Mount St. Helens
Today we hooked up with the Tangen family on the Summer of Love. Kent is here going to RailsConf as well, and Marilee and kids came out to join Tammy and Mazie while he and I go to the conference. Today though, Tammy and Marilee decided to hit the town all day and Kent and I loaded the kids in the van and headed to Mount St. Helens. It was a great day.
The drive to Mount St. Helens from Portland wasn’t too bad; about 50 minutes on the interstate and 30 or so on the highway. We got started somewhat late and stopped for lunch at the last place for food before heading the final 20 miles to the Volcanic Monument. Driving through the valley presents you with evidence of the massive destruction of this eruption even 28 years later. The valley that you drive through is 100 feet higher than it was before. Before it was a gorge and now it’s a pancake flat valley settled between the mountains. All the result of the eruption.
The view of the volcano, and the very young trees everywhere, just exclaim the power of something as mighty as a volcano. Looking at the mountain inspires awe and respect. It takes a wild imagination to envision the cubic mile of dirt that was blown out during the eruption.
If your in the area, take the time to see it. Even the kids thought it was pretty cool. I’d love to come in the summer and hike around the area – although access is very limited even now. I took a bunch of pictures – good stuff.
Rhythm of Travel
Doing extensive travel with Mazie has a certain rhythm to it. I’m sure this is very familiar to all parents. I find that this rhythm provides some structure to the day, as well as some forced downtime that is good pacing. Given that the Summer of Love is six weeks long, a more relaxed “marathon” style trip is appropriate.
Each day starts between 6:30a and 7:00a. So far on the Summer of Love we’ve started the day right around 8:30a with a little variance on breakfast. Everyday at 12:30p is the search for a kid friendly food spot, and then a return to the hotel for Mazie’s nap at 2:00p. She sleeps for approximately 2 hours and then the second part of the day is picked up. Bedtime is at 8:00pm so the 2nd part of the day is always pretty short so the agenda is lighter.
For Tammy and I the result is an early start to the day, a forced two hour break in mid-day and evenings are spent usually tucked in the hotel while Mazie sleeps in the other part of the room.
So, when you see me on email, posting on the website or twittering – it’s probably timed with this rhythm.
Greg Merkle: Great Music
This post is a bit of a tease since you can’t (yet) just go out and buy this music. I know Greg Merkle from working at Dow Jones and have been lucky enough for him to share some of his recordings with me. It’s great stuff. He’s starting to do more stuff and getting more online. Check out this video he just posted.
Delicious Library 2 Released
Last night Wil Shipley, and the Delicious Monster team, released Delicious Library 2. Delicious Library is a cataloging application that I’ve put to very real use to manage my CD and DVD archive. Since I’ve moved all of my media onto my network, the physical assets are of no use other than as proof of ownership. I’ve moved them all into Slappa cases and to track where things are I use Delicious Library. Yes, a spreadsheet could do it, but it would suck. Delicious Library is such a nice application for this.
Delicious Library 2 has been anticipated for a long time so it was exciting to get ahold of it. I’m happy to report that with my 1,400+ item library it is much faster. The old Library just stored things in XML, the new one uses CoreData and makes things much faster. Smart Collections are a very welcome addition and remove a needless step from my workflow. I’m also really excited to see additional item types. Software is now trackable and there is a field for serial number so I may move to using this instead of Backpack to keep my software licenses around.
I knew one of the big things coming was web publishing of your library. That’s neat, and I’ve already published my library on the web. You can see it at library.thingelstad.com. Pretty nifty! There is even a special iPhone view. However, even cooler, you can actually load a published library into another users copy of Delicious Library 2. So, if you have Delicious Library 2, add my library in and you can get native access to it. Very nice!
Publishing lists like this is a long standing tradition with me. My very first website had a list of my CD’s, as well as a list of Laserdiscs.
Blogger Born? Smaller Than A Redwood
Fire up your RSS reader and get ready to add a feed! Some of you know that my wife Tammy has had a blog, Smaller Than A Redwood, for a while, but it’s been pretty much idle. She’s gotten her blogger shoes on during the Summer of Love and has been posting pretty regularly. On top of that we outfitted her with a new theme. Exciting stuff! Check it out!
Baby Monitor in the Hallway
Tammy and I are hanging out in this extremely cool, funky hotel in Portland called McMenamins Kennedy School. It used to be a school, but they converted it to a hotel, restaurant and bar. It’s very cool.
Anyway, Mazie is asleep and the monitor doesn’t quiet reach to us. We have it sitting in the hallway about 30 feet from us where we can see the lights if she started hollering for us.
The funny thing is watching people walk by. People keep looking at it. Picking it up. Listening. Etc. It’s a pretty funny social experiment. It makes me think it would be pretty funny to actually broadcast something over it and put it in the hall. Maybe the original War of the Worlds or an early episode of The Shadow. Hmmm…
Dinner at Mama’s for Mexican!
At Top Pot Donuts.
Seattle has a lot of cool indie coffee shops.
- Mazie throws blanket on floor.
- Dad picks up.
- Go to step 1.
Attempted unwise flash of WTR-54GS to DD-WRT while traveling. Doesn’t look good. Have a brick right now. Will investigate more in morning. 🙁
At the REI flagship store in Seattle. When you pass away, if you have been good your whole life, you end up at this REI.
What happens when you give a near 3-year-old a digital camera and explain how to take pictures? You get a lot of pictures!
Summer of Love Day 6 Log
- 9:00 am: Woke up in Seattle and noticed that the F5 Networks office is right across the street from the hotel. “Hi F5!” 👋
- 3:25 pm: Weatherman said rain for Seattle today. Couldn’t be more wrong. Beautiful and sunny.
- 10:12 pm: Discovered The Blair St. Mugwumps today at a music event in Seattle. Totally whacky. Bought two albums.
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Sounds of Glacier
About three years ago Dante Vono sent around some links to photos he had taken in Italy. They were really great photos, but what hit me more was that he had taken a handful of them with an audio recording as well. I looked at those photos and listened to the audio and was amazed at how the sound just transported me to the place. Arguably, it was more powerful than just watching a video of it.
Inspired by his example, I attempted to do something similar using my Zoom H2 in Glacier National Park. Hit play to experience this picture fully. I like how you can hear the rapids in the background with the water dripping off the rock over the top.
Summer of Love Day 5 Log
- 10:08 am: On the way to Seattle.
- 10:13 am: Going through Kalispell, MT.
- 2:07 pm: Relaxing lunch in Coeur d’Alene, ID. Now in pacific time.
- 3:41 pm: Rain, rain, rain. In Washington state.
- 6:44 pm: Going through Ellensburg, WA.
- 6:54 pm: Just paid $4.06/gallon for gas.
- 7:20 pm: In Seattle, WA.
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Sites Now on Slicehost
If you are a regular visitor to my sites you have likely noticed that a
couple of months ago things got much faster. You may be thinking that I
finally went to my server and hit the turbo button, but not so.
I had been hosting all of my sites on Dreamhost. They had a ridiculous deal for a year of hosting and I took advantage of it. There was a lot I really like about Dreamhost. Their web interface is really nice, better than most. Their directory structure that they lay out for you is sensible and very workable. All in, the service is pretty good.
However, I was having horrible problems with performance. I would go for hours on end where my site would take 4 to 6, or even 10 seconds to respond. That’s just running standard WordPress and even with the wp-cache plugin enabled. The culprit always seemed to be one of two things – really slow MySQL response times or, even worse, slow file I/O times to get at your own home directory. Enough is enough and I decided to move hosting providers.
I did a lot of research and decided I wanted to move away from a shared hosting provider like Dreamhost. They all over-subscribe their service, it’s the only way they can give those unbelievably cheap prices. Instead I decided to look for a virtual private server provider. After looking around for a while I found something I had never seen before, a hosting company that had nothing but good feedback from everyone.
A couple of days later I signed up on Slicehost and purchased my first slice. I chose a Ubuntu 7.1 image and after a couple of hours following their extremely well written documentation I was up and running. As an added bonus, I even learned things doing this.
I’ve now been using Slicehost for over a couple of months and I can’t say enough good things about them. The service is stunning, and the move to a virtual private server has given me some great other benefits. For example, my slice is now backed up every day as a virtual server. If something bad happens, I can click a couple of buttons in the panel and have my server back the way it was in no time.
If you’re looking for a provider, and are willing to roll your sleeves up, Slicehost may be the way for you.
Site Performance as seen by Google
I mentioned earlier that I had moved my sites over to Slicehost. My reasoning for this was performance. Here is a graph that proves that performance out as seen by the Google robot. This graph shows the response times that Google was seeing when it spidered my site. The crazy noise on the left is Dreamhost. The nice, flat, consistently fast response on the right is Slicehost.
The world of SEO is filled with black magic, but I have had people that know there stuff highlight that site behavior does impact your ranking in Google. This intuitively makes sense. If your site is slow or eratic in response, Google is going to give a bad experience to the visitor they send to you. If you are fast and always available, it will be good. It’s easy to see how this could be used to influence search ranking, but it’s not provable.
Either way this is a good thing (tm) and it’s good confirmation to see the site performance improvement vetted from a third party like Google.
Trail of the Cedars
Contrary to the predictions of the weather people, today was a better day than yesterday. The temperature seemed slightly warmer and there was definitely much less rain. We stayed dry most of the day, except for our treacherous trip to East Glacier.
We had a great breakfast at the West Glacier Restaurant. The only restaurant open. Tammy and I are both confused why there are nearly 10 gift shops open in the park, but only one restaurant. It would seem that visitors in need of gifts would also be in need of dining. After breakfast we took headed up the Going-to-the-Sun Road as far as we could go, to Avalanche. It seemed like a popular destination as there were more cars parked there than we’d seen almost anywhere this early in Glacier.
Tammy and I have been trying to gauge our hiking (if you can call it that) expectations with little Mazie. As is typical, we have different worries. I’m worried about her getting in way over her head on even a moderate trail and that we are idiotic parents if we don’t have a basic first aid kit, compass, tent, sleeping bag, 3 weeks of food, etc. along if we have a small child with us. Tammy on the other hand isn’t worried about any of that, she’s just afraid of the bears.
The hike we took along Trail of the Cedars was perfect though. It’s a rare wheelchair accessible trail in a national park so Mazie could walk the whole thing. Most of the trail was a raised boardwalk. Just under a mile long with nice scenery in all directions. We had a great time and took a lot of photos. Thankfully, no bears encountered (or mountain lions!) and we didn’t fall in need of dire first aid care.
We were headed back for lunch and Mazie fell asleep on the drive so we decided to do an impromptu trip to East Glacier. First, a little background. Glacier National Park is huge. There are a couple of main entrances, unimaginatively named West Glacier and East Glacier. Tammy chose to stay in West Glacier because it is much more connected to the park. Typically the Going-to-the-Sun Road is the way to get between these two towns. However, that is closed. So we had to take US-2 all the way around the park, 56 miles one way, to get to East Glacier.
As soon as we got on the eastern side of the park is was raining and the temperature dropped 15 degrees. No good. We continued on and took the road up to where we were told a cool falls was that was an easy hike. We got there after nearly turning around a few times and decided to try the hike. Here however both my fears of hypothermia and Tammy’s fears of bear attack rung loud and after a short 0.2 mile walk we turned back to the van. There was a reasonable amount of snow there still. Not that much, but we were totally not prepared for anything. The lack of fellow hikers got Tammy thinking we were the sole prey for that hungry bear that must be lurking. So, around we went.
Since the Going-to-the-Sun Road is closed and isn’t going to open anytime soon we decided tonight to cut our trip short a day and head to Seattle tomorrow. There is much more to see here at Glacier, but it’s better seen in July, particularly if you have a toddler with you. I definitely want to return here. Next time we’ll maybe just pack our backpacks and hope on the Amtrak. We’ll be driving most of the day tomorrow.