Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 15
San Gorgonio Mountain
My last day of work this summer was August 14th, and I planned to drive home the following day. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t hiked the last Saint, San Gorgonio Mountain. This is the highest mountain in Southern California and I certainly couldn’t leave without bagging it. So, I packed everything from my summer accommodations the night of the 14th and woke up at 3am on the 15th to do my hike. I had been unable to get a permit for my desired trail, Vivian Creek, so I instead had one for the longer South Fork trail. This trail is about 11 miles long (each way) but has the nice feature that the top section can be done as a loop so I didn’t have to retrace my steps the whole way. I got on the trail at about 6:00 and, hiking quickly, gained the summit at about by 11:00 traveling up the Dollar Lake fork of the trail.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 14
More Pictures from the Beach
Here I have included a picture from a late July sunset on the beach. A few days later, I went up to Lower Trestles with my friend Kevin to check out the big waves that were the result of a nice southern swell.
Gmail: Please Bold the Hidden Labels Button when there are Unread Messages
I love Gmail. It does everything I could possibly want an email client (web or desktop) to do. All of my non-junk email accounts are Gmail or are forwarded to Gmail accounts. That said, occasionally something occurs to me that would make my Gmail experience a little bit better. Sometimes these crop up as Labs features, which I think is great, and is part of why I enjoy using Gmail so much.
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Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 13
The City and Experiments with HDR
I was in San Diego to watch Harry Potter last night (terrible, by the way) and I took the opportunity to check out downtown and Coronado. I’ve included a couple of pictures I took from Harbor Island.
Then today I spent more time taking pictures on the beach. I’ve been trying out some HDR techniques; you can see the results below.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 12
Beach, Surfing, and a New Camera
For the past couple days I’ve been heading down to the beach to take pictures of the sunset with my new Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I’ve really been having fun with this camera, and I’m learning a lot (especially how to estimate settings—I’ve been trying to force myself to use full manual controls for most of my pictures, and my eyeballing skills have much improved). I also got the chance to try surfing this evening, but I didn’t get any pictures of that.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 11
Baldy, Part II
I intended to climb San Gorgonio this past weekend, but couldn’t because my intended trail was closed due to “bear issues” (direct quote from the ranger). I ended up hiking Baldy again, this time with my friend Kevin from work. We went up the same way as I went last time, but we were both pretty tired and ended up going down via the ski area (and one helpful lift ride) to hitch a ride back to our car. The weather was unpleasantly hot, and is making me rethink my plans to do more hiking this summer. It was also crowded; Baldy’s proximity to millions of people makes it a very popular mountain. I’ve only included a few pictures because they were kind of uninspiring after Mount Rainier.
First Thoughts on Scala
Over the past week or so I’ve been looking into the Scala programming language. If you aren’t familiar with it, Scala is one of a group of new-ish languages including Groovy, Clojure, and Nice (as well as new implementations of preexisting languages like Jython, JRuby, and Rhino) that run on the JVM (either interpreted or compiled to Java bytecode). Over perhaps the past decade the JVM has been increasingly seen as an attractive target platform for language development for several reasons:
- Implementation in Java instead of C
- Features like garbage collection, portability, and a huge standard library come for free
- Languages benefit from advances and optimizations in the JVM
(This is part of a trend pointed out as Prediction #4 in a list of 10 predictions about software Steve Yegge made about 5 years ago.) In fact, targeting a virtual machine has almost become the only way to implement new, fancy languages with reasonable performance, portability, and implementation time.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 10
Burroughs Mountain, Mount Rainier National Park
For my second (and last) whole day in Seattle, I went hiking with four other friends. We went to Mount Rainier National Park, and hiked the three peaks of Burroughs Mountain, directly adjacent to Mount Rainier itself. It was a fun hike, with lots of snow left from the winter and unbelievable views of Rainier. The weather was also wonderful; it was warm the whole day, but with lots of very interesting clouds that made for great photography opportunities. I also got to introduce my friends to the joys of glissading; the trail to the third peak of Burroughs Mountain was entirely on snowpack, so coming down was fast and fun.
I took more than 400 pictures during the 8-mile hike, the majority of which were profiles of Mount Rainier itself. I’ve tried to pick out the best ones, but I had a hard time limiting myself.