Category: Fun stuff

Random fun things

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Some interesting pocket change

My old Netcom home page has been around since the late 90s and has been largely neglected for the better part of the last decade. I keep it around for posterity, but there’s a lot of linkrot there. I had moved some pages over to my blog, but not others. This is one of the last few remaining pages that haven’t been migrated over. The last time this page was touched was back in 2003 for some minor link editing, but most of the content dates back to around 1995 or 1996

Ok, so you’ve been out shopping or running errands all day. If you’re anything like me, you’ve managed to accumulate a pocket full of change from spending money you shouldn’t have. What do you do with it? Well, if you’re like most other people, you dig it all out, dump it into the change jar and don’t give it a second thought. My change jar happens to be a yellow piggy bank.

But, if you look closely, you’ll be surprised at what you can find in loose pocket change. Here are some of the coins I’ve found in mine. The unusualness mileage may vary for you, but for around here these are fairly unique. Well, for me anyway. I’ve buffed them up a bit so they look nice and shiny for you.

Coins are not shown at their actual or relative sizes

Coins from other places

Barbados headsBarbados tailsHere’s one from Barbados. This was one of my first acquisitions. I discovered it quite by accident when I was cleaning out my pig and rolling coins to take to the bank.
Netherlands headsNetherlands tailsA 10 cent piece from the Netherlands. I stumbled onto this one as I was rummaging for quarters for laundry. It’s a pretty small coin too, 1.5 cm in diameter (0.59 inches for you non-metric people). The date on the coin is 1957, so I would imagine they might look a bit different now. According to Psylocke_, I might be able to get a stick of gum with this…
Denmark headsDenmark tailsA small 25 øre piece from Denmark. Found it while I was dumping the change out of my pocket.
Susan B Anthony headsSusan B Anthony tailsHere’s a real live Susan B Anthony dollar coin that I acquired
on a recent trip to NYC. This was in the change that I got from a machine when I was purchasing a ticket for the Long Island Railroad. I can see why nobody likes them…they’re a lot like quarters.
Unknown1 headsUnknown1 tailsThis is a coin that I found while rummaging through my pocket looking for change to pay for a muffin at work. I’ve been told that it comes from England.
Germany headsGermany tailsThis coin is my first find since moving to the US 3 years ago. Stumbled upon this one while counting and rolling the contents of my change jar to take to the bank.

Canadian coins

This is a series of quarters that was minted to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Canada as a country. Each of the 10 provinces and 2 territories had their own coin. Each coin depicts a small scene which represents the culture and land in each province/territory. On the loonie are a some people in front of the Peace Tower, located at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.

When they first came out, people would buy rolls and rolls of quarters and hoard them, so nowadays it’s pretty rare to find one in your pocket. I’ve only managed to acquire 9 of the 12 province coins, plus a couple of loonies ($1 coins for those of you not in the know). I’ve also included links to the closest thing I could find for a home page for each province, just in case you wanted to do some touring.

British ColumbiaSaskatchewanOntarioNova ScotiaNew Brunswick
Britsh ColumbiaSaskatchewanOntarioNova ScotiaNew Brunswick
Prince Edward IslandNewfoundlandNorthwest TerritoriesThe Yukon
Prince Edward IslandNewfoundlandNorthwest TerritoriesYukon

and the loonie.
Loonie,

RCMP quarterThis one is the RCMP quarter, minted to celebrate 100 years of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It’s kind of an old coin, minted back in 1973 I think.

Miscellaneous coins

Subway token,The other sideThis one is a subway token for the New York City subway system. I just happened to have one left over from a trip I made to New York in June 94.
Arcade token This goes waaay back (entirely too far back) to my days as a mall rat and arcade junkie. It’s an arcade token from somewhere. I forget where it came from.
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BarcampCHS 3 tickets

Tickets for BarcampCHS the Third just went on sale through Eventbrite.

There are three levels of tickets available: attendee ($10), individual sponsor ($25) and generous sponsor (>$25).

Go get your tickets now while they’re hot!

This year’s BarcampCHS also features a poster contest: You Are the Face of BarCamp. Go ahead, submit something.

BarcampCHS can always use more sponsors. Sponsors help make BarcampCHS a great event and it’s a great way to reach out to some of the brightest people in the area. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or know someone who might be interested, contact the organizers.

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Dragon*Con recovery

Spending a long weekend among 50k+ of the geekiest and nerdiest and generally awesome(-est) people around takes a while to recover from, especially for introvert types like me.

This year my friends and I dressed up for the first time. Nothing grand, but my friend said we should wear bathrobes in the grand Hooligan tradition. Then I found these Star Trek bathrobes at ThinkGeek.

They were pretty awesome and got a great reaction from other people. We were the away team in bath robes. People wanted to take photos of us. It’s very interesting to be on that side of DragonCon where people are asking to take photos of you instead of taking photos of others in costume.

We also had some Jedi robes with us, but they didn’t get nearly the reaction that the Star Trek robes got.

DragonCon seemed a lot more crowded this year. One of my friends also seemed to think there were a lot more DragonCon newbies this year too. Registration was orders of magnitude better this year than it was last year. Kudos to the organizers for making changes to improve the registration process. To manage the crowds for panels and sessions, I think organizers moved the lines for the more popular sessions and panels outside, rather than have lines of people snaking around inside. That resulted in really long intimidating looking lines heading outside and around buildings. Made it a little easier to move around inside, but it was a little confusing.

As usual, I spent most of my time in the Space and Science tracks. All the sessions I went to were packed this year with lots of people being turned away once the rooms were full. Didn’t do much autograph seeking this year, and only made one trip through the Walk of Fame.

Lots of photos were taken, lots of cool costumes. It kind of seemed like there weren’t quite as many people in costume this year, although I didn’t spend a lot of time wandering around like I did previous years so I probably just didn’t see them.

My complete collection of photos for DragonCon 2011 and the parade are over in the gallery.

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Touring Charleston Breweries

You might be surprised to learn that there’s a lot of beer brewing going on in the Charleston area. Today I joined a bunch of people on Lowcountry Local First‘s Brewery tour, hitting three breweries.

The tour started off at Palmetto Brewing, then the SCLEEP bus took us to Coast Brewery and finally to the brand spanking new Westbrook Brewing. The even more brand spanking new Holy City Brewing wasn’t on the tour today, but maybe it will be for the next one.

You might think that since they all brew beer, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. You’d be partly right, but mostly wrong. All of them have more or less the same type of brewing hardware and follow more or less the same process, but each of them take different approaches to the craft of brewing.

Palmetto was the largest, most automated and produces the highest volume of the three. That doesn’t keep them from coming up with some tasty brews though. I sampled the Charleston Lager, Pale Ale and Espresso Porter. The lager was a nice light beer while the Pale Ale was a little too much on the hoppy side for my liking. The Porter was my favourite, with the espresso providing a nice smooth coffee flavour (courtesy of Charleston Coffee Roasters next door).

Showing off the brewing tanks

Coast is the smallest, brewing a volume of around 1/10 that of Palmetto. Coast is kind of my default favourite because they’re the first of the local microbreweries I started with. Coast prides themselves on being small and keeping as organic as they can, and it shows in the beers they put out. They had their usual four offerings, but I only had the 32/50 Kolsch. It’s a hard one to say no to on a hot day. The Boy King Double IPA is a favourite with most of my friends and although I’m not generally a fan of IPAs, Boy King is one I don’t mind drinking.

Coast tastings

Westbrook is new and shiny. Compared to Palmetto and Coast, which are both located in old warehouses, Westbrook Brewing is fancy. New building, shiny new equipment and pretty landscaping.

Westbrook tasting room

You’ll even find a few hops vines growing outside, which I’m told produces enough to be used for a couple casks of beer. If you’ve never seen real hops, stop by and check it out.

Westbrook likes to play with their brewing, adding flavours that you wouldn’t normally expect in beer. Here I sampled the White Thai and the Cowboy meets Farmer. Both were pretty hoppy brews that I’m not too sure I liked. I could probably drink the Cowboy though.

Perhaps most interesting was the beer they had aging in oak barrels.

Westbrook oak barrel aging room

There was beer aging in a variety of different types of oak barrels: Jack Daniels whisky barrels, pinot noir barrels, French oak, American oak. Wouldn’t mind having a chance to taste some of them when they’re ready to be tapped.

The tour was a great time, and it was pretty cool to get to see the different perspectives and approaches to brewing beer. I think Coast still remains my favourite though.

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A visit to Charlestowne Landing

Paid a visit to Charles Towne Landing for the first time today. Buried in the middle of the city, it’s a remarkably quiet place with a lot of gorgeous scenery, wide marsh views, native Carolina animals and lots of history.

While I was sitting around waiting for my fellow photowalkers, the person manning the visitor’s center told me an alligator had just swam up to the bridge, so I walked out to get a few photos.

Alligator

There’s a lot to see and a lot of trails to wander around. Head down to the creek and check out the Adventure, a replica cargo vessel that would have carried cargo to ports up and down the east coast.

Adventure

There’s also the Animal Forest, where you can see animals native to the Carolinas, including a few bison!

Bison

While you’re walking along the trails, keep an eye out to avoid stumbling into things like this

Crab spider

Charles Towne Landing is a gem of a place and definitely worth multiple visits.