a burger that comes with sauteed onions and mushrooms, plus onions, lettuce, and pickle. Fries were also included in the basket. The fries were actually pretty decent… standard sized fries that held up throughout the meal without getting soggy or hard. The burger had good meat in it, but I feel that they are missing something in the mix. It needs a bit more salt to really bring out the flavor of the meat.

    It is good food, don’t get me wrong, but I can not label these burgers as the best in Gainesville. I feel that there are better out there.

    The Copper Monkey is located at 1700 West University Avenue.


    📂This entry was posted in Food 📎and tagged

  • Imperial Flagship

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    So, I managed to get my hands on the Lego Imperial Flagship (10210) on Tuesday, despite it not being available for at least another two weeks. For whatever reason, the Lego store in Orlando has started selling them early. Yes, it was an expensive night for me, because I also bought the Grand Emporium (10211) at the same time. Let me just say this: The Lego sets in the 102xx series are bloody expensive (though worth it). I am not amused with them releasing two of them so close together in time.

    I worked on building the ship last night (and a little bit this morning), and I have yet to get up to the main deck. The keel is laid, the bow is complete, as is the stern, but the guns have not been laid in yet. The bowsprit I think is going to be coming up quite soon, as will a completion of the anchor windlass.

    I should mention that the galley is complete, though I have to put together any of the minifigs… so it is not occupied with a cook at this time. There is a chicken roasting, though!

    I was thinking of doing a pictorial log of the build, with minifigs and stuff working on it, but it doesn’t really fit the storyline that I want to present. Instead, I think I might get the pirate ship (Brickbeard’s Bounty, 6243) and do a pictorial of that getting built by normal folk, then right before the sails are raised, have a bunch of pirates come in and take over the ship, hence it becoming a pirate ship.  🙂  Just some thoughts, I guess.

    I have some other plans that I am thinking about, once I have completed the Grand Emporium. The first is to see what kind of parts I have that I can use to put together a sailboat or two. I have seen one put together on the web that I really liked the lines of, so I am thinking I might emulate that a bit. Beyond that, I have plans to redo my city layout a bit so that I can incorporate the train. I also want to see about incorporating some of the buildings from Town Plan (10184) and molding them into the form factor of the modular buildings. In particular I am thinking of the garage and what can be done with it.


    📂This entry was posted in Lego 📎and tagged

  • Upgrade mediawiki

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    OK… so when it comes time to upgrade mediawiki, and you happen to have more than one mediawiki site enabled on your website, you have to do some trickery in order to get the database to update properly.

    In my case, I have a script that matches against the $callingURL in the LocalSettings.php file. If it matches a specific case, it changes the site name and database name to a different one so that a different set of data is presented. Not that big a deal really, until it comes time to update the database due to a new version of mediawiki.

    When that happens, and you run the upgrade.php script as they state, it will only upgrade the default database, and not the other one, because the $callingURL won’t match. In this case you have to temporarily modify your LocalSettings.php file so that it forces the other database, and then it will upgrade that other database without issue.


    📂This entry was posted in Linux 📎and tagged

  • GatorLUG Meeting

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    Here at the GatorLUG meeting… talking about Google Fiber in Gainesville… at least as a possibility. There needs to be a lot more organization than I have seen so far in order for this to proceed, as well as a good bit more information. I feel so far that information is going to be the main thing that they are going to be needing at this time.

    The discussion has devolved into a political discussion, which for the most part is boring and ridiculous.

    Ed Allcut then gave a discussion about what good GPG is for. Eh, seeing as I don’t even like to admit that I have even used GPG, and that I feel that in most cases it is pretty much pointless, I have basically tuned it out. Instead I am being snippy about it on IRC.

    One question that has come up (at least to me): How would I implement a GPG enabled vacuum cleaner?

    The meeting is ending with a GPG signing, which quite frankly I am not going to participate in.


    📂This entry was posted in Linux 📎and tagged

  • Microsoft vs OSS

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    OK… I know that a lot of people consider Microsoft to be the bane of all things good. Well, sometimes they do come out with things that make sense, like the beginning of this article:

    MSDN Article

    Let’s just say that I agree, and that while everyone CAN read the source of OSS projects, it doesn’t mean that everyone DOES. I sort of liken this to the lesson learned in the movie Ratatoullie, where we learn that anyone can cook.


    📂This entry was posted in Linux 📎and tagged

  • A couple of things

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    Lessee… a couple of things…

    First, work is being a bit annoying. Our home area for the users went down, and of course there are no backups (no big deal, really… it is a part of policy and the users know that) but we really like to keep things running, so getting the home area back has been a priority for us for a couple of days now… and there has been no fruition. We are basically at the end of the rope now, and are trying to simply recover what we can.

    It sucks.

    And of course this is all happening now, when I have the first weekend in six months completely free with no plans whatsoever. Which means I will probably go in to work to see what I can do to fix things. *sigh*

    Got a new cable modem last night, though… DOCSIS 3.0 compliant. No idea if Cox cable is going to be providing me with better connections because of it, but by god I am ready for it when it comes… except that my router is maximum 100mbit, and the thing has a gigabit port on the back of it. Now I might have to start looking either for a gigabit port for the router, or a new router that has a gigabit port on it.

    In other news, the woman whom I mentioned earlier will be leaving the country in about a month or so. This is part of the reason why I didn’t pursue it further… I knew she was leaving for parts long and far away…  🙁

    I have a new harddrive for the Fulong, but haven’t put it in yet… I figure that might be something I do tonight… not sure if I am going to put gentoo on it, or go with the debian variant that is now available and not sucking so badly.


    📂This entry was posted in Linux Me 📎and tagged

  • GPG Spam

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    So a discussion came up just recently concerning spam scanners on mail servers and their tendency to score on emails that happen to be GPG encrypted, simply because the contents is a bunch of gobbledy-gook. Things were thrown back and forth concerning the computational expense of scanning emails for spam in the first place and stuff… then the conversation took a bit of a left turn when I started going off about how I was going to become the next spam king, whose sole purpose would be to generate spam using nothing but GPG signatures and encryption, as well as generating new keys for the spam every day so that a filter could not be placed on any single GPG key/signature.

    They whined a bit about how it is still computationally expensive, and that all of the key generation and encryption would actually reduce the amount of spam being sent, to which my reply was that they did not understand the goal I was trying to achieve… not to make money from spam, but instead to kill GPG forever.

    Yes, I was a bit bored…


    📂This entry was posted in Me 📎and tagged

  • Website work

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    Modified the css code so that even when a page is shorter than the full page, it is a bit taller than the screen. This forces the browser to always have a scrollbar. Why, you might ask? Well, because I center the webpages, they are always in a specific spot… but when a scrollbar appears automagically because the page is longer than the browser can display, the entire page shifts slightly to the left, which is bloody annoying. So, if we always make the page slightly larger than the browser window, there will always be a scrollbar and therefore there won’t be a shift between pages that have a need for a scrollbar and those that do not.


    📂This entry was posted in Linux 📎and tagged

  • Faire is over!

    Posted on by Wells Comment

    So, the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire is over for another year! Thank god! Really, I enjoy the faire, but the hours are killer for the job that I do. Next year I plan on doing one of two things… Either cooking for the guilde again, or not cooking for them and just cooking for the encampment. Whichever it happens to be, I am NOT going to be the quartermaster during the year. That can be someone else.The menu was basically the same as last year:

    • Sausages with grilled onions and peppers
    • Macaroni and cheese
    • Grilled chicken with onions and peppers
    • Baked Beans
    • Vegetable platter
    • Scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy for breakfast
    • Assorted danishes for breakfast

    Some other things that were added to the menu this year:

    • Kabobs for kids day
    • baked Potatoes

    Of course, I also had to do some special stuff, and I did the following this year:

    • Curried venison for the second Saturday. This was a particularly strong hit, because it was simply incredible.
    • Some elk roast. This wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped, but it wasn’t bad. I was glad to share it out to people because it was something special, and something that most people have probably never had before.
    • Another lamb roast. This was a lot better than the elk roast, and because it was so big I was able to save half of it to take home. I later threw it into a crock pot and make a lamb stew out of it.

    For that matter, I plan on dropping my role as the Director’s Committee Chairman. I’ll stay on the Director’s Committee, but not as the chair. That can go to someone else as well. I have enough meetings to deal with these days as it is.

    Faire was good, though. I enjoyed myself, despite now being sick because of it. I should be clear of the sickness that I caught tomorrow morning, though.

    In other news, I think I managed to fall head-over-heels for someone very special this past fortnight. I am not going to mention any names, because quite frankly I have had really bad experiences with that sort of thing in the past, and in this case I am going to keep it to myself. Needless to say if she reads this, she will probably know it is her. I don’t know how she will handle it, but this is my position on it (at least at this point in time…): I am not going to do anything about it. I just feel that there might be too much drama, and quite frankly I would prefer not to be with her and have her as a friend than to lose her completely, because she really is a special person to me.I made that mistake once… I’ll never make it again.

    This is a long collection of thoughts, and it is very likely that some of these thoughts are truly messed up in the process. Suck it up… I am a bit under the weather right now, and thinking clearly is not at the top of the stack right now. It’s just a good thing I didn’t post this yesterday, because I was really loopy then.


    📂This entry was posted in Food Me 📎and tagged