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12,000 Feet
Sebastian and I are going camping this week, and we plan to spend the night at a lake 12,000 feet above sea level. There are four Fourteeners nearby and we'll probably try hiking to one. Hope dad doesnt get altitude sickness!
The area we're going to is south of Breckenridge, near the town of Fairplay--also known as South Park. Lots of old, abandoned mining operations around; Sebastian is really stoked to check out some ghost towns. While we're there we're going to drive over Mosquito pass at over 13,000 feet ASL. Hope there's no snow!
Should be interesting...I'm looking forward to taking some sweet pics!
Cheese Macaroni Sandwich
Here's Sebass creating his own new foods...the cleanup after this was a serious chore!
Holy Cow
I'm sitting on the couch posting this from my iPhone. Amazing. One strange thing--I had to disabe TinyMCE to enter text info this field...wonder if Tiny has some dependency on a keyboard? Anyways, iPhone rocks!
From the Archives
Finally digitized some video from waaaay back, circa 1991 or so. Here's some footage from a trip to Punta San Carlos in Baja Mexico. This place was always a great place to road trip to and I hope to get back there some day. (Unfortunately this spot looks like it's been "colonized" and now includes a windsurfing shop and...a restaurant?)
Hiking
We went hiking this past weeken--Seb's first time climbing the hills behind the lake. He powered up and was full of excitement as we neared the top. He wanted me to carry him on the way down--oh my knees! Here's a shot that captures his enthusiasm:
Negative Space
Here's a cool picture of Sebastian emerging out of a pool of negative space. The kid's got a quick tongue; in other words, I missed the shot!
Boulder Fire
What do you get when you mix 50 degree weather, 80MPH winds, a power transformer, dry grass, and no snow? FLASH FIRE.
Thought you might enjoy this picture of huge flames out Sebastian's window! One of Ellyn's friends that lives about 2 miles north of us was evacuated (mandatory).
If push comes to shove I'll be out front tonight wearing my denim/fleece with shotgun and water hose.
Details here:
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/jan/07/i-70-closed-over-vail-pass-a...
We're all good; if conditions change Im grabbing the Beemer, then wife/kid, then computer....(hmmm...dog?) in that order ;)
New Website
I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my site to Drupal6. It's been a while in coming, but all my favorite modules are now Druapl6 ready.
The redesigned site has a bunch of new features and can probably be considered over-the-top as far as jQuery goes. But so what: jQuery and Drupal are totally fun to play with! Most of the jQuery enhancements happen in the Photography section. One neat trick is to pass Views arguments to your javascript using the technique I found here.
Speaking of Views, passing arguments in Views2 is totally different than doing so in Views1. It took me a while to figure it all out but the new methods are way more powerful and flexible. Recently the guys maintaining the Image module added Views2 integration which allows you to create relationships between nodes and images you've uploaed. Nice work.
A web redesign story wouldn't be complete without a few comments about how brutal it is to develop sites for IE6 and IE7, so here's mine:
...just go ahead and DIE you worthless piles of steaming bile!
Bye for now.
BoulderSkatePark.com
Since moving to Boulder I've been hanging around the local skate park. I finally got up the guts to get my old board out of the closet and give it a go. I haven't skated since college, and only skated on half-pipes, and getting used to skating in a park was pretty crazy. I remember the first day I skated: it was a cold fall day and I was bundled up in my parka. I fakied back and forth in the small kiddie bowl to get the hang of it and took a few good bails. But i was hooked again!
I decided to try my hand at taking some pics at the park--there's lots of good skaters here--and quickly got amped to start taking pics of the locals I met every time I went to the park. Everyone I've met has been really cool and there's a good vibe at the park, a big difference from what I remember in college. Me and a buddy from work decided that we'd skate the early morning session on weekends, and I typically skate Saturday and Sunday around 7AM.
I was interested in finding other pics of skaters at this park on the net and was surprised to find that the boulderskatepark.com domain was available, so I quickly decided I'd register it and build a site to feature all the pictures I've been taking. I've still got lots of work to do but you can check it out at http://www.boulderskatepark.com. I plan to add comments, a blog, and perhaps a few other goodies. Most pressing: I need to get the site looking like something I'd be proud of!
Anyways, here's a picture of a local ripper at the Boulder Skate Park:
LaCrosse WS2308 Weather Station
For Christmas last year my wife bought me a LaCrosse 2308 weather station complete with wind and rain sensors. I mounted the remote temperature gauge outside and connected the station to my Mac Pro with a USB to serial adapter.
Over the course of the past few months I've tried various weather station software packages including WeatherTracker and LWC. Unfortunately development on WeatherTracker seems to have halted, and LWC didn't meet my needs. Both are cool packages though. While I was experimenting with WeatherTracker I helped the developer of GaugeSoftware get his package compatible with PHP4 and PHP5.
Instead of using a compiled software application to log my weather data I decided to build my own data logger. Unfortunately LaCrosse doesn't publish any information about their device, so writing a method to query data direct from the station was impossible (for me). After much research I stumbled upon a perl library (available via CPAN) that acts as an interface for the USB serial driver.
Eventually I wrote a little perl script to query the device and submit the data to the database. I also wrote a LaunchDaemon plist file that fires off the perl script every hour during the day. With data logging to a MySQL db running locally I then wrote a little web application to query and post the data. You can see current weather data here. I also plot the historical weather data using a PHP library called jpgraph.
For kicks, I modified a script available for PBX In A Flash that speaks the current weather conditions to anyone that calls. Hows that for geekery?
Next, I'm going to improve this application by adding a "real time" method that will query the device every 15 minutes and log this data to the database.
Linked In
BoulderSkatePark.com
Check out more action photos at BoulderSkatePark.com.
Random Flickr
