GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Tuesday 29 July 2008

July Dinkey Lakes BP and Grass Valley visit

Backpacking trip (Dinkey Lakes) was great; approximate map: http://is.gd/OsO . Through Madera and up to Prather, the car thermometer was reading 111 degrees! Cooler at the 8200-foot trailhead. Serious mosquitoes bothered the susceptible at the lower lakes. We did a couple miles of cross-country up to beautiful Fingerbowl Lake. Ben and Annalise scrambled up to the top of the Third Sister! We got an impressive hour-and-a-half heavy (for the Sierra) thunderstorm, but our tarp and groundcloth kept us dry. Hiked out through another hour-and-a-half of heavy rain, lightning, and thunder, this time with hail for added drama!

The next weekend, I didn't go to Mammoth -- went instead to our group's offsite at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Shouldn't have. Got nasty food poisoning.

This past weekend, drove up to Grass Valley for Cliff's 80th, and we got some great Doughty family photos taken at the Empire Mine State Park. I hope to have figured out a photo place to put some of them up on the web, some time soon.
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Sunday 29 June 2008

Uneventful June; July plans

Matanzas weekend (on a budget, so we stayed a Motel 6; won't be doing that again -- they seem to be going downhill fast).

On the way home, we got another visit with Jordan, now a month old.

Smoke from all the fires seems to be dissipating -- the sky is still the wrong color around sunset, but the sun looks great with this unfortunate natural filter. Got some good photos Monday or Tuesday.

Looks like I'll be away from work every Friday this coming July: on the weekend of the 4th, my cousin and her family (and my mother) will be visiting; I have a backpacking trip on 10th to the 14th; may visit said cousin in Mammoth the 17th and/or 18th; and the 25-26-27 weekend may call for a visit to Grass Valley for my father in law's 80th birthday celebration.
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Saturday 31 May 2008

Under the wire

Well, it's been busy here at GIGO central. At work, I'm a part of four different (though related) projects in testing technologies. And the couple of 20% ideas I have are finally about ready to commit to.

At home, it's looking more and more like a hillbilly hangout, with a washer outside and hanging stuff up to dry much of the time.

In between, I've been riding the Gbus in from Scotts Valley, which, paradoxically, gives me more time to work while simultaneously making the commute take longer. It does get me out of the house earlier than I have been used to.

I have a new niece, born today, my wife's brother's daughter. The picture I put here is not related.

I hope I don't let this old weblog slide for so long, next time! ("Under the wire" refers to narrowly avoiding two entire empty months.)
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Friday 29 February 2008

Leap Day Posting

Woo Hoo! In the six years I've had this weblog, I've never done a February 29th posting before. An indication of my mental state, though, is that I dutifully checked in the GIGO Table of Contents, examining the end of February for each of the five earlier years, before realizing that there was only one to check.

In other incomplete stories, the Pinnacles trip was great, and led to making some connections with some of the other music-makers at the big G. And Ben and I hiked Uvas County Park, saw a bunch of waterfalls, flowing well.
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Thursday 31 January 2008

Winter camping at the Pinnacles

So, there's the tradition of an annual winter trip. In the past, I hear, it's mostly been a ski trip. Something different this year — Disneyland, or camping at the Pinnacles. No contest for me, despite the possibility of weather. Seems that somewhere under ten percent of the trippers chose to go camping with me, the other several thousand are going to Disneyland.

I plan to take some pictures.

Current forecast is for a spate of dry weather for a change! Keeping my fingers crossed.
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Saturday 5 January 2008

It's 2008. Do you know where your projects are?

Mostly stalled, but here's a partial, cryptic list:

weblogs and pix coalescing at l6r (revive zia.pycs, extract data from Radio, etc)
finish out my OCaml version of Danvy's grand tour of SECD-like machines
mangle spj's sudoku solver
weblog engine in scala, including quarkup, my contribution to the babel of wikilike markup syntaxes, and maybe (im)port Pandoc
build the two ubuntu machines
prototype a streaker interface for gmail & reader
scala android experiments

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Thursday 29 November 2007

Busy month; new job

A job change, about which more later; and a whole houseful of relatives and spice for Thanksgiving; and so what I want to do is to transliterate Simon P-J's Sudoku Solver into Scala, but then change it so it's not a solver but rather a hinter. That may have to wait for me to come up for air (and to get a new machine at home).

Just getting training at the new place, feeling my way around the mother of all intranets.
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