Europe Travelblog  -

+ 4 - 2 | § ¶Alaska pictures uploaded

I finally got around to narrowing our 660 pictures from our August 2004 trip to Alaska down to a manageable set.  I've uploaded 51 pictures to pages 2 through 5 of my Alaska photo gallery.

Enjoy!

+ 2 - 4 | § ¶Paris pictures uploaded

I've uploaded some of the pictures from our recent trip to Paris.  See them on pages 4 and 5 of my France photo gallery.  One of these days, I'll get the pictures from out August 2004 trip to Alaska uploaded.

Enjoy!

+ 1 - 7 | § ¶Returned from Paris

We got back from Paris on Tuesday night.  We had a great time.  The biggest lesson from the trip is a reminder to volunteer for getting bumped whenever possible.  We got bumped twice on our way there, and we ended up with flight vouchers worth four times what we paid for the trip!  It was definitely worth getting to Paris four hours late and flying through Frankfurt instead of Amsterdam to get such compensation.

While there, we stayed at the Allegro Paris Hotel, and it was a nice place.  It's in the 12th arrondissement, so it was a bit out of the way, but it was very cheap (€49 a night), very clean, and very professional.  We'll stay there again if we go back to Paris.

Some of the highlights of the trip were due to spending too much time with The Da Vinci Code and Amélie over the last few years.  We visited the Church of St. Sulpice to look at the supposed Rose Line and had a couple drinks in the Café des Deux Moulins, where Amelie worked. 

We saw other typical tourist sights in Paris, like ascending the Eiffel Tower and spending time in the Louvre (where the Medieval Louvre under the Sully Wing was a surprising highpoint).  Of course, we also had wonderful food and wine every day of the trip.

One highlight not on the typical tourist route was the Musée des arts et métiers, which surprised us with excellent exhibits on the history of transportation, measurement, construction, energy, materials, mechanics, and communication across the years.  We also got to see the original Foucault's Pendulum, which was very exciting for us engineers.

I hope to get some of the pictures up soon of our four fun days.

+ 3 - 3 | § ¶Heading to Paris

Jenny is about to see Paris for the first time.  We're heading to Paris, France for a long weekend - for four nights to be exact.  We stumbled upon a great fare on Northwest a few weeks ago, so we're heading back to France for some great food, wine, and adventure.  We don't have anything specifically planned while we're there, but we'll probably do a bunch of the standards; the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, scenes from Amélie, etc.

It's good to be returning to Europe.

+ 1 - 5 | § ¶Let's build an igloo!

I'll probably never have a chance to build an igloo as long as I live in St. Louis, but reading this description of building an igloo makes be want to move back to Minnesota and give it a shot.

+ 5 - 1 | § ¶Comment Spam, part 2

I think comment spam is now under control.  I had to delete something like four hundred fake comments on my blog over the weekend, but it shouldn't be a problem anymore.  I upgraded the the latest version of Pivot, my blogging software, and installed Pivot-Blacklist, a great extension that seems to stop comment spam completely.

I'll have to watch have my logs in the coming days, but I no longer fear that I'll have to remove the blog due to spam, as I feared over the weekend. 

Thank you, Pivot Team and Marco.

+ 4 - 2 | § ¶Comment Spam

Like every other blogger, I've been hit with comment spam.  Until this morning, it was at an annoying but manageable level; fewer than ten a day, and rarely at that.

Well, I woke up this morning to 115 spam comments, and counting.

Damn you,  video poker, black jack, texas holdem, and the rest of you.