Month: June 2006

Wanna see one of my first web pages? Visit http://www.policebox.org/. As a rabid SciFi fan I felt it my duty at the time to create yet ANOTHER Doctor Who website for all of us who were starving from the lack of Doctor Who at the time. Ten years prior to the reinvention of the Doctor Who series, we [Doctor Who fans] had nary a clue ‘Who’ would return stronger than ever.

I present you my personal homage to the beloved T.V. Series (circa 1995) complete with mouseovers, frames and Anglophilic text! I think the graphics changed again and again over a 3 year period. Then I dropped all work on it until 2000 when I updated the front page to link to the official BBC site.

I finally had time to correct the old stonehenge.nu and doctorwho.nu links with a small perl script*.

*Perl Search/Replace script: perl -pe 's/www.doctorwho.nu/www.policebox.org/gi' *.html

I had some downtime last week as I moved all of my sites to a new hosted location. GridCycle and all of the other sites should be ready later today. The speed is a marked improvement as my content is now hosted off of an OC-48 connection. Also, the new location has full backups, a UPS and a myriad of other features. They’re called bluehost. Check them out.

Well, this is my first blog in awhile and it really is a sad state of affairs when the catalyst for my prolonged absence from writing is The Main Street Grill in Hopkins, MN.

I work near downtown Hopkins where there are a variety of eating establishments nested among the Antique Stores that litter the main drag. Today we ate at the Main Street Bar & Grill. Everyone ordered their respective meals. And like a good Weight Watcher I ordered the healthiest item on the menu: Fish and Chips! “Lightly Breaded fish with French Fries” I believe is what it said on the menu. Regardless of what any menu says about Fish and Chips, the word ‘lightly’ should be taken as such: Not to be trusted. It is a known fact when you order fried food you are most likely ingesting the largest amount of fat and/or trans-fatty acids known to man. After a healthy wait, the food arrived. Everything looked O.K. at first glance. So we began to eat. I noticed that the fish looked a little darker than the golden brown you come to expect from Fish and Chips. In fact, this was mostly brown. I cracked into my selection of fish like a spoon cracking through the top of Crème Brule. The fish had been in the fryer too long. It was nearly solid all the way through. With some disdain I continued to chop away the breading to get at the fish. The malt vinegar helped a bit but ultimately after finishing about 4-5 fries and a portion of my first piece of fish I gave up.

When I finally got the attention of our waitress I was able to voice my concern. I told her that the fish was slightly overcooked. She took one look at my plate. Seeing the piles of breading, the full plate of fries and the one piece of fish right before her, she did what any incompetent, uncaring waiter would do: Offered me another piece of fish. No, she didn’t offer me anything else—not even an apology. In fact when she returned with the bill she patronized me by telling me, “Since you didn’t like the way your’s [the fish] tasted or whatever, I took 50% off.” Oh, thank you! I thought to myself.

Maybe she was having a bad day? Maybe she was having a bad week? Maybe I should have ordered a soda-pop instead of water? Who knows? The world may never know. What I do know is that I will not be going to the Main Street Bar and Grill again any time soon. However, if for some reason I must [though I don’t remember her name] I will make sure I don’t get seated in her section.