Personal

Sometimes I post things that are kind of personal, so I make sure to put them in this category. If there is a password on any of these posts, then the password will be my date of birth, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you know me reasonably well, then you should know that (or just ask me and I’ll tell you).

Hiking Half Dome in Yosemite National Park

Over the weekend, Robin and I traveled with a group of friends (most of whom I know through Krav Maga) to Yosemite National Park here in California to hike Half Dome. I had done some research so I knew it was going to be a tough hike, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. What follows is as much detail as I can remember from the trip, for my information as well as yours. It looks like this guy hiked the exact same route that we took (updated Half Dome guide from EveryTrail!), although he did it while there was still some snow around.

Total distance: Approx 16 miles, Elevation gain: 4,796 feet, Round trip: 13.5 hours

Half Dome, Yosemite

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My Review of The North Face Megamouth Hydration Pack

Simple and lightweight, The North Face Megamouth hydration pack ensures you won’t be parched by the end of the day. There’s also room for lunch and the 10 essentials.

Perfect for Half Dome

Beau L. San Francisco, CA 8/4/2009

5 5

Pros: Good Water Flow, Easy To Refill, Highly Adjustable, Stable, Comfortable

Best Uses: Mountain biking, Day Trips

Describe Yourself: Casual Adventurer

What Is Your Gear Style: Minimalist

I got this day pack because I was going with some friends to hike Half Dome here in Yosemite (California). It turned out to be an absolutely perfect pack for the trip (which ended up being a 16 mile, 13 hour round trip).

I bought it online, so didn’t have a chance to try it on or anything, which I knew was a gamble. I’m tall (6’4″) and so when I tried the pack on (with no load) and it stopped half way down my back, I was really concerned that the base of the back frame would dig into my lower back and make it completely unwearable. That all changed as soon as I loaded it up, and it settled down to be a very comfortable pack.

It’s a good size for day hikes with plenty of space internally (and LOTS of small pockets for bits and pieces). The built in bladder is a good size, and I really liked the magnetic mouthpiece that’s easy to grab-drink-release.

The “external” pocket was nice for cramming dirty/wet bits in (e.g jacket/socks) that I didn’t want in amongst my other items, and the reflector strip at the bottom doubled as a good place to hang my gloves from a carabiner.

All in all, I’m very happy with this day pack and am looking forward to taking it on some more short hikes around the Bay Area and beyond.

South by Southwest (SxSW) Virgin

sxsw2009Tomorrow morning I leave to go to South by Southwest, one of the biggest festival/conferences in the tech scene (and the music and film scenes). I’ve never been before, so I’m pretty excited. There’s one main reason that I’m going, but that’s just my official excuse — I’ve wanted to go to SxSW since I first heard of it, about 3 years ago. Last year I even promised myself that I’d go this year, but then I thought I was going to be in Chile, so didn’t get tickets. Then things changed, this year rolled around, and a matter of days before it starts, I found myself with adequate motivation and reason to go, so I bought tickets.

My main reason for going?

Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny

The reason this is specifically important for me is that I was on the WordPress team that’s competing/presenting on this panel. We put a heap of work into building a website/system based on supplied specifications/designs and will go head to head with Joomla and Drupal during that panel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m also really excited to attend a bunch of other panels, and of course the parties, but this one panel is my main reason. Oh, and I get to stay and hang out with my good buddy Ray Hernandez as well, so it’s all good. I’ll try to post a summary here when I get back, but in the meantime you can follow me on Twitter for live updates on what’s happening.

Why Are You Still Paying for Cable TV?

When I first moved to the US, I moved into a fully-furnished apartment with 2 TVs. One of them occupied the cable connection where I wanted my computer plugged in, so that one got unplugged and never got turned on again. The other one was in the bedroom and only ever got turned on to watch my favorite show at the time: Alias. When I moved to California and was faced with the price of getting cable installed, I realized that I really didn’t want to pay that much money every month to watch 1 TV show. I preferred to watch DVDs and often watched video clips and things online though, so I needed a solution.

Instead of going and buying a TV, I went out and got a Mac Mini (with bluetooth keyboard/mouse), which I connected to a Toshiba projector. I got a 3 ft x 4ft blank (white) painting canvas, which hangs on the wall, opposite the projector (which is on top of my coffee table). A long (50ft, which turned out to be massive overkill) VGA cable runs around the edge of the room to the Mac Mini, which is housed with my (multi-region) DVD player etc under the screen in a standard IKEA cabinet.

I started out using Bit Torrent to download TV shows. I use the excellent program for Macs called Transmission, and experimented with a few different tools which worked by automatically downloading RSS feeds from tvRSS. I had Transmission set up with Speed Limits enabled so that it would only download overnight (when I wasn’t using my internet connection). This worked well for a while, but those freedom-hating Communists over at Comcast didn’t like that, so they started messing with my connection, which affected me day and night.

After battling with a bad connection for a while, I had to stop with the torrents because I was having trouble working. For a few months I just went without TV of any kind, which was actually refreshing in its own way. Then I got access to hulu.

hulu.com has made everything so much easier, and it’s even taken away that niggling feeling that I was doing something “wrong”. I can watch all sorts of things on hulu, even queue them up under my account so that I can keep track of new episodes easily. It’s available on-demand and I don’t care if I “miss” when a show was on normal TV, because I can watch it on hulu whenever I want.

Obviously I go without a lot of shows that are available on normal cable, but am I really missing anything? I sure don’t feel like it.

Challenges You Will Face When Working With Remote Teams

For a number of reasons at a number of times in my career, I’ve found myself working with variously-distributed teams of one kind or another. Perhaps the “office” is a building that spans 2 square miles, perhaps someone was working from home for a day or someone was on a 2 week “vacation”, or even working for a distributed company with no real office. These were all different situations, but they all suffered from simliar challenges. I want to take a look at a couple of those challenges and some ways that you can help mitigate them.

I’m looking at this mostly as a member of a technical team of some sort, but I’m sure a lot of it would apply to pretty much anyone who’s not working face-to-face with their colleagues. Apologies in advance for this being kind of rambling (and very long). It’s a collection of all sorts of observations, links and ideas that I’ve collected over time. (more…)

Managing Your WordPress Install With Subversion (Safely)

There are a number of different ways to manage a WordPress installation, everything from not actually managing it yourself (WordPress.com can take care of it for you if you like) through to manually managing things via FTP. I’m going to look at my preferred method, which I think provides a few things that other methods don’t necessarily give you.

  1. Control: this method puts you in charge (which also means it’s your responsibility to keep things up to date).
  2. Safety: if you consistently manage your WordPress install using this method, then you’re in a pretty good position to avoid a lot of problems.
  3. Simplicity: WordPress updates quite often (minor releases at least every month generally). This system means that you can generally update when a new version comes out in a few minutes at the absolute most.

What is this magic system you ask? In a word: Subversion.

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Cupcake Camp 2, San Francisco

This afternoon I had the pleasure of attending the second Cupcake Camp, held here in San Francisco at the Get Satisfaction offices in South Park. For some reason, I was expecting a relatively small, civilized, fun event in South Park, with a few people, maybe 100 at the most, a bunch of cupcakes and some friendly conversation. Some of those expectations were met, some were vastly exceeded (or plain crushed). Here’s what greeted me when I got there:

Cupcake Camp 2

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On Airplane Productivity (PlaneWorking)

This week just passed, I had to fly (last-minute) from San Francisco to Minnesota for a funeral (and managed to be there for Thanksgiving as well). That meant 2 flights of a little over 3 hours each. Some people might see this as a drama, and a big loss of productive time, but I saw it as exactly the opposite. I’m hardly the first person to comment on it, but flying can be an extremely productive time to get things done, and I often find myself getting loads of work done while flying.

I had a string of things that needed to be completed/added/fixed on a client project before I left from SFO, and literally finished all of them and more before I arrived at MSP. I would normally have estimated that the list of things I had to do would take around 6 hours to complete. Removing ascent and descent times, (and judging by battery life), I probably only worked for about 2, but I still managed to get everything done. What’s going on here? (more…)

Krav Maga Level 4 Grading

I’ve been training in Krav Maga for a bit more than a year now and on Saturday, November 15th, I went through the grading to go from Level 3 to Level 4 as a Krav Maga practitioner at the San Francisco Krav Maga Gym. Simply put, it was the most grueling, physically-intensive thing I’ve ever done. I decided to post some details about it here for my own records more than anything else, but you might find it interesting if you’re into martial arts/MMA or that type of thing. For the record, I passed 🙂

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