Finally, the old photo gallery has been fixed! This time it was not my fault at all and was caused by a bug in one of the systems included with XAMPP, I’d say it was Apache most likely. I installed an updated version of XAMPP yesterday and the issue generating thumbnails I was having earlier was solved. The problem wasn’t actually with the thumbnail generation, but verifying the tools that create the thumbnails were installed. Now I have the dilemma of going back to using the older photo gallery, or continuing on with the gallery that is built into wordpress. I’m having a hard time deciding what to do. Old way or new way?

As mentioned earlier, we attended the Great American Beer Festival over this past weekend. This was our third time attending the festival and once again I put together a little list of must hit breweries. When we finally made it inside the festival doors we did our best to visit all of them. In addition to my own list, I also had a list of the 10 Not-to-Miss Breweries from local magazine, 5280. The nice thing about their list is that it included two beers from each with descriptions, but we later found that some of them were missing from the festival completely.

We attended the last session of the festival on Saturday evening. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you can find out which beers won medals earlier in the day’s official competition. The bad thing is that we found some of the beers were completely gone, and some breweries had completely packed up shop already. The event is still worth going to no matter what session you attend. Maybe next year I’ll consider going to Saturday afternoon’s members only session for the AHA, especially if I start brewing my own beer next year.

There used to be a category for posting called BC, which stood for Before Categories. I had this because I used to publish my blog via blogger, which did not support categories. So when I imported all of the old posts, there was nowhere for them to go. Well today I finally finished categorizing all of those old posts into at least one of the other site categories. I did have to add a new category called College to classify many of the old posts.

In looking back on some of the older entries, there are some changes I’ve made over the past seven years of blogging. First, I could never spell definitely correctly in the early years. I’ve definately learned my lesson! Also, I think my grammar, spelling, and writing have all improved drastically since those college days. Another thing was my style used to be just writing about what I was doing, more of a journal, whereas now my writing is very specific to one topic and much shorter. However, some things never change and I’m ready for the weekend to begin!

Thanks to my brother, I’ve been playing our new Wii nearly every night. He gave us one of my favorites of the wedding gifts, though there are some others that I may write about at a later date. I must say that boxing can be quite a workout! The rest of the Wii Sports package is really entertaining though, as I’m sure many of you already know. We also have Wii Play, which included a second controller. Despite costing just a little more than a controller alone, the games in this package are equally entertaining. I’m a pretty good fisherman, winning the platinum medal already. And I’m getting much better at laser hockey, which I thought was really tough at first. I’ve got a stockpile of Sears gift certificates, so I’m hoping I can add even more games. Any opinions?

Kim and I traveled back to Ohio over this past weekend for a variety of events. One of which was one of the best Oktoberfest celebrations in the country, the Minster Oktoberfest. It had been years since I was last at this party, but once I arrived in the small town of Minster it all instantly came back to me. I immediately grabbed a milk jug of beer and headed for the main beer tent to take listen to the festive bands. And I wasn’t alone, according to their website 80,000 people join the celebration in the town whose population is not even 3,000 strong. It really is an amazing sight to see. Unfortunately, my camera batteries died, but luckily my mom was there to document the whole event. For Kim and I, we’ll be heading to another huge event this weekend, the Great American Beer Festival. I love fall!

The last stop of our cruise honeymoon was supposed to be Tunisia. I was really looking forward to stopping there, especially after getting all kinds of great advice on a previous posting. Unfortunately, while checking in we were told that our itinerary had been changed to remove Tunisia and add Palermo, Sicily. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. We later found out that the change was made after previous cruisers expressed their opinions on the stop and suggested that the ship should stop in a different port.

I’m not sure if the change is really justifiable or not, but after our trip I made the suggestion to consider a port different than Palermo. Overall, I was not impressed by this city at all. Perhaps it had a little to do with my bitterness toward the itinerary change, but I honestly felt that the city was dirty and rundown. Sure there were some interesting sights to see, but we found them to be not very well kept up and were surprised to find graffiti covering even some of the most famous landmarks. After being disappointed on our walk around town, we decided to take a bus trip to the nearby town of Mondello and to visit the beach there. Though it was a bit crowded (and a little dirty too) it provided a much nicer day than Palermo.

One nice result of the itinerary change, was that our ship had extra time on our day after our stop in Croatia, so we cruised past the island of Stromboli. This island is home to one of three active volcanoes in Italy. The captain stopped the ship for a half hour or so, as we took in the frequent eruptions of the volcano in the nearly pitch-dark night. It was pretty hard to photograph, but I was able to balance the camera on railings and set the exposure to a second or two to get a couple of decent shots. Here are some of those pictures and a few from Palermo and Mondello.

The second to last stop on our cruise was in Split, Croatia. As mentioned in this planning post, we participated in our only cruise sponsored excursion of the trip, an Off Road Safari. On this trip we took turns driving manual transmission Land Rovers through the countryside, to the top of mountains, along the Cetina River, and through twisting village roads. We also were fed twice with some traditional, but still familiar, foods that were very enjoyable. We also got to jump into the frigid waters of the Cetina and have great views of the entire area. Though we had nothing to compare it to, everyone we were with said it was the best excursion they had done, and some folks did an excursion at every stop.

After the excursion was over, we took some time to explore the town of Split and especially see parts of Diocletian’s Palace. We didn’t have time to go into any of the buildings, but it was still interesting to see more ancient structures and compare them to the others we had already seen at other stops. Overall, we felt that Croatia was a beautiful country that was not nearly as touristy as other spots, and we would love the chance to go back and do more adventurous activities.

Hard to believe it, but I’ve been out of high school for over ten years now. This weekend is officially my ten year high school reunion weekend. Fortunately I am back in Cincinnati to take in some of the festivities, including a big football game tonight with arch-rival school Elder, also my dad’s alma mater. Looking forward to seeing some good high school football. Go Crusaders!

Tuesday night I finally made it back out onto the ice for another exciting game of adult league hockey. I missed one game while we were away exploring Europe and missed another last week due to a cold. So this was my first game of the season though my team had already played a couple of winless games. Though to their credit, the games were both close. In fact one of them ended in an overtime shootout. Things are definitely looking up for the team.

Despite the improvement in personnel for the team, I’m told the game on Tuesday was not much different than the previous two. Our new goalie played well. Our team played alright and put some pucks in the net, but we still managed to lose a close game. Final score was 4-3. I didn’t have any points in the game as I spent most of the game trying to learn how my new line mates played. I think with a little more time, our line will definitely start burying the puck!

This past Saturday we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park to view the changing aspen trees and the annual elk rut, aka the elk breeding season. We took Cari, our roommate for the past month, along with us for her first visit to the park. Cari’s family are longtime friends with Kim’s family, and we are happy to welcome her for her two month stay in Denver. She is a pharmacy student at Ohio Northern, and is participating in an internship-like program. Her next adventure will take her to Kenya! I’ll have to encourage her to start a blog about her time there.

Anyway, I wanted to introduce the stranger that is in a few of these pictures. Though the park isn’t particularly known for it’s aspen groves, we were able to find a few bright gold spots, especially on our hike to the top of Deer Mountain. However the main reason I wanted to go to the park was to see the elk in their mating season. Before we even saw them, we could hear them loud and clear. The males have a very distinct call, which is known as bugling. Often, you can catch the males fighting with one another, using their antlers to show who is boss. We only caught a brief physical encounter between males, and it was at quite a distance, but you could feel the tension in the air. The females, however, could have cared less about the males and just continued feeding in the large fields.