Circle Around the Rockies: Seeking Fresh Powder Edition

Mountain Collective? Check! Car? Check! Hotels? Check! Snowboarding gear? Check!

This is the second instalment of the yearly Spring Break Snowboarding series. Last year’s was about the West Coast, this year it was all in the Rockies. I went with my amazing friend Michael again, and we had an absolute blast!

The Mountain Collective, for those of you that joined this time around, is a loose group of ski resorts that all banded together to combat the evil empire, a.k.a. Vail Resorts (VR). VR owns a large number of places on the West Coast, including many of my favorites (like Heavenly and Kirkwood). Their passes are relatively cheap and suck up a lot of the snowboarding that could be going to the resorts in the Collective.

Firewire Unibrow Timbertek - The Review

It seems impossible that I’ve had the Unibrow for just two months! It’s grown on me so fast, it feels like we’ve been best buddies for a very long time. So here my impressions of my new BFF in the ocean.

First Impressions

I wrote about the Unibrow briefly when I mentioned Firewire Demo Days. They hold them frequently enough that I got a chance to form an opinion. Not a good one at first: the board is very narrow and it takes a while to get used to it. Because of the form factor, it tends to like some types of waves better than others. Since I couldn’t pick the waves on demo day, my experience with the Unibrow was so-so at best.

Legendary Creatures (all letters)

Legendary creatures for no reason<

Turning a Fixed Width Site to Variable Width Using Web Technology

I love my Y50. The 4k screen resolution gives me both a chance to see a lot more on a single page and much better and crisper text if I want to see it normal size. The only downside? Software that assumes pixel sizes.

It doesn’t really matter what I am looking at: anything that comes with predefined pixels turns into a microscopic smudge. It’s completely impossible to realize what the buttons do in the Gimp, for instance. Checkboxes are so small, it’s virtually impossible to tell whether they are checked or not.

The Nazi Wonder Weapon Revealed: Die Glocke

Research for the new novel is almost completed. There are going to be twists and turns that will make a helicopter spin, and I decided to keep with the strength of In the Mission: a novel about a deep mystery wrapped in a conundrum, where science parallels art which parallels the otherworldly.

Somewhere in the depth of the research (and it goes very deep), I found myself mired in a strange story. It was originally reported in the year 2000. Given that it was about something in the Nazi period, it seemed very odd we could still unearth something of fundamental importance 50 years after the fact.

Humans: a Sexual History and the New Moon Theory

There is an interesting principle in biology, named Haeckel’s Recapitulation Theory: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In simple terms, that means that you can read the whole evolutionary tree leading to a species just by looking at successive development stages of the fetus. We start looking like single-cell individuals, “evolve” into bunches of cells, eventually “turn” into fish, then lizards, then monkeys, etc.

It’s not as simple as that, and the principle/theory has been refuted/rejected. But the idea has wider applications than just in evolutionary biology. In general, I’d say, the notion is that the behavior of the (averaged) individual allows reconstruction of the group’s creation/formation/development.

Speedtesting Your ISP, Command Line Version

I currently pay an obscene $66 for 25 MBit/sec Internet. On top of that, I had to pay a mandatory $99 equipment fee for an enormous modem, and another $99 fee for mandatory installation.

Just as I was done with my first year promotional price and things “reverted” to the “regular” price of $66, I received a message. I had been underbilled, apparently, but I was lucky and they were not going to backcharge me. But from now on, I had to pay the “regular” price of $74.50.

Why I Gave Up On Facebook

You probably noticed if you follow me on Facebook: I’ve barely been on there in the past two years. I’ll log on, once in a while, mostly because I remember it’s someone’s birthday and I wish them well on the channel I know they use. But for myself, I am over it. Why?

There was a time when Facebook was cool. That was, of course, before I was on it. It’s when you had to have a .edu address to be on it, it was when college students from Ivy Leagues got an account and nobody else.

What Auxiliary Language Should You Learn and Why

As you may know, among the many languages I speak there is Esperanto. When the average American hears the name, the reaction is probably either Huh? for those that never heard about it, or the general notion of a failed project for those who have.

Also, in general, you’ll find that those that have an active opinion will say that nobody needs a made-up language as a form of communication any longer, since everybody speaks English. Those that do not speak English should just learn it!

Emergency Update

In case you were on here yesterday, for a brief period (a very long hour for me) the site was down. What happened? A confluence of things:

• The main hard drive filled up with an ever-expanding collection of source code
• I split said source code onto several machines, requiring a re-installation of the SCC software
• I ended up with repositories incompatible with the old version of the SCCS
• So I had to update the operating system
• Which updated everything, making my configuration files pretty much unusable

Here is the skinny.