Okay, enough time has passed and I've procrastinated enough to provide you with a detailed(enough) account of the events of and pertaining to the trip we took to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby.

After we arrived in Louisville, we parked in a fantastic spot right on Fourth Street and walked over to "Fourth Street Live!" which is an all-at-once development in downtown Louisville that was planned, assembled, and constructed by the Cordish company in Baltimore. It was kind of eerie seeing all the bars and restaurants, because many of them are also in Kansas City's brand new Power and Light District. But along with some less impressive names like Wendy's and the US Post Office, Fourth Street Live! also had an excellent British-styled beer bar called, simply, The Pub.

Erp, Amber and I sat down in The Pub and enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine and warmth coming through the opened front windows, along with some of their well-poured beers. After we finished there we walked back down the street to the patio at Bluegrass Brewing Company, or BBC as it is locally known. We greedily clutched some beers as we waited for Michael and Liana to arrive, and confirm my status that weekend as a fifth wheel.

After a couple of beers and catching up at the BBC, we all agreed it was time to move on. Prior to leaving Kansas City, I consulted Beerfly, as I always do when I travel, to find a good beer bar in Louisville. The place that seemed to have the best aggregate review was a place called Flanagan's Ale House, which was about a mile from the BBC over on a diagonal street that points away from downtown called Baxter. On the map it looked to be a simple five or six minute trip. Unfortunately though, there was a parade just getting out, so the traffic was horrendous. On top of the fact that we were sitting in parking lot traffic, the police had most of the streets blocked off, specifically designed to direct the thousands of cars back to the highway so they could all go back to their far-flung homes.

So, getting to Flanagan's took over an hour. We literally could have walked faster, there and back, but we were parked on the street, and feeding the meter would have been highly unpleasant from a mile away. When we got reasonably close we kind of threw our hands into the air and just grabbed a curb parking spot and walked the remaining three or four blocks past the stopped cars with drivers agitated as we had been or more.

Flanagan's is a great bar, and they have a lot of beer available in bottles, but the tap selection is pretty austere. We grabbed a table on the back patio, and the other four people lit up all at the same time. I think it's great that they were able to relax, but the smoke got to me after a while. I probably should have said something. We stopped at one more place on the way back, and went back to the hotel for deep sleep and breathe-right strips for me.

Everybody was up and about by about 9am, and helped themselves to free breakfast. Erp and Amber slipped away for some private time in Louisville, leaving me with nothing to do in particular. So, I went with Liana and her mother to find and choose adornments for the hat that she'd be wearing for the derby the next day. It was a hoot. For real, I actually had a good time.

After that, Michael and Liana and I went to the White Castle that was fortuitously located next to our hotel, and ate many many teeny tiny burgers. We retired to the hotel lobby after that, where I taught them how to play Maui. But Maui is really hard to play with only three people. Craig and Amber came back late in the afternoon, and we spread a map out in front of us to decide where to go for leisure time that night. It showed all of Shelby County, Kentucky, which seemed to extend for about ten miles in all directions from Shelbyville. My suggestion was that we just drive the twenty miles to Frankfort and find something downtown. This opinion was brushed off by everyone else though even though nobody would think twice about driving 45 miles to Louisville.

Anyway, we wound up just piling into the rental and driving down the main drag of Shelbyville. We were about to turn around, and Criag was indeed in the process thereof, when we spotted a bar in an unexciting building on the side of the road. We figured it'd be as nice a place as any, and wandered in. Liana lost her footing in a frantic attempt to get inside out of the slightly-drizzling rain. Her tumble was apparently watched in full by the bar's patrons inside. No matter, we thought. It was time for a beer, and possibly some food.

Sergio's, as the place turned out to be called, features about fifteen taps of carefully selected beer, and as of the day of our visit, six hundred and fourteen different bottles of beer. As I always enjoy, Liana, Michael, and Amber for the most part deferred to my judgement for beer selections, and were pleased with the choices I made for them. Sergio himself, a Brazilian immigrant who had to tell us he was not actually from the US, served the beers and was happy to fill us in about any beer-related knowledge he had. The beer was fresh, delicious, and served in chalice-like glasses. When we finished our beers, our bottles were not picked up, much to our confusion. But it allowed for a feeling of accomplishment as the table was quickly and completely covered with dead soldiers.

All payment is made at the register on the way out. Sergio advised us that if we had forgotten the number or nature of the beers we drank, to just bring up our bottles as we paid. So that was why. We made it back to the hotel in time for Letterman and a deep and heavy sleep. I was awakened seven hours later by the sound of the Angry German Kid that I set as the wake-up ringer on my phone. We got hastily dressed, and by 7am we were standing out in the gloom and drizzle, ready to go. Liana's aunt was in a very big hurry to get going, but once we reached them on the highway in front of us, we found that they were driving at ten miles below the limit in open traffic. "Oh well," we thought. "We're on vacation."

We arrived at Churchill Downs about 40 minutes later, and found a free parking spot on the street in a nearby neighborhood. Apparently the folks in the other car were approached by a large man when they parked who offered to "watch their car," for twenty dollars. When they told him that they weren't worried about it, he rebuked them with, "this place is ghetto. Your car isn't safe here." Near where we parked there were lots of piece of the curb that were blocked off with milk crates and garbage cans, so that the local residents could try to charge people to park there. Everybody's trying to make a buck.

The pictures can speak better of the Derby itself, and this entry is getting long, so I'll just say that though it was the first Kentucky Derby I've attended, it certainly won't be the last. It was extremely fun, and the weather cleared completely within an hour of our arrival. We never even got wet. Beautiful women beyond count were all around, dressed better than I'm used to seeing women dress for weddings. The sun became kind of oppressive, though it never got hot out. I lost about $175 in wagers and won about eight dollars. As far as I'm concerned, the 2009 Derby is a go.

I spent Wednesday night doing long overdue laundry, in preparation for the impending trip, and for the overall long-term goal of having clean clothes. I stayed up questing with Nick until after midnight, and still didn't get to bed until after 1am.

My alarm clock screeched to life at 4:26am. I don't know why I picked 4:26 for a 5am pickup. I know it sounds arbitrary and I can't explain it. We got on the road closer to 6am though, as there were some delayys about which I didn't ask questions. We stopped in Boonville a while later for some breakfast.

We rolled into Louisville at about 3pm, and wasted no time in finding a place to get a drink. We checked out Louisville's older and smaller version of the Power and Light District. Keeping with Cordish's modus operandi cheesily called, "Fourth Street Live!"

I don't really have time to go over much more, except to say that we had a great time in Louisville last night. More to come.

Okay, so that page I referenced before that had the step-by-step instructions for configuring fluxbox for the Eee had a pretty nasty typo. The first line after the sh-bang line was accidentally combined with it, and I just assumed that there must be such a thing as an shsudo command. With the help of my handy new USB rescue stick, I was able to fix the problem, once and for all.

So now, I have fluxbox installed and working beautifully. I still have a couple more customizations to make, but it's now in really excellent shape for a laptop of mine. I've gotten a couple of keyboard shortcuts set up, and the precious screen real estate is preserved in a much more efficient manner now.

In other, possibly more consequential news, I've been elected to the board of my building's homeowners' association. There's not much more to tell than that, though. I'll brief you when more developments arise.

I purchased an Eee PC last week, and it was delivered yesterday for me to ogle and admire ceaselessly. Unfortunately, I had multiple pressing engagements last night that kept me from getting to enjoy it much. So, because I was excited about it, and because I promised some people a look, I brought it to work with me today. In keeping with my naming convention of volcanoes, I named the little guy ararat.

I the course of my normal daily routine, I kept turning my attention to my new little laptop, and set about customizing it until it became clear to me that the default graphical user interface was not going to cut it for me. On a Linux-powered laptop, I require 7 relatively simple things: a web browser(firefox), console access(xterm), ssh(openssh), instant messaging(pidgin), perl, image processing(imagemagick), and the ability to play media(SMPlayer). These things are all arranged in difficult separated-out places in the default simple configuration, so I decided to start reading some of the startlingly abundant resources out there for hacking/customizing an Eee PC.

I quickly decided that I wished to use fluxbox instead of the default interface, and found a pretty detailed page on how to make this happen. I followed it closely, rebooted, and found that somehow, the setup I had followed caused my X server to break. On a normal Linux machine, if the configuration is broken, it tries a couple times and then stops, informing you that there much be something wrong, and that it's been disabled until you fix the problem. Not so on the Eee. It just kept trying and flickering and restarting X until I got tired of waiting for it to quit.

The Eee ships without the ability to have virtual consoles, so there was nothing I could have done even if it had disabled X. I had an unusable machine. Through a labored process, I finally managed to get a System Rescue CD loaded onto a USB thumb drive. I was able to get in, mount the root filesystem, and undo the changes that had been made.

Through some actions that are definitely not within the scope of novice computing, for which the Eee is targeted, I was able to restore operability on my computer. That said, most novices aren't going to mess with the system's settings either. There are lots and lots of resources out there for customizing Eee PCs, so I'll have to be more careful when I read them, at least now I have a bootable rescue disk on USB.

It's remarkable how fast the system boots. Except for one slow spot when my debbie-downer cube neighbor, Wayne, was watching, it takes literally under fifteen seconds to go from powered off to ready to use. Shutting down takes about five or six seconds. The system has a sleep/suspend capability, but it takes about ten or fifteen seconds to recover from it. With that in mind, I think it makes more sense to just shut down when I'm done using it, and turn it back on when I'm ready to use it again. It's a total difference of perhaps ten seconds between going to low battery consumption and just turning it off.

From my experience of using it for the last ten hours or so, I would highly recommend it. The solid-state drive is whisper-quiet. The fan, when it eventually kicks on, is imperceptably quiet. All that indicates to me that a fan is even running is a slight warmth on the left side of the keyboard.

Anyway, give one a try. I think it's great.

I've fished the pennies out of my change cup. I predict this will not make it past the housekeeping folks tonight.

The 2008 KCATA Pubcrawl was an unmitigated success. Some people came and went, but in total, over twenty people came out for the third annual crawl. Over a period of sixteen hours, the group visited eleven bars between Waldo and downtown. Some firsts for the crawl:

1. Bars: Pizza 51, Mike's Tavern, Crosstown Station, John's Big Deck
2. Route: The #25 bus
3. No Plaza bars
4. No Westport bars
5. No Midtown bars
6. No Power & Light bars

It's always great to expand the horizons of an annual pubcrawl, and it's good to see that without going to the most likely bar areas, new and exciting places can be found and enjoyed. The bars we visited that had been visited in previous iterations were Waldo Pizza, 75th Street Brewery, Charlie Hooper's, Grinders, Zoo Bar, Harry's Country Club, and the Red Front.

After leaving the Red Front, some of the few that remained gave the rest of the few that remained a ride to Town Topic. It was far too full, so said people(myself included) went to YJ's for coffee and breakfast food. At the end of the night, only Alex, Geoff, and I remained. Faced with the reality of not being able to catch a cab at 3:30am("I've got a two-hour wait." CLICK), we walked from 18th to my place on 7th before shaking hands and calling it a night.

Here is a selection of pictures from the event.

In what order do you defeat the bosses in Megaman 2? My brother and I used to team up. He'd take the first four, and I'd take the last, but even now, I stick to the same order:

1. Flashman (Easiest level, easiest boss.)
2. Metalman (The metal blade was absolutely critical.)
3. Woodman (First victim of the metal blade.)
4. Airman (Easily my least favorite boss.)
5. Bubbleman (The underwater level was awesome. Watch out for the spikes!)
6. Heatman (The slow-moving bubble lead made mincemeat of the human Zippo.)
7. Quickman (Some of the best music in the game, and easily the hardest level in the game.)
8. Crashman (My favorite music in the game, and the only good use that ever came of Woodman's stupid spinning Leaf-shield.)

What's your order? Accusations of nerdery will not be recognized.