Doug Landauer: personal

July Dinkey Lakes BP and Grass Valley visit

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:49:28 GMT

Backpacking trip (Dinkey Lakes) was great; approximate map: http://is.gd/OsO . Through Madera and up to Prather, the car thermometer was reading 111 degrees! Cooler at the 8200-foot trailhead. Serious mosquitoes bothered the susceptible at the lower lakes. We did a couple miles of cross-country up to beautiful Fingerbowl Lake. Ben and Annalise scrambled up to the top of the Third Sister! We got an impressive hour-and-a-half heavy (for the Sierra) thunderstorm, but our tarp and groundcloth kept us dry. Hiked out through another hour-and-a-half of heavy rain, lightning, and thunder, this time with hail for added drama! The next weekend, I didn't go to Mammoth -- went instead to our group's offsite at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Shouldn't have. Got nasty food poisoning. This past weekend, drove up to Grass Valley for Cliff's 80th, and we got some great Doughty family photos taken at the Empire Mine State Park. I hope to have figured out a photo place to put some of them up on the web, some time soon.

Uneventful June; July plans

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:17:02 GMT

Matanzas weekend (on a budget, so we stayed a Motel 6; won't be doing that again -- they seem to be going downhill fast). On the way home, we got another visit with Jordan, now a month old. Smoke from all the fires seems to be dissipating -- the sky is still the wrong color around sunset, but the sun looks great with this unfortunate natural filter. Got some good photos Monday or Tuesday. Looks like I'll be away from work every Friday this coming July: on the weekend of the 4th, my cousin and her family (and my mother) will be visiting; I have a backpacking trip on 10th to the 14th; may visit said cousin in Mammoth the 17th and/or 18th; and the 25-26-27 weekend may call for a visit to Grass Valley for my father in law's 80th birthday celebration.

Under the wire

Sat, 31 May 2008 23:54:22 GMT

Well, it's been busy here at GIGO central. At work, I'm a part of four different (though related) projects in testing technologies. And the couple of 20% ideas I have are finally about ready to commit to. At home, it's looking more and more like a hillbilly hangout, with a washer outside and hanging stuff up to dry much of the time. In between, I've been riding the Gbus in from Scotts Valley, which, paradoxically, gives me more time to work while simultaneously making the commute take longer. It does get me out of the house earlier than I have been used to. I have a new niece, born today, my wife's brother's daughter. The picture I put here is not related. I hope I don't let this old weblog slide for so long, next time! ("Under the wire" refers to narrowly avoiding two entire empty months.)

Leap Day Posting

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:37:09 GMT

Woo Hoo! In the six years I've had this weblog, I've never done a February 29th posting before. An indication of my mental state, though, is that I dutifully checked in the GIGO Table of Contents, examining the end of February for each of the five earlier years, before realizing that there was only one to check. In other incomplete stories, the Pinnacles trip was great, and led to making some connections with some of the other music-makers at the big G. And Ben and I hiked Uvas County Park, saw a bunch of waterfalls, flowing well.

Winter camping at the Pinnacles

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:42:09 GMT

So, there's the tradition of an annual winter trip. In the past, I hear, it's mostly been a ski trip. Something different this year — Disneyland, or camping at the Pinnacles. No contest for me, despite the possibility of weather. Seems that somewhere under ten percent of the trippers chose to go camping with me, the other several thousand are going to Disneyland. I plan to take some pictures. Current forecast is for a spate of dry weather for a change! Keeping my fingers crossed.

It's 2008. Do you know where your projects are?

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 07:18:49 GMT

Mostly stalled, but here's a partial, cryptic list:

weblogs and pix coalescing at l6r (revive zia.pycs, extract data from Radio, etc)
finish out my OCaml version of Danvy's grand tour of SECD-like machines
mangle spj's sudoku solver
weblog engine in scala, including quarkup, my contribution to the babel of wikilike markup syntaxes, and maybe (im)port Pandoc
build the two ubuntu machines
prototype a streaker interface for gmail & reader
scala android experiments

Busy month; new job

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:45:03 GMT

A job change, about which more later; and a whole houseful of relatives and spice for Thanksgiving; and so what I want to do is to transliterate Simon P-J's Sudoku Solver into Scala, but then change it so it's not a solver but rather a hinter. That may have to wait for me to come up for air (and to get a new machine at home). Just getting training at the new place, feeling my way around the mother of all intranets.

Three weeks in France

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:49:24 GMT

Typical pattern in a normal company: you have a week of vacation coming up, so you have to work 60 hours the week before it, and 60 hours the week after it. In a startup, you're already working 60 hours a week, so the numbers just go up. Especially if the vacation is three weeks. Anyway, so Deb and I spent a week in Paris. Our guidebook didn't mention how many stairs there are in the Metro stations. Had a great time, took lots of photos. Then we picked up our rental car, and learned why the "free upgrade" ain't such a great deal: the larger car is harder to park and some of the towns have such narrow roadways that it's even harder to drive in some of them. We drove through Chartres, to Amboise (2 days in a B&B), visiting Chateau Chenonceau; then south to stay a night each in Brive-la-Gaillard and Carcassonne; then two days in Barcelona to visit a good friend; and then back into France, for a night in Arles followed by several in another wonderful B&B southwest of Avignon; one night at a hotel on the beach in Cassis; and finally a nightmare drive through Marseille before the flight home. Fantastic time! Despite having gotten back here on Friday the 12th, I'm currently still in the catching-up phase at work. More details and over 4 Gigapixels of photos forthcoming at some point.

Cherry Creek Canyon

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:49:30 GMT

It was a great trip. Here's the Cherry Creek Canyon Trip Report.

We're all ready to do a similar one, next year.

Space squeeze

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:46:11 GMT

Low posting rate lately is due to (1) my Radio Userland space is down to 2% available (of the ridiculously tiny 40 MB), and (2) prep for a backpacking trip this coming weekend. As part of the prep, I've been walking four or so miles every time I manage to get out. E.g., Ed Levin park right near work in Milpitas (saw 50 or so wild turkeys), Rancho San Antonio in Cupertino (saw and photographed a bobcat). I'm guessing that my next post here will be my last, a pointer to some other place.

Matanzas Days of Wine & Lavender, Sonoma

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:03:16 GMT

On Saturday, we were at Matanzas Creek Winery, in Sonoma County's newest appellation area, Bennett Valley, to attend their wonderful "Days of Wine & Lavender" festival. I think this is our third year in a row. This event has fallen on the same weekend as some dorky auto race at Sears Point, so the traffic can be iffy, but it's nice despite all that. We invited Deb's brother and his wife, and rented a house a few blocks away from the square in Sonoma. The house was very nicely decorated and designed — I think this was the first time that I can recall going somewhere with Deb and having her say that she didn't need to rearrange or redecorate anything! The weather was mighty close to perfect, not too hot, but sunny. We camped for a while at the picnic tables above the main grounds, to enjoy the great Sonoma cheeses, the catered picnic-ish feast, and the Matanzas' great Merlots and Cabs. My weblog entries from previous years include pictures; I'll add this year's pictures after I find my camera's stupidly unique upload cable. Sunday, we visited B R Cohn Winery, a must for a number of reasons — their Pinot Noir, their beautiful olive trees and gourmet olive oil, and because Deb's sister's uncle is the Doobie Brothers' Pat Simmons, and Bruce Cohn was their manager for a lot of years. Later on Sunday, we visited Kenwood Vineyards, where we happened upon another special event. In this setup, they featured six or so of their wines, and paired each with a food dish, which they served in bite-sized samples along with the wine, so you could taste how it worked with that dish.
Traffic wasn't too bad heading home, but I think we'll try to take off the Friday and the Monday next year.

Heisenberg's Video Principle

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 06:54:17 GMT

The observer affects the observed. It's much easier to get unobtrusive candid still photos than videos.

SoCal San Diego

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 06:48:17 GMT

Lots of driving this past (long) weekend -- medical stuff in Huntington Beach and Torrance, very nice wedding in San Diego. Drove down on Wednesday, had appointments on Thursday, and had to be at a rehearsal dinner on Friday in S.D. Tried out my new video camera, and figured out why I've been avoiding them — Heisenberg's Video Principle.

25th, now with photos

Wed, 30 May 2007 21:29:23 GMT

Here's a pointer to the photos from our fancy beach fire anniversary dinner. More later.

25th Anniversary

Fri, 25 May 2007 07:57:00 GMT

Wednesday was Deborah and my 25th anniversary. I remain delighted and amazed to have found and managed to stay with someone who complements and inspires me so much. We went down to Rio del Mar after work, drove down to the east end by the state park, and set up a small fire in an existing makeshift fire ring. We had a small folding table, complete with tablecloth, flowers, and a candle. Deborah had put together the dinner: steak&mushroom shish-kebabs, four small lobster tails, homemade orzo salad, and a few other goodies. A 1998 Silver Oak Cab that I got for my 50th birthday, a Veuve Cliquot and a couple of desserts from the Cheesecake factory completed the wonderful spread. From near Scotts Valley, it was looking mighty foggy as we drove down that direction (around 7:30), but the fog turned out to be just fairly low clouds, and the evening was remarkably still, so it never got very cold. At any rate, we had the entire beach to ourselves, for nearly three hours, until a beach cop finally drove by around 10:20 to let us know that the beach "closes" at 10. We were already packing up by then, and he was pleasant about it. All in all, a truly wonderful evening!

Condors in Big Sur

Thu, 10 May 2007 06:55:59 GMT

[image source]

Since it hadn't been affecting my life much, I had sorta lost track of how well the California Condor reintroduction program was going. But Deborah and I were in Big Sur last Saturday, having breakfast at Cafe Kevah (at Nepenthe), and watching the red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures soar in the updrafts just south of us. And then one of the big birds flew straight toward the open deck, passing only about 30 or 40 feet above us. Although it was at least turkey-vulture sized, I had just about become sure that it wasn't a turkey vulture — the dark/light pattern on its wings was reversed fore-and-aft from the t.v.'s pattern, and less distinctly black-and-white — and was admiring the long finger-feathers at the ends of the wings, when someone elsewhere on the patio said "Condor". Wow. Here are some related Condor links:

http://www.bigsurcalifornia.org/condors.html
http://www.montereybay.com/creagrus/MTY_condors.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_condor
A bit farther afield, there is (was?) a Condor trail proposal in Southern California — I wrote about it here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/2005/08/13.html . Pity, it looks like all the links from that posting are 404's now.

25 mph == Tai Chi driving

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:08:15 GMT

I used to consider 25 mph a punitive speed limit -- the majority of us are being punished by requiring us to drive so slowly, due to a few idiots. But last week, after my mother mentioned taking a Tai Chi class, I decided to consider having to go as slow as 25 to be a form of Tai Chi driving. It changes one's whole attitude ... Apparently, others have come up with similar thoughts. See here and here. From the latter link:

Today I imagined how a Tai Chi driving lesson might go... "In the beginning there is stillness. From stillness comes movement, forwards, back, left and right, this is driving - you must understand this."

apt turns of phrase

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 06:58:53 GMT

gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts -- Douglas Hofstadter Climate change is not gonna be combatted through voluntary acts of individual charity. It's gonna be combatted through some kind of colossal, global-scaled, multilateral, hectic, catch-as-catch-can effort to stop burning stuff, suck the burnt smoke out of the sky, and put the smoke back into the ground. -- Bruce Sterling

A few days in Avalon

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:56:53 GMT

I spent much of last week on vacation on Catalina, in Avalon. We stayed at the Inn on Mt Ada (formerly Wrigley's mansion), above Avalon. It was a wonderful respite from the nonstop startup pace I've been sustaining for the past couple of years. We drove down south Monday after work, and stayed in a doubletree hotel in Carson. Most notable thing was that they had a poster of Winslow Homer's "Breezin' Up", which is a painting my Mom has a copy of on her wall. I may well not have noticed that except that I had snagged a .jpg of that painting, and included in a set of slides I made for her a couple of weeks ago, which I'll try to put up somewhere near here some day soon. Tuesday AM was hectic getting to the boat (freeways stopped up, and the Catalina Landing exit was closed), but the ride over was the smoothest I've ever experienced. We slept most of Tuesday, took the bus tour up to the airport on Wednesday, and the Casino tour on Thursday. The tour guides will tell you that Avalon is a city of contradictions -- Beach Bison; flying fish; swimming birds; a casino with no gambling; a mausoleum where no body was kept; a bird park with no birds; a city with a 3rd street, but no 1st, 2nd, or 4th (and 3rd Street is actually the second street from the beach); etc. The Inn loans you the use of a golf cart for the duration of your stay. I drove it around much of town. Other folks in town have some pretty amusingly customized carts. Fun trip.

My parents around 1965

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:24:11 GMT

A few days ago, I linked to Dick Oakes' Aman Folk Ensemble pages. They include links to a couple of photo galleries, but most of the photos are low resolution shots of groups of dancers, so I didn't really inspect them in much detail. So imagine my delight when I noticed the bottom of page 4 of Tony Shay's photos — a close-up of my parents, singing together.

Strikes me as being somewhat like a nice metaphor for their 58 years together! (Note: the date of this posting date is completely coincidental. No fooling.)

gc1 -- how appropriate for a discardia month

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:36:54 GMT

I wrote about my compact date- and time-stamp format a few years ago (alternate (conventional) link is here). So today is gc1, and so I'm unduly tickled at the fact that "gc" marks one of the months that contains a discardia period. Time to get out to that garage, attic, spare room, or shed, and start marking and sweeping so you don't end up leaving that dirty job to a later generation! According to Dinah, discardia lasts " ... the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. Sometimes it's short and sometimes it's long. Well, this month has a new moon on March 19th, and the equinox is no earlier than March 20th, so the discardia is an exceptionally long one — it should last until April 17th. By the way, it's cool to see that arcaeoastronomy site listing the pre-Christian "cross-quarter" holidays, Samhain, Beltane, Imbolc and Lughnasa.

Resurrecting my "songs I know" file

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 07:23:06 GMT

I consider myself lucky to be able to say that I've lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains since 1981. One of the drawbacks to that location is the likelihood that you'll have a long commute. I've commuted from here to Santa Clara, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Mountain View, Cupertino, and now Milpitas. For much of that time, that commute has meant spending most of an hour each way driving, twice a day except for the days I could work at home. Rather than just listening to the radio all the time, sometimes I just sing. (In 1986, I made up my own set of lyrics to Jackson Brown's "Fountain of Sorrow", changing it to "Mountain of Laundry".) I suspect that I know all the words to approximately 100 songs that I like. I wrote up a list of them, a file containing the names of the songs, and printed it out and kept it in the car's glove box, so I could pull it out sometimes to remind myself to sing something I hadn't sung in a long time. Unfortunately, I no longer have that printout, and the file itself seems to have vanished from all of my disks at home. So, I'm starting to re-create it, and figured that if I post it, then it might remain un-lost due to archive.org. The songs are dominated by singer-songwriters, mostly from the 1970's and 1990's. So here's the first seed:

david wilcox
cheryl wheeler
steeleye span
eagles
cliff eberhardt
pierce pettis
richard shindell
jackson brown
Dar Williams
benny goodman
makaha sons of ni`ihau
dennis pavao
paul simon
harry chapin
CS&N
austin lounge lizards
cole porter
peter paul & mary
eric bogle

kathy mattea,
(jon vezner)

warren zevon/ linda ronstadt

karla bonoff (way pre-bryndle)

robert palmer
grateful dead

jack traylor

danny O'keeffe

john dowland
michael praetorious

Home Sunset

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:22:15 GMT

] /RU/Home-sunset.jpg"> [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "my_gimages" hasn't been defined.] /RU/Home-sunset-thumb.jpg" align=left alt="2002 sunset, home in ben lomond"> Now that I'm on a roll, aiming (apparently) to break my posting-days-in-a-row record (don't worry, it's only in the low thirties), I look at my referrer stats once in a while. They're dominated by google searches for various nicknames from various cities, due to my city nicknames page. But I kept seeing this one home sunset photo that I shot in 2002 showing up. Weird, why would this nice but relatively obscure picture, that I hadn't really thought about for years, be referenced, on average, once or twice a day via google image search? The question didn't bubble up to being interesting enough to pursue until today. So ... I ran the google image search for home sunset. Whaddaya know, that shot is (currently) the first result shown. An inadvertent case of SEO, I guess.

Radio Out Of Space

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 07:52:41 GMT

Yikes, I guess I just ran out of space (40 whole Megabytes) on the Radio Userland server. Must be time to move onto a modern blogging/content management system. For now, I took the 8 Mb of images and moved them over to got.net, but a lot of links will eventually need to be updated, so older images will be broken for a while. Meanwhile, I tried to fix an extremely minor problem with my Radio U. desktop display -- it refuses to show the goofy little orange question marks. They are teeny GIF images, that live under the Radio U. folder, in www/system/images/qbullet/help.gif . The file itself exists on my disk, in the right place, and it seems to be valid (looks fine in Preview) and have the right permissions, but the Radio desktop simply won't display it. I had a symlink in /Applications , that pointed to the "Radio Userland" directory, and was named "Radio%20UserLand". Radio wouldn't accept that. Then I tried to move it out of the way and make it an (old-style Mac filesystem) Alias. Haven't had to *be* root on any Mac OS X system in a hell of a long time. (I'm sure there's some command-line "make alias" command, but I hadn't the patience.) Anyway, because I was denied write access in /Applications, I had to sudo to move the old "Radio%20UserLand" symlink out of the way, and then do some funkiness to make an alias. (For the record, it's Command-Option-drag to the desktop, then rename the alias to the name I wanted ("Radio%20UserLand"), and finally sudo mv to move it back into /Applications . And after all that? It still didn't work. Boo. Maybe if I really rename the directory to have the percent stuff in it. Nope, then Radio won't start up at all. Oh well, guess I'll live with it a while longer.

Sandhill Ecosystems

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:28:19 GMT

I took my nephew on a couple of short hikes today. My thought was to make it a "Lime Kilns" day ... visiting Fall Creek, UCSC entrance, and the Pogonip. (A fourth set of kilns are just north of Engelsmann Loop in Wilder Ranch State Park, but they're farther from any legal trailhead.) So, first we visited the lime kilns at Fall Creek (see any of these four links). We took one of the least-used entrances: around a mile or two farther up Felton-Empire Road than the main entrance, there's a trailhead with no parking available. But another 50 or 100 yards up, there's a turnout big enough to park in. It's just over a mile walk, down to the kilns, and we explored the "Blue Cliff" a bit, then climbed back up to the car. As we reached Santa Cruz, Ben said it'd be cool to visit that observation deck in Henry Cowell State Park, so we changed plans, put the other lime kiln sites on hold for another day, and headed up Graham Hill to the campground at Henry Cowell. That walk is another 1.2 miler, and the 360-degree views from the observation deck were as nice as I had remembered. Over near the closest Ponderosa Pine, someone had scrawled on the railing:

I can't believe
I lost my weed
Mind the weed
Of Roger Tweed
For the other side
Yee see

Oooohhhh kayyyy ... maybe that loss was a good thing? As usual, photos will be along once I have the patience to put them up somewhere.

Anyway, the sandy ecosystems up in that part of Henry Cowell park are similar to the ones around where I live. We recently got a flyer from the Zayante Sandhills Convervation Bank. (If it's legit, it does seem odd that a ".com" would have a say about what building projects are or aren't permitted. Did we become a total corporatocracy without a peep of protest?) About eleven years ago, I read a Sunset Magazine article that covered the "Sand Islands" of this part of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I've had a link to my OCR'd version of it for years, on my "Out &About" page