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I have a challenge/goal for you.  Check out www.aarp.org/states. Look at Wi marathon man.

So glad you are back!

*tap* *tap* is this thing on?

Ok, so that was a long pause. It was a combination of not much going on and, let's face it, lazyness.

Spent my Chrisirthday/Birthmas? money on a pair of ski boots. I like them a lot, but now I'm trying to find a pair of skiis to buy. the demo selection in town is really slim. Probably because there are no ski shops. There is a rental place in west laramie, where I tried a pair of Vokels that I kind of liked. Really lively and carved like a beast. But this particular pair was a little short for my height/weight. So really fun and quick in short turns, but pretty chattery at speed. Plus the bindings were set too low, so I kept loosing them on hard turns and in powder. Snow Range itself has a few demos, but they're all Elans, and the only non powder skiis they have are more intermediate level. And even comming off a 10 year break from skiing, I was outskiing them. I'd really like to try a pair of these Rossignol S86s (or anything else with the new reverse-camber/rocker/insert-marketing-term here hotness), But the nearest place I can try a pair is Ft. Collins, which is not near any ski areas. The next closest place is probably Steamboat, where I've been meaning to go to some weekend. But lift tickets are almost $100 a day. And I'm too flipp'n cheap for that.

I also finally broke down and got myself an account on the tweeter. Which you can look at over here.

I'm still refusing to get a myfaceonyourspacebook account. Screw that.

It took almost three months, but i finally finished watching The Shield. I really liked it. Of course, i was getting the DVDs from work, so my netflix account was pretty much dormant for that entire three months.

The Banff Mountain Film Festival was also in Laramie the last two days. The only things that really stick in my mind are a movie the first night about fly fishing on the Kamchatka peninsula that was more entertaining than a film about fly fishing has a right to be. If you get a chance to see Eastern Rises, do it. The second was last night's edit of Life Cycles. I still loves me some pretentious artsy-fartsy mountain bike films.

For about the 80th time, I have been planning a complete rewrite of this site. And this time i might even get it done. However, I'm planning on using the Zend Framework to handle a lot of the CRUD programming that usually bogs me down. Besides getting this thing a little more professionally done and maintainable. Unfortunatly, I'm still trying to teach myself the framework, so it's going to be a while. I thought I might get it done in time for this site's 10th anniversary, but I doubt I'm going to make that.

Also speaking of seldom updated sites, Hyperbole and a Half had one of it's all too infrequent updates. I laffed. If you haven't read it before, I would humbly suggest starting with The God of Cake and Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving. If you don't laugh, you might check your house for ninja doctors, because somebody removed your funny bone without you noticing.

Thanks for the link to the eclipse.  Happy Birthday!!!

for all the people like me that missed the lunar eclipse last night due to clouds and snow: http://vimeo.com/18046748

You're welcome.

SNOWING!!!!!  But the snow blower is working.

So here I am in denver again. This time I'm here for some training on a new interface for the alliance's digital repository. I'm also posting this from my phone, so it's going to be a little light on links to what I'm taking about. But the training is two days, so I get to stay at a hotel tonight on the university's dime.so I got that going for me. Which is nice. Right now I'm sitting in a coffee shop, because I got down here way too early. Now I wish I hadn't gotten up at three this morning so I could be on the road by four. Could have used the extra sleep. But better to be too early than late because of traffic I guess. Some how I've found myself in the middle of three books right now. I've been reading Treasure Island on my phone via the kindle app. It's not a great reading experiance, but it's good enough when I'm stuck somewhere with some time to kill. I'm also reading anti intellectualism in american life by richard hofstadter. Despite being written a little more than 40 years ago, I'm finding it uncomfortably familiar. It would be nice to think society has moved forward in that time, but perhaps not. Along some of the same lines, but far more poorly delivered, I'm reading grand theft jesus. On of the amazon reviews said the author is "the lefts answer to anne coulter". Could be. But if it's true, I can't figure out how either of them are best selling authors. The book is all bombast and terrible wordplay. He spends so much time going out of his way to make sure we notice how clever he is for conning up with such zingers as XL for ChristianityLight that he can't be bothered to make a better argument than ' these guys are bad, m'kay.' Totally unconvincing , and already at 50 pages in I'm just reading out out of spite because I can't let such a poor book defeat me. Anyway, it's at least late enough now that it wouldn't be unreasonable for me to show up at the office where the training is. So I think I'll pack this up.

lovin' the patty cake cats!!

To the relief of legless green pigs everywhere, I have a new obsession: Fruit Ninja.

For the first time since i moved here, I put my money where my mouth is, and got a season pass to the local hill. I went out Sunday morning, and enjoyed myself immensely. But I'm still sore. Guess my snowboarding muscles where a little out of shape.

Now I just need a new snowboard. hint hint.

On the way back to Laramie, I caught this neet-o picture of the backside of sheep mountain.

Please post so we know you are alive and well!

:)

Still snowing?!  Did you go see the Christmas tree? 

Most creative: recombobulation area: at Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport where passengers who "have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order."

—Word of the Year

 

How did I know? Have you met me? Even if the exact model Mi-24 didn't spring to mind, I know american military choppers are usually designated with <something>H-<some number>. Like UH, CH, AH, etc. Mi is AFAIK Mig, one of a couple russian aircraft manufacturers. And the Mi-24 is a pretty iconic russian helicopter.

So my old unused yahoo account did in fact get hacked into. I guess that explains the note from Dad a few weeks ago. I checked it out then, but I was still getting emails (almost all spam, which is why I stopped using the account in the first place), so I didn't know what to make of it. I assumed somebody had just spoofed the from line, which is unfortunately trivial to do. In retrospect I should have just changed the password at the time to be safe. But I didn't. Now I have. With a 20 character string of completely random gibberish. Which I will never remember. I would just have the account deleted, but then my flickr account goes away too. 

So instead, I tried out, and have just now bought, 1Password. It's not the first password safe type thing I've used. We have a different one at work for server passwords and such. But 1Password is by far the slickest I've used. They now have a MS Windows version, and plugins for all the web browsers I use, including a beta level plugin for Chrome, which was the most important to me. And it integrates pretty automatically with Dropbox, which I also use for syncing files among my various computers. So now I'm going through all the logins I can think of and changing my passwords to stronger, longer ones. Which I really should have done a long time ago. Live and learn and all that.

But, even with all that, it is a cool paint job!  Much easier to believe and hit the forward button than do investigation.    Besides, how did you mister smarty pants know all that trivia about helicopters?

it is indeed.

So I got this email from a relative that shall not be named (nobody here, tho) purporting to show an American Mi-24 helicopter in Afganistan sporting an eagle paint job. Even before I loaded the pictures, I was suspicious since I happen to know that the Mi-24 is a Russian helicopter perhaps better known as the Hind, thus fairly unlikely to be flown by American troops. And indeed, Snopes tells me it's not only not American, but also most likely not in Afganistan since it was painted for the Hungarian air force.

So the moral of the story is: fer chrissakes, do a little due diligence before wasting people's time with stupid chain emails.

 

Is this the view from you office?  I was trying to think of something smart *** to say, but this cold has my head all muddled.  It is 60 here again today - way too warm for November!  You will now find out if those shoes have traction and are warm.   Are you serious about the run in Springfield?

From Drop Box

I'm not ready for it to be winter quite yet.

bi-monthly update time.

Works been going pretty good lately. Since my department has been absorbed by UW IT, I've had a lot more time to do the programming they actually pay me to do. Which is nice. I've been messing around with Omeka themes for the Alliance. Depending on if they've installed my latest changes, you might be able to see an example of my handywork at the CDP's Heritage West site.

Also with the Alliance, we've been trying out a new digital archive presentation tool called islandora. islandora is basically a big Drupal module that front-ends Fedora (Not not to be confused with the RedHat spinoff Fedora). Which is actually a good thing. You can check out the UW's repository here: http://iuwyo.coalliance.org/fedora/repository/wyu:351/-/Wyoming+Map+Collection. So far, I haven't had to do much, but my Drupal hacking experience might come into play in the future. 

Speaking of drupal hacking, I've also re started work on the Index of the Annals of wyoming project that, as I like to say, got pushed so far off the back burner, it fell off the stove. Up untill now, the index was a 600 (!) page word document. With tons of data errors and duplicate entries. Right now, I'm working on getting the data itself cleaned up. Once the data is ok, I can stick it in a real database, and start working on the drupal module to make it all web accessable.

There are also a couple more internal and external projects that are still in the planning stages, so nothing to really show for those yet.

I think I've given up on running that marathon in Las Vegas in early December. At $150 for entry, it was unreasonably expensive. Plus, between vacations and getting sick on the weekends, and just general lack of enthusiasm for the project, my training has really fallen behind. I did an 18 mile run the first weekend of October, and nothing really since. I mean no long runs, I did 12 yesterday without any real problem. So I might be ok, but I found another marathon later in december I might try to do instead. It might not be as warm as Las Vegas, but it seems like it might be a little funkier. Who wouldn't want a horseshoe medal?

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?