This weekend my girlfriend and I were in Philadelphia for a Dropkick Murphys concert (http://www.dropkickmurphys.com/) and we screwed up the time.  Well, not exactly screwed it up.  The concert was for the Paul Green School of Rock Music.  So there were 5 stages and many, many bands.  The problem was, Ticketmaster told us the concert started at noon.  So we got there and parked at 10:30 to get a good spot and hang out before the show.  We find out Goldfinger and Less Than Jake don’t come on until 5 and 6pm respectively.  Dropkick wasn’t slated to start until 9:30.  We weren’t going to stand around in an overpriced outdoor, no seating concert area for 6 hours and pay $3.50 for water and $7 for Miller Light.  So we bailed.

We didn’t know where to go so we just headed south from Festival Pier and passed under the Ben Franklin Bridge and just kept walking.  We came to the Independence Seaport Museum.  By this point we were begging for Air conditioning and decided to head in, maybe find a water fountain or something.  We get in to find out its free Sundays from 10am to 12pm.  Lucky us, free museum to kill time with awesome AC.  So we walked around and maybe learn something.  To our dismay, we really didn’t learn anything.  Kinda hard to learn about ships in a museum when you are studying to be an engineer, none of the exhibits are technical enough.  Oh well, was worth the AC.

After this we decided to head for historic downtown Philly.  We hadn’t been there for 6 or 7 years and figured it’d be a nice place to go back to.  We hit up a microbrewery on the way and had a beer.  Triumph Brewery is a very nice place for a beer.  Upscale, relaxed, and most importantly on that day, cool.  I had a Honey Wheat and we left. ($5)  We continued downtown and got to Independence Hall, and much to our dismay there were no more tickets.  I spotted the US Mint on the map and figured it would be a great place to go since we are engineers and they use lots of big machines.  We made a quick stop at the liberty bell and headed towards the Nation Constitution Center.  It was right across from the Mint so we decided to at least check it out.

Turns out this place charges money (NO DICE).  We asked about the Mint and found out they don’t do tours on weekends (shot down).  So we sat down and tried to figure out what to do for 3 more hours until Goldfinger came on.  We thought about a movie and found out public transportation would take a long time to get there.  Then we decided to bowl.  We headed for the 44 Line Bus Stop and waited for the bus to show up.  The bus shows up, the driver gets off and closes the door.  He disappears for 10 minutes and when he returns he tells me the bus doesn’t accept $20’s and I must get change elsewhere.  I asked him if he could wait 2 minutes and he said no, closed the door and pulls away.  I just stood there and I was like, wow.  I was pissed to say the least.  I had to wait 10 minutes for him and he couldn’t wait 2 minutes for me.

Oh well, I was hungry and grumpy at this point and the Euro-cup finals were starting soon so we headed back to Triumph.  The lunch was quite good.  I highly recommend the Bacon Cheeseburger, it was amazing.  Two bacon cheeseburgers, an Irish Red Ale and a Vodka Cranberry (hers, not mine) came to about $35 bucks, $40 with tip.  This puts us at $45 and living up to my title of under 50 bucks.  The 1 thing I didn’t include was parking, since it is your choice how you get there.

We killed the last hour by taking a nap in the car with the AC on.  Yes, I know this isn’t very environmentally friendly and was probably against the idling zone laws if Philly has them, but it was hot as balls we were tired.  Come the concert we hit the dance floor and had a great time.

Goldfinger was great, Less Than Jake was OK, and Dropkick Murphys was AWESOME.  Anyway, there you go, how to hit up Philly for 5 hours for under $50 bucks.  You could do a lot more if you got the free tickets to Independence Hall and hit up the many, many other historic sites in the city which, most of if not all of, are free.

Ok, so after some nice lazyness on part of my host, it took them forever to move all the files over, but now I am back up and running.

I am switching servers so I expect to have some downtime in the next 24hours, hopefully it wont be too long.  Most of the down time will be the result of DNS changeovers.  Let you know when its all done.

It seems at about 23:00 EST my server went down.  Don’t know what happened, still don’t have full functionality back but I am working on it.  The CSV converters should be up and running again and all should be back to normal soon.

In today’s world of $4 per gallon gas, saving every bit helps.  Well, for those of you with a Windows Mobile Device there may be some help for you.  It’s called Car Maint. & Fuel Economy by BlueKatana, Inc.  This software has some nice features.  It can keep track of everything from brake changes, all sorts of filter changes, tire changes, all your fluid changes and even chassis lubes and the like.  This makes calculating your real world cost of ownership very easy.
Read more