I hope Santa was good to you all…
Santa was very good to bowtie6!! Just had dinner, opened one of my Xmas presents and watching “To Catch a Thief”… That blue Sunbeam was pretty darn awesome, but Grace Kelly in the white outfit and diamonds… Dayum!
At any rate, this is what Santa brought me…
Good times indeed!
Not doing a lot of work on bowtie6 this weekend since the Mrs and I decided to take a little road trip along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Since I am a fan of good bourbon I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more about it.. What a trip this has been!!
We won’t have a chance to stop by all the distilleries along the way, but we did take the time to check out some of the ones I really like. We started at Maker’s Mark – a smaller operation but nevertheless very impressive. Actually had a chance to see where “46” is made – if you haven’t had a chance to try it, do yourself a favour and get some. In the gift shop there, they had quite a nice selection and among the items not available except at the shop: the Maker’s Mark Mint Julep had been highly recommended. They also had “white dog” (the spirit before being aged) for sale in clear bottles. We had a taste at the tasting station and it was extremely good – I reckon this will burn with a blue flame and indeed it had plenty of “bubbles”. Yes, this was good “moonshine”.
Next on the list of visits was the Jim Beam distillery. This was a much larger scale facility and in addition to Jim Beam, they make smaller production batches of among other things, Knob Creek. Since they don’t rotate the barrels in their warehouses, the “good stuff” is found towards the middle to top of the racks of the warehouses. And by good stuff, they are not joking! In those select racks they choose the barrels that will become such items as Knob Creek Single Barrel (unique to the gift shop), Basil Hayden, Baker’s and Booker’s. We had a chance to taste Booker’s and that stuff is amazing: it is 129 proof!!
Well needless to say, when on such trips one never knows what one might see. At Maker’s Mark I spotted a fellow with a shirt with the Automobile Magazine logo embroidered on it… Well, in the parking lot was this:
I have seen this bad boy in several magazines and indeed this is the new Mini Cooper coupe. It is strictly a two seater. As it turns out, the fellow with the Automobile Magazine shirt is one of the web editors, and of course I had to start a conversation! This thing would be some serious fun. He said it was quick indeed and it performed as good as it looks. Here are some more shots…
That is a wing on the roof and it is trick!
So, if you are reading this post Mr Automobile Magazine Web Editor, it sure was nice chatting with you today!
STS-135 left Launch Pad 39A for the last time today. A sad day indeed for America.
I feel bad for the thousands of dedicated NASA workers that will be loosing their jobs in the next few days as a result of the cancellation of what basically amounts to America’s space program. I guess the cadre of “brilliant” politicians that unfortunately run things in America these days – starting from the very top to the very bottom – has decided this is no longer an important priority. So much of what we enjoy today as “technology” found its origins in the space program.
Perhaps I am a little one-sided. After all, I remember the day when “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was the news of the day. I watched it on a small black and white TV – imagine that in today’s world of 50+ HDTV’s…
Critics claim there is not enough money for luxuries such as a “space program”. I say not. If only politicians in our country were responsible and instead of pissing our resources on countries that have no desire to be associated with America perhaps we could invest those resources in things that matter: ourselves. Don’t take me wrong – I am not an isolationist, but I do have a problem when I read about how such a great portion of our wealth is squandered in “nation building” or corrupt governments all around the world. The same can be said on the domestic front.
Yes, I guess I’m one of the millions of pissed off Americans that hate to see our glory days in the past. I am optimistic however, in that good will eventually prevail. We are in such desperate need of true leadership. Leadership that can utter words that ignite the imagination of Americans. Words such as “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too“.
God Speed, Atlantis. God Speed indeed…
Whew! What a weekend…
Looks like there was an ‘issue’ with the block of servers this blog is hosted on and my hosting provider (they sponsor Danica) ended up locking things down including the database. They did a great job, so great we were unable to get back in.
I’ve spent more than my fair share of time this weekend with three technicians on the phone trying to solve the problem. After much effort, they were able to determine the root cause and a solution. We are back online. Fortunately, the weather this weekend sucked hard so I did not miss much.
Since I had ‘spare’ time waiting for my hosting provider to get their act together, I decided I would try to install a ‘local’ version of WordPress on my laptop to play with. This is a good thing, because it would enable me to fiddle with settings and plugins without risking the live site. Easier said than done.
I did several Google searches and found there is a nifty installer the boys from Redmond put together in order to install such things as WordPress and make it work nice with IIS. This little gem is called Web Platform Installer and it sucks. It sucks hard. The thing installs just fine, however it forces upon you a SQL Server Lite version with a lot of extra uninvited guests. So for those that say WordPress cannot run with SQL Sever, think again. Since I have WordPress with MySQL, all this stuff was uninstalled. Back to the drawing board.
Did more Google searches and finally found a way to make all this work. To make WordPress work on Windows XP Pro without IIS, run Xampp. I had read about this the first time, but had found some folks complaining about it. Let me say this: it works. It takes some careful tweaking but it works.
The install goes very smoothly if you follow the directions located here: Install Xampp instructions. There is mention of XAMPP Lite, but I just used the full blown Xampp installer. The instructions listed there are excellent, however there are some steps that will save you a great deal of aggravation. They are:
I hope this helps – if you have any corrections please let me know and I’ll edit this post. Hopefully this can save somebody some time.
Today, bowtie6 pays homage to Steve McQueen on his 81st birthday.
