razmaspaz

Its the dead of winter, so to stave off the cold I turn to summer trip planning.

For me, backpacking is the hub that all of my other hobbies shoot out from. It offers an excuse for sightseeing, fishing, cooking, photography, and even reading. I suppose if I was so inclined I could do some writing too.

Saturday I’m getting together with friends to plan a trip out west. We aren’t really sure yet where the trip will be, but the Grand Canyon or Rocky Mountain National Park come to mind as good choices. A rim to rim hike is on my life list of things to do, as is summiting a 14er.

All this indoors stuff is killing me. Trip planning is like my therapy. Well that and buying gear. Something I haven’t been doing much of this year. Once I get the location nailed down, I’m sure I’ll have a list of stuff I need.

Right now though I’ve got a couple things on the list:

Big Agnes Seedhouse 2 Superlight tent: I have a tent, and its a good tent. It weighs less than 6 pounds, is pretty much bombproof, and I don’t get much condensation in it. Problem is, last time out I used a smaller, lighter pack, and it was just too full. I’ve caught the lightweight bug. I’m hoping ot lower my core pack weight by a couple more pounds this year, and this tent, at 2lbs. 14oz. could be just the ticket.

MontBell America, Inc. Ultralight Down Jacket - Men’s: Either the Rockies or the Grand Canyon can get cold. I think its time I picked up some insurance against cold weather. This piece was pretty highly rated by backpaker, and at 7oz, its like its not even in the pack.

Primus EtaPower Express Fuel Efficient Stove: I’ve also got one of these on the list. I went on a trip last fall with a guy who had its big borther (Primus EtaPower EF Fuel Efficient Stove). The EtaPower rocks. The EtaPower is a little heavy, but the Express, well if it can boil water as fast as the EtaPower, and simmer anywhere close to as well as Big Bro, I’m all over it.

Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras: I don’t know that its really backpacking gear, but the new object of my affection is a wide angle lens. I’ve read mixed reviews about lens problems, but it sounds like Sigma has been quick to take care of them, and this sounds like a great lens for an adventure to the Grand Canyon or the top of Longs Peak. This is another big reason to lighten the pack load, more weight can be allocated to carrying camera equipment.

If you’re wondering about all the links to Amazon, here’s the deal.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/LAW03630012008-1.htm

That’s really all that needs to be said.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not quick to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to upgrading to new technology. I didn’t immediately upgrade to Leopard when it came out, and I’m glad I waited. HDTV is another one of those areas where I’ve been slow to come around.

Basically I haven’t felt comfortable upgrading. This is still one of those fast moving streams where the technology changes faster than the manufacturers can put out products. To me that says “stay away”. I could do early adopter if things cost $50-$100, but we’re talking thousands of dollars here. Three or four years ago, I thought I had it all figured out. Component was the cable of choice, optical and coaxial were carrying sound, and DVI was the computer architecture of choice. Then along came this HDMI thing. About 5 years ago I bought a decently expensive receiver that I thought would carry me into the HD age just fine. I don’t even think it would get me in the game today. I can’t imagine if I had bought a TV then. I’d be crying in my melted plasma puddle right now.

Despite my wariness, I’m encouraged. That’s right, me, encouraged. It seems like the industry is starting to standardize. HDMI looks like the official cable of the future, and surprisingly, it looks like Blu-Ray came out on top in the format war in spite of its ridiculously stupid name. On top of that prices are starting to stabilize and drop a bit, even if the dollar won’t buy what it used to. So, I’m back to asking that question, “is it time to take the plunge?”

I’ve been fooling with PicLens today. My recent foray into photography has caused me to up my consumption of photographs. I’ve been toying with a way efficiently subscribe to photostreams in flickr, picasa and the like. PicLens will most certainly be the method of choice for viewing these photos.

Now if I can just find a way to get this to work with a feed aggregator it would be most excellent.

My biggest gripe to date about Leopard has been that Command+Tab cycles through every running application, not just the ones active in the current “Space”.

I just stumbled on a little gem totally by accident this morning. It turns out that Ctrl+F4 will cycle through the applications in the active space. It doesn’t give that pretty GUI look that Command+Tab does, but it performs the function.

This may very well make my day, and its only 8:30. Here’s to a good day after yesterday’s “worst day of the year”.

I got the MacBook Pro back today. I feel so much more complete. It got a new logic board, but remains entirely intact from a functional standpoint. The hard drive still has all my glorious data. I backup, but some things just don’t make it through the backup/restore process, so its always nice to know that there is one less step in putting life back together.

The biggest difference I’m noticing right off the bat is a speed bump. Things must have been slowly failing over the past week or so, because my initial impression of Leopard was that it killed my performance, not so. Leopard screams like a high class whore (not that I would know, but one imagines). I’m very happy.

Its amazing how a well oiled machine becomes like an appendage. I’ve been through some serious withdrawal symptoms this past week. I think the mild flu I suffered though was some sort of reaction to not having a mac around. This thing seriously makes my life simpler and less cluttered. Maybe a real return to normal is possible now. We’ll see.

I bought my house before I had 20% to put down on it. That meant that I had to either get private mortgage insurance (PMI) or take a second loan to cover the difference between my down payment and the 80% part of my loan. I chose the latter as it allowed me to avoid the cost of PMI.

This isn’t a post about which is better, or the dangers of ARMs (which I don’t have). Thats a topic that has been discussed at length now in the news, and at the water cooler. This is a post about a discovery I made while making an extra payment on my loan today.

I had some extra money this month to put towards my loan. My wife and I are trying to pay this off soon in an effort to lower out monthly expenses. What was interesting about the extra payment, was that it actually counted as a payment. Even more interesting, was that making yet another payment counted as well. As it turns out, each additional payment I make on the loan pushes back the due date of my next payment. That means that if I break up my extra payments into lumps, I can extend my payment date out several years.

I should qualify this. Each payment has to be more than the actual amount for a payment, or it won’t count. “So what”, you may be saying. Well here’s the rub. If I have a full year of extra payments banked, and I fall on hard times, well I can just not not make payments on the loan. Sure I’m racking up interest in the meantime, but I DON’T HAVE TO MAKE A PAYMENT. Thats huge. In the event that I want or need to take a year off from work, or that I lose my job, my loan won’t go into default. So now, not only am I paying off my loan faster, decreasing my debt load, but I’m also building an insurance policy for the future. And it doesn’t cost me a dime, in fact you could say it pays me in the form of avoided interest.

If you have a mortgage and you are making extra payments, you should look into this. I know from now on I’m making my extra payments in increments.  See if your bank will let you do this too.

I must say I’ve been fairly anti Sun over the last few years. That’s Sun Micro, not sun (as in the big ball of fire hovering in our daytime sky). After getting burned badly on early versions of NetBeans and Sun Application Server, I shied away from most of the stuff coming out their doors. Eclipse, JBoss, Tomcat, it all just seemed so much better, and easier. But the recent rash (rash is a bad word, maybe heaping) of praise for Glassfish has caused me to take a second look.

Glassfish always seemed to like someones pet project at Sun. An undertaking that looked doomed from the start due to the fact that it was mired in obscurity, had a stupid name, and frankly came from Sun.

JBoss wouldn’t play nice when I tried to deploy a simple session bean as a web service the other day, so maybe I’ll give Glassfish a try. Anyone out there have any experiences with it good or bad?

I know its a little New Year’s predictions, but Damnit, this blog didn’t even exist on New Year’s.  Sun Bought MySQL Today, so here’s my prediction:

Sun Abandons Solaris, and fully embraces Linux.  If that wasn’t enough, fueled by their new acquisition, they drop their commitment to Java, leaving it in the lap of Open JDK (suckers), and begin work on an enterprise version of PHP.  To top it all off they’ll flush glassfish down the toilet (hey thats kinda funny), and embrace Apache as the one true way.

I’m pretty hosed up this morning. My Mac won’t boot. Not even a whisper out of it when I hit the power button. All signs point ot the PRAM, which is supposed to be repairable by pushing the power button for 5 seconds with the battery out of the machine. That didn’t get the job done though, so Its off to the Apple store tonight for a session with a genius.

Hopefully I’m going to get out of this without a big bill at the end. Hard to say with Apple though. This computer is right at the 1 yr mark. You just never know.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll return with reports of a happy again Mac. Maybe!