The Southeast Linux Fest has opened registration. I am seriously thinking of going to this con, because I figure there might be some really interesting things there, and also because it should be a really nice ride up there on the bike. Yes, I have ulterior motives for things like this! 🙂
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Medieval Faire in the news
Looks like the acting troupe I work with got into the paper recently:
I have been working with this group for eight years now. I started out as a fighter, moved on with the group to become a trainer, and have now hung up my fighting boots in order to cook for them instead. Next year, I’m just going to run around and do stupid stuff, because cooking is bloody tiring. Yeah, I have become a bit burned out from it all, so I need a rest from it. There are others in the group that are becoming the same way, so hopefully this coming year we will get a number of new people to step up to the plate and take the reigns for a while.
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PETA Goes After Skater
PETA Goes After Skater For Wearing Fur
Yeah… PETA is annoying this way. Really, I am glad that more and more people are starting to realize and write about just how messed up this organization happens to be. I am in exactly the same place as this guy in regards to animal treatment. I believe in protecting animals that are endangered. But dammit, they are a resource, and I also see no problem in utilizing that resource responsibly!
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Discrimination
It is stuff like this that flashes all kinds of warning signs that England is truly headed to a dark future as depicted in “V for Vendetta”. Yes, it is discriminating against the useless. Too bad. That is life. Life is full of discrimination… it is a part of nature. All parts of nature discriminate against other parts of nature… You don’t see pine trees growing in the bottom of the ocean.
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Another ride and food
Went for a ride this morning, leaving around 10am. Headed out to the beaches via SR 100 and Palatka. Took 100 all the way down to Bunnell and US 1, then US 1 down to Ormond Beach. When US 1 crosses under I-95, there is a huge motorcycle superstore there at the intersection, and I stopped in there to take a look at things. The Harley shop had bupkis for me, and their saddlebags (which I am in need of new ones) frankly scare the daylights out of me. Why would you ever pay $800 USD for a set of saddle bags? I don’t care if they are made of leather… that is just too much.
There was another place in the same complex that does after market stuff and stuff for metric bikes, and they had some decent bags there. I didn’t buy any, but I took note of the manufacturers of the bags that I liked, and I will probably just order them online instead.
Kept going down US 1 and took the turn off to Ormond Beach, then headed north on A1A until I got to one of my favorite places to eat lunch… High Tides at Snack Jack. The food is decent there, and the view is incredible, overlooking the ocean the way it does. All cage parking is via valet, as they have a limited amount of room for parking and they know how to park vehicles better than the rest of us do, at least for their parking lot. Bikes on the other hand simply park in a small area they have designated.
I just had the wings this time around, and they were quite good. Lots of meat on the bone, and the sauce was just spicy enough for my tastes, which means that a normal person would have been unhappy. It wasn’t drowned in the stuff, however, which is something that I have found a number of places do in order to make their wings “super hot” (as an aside, for those that have been to The Blog of Unnecessary Quotes, I believe I used those quotes quite appropriately.)
Left there and headed further north into Flagler Beach, where I hit another of my favorite places to eat… the A1A Burrito Works. They don’t have a website, but they can be searched for on Google and an address found there. Ordered a large beef burrito with all the works, and it was incredible. Their burritos are different from those found at Burrito Bros. Taco Company, and I really can’t say that they are better or worse. The one key ingredient that made their burritos so darned good, I have to say, is the large amount of cilantro they put into it. That gave it a spiciness that was just heavenly.
After finishing my burrito, I continued up the road until I reached another favorite stopping-off point, the Hammock Wine and Cheese Shoppe. They are normally closed on Mondays, but their front door was open so I took a peek inside. Turns out that they are remodeling the place a bit and moving some things around to make things easier to sell and stuff. They should be done by the end of the week, and on Saturday they will be having a wine tasting event as a grand re-opening of the place. I was able to make a purchase, since they were there and I gave them a much needed uplifting of attitudes. Bought a bottle of dessert wine, which I will have to try out… it is a red Muscat.
By this time it was starting to get late, and I curtailed my plan to head all the way up into St. Augustine and then home, and instead just cut across to Palatka when I got to Crescent Beach. The ride home was uneventful.
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Blue Highway Pizzeria
Went to the Micanopy Blue Highway Pizzeria last Friday, and enjoyed every bit of it.
Went there after work after going for about a 50 mile ride on the bike. I took the reverse 100 mile route, skipping a good portion of it since I really just wanted to eat something, but didn’t want to take the direct route to the pizzeria.
Blue Highway was as good as always. Ordered my favorite there, a thin crust Hawaiian with onions. I know, it’s odd, but I enjoy it so much.
Shoot… forgot to include a link to their website: Blue Highway Pizzeria
I have yet to try the one in Tioga Town Center. It seems to me that there is just no way that one could be as good as the one in Micanopy, which is the original.
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Naval blogs
I’ve been reading a number of naval blogs lately, and it has gotten me thinking that I need to start writing more of my own stuff. For now, though, take a quick gander at Bubblehead’s blog, The Stupid Shall Be Punished
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Great Outdoors Restaurant – A Review
So yesterday I went for a bit of a ride on the bike, despite the weather being not so warm (went by the dealer today to pick up some winter gloves… the summer gloves just don’t cut it!) and decided to stop off at a place in High Springs for lunch.
Now, I went in during the lunch rush on a Sunday, so I hit them when they were getting hit by the typical church crowd in their Sunday finest, while I am sitting there in a pair of ripped up jeans and a T-Shirt.
SERVICE
The service seemed to me to be on par with that of a diner, despite the decor of the restaurant. Really, the place is beautifully decorated, and really I figure it was a chain or something given the amount of cash that has gone into setting the place up. Oddly, it is a one-shot place. There must be about $30,000 invested in just canoing equipment hanging from the rafters alone in the place.
Back to the service… I walked into the door and was somewhat ignored. Watching throughout my time there, the host was very lax in his job to greet guests and escort them to their seats… I blame this partially on the design of the entryway, whose view from the rest of the restaurant is blocked by a partition, so none of the servers can see people when they walk in.
I was waited on by Kayla, a nice southern bell who obviously has grown up in the High Springs and Alachua area all of her life. She was nice, and had a good attitude, and knew the menu very well, including the current specials.
The Food
For a drink, I ordered the peach iced tea. This was a nicely flavored iced tea, and it was hard for me to discern whether or not it came from a pre-packaged mix or was brewed properly. Regardless, it was quite nice, and I enjoyed two glass-fulls.
For an appetizer I ordered the chicken vegetable soup. It was a good soup, and had lots of chicken chunks in it. I am still not too sure about the corn that was in it, but it tasted fine. I am just not used to seeing corn put into a vegetable soup, I guess. Perhaps it’s a southern thing. The only real comment I could make about the soup is that I felt it needed a bit more salt to bring out the flavors more… but that is just me, and quite frankly I have no problem in adding a bit of salt to something, rather than having it come out to me too salty to begin with. Sure, it is a bit of an insult to the chef to have to salt their food, but this is not exactly what would be considered “High Cuisine” by any means.
For my main course, I ordered the cheeseburger. I think it was called either the “Suwannee” burger or the “Savannah” burger… for some reason I didn’t write down the actual name of the burger… grrr. Anyway, it was your basic cheeseburger, which I ordered with jack cheese. It came with a slice of tomato and a huge slice of red onion (nice touch! It got me wondering what they do with the rest of the onion, because they probably only get about three of these slices of onion per full onion…) along with a piece of lettuce. This was all separated from the burger itself to be added on by the diner, which is how it should be done. The onion was incredible, and really added to the burger. The lettuce was useless, however. It was too big and unmanageable, and slightly wilted. Since it was on the bottom of the vegetable stack, it was also a bit soggy and somewhat unappetizing. The bun of the burger was slightly toasted, which was a nice touch, but I felt that the bun was a bit too small for the burger. There needs to be some amount of overlap of the bun compared to the burger patty, otherwise it is impossible to eat. These buns were the same size as the patty, which made it a bit hard to eat.
Oh yes, there was a pickle spear as well, which I ignored. First of all, I dislike pickles. Second, I couldn’t see how it could be placed on the burger. You would have to eat it like a french fry. Also, pickles are annoying when they are placed on top of other things on the plate, because they have a habit of leaking into those other things and corrupting them. In this case it didn’t, but that is partially because I was quick enough to remove it from the good stuff underneath.
The patty itself was done to perfection. I ordered it medium rare, and that is how it came out, with some bloody juices flowing. It finished cooking right there on the plate so the juices didn’t run too much.
The burger also came with fries, and let me tell you, these fries were incredible. I would go back to this restaurant just for their fries. They fry them in some sort of flavored oil that makes them taste incredible. I felt there was no need to add salt or anything else to them, and that they could be eaten just as they were. I did try them with a bit of catsup as well, but really they did not need it at all.
Other Things
As nice as this place is, I think they need to put more emphasis on their service. It is too nice a place to have a diner-level service. Things may be different at night, but for lunch that is the feel that I got from it. One other thing that annoyed me… the booth that I was seated in had a light to the side… unfortunately this light was placed a bit too low, and the bulb in it was distinctly visible to me (I’m only 5’11”, so it wasn’t as if some tall freak had sat there…) and caused me to be slightly blinded.
Final
I would go back to this restaurant, if I happened to be passing through High Springs at the right time. I think I would first explore and see if there is anything else out there really quickly first, but I would consider this to be a place to fall back on for a meal if nothing else felt appetizing. There is a Mexican restaurant just down the road that I feel warrants a try sometime, but for meat and potatoes types of meals, the Great Outdoors Restaurant in High Springs is a decent choice.
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The bike
So, I haven’t posted about biking in a while, because I have been recovering from an accident I had down in Orlando about two months ago.
It had just started raining, for the first time in about a month, and I lost control of the bike on a curve due to “Florida Black Ice”, i.e. an oil slick that appeared because of the rain.
Personal damage: A banged up knee, a shredded arm, and my pride. Suck.
Bike damage:
- Headlight rim
- Headlight casing
- Brake lever
- Right hand turn signals (front and rear)
- Right hand mirror
- Speedometer casing
The brake lever was one of the more odd things, because it was bent way out instead of what you would think it would, which would be to bend in towards the handlebar. There are some other dings and stuff, a couple of dents in the tank, and the front tree is a bit…skewed. Wear pattern on the front tire is normal, and it rides straight, but when I am going straight down the road and I look down at the handlebars, they point a little to the left. A little bit disconcerting, but I am just going to leave it as it adds character to the bike.
I also just replaced the battery, as it was no longer holding a charge. The bike is a 2006, so the OEM battery is about four years old. Now, as far as I am concerned, people should never have to do regular battery maintenance on car style batteries these days. You put them in the car and forget them. Not so with motorcycle batteries, apparently. The OEM battery I pulled out had zero water in it. How it had been working for so long I have no idea. One thought I do have is that it may have sprung a leak during the accident… no idea, and there is no apparent damage to the casing. Anyway, I replaced that with a G-Bat, which is a gel-style battery, and life is good. No maintenance on the battery, and I swear the whole bike is running better because of it. The battery was a bit of a bitch to install, however, because you have to remove the padding that is in the battery box in order for it to fit, and then the terminals are not in exactly the same place, so tightening down things was a bit of a nightmare.
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HOA’s — They Suck
Just reading the news this morning, and I came across this item about Col. Van T. Barfoot,a retired Medal of Honor winner who is being forced to remove the flagpole in his front yard by a home owner’s association.
From the story, it looks like the HOA is going to get fucked, at least from a popularity point of view. My hope is that they back down and go piss up a rope.