The three of you out there that have been reading this rubbish for awhile will notice a rather dramatic new look. Which is to say, of course, an old recycled look blatantly stolen from a previous incarnation of my online journal, the short-lived LoggyLog. [note: the background scanlines are now vertical, see, so it's like a whole new design!]

There have been a few changes other than the look. Most notably, I am no longer powered by Blogger. While I love their product, their service has been too inconsistent to justify the inflexibility of their system. Their recent reduction in staff to 1 (one) has left them incapable of dealing with feature requests from the likes of me.

I have never found myself in a position where I need to post while I don't have access to FTP or SSH, which basically nullifies the necessity of the browser-app. On the other hand, I have frequently found myself attempting to post to blogger and not being able to connect to their server. Granted, posting in raw HTML will incur a slightly higher maintenance overhead, and my lack of fancy design probably makes my "infelxibility in design" argument moot. But until they're a bit more stable, I'm just gonna fly solo.

Let's see here... oh, the archive works now (see link below). And what else... oh, the title graphic is smaller. Yeah OK so that's about it. Oh and I ditched the "time of post" information and permalinks that I don't think are particularly useful.

So, all that having been said, on to a regular post:

Tomorrow morning I beginkicking ass and taking names on the research. Jean is coming over and she's going to teach me VisualBasic, GDPro, and the new Tecolote. Then I'm going to start coding models and writing tutorials like there's no tomorrow. If there are no problems, I could be done with my contracted deliverables in a couple weeks, leaving me free to work with Dimitri for the rest of my stay here.

I bought a trail map for the Pecos Wilderness out behind Santa Fe and I think I'm going to try to put together a two-day hike for when Broxton gets here. It's sort of a tour of 12,000'+ peaks in the Sangre De Christo mountains. We'll start at the Aspen Basin ski hill and walk up to Tesuque Peak (12,045') then along the ridge overlooking Santa Fe Lake to Deception Peak and Lake Peak (12,409'), then cut east over to Penitente Peak (12,249'). Turning north, we'll go down trail 251 to Nambe Pass (11,050') then up the switchbacks to the foot of the Santa Fe Baldy summit push. A short detour over to the shore of Lake Katherine (11,742'), and then back to the summit push and up.

The ~1 mile trail leading to the summit of Baldy goes up 1,400+ feet and is described on Peakware as "very steep." After having already hiked some 15 miles before the summit push, this should be really really grueling. But well worth it, from all accounts. Santa Fe Baldy (12,622') is one of the tallest peaks in New Mexico. It's much taller than anything nearby, giving a terrific view in all directions, including a nice look down at Lake Katherine.

Going back to the car via the Winsor trail and trail 254 gives a nice easy descent. Total trip length is about 30 miles, and I'd like to get it over with in two days. Not sure if this is wishful thinking or not. I could shave several miles off the trip by only going to Baldy and skipping the rest of the peaks. But they're all right there so close to each other, it seems like a waste to miss 'em.

I guess I'll have to wait and see what Mike is up for. And I'll probably need some more exotic gear for this one.