aragirn: Summer Trip 2008 - Yellowstone National Park pictures

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aragirn: Summer Trip 2008 - Grand Teton National Park pictures

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 36 - Butte, MT

Unfortunately for my plans of making it to Glacier today, two articles I saw in the morning paper here changed my plans. First, the fireworks show for the Fourth of July is tonight and second, Barack Obama is going to be in Butte’s Fourth of July parade at 10am in the morning. So, plans changed, and I’ve got a tent pitched at Lowlands campground in Beaverhead - Deerlodge National Forest to crawl into after the fireworks show. My plans are to wake up at 7am and hit the road into town and clear the metal detectors to get a spot close along the route to shoot pictures from. I imagine the Secret Service will have a field day with my camera bag.

After we made that decision, we hit a couple sporting goods stores to find some hiking boots for Sarah, watched Hancock at the local cinema (loved the movie - Will Smith is definitely becoming one of my all-time favorite actors) and attempted to explore some museums around town. Sadly, it seems like most of the town had closed up shop a day early for the holiday weekend.

Rookwood Speakeasy Museum was closed, Myra Brothel Museum was closed and we couldn’t find the local art gallery. However, Charles Clark Chateau museum was open and we toured a turn of the 1900s private mansion turned museum. Cool place, octagonal rooms, library and ballroom included.

So… now, we’re sitting in a thunderstorm, two hours before the the fireworks show is scheduled to take place waiting for it to clear off and hear whether or not it will actually happen. And when I say thunderstorm… at its peak a few moments ago, I couldn’t see out the car windows.

Travel Distance: 75 miles around Butte, MT

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 35 - To Butte, MT via the Dairy Queen in Bozeman

Hit the road this morning from camp and made the trip to Old Faithful in Yellowstone (through road construction, where I met a nice older couple from West Virginia). From there, I decided to take a small detour through Bozeman, MT to get some ice cream (I should have stopped at the Cold Stone Creamery though) and continued on to Butte. Tonight, I’m spending the evening and likely into early morning holed up in a hotel room editing pictures. Nothing to exciting today really; check out flickr tomorrow for pictures.

Travel Distance: 251 miles

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metallikop: New Album Releases (Last.FM)

One of the biggest features missing for me from Last.FM has to be notification of new album releases.  I don’t browse the new release section at Harmony House Amazon.com and if I did I’d see the popular releases like Coldplay, Emmylou Harris, Duffy, or Lil Wayne and not what I actually listen to.  Last.FM is great for fiding events in your area but for some reason they can’t find albums you might be missing in your library.

Thankfully behlert has came up with a solution, Soundamus.  Mashing Amazon Web Services new releases with any artist you’ve listened to 5 or more times you’re presented with a webpage and RSS feed of new releases tailored to you’re musical interest.  Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a hack and would be a lot better if Last.FM did this themselves but this is a good start.

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 34 - Grand Teton National Park

Sunrise was not nearly as impressive this morning as it was yesterday or the day before, unfortunately, there was a low hanging cloud that diffused most of the light. I took a few shots anyway, then headed down to the previous morning’s spot to show it to Sarah. Apparently, she’d already been there 4 years ago or so with her family.

Back to camp for a nap (is anyone noticing a trend?) and we headed into the park (for what will be my last time, this trip at least) and decided to defy the predictions of thunderstorms and go on the hike I’d been planning on doing, through Cascade Canyon.

Now, to get to Cascade Canyon, there are a couple of options. You can take a boat across the lake for $5 each way, or you can hike a few miles from the Jenny Lake Visitor Center to the mouth of the canyon. Well, you can bet on which one we did. Thirteen miles of hiking later, we came to the mutual conclusion that 13 miles at a go was too much. My knees were killing me (I only made it with the aid of my trekking poles) and she has a wonderful assortment of blisters on her feet.

And that’s how we came to pitch a tent at 6:30 in the evening, ready to call it a day in what is apparently a primo mosquito breeding ground. A hasty dinner eaten inside the Jeep and now we’re simply reading to pass the time until it is dark enough to go to sleep (and hopefully the kids in the RV parked across the campground will stop screaming by then).

No sunrise in the morning for me (at least I hope not to be awake to see it) and tomorrow when we break camp (hopefully amid fewer mosquitos, we’re passing through the southwest portion of Yellowstone on our way to Glacier. It’ll be a short traveling day as my intent is to get a hotel room mid-afternoon and get to work on editing all the photos from Yellowstone and Grand Teton (there’s a ton).

Travel Distance: 78 miles and another 13 miles on foot

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 33 - Grand Teton National Park

I think the most humbling moment of my vacation occurred this morning. I suppose that’s what shooting the sunrise at the Tetons next to a guy who is going to expose an 8″ x 10″ sheet of Velvia will do. Frankly, I can’t imagine having the patience to shoot on a piece of film that costs $10. And that’s after you compose upside down and reversed. Eric (the photographer from Colorado that I met yesterday showed up for sunrise and brought his camera along, (and not his Holga this time). He took two shots the entire sunrise; I must have shot 50 and I’m certain another guy down our little line shot over 200 (for some reason he was using continuous (which doesn’t make sense unless he was bracketing).

I finished up the sunrise with a trip back north, towards my campsite, hoping to spot some animals to shoot along the way. Unfortunately, I only shot a couple of bison, and I have plenty of pictures of them. Got to my campsite and took a 2 hour nap (getting up for sunrise every morning is wearing on me.

After I “checked-out” of the campsite, I hit the road south, there were still a few places I wanted to go but hadn’t made it to yet. I made the drive up Signal Mountain and wasn’t terribly impressed with what I found; that’s probably because I don’t find the geography of the rest of the park nearly as exciting as the mountains themselves.

Back down the mountain I drove, heading towards Lupine Meadows which, to my disappoint, is really just a trailhead to a few lakes. But I hit the trails anyways and was rewarded with a very photogenic squirrel shelling a nut along with an elk herd. So all wasn’t lost on that trip.

Next stop was the airport to pick up Sarah, an friend of mine who is accompanying me on the next leg of my trip (I’ll be dropping her off on my way home). My timing was impeccable, I entered the terminal just as she was coming out of the ramp. We headed into Jackson in search of somewhere to buy a couple groceries and things, thankfully we were able to track down a K-mart in the phone book (no Walmart here apparently). Then off to a western wear store where I admired Stetson hats and belt buckles. (Watch out Scott, I’m going to attempt to find a comically large belt buckle so that I can outdo you next time we see each other. Hopefully it won’t be so large that I won’t be able to sit down.)

Since she was tired from her flight and I was tired simply from traveling, we pitched our tent on some Forest Service land outside of the park around 7:30pm. A little wandering, checking out the lake we were by and now it’s time to call it a night. There’s a sunrise in the morning to shoot.

Travel Distance: 110 miles

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 32 - Grand Teton National Park

Woke up at an ungodly hour this morning… 4:45am I believe in order to get to Jenny Lake to shoot the sunrise. I barely made it, guess I should have planned a bit better and paid more attention to how long it took me to go in. After sunrise there, I hit my secondary location, an old barn along Mormon Row, the area that a group of Mormon settlers established homesteads on. Unfortunately for me, there was a group of about 15 photographers there doing some sort of organized group shoot and they went in close to the barn for portraits just as I was setting up to use the entire barn as a photo element.

Oh well, I switched gears and got to work, by the time my new concept was executed, they’d moved on down the road to the next building and I shot my first idea. Time will tell which will come out better. I did a bit of tooling around, looking for moose, but finding only bison. Dropped by the Visitor’s Center again and watched their movie, dumped photos onto my external hard drive and finished the book I was reading. Nothing terribly exciting this morning.

This afternoon, I met another photographer (from Colorado) named Eric at a turnout down a side road. He’d been shooting the carcass of what I believe was a mule deer with the Tetons as a backdrop with his medium format camera (think big, heavy and the image you see is upside down and reversed). He was a pretty cool guy, and we parted ways only to run into each other at the next stop up the road. We ended up going on a bit of a hike to pass some time as the 2pm sun was too harsh for any really good photos here. He pointed out a good place for a morning photo and we’ll probably run into each other at sunrise.

By this point it was early evening, so I headed north to get a campsite for the night (I’ve been getting sore from sleeping in the Jeep) and set up camp, cooked some dinner and repacked the Jeep a bit more efficiently. I tooled around until sunset and then headed south, timing my morning drive and now I’m sitting in a parking lot waiting for the stars to come out so I can do some star trails with the Tetons as a background and hopefully have it pretty well reflected in the small lake I’ll be on the shore of. [Scratch that, the shoot is canceled for tonight due to some cloud cover that rolled in.]

Oh, and another lovely tidbit, I got some text messaging spam earlier tonight. Guess I get to call Alltel and complain so they won’t bill for receiving it. Talk about the stupidest thing ever - being billed to receive messages. It’s not like I can say, “I only want to be able to receive them from these people; those are the ones I’m willing to pay for.”

Travel Distance: 75 miles

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 31 - Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks

I slept in until the oh so glorious hour of 7am. Wait, what’s that? 7am? I must be getting up too early on a regular basis.

In keeping with a leisurely morning, sneaking into the Old Faithful Inn for a shower was in the cards, followed by a buffet breakfast (Hey, I ran out of pop tarts a few days ago and dried knock-off Cheerios were getting old.)

There were a couple places left in Yellowstone that I wanted to see, mainly because they were on the way to a couple waterfalls, and we all know how much I love taking photos of waterfalls. So, I started my morning by finding a couple of elk carcasses that were pretty well chewed up alongside the road to my first stop. Yeah, I have pictures, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the carcasses look… interesting. Sure, they were cool to see, but how do I translate that into a photograph? Perhaps I should have grabbed my 50mm f/1.8 lens and used a narrow depth of field to capture just parts of the carcass at a time; I’ll have to stop by and see if it’s still there on my way to Glacier.

Not a whole lot going on the rest of the day; geysers, mud pots, fumaroles, hot springs, canyons and waterfalls. There is one thing that stuck with me though. Almost everyone has probably seen the Discovery Channel’s (or maybe it’s one of the other “educational” channels’) show on how Yellowstone is a super-volcano that could blow up at any time and destroy the world as we know it. I’ve always thought, “What a bunch of bunk; no way it could happen, especially not without warning.” I’ve begun to take the concept a little more seriously since spending a few days in the park.

Now, hear me out before you call me loony. A good portion of Yellowstone is actually the caldera of a volcano (you know, the part at the top of the cone that the lava always spews from in the movies). Not only that, but it’s active. Seriously, it is. You can’t really appreciate that fact until you visit Yellowstone; when you’re walking along and all of a sudden you pass a hole in the ground which is venting steam and hissing like a punctured cylinder of propane. And that’s sitting next to a hole in the ground that’s spewing 4,000 gallons of steaming water a minute into one of the nearby rivers. Now, picture yourself in a field full of these types of features. It brings the scenario home, that’s for sure.

A number of the Yellowstone features were created when earthquakes struck the area. Geysers that had died came back to life, new mudpots formed, other features stopped erupting. What happens if an earthquake hits and causes the perfect storm of events that leads to an eruption? Features that currently vent pressure have their “plumbing” turned off. That pressure has to go somewhere.

Anyways, that was my big thought for the day. My afternoon wasn’t too exciting, some laundry, some shopping (I picked up a bottle of Moose Drool Beer as a souvenir). And this evening I headed back south to the Tetons in order to find my sunrise spot. Right now, I’m camped out in the back of my Jeep in an area I’m probably not supposed to be because I don’t want to pay $20 for a spot of land large enough to pitch my tent on; though I might tomorrow night just so I can shower.

Plans for tomorrow: sunrise shots, I’ve got two locations planned and a nike around Lake Jenny.

Travel Distance: 150 miles

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evarlast: Critically Analyze What You Read And Hear

Thanks to Jon Paul Davies for quoting the Pragmatic Programmer.

“Critically Analyse What You Read and Hear. Don’t be swayed by vendors, media hype, or dogma. Analyse information in terms of you and your project.”

-The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas

I’ve been living my life that way for so long I’ve given up even trying to be gracious about accepting someone’s words. I’m known to just flat out say “I don’t believe that.” When I hear something from someone which doesn’t match points at which I have arrived from previous critical analysis.

Jon Paul also has a really cool domain name. It makes me want to register jay-w.com for myself, but there is already a jayw.com and wouldn’t you know it??? This Jay Walters fella is a Software Developer too!

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 30 - Yellowstone National Park

Well, for the first time since the Badlands at the beginning of my trip I’ve managed to get sunburned. It was entirely my fault today, I went for a hike around 11am and forgot to put sunscreen on first. My arms and legs are a nice rosy shade of red that should fade within a couple days. At least it will keep me warm at night though. Gotta look at the bright side, eh?

I went for a sunrise stroll through the geysers that are near Old Faithful; something on the order of 4 miles or so of trails (though that number includes a good bit of ground I covered twice so I could get back to my car. I managed to get the perfect shot that was in my head when I set out this morning; sunlight streaming through the steam of a geyser silhouetting a tree. With that mission accomplished, I showered for the first time in 3 days. (Don’t worry, I’ve been taking what the army refers to as “field showers.” Think, Wet Naps.)

Looking at my map, I realized I wasn’t too far from Mystic Falls. So, I drove the couple miles to its trailhead at Biscuit Basin and followed the trail, heading for the overlook first. (Of course, my hike involved switchbacks and several hundred feet of elevation gain, but what else is new?) Talk about a waste of time and energy. The overlook is probably at least half a mile away from the falls, and it took me a couple minutes to even figure out where the falls were. Not my idea of an overlook.

So, I humped it back down the hill (bigger than most hills we have in Michigan) and made my way to the falls, where I could take some proper pictures. Of course, by this point, the sun wasn’t cooperating, but I’ve learned to take it as it comes.

When I was hiking through the geyser area this morning, I noticed a sign saying that Riverside Geyser was due to erupt in the early afternoon. I had no idea how big it would be, but the structure of the geyser was interesting and it’s location along the river nearly idyllic, so after grabbing a liter of water (something I forgot on my earlier hike) I walked the mile or so down the trail to the geyser to find a small crowd already formed.

While I waited the hour or so before the geyser actually erupted, I got to talking with another photographer there, a girl who works in a salmon fishery on a remote island in Alaska. (Have I ever mentioned before that almost everyone I meet knows someone who either teaches in Alaska or moved to Alaska.) Her mother was taking her on vacation around the lower 48 in hopes of convincing her to move back. Anyways, she gave me some pointers about places to visit in the park and I hope to check them out tomorrow. Needless to say, the geyser erupted, it was pretty and I have pictures.

Then came what I am convinced most people think I’m a nutter for doing. I pulled into a picnic area, read for half an hour and took a couple hour nap. (I can just see people coming by, seeing me asleep in the front seat of the Jeep and wondering why I’d come all this way just to nap in the early evening. Oh well, I’m willing to bet they’re not up at sunrise.) I’ve done stuff like this before, I love heading out into the woods with a book, that’s part of the reason why I hunt.

I finished the evening off with a trip to Kepler Cascades (a series of short waterfalls) and sunset at the Great Prismatic Spring, where I think I came out with some decent shots.

I also emptied another 4 gigabytes of photos onto my laptop today, bringing the total for Yellowstone to 7.5 gigs of photos. I think somewhere between here and Glacier I’m going to have to hole up in a hotel room as early as they’ll let me check in and spend a whole afternoon and night processing photos…

Travel Distance: ~30 miles, 10 of it on footri

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Hellion Prime: w00t! Birthday l00t!

My wife got me a new camera! I now have a Cannon Powershot S5 IS. 8MB, 12x optical zoom. I'm looking over the documentation now. It looks quite nifty.

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afreak: I want a refund for my music

I have a question for all IP holders who are demanding that we have our copyright law changed to reflect their wishes: will you refund me my money when the technology that contains their material becomes almost unusable?

A case in point: my parents’ cassette tapes. In their library, they have something along the lines of about 70-90 cassette tapes that realistically cannot be played anymore. If you walk into almost any electronics store, nobody in their right mind will be selling tape decks. You can certainly buy them used, but at that point, you’re running the risk of having a malfunction due to the nature of how a tape deck works.

Why I bring up cassettes is that I want to contrast it to what the music industry is adopting: that is the whole issue of digital rights management (DRM). In today’s digital music field, there are two common DRM products: Apple’s Fairplay and Microsoft’s PlaysForSure. Both of these products ensure that whoever has purchased the music is the only individual that can play it.

The problem I see with this is quite simple: what happens if Microsoft or Apple change the format or go out of business? These audio files are authenticated against services provided by the two companies, and if they go out of business, does this mean that my music collection no longer will play?

In my case, I am well ahead of that problem for one simple reason: all of my music is DRM-free because I have copied my music from compact discs that I have bought. Thanks to today’s copyright law, I am entitled to the right of copying material that I already own and even in the event that the label behind the disc’s release goes extinct, it will still mean that I can still play their music.

The new copyright law as proposed in Bill C-61 will make me a criminal for circumventing this tactic. In an essence, I will have to repurchase an album from the new IP holder if the former goes bankrupt. I will not be allowed to rip any CDs I buy and play them on my computer or iPod where the disc will not be in place. I will effectively be “locked in” into using whatever medium they’ve chosen and have no freedom in how I choose to listen to their product.

When CDs are no longer available, will I be able to ask these IP holders whether or not I can get a refund?

Digital Copyright Canada provides a good resource on what is happening with copyright in our country. Don’t let us become the 51st state.

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Hellion Prime: HP 2133

So HP sent us one of these machines for us to evaluate. Here's some pics behind the cut:




Overall, what did I think?

Well, the screen isnt bad. The resolution is very nice to work with given the size of the machine. The keyboard is also plesant to use. The trackpad, however, was was annoying to use. I found the location of the buttons to be very difficult to get used to. This particular model came with Vista Business installed, and seemed somewhat pokey. I didnt spend much time actually using the machine tho, so thats pretty subjective.

I would've  liked to have seen what HP did with the linux version just to compare the two.


EDIT: I just cracked it open. and its got a full size 2.5" SATA drive in it for storage. A 120GB 7200rpm Travelstar 7K200, even.

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metallikop: Internet Drama: ATVPatch.com — Screwing Devs

I hate getting involved in Internet Drama.  I also hate it when startup-like companies take advantage of their employees and spin the truth to publicly defame employees they’ve previously taken advantage of.

I previously praised ATVPatch for concocting an easy solution for someone who does not have a Mac to mod an AppleTV to mount samba shares, play a majority of CODECs, and add in a few other wizz-bang features. In a nutshell, ATVPatch is a .iso file you copy to a USB thumbdrive and plug in to your AppleTV.  After rebooting, your ATV boots from the USB thumbdrive installs ssh-server, CODECs, and a bunch of applications.  It’s a very easy process, though probably illegal.

The core of the USB thumb drive has kernel extensions from a desktop/laptop Mac coupled with some shell scripts to push everything to the ATV device.  The not so illegal way to create a patchstick would be to take these extensions off a Mac that you own, and cut your own bootable USB thumb drive.  All the work done to get a patchstick created was done free of charge by a number of developers.  Unfortunately, companies like ATVPatch are taking advantage of these developers by charging for the hard work they’ve done and selling a ready to go solution by including the portion that you need to have a Mac for.

I know that most of the people that read my blog find it through planet.arslinux.com and mostly close friends and family (and spammers) are the rest of my regular visitors.  Being that Planet Ars generates a good majority of this traffic I’ll placate to Open Source types.  Imagine that all the hard work put in to Banshee by some very talented developers was taken by a company repackaged, reskinned, and sold for $20.  Outraged yet?  If not, I imagine you will be shortly.

From my understanding ATV4Windows, which became ATVPatch, was founded by CiscoTM and developer h3lbro.  They initially charged $15 for their patchstick and later upped the price to $20 for new subscribers.  As a subscriber you get a 35MB .img file which enables you to mod your AppleTV with very little effort.  H3lbro, who was the only developer on the project, put in a number of hours to create the ATVPatch-stick and package it up to make it easy for anyone to use.

The drama apparently started a few weeks ago when CiscoTM, founder, refused to pay h3lbro a fair sum for the amount of work he’d done.  H3lbro stated on his press release, “a simple calculation reveals that for our online members alone, the gross sum of $21,700 has been generated through the work of myself and CiscoTM.” H3lbro claims to have only made an initial payment of $250 and after much back and forth received a second payment in the amount of $750 and CiscoTM kept the rest.  According to h3lbro, he brought up his concerns to CiscoTM and was subsequently banned from ATVPatch.com.

I have no affiliation with either CiscoTM or h3lbro, but I would truly like to make this visable to anyone contemplating on using ATVPatch to mod their AppleTV.  I don’t have CiscoTMs side of the story other then a few poorly written posts on his private forum.  I have dealt with CiscoTM personally in the past and was more then a little taken aback at his rudeness.  Please, Digg this, or any other blogger who is taking about this.  I’m not going for page views (I don’t advertise on this site), I just want people to be made aware of the situation.

UPDATE: I spoke with CiscoTM via IM and it seems like 75% of what h3lbro said was incorrect.  Without playing Mr. Moderator it’s totally likely that everything I said above is incorrect as well.  I don’t know what’s going on with the situation.  I stand firm on my belief that little is being done to accomidate upstream developers and people that put hard work in patchstick.  It sounds like it all comes down to money and “what was said”.  Let this be a lesson kids, if you’re going to start a project with someone with the potential of making money… get something signed up front.  Whether h3lbro was a coding monster on the project or it was split 50/50 I can’t say.

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Hellion Prime: Birthday!

Happy Birthday to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

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stonetable: I am…

…blogging. I’ve been lax on posting updates and commentary, so this is my make-up post.

…tired. Work has been absolutely crazy lately. Long days, longer nights. I’m really looking forward to the days where I can delegate much more of the work. I never thought I’d look forward to taking more of a management role but in this case it means sane hours.

…writing. My serious writing push started last spring and really gained momentum following the James Gunn Workshop last year. This year I’m on track with writing one new story a month, keeping the finished stories in circulation, and I’m gaining confidence in my abilities each and every day.

…editing. Boy, does it suck. No, really. I tend to write the first draft of a story and let it sit for a few weeks, working on another story while the previous one airs out. Inevitably, when I return to editing I find things I could have done better. It’s a clear sign that I’m improving but still frustrating.

…living. The divorce is still pending and money is tighter than Ritchie Riches money clip. It’s good to know I haven’t lost the taste for Ramen noodles.

…organized. We’ve done a smashing job of cleaning house and rearranging furniture. I keep meaning to take and post pictures.

…happy. We’re doing what’s important right now, and that’s enjoying each others company and enjoying life. No matter what frustrations life throws at us, we keep each other balanced and focused.

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aragirn: Summer 2008 Trip: Day 29 - Yellowstone National Park

I made it out to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River this morning for some sunrise photos. Sadly, the sky was pretty cloudy, so I only had patchy light to shoot by. Regardless, I’ve got some shots and we’ll see how well they pan out.

I followed up my sunrise photos with a trip to the lower falls of the Yellowstone River, down a short little trail called, “Uncle Tom’s Trail.” Well, it was short in a horizontal direction. Since it descended 3/4 of the way into a canyon over 300 feet deep, the vertical ascent coming out was something other than easy. It was one of the most impressive waterfalls I’ve been to though. Shoshone Falls in Idaho was prettier, but a large part of that was due to the intricacy of Shoshone; the falls on the Yellowstone River flow through relatively small openings, while Shoshone is made up of several large falls going over a fairly large cliff.

About the time I got back to the car, it started to rain again (it actually rained off and on earlier in the morning as well,which I waited out by doing a bit of reading). Once it let up, the sun came out for a bit and I headed south on the loop road hoping to spot some wildlife. My first stop (for some mallard ducks) came up empty and left me with a pair of muddy pants. So, I headed back up the road a little ways and was rewarded with a heron who wanted to pose for me.

After schlepping my gear back to the car, I headed a bit further south to the Mud Volcano area, where instead of thermal vents and geysers, the soil and acidity of the gases have turned what in other areas of the park are founts of water into boiling pits of mud. Kind of cool, very smelly and not particularly photogenic, but I got some shots in anyways and we’ll see what turns out.

I headed a bit further south, found a nice turnout and took a rather satisfying 2.5 hour nap parked by the side of the road (I found that if I shuffle things around, I can actually shove enough stuff out of the way in the back to pick up the rear passenger seat and recline the driver’s seat). I woke up around 3 in the afternoon and after making a lunch of Ritz crackers and cereal bars, I paid a visit to Fisherman’s Bridge.

At one point, Fisherman’s Bridge was a very popular fishing spot until the Park Service found out that the overfishing was destroying the Cutthroat Trout supply of the river. My civil engineering friends will be interested to know that the bridge is made of wood with a layer of asphalt covering it. (I know because hunks of the asphalt are missing in some places.) I was quite excited to find that there was a whole… flock (is that the right word) of pelicans on the water along with a trail running off the side of the bridge that let me walk a ways along the water to get close enough for some decent pictures. Coming back to the bridge, I took a side trip down to the Visitor’s Center at Fisherman’s Bridge and was actually semi-impressed with this one.

(To be honest, I’ve been rather unimpressed with the Visitor Centers that I’ve seen in Yellowstone, Old Faithful especially. Coming from other parks, there just isn’t that much information in the Visitor Centers; in fact, the one at Grand Teton dwarfs Yellowstone by a wide margin).

I hoofed it back to the car, found out how the showers and laundry facilities work (I’m a clutz, I got chocolate on one pair of pants while traveling and I’d muddied up another pair earlier in the day - probably take care of that Saturday) and popped into the general store there. Now I know where they keep all the memorabilia at Yellowstone; unlike other parks, most of the stuff isn’t in the Visitor Center store, but in the General Store instead.

The rest of my night hasn’t been too interesting really. I finished Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, started another book and took a few short hikes looking for wildlife. Not much found, but I did manage a shot of a couple goslings that I think I can work with.

And now, a little bit of thinking I did earlier, which means you can save yourself a few minutes by not reading:

It struck me earlier, as I was attempting to fall asleep at a pullout along the road that loops through Yellowstone that the park road is significantly more busy than any road I’ve lived on before (excluding the highway by my parents house when the road is blocked a little ways up for the Fourth of July parade). It seems odd to get in your car, drive for hours and hours, to sit in a traffic jam hundreds (if not thousands of miles) from home so that you can at least due it among trees and geysers that explode every once in a while.

Aren’t these parks supposed to be about solitude and communing with nature? Instead, people hop in the cars, or their RVs (Why does anyone need a private bus?) and drive around a 130 mile stretch of road with all the other people from the city, leaving their cars only when they need to take a picture that they can’t hang out the car window and get. Not to mention that when you do actually go on a hike, it’s from an established trailhead with a giant parking lot with 100 of your closest friends you’ll never see again as soon as you step back into your car. I suppose that with 1,000 miles of backcountry trails, if you’re willing to walk a few miles away from the road you can escape a lot of that though. I don’t think many of the city slickers are really into that kind of “adventure.” With camping only allowed in backcountry sites though, you’re likely to have company for the night.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just really missing the Keweenaw, where you can go out for a day and never see another soul quite easily. Sure, the ground doesn’t explode in founts of water there, and there’s no three or four hundred foot canyon running through the middle of it, but by god, you experience nature and you leave having gained an appreciation of it. Hopefully Alaska can provide me with some of that feeling. At this point though, I’m seriously considering coming back through the U.P. so I can spend a little more time in the Keweenaw, I’ll just need someone willing to put me up.

Ah well, I’ve got to get to bed, sunrise comes early and I have a little ways left to drive tonight so I can get to my morning shoot location.

P.S. Does anyone know if you really have to refrigerate jelly after you open it? I bought a squeeze thing of Smucker’s at the General store for sandwiches and will be disappointed if I have to eat 38 sandwiches tomorrow morning before it warms up just so I don’t waste it.

Travel Distance: 53 miles

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stonetable: Meme: Things I’ve done

• Post 3 things you’ve done in your lifetime that you don’t think anybody else on your friends list has done.
• See if anybody else responds with “I’ve done that.” If they have, you need to add another! (2.b., 2.c., etc…)
• Have your friends cut & paste this into their journal to see what unique things they’ve done in their life.

I have:

1. Been on the set of Saturday Night Live during rehearsals

When I was a consultant, I worked at NBC headquarters in New York City. One afternoon, shortly before New Years Eve 2000, one of the NBC staff took me down to the set and gave me a brief tour while Blink 182 was practicing.

2. Worked in a meat processing plant

One of the odd jobs I worked while doing temp work. I showed up that evening for the “interview” and was promptly ushered to the killing floor to clean/scrub the equipment, walls, ceilings and floor. I only worked the one night but it took me six months to eat meat again.

3. Rode in an airplane with the Chicago White Sox

When I was seven or so, my brother was in the hospital at the University of Minnesota for a kidney transplant (his first, when he was two). They needed to get me up there quickly and someone managed to get me on a flight with the Chicago White Sox. I sat across the isle from Carlton Fisk, my favorite White Sox player of all time.

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stonetable: Superpowers

Former writers group buddy (before he escaped to the land of 10,000 lakes) and all around nice guy, David Schwartz, released his first book earlier in the month.

“Superpowers: A Novel” (David J. Schwartz)

I remember when I first heard him describe the book in group one night. Five college friends wake up one morning to discover they each have a superpower. Superheroes in a world without a supervillain. The story follows them through the discovery of and adjustment to their newfound abilities and explores the consequences of their actions.

I didn’t have access to comic books growing up but in the last year I’ve really started getting caught up on graphic novels. I’m far from a comic book expert but I don’t see this isn’t just a rehashing of every other superhero story. There are some surprising twists and turns throughout the story, particularly at the end.

I haven’t been the most voracious of novel readers lately but I found myself looking forward to the end of the day so I could sit down and read more of it. I finished it up late last night and the ending left me both sad and satisfied. It was a fun, entertaining read, well-worth the price of admission.

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