Spokane

Just got back from Spokane, where we visited my sister for her birthday. We’ve never really visited Spokane before, but it was a great trip, and a wonderful city. We had a really good time, and Hilly gave a good tour. Saturday morning we did the Peace Rally downtown, and there are some pictures in the Gallery.

Second Week Blues

Every term starts off with a flurry of people who haven’t read the instructions, or didn’t take their caps-lock off, or can’t connect from work. Its somewhat invigorating to talk to that many people that quickly.

The second week slows way down, and you start to get calls from the truely hopeless, ingorant, and mean people. This term, the second week was busy. We’re having students take the WebCT calls and such, but I think the volume was higher. Not sure why yet. But I’m exhausted. Oh, and the entire network is down because a router crashed, though its been acting up all day. Sadly, no one cares when its not your fault.

Ansel @ 100

Today Scott, Sarah, Chandra, Michelle and I went to the Ansel Adams @ 100 exhibit at the World Forestry Center. There were 50 pieces on display, and two in particular that have been imprinted in my mind for years. I can remember writing an essay on the boulders piece in high school photography. Seeing it full size and in person is much nicer. Granite really is beautiful.

Just outside the Ansel gallery was a picture of Theodore Roosevelt & John Muir, and Teddy with Gifford Pinchot. These names were all fixtures in my Environmental Ethics class. All the while Muir & Pinchot (etc…) were battling, Adams captured the escense of these places that most American’s can only experience through his pictures. To his credit, these pictures are almost enough.

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” – John Muir

outage

Sorry for the outage. I was playing a game that crashes after every level, and every time I restart I get a new IP address, and I forgot to re-map the ports at my router. I promise I did it every other time.

Joe & Lindsay

Joe and Lindsay were kind enough to drive down to Portland and see us while they’re back home. It was great to see them and hear about life out east. They spoke of how self-absorbed people on the east coast were, and feel like yelling “be happy!” It would be rough to be surrounded by fearful drones.

Joe, Scott and I played a round of disc golf at Dabney St. Park. It was very nice, though muddy. I left my discs at home, so I played 9 holes with Scott’s putter, then used a discarded “chauncy shit disc” someone hadn’t wanted to keep. It helped but not much.

Solaris upgrade

Today I went to work at 6AM so we could upgrade our Spot server to Solaris 8, move it to a different server room, and add a 330GB storage array. Its gone fairly well so far, but we’re having trouble moving the WebCT partition to its own RAID5 unit. Now I want to go home, but can’t until i make sure WebCT works again.

In other news, I may finally be able to install Solaris for x86 onto an old PC at work.

Year in Music

Here’s my year in Music:

  • Busta Rhymes: Genesis – “My vernacular is spectacular”
  • Doc Watson: Misc – “There’s a dark and a stormy side of life; there’s a bright and a sunny side too”
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers: By The Way – “I’m a notion, in your bedroom, make you feel, make you want to reassume.”
  • John Hartford: Morning Bugle – I can’t think of any words because Michelle is listening to freakin’ George Michael. Who got her that CD, anyway?
  • Bud Powell: The Genius of Bud Powell – um, there aren’t any words.

More Memory, Christmas Pictures

Two major updates: Pictures and memory.

Using a gift return, I was able to bring my server back up to 448MB of RAM. Everything is running better again, especially iPhoto. It only crashed once, but remembered all the photos. Which brings me to the second part:

Christmas pictures have been uploaded. Two galleries; Christmas 2002 and Doug and Barley. Click on the Gallery link above or left to view them. It was a wonderful trip home.

Sore legs

Two days after skiing for the first time in two years, my legs hardly function. I have the most trouble going down stairs, sitting down, etc. It was a blast though. Hilly and I skied a half-day at White Pass, which was windy, but the snow was nice and the lines were short.

We were going to meet with several friends, but didn’t run in to them until the 2nd to last run. Low visibility and such. Also, I couldn’t get the shoelace into one of my crappy boots, so i only had one shoelace. It was fun though. It was also relieving to not suck. I could ski just as well as I did two years ago, but without the endurance. Hopefully I’ll do more this week.