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Key West

My sister and her friend Lisa had been planning to go to the beach in Key Largo. They set the date for Thursday, December 27, and asked if I wanted to go. I said heck yes I would and asked Justin to come along too. Lisa brought her friend Allie. I think her name is actually Allison, and I’m not sure how she would spell Ali/Ally/Allie/Alley?, but I’ll call her Allie. It sounds good, but it’s probably wrong.

So, it was just the five of us. Lisa drove. And drove and drove. It’s a long drive to the Keys, but eventually we were in Key Largo, the first key. We were also hungry. We decided to stop at a Japanese place called Sushi Nami. It looked kind of deserted, but certain people in our party were really desperate to have sushi. They regretted it when they realized that their sushi wasn’t very good. My sushi (and the rest of my food) was fine. I got a lot of it for a pretty reasonable price.

We decided to go further and look for a beach. Eventually we got to Anne’s Beach, where Japanese tourists took a picture of my dog on my last Florida Keys trip. The water was still really shallow like last time, and the surface was covered in sea grass. That was a no go. So we kept going.

Update (Fri Dec 28, 2007 22:04 EST): As requested by reader Kirsten, here’s a photo I took while we were on the road.

I had figured there’d be a 50-50 chance that we’d go all the way, and now that we had failed to have any sort of enjoyment at a beach, there was one thing left to do: keep pushing along. We decided it would be a waste if we didn’t go to Key West, so after a few hours of driving through, by, and between islands, we found ourselves on Whitehead Street at the marker for the Southernmost Point in the Continental United States.

Throngs of tourists were lined up to take their picture at the buoy-shaped marker, so we decided to take pictures with the holiday displays that were set up nearby. I now have pictures of my friends with the Southernmost Christmas Tree in the Continental United States and the Southernmost Menorah in the Continental United States. After that, we moseyed down Duval Street until we got to a place that had henna tattoos. Allie got one. Was it a Chinese character on her lower back? Yes.

By that time, we had missed the opportunity to watch the sunset in Mallory Square (a popular pastime probably only for tourists), but we were hungry again. We eventually found a sports bar and grill called Jack Flats (509½ Duval St.). It wasn’t very crowded, but that’s because we were there early. The food was great. We did a little more looking around at stores and left Key West at 8:30. The drive back was pretty dark quiet. It didn’t seem to take as long to go through all the islands in reverse. The traffic was better. I could see more stars.

About four hours later, I was home and tired. Even though we probably spent about 10 minutes at beaches of any sort, it was a big day and a fun trip. It was my fifth trip to Key West. I hope to go back there soon.

Today was less eventful (and it seems like it’s been much shorter). I went with Nick and TJ (not that TJ) to the Pompano Beach golf course. They were going to practice their driving because they’re going to play some holes tomorrow. I had never golfed before, so I had to learn how to swing a golf club and everything. Since Nick and TJ didn’t have left-handed equipment, I had to do it right-handed. I wasn’t able to hit the balls very far, and they usually stuck pretty close to the ground if they didn’t roll the whole way. In short, I was pretty bad, but I’d try it again with better equipment.

I’ve been involved in distributed computing projects (think SETI@home) before, but I haven’t participated in any lately. My friend Luke made me aware of World Community Grid, a collection of projects that runs on the BOINC framework. It turns out that you can use the BOINC client to participate in any project that uses the BOINC infrastructure. I’ve just signed up with World Community Grid for now; it should be enough to keep me busy because it consists of several sub-projects. I’ve joined a few of them, so now my computer has been assigned to crunch one unit for FightAIDS@Home and one for Help Conquer Cancer.

The BOINC client is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Conveniently for Linux users, it’s in the repositories of some distributions. In Ubuntu, it’s located in the Universe repository as boinc-manager and boinc-client. Awesomely, the client is free software.

Find out about the Real ID Act, the national ID law that was signed into law by President Bush in 2005.

The University of California marching band recently did a halftime show featuring songs from video games. The video is the best six and a half minutes you will have today.