Following the Pineapple Express to Mammoth with a Mountain Collective Pass

What a tragically bad season to get a Mountain Collective Pass! We’ve barely had any precipitation at all in California, and the more South you go, the drier it gets. Snow pack was below 33% of normal, which means most mountains would only allow on-piste skiing, and that’s tragically bad for crowd control.

The Mountain Collective Pass, if you haven’t heard, is the attempt of the non-Vail resorts to band together. Vail owns many of the top ski areas in North America, and they offer a season pass that allows you to ski at all of them. The other ones had nothing similar to offer, and have been coasting on monopolistic revenue for way too long: the snow aficionado could only get a pass to, say, Mammoth or Whistler, and then buy day passes at all the resorts for which a season pass wouldn’t be cost-effective.

2014-02-08 Mammoth

A tumblr-like Gallery in Joomla?

I guess a lot of people have noticed the presentation of galleries on tumblr, the image blogging platform, and liked it. I certainly loved it so much that I looked back at the more traditional gallery I use, JoomGallery, and wished it were a little fancier in its presentation.

A little scouting expedition into the depth of the Internet showed that there were many, many extensions available for other platforms, but nothing for Joomla.

2013

Movies (No letters missing)

Elysium (2013)

I was curious about this movie, an allegory of the current state of mankind and of health care. Not curious enough to break my long-standing ban on movie theaters, but enough to actually pay-per-view on Amazon.

My conclusion: the problems with which the movie concerns itself are real, but the movie doesn’t work. It is too slow, too long, and the plot has severe theatrical deficiencies.

Let’s start with a plot summary. It is some time in the 22nd century. Earth is an ugly, overpopulated, diseased planet. So much so that the rich moved to an orbiting station called Elysium where they can pursue a life of quiet boredom, or cocktail parties and giant mansions.

Living With the Puck: StraightTalk Unimax U240C Reviewed

Results in Hilo:
  Ping: 128ms
  Download: 2.27 Mb/s
  Upload: 0.51 Mb/s
           San Diego:
  Ping: 79ms
  Download: 1.35 Mb/s
  Upload: 0.79 Mb/s

My annual pilgrimage to Hilo used to be fueled by a Verizon 4G MiFi. But it made really no sense to have a $50 a month plan that I’d use only in emergencies and when I was on the islands. So I gave that up and have been looking for a replacement.

2013-12-08 Hilo

L'America: The 411 on Thanksgiving

With the holiday behind us, I got my usual load of questions about Thanksgiving. What is it, why is it such a big deal, and what does it look like?

To give you an idea of what it feels like to an outsider, I’ll tell you the story of my first Thanksgiving after moving to America. There was one before that, but it was a coincidental Thanksgiving while vacationing in Hawaii, so that doesn’t really count.

Fixing KSnapshot Quirks - and Programming the Linux Shell in the Process

KSnapshot is the best of programs, and KSnapshot is the worst of programs.

First of all, KSnapshot is a terribly nifty utility that takes screenshots of the current screen. It’s very flexible and allows you to grab the whole screen, a single window on the screen, an area of a window, a random rectangle on the screen, or even some weird shape that you draw on the screen. It’s got tons of opportunities for you to record what’s going on.