Gnubbs Blog

Today, Eldora Ski resort opens. I bought my first season pass this winter. I have been building my winter outdoor gear selection. I am ready for winter.

This summer was my first real summer of climbing. Last summer I got in quite a few days top-roped and learned some basics of climbing movement. This summer I spent Trad climbing quite a bit and learned a lot. Now that the climbing season has been reduced to only the best weather days, I have a moment to think about what I would like to do this winter.

My goal is to be a 5.10 climber next year. This means being comfortable on 5.10a routes, and capable of harder 5.10 routes. I am talking about real, old school 5.10 routes in Eldorado canyon. I would also like to start leading sport routes next year, and maybe even a trad pitch or two if I am comfortable with that. I also want to get up into the mountains and follow on some alpine climbs next year.

These are pretty ambitious goals for me. They are going to require that I get my act together, and be in much better shape than I am now. It also requires that I start to pick up a lot of skills that I now lack. To that end, I have some plans for winter.

First, I am going to climb at least 3 days a week all winter. This is why I have a climbing gym membership. I am also going to try and take some of the intermediate climbing classes at the gym. These teach movement, balance, and technique that I need to get dialed if I want to climb hard. I also need to get into better cardio shape — which means running, cycling, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, winter hiking — whatever I can do this winter to be ready for more strenous, longer days in the mountains next summer.

Second, I am going to start to learn the skills that I need for mountaineering. For this, I am going to join the Colorado Mountain Club and start taking the classes they offer. An avalance class, a self arrest class, maybe even a class on ice climbing. I am also going to try and find a climbing partner for ice climbing. (That requires such a serious investment in gear that I don’t know if it will happen.)

I am already 24 years old, so if I plan on doing any serious mountaineering I had better start learning now. I have walls to climb in Yosemite. I have mountains to climb in Alaska. I have all sorts of torture awaiting me, so I had better start getting ready.

gnubbs

This post is coming to you a couple of weeks late. After I got back from my honeymoon, there was still a week before the time changed, so Scott and I managed to get out for one more day outside after work. We headed up Boulder Canyon to Castle Rock.

We had tried to climb at Castle Rock earlier in the year because there are a lot of ultra classic climbs. Many of these climbs date back to the 1950’s and sixties. Unfortunately, every time we tried to climb there something would prevent it. A number of days called off because of storms. One day our nerves were broken after there was a climbing accident right where we were supposed to meet. We were starting to think that the Mountain Gods did not want us to be climbing there.

This day was seemed a bit different. The weather was perfect for a late fall day — sunny and sixty. We got to Castle Rock, geared up, and decided to climb a route called Bailey’s Overhang. This route follows a beutiful dihedral (think inside corner of a room) with an nice crack system running up it’s corner. Scott headed up on the sharp end, and set up our belay.

I followed up behind him and was surprised by this route. The climbing was not difficult, but it was very systained at an almost difficult level for me. I did not make the crux look pretty (some sort of full body crack jam), but got through it without much difficulty. At the belay, I handed gear back off to Scott and he was off. This is where things started to get ugly.

The first pitch took us a bit longer than we had hoped. As Scott proceded up on the next pitch, he chose a route that ended up being not that promising. So, he downclimed a bit, found a better route, and made for the summit. Once I was on belay, I quickly ran into a problem. One of the cams was over-cammed and I couldn’t get it out. Just as I started to work on cleaning it, the sun dropped over the line of ridges, and I started to feel some pressure about the time of day. Five minutes later, cam still in the crack I had to abandon it. A number one Camelot, $70 piece of gear, but it was time to get moving. I made short work of the rest of the route, climbing as fast as I could, and met scott on the summit as daylight fell into evening.

As we started the downclimb, Scott mentioned that it would get a bit exposed. This meant that it was not technical, but that I slip would send you plummeting — unroped — the couple hundred feet to the ground. As we made our way down the ledge and ramp systems, the available light started to fall off. We finally got to the worst part of the downclimb, and it was too exposed for me to be comfortable. So, we strung the rope around a burly tree and repelled that 50 foot section. When I got to the bottom and unclipped, Scott tried to pull the rope and it got stuck. We both put all of our weight into it, and managed to get it moving. As the other end of the rope neared the top of the cliff, it got stuck again. Try as we might, it wouldn’t budge.

This left Scott with the unenviable job of free climbing back up to the rope, freeing it, and climbing back down in near darkness. By the time he got back to where I was, and we headed down the last sections of downclimbing, stars were lighting our way.

As we sat down at the car after a near epic, stars winkling in the sky, we decided this was a good note to end summer on. My first season of good, challenging climbing was over. I had climbed some good hard routes for me, faced my first serious climbing moments (some DFU moments for sure), and ended the season ready to climb harder and higher next year.

I bought my first computer about seven years ago. In that time, I have spent a fair amount of my life sitting in the cool glow of it’s monitor. I have upgraded computers, added new bits and pieces, learned about many of it’s inner workings, etc. I had, however, managed to avoid ever purchasing anything to transfer information on my computer into a media usable in the physical world. So, this weekend I bought a printer.

Why, after avoiding it for so long, would I ever do such a thing? A couple of factors converged this weekend. First, the wife wanted one to do wife like craft thingies. Second, I have a lot of digital photos that I would like to be able to print. Third, they are so stupidly cheap, and wickedly nice.

So, I did some research and after reading about all of the photographers using the seven ink Epson 2200p, I decided to go with an epson 825. This uses thier one generation old six ink technology. So, I have key (black), Magenta, Light Magenta, Cyan, Light Cyan, and Yellow inks. A resolution something on the order of 780×1440 ppi. (True PPI, not some enhanced make believe PPI.)

So, I printed out some test pictures when I got home, and they are truely amazing. All of my test prints looked just as good as any of my actual photographs. The colors are rich and vivid. The images are perfectly sharp.

The plan now is to buy a slide scanner and start shooting slides excusively with my 35mm. Then, scan the slides, and I have digital copies to alter and print as I desire. A nice setup. I get all of the benefits of slides, and then have the option of cheap printing as well. Cheap? Yeah, all this quality for a whole $100 dollars at target.

gnubbs

The program that I work on at work in my spare time is a bit out of the ordinary for me. The industry that I work in is extremely regulated. There are very good reasons for this — peoples lives depend on my actions every day. The FDA says that there must be a formal process for everything, and that we must follow that process. So, the everything engine is no exception.

The idea is simple, and regular readers of my irregular posts have a good idea of what the EE does. Think of it as a home grown Wiki or any other user updated web site backend. It provides tools needed to add and edit web pages, comments, users, etc.

The goal is to have a knowledge base for use by myself and others in my call center. They learn something new, glean some new information, they post it to the site instead of sending out an email like they do now. In the end we will only have one place to look, with searching capabilites for all our information. It will be a big improvement over what we currently use.

In theory. In reality, the project has now hit a very dangerous stage. The software is nearly complete. I am currently writing a peer review module that facilitates review by other members of our department of every piece of information before it is posted on the site. Just a simple sanity check so that someone in my department can’t put up information that is obviously wrong. Once this is done, it will be ready to launch.

The danger comes in because this project has been being built somewhat under the radar of the rest of the company. Not completely, but to an extent. My boss has been behind it, his boss is aware of it, and IT has okayed our internal servers. Now it is about to brought into the daylight. Regulatory will have to approve of it. R&D will be pissed because they weren’t involved in it’s design. Marketing will be upset because they have been left out. Every department is going to be offended that they didn’t get to have input into a tool that will only be used by my department. They will be upset there have not been meetings and commitees and formal design processes.

That is the danger that I now face. All of this work — tens of thousands of lines of code — hang on the will of people who don’t have the most basic understanding of how my department works. We have attempted similar knowledge bases in the past, and they have all failed because too many people got thier fingers into them. So we avoided that mistake this time, but have yet to see if we committed some other.

Godspeed EE, this is where things get rough.

My programming lately has been, well, ugly. My programming at work is something that I do in my spare time so that I don’t lose my mind. Having a tech support job sucks, but spending my nights and weekends in the mountains more than makes up for it. Programming that is continually interrupted by ringing phones on the other hand has lead me through the slow process back to ugly programming.

So, last night I picked up my favorite remedy for lows in my programming skills. Code Complete is a great resource that I think that every programmer should have. Just for those days when you walk in the door and think to yourself that every line of code you wrote that day stunk. Sit down with the book, open up to any chapter, and follow every piece of advice that it gives you the next day.

The result for me is always an immediate push back into good programming style. My poison today has been PDL and the “PDL to code process”. Basically, it says to write each of your routines step by step in plain english. Revise this list of steps until you get to a point where it is easier to do the next iteration in code. Then, mark each line as a comment, and fill in the code. You end up with well commented code, and plenty of chances for refactoring before you get to actually writing code.

The methods that I wrote this morning using this process are so much cleaner than my code has been lately. Good comments, well structured, and efficient. That is as much as I can ask for from my day to day code. Nothing particularly clever, nothing unnessecarily complex. Just good clean code.