Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

AirTran travel fail

I've mentioned elsewhere that the more flying I do, the more annoyed with it I get. This weekend was no exception.

Seriously, if you're flying AirTran out of LAS (Las Vegas) and either haven't done online check-in the night before or have bags to check, make sure you show up at the airport at least 3 hours before your flight. 4 hours would probably be better.

My 3 day excursion to Vegas was a lot of fun until it came time to leave. Not in a "sad to leave fun Vegas" sort of way, but in a painful "3 hour wait in line to check in at the airport for a flight that's delayed 2 hours" kind of way. AirTran has no check-in kiosks at their desk, so you're back in the 80s waiting in line to check in. If you're checking luggage, you have to wait in line anyway. It's a pretty long line. The only reason I didn't miss my flight out of Vegas was because the in-bound flight was delayed. To be fair, I believe the Las Vegas airport has some generic check-in kiosks that I could have used, but it wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway with the delayed flight. I still ended up missing the connecting flight back to CHS, but fortunately the delay was caused by mechanical problems with the plane so AirTran put me up in a hotel in ATL to wait for the flight out the next day.

Leaving ATL was only a little less painful. Between two gate changes and the plane the flight crew was on being delayed by weather, my flight was only about an hour late getting off the ground. I think I finally made it into Charleston about 14 hours after I was supposed to have arrived.

Ugh. Maybe I'm just getting crotchety in my old age, but I'm really starting to dislike flying. A lot.

Home Team meatup

I think BBQ needs to be its own food group.

There was a very good turnout for tonight's Cin-cue de Mayo BBQ meatup at Fiery Ron's Home Team BBQ. To commemorate the occasion, Chrys had some appropriately themed door prizes

The BBQ meatups are always a good time. For the next meatup, keep an eye on the calendar at LowcountryBBQ.org.

Las Vegas excursion

Travel pain aside, my weekend excursion to Vegas was a pretty good time.

On the way, there were cool sights like this to see. Not entirely sure where the plane was, but the pilot said we were passing by the Grand Canyon when I started taking these pictures.

Went to Vegas mostly to meet up with Rick and Mike and hang out. Since Sara is in that area too, we met up with her also. We were supposed to be there for Mark's "wedding", but he stood us up. We still had a good time anyway.

Took me a little bit to track down Rick when I got into Vegas, but eventually I tracked him down. After dumping my stuff off in the hotel room, we headed off to wander the strip and find some grub. First stop was the Vegas Hilton to see what was left of the Star Trek Experience. The Experience is gone, but oddly enough the Starfleet logo remains on the Hilton's sign out front.

Then we hopped on the monorail to the end and decided to wander the Strip starting at the Luxor back to our hotel (Circus Circus). Turns out the Strip is a lot longer than it looks on the map.

The next day we met up with fellow geek Sara and spent a good chunk of the morning in the geek nirvana known as Fry's. After, we decided to go for wings at, fittingly enough, Buffalo Wild Wings (a bit of an inside joke).

The rest of the evening we spent hanging out and talking at one of the hotel bars.

The trip home took almost as much time as I spent in Vegas.

Wild Olive

I'd heard about the Wild Olive a few weeks ago and was delighted to hear about another Italian restaurant on my side of the Charleston area. Sunday I went to check it out for the first time with a few people from one of the Meetup groups.

Although the decor was nice, my first Wild Olive experience was somewhat underwhelming. I opted for the Sunday spaghetti and meatball dinner special ($15), which includes salad and garlic bread. The salad with balsamic dressing was pretty good. Nice cool, crisp greens. The spaghetti on the other hand was kind of disappointing. The spaghetti was more like angel hair pasta (pretty thin) and came out rather overdone. The sauce and meatballs were still quite good though.

Not wanting to pronounce judgment after just one visit, I went back tonight for dinner to try something else on the menu.

This time the experience was much better and a 180° change from a couple of days ago. I opted for one of the specials of the night: the Legare farms porterhouse steak with gorgonzola mashed potatoes and wilted swiss chard. On the pricey side, but totally worth it. It was big enough that I could probably get 2 more meals out of it. The steak was probably one of the best I've ever had here. Preparation was very simple: salt, pepper, grill. Cooked to medium, the steak was very tender, and just plain delicious.

I was initially a little skeptical about the gorgonzola mashed potatoes, and not being a fan of blue cheeses, I wasn't expecting to like it much. Again, I was delightfully surprised. Smooth and creamy, the potatoes had enough gorgonzola to make it yummy, but not overpowering. I could have easily made a meal out of a pile of those mashed potatoes.

At the end of my meal, I started thinking about if, given the choice, would I rather go to Oak or Wild Olive (Oak is one of my favourite meat places to go to in Charleston). Tough choice, but I think if Wild Olive had the Legare Farms steak as part of their regular menu, Wild Olive would definitely win.

Wild Olive is definitely worth the trip.

4 stars out of 5.
$$-$$$$ (can be a little spendy)

Anniversary meetup

Plans to meet at Harbor Grille prior to tonight's showing of Star Trek at the Hippodrome got me thinking about the first Lowcountry blogger meetup, which was held there (it was Toucan Reef back then). Delving in to my blog archives, I discovered that tonight's meetup almost coincides with the third anniversary of the very first Lowcountry Bloggers meetup.

If anybody's interested, I propose that to celebrate the third anniversary of blogger meetups (you Tweeters can come too) we all return to the scene of the crime for an anniversary meetup.

What: Lowcountry Bloggers 3rd anniversary meetup
Where: Harbor Grille
When: May 16, 2009 6PM to whenever
Who: You (and whatever friends you want to bring along)
Why: Because it'll be a fun time!

Not your father's Star Trek

Two words: Alternate Universe.

I've never really been a fan of people "rebooting" or "reimagining" well established franchises, especially when they try to justify it by saying they're trying to reach a new audience. Aside from some wicked cool special effects, I wasn't really expecting much from the new Star Trek movie. I figured as long as they didn't totally screw up things and alter the Trek universe, then it would be at best a pretty decent movie.

Without spoiling things, I have to say I was pretty impressed with the way Star Trek turned out. The story deviates pretty far from canon in a few aspects, but given that it's sci-fi, the writers have given viewers a way to accept the changes. Purists will probably still be mildly annoyed, but I think JJ Abrams has managed to give us a new Star Trek in a way that is still palatable to die-hard Trekkers.

The Terrace Hippodrome isn't too different from the former IMAX. Decorations are pretty much the same. The new seats are nice, cushy and comfortable. The screen is smaller than an IMAX screen, but still pretty big. After seeing movies in IMAX format, and now in the jumbo Hippodrome size, it's pretty hard to go back to the "small" regular sized movie theater screens. The sound system is pretty impressive and loud. Not quite as immersive as IMAX sound, but still pretty good.

I think I'll make the Hippodrome my default theater from now on.

Back to regularly scheduled programming

Whew, GRE is over and done with now. Time to get back to everything else that I'm supposed to be doing.

The exam turned out to be not too bad, although my score on the verbal portion wasn't quite as high as I expected. I'm pretty sure if I had put a little more effort into preparing, I could have done better. Fortunately I'm in a position where doing well on the GRE doesn't really matter. If I ended up crashing and burning on the GRE and Clemson decided I didn't meet their GRE standards, not the end of the world. I just continue on working and life goes on.

Glad it's all over now. To celebrate, I think I'll head out to the Terrace Hippodrome and catch Star Trek one more time. I'll be there for the 8PM show if anybody wants to join me.

Southeast LinuxFest rolling along

There's still time to register for Southeast LinuxFest. Space at the Comfort Inn, the offical SELF hotel, is running low but there are still rooms in the SELF block available.

The list of speakers includes notable names from Zenoss, Google, Redhat, Fedora, Digium and others. There will also be breakout sessions that will cover topics of interest to anybody involved in using open source. Whether you're a hardcore Linux/Opensource geek or new to the whole opensource world, SELF will have something for you. Check out the exhibitors to find out more about them or meet other like-minded users and see what they're doing with Linux/OSS.

SELF is free to attend, but if you register as a paid supporter, you'll also get the spiffy SELF shirt.

Dead pixels

This is the Encore in Las Vegas. Seeing this reminded me of the dead pixel in Google Earth photo

3 years of meetup-ing

Hard to believe, but May 16 will make it 3 years now since the inaugural Lowcountry Bloggers meetup (yes Chuck, I know you and Joan and a couple others met up before that).

From that very first meetup at Toucan Reef (now called Harbor Grille), the Lowcountry blogging community has grown from a few dozen blogs to well over 400 that are being rounded up and aggregated at lowcountrybloggers.com and lowcountryblogroll.com. It's a community that's grown to encompass not just bloggers, but Twitter users and just about every other social web thing out there.

Doesn't seem like it's been only three years. I feel like I've known the people I've met through LCB a lot longer than three years. I've met a lot of really great people through their blogs (and tweets), and being able to meet them in person has been pretty awesome.

To celebrate the occasion, I've checked with Harbor Grille to make sure their patio will be available and they've said it should be no problem. So join me and a few others returning to the scene of the crimewhere Dan helped kick everything off.

Oh, and don't feel like you have to be a blogger to join in. Come hang out with us even if you're a non-blogger. We don't bite (pretty sure most of us don't anyway).

First Flush haul

Turned out to be a fantastic day for the First Flush Festival at the Charleston Tea Plantation. Met up with a few people from the photo meetup group and wandered around enjoying the festival and taking pictures.

This is what I came back with

A tin of green tea, two peach and two of the First Flush to resupply my stock from last year.

See the rest of my photos from the festival here.

LCB's third anniversary

Heather noted that most of the better attended meetups happened to be ones that I threw together. I think I just got volunteered for stuff.

Today's third anniversary meetup turned out pretty well. Had about 20 bloggers and tweeters show up, possibly much to the dismay of the lone newbie waitress working the patio area who was expecting a slow evening. I was pleasantly surprised by the numbers that showed.

It's always good to get together and I think everybody had a pretty good time.

Several #jaredrumours were being formulated.

See the rest of my pictures here.

In search of: Udon noodle soup

It was in Detroit where I discovered udon noodle soup. After moving here, I had to go without it for a long while until Shi Ki opened and I discovered they served udon noodle soup. They make a pretty good one too (I usually order the nabeyaki udon). Nice rich dashi broth, enough seafood, veggies and noodles to make it hearty but not so much that it becomes more stew-like. I consider it pretty yummy.

Last year Sakura opened on Ashley River Road, and I discovered they also had udon noodle soup, so I stopped by to try it out. Nice restaurant, the udon soup, not so much. Theirs was made from a chicken based broth, so essentially you're just eating chicken noodle soup.

Yesterday after putting out a query on twitter to see if any other Charleston restaurants had udon noodle soup on the menu, I learned the relatively new Bushido (famous for their Spicy Tuna Handroll Challenge) has it on their menu. They make an decent enough soup (went with the tempura udon soup) but I didn't think the broth was quite as flavourful as Shi Ki's, the noodles were a little bland and heavy on veggies. It was much better than Sakura's offering though.

I've been told Mama Kim's on Calhoun also has udon noodle soup, so I think I'll have to make it a lunch destination one of these days to check it out.

So far:
Shi Ki - Win
Bushido - Good if you're in the area
Sakura - Give it a pass.

Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk

This year Charleston is a location for the 2nd annual Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk and I'm helping to organize it, along with Chuck!

What is it? It's a day (July 18) where hundreds of people/photo geeks all across the world will get together in groups and go take pictures. So far there are 400 locations all over the world with walks being planned.

For the Charleston event, the plan is to start the gathering at the Gazebo in White Point Gardens at 9AM July 18 and head up the peninsula from there. I'll try to work out a route that will take the group through some interesting areas, but the route will be flexible. If people in the group know of other good spots to go to, we can do that. Afterwards, we'll descend on the unsuspecting Tommy Condon's for lunch and celebratory libations..

The photo walks are limited to 50 people, so if you want to go, check out the photo walk page and sign up.

I think what I need to do is get with Joan and have her help me plan out a route. Even better would be to get her to come along!

Mostly normal

NOAA came out with their forecast for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season a few days ago and said this year should be pretty normal as far as numbers of storms go.

They've forecast 14 named storms, 4-7 hurricanes with 1-3 of them being major hurricanes.

Shaping this seasonal outlook is the possibility of competing climate factors. Supporting more activity this season are conditions associated with the ongoing high-activity era that began in 1995, which include enhanced rainfall over West Africa, warmer Atlantic waters and reduced wind shear. But activity could be reduced if El Nino develops in the equatorial Eastern Pacific this summer or if ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Atlantic remain cooler than normal.

NOAA also retired 4 names from the list of names: Gustav, Ike and Paloma for Atlantic coast and Alma from the North Pacific list.

Hopefully the worst we get here are windy tropical storms that will bring some much needed rain and no hurricanes.

Gallon #6

Today I chalked up blood donation #48 since moving to Charleston. That makes it 6 gallons of blood that I've donated over the past 10 years. Counting donations back home, I think I'm just over 10 gallons over my lifetime. That's almost 38 liters! The average person has about 7 liters of blood, so I've donated my entire blood supply 5 times over in the past 20 years or so.

Yay me!

So how many are you up to now?

Photowalking the former Navy Base

Building 2

Sun setting behind a building

The old Power House

Sun rays

Inside one of the machine shops

See the rest of my pictures here.

Cooper River at Riverfront Park

Panorama of the Cooper River taken from the boardwalk at Riverfront Park. Stitched together from 10 photos covering approximately 180°.

The full sized panorama in all of its 19226x1865 glory is here