So they've repealed the 9/80 schedule at LANL as of August 30th. So I have three more three-day weekends including this one, and I plan to make the most of them. Nina and I are out the door right now to go up to Colorado and do some backpacking.

The plan is to hike up to Willow Lake just north of Great Sand Dunes National Park and make camp. In the morning, we're going to try to climb Kit Carson Mountain. This will be Nina's first 14er. Sunday, maybe we'll visit the sand dunes.

Extended Weekends 2 and 3 have not yet had their plans finalized, but I plan to make them extraordinary. Wish me luck.

We've had some death in the fishtank over the last couple of weeks. First to go was the fancy guppie, "No Spot." He was getting towards a year in age and that's about how long those little guys live, so we don't suspect foul play.

Then, two days ago, I found the large trumpet snail floating dead. I'm not sure how the snail lifecycle works... there were definitely dozens of baby trumpet snails at one point and every now and then I see one of them crawling around on the gravel, but for the most part all of the young snails seem to have disappeared. Perhaps they are building an amazing under-gravel colony that will rise up and take over the tank when the planets are aligned or something.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the current population of the tank consists of two Corydoras julii, one Otocinclus, and six three-stripe african glass catfish. This icky-looking brown hair-like algae is also doing quite well, growing all over the top of my java moss. I think the java ferns are also finally growing, though they seem to have budded new plants (including root systems) right off the top of their leaves (??). Weird.

Amazon at it again:

"Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, Book 6) [by Stephen King, et. al] was released today; We thought you'd be interested because you bought Chilton's Ford Ranger/Explorer/Mountaineer 1991-99 Repair Manual."

I have no explaination for this. But maybe when I go climb Kit Carson this weekend with Nina, I should bring my new suit just in case we run into one of these guys..

"My Life [by Bill Clinton] was released today; We thought you'd be interested because you bought Chilton's Ford Ranger/Explorer/Mountaineer 1991-99 Repair Manual."

When I saw the trailer for I, Robot a few months back, I thought it looked like a disaster. It looked like a blockbuster dumming-down of a good book by one of my favorite authors and I was worried.

In retrospect, having watched the movie last night, I think the people who made the trailer were very clever.

The trailer seems to suggest that the movie diverges from the themes of Asimov's robot novels and turns it into a SFX craptacular. But the bulk of the people who read the book and liked it are probably going to see the movie anyway, so there wasn't really any need to pitch the trailer to them. The trailer was made to entice the big-budget-blockbuster movie lover into coming. The trailer is indistinguishable from any other SFX-driven action/sci-fi movie trailer.

The beauty of it is that the movie is actually smart, sticks to the spirit of Asimov's robot universe, and having a dumb trailer allows them to not give away any of the secrets. I hate it when I go to see a suspense thriller and it turns out that the surprise ending was alluded to in the trailer. Arlington Road, anyone?

Yeah, so I went into the film expecting somewhat of a let-down. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film and I had no foreknowledge of the actual plot twists. Well done, 20th Century Fox.

So I bought this fancy electric toothbrush thing on the advice of my dentist. Sure, it cleans my teeth really well and costs a pretty penny, but what blows me away is the contactless recharger.

The recharging station has a little plastic post on it, and to recharge the toothbrush you just set it down on the post. Neither the post nor the hole in the base of the toothbrush have any conducting contacts. Apparently the system uses induction to deliver energy to the toothbrush to recharge the batteries.

Imagine how useful this technology could be for general power delivery to small devices. Say there was a surface on your desk with a small outline indicating that it was capable of inductive power delivery. Any suitable device could simply be placed on the desk and would come alive. No need for batteries, and because there are no exposed power contacts, the casing on the devices could be much better sealed. Possibly good for kitchen devices or industrial stuff where harsh environments are a problem?

Anyway, just a babble.

Robin and I did another one of our spur-of-the-moment Friday mountaineering trips again. Successfully ascended Wetterhorn Peak (14,015') in Colorado. Trip report is here. Photo gallery is here. That's #4 for fourteeners for me.

Yesterday we had a search up in the Jemez for a guy who, as far as I can tell, isn't there. Read all about it here.

So right on cue, the finch eggs in the carport have hatched! We now appear to have two healthy baby house finches. This comes exactly two weeks after the eggs were laid. Check out the photos.

So I re-did my highpointing statistics webpage in a fit of boredome while waiting for my user account at LANL to be reinstated. I added a couple of stats that are of some interest:

On my highpointing trips I have hiked over 243 miles with a net vertical gain of over 53,000 feet (over 10 vertical miles). That sounds impressive to me, until I look at Scott's webpage and see that he has hiked 1,423 miles and almost 300,000' of vertical gain. Oh well; he's been doing it for 10 more years than me.

In other Feats Of Strength news... I managed to misuse a broken security turnstile here at work in such a way that the bars came flying back at me and knocked me right in the face. I have a huge welt and bruise on the bridge of my nose and it hurts like crazy. I'm glad nobody saw that happen...

It's been a long weekend. Nina's mom showed up for a visit last Wednesday and is here until this Wednesday. My parents, sister, brother in law, and niece all showed up on Friday and left yesterday.

Apparently, I deal with the stress of entertaining so many guests at once by buying stuff. I bought the miter saw, two DVDs (Seconds and Lost in Translation), a new bird identification book, and a large heath bar blizzard from Dairy Queen. Yum.

Amber is a cute baby. Usually, I think think babies look like aliens. But she manages to be cute. And she didn't really cry at all - very even tempered. That's a plus. I put a picture of her here.

This is the 500th entry in my Moveable Type database. I never got around to moving all the old journal entries over, so there's a bunch of content that is missing... but as of today there are 500 entries in this particular journal. :)

So you may notice that I am at my computer and not, in fact, on top of some giant mountain as per my plan. Turns out my climbing partner got sick just before we left and the trip was scrubbed. So I'm spending my long holiday weekend relaxing at home.

The new bird cam is up and running, but it isn't uploading automatically still. I'm having some problems with the Hauppage framegrabber software. It seems to die randomly every now and then. I may swap it out for Webcam32 or something, which will also allow me to do automatic uploads to the webserver.

I did manage to get a good picture of the eggs in the nest.

Well, that was worthless...

I drove all the way down to the Manzano mountains last night, camped in my truck, got up at 5:00 this morning and got all my gear on... only to hike about 20m to the trailhead sign and see that the area was closed due to "extreme fire danger." Nevermind that the ground was soggy from recent rains... I decided to honor the forest service's request that no one use the trails and drove back home this morning.

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In good news, however, for some reason another house finch has made a nest in the carport. I rigged up the new IR camera I have for another round of BirdTV. And now I've got the Hauppage USB-Live video capture unit hooked up to it. Once I get the camera oriented correctly and make sure everything is working, I'll have a fully web-enabled BirdCam. Coming soon.

It's been a busy couple of weeks, and the coming month doesn't promise to let up much. Nina is just finishing up her Geology 101 class down at UNM, which means that after this week she won't have to drive down to Albuquerque and back every day. This should drastically improve her mood and therefore mine. Unfortunately, on account of her professor being a dingus, her final exam is this Saturday, July 3. Which puts it right in the middle of our four-day weekend.

This is a bummer, as we were planning on doing something special on this last holiday weekend before she goes off to Iceland and then to graduate school on August 9th. In order to salvage something out of the weekend, I'm going to go down and hike in the Manzano mountains south of Albuquerque tomorrow (and pick up two county highpoints while I'm there. When Nina gets back from her exam on Saturday afternoon, we're going to pack up the truck and drive to Colorado and climb some mountains there. We're tentatively looking at the Mt. Lincoln group and maybe Quandary Peak as a bonus on Sunday.

On Monday, my friend Luka from MIT will be stopping by as part of his across-the-USA driving tour. Wednesday, Nina's Mom shows up to visit. She will be followed two days later by my parents, sister, brother in law, and new niece. It's going to be a zoo.

So don't be surprised if you don't hear much from me for awhile.