Washington D.C. Trip 2006 – Day 2

Day two was dedicated to museums. We went to most of the Smithsonians. Shocking you may say. How could one do the Smithsoninans in a day when others could take a week. Simple really….Casey’s a looker, Doug’s a reader. Guess who won. We did lots of looking (not much reading). You can go pretty quick if you are just looking at everything. If I ever go back to Washington, it would be to spend the entire time in the Smithsonians and read everything. Great place. Oh and the price is absoultely right. FREE!!

Always nice to get to use something you pay for with you tax dollars without incurring extra costs (cough, Vulcan, cough, Federal Renovation Money, cough 1.5 million, cough $9 tour prices).

After the Smithsonian tour, we went to the Holocaust Museum. This was one of the most moving things I have ever seen. I have read a good bit about World War II and the Holocaust, but to see some of these artifacts from the time first hand really hits home. The sheer numbers involved are mind blowing. For this many people to senselessly lose their lives is beyond criminal and immoral, it is plain evil.

Reading about how Adolf Hitler came to power is a bit scary as well. In its roots are things we as Americans must be mindful of with the direction government has been going of late. Hitler played off fears of certain groups to claim more power and limit rights, privacy, and personal freedoms indefinitely (AKA never ending War on Terror, not that we would ever go to that extreme). But it shows how good people can allow these things to happen. I hope I never see anything like this come to pass in my lifetime. Seeing the things that are at this memorial really make you question whether people are inherently good or just plain evil through and through. 6 million Jews prayed for a miracle that never came while they were living. Makes you wonder if praying for a sick loved one has any chance of making a difference.

Can’t recall what we did that evening. I think we just went to a restaurant near the hotel and took it easy since we had to be up early the next day. (Warning political rant coming in next post)

Full Flickr Photoset Here

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Washington D.C. Trip 2006 – Day 1

So I’m finally getting around to posting about the trip. I will try to limit myself to one good rant about politicians, but that will come later.

Casey and I were looking at taking a trip out to Colorado to snow ski since she was off for Mardi Gras. Unfortunately during prime time ski season, my frequent flyer miles were completely useless (thanks Delta). Thus I went to doing something that Clark Howard would definitely approve of (and advocates). I searched for someplace that had cheap airfare during these dates.

I used the fantastic Kayak Fare Buzz search and found a round trip ticket for around $200 to Washington D.C.

Casey had been once before but this was a first for me (and I was quite excited considering how much I love our boys in Washington). The trip out on Friday was uneventful (which is a good thing when traveling by air). We stayed downtown at the Hotel HarringtonGoogle Map, which was pretty good considering it was half the going rate for other hotels in the area ($100/night versus $200/night for everyone else). This hotel had an awesome location and was walking distance to pretty much everything.

Saturday we got up and took the Metro out to Arlington National Cemetery. It was truly an awesome place. To look across all of the tombstones and think of the Americans that have given their lives for this country was a very sobering experience.

There is a Kennedy Memorial that has an eternal flame that is also a very somber sight.

The most impressive and touching site at the Cemetary is the Tomb of the Unknowns and the changing of the guard there. A guard is posted at the site 24 hours per day, 365 days a year with guard changes every hour. It is a very symbolic and respectful duty these soldiers perform. The dedication and discipline they show is touching and the whole experience will bring a tear to your eye.

I have some AVI videos of the changing of the guard, but can’t find a utility to merge them into one so I can post it. If you know a free utility please let me know.

There are also tombstones for those that died in the Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia tragedies along with the attempted hostage rescue in Iran.

After leaving the Cemetary, we went to the National Mall to visit the monuments.

We took a tour of the Washington Monument which was very interesting and beautiful. Amazing how that thing stays up given the manner in which it was constructed. Quite tall too and the view from the top is awesome.

Then we walked past the gazing pool to visit my man Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. Beautiful simple building and one really big statue of the man. Too many people around for me to try and climb up into his lap and get a picture so these are the best you will get.

Along the way back we saw the World War Two memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. The Vietnam Memorial was very touching since my stepdad served in Vietnam (Dustoff Pilot) and lost some very close friends whose names are imprinted on the wall there.

Along the walk back we also passed the White Housea and decided to get a picture. Shockingly enough you can’t get very close (due to the big iron fence) and the many, many secret service agents that like to stand 10 feet away from the crowd (a bit intimidating even if you are a law-abiding tax-paying citizen), not to mention the sniper on the top left corner of the roof of the White House (visible in person but not really on the picture). Let freedom ring 🙂

There was a brief stop in the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian somewhere in there while we had an hour to kill (awesome place!!!)

We met up with some friends of Casey’s that live in D.C. for dinner and drinks and thus ended day one.

Full Flickr Photoset Here

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Unofficial Clark Howard Show RSS Feed

Another of my favorite radio shows is the Clark Howard Show out of WSB in Atlanta, GA. Clark Howard provides daily consumer advice about a range of topics mostly dealing with personal finance. His motto is “To Help You Save More, Spend Less, And Avoid Getting Ripped Off”. Now that is a show I can get behind.

Clark posts a daily recap on his site with the high points of some of the topics covered and also some of the helpful websites mentioned. I love reading the recaps, but these days if it doesn’t come through an RSS feed. I do not read it. Thus I have hacked together a Ruby script to create such a feed. The feed is located here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/clarkhoward/index.rss

If you would like to check out the Ruby script itself, it is located here: clarkhowardfeed.rb

If anyone that works with Clark Howard is interested in hosting this feed themselves, I would be more than happy to FTP it to the official Clark Howard site nightly when it is generated. Would save me bandwidth and hopefully enlighten more people to the wonders of RSS.

Don and Mike Show RSS Feed Update: I have fixed the Don and Mike Show RSS Feed, so it should function again. The only change is that due to the new site using the Wimpy audio player to host the MP3’s of the audio recaps, the feed no longer contains these recaps. This is because the audio files no longer follow a standard naming convention based on the date. Now they include the date and arbitrary text describing the content. Unfortunately all of this information is locked up inside the Wimply Flash Player on the site, so I cannot scrape it to include it. If this changes in the future I will let you know.

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Get Elected to Congress, Get a Free Car

Another in the ongoing abuses of our American royalty (the members of which are of course our beloved Congressmen). Get elected to congress, get to lease yourself a fancy automobile at the taxpayers’ expense.

Luxury leasing Congress’ top perk

I’m sure this will be quite comforting to all of the college students that will be paying more for their student loans (one of the few federal programs I actually endorse and would not cut if I were elected King). Government excess at its finest. I vote that we institute the official car of the United States Congress….the Kia Rio.

A bargain at around $10,000. Not as sexy as the BMW 530i that Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York rolls in, but much more economical.

Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll have the posts up from my trip with Casey to Washington D.C. Also my Unofficial Don and Mike RSS feed is currently broken thanks to them changing hosts. That’s the beauty of screen scraping, very fragile. Hopefully I’ll get it updated in a couple of days.

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Unofficial Don and Mike Show RSS Feed

I have written a script to generate an RSS feed of the Daily Recaps and Audio Recaps for the Don and Mike Radio Show. The feed can be found here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/donandmike/index.rss

I have been toying with the idea of creating an unofficial feed for some time. I started out planning to create a script in PHP and did some experimenting with the libraries required to do screen scraping in PHP. That fell by the wayside and this weekend after a conversation with some friends I decided to go a different route. Enter the language Ruby. You have probably heard about Ruby these days from the excitement surrounding the web framework Ruby On Rails. My site is hosted by TextDrive which provides full support for Ruby (and Rails also) so this was a viable option. And this script provided a great opportunity for me to dive into the language.

After a little perusing of some tutorials and docs and a bit of hacking, I produced a working script that generates an RSS feed for the great Don and Mike Show. Since this could preclude you from visiting their site directly, I have added links at the bottom of each entry in the feed for their streaming Internet feed, a link to download their podcasts from iTunes, a link to shop for swag from their store, and of course a link to Hank’s Look-around Cafe (also known as O’Meara’s).

The Ruby script I wrote that generates the rss file is available here: donandmikefeed.rb

It is my first Ruby script and could no doubt be dramatically improved (and will be as a get the hang of some of the fancy dynamic features in the Ruby language) so be gentle with your evaluations. Feel free to comment here or mail me with any feedback.

Also, anyone associated with the show that would like access to this script or file, just let me know. I would be glad to have it FTP’d nightly to your server so it could be hosted as the official feed (and save me some bandwidth potentially).

Posted in Radio, Ruby, Technology | 2 Comments