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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Poets' Walk
Tuesday, May 24 2005
This evening Gretchen and I went to the Tuesday buffet at the Curry House in Red Hook. We went early and there weren't many people there. After our meal Gretchen made the observation that the Tuesday buffet isn't quite as good as the Sunday buffet. Perhaps the Sunday buffet is better because the turnover is higher and the food doesn't linger as long outside the kitchen.
Gretchen tells me that there's an Indian restaurant in Manhattan where the quality of the food is dependent on whether or not the cook's wife is in the country. When she's here, he's miserable, and the food suffers. But (as the maitre d' put it), "If you come here and see a line going around the block you know that she is back in India and he is happy and the food is good!"

We'd brought the dogs with us, and after dinner we drove to a small park called "Poets' Walk," a bucolic strip of land connecting Route 103 to the Hudson River a half mile north of Route 199 on the east bank of the river. It's a contemplative park featuring several cedar structures including rustic benches and a gazebo. Much of the property is kept bush-hogged to keep the fields open and maintain the view of the river. It's best to keep to the trails and not walk across those fields, though, because they are extremely rich in poison ivy and various thorny vines, one of which temporarily crippled Eleanor. Also, it's prime habitat for the ticks that carry Lyme Disease.
Less than half way to the river you cross a ridge and are granted a spectacular view of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge just to the southwest. It's an unusual view here in the forested East, resembling the view of the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin County. The K-R Bridge is currently undergoing repairs and part of its length was covered in tarps, making it look like it was the setting for one of Christo's installations. This led me to joke that perhaps Christo's students and underlings go on to find work as consultants on bridge and building repair projects in cases where there is some concern about the æsthetics of whatever temporary tarps might be used.
Being a cool rainy evening, it was a good one for walking dogs at Poets' Walk, which (given the number of people we saw even in these conditions) would ordinarily be crowded with pedestrians. As with most parks, dogs are supposed to be leashed at Poet's Walk, but to have actually done so would have been to commit a crime against nature (or at least against the nature of dogs).


This evening I migrated the site tracking code (written in Microsoft SQL and VBScript) from the now-defunct Vodkatea.com site to a directory on Bathtubgirl.com. Now that this code is back on a live server, it will allow me once more to track sites using web bugs (which I consider nefarious in the hands of anyone but me). Such web bugs and the data they generate are essential in helping me interact with the web in my preferred style. I like to check referrals and hit statistics and sort that data in different ways to tease out interesting trends. Unfortunately, though, the migration was made unnecessarily difficult by Microsoft's DTS wizard, which tended to fail after ten minutes of activity without giving me an error containing sufficient information for me to correct whatever the problem was. Furthermore, the DTS wizard saw fit to completely blow away a table that I hadn't told it to modify or replace, and I had to end up restoring it from a backup.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?050524

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