I purposely avoided posting on this, I assume most of you have been following it for a while now. God knows there have been about 100 articles in the last week alone, ranging from speculation on valuation to a list of who is going to get rich (other than Sergey Brin and Larry Page). I just mention it here now because, well, I have to. Anyway, I guess it's official now, we return you to your regular rambling.
Kudos to the San Francisco Giants for setting up Wi-Fi in their stadium. I think it makes perfect sense that they are the ones to lead this, given their location and their major sponsor and their market. I hope the Padres follow soon, I would love to be able to get stats, scores and other useful information while I'm at the game. Remember those small video consoles they placed in some of the outfield seats at Qualcomm Stadium for the World Series to let fans see video, purchase merchandise, see stats? This would be 100x better.
I finally got enough time to sit down and scan the slides I took and write a bit about the trip to Zion. In a word...amazing. The park is absolutely gorgeous and it was a very fun and relaxing weekend.
The trip started out on Friday, April 16th. I chose to drive, since Zion is only a couple hours past Vegas, although it was about as far as I think I would be willing to drive, and next time I go I will most likely fly and rent a car from McCarran airport in Vegas. We left shortly before 11:00 a.m. on Friday and arrived around 7:00 p.m. local time, losing an hour to the time zone change. Sunset is currently at around 8 p.m. in Zion so I had an hour to set up camp and get settled in, which was plenty of time.
Saturday morning I got up approximately an hour before sunrise (sunrise was at 7 a.m.) and took some pictures of the hills around the Watchman campground area, which is where we camped. Next we headed out and grabbed a shuttle to the northernmost part of Zion Canyon. This is the 5th year of the shuttle service, from what we were told the place would get incredibly packed during the warmer months of the year, so crowded that they set up a shuttle service that runs from April through October. I have to say, they have their shit together. The shuttles run approximately every 10 minutes and a round-trip from the Visitor's Center out to the Temple of Sinawava, which is the farthest stop, and back to the Visitor's Center is about 90 minutes. We took the shuttle to the Temple and hiked down the Riverside Walk, which ultimately ends up at the entrance to The Narrows. The Narrows is a very narrow passageway through the canyon that has anywhere from a couple inches to several feet of water. We basically stopped here, since it was the end of the trail and walking any further would involve getting fairly soaked.
Now, when I say "trail", I use the term rather loosely. Zion attracts roughly 2.5 million visitors every year and so they have built the park up fairly well, most of the shuttle stops have bathrooms and serve as trailheads for at least a couple trails. Riverside Walk is also paved all the way up until the entrance to The Narrows. That gives new meaning to the term "roughing it", wouldn't you say? Anyway, I made up for all that by carrying 30 lbs. of camera gear with me.
Before I go any further, I should talk about the history of the park a little. Zion is on the edge of the Colorado Plateau and is part of the Grand Staircase, a series of cliffs stretching from Bryce Canyon down to the Grand Canyon. Zion is part of the middle of this staircase - the top layer of rock at Zion is the bottom layer at Bryce, and the bottom layer of rock at Zion is the top layer at the Grand Canyon.
275 million years ago Zion was a relatively flat basin near sea level. There are several factors that have contributed to making Zion what it is today - sedimentation, lithification, uplift, erosion and volcanic activity, to name a few. The majority of the cliffs at Zion are primarily Navajo sandstone, with some Kayenta sandstone at the lower levels and Moenave sandstone just below that, visible in the lower elevations of the park. You'll see a lot of red in the pictures I am posting, and that is due to the iron oxides in the Navajo layer. The lowest elevation of Zion is currently about 4,000 feet and the highest peak in the park is approximately 9,000 feet.
Of course, probably the major contributor to Zion's topographical changes is the Virgin River, which is said to move approximately 5,000 tons of rock every day as it cuts through the park and makes its way down into Nevada.
Okay, back to the trip. As mentioned before, there are several trails throughout Zion Canyon, ranging from very flat, easy trails to very strenuous, steep hikes. Being a bit out of shape and carrying a heavy pack, I pretty much stuck to the easy trails. Over the two days we hiked, we covered all four of the easy trails and did one of the moderate ones. Riverside Walk was the first trail we hiked on Saturday. About two-thirds of the way in I stopped and took this picture looking north along the trail.
Coming back out of the Riverside Walk trail we returned to the Temple of Sinawava. Here, there are two large rocks appropriately named The Pulpit and The Altar.
The next stop south of the Temple is Big Bend. Big Bend is a nice viewpoint, you can see several peaks and canyons from this location, including Angels Landing, The Organ, Observation Point, Weeping Rock, Cable Mountain and The Great White Throne. Here is a picture of Angels Landing, looking up from Big Bend.
Angels Landing is one of the most strenuous trails, it is 5 miles roundtrip but ascends almost 1500 feet. In the narrowest parts the trail is only 34 inches wide, with 900 and 1500 foot drops on either side. Definitely not for acrophobics. Needless to say, I did not do this hike. We could actually see some people walking at the top of this cliff from below.
Later in the day we headed towards the Court of the Patriarchs viewpoint area. From there you can see the Three Patriarchs, three large peaks named after Abraham, Esau and Jacob (l. to r., in that order). Storm clouds started to roll in around that time.
From there we headed towars the Middle Emerald Pools trail, the one trail of moderate difficulty that we did take. Unfortunately, all of the pictures I took of the pools sucked, so I don't have any to share. I did, however, want to share one picture I took along the trail of what I believe is a cottonwood tree. Take a look at the brilliant green color of this tree. It isn't often that I stop in my tracks to take a picture of a tree, but when I saw this one along the Lower Emerald Pools trail, I just had to shoot it. Keep in mind I never digitally alter any images you see here, the only photo editing I do is cropping images to make them fit or to remove stuff I don't want in the picture. Unfortunately, I am losing a lot of detail and color by the time I have this image scanned and saved to JPG, but ask me to show you the slide some day, it'll blow you away.
Well, that was pretty much it for Saturday. As I said earlier, a storm rolled in and it rained that night. Actually, it almost snowed on us, the temperatures were probably in the high 30s at our camp site elevation. The bonus for me was that when I rolled out of the tent Sunday morning at around 8:30 a.m. (no way in hell was I going to get up early that day) I saw the storm had lightly dusted the nearby mountains with some snow, as far down as just a few hundred feet above the camp site. Here is a picture of one of the peaks along the Towers of the Virgin.
Here is a wide-angle shot of the Towers of the Virgin, taken from behind the Zion Museum. I made this photo a little larger so you can see the detail.
We went back to the Riverside Walk trail, I was going to try to get a picture of some snails, believe it or not. There is a particular type of snail that only lives near The Narrows. Unfortunately, they are very hard to see since they are about the size of a matchstick head. I didn't have luck finding any, so we left. Shortly after that the sky started to clear up and after a couple hours the sky was mostly clear with a few patchy clouds. The clear skies along with the right light towards the mid-afternoon yielded some of the best shots I got during that whole weekend, see if you agree. Here is a shot of Mt. Spry on the left, and The East Temple behind it on the right.
These mountains are visible along the road that goes east from Canyon Junction. Continuing east on this road will take you to The Great Arch, which you can see in the following picture.
The road goes through the Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel, which is about a mile long and will take you to east Zion. There are some very beautiful rock formations and colors to see along this road, such as the following.
Of course, no drive out to the eastern side of Zion would be complete without a stop at Checkerboard Mesa. From the following picture you should be able to readily identify the markings that gave it its name.
And finally, what blog entry with pictures would be complete without some flowers (right, Andy?). Here is a picture of a pretty amazing plant, the Slickrock Paintbrush. This plant grows almost exclusively in crevices, where rain water collects. If you go up two pictures, to the picture just above Checkerboard Mesa, this plant was photographed on the left side of that picture, about two-thirds of the way up that rock. Obviously you can't see it in that picture, since it is just a speck, but that gives you an idea of the harsh conditions where this plant thrives.
Well, there it is.
Trying to market your photos is a real pain in the ass, I've been carefully picking out the better pictures from my trip to Zion National Park, putting together all of my notes for each one, inserting all that information into a database, etc. And I still have yet to digitize them. But here's a teaser for you, this is a picture looking up at Observation Point from Big Bend.
Two recent incidents caught my attention, most of you are probably familiar with one or both, but I just thought I'd mention them again here because they kind of stuck out in my mind.
The first incident was the death of Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan on Thursday. Quite a story, turning down a 3-year contract with the Arizona Cardinals so that he could join the Army Rangers and fight for his country. What impressed me the most was that he declined all media coverage. In an era where it seems most athletes can't get enough headlines, he just wanted to go about his job quietly, doing what he thought was right. If you want to read more, go to ESPN or some other major news site, I didn't bother posting a link since this story is well-covered.
The second, and also fairly well-covered, story is the firing of Tami Silicio, a photographer on private contract who last week took pictures of flag-draped coffins being loaded onto a military transport. The Pentagon's reaction to the photo is what led to the firing, but also had the unintended side effect of suddenly making the story (and the photo) of huge interest to several other newspapers. Oops, I guess the Bush administration didn't learn anything from the Richard Clarke incident about how to handle unfavorable situations.
The application of high-tech in the world of sports continues to grow in new and interesting ways. Wired has an article on how the San Jose Sharks use a combination of wi-fi, DVR, and tablet PCs to deliver instant video to the coaches.
Digital Photography Review has just posted reviews of four new digital cameras. It appears that 8 megapixels is going to become the standard soon in the "prosumer" market.
A few weeks ago I posted about Gmail, Google's new webmail service offering 1 GB of storage. Since then, several organizations have expressed concerns regarding privacy, as Google plans to scan emails for the purpose of providing customized ad placement. It is amazing how much attention this issue is getting. Are people really that ignorant about how much of their information is already being used in much worse ways than what Google is doing with it? Remember the Superbowl incident with Janet Jackson and the announcement from TiVo a couple days later about how it was the most replayed event in TiVo history? At least Google is telling us about what they are doing up front. I think this issue is getting blown way out of proportion.
But don't take my word for it. Tim O'Reilly has an excellent discussion on why the fuss needs to end.
I just got back from Utah a couple hours ago. Zion National Park is amazing, it was a great trip. I took some pictures, but quite a bit less than I thought I would, only three rolls or so, for several reasons. Mostly, it was my first time there so I wanted to see as much of the park as possible. That meant a lot of walking around, I think we walked more than 10 miles over the course of the two days we had for exploring. Also, set-up and tear-down time for each shot was time consuming. The main part of the park is essentially a long canyon, and not much daylight hits it, especially towards the northern part, and also most of the shots I took required huge depth of field, so I had to use a tripod for nearly every shot.
Anyway, I should get the slides back tomorrow. Sometime tomorrow night I will try to scan a few and put them up.
I went to Petco Park on Thursday night to see the Padres host the Dodgers. Most of you know I'm from Orange County and was a Dodger and Angel fan as a kid (yes, you can be a fan of both teams since they are in different leagues, I realize that is a strange concept down here). This was my first time at the new downtown ballpark and I have to say I was pleased overall with the experience. Well, except for the parking, which was extremely painful. Some of the lots closer to the park were charging $30/vehicle. I ended up parking on the corner of F and 11th streets and paid $15, and then walked the six blocks or so to the ballpark.
I meant to take quite a few pictures of the park and the surrounding areas, however, traffic was absolutely horrible coming down the 15 from Escondido and it took me almost 2 hours to get downtown, which left me with little time for taking pictures. Here is a shot of the new scoreboard.
It was a pretty exciting game. The matchup was Brian Lawrence vs. Hideo Nomo. The Padres got out to an early lead, Loretta and Nevin (go Titans!) in the #2 and #4 spots hit solo home runs in the bottom of the first and added a run in the bottom of the 2nd with an RBI single. Nomo was looking pretty shaky. Looks like he's put on some weight, also.
Nomo would go on to get the win, thanks to a hefty dose of Dodger offense, something you couldn't say last season. The final was 7-5. I got a treat at the end when Eric Gagne came out to close at the bottom of the 8th after the Padres had pulled to within 2 and the save situation was on. This guy is just scary, came out of the bullpen and was throwing 97-98 mph heaters. Got the 3rd out of the 8th easily and then later finished up the 9th. There were quite a few other notable plays, one was an attempted tag from 3rd by Paul Loduca who was gunned down by Brian Giles from fairly deep in right field. A great game overall, it was nice to get out to the ballpark again.
The seats were great, I went with a friend and ex-coworker Nick Piazza, who has purchased season tickets for the last 7 seasons or so. In all that time, he has missed 3 games...this guy is hardcore. The nice thing is, of course, that he has some pretty good seats, 8th row field level just beyond 3rd base. Here is the view sitting down.
Let's see, what else...oh yeah, THE FOOD! How can I talk about a ballpark without mentioning the food! Well, I didn't get much time to check out all the food areas. Although there were a couple things I liked right away, such as the multiple hot dog and nacho stands that are spread out around the park. You can get in line for a Friar Frank behind 30 other people, or you can go to the hot dog cart and get a hot dog in less than 2 minutes. I bought a hot dog and a coke, devoured the dog while in line for nachos, and still made it back to my seat in less than five minutes. I didn't get a chance to try out the beers, but there seemed to be quite a selection by looking at the people sitting around me.
Oh, and I almost forgot...we got a surprise visitor in the 5th inning. At the top of the 5th, I noticed quite a few people standing up and looking over at the next section over on my right, which would be the section immediately beyond the Dodger dugout, behind the press photographers. I looked over to see who it was and got pretty excited about who had just arrived. Unfortunately, I noticed this gentleman just as he had almost reached the aisle where his seat was, so by the time I grabbed my camera he was just about in his seat. It is pretty hard to tell who it is from the pictures, only one is in focus, but rather than spoil it for you, I figured I'd leave it to you, my astute readers, to try to figure out who it is. A couple of you I know (Rudy? Tom?) should be able to figure it out pretty easily. Give it your best shot. If you need a hint, I'll post one in the comment area if no one correctly guesses within a couple days. :)
Next month, the 'at' sign (@) will officially become part of the Morse code, the first change in over half a century. Apparently the need to exchange email addresses by amateur radio enthusiasts is the primary reason for this addition.
Although clearly labeled as being in the beta stage, Amazon's search tool has gone live. Several sites have related articles, such as CNet and John Battelle's blog. Of course, if you go to the Amazon site and do a web search you're still using Google, but we'll have to see how long before it is replaced.
I can see it now. A new headline at The Onion. Something like, "Chinese Man Takes Onion Seriously". Pretty funny, eh? I can hear a few of you laughing already. The article would go on, in typical satirical style, to talk about about how a man in China mistakenly took an Onion article for real and reported about it on their evening news. Doubled over yet? Sides hurting from laughter? Here's the kicker. It actually happened. Amazing, isn't it? Some of this stuff just writes itself.
This Sunday, April 18th, is the last day of the 11th annual "Butterflies & Orchids" display at the Wild Animal Park. The butterflies are fearless, they'll land right on top of your head or on your shoulder. One guy I saw had three butterflies on him. It's a pretty neat event to see and great for kids, too. Here are just two of the many varieties to see there:
If butterflies aren't your thing, there are lots of other things to see at the Wild Animal Park. Such as...
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...and even the occasional hummingbird.
And if even THAT is not your thing, I think even my friend Andy would approve of this.
More and more people are filing their taxes electronically, not just professional tax preparers but also home users who choose to file their own returns. I've been using TurboTax for the Web the past two years and have been very happy with it. This year my taxes were a bit more complicated than usual, with mortgage interest to write off and a month of consulting work that I did, not to mention three W-2 forms, yet my refund was direct-deposited into my bank account in six business days from the date I filed it. Of course, being the good consumer that I am, I had spent it all by that time.
Yup, yet another techie term for you to learn, if you haven't learned it already. Moblogging is short for mobile weblogging. Even Google doesn't know what this one is yet, it will ask "did you mean mudlogging?" I don't even want to know what mudlogging is. So what exactly is mobile weblogging, you ask? It means publishing to a blog from a mobile device. And can you guess what kind of device is one of the more popular ones for moblogging? You guessed it, the one device that I detest more than any other, and being a geek there are few devices I dislike - the camera phone. So, now we get to see crappy pictures to accompany the boring content on most weblogs. Great. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of being able to publish blog entries from virtually anywhere using a mobile device, I just don't need to see blurry, poorly composed, out of focus pictures all over the place.
Which reminds me...while I love digital photography and am amazed at how far it has progressed in the last few years, it has also created a bunch of wannabe photogs who don't know the difference between an f-stop and a doorstop. Consumer digital cameras are great, and most people use them for exactly what they were designed to do...take great shapshots and publish or distribute them quickly. And then there are people like mikemo. Some of you may recall a link I posted to the World Wide Media Exchange site a while back. I was initially very excited about this project. For those that are unfamiliar with it, it lets people upload digital images with GPS coordinates. Well, this mikemo guy uploaded literally thousands of crappy images he took with his digital camera. I had this image in my mind of a guy driving down the freeway with stacks of memory cards on his dashboard and his finger holding the shutter button down. He did absolutely no editing of his work at all to try to filter out bad pictures. I quickly lost interest in the project because any time I wanted to find a picture from a particular area there would be dozens of mikemo pictures that I had to suffer through. So many great ideas have been killed by one or two idiots.
So, here is my advice to you, if you are a moblogger or photoblogger or just take lots of pictures. And this applies to digital and film shooters. Edit your work...ruthlessly (and by "edit" I don't mean "use Photoshop", I mean "filter", or "screen", or "throw away the bad ones"). People don't want to see 50 pictures of your dog taken from the same angle. Pick the best one or two and post those. Even the pros claim to average 3-4 good shots from each 36-exposure roll, and they know a lot more about taking good pictures than you or I. A book I read recently from a well-published professional photographer had an entire section on this topic. It's good practice, you'll become a better shooter and your visitors will be more likely to come to your site often.
The Register is reporting that a start-up company is testing a Wi-Fi chip that can deliver up to 50 Mbps by using multiple channels in parallel. The popularity of Wi-Fi is undoubtedly helping to create technological innovations in this market, it should be pretty exciting to watch.
I wouldn't call myself a supporter of the RIAA, but if you're a regular reader of my blog you are probably familiar with where I stand on the issue of music file-swapping. I'm glad to see people are finally getting educated about the whole issue. Just because it is easy and cheap to do and everyone is doing it doesn't make it legal. Besides, I just think that people should get paid for contributing valuable services or entertainment. I still remember when the San Diego symphony went bankrupt a few years back. We can't afford a decent symphony, yet the city can pick up the tab on all un-sold seats for football games for a losing team? That's pretty fucked up, and I'm a fairly avid sports fan.
Anyway, I'm rambling, but you've come to expect that from me. Back to the subject of music...I've purchased several songs online recently. I really like this model, I can purchase individual songs at roughly $0.99 or complete albums for about one-half to two-thirds of what I would pay for the latest CDs from Amazon. According to The Register, some record labels think that is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the price to somewhere between $1.25 and $2.99 per song. Here's where I personally have to draw the line. It seems to me the RIAA has been fairly successful at educating people on what the consequences of music file-swapping are and they are building momentum in their favor, with recent decreases in file swapping and increases in online music sales. Now, they're just going to shoot themselves in the foot by increasing the cost of legal song downloads. I don't understand.
*edit*
Here is a link to a similar article posted on Wired.
I was talking to my friend Kral the other day and during our conversation I remembered I have a neat regular expression that is useful for stripping malicious HTML tags, so I thought I would share it. I first came across the need for such a thing while writing an RSS aggregator. Dive Into Mark has an article that discusses why you would need this capability. I initially did a Google search (isn't that the default behavior these days?) but everything I found was far from satisfactory, it would either do a dumb strip of all tags, including stuff like changing "5 < 6 and 3 > 2" to "5 2", or didn't do a case-insensitive search. Anyway, here is my regex:
Here's a regex you can use with Perl:
As you can see, this regular expression is a lot more flexible. First, it is case-insensitive, and since HTML is case-insensitive then this is a requirement. Next, it removes only the tags that I have specified, so my users can put links and other safe HTML in their comments, and it is very easy to add/remove tags. Finally, it removes start and end tags while preserving any plain text within the tags.
I haven't done any rigorous testing so there may be ways to improve on it still. Regular expressions, by the way, are a great feature of the .NET Framework, I am glad that MS decided to include them as part of the framework. I've only been using them for a couple years now but when I first ran into them my immediate thought was "How did I live without this before?" Of course, like anything else, they can be abused and/or misused, but when applied judiciously they can save you a lot of work and give you a tremendous amount of flexibility. For example, you could do pattern matching to extract relevant driver license information from magnetic stripe data (Tom, are you reading this?). If you discover a new format, just create and add that regular expression to your list and you're all set. You could even put your regular expression list in a separate text file and push that down to your users and not need a new build.
You've been asking, so here it is. A recent picture of the refrigerator. It's looking a lot better these days, I'm getting a little help keeping it stocked. :)
Rudy in particular should appreciate the bottom shelf. Hmmm, looks like that milk in the door is turning kinda green, guess I should get rid of that.
Canon has announced a new black body for the Digital Rebel. I know a few people with this camera, and I gotta say, the "silver" body doesn't quite do it for me, I think they should have made it black all along. Don't get too excited yet, though, it is unknown whether the new black body will make it to Europe and North America, although I imagine you could get it through the gray market.
Well, I'm back on a Linux host. You might call it indecisiveness. I call it laziness. I started out pretty well, cranking out all my hand-written blogging code in just a few days. But it's tough to duplicate the functionality and features that I can get for free from Movable Type, features like TrackBack and support for Atom. Besides, I don't really have the time to be working on it very much.
A few things to mention...first, I'll be retiring the CD Peep Show game. It had reached a fairly dormant state over the last month or so, I think only two or three people had logged in during that time. Also, I just got the blog software up and running so I have yet to tweak the layout and colors, but just be aware that the site will take on a different look over the next couple of days.
In 8 days I'll be driving up to Zion National Park in Utah for 2 days, 3 nights. I'll be taking lots of pictures, I recently purchased a couple more lenses so I have a very good basic setup right now - a 24mm 2.8 wide angle, a 35-70mm 2.8 zoom, and an 80-200mm 2.8 telephoto zoom. The 35-70 zoom is replacing my 28-80mm 3.5-5.6 zoom. If you know of anyone interested in this lens, I am selling it along with a 56mm polarizing filter. It's a Nikon F-mount lens. Otherwise, I plan to put it on eBay for about $40. The filter alone cost me $32, the lens originally cost me about $120, as I recall.