Temperatures in the Denver area have definitely taken a downswing in the last couple of weeks. Though it may not be a welcome change for everyone, I’m loving it! There are few things more refreshing than the cold crisp air. It’s been so chilly that we actually had to kick on the heat over the weekend. Another thing the change brings is the ski/snowboard season! In fact two resorts opened up this morning with about a foot and a half base of snow. These two (A-Basin and Loveland) are the same ones that compete nearly every year for the first opening day, and this year it was a tie. I cannot wait to get out and make some turns, though I may still wait a couple of weeks before heading out.

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, so how about another poll?

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Be sure to click the links in the poll to see an example of both methods.

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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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!