Salt Lake City

One of the great parts of working for an airline is the ease to travel on short notice. On a whim, my girlfriend and I went to Salt Lake City with no defined goals to visit anything. Usually I come up with a few ideas, and then visit them whenever we feel like it.

Upon arriving in Friday night and checking in, we hit the town. There's a big mall called the City Creek Center which was mostly closing down, but still had a few people enjoying the outdoor fountains and benches. We wandered around until we were bored and eventually visited a local pub (more on this later).

The next day, we went down to Thanksgiving Point. There's multiple attractions there that you can pay for an  inclusive admission pass. The Gardens is a very impressive site, as we saw a group prepare to take bridal photos at the location. We spent hours walking around and viewing the grounds.

The second most interesting point was the Museum of Ancient Life, which is basically a natural history museum. All the favorite dinosaur bones were there, and they had a fairly nice aquatic life section which a model of a megalodon shark head.

There was also a children's garden and a "Farm Country" area that taught children about farm life. Those sections were not as interesting, but we spent maybe an hour at each spot.

What luck! That very day, Salt Lake City was celebrating a Scottish Festival. Some vendors offered traditional Scottish food (and turkey legs), and sodas. None of the vendors sold alcohol, which was by design. They had several traditional sporting events which I don't know the names of, but we watched one where competitors launched small bales of hay across a pole vault bar. Another impressive sport was where competitors lifted a log on its end and tried to flip it in a straight and complete rotation. We didn't understand the scoring or who won exactly, but it was fun to cheer them on regardless.

I haven't done any research on this, but the alcohol rules seem awfully strict in the area. There are not very many bars in Salt Lake City, and we found it very weird for a Scottish Festival to be completely alcohol free.

On Sunday, we visited the Temple Square to visit a taping of the Tabernacle Choir, a show that has been running since the 1930s, I believe. It was a well produced and executed 30 minute production, and worth the visit on Sunday morning regardless of religious preference.

Afterwards we took an hour drive to get to Antelope Island from Salt Lake City. The admission for the causeway costs $9. We only spent a couple of hours there, but we managed to see antelopes and plenty of buffalo. At the end of the South route, there is a free ranch museum that explains the businesses that existed on the island. Definitely worth a relaxing day there.

Migration Step 2: Front Page Redirection

So far so good with blogger! I think that I will have to do some more theme customization, but not having to deal with software updates is a big plus.

Now, since I still have some directories and files that I need on my hosted site, I have temporarily moved the front page to blog.jameskupke.com using an HTTP 302 redirection from / to blog.jameskupke.com.

I haven't decided if I want to keep the front page as the blog or not, but this will keep all relevant content accessible for now.

Migration Step 1: Wordpress Content Migration

So being fed up with trying to maintain my own Wordpress build on my website, I've decided to give Blogger a shot, since I have pretty much everything else already on Google. Since I have paid web hosting on jameskupke.com for a while, I will still find some interesting uses for my web space. I don't really have time to debug why links and other widgets aren't working anymore.

So, step 1 is to export post content from Wordpress and feed it into Blogger. Luckily, I found Wordpress2Blogger covers this pretty quickly. A couple of clicks later, voila! All content moved, including the photos!

I'll have to consider the implications of moving my image gallery around and breaking the image links for the posts, but I'll worry about that when it comes; that's the agile way. :)

Considering moving to Blogger

A lot of the wordpress options are now broken, which irks me a bit. Looking into using blogger, so some overhaul is in process.

Still Around

I've taken a few trips, and a have been doing a lot of stuff actually, but I haven't been updating it on my website since I have Google+, Facebook, and Twitter as other mediums to share. I think it's time to do some redesigning on this page, I'll have to figure out what its future is.

Dallas Comic Con

Interestingly enough, I almost missed this event as I haven't been paying attention to any upcoming conventions except for A-Kon. I didn't take very many pictures, but there wasn't anything specific that I felt I had to take.

Some of the notable guests at the convention was Stan Lee, Leonard Nimoy, and Carrie Fisher. They were only doing paid autographs/photographs, so I didn't meet any of them. The longest line was for Leonard Nimoy, which was also apparent by the numerous Star Trek costumes.

I spent most of the time in the main exhibit hall. Stan Lee was actually located in the exhibit hall, so I could see him signing autographs. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed. I wandered around the entire hall, visiting stores and smaller artists and inkers. I got a few new sketches in my sketchbook, mostly of humorous characters or silly drawings.

One really interesting exhibit was the Art of Akira. Several of the original cells used for the movie were on display. It was really interesting to view the layer of cells to see how it was created.

It was a fun visit, and I picked up a few free comic books and sketches, but I thought the $20 price tag was a little steep. However, conventions don't come all the time, so I would probably go back to it if I was in town that weekend.

Scarborough Fair

Well, Scarborough Fair is approaching to a close, so I figure that I should put my post up before it's over! The drive over to Waxahachie isn't too bad, as it only takes about an hour or so from the metroplex. A friend of mine had a pretty busy schedule, as we tried to catch as many of the shows as the place had to offer.

We started off with the storyteller. He retold many childhood stories with a sense of humor and playing with words by flipping the first consonances. We followed the storyteller with one of the most iconic events: the joust competition. The joust tournament was interesting there were several competitions involved. The ones that we watched was hooking in rings to the lance, and then direct joust against each other. The show was really impressive and its a must watch for the renaissance festival.

Don Juan and Miguel is a show that was geared towards the kids, and the particular show that we watched focused on tricks with whips. Both Don Juan and Miguel were extremely funny. The main trick was the hold straw in their hands on or in their mouth and to continuously whip the straws shorter and shorter.

The Iris and Rose Wild 'n Thorny show was a funny adult theme singing act. Iris and Rose have a strong following, which is apparent by the audience participation in their act. All the songs had sexual innuendos, some more blatantly obvious than others.

Some of the all right shows were the German Twins, Human Chess Match, and Daniel Duke of Danger. Daniel was geared much more towards kids. There was also an improv comedy show. The Fire Whip Show was really interesting as a professional whip expert used a kerosene coated whip to create spectacular fire visuals and fast cracks. I only caught the last 15 minutes of the Human Chess Match, and I couldn't really hear the actors, so I didn't know what was going on.

Although it's possible to visit most of the shows that you want to watch in one day, I found it somewhat exhausting moving from one place to the next. I could easily see spending a couple of days at the fair to leisurely visit all the shows and soak in the environment.