A lovely town and meeting new old friends...

We had a great time in Providence. We got directions to the Trinity Brewhouse from Xian, and it turned out to be quite easy to find, right off the freeway. We had a bit of a problem finding a parking place, but eventually we did. And it seems that they turn off the parking meters, so we didn't even have to feed the meter.

A short walk brought us to the Trinity, which is a nice little pub and restaurant. We were warmly greeted by our hosts upon walking through the door. Xian and Mike were very nice and a lot of fun to hang out with. I've "known" Xian on Stumbleupon for a couple of years now, but this was the first time to actually meet her in person. She's as nice as I expected, and someday or another, we need to get back up here and actually be able to spend a little more time, not just an hour or so at dinner.

As it is, we spent a while enjoying dinner and trading stories of their mad drive across the country from Washington and our drive so far from Texas, along with whatever happened to come up in discussion. The tiny size of some of the states here in the northeast came up. It's funny that people here often won't drive to someplace 10 miles away because it just seems to far. Of course, considering that we're in a state that's pretty much a square 100 miles tall and 100 miles wide, I guess that's not too odd a mindset.

Unfortunately, I forgot to get pictures again. Xian did indeed have the glitter on her eyes that she often displays on her blog pictures. The girlfriend and I were also both expecting her voice to be a bit more high-pitched than it was. Oh, she displayed her "little girl" voice here and there, but in general, she's got a very nice voice that really isn't much higher than I would expect from seeing her. That's a good thing...

The meal itself was pretty good. We all pretty much had pub grub, but the burgers and fries were very tasty and well-prepared. And apparently the beer was pretty good, too. They brew it themselves, but I didn't indulge, because the hops tends to do very bad things to my body. My sweetie had a dark Russian ale, and she said it was quite good. I just had a couple of rum and cokes.

After we finished our dinner and drinks, and had chatted for a while, we had to call it an evening. My girlfriend and I were still pretty tired from all the walking and driving we'd been doing for the past few days, and I think if we'd stayed out too much longer, we would have had to take a nap in the car before getting back here to the motel. As it is, it took us a little longer than expected to get back here.

We walked back to the car, and I snapped a couple of pictures of some of the nearby buildings, which were lit up pretty nicely:






We'd like to get back sometime in the future and be able to explore the city a little more in the daytime, but we didn't really have the chance this time around, and we didn't really want to drive around the city at night, when most of the interesting places were probably closed anyway.

So we headed back toward the motel. Or so we thought. We kind of got trapped in the wrong lane by a little bit of traffic and wound up hitting a different highway than the one we came up on. Of course, since it seemed like it would be so easy to find the Trinity and get back, I hadn't bothered to bring the laptop or GPS. So we wound up driving a few miles in the wrong direction. I really need to learn to trust the girlfriend's holistic driving techniques, because she would have had us back on the path a lot quicker than I did. I would have had us back in Connecticut before too terribly long. But we wound up backtracking after driving through a couple of little residential districts. At least we didn't end up in the industrial part of town...

After getting on the right freeway, it wasn't too tough to get back to the motel. And here we are, watching a bit of history on the tube and getting ready to call it a night. Overall, it was a really nice visit here to Providence, but tomorrow, it's on to the real goal of the trip...

Thoughts about StumbleUpon's forums

Almost three years ago, I joined StumbleUpon. It took me about a year before I really started getting somewhat active on the forums on SU. I've never really been all that much of a forum poster, but I've enjoyed myself. I've enjoyed the slight sense of friendly anarchy that has pervaded a number of the forums.

One thing I never really understood though was why the developers of the system felt the need to limit any thread in those forums to 1000 posts before locking it automatically. As a database developer, I don't believe that there is any kind of performance reason to create a limit like that. And for space, it's useless to create that limit, because there's no limit on the number of threads that can be created in a forum. So, rather than have one thread with 10,000 entries, users simply create ten threads with 1000 each.

On a few of the forums, people have found some ways around this 1000 post limit, mostly by opening multiple tabs in Firefox which point to the end of the thread in question. This allows you to enter something in one tab, post it, close that tab, enter something else into the next tab, post it as a new forum entry, and so forth. There was no real checking to make sure the thread wasn't closed, so that trick allowed some threads to extend into the multiple thousands of entries on some forums. It was basically just a good-natured sort of challenge to see how far we could push that particular envelope. I've not noticed any particular performance problems or anything in any of those extended threads.

Now the developers have implemented a change on the forums which prevents any post beyond the 1001st. It just drops anything else quietly. Not a really huge deal, and I suppose it's their prerogative to set the rules and enforce them, but it really seems that they've been taking a fun place to play around and enjoy myself and turning it into somewhere that I'm no longer quite enjoying so much. Why do they think that a fun little site like that needs to be ruled in such a hardcore manner? And, more importantly, why do they have to spend the effort stopping something like that instead of trying to prevent the spamming and crap that goes on in the forums and in people's inboxes on a daily basis?

Oh, yeah, it's because eBay bought them, and eBay is all about trying to turn everything for a profit...