August 2006 Archives
« May 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
August 31, 2006
At Lake of the Clouds
N: 44 deg 15.530', W: 71 deg 19.143'
Well, we made it up from Pinkham Notch through Tuckerman ravine. We even got in before dinner was over so we got some good food. It's a pretty nice hut; it's basically a hike in hostel, but they don't call it that. It costs a lot more than a hostel, too. And it comes with dinner and breakfast, so that's not so bad.
Laurie and I got adjacent bottom bunks, so that works pretty well for us. The bunks are three high -- at least I won't roll out and fall. It'll also probably be quieter to get in and out.
There are 62 people here plus 5 crew, so it feels pretty populated. However, they normally get more people and have far more crew people, so they feel understaffed -- and underbooked. Of course, 52 people were reserver, so the food was a little light.
We had some slight trouble coming up. Laurie pulled a groin muscled and I was starting to have some knee trouble. The hike is a pretty steep climb -- up about 3500 feet (from 2000 to 5500) over 4 miles, and then back down about 500 feet over another mile. The down portion was causing me some ankle pain, too.
Our friends made it up before us, but family was after us, so we didn't feel so bad. I'm not looking forward to going down, though, because of the trouble with the little down portion towards the end. We're looking at other possible options, though, so we'll see.
We just got in from taking some pictures. The sunset from here is sectacular. The primary windows look out over an impressive view to the west. So, Laurie got some pictures of us towards the sunset (with her Canon 30D with 10-22mm EF-S). Then I grabbed my Canon 30D with 100-300mmL lens to take pictures of the moon. I got some pretty good shots of it this time, but they still aren't anything like I've seen others do. One of these days I'll figure out how to do it right.
Our new Garmin etrex Vista Cx was great for the hike. It shows the elevation graph, the tracks, etc. It's got much better battery life than our old Vista (non-Cx) model -- and this one has a nice color screen! It's about the same size, too, so that's a great improvement. Not only that, but the support for standard mini-USB (the old one had a proprietary serial port) and the microSD (aka TransFlash) slot is a huge improvement. We grabbed the MapSource World Map for it so we had a somewhat more detailed basemap to use with it while we travel around.
Lights out is 9:30pm, which is fine since we got up at 7am (aka 4am PST) and we're all a bit tired. They rise everyone at 6:30am, though. That said, it's not so bad since we're tryin to keep moving our time zone forward since we're going another 5-6 hours forward.
And now I'm blogging on our wonderful Dell XPS M1210 laptop that is getting wonderful battery life. I think it was worth hiking it up here, too. I didn't need to bring the AC adapter, either, because of the exceptional batttery life. At 90% remaining, it's showing 5 hours and 30 minutes left. Well, with no WiFi or Bluetooth the soak up some and the lowest light setting being good enough for here, I don't think there is much of anything that I could do to kill it before I have to go to bed (both because of light's out and because I'm already tired).
My phone (LG VX9800 "The V") is showing between 1 bar and 3 bars of 1x coverage, but I can't get any SMS out. I doubt the Sprint phone (Samsung MM-a920) would work up here for data connection, but I'm going to have to try since I brought it all the way up here on reports that cell phone coverage works. ;)
As expected, time is going quick now that we're actually on our trip. Of course, we've not even been in New Hampshire for 24 hours yet, but tomorrow is Friday and it seems like the week just began. Then again, we kept thinking Tuesday was Friday. For us, it almost was since we're starting a really, really long weekend in some respects. ;)
I'm not getting some looks for my use of a laptop here. I'm guessing they don't see them too frequently, but it wasn't too hard to bring it up. The hut provides food and sleeping material, so you can pack pretty light. We packed up with warm clothes (it's freezing out, literally), lunch, the cameras, and the laptop. Oh, I also brought up the Nintendo DS's so we could play those if we wanted to.
I'm currently trying to play Animal Crossing DS. I tried to rent through a bunch of DS games from Gamefly before we came, but we didn't get very far. It was exactly the one I wanted to take with us, but it's not too bad. It's actually very much like The Sims. It's supposed to have WiFi component, but I haven't had a chance to try that out yet. Laurie has been playing Age of Empires and liking it a lot. I haven't checked it out yet to see if it has multiple saves available. We also have Pirates of the Caribbean; I don't think either of use have tried that yet. I was hoping Star Fox was going to be out soon enough to rent, but it wasn't. I also wanted Advance Wars DS, (wasn't it named after the Gameboy Advance?) but we didn't have enough time to return a game and get a new one out before we left.
Update on the satellite phone: Mobal gave me a call (while I was still able to check my voicemail, too) and said that they had gotten a sat phone in and they were shipping it out overnight to us! That's excellent and I'm happing with them for giving me updates. We'll see tomorrow if we get it or not.
Alright, I just got to try out the Sprint phone. It shows 2-3 bars of digital roaming, but when trying to make a call it drops out of service. *sigh* Our friends have a GSM phone and apparently they can get calls out. It sounds like there might be a GSM cell tower on Mt Washington. That said, I didn't think it was legal for the cell towers to be up like that (except for the old Nextel towers).
Well, I guess since I don't seem to have much more to write about, I'll go grab the DS... or join in the next game of Jenga. Not sure which yet...
Laurie's Note Area:
Quote of the Day: Nathan: "Dad, do you have any earwigs?"
August 30, 2006
First Leg, Check
Of course, we're still in the US, so what could have possibly gone wrong by now?
Sitting in the hotel, discussin meds, not really thinking about going to sleep considering my head doesn't really think it's as late as it is. Planning the day tomorrow; it's a hike up Mt. Washington.
Hey, we've got free WiFi here! That's nice. ;) Well, that means I can post from here... if I want to. Problem is, I'm not doing real-time posting on this trip. So that means I can't take full advantage yet of the posting ability.
I am, however, using Windows Live Writer to draft the posts. So far, I'm really liking it. It's better than any other offline posting tool I've used and it was also the easiest
First Possible Problem
N: 37 deg 37.266 feet, W: 122 deg 23.467 feet (plus or minus 115 feet)
And it came in before we even got through security at the airport.
Mobal, our choice for satellite phone rental gave me a call. They are currently out of phones! Well, since we are having it delivered to the east coast we have a couple of extra days. However, it's still a little annoying.
We may have to get the Mobal GSM phone instead and try to rent a sat phone when we're actually in Kenya. We'll see what happens.
On the plus side, our GPS unit got a fix while in the airport. It didn't have enough time to get a fix before we got on BART on our way over, though, so we don't have that as a start. (We had picked up a new Garmin etrex Vista Cx -- it's great because it uses microSD/TransFlash cards for storage while still having some internal memory.)
August 26, 2006
At Lake Tahoe
Sitting in a cabin by the lake... watching TV... typing this blog entry. I have blogged once, twice now, in months. I'm not quite as used to it as I was. I haven't really had time to read any lately, either. And when I have had a few minutes, I've found that so many of the blogs have changed substantially or gone away since I was reading them... and that was only months ago.
We're days away from headin out on the longest vacation either of us have ever taken. I've been really busy at work and it's been very draining on me so I haven't been doing nearly enough to get us ready for the upcoming trip. In fact, I've done almost nothing. Well, if you count doing things like ordering Canon 30Ds and our Dell XPS M1210 that I'm typing on now, then I've helped a little.
Now, this probably won't be posted for a while because of security concerns over this trip. We're heading off to some countries where we could run in to some trouble. Virtually none of the countries we're going to are all that safe.
In addition to having to delay post things, there have also been a number of events lately that I haven't been able to blog about for one reason or another. And, well, I still can't.
We sold off both of our digital cameras recently. We had an original Canon Digital Rebel (300D) and the Canon 20D. We replaced both with new Canon 30Ds. The Canon 30D has basically the same sensor as the 20D, but has a better screen on it, finer ISO controls, and selectable frame rate. It also seems a little bigger and heavier. But aside from that, it's virtually the same. This is great because now Laurie and I don't have to bicker about which camera we're going to use. Of course if we program our names into the camera we'll have to have something external to be able to tell the cameras apart now. ;)
August 6, 2006
It's Been So Long!
It's been far too long since I'e posted up here. There have been many reasons, of course.
So, what have I done since I posted last and why haven't I posted at all for months? It's been well over three months now.
Well, not long after my last post we took a trip to Hawaii. It was my first time there and it was rather pleasant. It was actually colder than I expected. Not that it was cold, but it was scorching sunny -- it was often overcast or just comfortable. The water was a bit cooler than I had hoped for -- I still got cold in many areas.
After that, work got very busy for me. However, wedding prep and other things kept me away from blogging even when I wasn't at work.
We had decided to replace our carpet floors with hardwood before the wedding. One problem led to another and it's still not done, but we're doing all of the work rather than paying others to do it. This came about because of some problems with others, too. The reason we haven't finished it isn't because we can't go faster. It's mostly because we've been waiting on various things to happen. The latest is that we have to get our concrete floor levelled and we haven't been called back by people to get quotes on it. Two large cracks have createed a floor with 3 different planes to be levelled.
Now we're keeping busy doing house work (the goal is to make progress every day), planning for our honeymoon, and doing regular work.
On the gadget front, many things have taken place.
We returned the Averatec because they wouldn't help us get Windows back on it and the Linux driver support was pretty poor.
I finally got a replacement for the Jeep stereo (VRCD-300USB) from MegaSound -- the MegaSound VRCD-400USB (It's nicer looking, but so far isn't working much better -- but I haven't had time to really try to get it working).
We got an XBox 360. It's really quite great. ;)
We got a DS Lite and a DS. Compared to the PSP, the features aren't as good but the battery life and ease of picking them up and putting them down to play quickly is much better, IMO. I still like the PSP and still need to download the LocoRoco demo.
We got a Dell XPS M1210 for our upcoming trip. This is my favorite laptop, to date. It's small, but not too small. It's light (ok, it could be lighter -- but it is under 5 pounds). It's not so small it's skimping anything -- it has a dual core processor, can take up to 4GB of RAM, has a DVD burner, and has a real video card (64MB fixed and 192MB shared). It's the battery life that has me sold, though. In my typical use for it, I'm getting well over 5 hours and usually 6-7 hours of usage out of it. (My typical use? Browsing, email, Google Earth, and other non-development and non-gaming tasks with WiFi turned on. It is the T2300E, with a 5400rpm hard disk, too.) Basically, with the exeption of the screen resolution, it can be a full development machine if it wants to be. It won't be the best gaming machine, but it won't be bad either. The screen can be seen in full sunlight, too, which is very useful.
I'm sure there are plenty of other things I'm missing (that's why you're supposed to blog frequently and as things happen, right?) Some things I'll need to elaborate on, when I get the time.
Speaking of that, when will I blog next? I actually don't know -- all of the things keeping my away from the blog are still present -- and then we'll be on our honeymoon.
So, until next time -- whenever that is -- enjoy!
