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After a nice morning and a stop at Harvard for lunch, I hopped the train to the airport.  Upon arriving, I find that all their flights to Philadelphia are canceled due to “storms”.  Funny – the other carriers didn’t seem to cancel their flights to Phili.  So, I get to stand in huge line with a bunch of other folks.  Well, long story short, I ended up getting my 5 hour near direct flight re-routed though Arizona and it turned into 8 hours of flying for a total of 12 total traveling hours including the delays and standing in lines.

I did manage to get my checked bag (that was also overweight) thrown in for free, and exit rows on both flights – at least that made up for some of it.  People right next to me took the same flights to Portland – but didn’t get those amenities.  Shows what being nice to the gate agent will get you.

Still I seriously doubt I’ll fly US Airways again.  I got the distinct feeling they were simply canceling flights to fill existing flights and staffing.  They mentioned that the flights I was re-routed on were nearly empty. One fellow in line next to me said in the 3 years he’s been flying them (traveling at least monthly) he has only had everything go smoothly about 5 times.  Not good.

PS: on my way out, we got deplaned in AZ at 1am and delayed an hour due to hydrologic problems.

We got a relaxing start to the day and planned on doing the tour of Fenway park and then seeing the Isabella Stewart Gardner house and maybe the Museum of Fine Arts.  However, after the tour of Fenway, I was convinced I wanted to stay for the evening game.  Problem was getting tickets – and so began the most amazing evening of baseball ever – which ends in me actually getting into the baseball hall of fame.  No, I’m not lying or exaggerating.

So, my brother and I decide to try our hand by standing in the line for same-day-sale tickets that are left over from all the sales.  It’s basically 100-300 tickets that were left unsold at retailers.  You just walk up and get what’s left basically; but you only have to pay normal face price.  Ah Fenway, your ticket scalpers were everywhere selling tickets around the stadium for 2-8x the face value of tickets.  Pushy too.  We were prepared to take anything that was left.  We got in line about 5pm, and then waited until 7pm when the gate opened.  We were about 50th in line, and the ticket agent actually had 2 tickets together up on the green monster.  We bought them at face value and headed up to our amazing seats.

Second row of the green monster, seats 1 and 2 right over the third base fowl line.  So close you can taste the action.  We sat next to two older guys, Mike and Ron who said that in the 30+ years they’d been attending games, this was the first time they’d ever gotten tickets over the green monster.  They couldn’t believe we’d actually just gotten tickets by walking up.  Apparently luck was smiling.

But that’s half the story.  Next up, this game was the record-breaking 456th consecutive sell-out crowd at Fenway.  As part of the proof of the record, the names of all the ticketholders were included in the record-breaking submission.  So now my, and several thousands of others, names are now in the baseball hall of fame. No lie, I have a little certificate to prove it.

And finally, I got to meet the ball boy+girl and the guy that threw out the first pitch – who happen to have gotten the seats right next to us.  How’s that for amazing?

Oh yeah, and here’s the last play of the game (avi) – Boston wins 3-0 against the Rays:

We didn’t actually get to the museums – but somehow I don’t feel sad.

Went on the freedom trail today – well, half of it anyway.  Time was a little limited and after mass, we only had time to take care of the whole Northside part of the trail – which was great.  Got to see the ‘little Italy’ part of town and attend mass there.

We toured Paul Revere’s house, the old North Church where the ‘one if by land two if by sea’ lanterns were placed.

Also saw the Constitution – the worlds oldest floating, still operational battleship

Overall, a great tour of Boston’s north end.

Probably the best day yet.  After dropping our sister off for her last day of work, we took off to Lexington/Concord.  We saw battle green in Lexington, and then traveled Battle Road to Concord.  At Concord we saw the North Bridge – where Patriot troops opened fire on British regulars and then a mob battle all the way back to Boston took place.

The visitors center about half-way down the trail has a really excellent video presentation of how the events took place.  Lots of stuff I didn’t realize about how this historic event took place.  It presents a great timeline of events and people involved.

Also along the very hikable trail are great preserved scenes and locations from the battle.  At one of the taverns where skirmishes took place, they even have musket demonstrations from a really great and knowledgeable staff.

So far, the most amazing thing so far is how close everything is.  You can drive one end of the road to the other in just 30 minutes – but the events that took place there ranged over a whole 24 hour period.  I would highly recommend this whole area if you have a chance to see it – and learn amazing things about the birth of your country.

Finally, we stopped by Waldon pond and saw the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Good times.

Ran up to Cranes beach and hung out for a couple hours enjoying the sun and surf.  Beautiful beach owned originally by the plumbing magnate Crane.  We drove up to the house but it was closed for a private event.

On the way back, we stopped at Salem, MA – the site of the Salem witch trails.  Also the site of Nathanel Hawthorn’s home.  We stopped by the House of 7 Gables and his own home (which was moved next to the 7 gables house when the original site was slated for destruction).  Great tour and definitely worth seeing.

Arrived at Boston and it’s a bit warm and humid – something different than the usual Pac Northwest I’ve grown so accustom to.

Did an overnight red-eye then hit the ground running when my brother arrived a few hours later.  We went over to Harvard (or Havhad if you please) and toured around.  Got to get our picture in front of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe.  Wandered around the campus a bit and saw the sights, stopped into the bookstores/shops nearby and generally had a good time.

We also ran down to MIT and also saw the Good News Garage – the home of the Cartalk guys.  Fabulous.

I just saw that my trusty passport was expiring soon, and decided that since I wasn’t doing any immediate travel, to renew it now.  It was my first passport and had a bunch of stamps from my travels to Europe, New Zealand and so forth.  But time marches on so I dropped my new photo, the old passport and the form into the mail.  A few things:

1. The website seem to direct you towards getting a cheaper “passport card” that looks like a drivers license.  It’s faster to get and cheaper, but if you read the fine print you find it is ONLY good for traveling in/out of the country by land.  It won’t work for any air travel.  My guess is that’s because there are lots of commuters between Canada/Mexico and US.  But the not-good-for-flights restriction isn’t immediately clear – so beware and dig around for the normal renewal.

2. It only took about 2-3 weeks to get my passport with the regular mail-in service (not expedited) – much faster than I anticipated.  They mailed my new passport (which has new RFID embedded in it and a much nicer/glossier/protected photo page).  A day later, I got a brown, unmarked envelope with my old passport in it.  They’d punched a hole in my photo page to void it – but I had all my old stamps.  Cool.

Surprised nobody ran across this yet, but then again, makes sense.

When compiling either the freeglut and GLEW (packages nearly essential of OpenGL graphics development), both have the option to be built as libraries statically or dynamically.  When the libraries are built dynamically, you just include the lib in the link line then copy the dll’s over to your binary folder.  But when compiled statically, you need to specify GLEW_STATIC and FREEGLUT_STATIC symbols as compile-time defines when compiling the libraries (and be free of dll hell).

The tricky part is when you include those two libraries in another library and then try to compile that combination into a binary.  In the case of freeglut, the linker will complain that it can’t find “freeglut.lib”.  Which is strange because freeglut static compiles into a library named “freeglut_static.lib” and only the dll version compiles into “freeglut.lib”.   Hmmm, why is freeglut looking for the wrong lib?  Well, freeglut_std.h line 53 holds the key.   If FREEGLUT_STATIC is defined, then there is a pragma to include “freeglut_static.lib” otherwise the pragma points to “freeglut.lib”.  So, you need to include the -D FREEGLUT_STATIC in the link line of the final executable’s link line as well.

GLEW also has this problem, but if you forget the -D GLEW_STATIC in the link line of the executable, you’ll get errors about unresolved externals.

And there you have it.

(update: you must also put  GLEW_STATIC and FREEGLUT_STATIC in the link lines of the intermediate libraries as well.  The chain of libraries from freeglut and glew ALL need to have that compile parameter specified or you’ll get the same errors).

Hehehe – this is a great series about some folks that play far too much online gaming – and then try to get through real life.

http://www.watchtheguild.com/

Follow the links to the YouTube clips where you can watch the whole series online (for free)