Category Archives: General

Default place where things go if they are not categoried or are of general interest.

The National Museum of American History in Washington DC – Part 1

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Monday, September 29 — After we finished doing school in the morning, we went to lunch at the pizza restaurant that Eric and Keith had gone to last Tuesday. They’d really liked it and wanted Christi to try it. It was along one of the perpendicular streets that connect the waterfront and Main Avenue SW, but this street was closed on the street side, making it a little cul-de-sac accessible only from the waterfront side.

The restaurant was called Lupo Marino Italian Street Food. The sign was small and discreet, so the restaurant was easy to miss. As promised, the food was great.

After lunch, we went to the American History Museum. Eric picked it because he wanted to see the cryptological exhibit that he remembered as being really good. We caught the free shuttle to the National Mall, then walked northwest to the museum.

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Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington DC

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continued… We hailed another ride share to take us to a restaurant called Old Ebbitt Grill, located directly across the street from the US Treasury. Eric was dismayed to see the ride share app showed it would take 20-minutes and cost $28 to take us the two miles. Per the Map app, the bus would take 45-minutes and there was no Metro stop nearby. We debated about walking, but it was 80-degrees and humid, which would make it an uncomfortable walk. And we were hungry… we decided to pay the money.

Our ride share driver said that traffic like this was normal on the weekends. The bright side of being stuck in slow moving traffic was that we were able to take in the city. Since there was no place for him to safely pull over near the restaurant, he dropped us off a block away, on the Treasury building side of the street. The Treasury building:

The building that Old Ebbitt was in used to be a theater called B.F. Keith’s. It opened in 1912 and had a six-story-high auditorium with 1,850 red leather seats, walls covered in red silk, and a stage curtain that was ruby red with gold fringe. The lobby walls were marble.It started as a vaudeville theater, and in 1928 started showing motion pictures, too. We’re not sure when the vaudeville acts faded away, but it stayed a movie theater until 1978. Since the building was a national landmark, the exterior was kept intact and the entire inside gutted and renovated.

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Beat the Bomb in Washington DC

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Sunday, Sept 28 — Keith has not enjoyed the activities that we’ve done over the last few days, so we decided to make it up to him by letting him pick an activity that he thought would be fun. When we’d asked a local for suggestions, one of the things he’d mentioned was an escape room called Beat The Bomb. Keith thought that sounded fun, so we booked a reservation for today at noon. It was meant for groups of 4 – 6 people and cost $50 per person. However, they will allow groups of 3, but it actually cost more for three people than it did for four!

Beat The Bomb was about two miles northwest of the Capitol. From where we were, getting there via public transit would have involved taking the Metro and then transferring to a bus. It was slower and more complicated than we wanted to deal with, so we took a ride share.

When we walked in, we were directed to some kiosks to check in and sign release forms. Once we’d finished the check-in paperwork, we were told to wait in the lounge until we were called, and encouraged to purchase drinks and food from the bar.

The black partitions off to the side looked like virtual game areas. A television screen was playing a live feed of the groups that were currently in the escape rooms. The rooms were solid black and they were moving in strange ways. They looked pretty darn silly.

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Introduction to Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)

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Keith had to write a report for school on a topic of interest to him. We decided to post it so he can share it with the new potential players that he meets.

Dungeons and Dragons, known as D&D for short, is a strategic roleplaying game. There are a variety of things you can do in D&D. The entire premise of the game is that you are someone else, somewhere else. That someone else could be a dragonborn monk, an elvish wizard or an orcish ranger. The somewhere else could be a dark dungeon, a mighty forest, or the open ocean. 

The core part of D&D is rolling dice. For the ease of play, people abbreviate dice names. They call them “d” and then the number of sides there are on the dice. For example, a d6 is a six-sided dice. 

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The National Cryptologic Museum in Annapolis, Maryland – Part 2

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continued... Here were some American machines used in World War II. The little machine on the left was a portable unit. 140,000 were built during WWII. They were also utilized in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well. The bigger one to the right was the first production model of an Electric Cipher Machine. The Navy called it CSP-889 (later renamed to ECM Mark II) and the Army called it SIGABA.

They also could do voice encryption. We believe this was a model of a SIGSALY machine that produced encoded records. There were two turntables that synchronized the sending and receiving ends. When played on a regular record player, they just sounded like random noise. A matching record at the receiving end could unscramble them. They held about 12-minutes of content. They were in service from 1943 to 1946.

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