A friend and I were kicking back in easy chairs in my home office recently, sipping some wonderful Cream Ale that my friend had brewed when the girls burst into the room pointing at the window. “Look! Look outside!” one yelped, “I see our next door neighbor with a camera!” said the other. A bit groggy from the ale, we forced ourselves out of the comfortable chairs and stumbled to peer out the window. “What is it?” I asked. I saw nothing out of the window, but the clamour in the front room told me they were probably seeing something out front now. Making our way in there, we were lucky enough to spy the object of the girls’ excitement – a male Indian peafowl (a peacock) strutting around on the lawn. Peacocks are the national bird of India and Pakistan, and while there are a few in sanctuaries on the Island, as far as I know there aren’t any communities living in the woods hereabouts. Grabbing our cameras we caught some images of this most impressively arrayed fowl, but weren’t lucky enough to see him fan his brilliant plumage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Saw a powerful and thought-provoking film today on NetFlix called 180° SOUTH by Jeff Johnson which is a film record of his journey to Patagonia in the footsteps of his heros Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia, Inc. the outdoor clothing company) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and co-founder of ESPRIT). Environmentally-aware, these guys are self-described “dirt bags” who would spend most of their time in the sixties hiking, surfing, camping, and mountain climbing in the great wilderness areas of the west and eventually built businesses around what they loved to do. Their successes eventually allowed them the resources to help create and preserve huge tracks of land in South America even as the countries there were building dams and paper pulp mills and power plants to fuel their fledgling economies. Jeff’s trip (by boat) gets delayed when they shipwreck and are forced to detour to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) to re-mast. The lesson of the deforestation of Easter Island by islanders driven in competition to build ever larger status Moai is not lost on the film-maker (there is still disagreement about this in the scientific community). The film’s name comes from a comment that if progress up a mountain brings you to a cliff does it make sense to march into the chasm when you could instead turn 180 degrees around and take a step forward? Beautiful scenery, interesting characters, important social issues, awesome soundtrack largely by Ugly Casanova (Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse) and James Mercer, though the haunting melody sung by Mahoke, a girl Jeff meets on Easter Island and decides to take the journey with him may rank as my favorite song in the film.

My wife has been reading books on her palm pilot for years but when the prices began to fall on the e-ink e-readers recently I urged her to get one of those instead. The e-ink screens aren’t backlit, so you have to read them in a lit room or outside but they’re reflective (like real paper) so they’re much easier on the eyes than what is, on LCD screens, essentially staring into a glowing lamp. We looked at the Amazon Kindle, the Sony e-reader and the B&N Nook. I’m a long time Amazon customer, so it seemed natural that we’d go for the Kindle, but the Kindle doesn’t support the electronic book formats that our library uses and I’m not a fan of vendor lock in like that. Also, we were afraid that we’d end up spending a lot of money for Amazon content that we weren’t planning to do because it would be so easy. Sony was out because I’m a rabid anti-Sony person – I won’t buy anything made by that company for multiple reasons no matter how great it might be – don’t get me started. The Nook runs Android, supports our library’s file format (ePub, an open but DRM-able format), costs less. While I don’t like the idea of the separate touch screen, at least it doesn’t have a bunch of stupid blackberry-like buttons on it, so we decided on the Nook – here’s some quick first impressions:

Read the rest of this entry »

The girls enjoyed their introductory ride at CP yesterday, but I still needed to get my own ride in. The skies were threatening, but the weather maps looked like I’d have at least a few hours before anything serious was to roll in so I suited up and headed up to Rocky Point [map in pdf]. This was my first trip over to RP this year and I didn’t intend to do the whole thing. If you do every single black diamond and optional West Side loop its something over 20 miles which for me is a 2 hour ride. I skipped the West Side, did a few of the black diamonds (the Moguls and Campsite), then bailed down Firestone Road for a total of 11 miles in 1 hour 10. The trails at RP are nice and smooth track, without roots and you can get up serious speed at some points.

Firestone Road isn’t a fire break – its a road that was used on the RCA property to connect the main powerhouse building of Radio Central with a smaller building to the North (currently only marked by a small area surrounded by a chain link fence with a Hazardous Materials sign on it). When I was younger…

Read the rest of this entry »