Blog Baltimore

We went up to Lagers in Canton for the Ravens game this Sunday. I was impressed to see the Ravens win their game, it’s amazing what happens when you get a quarter back that’s somewhat competent, also having a competent offensive coordinator helps too.

Lagers has a decent location, it’s off the beaten path but still close enough to the American Can Company that you can park for free. You can find the bar located on the corner of Fait and Rose.

The food at the bar is good and their menu has all sorts of different options. The sandwiches and fries are a personal favorite of mine. The just added sliders to the menu, unfortunately I think they missed the definition of sliders. The burgers are not what you’d expect from a slider, they’re basically mini hamburgers that don’t “slide.” They’re tasty, just don’t expect something similar to a White Castle Slider.

We’ve been there a considerable amount of times and for the most part it’s fine, my biggest complaint is how much of a Bro Club it is. Their tag line for the bar is “Warning: It get sexy in here!” I understand that you want to build an image but trying to bring the Annapolis popped collar scene to Baltimore isn’t the way to do it. There’s only so many times that you can listen to Summer Girls by LFO singing about Abercrombie & Fitch.

Ultimately though we dig the place, if it lightened up a bit and the atmosphere didn’t make you feel like you had to be a body builder or a swimsuit model to have a good time or get a drink then we’d be more inclined to go there more often.

According to the Baltimore Sun it appears that a bomb was found at the University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. The bomb was found over in the Bio Park where police blocked off the area and started to search for suspects. The article also mentions that it probably had nothing to do with the University. It’s possible that the guy was just passing through. Who in their right mind in Baltimore would walk around without affectively concealing what they were going to hide anyways? The campus mood was overall quiet from what I could tell where I work. The communication across campus was very good. The campus has an opt in alert system that informed us of problems on a major scale and this system played out very well in this case.

An affiliate of WJZ sent an email over to me the other day asking if I’d be interested in using the same advertising as WJZ. I’m kind of against advertising because I want the site to be as pure as possible without all the clutter and crap. After doing some more research on the site and looking at their options, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to give it a shot with just a small banner on one side. The nice thing about the banner is that it lists news articles that I choose (such as sports or funky news articles or headlines) as well as an advertisement. If you feel that the ad banner is distracting then let me know, I’ll do what I can to remove it. I don’t gather enough hits on my site to warrant any money but the original reason for starting this site was to see what I could write about that would draw attention. Consider yourselves an (un)documented experiment Baltimore. I promise I’ll be gentle!

Just an FYI out there for those that don’t know, as I’ve mentioned before Baltimore does have a bike plan. It’s somewhat lackluster and definitelly doesn’t support downtown all that much but here it is.

http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/planning/bikeplan.php

I’d honestly like to see Baltimore do the right thing and take this opportunity to improve it’s mass transit, not only through bus lines and the light rail system (which it already screwed up royally) but also through bike and single stroke engine lanes. Granted there’s a lot of traffic in Baltimore but that doesn’t mean it’s going to get worse if the lanes were shifted to make them more bike friendly. The city is structured enough that those in the surrounding neighborhoods that do work downtown might actually take the opportunity to improve on their health by biking in to work. I know for one that there are many at the University of Maryland that are sick of paying the high prices for parking that might take this opportunity…I know I would.

I haven’t been keeping up to date with the blog lately as work has been very taxing. Microsoft Vista always seems to have a new flaw here or a major issue there that keeps me burried in laptops or desktops. I just realized yesterday that if I put my Dell Optiplex 620 to sleep in order to try to conserve energy it won’t grab an IP address after I wake it up. I have to reboot before it’ll get an address. I’ve tried disabling and re-enabling the NIC, I’ve tried releasing and renewing the address, and no luck. I’ve also come to discover that there’s two patches for Vista Ultimate that if applied to your XPS M1330 it can cause it to blue screen and require a reset back to the last known good configuration.

I can see why Windows XP is still strong in the market. Microsoft reports sales are up for Vista but that’s because they’re forcing the manufacturers to switch to Vista. If you force someone to switch to something else, the numbers of that something else WILL go up.

Also side note that I proposed to my girl friend a couple months ago down in Ocean City. We were staying at a hotel the weekend before Memorial Day weekend. The weather was ok, kind of cold and rainy but the place was nice and we were having fun just getting away. We arrived at the hotel and not wanting to ruin dinner grabbed a quick bite to eat down at the bar and had a few drinks. We went out to dinner later that evening at a restaurant on the bay side which had a nice few, minus the damp weather. My fiance had a few drinks but wasn’t feeling up to dinner, something about the snacks at our hotel wasn’t sitting well with her stomach so we took our dinner to go and headed back to the hotel.

As we finished dinner we moved towards the balcony to watch the ocean. Like I had mentioned, even though it was cloudy it was still very nice, almost serene in it’s view. The sound of the ocean without the crowds was especially nice because it was very calming and helped to cool my nerves. Eventually I went inside and grabbed the ring, I put my jacket on in an attempt to hide the box. I came back out and sat with her for about 10 minutes and couldn’t think of how to ask her. I never realized how hard it would be to ask her to marry me but when you have the ring in one hand and the girl in front of you, things get a little harder to do.

I turned to her and asked her if she would promise me something, to which she replied smiling “No!” I told her I was serious and asked her again and she responded again “Forget it! I’m not promising you anything.” Finally I convinced her to say yes and then got on one knee and asked her if she would promise to be mine forever…of course, in usual fashion her response was “Are you kidding me?!” Which meant yes!

Other then that we’re moving out of our current place of residents on Linwood Ave. My best friend (who I live with) has bought a house near by and my fiance and I are moving to another place, also close by. It’s been fun living close to the square but there’s been too many nights of no sleep due to the crowds and parking has been really rough. More than anything though the place of residents has not been kept up by the landlord. When we initially moved in there were many things promised to us, such as roof repair, various water spots repaired and other minor things, none which have been completed. I just hope that who ever moves in after us has better luck with the landlord.

I saw the most amazingly awesome thing on Sunday as I was coming back from my shower on the Fort Meade golf course. I was driving through Canton square and low and behold comes a massive group of meandering zombies! The makeup was awesome and aside from special movie affects they could have passed for zombies. I did some digging and it looks as though there’s a group of people who do this on a regular basis which is awesome! I tried to grab pictures but since they were walking in the streets and acting in character, I didn’t want to hit any of them.

Zombies in Baltimore

A while back I was complaining about how bad the streets of Baltimore are and how things should be changed to meet the needs of other forms of transportation other than cars. B Free Daily has an article up talking about the same thing over at Fuel Free. I did some digging and found some information on Baltimore City’s website.

I’ve included an image of the proposed introductory plan and I hope to follow up and find out the status of this plan. I for one would be a huge proponent of Baltimore City being a bike friendly environment. The city is well structured for supporting easy biking for many of its workers.

We went out for a fun evening at Growlers and then went to a house party afterwards. The house party was fun, there was flip cup and beer pong going. I of course started out the evening with gin and tonic which always leads to fun crazy times and finished up at growlers with Resurrection. The combination of the two drinks always leads for the worst. Regardless though, we had a good time at the party even though I was hammered by the time we left. We started walking in the direction I thought was home but that wasn’t the case. We even passed a traffic cop, asking him which way we go to get to Boston street. He pointed us north which was wrong. If I hadn’t been so drunk I would have realized that we were walking north bound on S. East St. and were walking right past Patterson Park. At 1:30am, one place for a white couple to be is NOT north of Patterson Park on the corner of Baltimore St. and S. East St. People started showing up from out of nowhere and someone started hollaring at us. Obviously scared out of our minds we started walking back the opposite direction we came and realized we were eventually going the right way.

We got home a little after 2am, scared, tired, and ready for bed. Sometimes it’s too easy to be too comfortable in Baltimore and then is moments like these that I’m reminded that the city has a long way to go, but it’s trying.

We went to Growlers last night up at Fleet and Potomac and had a hell of a time. They don’t have a menu, unless you’ve got a hankering for white cheddar popcorn, chips, or pretzels. They do have this fantastic liquid of love called Resurrection which definitely makes up for the poor menu. The bar’s got a decent setup with a pool table at one end right next to golden tee and a long bar. Since it’s off the square it’s usually more of a local bar. The music was much better than most other bars (unless your out to dance.)

Apparently President Bush is in Baltimore for some reason or another? I want to say it’s something to do with some financial program he backed in regards to housing, I could be wrong though. What I do know is that traffic is going to be a disaster as usual. Last time he was here in Baltimore he was visiting the VA Hospital and everything was on lock down in a two block radius of the place. It was comical to see men in black suits on top of buildings looking down at all the pedestrians and drug addicts.