Category — Social

This morning, I launched a new version of the HR Geeks website.  I’m proud to say we now have the only non-hideous, non-1995 website of any geek group in Hampton Roads

The site is running WordPress, with a highly hacked up GridFocus theme.  After much debate, and a not-insignificant-delay, I determined that I didn’t have the free time or energy to maintain the site using a custom CMS, or even a pre-built ‘framework’ like Django.  The big scare over a ‘public’ CMS, like WP, is security issues.  Luckily for me, I use WP on a number of other blogs, so keeping track of upgrades and the like is fairly easy to do.

As part of the migration, we also dumped the old PHP Webcalendar system, and moved to a public Google Calendar for all event tracking.  PHP Webcal was a very non-elegant system to use, while Google Calendar provides a superset of the features, with nearly 0 effort on our part.  There is even the possibility that we could grant access to the public calendar for certain groups to modify their own dates.  I’m not sure how access controlled Gcal is  currently (I know you can have multiple editors, but is it free for all for them?), but it’s worth a look.  Having iCal support, now that I’m using OSX full time, is incredibly useful.  The HTML output is substantially prettier than any of the other PHP web calendar’s that I’ve seen so far.

I had a pretty fun weekend – did a lot of stuff outside the house, which is a nice change.

On Saturday, I went with Mary and my in-laws to the Jefferson Lab open house, a bi-annual open-to-the-public event, where they open up the accelerator tunnel, the FEL, an experiment hall, and setup a bunch of demonstrations and displays about JLAB and the physics/science research that gets done here. Pictures coming shortly!

On Sunday, I went with Chris to the ‘Taste of India’ Indian cultural festival at ODU’s Ted Constant Center. $10 got me a 10-ticket meal pass, which I used to try some new Indian food (unfortunately, I can’t remember names, but it was all awesome) and a couple mango lassis. While we were eating our yummy food, we watched the inter-collegiate Bhangra Dance competition, which was pretty cool. It was amazing how many people were there (the Ted was pretty full) – I guess Hampton Roads has a fairly sizable Asian/Indian subculture. Pictures coming shortly!

Late Sunday afternoon, Chris, stugs, and I went down to Nauticus to see the visiting English helicopter carrier / amphibious assault ship – unfortunately, the visiting hours were Saturday only Instead of visiting the ship, we decided to explore the new cruise ship terminal being built right there at Nauticus, and it looks like it’s going to be alot more fancy / nicer than any of use had expected. Things are moving along nicely!

That evening Chris sent me a blurry picture of a crazy looking ship in the shipyard across the river from Harbor Park, at the same shipyard the NS Savannah was refurbed at. I had briefly seen it the day before going down 264, but forgotten about it. Chris’ picture stirred the desire to find out what it was in me, so I grabbed my tripod and 300mm lense, and went to Harbor Park to take some better pictures. As it turns out, the ship is an old Soviet ‘Space Event Support Ship’, to help track and communicate with Mir and other Soviet satellites. It was also featured in the movie ‘Virus’, and has since been anchored in James River as part of the US Reserve Fleet (still trying to figure out how the Soviet ship ended up in the US Reserve Fleet). It’s at Colonna Shipyard, and I’m going to be contacting them and asking if I could get a quick walk through / tour, and some better up-close pictures of the awesome satellite / comms gear. (*UPDATE*) The ship is atually NOT the Volkov. here is the info:

The ‘Akademik Vladislav Volkov’, formerly the ‘USS General Harry Taylor’, a WW2 troop transport, which was then converted into the ‘USS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg’, is show here in Colonna Shipyard, in Norfolk, VA.
The ship started life as a troop transport during WW2, and was decommissioned in 1946. In 1964, she was recomissioned as the Vandenberg to serve as a missle range instrumentation ship for the US Air Force.
After it’s decommissioning in the 1980s, she was transferred to the US Reserve Fleet on the James River in Virginia.
This ship was also featured in the movie ‘Virus’, and downloaded an electronic alien virus from MIR, while in the South Pacific, and killed off it’s crew!
Now it’s in Colonna shipyard on the Elizabeth River for environmental cleanup – she’s destined to be sunk as an aquatic reef off the coast of Florida some time in 2008.
The rear radio dish is missing, as it was ‘damage’ used during the filming of ‘Virus’.

The Ship

The rest of the pictures from Harbor Park of the ship, the Akademik Vladislav Volkov, are on here.