Blog Baltimore

We went to trivia Night at the Gin Mill in Canton last night and it was quite a blast. The event started on time and ended on time which was much better than the last place we tried trivia at. The trivia was based off of Brain Freeze Trivia which was challenging and competative. This felt a bit more official and fun since the event was run through Brian Freeze. They offered gift certificates and DVD movies as prizes too. The questions ranged from multiple choice and matching to true/false and fill in the answer. The Gin Mill also has a nice clean atmosphere. The food there has been getting better since it’s been open. Initially it was standard fair with no flavor or spice but they’ve been improving. My only complaint about the Gin Mill is that they don’t have any exotic Gin’s. I had assumed that with the name Gin Mill, it would specialize in various different styles of Gin, but this is not the case.

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.

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

JD’s Smoke House in Canton has changed up their menu and it’s quite good! Before they had a wide assortment of “bar foods” with a decent amount of standard dinner foods but now they’ve got a very good and very strong dinner menu. I had the meatloaf with mashed potatoes and broccoli which was very good. The broccoli had a very good tenderness and the meatloaf was tasty. My girlfriend had some form of chicken which I cannot remember but she loved that as well. We frequent JD’s quite a bit and this is a nice change to their standard fair.