sethbc’s (infrequent) blog…

My, oh my, there is simply so much to talk about!

First, the Braves just clinched their 14th straight division title. I can’t say I’m surprised. I don’t know what to expect from the playoffs this year. I think we’re probably going to have to face Houston. I certainly hope that we don’t fizzle out in the first round like we have done the last several years. I mean we’re chocked full of rookies this year, but I worry about our pitching. I hope Smoltzy is feeling better by the first round — we need him in the playoffs. Our problem the last couple years was that we just couldn’t get him the ball with a lead!

Second, I started school.  I have many hours of class a day, and I barely understand the professors. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll be more comfortable in the next week. It’s just very hard to get back into the swing of things after so long on the road. The other problem is that I know nothing about EU law. All of us Americans are in pretty much the same boat though.

Third, I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently, most of it in the whole thriller genre (a la Dan Brown). I read all four Dan Brown books (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and Digital Fortress), and The Rule of Four. The first time I read the Da Vinci code I wasn’t impressed, but after reading The Rule of Four, I realized just how bad novels in this genre can be. I know that Rule is supposed to be a compelling read, but I’ve got to say that I wasn’t impressed at all. The writing was poor at best, and the plot was completely implausible. I didn’t go to Princeton, but I can make a fair guess that people don’t sit around doing the things the characters in Rule did. I mean seriously, who speaks 6 languages (including, Greek, Latin and Hieroglyph) during their sophomore year.

Unfortunately, the Dan Brown books, while light-years ahead, are hardly literary masterpieces. The plot in the novels, while being implausible, is at least entertaining. Unfortunately, the plot in all four novels are virtually the same. Government agencies, secret societies, the Catholic Church. They’re all the same. The characters as well. Rachel Sexton? Give me a break. Beautiful young intel worker, daughter of the foremost presidential candidate and aide to the president? Are you kidding me? The characters are simply paper thin, they have no dimension to them at all. After two novels about Robert Langdon, I know nothing about him other than the fact the he used to be a swimmer and can get every woman he wants. He’s like the guy’s version of Nora Roberts.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought the novels were entertaining. I just don’t see that writing them can be that hard. I think I should start researching an as of yet unnamed book. If I never write it, who cares? I’ll just start accumulating random knowledge about secret societies, religions, and technology. Eventually I’ll come up with a plot or tire of the exercise. I’m going to do most of my research/writing on a wiki that I’m running locally on my laptop. Maybe I’ll put it online when I get back to the states (or maybe I’ll be sick of it by then). I’ve been running mediawiki on my apple. One pain though — CEU has blocked CVS, so I can’t download the source for the 1.6 branch. I know that fink has a cvs proxy support, but I don’t know how the hell to use it. I don’t have a visible proxy here, they just block ports if they don’t know what they do. My first step is going to be to try to get CEU to open up the SVN and CVS ports.

In another random note, I saw Trek came out with their bikes for next year, but I don’t see the SSLx. I wonder if the Madone 5.9 SSL is the same as the SSLx. I know that the TTx is there. I also don’t see anything about a Lance bike (like the Live Strong bike). Their mountain bike selection is just amazing now. The Session 10 has like 210 mm of travel in the front! Thats just unbelievable! I’d like to get some kind of mountain bike some time, but I’m just not sure what I’d go with. I mean something that rugged is almost certainly a downhill bike, which I’m less interested in than an all-mountain bike or a hard-tail.

The other thing that intrigues me that I saw mentioned by the Fat Cyclist (once yesterday and once a month ago) is the track bike he just got. They’re not that expensive, and real men ride fixed gears. Okay, maybe thats not true, but I certainly think that fixed gears and single speeds are rock solid. They give you a connection to the road that you don’t get from anything else. Unfortunately, using them on a group ride isn’t very practical. Hard to keep up on a climb when everyone else is riding a geared bike. So many bikes, so little time/money/space! I’d like to get a mountain bike, I’d like a road bike, I’d like a single speed or fixed gear bike. I already have a hybrid. The thing is, I really don’t need the best of everything. The fixed/single speed might have to be last on the list. I’m sure I could get a cheap road bike that I could train on. I know Trek sells one for like 600 bucks (the 1000) that has a lot of bang for the buck. As far as mountain biking, I need to build up my legs before I really go out there and do something crazy.

Technorati Tags: Baseball, Books, Cycling, School

This is a picture of me on the summit of Zugspite!

You’ll never guess who we ran into for Oktoberfest? Thats right. Marc Lewinstein. We were just sitting in one of the tents, and saw him cruising around down below us. I was at Oktoberfest (again), and had a blast. The chaos that ensues immediately following the opening of the doors to the tents (on the weekend anyway) is unreal!

Technorati Tags: Europe

Well we’ve had pretty much the “Worst Luck Evar!

Yesterday, the day was spent in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (G-P). I know its a mouthful, but it was absolutely gorgeous. And now for a little background on the location. Garmisch and Partenkirchen united to host the 1936 Winter Olympics, and the towns have been a combined ever since. The city is nestled in the Alps in Southern Bavaria, and the geography is simply stunning. Moreover, Garmisch is right below the tallest mountain in Germany, the Zugspite. The chief activities in the region center around drinking beer, shopping, and climbing to the top of this nearly 10,000 ft. tall peak.

Well, as it turns out, we’re lazy American tourists, and not mountaineering experts, so we decided to take the Cogwheel/Cable Car up. The trip was absolutely fantastic, though we were a little dismayed to learn that it would in fact be cold at the top of the mountain (it was, the mountain came complete with a glacier and snow). From the top of the mountain, you have an excellent view of both Austria and Germany. The weather was pretty good up at the top. I think we lucked out — there were only very brief patches of fog (i.e. clouds), and the visibility was generally excellent.

From the lodge at the top of the mountain, they let you climb to the actual summit. Let me be the first to say that the climb was a humbling experience. From the bottom of the lodge, you step down a small ladder to a narrow ridge. One slip on this ridge means at least a 40 foot fall on either side. Crossing the ridge brings you to a ladder mounted directly on the rock. The ladder leads to plateau before the summit. This is where it gets tricky. To reach the summit from the plateau, you have to shuffly along a narrow precipice 3,000 ft. above the ground below, with the aid of only a single steel cable. The precipice flattens into another narrow ridge, and then you reach the crucifix mounted at the actual summit. I decided to hit the summit, and then did the climb again. I’ve got some pictures of me at the summit that I’ll try and post later.

After retreating to the relative safety of the observation deck, I purchased a beer and a wiener as my well-earned reward. From there, we took a different cable-car down to the lake. If you’ve never seen a glaciated alpine lake filled almost entirely from water melted from the snow at the top of a mountain, you’d probably be surprised. The water is by far the clearest I’ve ever seen, surpassing even the bluest waters in the Caribbean.  I decided it would be fun to go for a paddle-boat ride on the lake, and we were pleasantly surprised at how nice it was. There is only one motorized craft on the lake, and it is run by the same people that rent the paddle boats. The water was extremely calm, and in places where the water was shallow you could see nearly 30 feet to the bottom with no difficulty at all. That being said, the lake was extremely deep. Like the finger-lakes, this lake was carved out of the ground by a glacier, at its deepest point, the water is supposed to be nearly 1,000 ft. deep.

One thing that we noticed while out on our paddle-boat cruise (other than the constant burn in our legs), was that a number of people were swimming in the lake in secluded areas. Having brought our bathing suits to go to the beach s it is, we threw caution to the wind and found a little place of our own to swim in. If you’re thinking that a consequence of going in a lake so deep and at such a high elevation is that the water would be frigid, you would be absolutely correct, but man were we refreshed. The water was freezing, but the sun made the temperature bearable, and we swam for at least an hour.

Following our dip in the lake, we relaxed and basked in what was left of the afternoon sun at a biergarten overlooking the lake. As the afternoon faded into evening, we took the cogwheel back to G-P. In town we decided to dine in traditional Bavarian fashion, and I got, of all things, wiener schnitzel. I’m not sure many people (including myself) in the U.S. rightly know what that is; for those of us (including myself) so culinarily-imparied, wiener schnitzel amounts to thin slices of veal, breaded and fried.

It was at this point that the day got to be exasperating. We have reservations in Cannes on the 17th, so we absolutely have to get there by then. We worked out a way to spend a day in Venice before taking the night train to Nice. Turns out though, that the train to Venice was full. Uh Oh. The other problem was that the train was the last one to leave Munich that night, and we needed to get somewhere where we could get to Nice (which takes us to Cannes). We hopped on a train to Vienna (a little out of the way, but we wanted to sleep some), and then on a train back to Innsbruck. If all goes as planned, we’ll catch the train from Innsbruck to Venice, have a wonderful couple of hours in the Venice train station, and then sleep on our way from Venice to Nice. If things do not go according to plan, I have no idea what the hell we’re going to do, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out. Thats enough for now, I’m feeling absolutely exhausted and I’m going to try to nap for a couple of hours.

Technorati Tags: Europe

Since I’ve been in Hungary, I’ve been using SkypeOut more and More. Its a pretty cheap way for me to call the States, and the only downside that I can see is that I have the whole “Time Zone

So I’ve got to say, the iPod nano looks pretty sick. I’m not sure how much more apple could hone the iPod. I think, as do a number of other people, that a video iPod is due soon. Apple keeps revolutionizing things, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see one.

Technorati Tags: Apple

Salzburg was awesome. There is just something about Switzerland and Austria that draws me to them. All they appear to eat over there are pretzels. That would almost definitely make my dad happy.

Salzburg was just exhausting though. We walked probably seven miles with packs, and the packs were certainly not light. It was definitely worth it though.  The remaining pictures from our trip are uploading now (slowly but surely).

The first thing we did was walk through town. The town is actually pretty tiny. After walking through town, we hiked up to the castle which overlooks the town. The views from the overlooks were incredible, though the walk up was tiring! After the castle, we walked all over the ridge through town, saw several churches, and hiked out to a lake near town to see the Sound of Music House. Following our triumphant return into town, we were both thoroughly exhausted.

Actually, the best part of Salzburg was this incredibly cool biergarten. The food there was amazing. It was set up as kind of a market — you went to individual vendors and got what you wanted. You then brought your tray outside to this shaded grove, and got yourself a monastic beer! This place had the best beer I have ever had. It was just unbelievable, and made by monks! After the meal, we hopped back on a train to Vienna, then back to Budapest.

Technorati Tags: Europe

Well Florence completed our mini-tour of Italy. I’ve got to say of the cities we went in Italy, I was most impressed by Florence. That being said, of all the cities we went to in Italy, Florence was by far the most touristy.

As a brief aside: if you are planning on traveling in Italy, be advised that their train system does not prioritize timeliness. Every single train we got operated by TrenItalia was late.

I digress. Unfortunately for us, the tardiness of our train and the vast number of tourists flocking to Florence left us out of luck in going to the museums there. Both museums we wanted to see were inundated with tourists, and operating above capacity. Though I really wanted to see some of the artwork, we didn’t want to wait in the lines. Instead we meandered the narrow streets of Florence, and happened upon some beautiful squares, amazing statues, and the house of Dante (of Inferno fame, not Dante’s Down the Hatch). As a finish to our day in Florence, we watched the sunset over the Arno river.

When we got back to the train station, we had planned on getting on an 11.30PM train to Luzern, but TrenItalia just had to make things difficult. Their reservation system doesn’t work the day of, and since that was the last train out, we didn’t really want to risk being stranded in Florence if the train was full. The train we ended up taking brought us to Munich at 6.30AM, and we’re currently on our way to Salzburg, and then home to Budapest.

Technorati Tags: Europe

I’m going to try and hit two topics here that I’ve seen in the news recently, so if all you care about are our travels in Europe, you can stop reading . As promised, I’m going to hit the fallout from Katrina, and the fallout of the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist.

Whatever happened to “the buck stops here.