sethbc’s (infrequent) blog…

Thanksgiving was an absolutely smashing success. We ate about 7 metric tons of food, went out to the awesome christmas market at Vorosmarty Ter, and then came back and had dessert. The meal was absolutely incredible. Today, we had round 2, and i feel confident saying that most of the food is gone. All that remains now are some pieces of turkey, corn bread, and apple pie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails a lot recently, and have managed to set up a couple of test sites on my laptop. I’ve got to say, it’s definitely a pretty solid web framework, and it certainly makes development (both standard and AJAX) fairly easy.

One of the coolest rails apps I’ve been playing with is Typo. Now over the last 8 years I’ve used numerous different blog systems/CMS. I think I started out with nuke/postnuke, bounced around between drupal/wordpress and about a million others, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t try out typo:-). I think the interface in typo is just ‘better’ than the interface to wordpress. While drupal is an amazing system, it just has too much power under the hood for merely hosting a blog (and it isn’t tailored enough to blogging).

The other rails app I’ve been playing with is Instiki. Instiki is yet another wiki software, and while it does appear to be both quick and easy to use, I don’t think they can hold a candle to mediawiki.

Rails has been maturing extremely rapidly, and these web apps are extremely young. In the next couple months, things are going to get very interesting. Rails seems to make the design and implementation of a Web 2.0 site pretty easy, and I don’t see rails slowing down any time soon.

It snowed!

It’s been a while since I’ve been updating frequently. I guess I’ve just been caught up with some other things.

The last couple days we’ve gone out, it has been a blast, but I’m really getting geared up for thanksgiving! Yesterday I had biscuits for dinner. That’s right, biscuits. I was a little worried about making them for thanksgiving without any practice, but they turned out great! The next step is going to be getting together some good sausage gravy.

One thing I’m a little concerned about is getting all the pieces for the Turducken. I know I can get a chicken, and I hope I can get a duck, but I don’t know if they sell turkeys whole. Hopefully we can go to the big market and figure that out. Then its just a matter of making everything and putting it all together!

And now why I decided to post in the first place. The forecast says its going to snow! If I get some good snow pics, I’ll post them

My Best of Paris ‘04 photos are up now. I haven’t gone through and commented on all of them yet, but I’ll probably finish that up today.

We haven’t been at the law school all that much because we just don’t have class that much. That certainly is a welcome change from last semester. Unfortunately we don’t have our grades yet, though I’m sure we both did fine.

We’ve been kind of busy trying to plan our thanksgiving dinner, which we’re planning on doing sometime next week (though not necessarily on Thursday). The plan so far is to have a bunch of different things. Here’s a rundown of the temporary menu.

For Dinner

• Green Bean Casserole
• Sweet Potato Casserole
• Corn
• Buscuits & Gravy
• Cornbread
• Mashed Potatoes
• Stuffing
• Cranberry Sauce
• A Roast
• A Turducken

For Dessert

• Apple Pie
• Peanut Butter Pie
• Vanilla Ice Cream

The Turducken is the real piece de resistance. A chicken inside of a duck inside of a turkey. I’m looking forward to getting that one going.

We tried to go to the house of terror today, but unfortunately we forgot that museums are closed on Mondays. I guess we’ll just go shopping for cooking utensils and other non-fresh foodstuffs necessary for our thanksgiving. The current plan is to go to West End City Center to the really big match (and possibly look for some Crate and Barrel type thing).

My Best of Europe 2005 Album is up at my photo site right now. I’ve tried to go through and caption all of the photos, though Mom pointed out that several captions contain errors. If anything jumps off the page for you, feel free to send me an email.

In other news, I have posted links to my three calendars on the right sidebar of my blog. You should be able to check most of my travel dates, class times, and any personal appointments I have marked down.

So I’m looking for a new set of snow skis, bindings and boots. I’m leaning towards the Atomic Metron:B5 as the skis and the Atomic Neox 6.14 as far as bindings. The question of boots is a little different. I really need something that isn’t going to kill my feet. I’m hoping that the Metron M11 or M10 is decent for my foot, but if not my backup plan is to check out the Tecnica Vento 10.

I’m uploading two photo albums that I spent a fair amount of time on, my “Best Of

I returned home yesterday from my short trip to Amsterdam and München. Despite having to walk back from the train station at 11:30 at night, the trip was a success.

First things first. Amsterdam is just ridiculous. The city is absolutely gorgeous. Most cities are referred to by guide books as “concentric circles.”? Most of the time this is a lie. Concentric implies some sort of regularity. When the guidebook described Amsterdam as circular, I had my doubts. Let me be the first to say that I was wrong. Amsterdam is virtually a perfect circle around the train station. Radiating out from center are a number of roads and a few canals, and everything is circled by both roads and canals. The city is quite impressive. I made sure to attend the Van Gogh museum, and we walked by the Anne Frank house, but I had a backpack on so we couldn’t go inside. We hit one of the coffee shops where I had a coffee, and then we walked around the Red Light district. It was fascinating that people window shop for hookers. I must admit, the whole thing was a bit surreal.

From Amsterdam we trained back to München. The weather was absolutely horrendous, but we made the best of it. We visited a delicatessen known as Dallmayr’s, and it was the most unbelievable “grocery” store We’ve ever seen. The food was all incredibly fresh, and absolutely everything we tried was amazing. Because the weather was so terrible, we decided to spend the rest of the day indoors. We visited both the Hofbräuhaus and the Augustiner brewery. Around mid-afternoon, we headed back to the train station, and caught the train to Wien and from there we got the train to Budapest.

This is the second time that we’ve been late coming into Budapest. The train gets in at like 10:53, and the metro closes very shortly thereafter. Unfortunately for us, we were late by about forty minutes, and were forced to either cab home or walk. We opted for the latter of the two, as the former has a tendency to result in rip-offs. We got home safely though, and hopefully our trip to Wien this week will go off without a hitch.