Betsy & Hope are off to “bag a president” (i.e. climb a mountain in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire). And true to form,their motto for the trip is: Go Big or Go Home

Ten Highest Peaks of the Presidential Range

Yep, they’re going for Mt Washington. One of the most valuable tools for this trip has been the subscription to the White Mountain Guide Online.
They already knew they were going to be hiking from Pinkham Notch to the summit of Mt. Washington, so I searched for a route among the “suggested Hikes”. Going to the summit appears to be strenuous.
It’s pretty cool to see the whole of the Boott Spur Loop laid out on a map:
But you don’t feel that in your gut like this:

Hope, I’ve added waypoints and much trail description in this Google Earth file.

My wife hikes the Palmetto Trail with her childhood friend. They call me “Compass” because I get on Google Earth and map out their route then download it into the GPS. The maps provided by the Palmetto Conservation Foundation have UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) coordinates, which are a whole other ballgame from Lat/Long.

After 10 long minutes of scouring the web, I found one site that converted the UTM coordinates to latitude / longitude: The Canadian Spatial Reference System’s GSRUG at http://www.geod.nrcan.gc.ca/apps/gsrug/utm_e.php

The link I found was broken (from a 2005 keyhole bbs post) – so here’s the product description from the CSRS website:

Geodetic Survey Routine, UTM/TM to/from Geographic coordinate conversion. Compute either Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates from the geographic latitude and longitude of a point or the reverse conversion.

Scott Adams is the author of the Dilbert cartoon series. He also writes a daily blog where, as near as I can tell, he tries to instigate people into vehemently attacking or defending some point of view in an argument that cannot be resolved. The topics he presents are often thought-provoking, and he makes interesting (if inflammatory) arguments.

My guess is that this is one way he plumbs the public psyche for material – he can get a reasonable approximation of which topics generate the most emotional response. It would make the kind of television that I can’t bear to watch – people being goaded into espousing a position they haven’t fully considered, and then sticking to their guns as their argument is torn to shreds around them. But I can conveniently avoid that part of it by not delving into the comment strings.

“Aggravavor” is the term my kids use when one of their siblings is doing the psychological equivalent of poking them with a stick – as in “Daddy, Jack’s being an aggravavor. He won’t stop singing I want my mullet back.” Scott Adams is an aggravavor on his weblog.

But he’s an entertaining and sometimes informative aggravavor. I enjoyed his 3-part post on global warming, enough to share the links here:

• Global Warming – Part 1
• Global Warming – Part 2
• Global Warming – Part 3

Jack’s 4th birthday was just a few days away, and we hadn’t gotten him a present yet. We knew there were going to be plenty of trains and cars and books and games, but I wanted to get him an honest to goodness toy.

Enter a metafilter post titled Birthday present for a 4 year old boy?, and a no-nonsense post from Otis:

Well, I like rockets as much as the next guy. And I know Jack has some stomp power. Plus he could play with this outside with his buddy Fischer. To be fair, I did look at the other ideas on the page, but most were along the same lines as Chrischris – things Jack already has too many of – or kendrak, who is obviously buying toys for her nephew to get back at her older sister for being mom’s favorite.

So, off to Hollipops I go. I was in and out in 15 minutes and even had some bonus little circes for the girls. This is a self contained launcher with handle and storage. Kids have no problem operating this all by themselves – the rockets are soft and it doesn’t take much force to get the rockets flying!

And as you can see from the pictures, a good time was had by all!

Jack gets his stomp on:

Mom takes a turn!

Daddy performs load test (passed BTW):

Gotta have it right now?