Gnubbs Blog

So, I have come to the conclusion lately that I have allowed my development skills to become somewhat outdated. Don’t get me wrong my skills with the tools I use everyday has been improving. I am a much, much better perl programmer than I was a year ago. My PHP/mySQL is also much improved. The problem is that there are a lot of technologies that have come around lately that I have not been keeping up to speed on. I basically don’t know anything about CSS, JSF, RoR, or any of technologies that I should be up to speed on.

I don’t expect to be as good of a developer in any of these environments as I am in my native work environment. However, I should have at least a good enough understanding of JSF to explain how they work and why we shouldn’t be using them. I should know enough about RoR to intelligently say, yeah, this is what we should be doing new development in.

Well, after spending 2 years out of the loop it is kind of hard to get back into the geek mindset. For those 2 years I was providing tech support full time and programming when I had some spare minutes away from the crushing weight of the ringing phone. So, my skills did not get too rusty, but I also didn’t realy develop at all.

About 4 months ago my job changed and I was supposed to start working full time as a programmer. Well, a product recall came up that I had to help handle and before I knew it three of those four months was gone. Finally, that is over and I am starting to work on my new actual job. I have posted a bit about my learning to use the gtk2-perl API. Those posts will continue soon and I will hopefully end up with a useful tutorial for starting using that API. Next up is to come to grips with CSS and convert all of my sites. That will be a bit of a project, but the graphics needed some work and this is the perfect opportunity.

So, in the end it looks like the cost of moving to Boulder was that I couldn’t afford to be a geek for a while. It sure is nice that I have finally paid that price and can pick up where I left off.

Okay. I don’t often write anything about my aquarium, but this is probably my favorite thing to play with while indoors. Or at least second favorite… Aquariums to me seem like a near perfect hobby for geeks and engineers.

First, saltwater/reef aquariums can be made as arbitrarily complex as you like. You can have a simple aquarium that is entirely contained in a glass box and do all of the work by hand. On the other extreme you can have tanks that are hundreds of gallons with amazing complex computer controlled life support systems. I am currently somewhere in between.

My current tank is a 20 gallon reef tank. Occupants currently include some snails, crabs, a fish and coral. Plus an entire ecosystem of worms, copepods, amphipods, tiny starfish, feather dusters, sponges and who knows what else that I haven’t caught sight of yet. I have a protein skimmer and a chemical filter that hang on the back of the tank, and a heater and some water pumps inside the tank. Add 110 watts of Power Compact Fluorescent lighting and you have a decent picture of my little time ocean.

The problem lately has been that it is looking a bit more like a swamp than an ocean. I have been overrun by red scrub algae. It is like red steel wool growing on every available surface. I have been fighting this problem for a while, but only recently have I gotten serious about it. First, I upgraded to a real protein skimmer. Next I switched from more or less tap water to RO/DI water. I have added more scavengers (snails and sponges) and used chemical filters to reduce phosphates.

Well, I am hopefully making some head way here. The algae does not seem to be growing back as fast as it once did. I just ordered a new powerhead and plumbing parts to improve water movement. I also ordered all new bulbs for my lighting. All of these things plus improvements in my husbandry should finally fix these problems.

Or maybe they won’t and I will have to come up with some more ideas. That is why reef keeping is so good for geeks. Everytime I look at my system I see something could be improved. I see a problem I could fix or a parameter that I could control more accurately. Some problems I can go out and buy a piece of technology to fix, some problems require process improvements to fix, and sometimes I get to pull out the dremel tool and super glue and build a solution myself.

It seems like it would be a lot harder to geek out owning cat.

So, it has been a while since I have been regularly posting on my blog. Between catching a seriously bad cold and having software going to V&V in a couple of days I haven’t had much that is interesting to write about. Well, I can’t promise anything interesting but I can promise that I will be back to regular postings again now.

This photo is from the trip that Stephanie and I took to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks this past fall. I finally got around to developing all of my film this past week. (I had ~10 rolls of film at between $14-20 a roll for processing. Back off.) One of the new services my lab offers is they will upload a scan of each of your frames to thier website for free.

With the background out of the way, here is my critque. First, it is very grainy. I had ISO 400 film in the camera when this lighting hit Mt. Moran. So, I am left with a very grainy shot. Second is that there is not a lot of content in the clouds. They were there so there wasn’t much I could do about them, but they are not dark and sinister enough to tell any real story. So, I am left with a pretty sunset on an overcast day. Still, I really like this picture a lot.

Film: Kodak ISO 400 Color Print Film
Equipment: Nikon N65, Nikon 24-120 lens, Generic Tripod
Processing: resized and used an Unsharp Mask in the gimp

Friday 2pm I give my friend JT a call that go something like
me: “Hey do you want to drive to Death Valley tonight. Maybe leave around 7pm?”
jt: “Sure. I will pick you guys up when I get of work between 7 and 8.”
Well, if we lived in LA and this was a 2-3 hour drive that would have been a pretty normal conversation. For us however, Death Valley is about 12 hours away assuming that we can average about 80-90 miles per hour (including gas, food, etc.)

First, a bit of background. We have been talking about going out to Death Valley for about a month or so but have not been able to find a weekend that worked for Stephanie, JT, and myself. Why this big urge to see Death Valley right now? Thanks to death valley getting about 7 inches of rain over the winter (it normally gets about 1.6 inches all year) the entire valley is covered in wild flowers. According to the ecologists, this is a once in a hundred years event. That means that the odds are not high that it would ever happen again in our lives.

So, JT picks us up in his Jetta TDI on friday at about 7:30 pm and we are on the road. The night is clear and cold, and we quickly start making good time. We head south to I70 and then west. After about 3 hours we are in Grand Junction, CO and hit the Utah boarder around 11pm. Another 2 hours or so I70 comes to an end and we head southwest on I15. I15 drops southwest through Utah, the top corner of Arizona, the bottom corner of Nevada and lands square in Las Vegas. We get to Vegas just after sunrise and head northwest towards Death Valley.

We get to the entrance to Death Valley at around 8:00 am Pacific Time. 12 hours or so from Boulder to Death Valley is pretty good time. As we head into the park we treated to expansive views out into this wasteland. Well, actually I am only saying that because that is what people expect to hear. Actually there are fields of wild flowers everywhere. The bottom of the valley, normally one of the hottest, driest areas on Earth is covered with huge lakes.

Spectacular. We head north through the park to Scotty’s Castle. This is odd. It is a full on castle built in the middle of death valley. I think some guy named Scotty built it. I really don’t know. They wanted an additional $12 per person to go into the castle, so I vowed to learn nothing about it in protest. So far I have kept that word.

We continue on to Ubehebe Crater which is a spectacular volcanic crater about 600 feet deep. On the way we try and head out to the Racetrack, but the gravel road is too rough to continue on for 27 miles. Stephanie looks on from the crater rim as JT and I scamble, stumble, and slide down to the bottom of the crater. There we find awesome cracked mud flats, butterflies, and a lizard. After about 10 minutes of chasing a tiny lizard around we head back up to the car. Needless to say the climb up the slippery, gravelly slope is much harder than the descent.

After the crater, we head south through the park stopping to investigate wierd plants, roadside signs, etc. We stop at Stovepipe Wells and have a picnic lunch in the 90 degree heat. April 1st and it is 90 degrees with a blazingly hot sun. After lunch we head further west to the very west most border to find Joshua Trees. Joshua Trees are really just giant Yuca cactus, but they are very, very cool. On our way back to the car from having a close up look at the cactus, we spot a little monster running through the bushes. Upon closer inspection we discover that he is a Short Spined Lizard. Again, JT and I spend 10 minutes or so chasing him around trying to get a good look or a clear shot on our cameras.

We head back into the heart of the park and stop by the vistor center. We had heard the park was crazy busy, but up until this point I hadn’t really noticed. The visitor center was chaos. People everywhere, lines for the bathroom, lines for the gift shop, lines for everything. We poke around for a little while looking at books about lizards, and Stephanie gets another stamp in her National Parks Passport.

From the visitors center we head south to the Devils Golf Course. This area is normally filled with dirt covered salt formations. We instead find a lake with little gleaming white salt islands rising from it. The water is so saturated with salt that when you take a big chunk of delicate salt crystals and drop it into the water it doesn’t disolve at all. After pulling it out it looks exactly like when you threw it in. Wierd.

We continue south to Badwater Basin, which at 282 feet below sea level is the lowest point in the western hemisphere. (The lowest point in the world is the Dead Sea at something like 1140 feet below sea level.) This place is packed with tourons like us. People are wading in Lake Manly (normally, a dry lake bed), kyaking and just generally playing in the water.

We continue south out of the park and back towards Las Vegas. As the sun sets we cruise the Strip before heading to Binions Horseshoe. There we play some cheap games and get some food. From Vegas we decide to drive to Mesquite, NV right on the Arizona border to find a hotel. In Mesquite we discover that all of the hotels are booked. We continue into Arizona and continue to have no luck. Finally, about 2am we find a place to stay in St. George, Utah.

Rest at last! It is now 2:30 am on Sunday morning, and I haven’t had any sleep since I work up on friday at 7am to go to work. We all crash hard.

After an excruciatingly slow breakfast at Dennys we head back out onto the road and make towards Zion National Park. We park at the visitors center and take the shuttle into the canyon. This is really a spectacular place. Shear sandstone walls rising over a thousand feet into the air. We poke around for a while and then catch a shuttle back to the car. We take the car through the most wild tunnel I have ever seen. It is cut close to the side of the cliff, and there are large windows cut from the tunnel through to the cliff space. It is really wild. We crank up some man of war and cruise through the blackness and out of Zion.

From Zion we head to Bryce Canyon National Park. This is another beutiful canyon and we take our time enjoying the snow-covered hoodoos.

This ends the site seeing portion of our trip and it is now time to burn some miles and get back home. We head straight north out of Bryce on the most desolate stretch of road I have ever seen. We go through the odd town of Antimony, UT (I am sure there were polygamists there) and finally hit I70 again.

As the sun sets we fly down I70 at 90mph through the high palteus and stunning canyons of Utah. The land is amazing and I left thirsting to climb some desert towers.

As night descends we stop in Grand Junction for dinner, before finishing our trip home to Boulder. This trip was much less eventful than our trip to Phoenix, and we get home about 2:30 am monday morning.