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.

Jake, I love to race realistic sims as much as the next guy, but sometimes you want to stomp the pedal and hit 650km/h on the straightaway (that’s 403.9 mph for those playing along at home). I’ve been playing this game for a couple of years and they just came out with a new version. Trackmania has always put sim graphics on an arcade racer and given it to you full on. Dude, you can brake while you’re in the air!

Official Game Site of Trackmania Nations Forever

In case you’re still not convinced to give it a try – it’s FREE – here’s a trailer:

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.

I suppose it would just illustrate my kinship with these souls to publish a formula from my hypothesis that “15 minutes of fame” is an outdated concept. Given that News 2.0 is presented on nearly ubiquitous media and is available on demand, the baseline fame “hang time” will vary as a function of the true mass appeal of the story. No longer will “15 minutes of fame” be awarded solely by media outlets – now spotlight seekers have the power to grab the attention of the media on the internet, who can pick up the story and award t minutes of fame. The formula is

t = (e^(1/x) + ln(x))
x = number of internet webpage views
f(10) = 3
f(100) = 6
f(1,000) = 8
f(10,000) = 10
f(100,000) = 13
f(1,000,000) = 15


Case in point, this story on WIRED caught my eye:

Star Wars-Obsessed Rocket Geeks Build and Launch an X-Wing Fighter

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/15-12/st_xwing

But it’s only worth sharing because of this response:

What Really Happened to the Life Size X-Wing

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

No: If you already have WinXP on a computer that is less than 3 years old, I’m a big fan of ftain’t bro’akded, do’an fuxut.

No, just buy a new PC: If you have WinXP on a PC that’s 3-5 years old and you think an upgrade to Vista will “make it run better” you’ve been misled. Order a new Gateway online or pick one up at Best Buy with Vista preinstalled. Spend between $1000 and $1500. Don’t want to spend that much? Don’t do anything. Your PC is just fine.

No, buy a new PC: If you have Win2K/Me/98 as your desktop OS, then it’s probably time. Order a new Gateway online or pick one up at Best Buy with Vista preinstalled. Don’t spend more than $1000, and make sure you get an LCD monitor. You will get a computer comparable to the the one I have sitting on my desk at home.

^*If you want to be running the latest and greatest software for it’s own sake, then by all means upgrade. But then you already knew the reasoning behind my “No” answers. Oh, and the whole reason I started this post is because Ken Fisher at Ars Technica has put together a most clear and readable synopsis of the difference between OEM and Retail versions of Microsoft’s OS, and I wanted to share.

It won’t surprise those of you who know how attuned I am to the 4 to 8 year old mind that I got wise to their pop-culture hijinks when somebody else told me about it. My feed reader picked the story up from Ars Technica, and I drilled on down to Slate. Anyway, the title says it all: jTunes, The insanely great songs Apple won’t let you hear. Besides Japan,

… there are 20 more countries where iTunes users can lurk among the samples, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, and Australia. They won’t let you buy their songs, either. You can find an EP of Scottish sensations the Fratellis at iTunes United States, for instance, but their hit glam singalong “Chelsea Dagger” is in nearly every country except the United States. (Their randy burlesque video for it, naturally, is all over YouTube.)

What? I can check out foreign music on YouTube? OK, I’m hip…

NOW PRESENTING, IN THEIR BBEOJ.COM DEBUT, … THE STRAIGHTENERS AND THEIR YouTube HIT KILLER TUNE

Whoa, they Rock. With a capital R. And that’s cool. Hip time must be over. Sigh.

The truly cool among you can check out the Slate article for more info (and more video links)…

B – out.

Yes, he used the “new” version and I only ever messed with the original… but it’s still very cool.

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?

Long story short: after trying-on numerous open-source CMS frameworks like a bride at a discount wedding-dress warehouse sale, I found Textpattern to be the one for me.

[EDIT - I've since switched to WordPress, as 2.0 provides non-klugey pages and a KISS interface. Watch this space for more info, or drop me a line if you have questions.]

First runners-up

• Drupal almost had me. I got a simple website up and running quickly – one static “about” page and one blog page. The I started digging in to extending it to include basic custom db -driven pages and got frustrated with the model. You might pick it up right away, it just didn’t “click” for me.
• e107 is geared towards membership sites, with well thought out emphasis on users and permissions and forums. It includes an elaborate interface for managing the various and sundry settings required of a “community” site. Perfect if that’s what you need. I need a simple framework with lots of transparency.

Second runners-up

• I wanted to like MovableType, I really did. But setting up a static page felt too kluge-y, and it’s something I’ll be doing quite often for clients.
• WordPress ditto

Honorable .NET 2.0 Mentions

• Umbraco is a very powerful and highly configurable framework. If you ALWAYS want control over everything (e.g. you want to write it all from scratch every time), then this is the framework for you. I need something a little more “lightweight”.
• MojoPortal, DotNetNuke, RainbowPortal – All these apps are community servers of one flavor or another, and didn’t fit my needs. Which is too bad, as my hosting company supports .NET 2.0 on MSSQL way better than php/MySQL on IIS.

Not evaluated (yet…)

• Django – a “high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design” I don’t know python at all, but when the website claims that “It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly” – they are throwing down the gauntlet. I may have to get a *nix hosting account just to try this one out, as I doubt my current budget hoster will support a python distribution.
• Ruby On Rails – another language I don’t know, but lots of good buzz from the technorati. I first heard of Ruby about five years ago, and have been looking for an excuse to learn it ever since…

And the winner is… TextPattern

• Pros – total transparency to the html/css, and it fits my mental model of a simple web system.
• Cons – requires mod_rewrite (or similar) for non-messy urls. This means tweaking downloaded templates, but I’ll probably end up tweaking them anyway (or starting from scratch).

Yes, it is easy to set up for blogging. But it’s also easy to set up for static pages, or image galleries or just about anything your clients want. And they can have control of the content.

Or {gasp!} try your hand at php and extend it – I’ve got a couple of applications in mind and will link to them from here as they progress.