Just a quick note…. We’re back from a five day swing through the South. We drove to Madison, Georgia, to attend the annual Dingler Family Reunion (Kristin’s side). On the way there we spent some time in Chattanooga, and on the way back, we visited Atlanta and Nashville. Details to be posted later along with some photos.
We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl yesterday with J&M. We loved it! It is a bit long at 2 hours and 20 minutes, but I didn’t even notice. They did a great job weaving in bits and pieces of the Pirates theme park attraction into the movie. Being a bit of a fanatic about Pirates (I went on the attraction at least a dozen times during my visit to Disneyland in October), it was a lot of fun when these treats popped up on screen.
Even if you’ve never been to Disneyland, there’s still a lot to love about the movie. Adventure, action, comedy, and creepy living skeleton pirates! What more could you want from a pirate movie? If you’re looking for a fun time at the movies this summer, you can’t go wrong with Pirates of the Caribbean.
I think J and I are encouraged by their handling of this movie to hope that the Haunted Mansion movie won’t be a total disaster. HM is my other favorite Disney attraction, so I really hope they do it well. The preview shown before Pirates looked good, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
It is finally done! We now have a fence in the backyard and a railing on the front porch. No more being tethered to a tieout for Collen! We used the Deck and Fence Store, and so far everything looks good. The only thing left to do is add the railing to the side of the porch. Some part is back-ordered, but they’ll finish it once it comes in.
So far Collen seems to enjoy it. Although we’ll see how happy he is when we open the door, let him out, and then go back in inside. For now at least, it is great to be able to let him out and not have to deal with the leash and all that. When it gets a little cooler, I know he’ll spend more time playing outside.
As usual you can find photos on my Pbase site. The fence and porch photos are in their own gallery. Here’s a preview:
Bear with me… I’m still catching up on postings.
My dad and I drove out to Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri the weekend of June 14 for their annual air show. Whiteman is the home of the B-2 Spirit, a.k.a. the Stealth Bomber. Until this show, I hadn’t had an opportunity to see an actual B-2, whether in flight or on static display. So this was a not-to-be missed show.
Whiteman is about 3 hours away, in Knob Noster, Missouri. (Never heard of it? Don’t worry, you’re not missing much.) So we spent the day at the show on Saturday, spent the night in Concordia (about as exciting as Knob Noster), and drove back to St. Louis on Sunday. The weather was fantastic the whole weekend, but standing on the concrete at the base made it seem a lot hotter and ensured we’d get a good tan.
They pretty much had everything at the show, including:
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Whew! The Air Force Thunderbirds were there as well, celebrating 50 years of performing.
Here’s a sample photo. For more pictures, check out my “Wings over Whiteman 2003 Gallery”:http://www.pbase.com/ladewig/whiteman2003.
I was in Dallas for Microsoft’s Tech Ed 2003 conference June 1-6. You can find photos from my trip in the TechEd 2003 gallery at Pbase Fotki if you’re interested. Last year I attended MEC (Microsoft Exchange Conference) in Anaheim, but they’ve shifted the content from that event to the Tech Ed event. With both developer and IT Pro tracks now, they’ve extended the conference to five days (same as MEC used to be) and more than doubled the number of sessions (from 200+ to 400+).
I stayed at the Adam’s Mark downtown on the 33rd floor. Great view of downtown and a pretty decent room. The DART stop (Dallas’ light rail) was across the street from the hotel, so I used that to get to the West End two nights for dinner. Of the two nights, dinner at Hoffbrau Steaks was definitely the highlight. The steak was great and the fried pickles appetizer was delicious! I haven’t had fired pickles since my internship at Dow in Plaquemine, Louisiana, so that was a treat.
Overall, the conference was a great event. I attended some excellent sessions on Exchange, RTC Server, SMS, and so on. I also spent some time doing hands on labs with the Exchange 2003. The trade show floor was pretty crowded, and I had a chance to talk to some of our vendors and some vendors whose products we’re considering for future use. I wound up with a lot of swag this year, much more so than in previous years. A ton of shirts, a remote control car from Dell, stress balls, and so on.
On the down side, the network at the event was pretty unstable. The wireless portion was nearly unusable the first couple days, with connections hard to find and DHCP addresses even more scarce. By Wednesday things had improved, but it still seemed we lost connectivity more than we should. I guess all 9,000 of us brought wireless devices!
The biggest surprise of the show was running into an old friend, Chris Brooks, at the show. Chris and I were on the same floor freshman year and have been friends ever since. He’s CTO at Corillian Corporation, “a premier global provider of eFinance solutions that enable banks, credit unions, brokerages, financial portals, and other financial institutions to deploy enterprise-wide services over the Internet.” So check them out if you’re looking for that kind of thing. You can check out what Chris is up to at his site, http://www.chrisbrooks.org.
Chris and I went to the Tech Ed party at Fair Park. We spent most of the evening in the “casino” playing craps. I finally have a basic understanding of the game thanks to Chris, even though we still lost all of our play money. The rest of the evening was a concert by The Wallflowers. It was an excellent show, and I’ll probably pick up some of their CDs.
Next year, Tech Ed will be in San Diego! So Kristin and I will be planning a California vacation next year. Disneyland here I come!
