I know Waterdog in Belmont pretty well. I’ve ridden there for years, at times as often as four times a week, before work. I was surprised when I joined Passion Trail Bikes’ Wednesday Wride last night and we rode a trail completely new to me.

To be fair, it wasn’t in Waterdog proper, but on the other side of Hastings Drive, on the way to the jump area farther down the hill. But this trail, called “Jack Daniels” by the folks on the ride, was good stuff. It’s steep and loose and has lots of tight turns with berms. It’s pretty soft, probably due to summer conditions and obvious wear—it clearly wasn’t built as a sustainable trail. But it sure was fun, and I’m looking forward to hitting it again the next time I’m at Waterdog.

The Online Photographer has a review of the new Olympus E-P1 Pen online today. I love the concept, but think that the lack of a real viewfinder is a real bummer. I love the 17mm pancake lens, and perhaps the reported chromatic aberration at wide apertures is something that can be corrected in Lightroom fairly simply.

Still, it’s wonderful to see a camera like this getting made and the bottom line is that I’m not really in the market to replace my Canon G9 yet. I think I’m going to continue sitting this generation of small(ish) cameras out. I am definitely looking forward to the E-P2 though. On top of the excellent start with the E-P1, I’m hoping to see a real viewfinder and simple refinements to the rest of what looks to be an excellent camera. Improved autofocus would be nice too, but I’d be willing to manually focus to get an otherwise superb camera.

Dave, one of a group of friends riding up in British Columbia, is posting pics and accounts on his blog of this year’s version of the BC trip. I’m jealous that they’re up there and I’m not, but what’s up with that pic of Brian on those steep features? Check out that pic of his fork. His zip-ties are only 3/4 up the stanchions! I thought this was BC riding!

According to Fortune, the built-in video functionality of the iPhone won’t kill the Flip. While they’re certainly right in the short run, I don’t think it’ll take all that long for the Flip and its ilk to die.

I have the Flip HD and have now had the iPhone 3 GS for a couple of days, and the main saving grace the Flip has is that it shoots in HD and the iPhone doesn’t (yet). But the old adage that “the best camera is the one you have with you” applies here. Now that the iPhone can shoot video, I’m less likely to take the Flip with me anywhere. Yes, I still keep it in the living room to shoot a video of the baby when she does something cute, but when we leave the house, I’d rather not have to remember something else.

As the article points out, the iPhone already surpasses the Flip in functionality, other than the aforementioned HD quality. Users might like that simplicity (although I’d argue that the additional functionality is out-of-the-way in the iPhone’s interface), but I think that the “camcorder industry analysts” who believe that simplicity is what Flip users really like are underestimating the power of one less thing to carry.

I have a heck of a time maintaining a blog. I blame it on the fact that my friends and I have participated in a walled garden of my own creation for many years, and when I think to post something, I think of them as my audience, and I post it there. I’d like to have a more public way to do that, and that’s what I intend this to be.

That said, I’ve started a blog before, and I’m not sure what I can do short of pure willpower to keep it current. Anyway, I’m going to try again.

I’ve set this up with the latest Movable Type and some plugins, and I’m certainly not done. It has a mostly default style, with my “action streams” (read: my updates from other sites) thrown in the sidebar. I’ll work on making this look better, but I didn’t want to wait for that to start posting here.

I like a lot of these ideas. Especially the one about knowing when there’s an HD/SD version of the same show and following my preferences to record the right one.

Just wanted to drop a quick note saying that we’re home. We decided that it was time to come back to real life and look for jobs, and got back on Friday evening, just over 1 month after leaving.

We had a great time, and I obviously stopped writing up the trip here, and perhaps I’ll try and post more later. There are pics on Flickr for those who are interested.

Stats for the trip: 5900 miles on the dot and according to the truck’s trip computer, we averaged 10.2 MPG for the whole trip. We managed to hit all the Swine Flu hotspots, but seem to have dodged the flu itself. (I did feel a bit flu-ey one day, but was feeling better pretty quickly, so it must not have been the bad stuff.)

I managed to re-injure my old knee injury by twisting on it wrong and dislocating it. I set it on the spot, took Advil and iced it and it’s getting better much faster than when I did it many moons ago in karate. Must be getting old…. 😉

I’m behind on writing the trip up, but I’m caught up on uploading pics. They’re gathered in a collection on Flickr, which I keep adding to.

(Pics of this leg.)

After the touristy walk in Tombstone, we headed for Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. That’s a drive of over 450 miles and we were starting in the afternoon, so we set a goal to stop for the night in Las Cruces, NM and complete the rest the following day. We made it to Las Cruces no problem and “camped” in the local Wal-Mart parking lot. For those not into RVing, there are 2 places that are easy to stop for a quick pit-stop when you’re not in a place to actually see it, but are just driving through: a rest stop and Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart are very friendly to RVs, and allow RVs to stop overnight in their parking lots, and many even have their security patrol the area where RVers stop (usually in a far corner of the parking lot). It’s considered bad form to stay more than a night or to fully deploy your gear, but it really makes for a safe, handy place to stay when you just need to get some sleep before moving on. I’m sure Wal-Mart makes a decent amount on people who stop and go in to get a few things while they’re there. We usually buy something when we stop there—it’s the only time I really shop there. Anyway, this stop was uneventful, and we moved on in the morning.

Getting to Carlsbad routes through Texas if you look at the map, and we got a quick look at El Paso as we passed through. It’s clearly a city of religious, mostly Christian, people. I don’t know if they were gearing up for Easter or what, but there were lots of anti-abortion billboards and “praise Jesus” sorts of signs. Anyway, we weren’t planning on stopping in El Paso, and so continued on to Carlsbad Caverns.

Once in the vicinity of the Caverns, we stayed at Brantley Lake State Park, which was a nice, cheap state campground built on a reservoir. Many RVers (including a couple of other Airstreamers) were there, several with boats. It was a nice place to stay, and we enjoyed a nice night—grilled dinner, eating beer and watching the end of Arrested Development (great show that we just caught up with on DVD).

Carlsbad Caverns is a national park that is mostly underground. We did the “Big Room” tour, and when they say big, they mean it. It’s 75-stories underground, but is 25-stories high at its peak. Walking around the outside perimeter is a 1.3ish-mile walk. It was challenging to take pictures—I hadn’t brought my tripod because we were pressed for time and I knew I wouldn’t have time for setups. On-camera flash pics don’t look good because of the harsh shadows and the way the vast rooms swallow up light in wide shots. So I went available-light, and there wasn’t much. The NPS has lit the caverns interestingly, but it’s still hard to capture. I spent a lot of my time at ISO 6400 and 12500, as those were really the only options for an decent pictures at all.

Anyway, the caverns are a constant 56 degrees, year-round. It’s a little humid, but it felt kind of good when combined with the longish walk. I’d be interested in going back and doing it again and taking more of the walks. One of the things the Caverns are famous for is the nightly rush of bats flying out of one of the cavern mouths, heading out to eat insects. There are apparently over 300,000 of them that fly out all at once. Unfortunately for us the bats are still hibernating so it doesn’t start until later in the year, perhaps next month.

Next, on to Texas.

Pics of this leg.

Leaving Grand Canyon was uneventful, other than having our tanks still frozen from the cold nights, making it difficult to dump on the way out. We left south through Flagstaff and headed to Phoenix. Phoenix and its surroundings are strange—there are more strip malls here than I’ve ever seen in my life. If you want a pet food store, fear not, because there’s one in every third strip mall. We stopped at a Best Buy and picked up some things we forgot (card reader to get pics off of the camera, etc.) and after getting an appointment to get our batteries changed out (see Laid-Off Detour #1), we spent the day doing errands like laundry and more shopping. It was amazing to be in 92-degree weather after having just been in the teens the previous evening—no worries about frozen tanks anymore!

That evening we headed south towards Tucson. We pulled in to Catalina State Park, which was one of the nicer campgrounds we’ve stayed at. It was RV-friendly with partial hook-ups, looked nice and was cheap. Our neighbors were very nice and came over to visit the baby, see the Airstream and gave us fresh grapes. We planned to hit Saguaro National Park the next day.

Saguaro National Park is pretty, covered in its namesake cacti. The nature walks weren’t dog-friendly, and it was too hot to leave Lucy anywhere (we don’t leave her in the trailer in case a fuse blows or something, killing the air conditioner and turning the Airstream into an oven). After checking out the nature center, we took a driving tour, which was pretty nice. It turns out that the #2 threat there (after rattlesnakes) are freaking killer bees. They’re all over the place and hyper-aggressive. They attacked the truck most every time we stopped to look at something. The only way to get them to stop attacking is to run .25.-.50 mile from their hive. We never saw a hive, but saw tons of the inch-and-a-half long bees. They looked like scary large wasps to me.

Anyway, there were tons of interesting cacti. The saguaro are huge, some 20-feet tall, and they cover the landscape. Some cacti are in bloom now, but the saguaro don’t bloom for another month or so. I managed to get out of the truck and snag some pics without offending the bees, and escaped unstung. 🙂 We decided to leave the next morning, heading for Tombstone.

Tombstone is the location of the shootout at the OK Corral. It’s a tourist trap, to be sure, but was worth a stop. The most interesting thing here is the Tombstone Courthouse Museum, where they have tons of historical items from the old west, including Wyatt Earp’s pistols. Wyatt’s house still stands, and is a for-pay museum, although we didn’t pay to go in. Fremont Street, the site of the famous gunfight, is still a dirt street, but is now lines with Disneyland-esque buildings which entice tourists with saloon food, western wear and ice cream. We walked up and down, getting rave reviews for our cute baby and nice dog, but didn’t stay long.

We left after a couple of hours, heading towards Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

This detour, part of our stay in Grand Canyon, requires some fairly dull background of how an RV works:

There are three power sources in an Airstream: 1. Propane tanks (ours has 2 tanks, each holding about 8-gallons, which is typically good for several days of normal use. The propane powers most important things: the kitchen, including the refrigerator, and the furnace). 2. batteries (which provide 12 V current for lights, fans, and the stereo). 3. 120/240 V AC shore power (provided externally). When you hear of a campground having “full hookups”, that includes AC shore power, which charges the trailer’s 12 V batteries and provides power to the household plugs, thus enabling the TV and air conditioner. RVs frequently use gas or propane generators when there is no shore power available. This works well, but uses fuel and makes noise (most campgrounds have restrictions on when you can run generators because of the noise). We have 2 pretty quiet Honda generators that can run in tandem providing all the power the trailer needs for 15-20 hours on 2 gallons of gas.

When we got Minnie, our motorhome, it came with two 12 V batteries, but ones that are supposed to be suited to RV usage, not starting cars. The batteries were never very good, and we swapped them for two 6 V golf cart batteries wired serially to look like a large 12 V battery. This worked very well, and we never had a problem with them. Unfortunately the Airstream’s battery box wasn’t big enough for the taller 6 V batteries, so we kept the two new batteries that it came with, which were much like the ones in the Minnie. And they sucked again. On top of that, though, I left the trailer plugged in since we bought it, thinking that its charger was sophisticated enough to keep the batteries charged without frying them. I was wrong, leading to some fried batteries. They worked, but even more poorly than before.

That’s enough of all that background. Remember the night it snowed and was freezing cold? Well, up until then, we’d run the generators when it was allowed, charging the batteries. When we had left home, I’d filled the propane, but one tank wouldn’t take any more, so it just had whatever was left from the last trip, which clearly wasn’t a lot. I didn’t worry too much about it, because we’d never completely finished one tank before finding a place to refill. So we had just over one tank of propane, and two generators full of gas. We ran the generators more than normal because of the shitty batteries. We ran the furnace much more than normal, because of the cold-ass weather. You can see a problem coming, I’m sure.

During the evening, we noticed the batteries were not doing well, the cold weather hurting their already shitty performance. We turned off everything in the trailer except the furnace and went to bed. The problem came when the batteries died completely during the night. You might remember back to how I said that the furnace runs on propane, not electricity, and think we’d be OK. Unfortunately the blower for the furnace and the thermostat that controls it both run on electricity. So when the batteries died, so effectively did our heat.

The baby was fine, cuddled nicely between two warm parents. But let me tell you that any piece of us that wasn’t covered with a blanket was fucking freezing cold by morning. 8 AM rolled around, and I had to haul my ass out of the warm bed and out into ice and snow to start the generators to get the heat back on. And, you guessed it, we’d run the generators so much to compensate for the batteries that they were out of gas. So I had to load the generators into the truck and drive to the gas station to refill them. That sucked, but the heat was back on and we’d survived.

The next night, we knew the batteries were on their last legs, and so really ran the generators as much as possible and kept our use of battery power to an absolute minimum, since the forecast was an even colder 17 degrees. The batteries died again, but we made it farther into the next morning and it wasn’t as bad as the first time. I went out at 8 AM again to start the generators. They kicked on but soon after—you probably guessed it—the propane ran out. We made it through, but it was clear we were going to have to be more on top of our power. We had the propane refilled (and this time, the second tank filled fine).

Seriously cold weather uses serious energy that we weren’t prepared for, obviously.

Upon leaving Grand Canyon and getting back to civilization (around Flagstaff), we decided to have our batteries swapped for the good ones. This required us to have the battery box modified slightly, so we began making calls to places in the area. There are a ton of RV places in and around Phoenix, and we found one that could accommodate us and they got it done in one day. While they worked on that, we picked up some other miscellaneous things we figured out we’d forgotten, including a car charger for our iPhones—yes, another battery problem. We had a car charger, but the one that we had in the truck stopped working and our phones were dying.

With big new batteries in the Airstream and our phones juiced up, we are finally no longer power deficient. 🙂

We started fairly slowly—there’s a lot to arrange before leaving for a 5-week trip that you don’t have to do as much of before a smaller trip. For instance, we canceled our trash collection for a month. We have 2 people looking in on the cats (since it’s a long time and it’s best to not over-burden just one friend—thanks again, Beau). We packed everything we could think of (knowing that’s really impossible) and set out from San Jose on Tuesday, March 31 at just after 2, heading generally towards the Grand Canyon.

We made our way through California through Gilroy, down I-5 and across US 40. Given that we have a baby and a dog with us and are towing a trailer, we move more slowly that we might otherwise, but we knew that when we decided to take the trip. We made it as far as Ludlow, a bit shy of the Arizona border. We pulled off in a rest stop to sleep for the night, which is a bit noisy, but otherwise fine (and free!). The next day, we got up, ate breakfast (one of the joys of having an RV for a trip like this) and made it the rest of the way to Grand Canyon.

We’d made reservations for the campground in the park through Sunday morning. One nice thing about state and federal campground is that they’re cheap—we paid $18 per night to stay right on the south rim. Accommodations that close can be easily over $300 per night. We had also packed the trailer to the gills with food from home, so we planned on eating in the trailer most meals (in fact, we only ate in a restaurant once while in the canyon, and it was easily the worst meal we had the whole time).

I’d been to the Grand Canyon before and was a bit underwhelmed. This time, with more time to explore, I enjoyed it a lot more. We did all of the free tours, which entail buses that take you along the various parts of the south rim and let you on-and-off as much as you like. The first two days, we hiked along the part goes from just above the visitors’ center to the start of the “red line”, which is a longer hike. We did that the third day, using buses to get to a lot of the points-of-interest there, and walking a little less. The Grand Canyon isn’t particularly dog-friendly—dogs (or strollers for that matter) are not allowed on the buses—but they did have a kennel that we used a little when we wanted to do something where the dog wasn’t allowed.

The weather was weird, but mostly in a good way as far as seeing the canyon goes. It was brisk the first day, but incredibly clear, leading to good views of the canyon. As we got back to camp, it started snowing, which we knew was a possibility, but it actually came down quite a bit more than was forecast. It got down to the mid-twenties that night, which led to some interesting trailer issues, which you can read about in the post (coming soon), “I need more power!”. The next night was even colder: 17 degrees. Our tanks froze, but nothing burst. Whew!

The days were cold, but not nearly as severe, and the crisp weather really made for some great views of the canyon. There are far fewer people in the canyon in the spring, and the guides indicated that the combination of the views, cooler weather and fewer people made this time of year one of the best to see the Grand Canyon. I had a good time and recommend coming this time of year if you can manage it.

Soon enough Sunday came, and we rolled towards Phoenix….

Pics are in my Grand Canyon set on Flickr.

Val and I, both being unemployed at the moment, have decided to treat this as an opportunity and are planning on leaving town for awhile. We’re loading up the Airstream now with the goal of rolling out on Tuesday. Our initial destination is the Grand Canyon, but our larger plan is to head east via the southern states, potentially getting as far as New Orleans.

We had plans to meet friends in Fruita and Moab the first week of May for a bike trip, and we now plan to meet them on the way back from this trip, which will make this about a 5-week excursion. We’re planning on being very flexible and taking more time if we find something really interesting and so aren’t putting too many expectations on distance.

We should be well-connected technologically-speaking—I’ve equipped the Airstream with a WiFi router that uses a 3 G wireless card to give us a mobile internet station, and of course we’ll have our phones. We’ll start looking for jobs remotely on the second half of our trip and hopefully have some interviews queued when we get back.

Anyway, we’re excited (and of course a little nervous) about such a large trip and the unstructured nature of our lives at this point, but we both think it’s something we’ll look back on as having been worthwhile, and hopefully that will bear out. Hopefully we’ll be able to, pardon the cliché, turn these lemons into lemonade.

I got this from the 1password support forums:

To enable 1password in Safari 4 Beta:

- Quit Safari - Locate 1Password in your /Applications folder - Ctrl-click > Show Package Contents - Contents > Resources > SupportedBrowsers.plist - Root > Safari > MaxBundleVersion > Change value to 5528.16 - Start Safari

Works great for me.

UPDATE:

I didn’t mention this in the main post, but the “1P” button doesn’t show up, but the keyboard shortcuts still do. Command-\ is your friend. (Thanks, Etay.)

UPDATE 2:

There’s a new beta of 1Password that supports Safari 4 beta. Go to Preferences → Updates, make sure you have “Include Beta Versions” checked and update.

I completely agree with John Gruber about the Best Picture Oscar. Well, at least I agree with the premise that he puts forth—I haven’t seen WALL-E, so I can’t really comment directly about that, although it’s definitely on my Netflix queue. The Oscars is a popularity contest, not among people who love movies necessarily, but of the movie-making establishment. This means that the process in inherently political more than a straight vote on the absolute merits of the movie itself.

All that said, I had even less skin in the game last night. I hadn’t seen any of the movies that were nominated. Most of them came out late in the year, after Ainsley came along, making it hard for me to get to the theater. Either that, or I didn’t care about the movie. Either way, not a lot for me on this year’s version of the Oscars.