I’ve heard of April showers bringing May flowers, but what do April snows bring? On Friday, I awoke to a white world with about an inch of snow covering everything. It was kind of a shock considering only a week before, there were promising signs of Spring. Of course, after the snow, the temperatures are back up and the weekend’s forecast is quite pleasant.
In case you weren’t aware, Geocaching is one of my hobbies turned obsession that fills my life with joy. Geocaching is a game in which people hide containers and post the coordinates on the web for others to enter into a GPS and go out and find. The game began in May of 2000. On May 2, the US Government declassified signals from the GPS satellites making them available to the public. This increased the accuracy of commercial GPS receivers from around 100m down to 10m. The next day, Dave Ulmer hid a stash in the woods outside of Portland,…
Last night was full of bad-assery. Yeah, that’s right, it was so bad-ass that I made up a word to describe it. After a cold spell, temperatures quickly rose into the 80’s yesterday making for a hot and somewhat muggy day. The conditions were ripe for evening thunderstorms. As I arrived home, I heard reports on the radio that there were some severe storms just west of Orofino. But looking around, all I saw was sunshine and blue skies. The storms were passing to the south of us. As I was washing my car, dark clouds crept in over the…
While the east coast has contended with an earthquake and a hurricane, we have been enduring our summer heat wave, temperatures in excess of 90 degrees. It rarely gets to 95 out here, but when it does, it’s brutal. Of course, when it’s in the mid-90’s up on the Palouse, it’s over 100 down in Lewiston. Currently, our weather station reads 98 outside and 92 inside. We don’t have air conditioning. There’s really no need for it. While it’s in the 90’s now, at night, it will cool off below 70, sometimes getting downright chilly. We wake up in the…
I went to Florida, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. Taking a break from the usual trips into the mountains, I went to Florida last weekend to celebrate the marriage of one of my good buddies. The wedding was in Pensacola Beach, with the actual ceremony on the beach outside of town. I’ve been to Florida before, but not the Gulf coast, and especially not the panhandle, and so when I got there, I was quite surprised at just how built up it was. When I think of Florida, it’s usually the Tampa/Orlando area, which I try to avoid, or the…
For the past seven years, I have been living with slow, unreliable internet. In 2004-2005, the Weis Ecology Center was on dial-up service. Camp McDowell in Alabama was also on dial-up service, shared on a wireless network. If you can remember far enough back when dial-up was the forefront of home internet technology, you might also remember how long it took for webpages to load and how it would randomly lose connection, and then the busy signals trying to reconnect. In 2006, those problems had not improved. Ferry Beach had a more reliable connection, though it was still slow. I’m…
Holy crap it’s Thanksgiving already! Well I’ve been thinking about what to make this post about. There are several great options: The real story of thanksgiving and how it became what we perceive it to be today, the start of the commercial materialism season, the nature of human behavior, and so on. But I think rather than the normal cynical post about our need to celebrate lies and propaganda, I’ll just fill you in with a brief update of what I’ve been up to. For starters, it’s been a busy semester. The past month, I’ve been breeding the 3rd generation…
