BurningbirdTwo photos from the hike today. I have others and a hiking story, but I don’t have the writing itch tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
It was a tough hike, but beautiful. Limestone carvings and cliffs and ferns and lots and lots of boulders to climb over. Supposedly there are orchids around this area in the summer.
I’ve just returned from a hike that was harder than anticipated, though incredible for all of that. Unfortunately, when I turned on my computer to upload photos, I received several emails, all related to an email I had sent out earlier to Marc Canter and three other people.
An email where Canter completely discounted what I wrote in favor of someone who was ‘higher profile’ who had responded to it. An email that was forwarded on to several other people, and used to create a ‘backchannel email list’. An email that was ended with:
By the way, this is NOT for publication in your weblog. Or distribution outside of this tiny group.
I guess that within certain weblogging circles, and with certain webloggers, confidences are not respected. It’s my fault, though; I should have known better than to expect courtesty or confidentiality from Marc Canter, because all Marc Canter respects is Marc Canter.
What did surprise me was that no one else on this list took Marc to task, or even felt there was anything wrong with it. What the f**k is wrong with webloggers now?
The word ‘respect’ is being bandied about, primarily because of money and this whole ‘blogging for dollars’ crap. But respect is more than just money — it’s also how you treat people.
(By the way, if someone pays me to write about my hikes, that’s being paid to weblog; anything else is nothing more than product endorsement. We pride ourselves on our honesty, as compared to “Big Media”; yet in this first genuine test of blogging commercialization, we won’t even call an endorsement, an endorsement. )
I had a successful venture at the library last week and came home with several very good books. One is Birth of a Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom, which I found to be a very entertaining book and plan on writing more about later.
I also found a book on the Korean “comfort women”, women held as sex slaves by the Japanese in World War II. It’s titled Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaeves of the Japanese Military, and features nothing more than each woman’s account of her experiences. It’s a compelling, though oddly unemotional book — stark, and made more so by the photographs of the women included with each woman’s testimony.
A third book was The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw, the female swordfish captain featured in the movie The Perfect Storm. This is an interesting story about life on a swordfishing boat, but for some reason her writing just hasn’t grabbed me that much and I’m not sure I’ll finish the book.
The last book was a lucky find, One Hundred Nature Walks in the Missouri Ozarks. This book details several new hiking areas I wasn’t familiar with from my other books. And since today is the first nice day we’ve had in almost a week, I think I’ll take a break from this computer and my work on the commerce site and weblogging, and go for a walk. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find a photo or two.
This weekend I also spent time reformatting and re-installing Windows 2000 on my laptop. As I was digging out the old disks, I realized I had forgotten what I needed, it’s been so long since I did a reinstall. And the disk itself was quite old, from the last of my Developer Network subscription in early 2001.
I did remember, though, that I would have to add in several security patches from the Microsoft site after the OS was installed. Unfortunately, though, all I had was a modem connection. I had installed the accelerator software on my Mac, but not the Windows machine, and without it downloads were amazingly slow. Still, it’s just a matter of starting the load, keeping the connection going, and getting the job done.
After the install, I accessed Microsoft and the update page. The update service failed twice, as software to handle the automated update had to be installed; eventually it worked and I got a page of new software I would have to install. Close to 60M of software!
I started with the larger security service pack update, which was 25M. As I was downloading it, I noticed a message pop up. It said something about my system was using unprotected software and recommending that I click a button to update my machine. The first one I got I thought was part of the install process, and clicked okay. My machine started to get funky, and the next ones I got, I examined more closely and could see they weren’t part of the install. I had no idea where these messages were coming from, and couldn’t seem to stop them, so I closed out of each using the window control buttons.
When the machine finished the download and install of the service pack, I re-booted, but when Windows opened, first one of the laptops fans started and then the second one. Checking the processes, I could see some strange ones running uncontrollably, and I couldn’t kill or shut them down. It would seem that as I was using a very slow modem to download the software to protect my Windows 2000 installation, something had crawled in.
I was pretty peeved, as you can imagine. After spending all day downloading software, I would now have to start over again using the same slow modem and the same exposed machine. Damn Microsoft and its damn buggy software! Damn the modem, and all software, and hardware for that matter, that doesn’t work.
After fussing and fuming for about an hour, I went to bed with a really good book and just ignored all of the machines. The next morning, the first thing I did was to pull the modem card from the PC and re-install it’s wireless card. I then switched my Airport back on in my Mac, connected the accelerator-enabled modem in this machine, and turned on internet sharing for the modem connection. I also opened up a secure shell (SSH) to Burningbird, went to my raw logfile directory and did a ‘tail -f logfile’ to keep a running print out of the log file. Doing this would help keep the modem from being disconnected by the ISP.
From there it was a simple matter of re-installing the operating system, accessing the Microsoft site and installing the recommended security updates. It was still slow, but stable, with a connection that would last on the PC, even if I were to lose dial-up on the Mac. And which wouldn’t have to be reinitiated with each update reboot.
More than that, my Mac was keeping the connection protected so my vulnerable little PC would be left alone long enough to get the security updates it needed.
While this was happening, I read my excellent book some more, looking up from time to time at the smooth flow of data to my machine (it took all day to download the software), and thinking wasn’t it great when things worked.
It worked last week when I realized I had accidentally deleted an entire directory of photos and was able to download My File Recovery to help me recover them. However, before I went to download the entire OpenOffice installation for the PC today, at close to 50M, I also re-established my cable modem. Now, things that worked great are working even better.
The weather has been very dismal lately, but it broke a couple of times, enough to get out for some short walks. Thanksgiving day was one such day, and it was the type of weather I enjoy for walks: cool but not cold, snow on the ground, but not the walks. And not many people out, which suits me, as I haven’t been in the mood for lots of chattering about.
I followed the path into the forested area, enjoying the sun breaking through the clouds. As I walked I could hear crashes all around me as snow came falling out of the taller trees, heated by the new sun. When a fairly solid chunk hit in front of me, I quickly put my camera into its waterproof carrier bag, understanding now why I had the treed area to myself. Other than that, I wasn’t worried about getting hit by the snow–it was too light to do more than send cold trickles of water down my back.
I still managed to grab a few shots, including this one I rather like. More, I also tried out the new Photo Stitch software that comes with the Canon printer to create a semi-panoramic picture, which you can access here. It’s not a true panoramic, because I didn’t have the camera on a tripod to maintain the same height for all pictures, so the software had to do a lot of extrapolation; this results in some blur, but not enough to obscure the scene and show why it’s one of my favorite contemplative retreats. It’s more popular in the summer, but I like the winter view; quiet and gentle and somewhat timeless.
Later that day, I walked through the Botanical Gardens, checking out the Conservatory and the Climatron. Of course, the Climatron, with its warm, moist atmosphere, probably will be out for wanderings the rest of the winter — not unless I get my eyes operated on so I don’t need glasses. The Conservatory was pleasant, but most of the winter flowers are still in bud and won’t be out until about the time of the orchid show.
At the main center the Gardens had created a Christmas room filled with model trains. There were antique trains, and modern ones; a San Franciso trolly car, and even a steamboat. I grabbed a closeup of one of the scenes, and then a larger photo showing the detail in the room. The larger photo is a big file, so you might want to pass on it unless you like model trains.
Yesterday morning I went on a walk at Powder Valley to exercise my ankle, which had been getting stiff from the hikes on uneven ground. I saw one of the bucks, which are a rare sight, and this young man was a beauty — a thin rack, but with several smallish points.
I had passed a father with two little girls earlier and decided to walk back and mention about the buck, to tell the young ladies if they approach quietly, they might be able to see him. After a few feet, I hear this blood curdling scream, and there was one of the girls running through the forest chasing the deer. Another was hanging on one of the trees, pulling at the vines, tromping all over the growth at the side of the “please stay on the walk” conservation area.
I continued approaching the man, smiling and he smiled back. I then proceeded to tell him that this part of Powder has a thick covering of poison ivy in most spots, and even though you can’t see the leaves, the branches of the plant are still coated with the substance that can cause serious allergic reaction. The two young ladies stopped and looked at me, as the man thanked me for telling him this and then turned to his daughters and said, “Did you hear that? You want to be careful.”
(I am visualizing a scene ten years from now when both girls leave for the evening, both stoned out of their minds, ready for as much unprotected sex with strange men as they can get, and the man points to an ad on TV warning against drugs. Did you hear that? You want to be careful.)
Today, though, was not a good day for a walk, being wet in the extreme. When I returned home from errands, I noticed, though, an odd fluff falling down from the tree above. Looking up I saw a sharp legged hawk directly above me, pulling feathers off a finch that it was eating. It would pull a feather and then spit it out into the wind; another feather, another spit, creating a trail of feathers dancing in the breeze.
I ran inside and grabbed my D70 but the battery was dead and I had forgotten to charge both it and the spare. I then grabbed my trusty old 995 and managed to grab one photo before the bird grasped what was left of its prey and flew off. It’s over-exposed, but you can at least see the bird.
He’s a beauty, isn’t he? But how will it work for cat Friday?
