101 things in 1001 days, revisited

So September 28, 2009, my experiment in completing 101 things in 1001 days ended. By my own tally I only completed 43 of my objectives. At one level this is an abject failure; on the other hand, a large number of life changes may make this a reasonable outcome. In the past three years, I’ve met my future wife, had open-heart surgery, gotten engaged, began life with a new family.

In the next couple months, I plan on restarting my 1001 days with many of the remaining objectives my previous list, as well as some new ones thrown into the mix. I look forward to starting a new challenge, along with the new year.

Free Trail-a-bike

General cleaning and organization has led to a few surplus items. We’re generally taking them to goodwill/local charities, but if something seems like it might be useful to friends, I’ll list it here. The first item up for grabs is a Trek Trail-A-Bike; this let’s budding cyclists hitch a ride behind a parent. Our looks like this one:


mttrain201_silverblack

But we don’t have the flag. Let me know if you’d like it. E-mail or phone is best. Thanks!

Wedding Update

topper
Or announcement, or something. What we know at the moment:

Kim and I are getting married at the Memorial Chapel on the UMCP campus on 10/10/10.

For the numerically geeky out there, in binary that’s 1010/1010/1010. Or if you take it as a binary number: 101010 = 42 in decimal. And I don’t need to tell you the meaning of the number 42.

The ceremony will be at 6pm with a reception afterwards. There’s plenty of room at the chapel — it seats over one thousand, so anyone and everyone is welcome there. The reception won’t be the same situation.

We also have a cake topper, all the way from France. That’s it at the top of this entry; and we have an idea of what we’d like the cake to look like.

I think Kim has tentatively found a dress she likes.
But, we’re still looking at reception halls, photographers, etc.

More details as they become available.

France 2009 photos

kim+sandroI finally got around to posting the photos from our trip to France on my Flickr photo stream. I didn’t bother editing the photos at all, otherwise I’d be posting them to the photo blog. Let me know which photos you like, and I’ll edit them for the photoblog.

You can see them here.

There are more pictures from the Tour de France including some panoramas I took on the new website:
http://visitletour.com/index.php?tid=6

Mini-Bar

minibarOn Friday night, Kim and I had the great pleasure of eating at the Mini-Bar by José Andrés.

A six-seat dining experience nestled within Café Atlantico, Kim had to work a bit to get reservations (call one month in advance @10 am). We were rewarded for our efforts by a 28-course tasting menu of “molecular gastronomy”. Most dishes were just a bite or possibly two, so 28 courses wasn’t the ordeal that might be imagined. Most of the dishes are amazing delicious, and all incredibly interesting to behold. Surprisingly, the chefs (2 for just the six seats) assemble and plate all the food before your eyes, and are willing and able to keep a running commentary of the ingredients and techniques employed in creating the meal.
The service, like the food, was impeccable. At the suggestion of our server we paired the meal with a 2005 Domaine William Fevre Chablis Les Clos. In the end, we had a throughly enjoyable (albeit pricey) evening.

Keeping SSH sessions alive

terminalSince I just had to re-remember how to do this, I thought I’d post a quick note. To keep SSH sessions alive you just need to create a file: .ssh/config. In this config file you can just add:

Host *
ServerAliveInterval=60
KeepAlive=yes

This works on the relatively recent (last 3-5 years) versions of OpenSSH that come with MacOS X. There’s probably a similar mechanism in older/other versions of SSH, but I haven’t researched it too deeply.

In France

Kim and I have been in France for a day now. While we haven’t done much more than walk through the city in the evening; so far Paris is as lovely as I remember. I snapped a quick photo from the “Pont de Tuilleries” last night, that hopefully will show up along side this post (made on my iPhone). For those interested in following our progress more
closely, I commend you to my Twitter feed that I’m going to try to update whenever I have Internet.