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GIGO: words unreadable aloud
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Sunday 31 July 2005
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Pix from Backpacking with Ben
I went backpacking with my nephew Benjamin a couple of wekeends ago
(Friday 15 July through Sunday). The photos are up
on my mac.com site.
Ben is 10 years old, though he's a big 10. Last year, I took
him on the first six or so miles of the High Sierra Trail,
and we had a blast. So he'd been asking when we could schedule
another backpacking trip this summer.
Ben and his mother Mary had flown up from T.O., and she had to
be in San Francisco for a work meeting. So I came up with the
idea of having her drop Ben and me off on Skyline, and we would
walk down through Long Ridge Open Space Preserve, down Ward Road
into Portola State Park, and on out through Pescadero Creek
County Park. It's a mostly downhill hike :-), but this time
Ben's pack would be somewhat heavier.
The captions tell much of the story,
but since I ran out of camera space on Saturday afternoon,
there aren't captions for the pictures I didn't take. So:
Saturday morning, we had headed straight out from Slate Creek
Campground to do Peter's Creek Loop. We had seen a total of
three people (and one raccoon) since leaving the trailhead.
Peter's Creek Loop climbs a bit from camp, then has a very
steep descent to the loop part. Near the high point of the
trail, there are several spots with a lot of poison oak
very close to the trail. Ben did quite well and I think
he has a good idea of what poison oak looks like, and can
recognize many of its varied forms.
("Toxicodendron diversibolum" is one of my favorite
latin-style species names; it's so descriptive.)
On the way back to camp, we did see a couple of adults
and a couple of kids heading up there. We warned them
about the poison oak, and it turned out that even the
adults weren't quite sure what it looks like. So I
pointed out a couple. Hope they didn't get any.
Ben and I returned to camp, filtered some more water
and played in the creek some more (it was a pretty hot day).
Ben had just attended a house concert where
groovelily
had performed, and had a song of theirs in his head.
Ben's a good-natured guy, and he sings a lot.
Unfortunately in this case, he only had about two or three
lines of this one song going. I heard that a few times
before I finally started singing a few of the
amusing
songs
that I know. His favorites ended up being Eric Bogle's
"Nobody's Moggy" and the Austin Lounge Lizards' "Saguaro".
Anyway, we ended up at the Portola State Park HQ around
five pm, and discovered to our delight that they had
cold sodas and gatorade! We spent a fair amount of time
there, rested, and called home to check in. Then we
walked the remaining mile and a half to Tarwater Trail Camp.
About when we got there, I remembered that I had intended to
fill up our waters with tap water at the station, but it had
completely slipped my mind.
We did have enough for dinner, though, and the
freeze-dried spaghetti meal wasn't bad at all.
Sunday, we packed up and headed out; I had been
thinking of taking the Pomponio Trail, since it's
mostly singletrack, but we talked over the options
and ended up walking back on Old Haul Road. It was
cooler and a bit of marine layer had been sucked in.
Old Haul is just inland from Butano Ridge, so it doesn't
get much direct ocean breeze, but as we crossed each
side canyon, there was a nice light cool breeze
coming down it.
We made pretty good time, and got out to the trailhead
and saw a deer on the (paved) road. (Had not seen any
deer at all in the wilderness part of the trip.)
Headed over to the ranger station and store for
milkshakes!
Very fun trip.
11:48:20 PM
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Thursday 28 July 2005
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Dwarvish and Reverse Polish Wines
Italian Varietals? That second one sure looks Dwarvish to me!
Jeez, the summer of 2005 is halfway over!
It sure has been a long time since I put any
photos up here. Deb and I got to take a nice trip up to
the wine country a few weeks ago, mainly to attend the
incredible annual lavender festival that is held at
Matanzas Vineyards, near Santa Rosa. I haven't done
up all the pix from the whole trip, but here are a few
wine store pictures, with a cool shimmery outdoor wall-art thing
from Santa Rosa. The wine store was Oakville Grocery, on the corner
of the main square in Healdsburg.
Click on the pix to get bigger versions, with some brief captions.
I find it amazing that no one else has posted anything anywhere
on the web about the
Reverse
Polish
Wine:
9:56:16 PM
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Thursday 21 July 2005
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Kill Blobby-the-whale
I Took Bear Creek Road to work this morning, and
shortly after I dropped onto Hwy 17, a great blue
heron flew over the freeway. Good omen.
In unrelated news ...
(For the non-locals: highway 17 is the main drag
connecting
Santa Cruz (sea level) over the hill (Patchen
Pass, 1800 feet elevation) to Silicon Valley
(approximately sea level).)
For nearly as long as I've lived in Santa Cruz
County, there has been a billboard for the
southbounders, just before you reach the
straightaway freeway section that bypasses
Scotts Valley. The billboard almost exclusively
advertises some car dealership, and it almost
always features this very annoying rounded-cartoon
whale/seal character, very badly drawn.
Well, I was so delighted to see a URL covering part of
that billboard a few days ago ... http://www.killblobby.com/ ...
that I literally laughed out loud.
Ahh, I thought, someone agrees with me about the grossness
of that dorky blobby whale-thing. I could hardly contain
the anticipation to see what humorous website someone
had come up with, taking up a web-collection or doing
a silly web-survey asking that the damn blobby whale-thing
never grace our commute again.
Sadly, it turned out to be some kid-with-cancer site.
At least it's a "successful surgery" k-w-c site, but
still. Color me wryly disappointed, and send Cole
my congratulations and best wishes.
9:37:47 PM
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Tuesday 19 July 2005
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LL1 explodes again; Django; lesscode
The MIT Lightweight Languages mailing list is amazingly bursty. After carrying absolutely no traffic whatsoever since June 6, over a hundred messages showed up in the past 48 hours. Weird. And it's several different subjects, though the "Guido's bias" discussion dominates.
In other Python news, Simon Willison announced Django, aka YAPWF, as if the world needed another one. But this one does look pretty cool.
Since I'm doing Ruby at work these days, I'll probably install Ruby on Rails on my work Mac, just for internal web-fun.
Simon also mentioned Ryan Tomayko's lesscode.org.
11:16:37 PM
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Monday 18 July 2005
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Cell Phones and Face-Reading: Gladwell, Take 2
A recent study reaffirmed several previous ones, in noting
the danger of driving while talking on a cell phone, and in
showing that "hands-free" makes *no* measurable difference.
Here's a bit of a dialog from a mailing list in which
I participate.
One participant said "I had to dismiss it out
of hand. FOUR times more likely? And handsfreee makes
no difference? That goes against common sense."
Common sense is neither common, nor always sensible.
"... Could be true, but I suspect that they have no
repeatable tests and no hard data."
Yep, this particular study may have been flawed. But do a simple
search for, say, studies "hands-free" cell phones and you'll
uncover at least five previous studies that came to the same
conclusion. (I.e., they have all concluded that hands-free-ness
makes little difference -- talking on a cell phone leads to
crashing more often.)
Could be that all of these studies are flawed, but Occam's razor
suggests that maybe they've uncovered a grain of truth that surprises
our "common" "sense".
As for me, I don't even own a cell phone, so I'm naturally biased
to believe that THEY ARE UTTERLY EVIL AND ARE USED WHILE DRIVING
ONLY BY THE MOST EVIL OF DELIBERATE CAR-CRASHERS.
Ahem.
Speculation: I think that it is somewhat as another
participant suggested ...
"I really do believe that talking on the phone is more
distracting than talking to a real live person next to you,
but not extraordinarily more so."
... but much worse -- I do believe that it is
extraordinarily more distracting, for the reasons outlined below.
"My contention is that the extra effort to visualize the
other person and to get their meaning without the standard
visual clues absorbs some of our power to otherwise attend
the road.
I suggest that it is the fact of having an audio-only
conversation with a person who is not there that is the
main cause of the loss of attention that leads to the increased
wreck rate. And that there is a third, very important
component of a conversation -- the emotional factor -- that
is only dimly seen when your only channel is audio, and
that those of us who work in analytical engineering-type
professions tend to ignore.
I'm sure many of you have read "The Tipping Point" and
"Blink". Think about the chapters that cover "face-reading",
the sections that show evidence (1) that our facial expressions
can sometimes *cause* us to feel the corresponding emotion,
and (2) that we typically mimic the rhythms and moods of
those with whom we converse (face-to-face). So when our
close friend is talking with us and feeling a great sorrow,
our mimicking of their expression causes us to feel a
similar emotion, which we then either simply share, or
translate into a complementary emotion, like compassion
or sympathy.
I don't think Gladwell mentioned it, but there is a
plausible reason for us to have evolved that unexpected
trait: before we had any audible "language as we know it",
this kind of communication allowed groups of humans to
communicate fear or friendship or trust or hatred or
attraction or love and to be able to see whether such
emotions are shared. Even after language was invented,
there remains a wealth of info communicated by a
glance, an upturned eyebrow, a scowl, a grimace, or
the simple wearing of a big round red nose.
My suspicion is that we are evolutionarily hard-wired to
*always* expect to be able to make that kind of deep connection
with our conversational group, and that this is the reason
that the lack of those visual clues is more distracting
than most of us realize.
-- Cell-less in Seattle ... or, uh, Santa Cruz
PS, in case you couldn't tell, the actual facts are that
I just don't like talking on the telephone.
10:23:49 PM
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Sunday 17 July 2005
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Backpacking with Ben
Just back from a 3-day trip in the neighborhood, with my 10-year-old nephew Ben. On Friday, Ben's mother Mary dropped us off where the trail crosses Skyline in Long Ridge OSP, and we walked down that trail and Ward Road, to the Slate Creek Campground in Portola State Park. Saturday, we did the Peter's Creek loop and then walked down to park HQ, resupplied a bit (cold sodas!), and went on to Tarwater trail camp. Finally, today, we walked out to the store at Pescadero Creek / Memorial Park ranger station. Very fun trip.
11:45:31 PM
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Wednesday 13 July 2005
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Tuesday 12 July 2005
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Backpacker Mag -- Hiker-Slang, Sea-to-Sea, Bonny Doon
Here are some notes inspired by the August 2005 issue of Backpacker magazine.
There's a very amusingly-written article about hikers' slang -- "The Unofficial, Unabridged, Slick-talking, Fast-walking Hiker's Glossary". The article is unattributed, but it sure reminds me a lot of the Dictionary of MTB Slang that I edited a decade ago, and that Jim Frost has been maintaining ever since. (I'm not suggesting plagiarism -- the article is original and quite well-done. I just wonder whether the unmentioned author had read the MTB Slang page -- the styles are quite similar, IMHO.)
The article is illustrated with cool, retro-cartoon style drawings that also rung a bell -- this time, a wine label bell. My wife and I are members of DEWN, the wine club for Bonny Doon Vineyards. Their early-release wines always have distinctive and interesting labels, and it turns out that some of my favorite labels (e.g., the DEWN Freisa) were indeed
created by Gary Taxali, the illustrator of this month's Backpacker article. Cool.
The other article that caught my interest was about the
Sea-to-Sea trail, from the mouth of the St Lawrence, to the
northwest corner of Washington State. I mentioned that trail and the Pacific Northwest Trail in my long trails in North America article. (Aside: check out this search.)
This month's related Backpacker article highlighted Andrew Skurka, who by next month may complete the journey that makes him the first person to "hike the entire 7,700-mile Sea-to-Sea Route (C2C)".
Further mention of the Range Creek Ruins will have to wait.
11:47:12 PM
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Saturday 9 July 2005
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CTM arrived, squashed my dog
For two or three years, I've been seeing references to PvR's CTM book, and I
even snagged the entire text of an online draft a while ago.
PvR is Peter Van Roy, and
CTM is "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming",
a work of astonishing breadth that covers in great detail most
of the ways that people think about programming these days.
(It's actually a collaboration between PvR and Seif Haridi.
PvR is the more visible of the two, being more active on LtU, for example.)
I ordered a physical copy of the book a while ago, and just
received it yesterday. Man, it is heavy, and I don't
mean philosophically. It's a big book, around 900
large pages. Not the sort of thing you'll be slipping into
your backpack for idle reading on the train ride to work.
Anyway, LtU user rumplestiltskin
mentioned
the book, with a quite cryptic "stuck with" and
"FC3".
Chris Rathman responded by adding a few links:
(By the way, when rumplestiltskin says "FCn", that refers to
Red Hat's "Fedora Core n" series of Linux releases,
where n = 1, 2, or 3.)
12:24:54 PM
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Friday 8 July 2005
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VMs and IRs, placeholder
On LtU, Chris Rathman
pointed out an interesting
article on embedded.com.
Summary: For DSP algorithms, ESL circuit designers often use a
MATLAB representation and then hand-code that design in C, C++,
SystemC, or RTL. We need to automate that.
Maybe it's time for things like the
Haskell-based Lava hardware design language to shine.
A tangentially related item:
On my (late, lamented) pyscerocha weblog, I made a posting
about VMs and IRs. I'll try to resurrect from memory,
part of the list that was implied.
Summary: a survey of compiler intermediate representations (IRs),
virtual machines (VMs) and their [byte]codes.
IRs -- e.g., SGI/Blackbird's WHIRL; C--; sun's IR; PIL; GSA, TGSA, VDG,
gcc's RTL and their new SSA form
VMs -- starting with LLVM, but some google searching
led me to add VVM, and LtU discussions of Oz and Alice added SEAM.
I had a bunch of others, though. I guess the MS stuff ought to be there.
Closely related are the particular bytecodes used by each VM.
Somewhat related to VMs are the
mobile/downloadable code systems
(Juice; E; NeWS; Java/JVM ... )
I'll have to sit down with Google to flesh out those lists.
Someday.
11:17:20 PM
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Thursday 7 July 2005
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When is Google going to do Google Topo?
I spent last night drawing up three hikes, using the awful "Topo!" software that National Geographic sells. I had forgotten just how horrible its user interface is -- it may even rival Lotus Notes for UI blunders. Too bad most of its competitors aren't a whole lot better. I can hardly wait for Google to turn its attention in that direction.
Anyway, I've been trying to plan a couple of backpacking trips for later this summer; one short one with Ben in the southern Sierra, and a longer one in the wilderness between Kings Canyon and Wishon and Courtright Reservoirs. Another North Fork, though this time it's the Kings River, rather than the San Joaquin.
I've uploaded info about the two NFKR trips to Flickr, with the tag "blackcap". (For each version, there's a trip profile, the approach, and the main loop.)
10:10:42 PM
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Wednesday 6 July 2005
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A SLO-ish Fourth
Over the long weekend, Deb and I took a trip south to Cambria,
to meet with nephew Ben, his mother Mary and her partner Marty.
Nice time staying at the
Cambria Pines Lodge.
Nice pool, exceptional gardens, decent rooms.
It's quite close to town (maybe a third of a mile?), but the
steps down to town are mighty steep. I walked down them, but
didn't walk up.
The overcast, cool weather was a welcome contrast to the
too-hot weather we often get on the 4th.
Had a barbecue on Sunday: shrimp skewers, and some wonderful
pasta salad that Deb had made. We did that at
Leffingwell
Landing,
at the north end of Moonstone Beach Road, and the
very stiff breeze kept blowing out the flames.
On the fourth, we headed east on
Santa
Rosa Creek Road, a very small, twisty, and sometimes
very steep road that passes through some beautiful, open,
classic California grass-and-oak canyon land for 20 or so
miles, before rejoining the main highway (46) back toward
Paso Robles.
On the return trip, I ran into no traffic whatsoever.
11:42:37 PM
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Tuesday 5 July 2005
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Friday 1 July 2005
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Another G-Whack
Cool, my semi-intentional coinage of a couple of days ago led to a G-Whack, at least for today. Take Lollapalooza and replace the "loll" with "intern", and you get my silly description of Google's Summer of Code. One single page at the moment, but I suppose it'll be more once Google indexes my monthly archive.
In other news, I now work in Milpitas, in a 17-person startup. Met one co-worker today who lived over the ridge in Lompico for a while, and another who does a fair amount of solo backpacking. Another worked with my older brother for a few years, and grew up within a couple dozen miles of where my nephew and my parents now live. Small world...
12:07:28 AM
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© Copyright
2007
Doug Landauer
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Last update:
07/2/6; 12:46:19
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