Took a much needed vacation out to Colorado last week. Started the trip by visiting the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.
"The Stanley Hotel is a 140-room Colonial Revival hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, United States, about five miles from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. It was built by Freelan Oscar Stanley, co-founder of the Stanley Motor Carriage Company, and opened on July 4, 1909, as a resort for upper-class Easterners and a health retreat for sufferers of pulmonary tuberculosis. The hotel and its surrounding structures are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Stanley Hotel is largely known for being one of the most haunted hotels in the United States, and served as the inspiration for the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's 1977 bestselling novel The Shining and its 1980 film adaptation. It was also a filming location for the related 1997 TV miniseries."
From there, we hiked approximately six miles in the Rocky Mountain National Park. We headed up the Alberta Falls trail to Mills Lake and back before heading to our destination, Steamboat Springs, where we would spend the next four nights.
When not roaming the streets of Steamboat Springs we headed to Dinosaur National Monument on the border of Utah/Colorado, Rabbit Ears Pass, Fish Creek Falls, did the Alpine Slide, visited natural Hot Springs, spotted Elk, Moose, Antelope, Buffalo, Deer, Black-billed Magpie's, Snakes and many other small critters local to Colorado.
The elevation and thin air made it tough while hiking but overall the trip was a success and the weather could not have been better. We had hoped to get a glimpse of bears but the closest we ever came to seeing them was by seeing their droppings on the street right outside our place on the morning of our departure.
We had a very scenic drive through the Loveland Pass (HWY 6) on our way back to Denver. We tried hard to spot Big Horn Sheep outside the small mining towns along the route but unfortunately, we were unable to spot any.
Colorado has always been a favorite destination of mine and I always look forward to future trips back to explore more of the State. Perhaps on my next trip back, I'll try my hand at fly fishing in hopes to catch some Trout.
I've wanted a Mechanical keyboard for quite some time. I decided to do some searching on mechanical keyboards. As I sifted through pages of them, I got to thinking to myself, I wonder if anyone makes one that also has that retro look to match that retro feel that I remember so long ago?
By narrowing my search, I stumbled across the AJAZZ NACODEX AK510. After reading some reviews, I decided to hit purchase.
I received the keyboard in a few days time. I wasn't too excited to see as I opened the package, 3/4 of the key's were laying loose in the bag with the keyboard. As I took everything out of the bag, it had me thinking, how cheap of a product is this? Even as I attached the keys back to the keyboard, some of them felt as if they weren't even going to stay, as if they were just resting on the switches. That feeling went away as I began working with it. Once I had the keyboard back together it looked pretty cool, in an ugly sort of way.
The device has a weight to it that adds to that nostalgic look and overall feel of the product. Once I plugged it in, the back light was a constant flash of LED lights in a rainbow colored pattern. It looked ridiculous in the daylight. I also felt that it distracted from the nostalgic look of the keyboard. With a few key strokes I changed the back light color to a green and got rid of the flashing of the strobe like pattern and felt it kind of nice when lit up in a solid state. I only lasted about 10 minutes until I decided to remove the back light all together. I'll play around with that over time as I do feel the back light is a nice feature in the evenings and as I typically keep my computer on at all times it is nice to know that I am able to turn the keyboard off when I'm done to avoid lighting up the room.
Overall I'm happy with the product. The retro shape of the keys takes a little getting used to. I do wish the sound was a little stronger, resembling what I remembered as a kid. However, this being a little softer may have been a better way to go as it is still loud enough to be border line obnoxious. If my home office were near others in the house, my typing would probably drive them nuts. Keep that in mind if you decide to purchase one. Others may not like it as much as you do.
In the end, I would recommend this product. It was only about $65.00 when said and done. For now it's fun to look at and I am looking forward to familiarizing myself with its features and other capabilities.
Liquid Brains has an official logo. Artwork by Ken Adams. New merchandise to come.
I developed a website for Root Down Nutrition in Lakeville, Minnesota. Released it today to showcase our new menu. No template was used, I hand coded everything in an IDE. I utilized Bootstrap 5 and pieced components together to create a base then overrode them with CSS3 to give the overall feel some character. The backend I developed in PHP and I will be integrating more as we go.
If you haven't been to our Nutrition Bar yet, come on in and get yourself a healthy Smoothie, Tea-based Drink, or an Iced Coffee.
There's something to say about wiping a server clean and building it back up from scratch. I did just that with my personal web server and in doing so I was able to remove all the garbage that had collected over the years, free up resources, reorganize the file structure for virtual hosts, and start fresh with only the necessities. It feels good to have a clean, well organized machine.
I chose to go with Debian as my OS and thus far I have been pleasantly surprised with the speed, reliability and ease of use. On another note, my Apache "skills" could use some sharpening as getting MOD_REWRITE and MOD_AUTH to work properly took a lot longer than it should have.
