Obsession #1 - Digital SLR selection

Well, I think others would judge this to be my #1 obsession, so I will start here.

It is a particularly good candidate in the obsession category, because I seem to be stuck in an endless loop - market research SLRs, visit the same web pages over an over again, check prices, do nothing, repeat the entire cycle.

Part of it is that there is no good solution with works for me right now, and I am not in a real hurry, and part of it is that now that I am used to checking these things out, I don't know how to stop.

Here is how it started. In the beginning, many, many years ago, digital photography started to be used by real people. But film was still better. Then, around 2002, after watching patiently for years, I finally determined that the high-end point and shoot market was mature enough - that in this area it did everything better than film point and shoots. So I finally bought a Canon G3.

This turned out to be a great decision. Almost 5 years later (they are now on the Canon G8!) my G3 still does a great job, and it has literally revived photography for me - changed it completely. So, even if my camera which cost $850 5 years ago is now about $200+ on the used market, it still solves most of my day-to-day photography needs.

During this period, digital SLRs were just a niche market at the low end, or WAY too expensive at the high end. Simply put, the SLR market was not ready yet for me - anything I bought I figured I would need to replace in several years because something better would come out. So I waited.

Meanwhile I continued to use the point and shoot (a rather nice one at that). I am amazed at how much of the normal SLR things I could do with it (and some things I could not do with an SLR). But, I still longed for my SLR, which I have not used since getting the G3. With time, I knew that I would end up with another camera.

About 3 years ago, a friend of ours (Yana) bought a Canon Rebel. This was the first viable "consumer SLR" camera. I was impressed by the pictures it took, and it effectively started the clock ticking on the selection of a camera.

The whole SLR scene has almost come together in late 2006, with four dominant SLR models, from four different manufacturers each offering a fantastic feature set - and one with which one could live for many years without buying a new camera. These are:

• Canon XTi - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos400d/ - this is a 10 MP successor to the Canon Rebel line. Great price, possibly the best image quality sensor wise, and a good feature set. Not perfect in several areas, but very good indeed.
• Nikon G80 - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond80/ - to me this very closely approaches a perfect SLR, with great ergonomics. It is my front-runner at the time. Nikon also has one of the most desired lenses on the market - a 18 to 200 mm zoom (!!!) that is actually very good. There are some issues (see a later post), but none are with the camera itself. Frankly, if I could get the len I wanted now for the list price, I may have already bought it. But everyone wants this lens, and it is either back ordered for 4 months (at the list price), or sold in-stock at $300+ above list. So the package at this time is out of my price range or not available. Hence temporary paralysis.
• Sony DLSR-A100 - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydslra100/ - very interesting camera indeed, and probably by many standards the deal of the year. Image stabilization built in, good lenses, and a very low price for what you get. For the market they are reaching for, a best buy, it seems. I think they are a little off my market, however, because first of all, I don't yet trust their ability to make an SLR, and some of the features are a bit, well, Sony-like. And I have not forgiven them for using a proprietary SONY flash hot-shoe. Very Sony. But for many, take a serious look at this late-comer to the party.
• Pentax K10D - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxk10d/- this WAS my leading contender a bit back, and is now in second place. It got dinged in its review on JPEG image quality, but this can be fixed in a future software upgrade, which they will probably do some day. It also has in-camera image stabilization, and very good Pentax lenses. But lenses when you look at the details are the problem here. To make a long story short, they don't have (yet) any wide-range lenses that are also ultrasonic motor focusing yet. Pentax will introduce them in "2007 and beyond", but I am worried about the price.

Well, that's enough for starters - I will continue this in a future entry.

Winter, finally

Well, the last 3 days have proven that winter is not going to pass us by entirely. It is now the end of January, and sure enough, it even feels like it. High temperatures around -8, and lows around -16 (Celsius). And about 15 cm of fluffy snow. Maybe this weekend skiing will be possible!

Nina is going through mid-term exam week, and still seems to be alive, although at times we may have to change that to be "barely alive". Gwendolyn is keeping herself quite busy even without classes at the moment. I am I pursuing my various obsessions. I think rather than corrupt this post with them, I will write separate entries for them.

Evil things to do to your roommate!

I was talking with a female co-worker of mine, and somehow the discussion of evil things to do to people came up. Much to my surprise, said person (whose name is being withheld to protect the guilty) did indeed have an evil past! Here are two of her dirty deeds (as opposed to "the" dirty deed - an entirely different thing....):

Story 1:

She and her roommate had bunk beds, one on top of another. Her roomie's is on top. One night she made sure she was not seen arriving home when her roommate got ready for bed. But she watched from afar. Knowing her roommates routine, she waited until said roomie crossed the hall to the bathroom for that final bathroom stop. After the door closed, she quickly went into the room, crawled into the top bunk, and buried herself completely in the covers. And waited. And waited... Finally, roomie comes in, sleepily climbs the ladder, and starts to climb into bed..... and .... suddently out pops my coworker, arms agape, yelling "Ahhhhh!!!!". As it happens these arms than had to GRAB the roomie, who was starting to fall down the ladder. (Apparently they are still good friends)

Story 2:

This is a real treat! Different victim (not her roomie but rather a suitemate). This joke turned out a bit better than planned, as it happens. Here is the setup - in the suite bathroom. Victim showering in the next stall. She had been in there a while. My brave co-worker takes a packet of cherry crystal light powder (a diet drink mix - essentially powdered red dye), and throws a handful over the top of the curtain. And runs.

Well, here is what she did NOT know when she did this. Her suitemate was apparently shaving at the time, with shaving cream here and there, sharp blade in hand, against skin.

Heard while running out of the door: Oh my god - I'm bleeding!!!!

Evil, very evil!

Three cool web sites to spend your money on....

http://www.sciplus.com/ - just cool science things. Very amusing text
http://www.widgetsupply.com/ - best gadgets and hobby tool site around!
http://www.firefox-fx.com/ - firework and rocketry site. One of the few sites still selling chemicals, so probably an FBI front :-) Buy your oxidizing agents while they are still legal! :-)

I doubt I can exactly blame president Bush, but...

It is really warm today. All week it has been at least 8 degrees, and now it is a balmy 13 degrees (56 degrees F)!!! And what am I doing? Sitting in the basement of my building and working!

Oh well, no complaints, at least when its this warm. I think the immediate blame is now formally attributed to El Nino. But for that I will try blaming Bush!

It is amazing on how busy things are. A full week of Christmas vacation has gone by, and I did not even find time to write in this blog. Wow! In the meanwhile, check out our photo site. At least there are some pictures of what we did. If I get a chance (no promised today) I will try to "bloggify" it here.

Finally, my toilet entry for the month (some readers have been telling me I am obsessed by toilets, based on several previous posts). The only thing we have are clogged and overflowing toilets here at home now and then. And that is not that funny...

Atlanta airport

On way to San Diego (OK, Carlsbad, for those who care) California, I flew via Atlanta, GA airport. This is not normally an airport I fly though except when going to Florida, and it has been a while. This is a fairly new airport (maybe they built it for the Olympics 8 years ago, I don't know), and it has several peculiarities.

After eating lunch, I was walking to my gate I needed to attend to my biology, so to speak. No problem, just follow the signs. Well, I walk, and walk and walk down the terminal corridor, and the helpful signs gave up directing me. No bathroom! I turn around, and walk the 100 m back to where I had started. I go the other direction, and finally have to walk another 150m before a find a place. Do they really space their bathrooms 250 m apart?

Inside it was very clean, very modern, very new. And of course had a fancy sink with a "touchless" design. Two faucets, identical - one to the left, one to the right. Well, I want HOT water, so I select that one.

Green soap gets deposited onto my (dry) hands. Not what I wanted, and not my style. So, without thinking I go to the right. Yup, a gushing stream of cold water is deposited on my hands, what takes the dose of soap and splashes it onto my shirt. Really, I am not lying!

GRRR. I look at the taps - surely these should be labeled! Well, they were - when you hold your head just right with the light you can tell that "soap" and "water" (they didn't say cold) are etched into the shiny metal. A bit too subtle for me, I guess.


The rest of my bathroom experience went normally, I am happy to say.

Now back to the airport corridor. I bought a strawberry smoothie (only on business trips, I am always too cheap to pay for them myself). After drinking it, I throw it in one of the many shiny trash containers every 10 meters down the hall it seems (guess they figure more people throw out trash then go to the bathroom). No problem. I then stand nearby waiting in line to board my flight. Several minutes later, the garbage can I tossed my drink into starts making noise. They are electric trash cans! A light goes on, there is a whirring and crunching noise, the can burps (just kidding), and it becomes quiet and smiling again.


Next time I come back to this airport I think I'll bring a really heavy weight plastic bag, and fill it with some air!! Or bubble wrap. Or an aerosol can of, say shaving cream. THAT ought to be fun!

Speaking of such things, while I was standing in the luggage screening area in Rochester, I overheard a snippet of conversation - don't know how it turned out--

Screener person, sitting at the X-ray machine to traveler: "Hey, is that a football you have in your bag here?"


Passenger - "yup, you got it - bringing with with me to Florida to play on the beach!"

Screener - "Yeah, only one problem - we're going to have to cut it open, you know to see if anythings inside".

Passenger - "You gotta be kidding!"

Screener - chuckles..

Sometimes you just have to say something, and this one is a week overdue now:

It took several years, but certainly no one can say you hardly know each other! We look forward to your upcoming wedding, presumably this summer.

VERY cool!

Aurora watch...

Today has been really warm - it got up to about 12 degrees today. Now, just around midnight, it is still a bit over 10. I walk outside - there is a warm wind and it is very quiet. I hear the dry oak leaves left on the tree cracking in the wind. A coyote is heard in the distance. Wth some imagination I could easily believe that it late September instead of mid-December.

There is an aurora watch tonight! Here we are, in the minimum period of the solar sunspot cycle, and there was a big solar flare yesterday. Well, I was looking during my walk, and unfortunately there are some low scattered clouds filling in. Did I see some light green flickering in the northern sky? Well, maybe. It would be good to believe. But I expect it was my imagination.

Today's highlights

Christmas is coming! 11 days until Christmas! I have actually started my shopping, if you count mail order as shopping. Next week is going to be pretty busy because I am in California!

I am surrounded by students. Two in my own household. I came home from volleyball at 10:30 pm, and both Gwendolyn and Nina were working on papers, each due Friday. For Gwendolyn, this is the end of a semester. For Nina -- well, just the end of a week.

Now 11:15 - G is going upstairs to "rest" - I'm supposed to come get her at midnight so she can start on her next paper. Nina also is getting done with her first paper, and has not started her second one yet. Me? Typing a blog - a waste of time by comparison.

Speaking of volleyball, Thursday night pickup was very good tonight - everyone was good, and I was one of the weaker players on my team, which is how I like it. Everything went well, and I didn't kill myself (always an option).

A new solution to an old problem...

Here is the problem - you have a canal, and it either needs to change height (think long "sloping" canal), or intersect another canal system or river at another height (this would correspond to the "waterfall running into another river".

Well, there is a classic solution to this problem, one that has developed over the years into a fine art - the "Lock". If you never actually sat down to think how they work, it is fascinating in its simplicity. Here is a cool simulation that shows the basic idea.

Summary of cool points:

1. The lock can operate in both directions - boats can go up and down


2. It theoretically takes no energy to run the lock, if you don't count the change of height in the water. Put another way, no water is pumped, and there is only friction on the doors.


3. It is pretty fail safe. By angling the doors slightly toward the upstream end, it can be arranged that the pressure of the water against the doors forces them closed - only after the water level is equalized will it be possible to open them. Terrorist-proof!

This does not mean that locks are not without a few problems:

1. There is a practical maximum height to a lock. If the lock gets too high, those really tall doors have to be quite strong to hold back the water. Note that the door height it not the depth of the canal, but rather then drop required plus two times the canal depth. When there is a big drop, a sequence of locks must be used - in some cases upwards of a dozen. It takes a long time to traverse these, and people get bored.


2. You have to fill those big locks full of water each time, and the water height is again twice the canal depth PLUS the drop across the lock (this is true even with cascaded locks). And of course the volume is proportional to the length of the lock. All of this filling takes a lot of time, and it can actually take a lot of water. If the drop is high and the canal shallow, the canal gets to flow like a river, even if it is flat!

Well, there is another way, it has just been impractical until recently. Consider if you could take a strip of the canal, ship and all, lift it with a crane (think LARGE bathtub!), rotate the crane and place it alongside the (lower) canal. Then open the walls to the bathtub and off goes the ships.

Well, cool idea, but not practical. Consider:

1. One hell of a big and heavy bathtub! No crane is going to be able to life it.


2. It would take a lot of energy to move the bathtub uphill! Bundles of energy.


3. Big disaster in the making. Heck, we can't even build bridges without them falling down occasionally.

And that's how the world stayed - until 2002. But not so fast - it wouldn't be fun for me!

The first step is to take a lesson from a vernicular. There are the cable cars that ride up and down a mountain, usually in pairs. They take little energy, because the car going down helps to pull the car going up - if the passenger weights match exactly no energy is required.

How does this relate to our canal problem? Well, let's take the bathtub now, put it on wheels with a cable arrangement, and make a vericular. Now we have solved the energy problem, provided the cable does not break. And you get a bonus - it doesn't even matter how much the ships weight, because they displace exactly their weight in water (think about this some...).

Now we get to our modern solution. Since pictures are worth a thousand words, take a look at this link on the Falkirk Wheel.

Talk about cool things! If you want to see it in motion, click this link and select the "presentation video".
Now, a couple of things I find are really cool about this:

1. The two sides exactly counterbalance each other. They claim that to perform a rotation uses about as much energy as boiling 6 tea kettles of water!
2. It is pretty fail safe - no cables to break
3. It uses some really techie gear work to keep things from spilling. Interested? Read about it here.
4. Form followed function, but the form is really nice!
5. It uses very little water - only to the depth of the canal. And water is returned, in a way. Put another way, although some mixing occurs, the same water keeps going back and forth (except that "vacated" when the boats leave). So you could say that no net water is transferred between the canals (or two rivers). Compare that with the canal lock system (it is estimated that if the Falkirk wheel was built, the previous system in the same place took 11 locks).

Isn't technology wonderful?

Normal weekend day, nothing special

Well, today has turned out to be pretty normal. It was finally time to put the snow tires on the cars (OK, only one car, havn't gotten around to the others yet). Chocolate chip cookies were baked (yumm), and Nina cooked some Borsch. Ok, LOTs of Borsch. Also yumm. So I guess it was a yumm day.

Oh, one other amusing thing. G now officially has purple hair! This just proves that you are never too old for this. Here she is:


Heck, not only is her hair purple, but she can be color coordinated as well!

Engineers will be engineers...

In our building at work, they are replacing all of our conventional phones with brand new "Voice over IP" phones. For now, don't worry about what VoIP means. The only important thing for this post is that the phones are really cool, and have big, 7 x 10 cm graphical displays. There are lots of "soft" keys whose function is labeled on this nice, graphical display.

You can program many "speed dial" numbers in the phone. However, since this is a VoIP phone, you don't program this into the phone, but rather you go to a web site to do this. Here you enter your user id (which is our standard ID we use inside the company) and there is an initial preset password set to "12345".

You log into the web site, change the password, and then program your phone with your speed dial numbers. For each speed dial number, you can also give it a name that displays on the screen. Your first speed dial number is always displayed, and is activated by pressing the button to the right of it.

I programmed some numbers, changed my password, etc.

As it happens, this saved me!

Engineers, you see, like to play! And speed was of the essence, since most people had not used with their phones for the first time yet. So, guess what, since everyone's user IDs were known (they match our email addresses), the game of the day was to set someone ELSE'S speed dial number and the all important label which displays. Some of the favorites were:

• "Speakerphone"
• "Configure"
• "Redial"
• "Mute" and
• "Help"

When the victim walks up to their phone, of course all they see is this string - they never realize that someone actually set it to do something. Said victim may press the 'configure' key, only to find out that it calls the local pizza shop. Another favorite trick was to call your own phone - as it turns out, you can do it, and yes, its very confusing if you don't realize what you did.

And then there are the poor guys whose "new" password is being held for ransom, until the appropriate bribe is paid.

How NOT to design a toilet stall....

Several years ago they renovated the Univ. Rochester's Strong Auditorium. This included the men's bathrooms. Very nice, very clean job. You could probably play a four person bridge game around the single throne in the handicap stall.

There's only one small problem...

First, lets talk about the design. You walk into the stall and a very nice, automatically flushing toilet is sitting there staring at you (looking inviting, of course). So you turn around, and sit down. On your wall to the right, near the door is the all-important toilet paper roll.

So far, so good. In fact, you start to notice that it is a WARM toilet. U/R is heated by steam, and the water supply line seems to run near a steam pipe.

We'll skip the part you do between sitting down and getting ready to leave.

Now, time to finish up. You reach for the toilet paper. Damn - can't easily reach it! (What were they thinking - what DO people with wheelchairs do? Well, you leeeeaaannnn forward. There - got it.

Now comes the unpleasant surprise. Remember that automatically flushing feature? Well, the darn toilet now flushes with abandon. And guess what, just like Niagara Falls, the rapids at the bottom throw up lots of spray! Result? Wet cheeks! Well, what do you do about that?

You learn forward to get some more toilet paper....

Orlando, FL day 2

I know, I'm starting in the middle of something! Well, when you haven't been writing in a blog for a while, sometimes it is better to write rather than think about explaining.

Orlando, Software Defined Forum conference. This year I am just attending, no presenting, so it is a pretty easy trip. Wake up, eat, listen to some papers, eat a morning snack, listen to some papers, eat lunch, listen to some papers, skip listening to some papers and do some "work work" sitting alongside the pool with my laptop, listen to some papers, eat dinner, visit vendors booths, talk too much until I am silly tired, then my evening begins.

Tonight the evening began at 8:30 pm. I started by just resting and recovering (i.e stay away from people, read and daydream). Then, I put on my running cloths (it is around 20 degrees C here at night), and walk out to the main road we are on. I get on a local bus (doesn't really matter where it goes, as long as I watch WHERE it went), ride it for about 15 minutes, get off, and then run home.

Actually, it was a little more controlled than that - in the part of Orlando I was in, there is a really great trolley bus that has numbered stops, and essentially works like a metro. Here is a link: http://www.iridetrolley.com/ I measured off 6 km on my map, figured out which number that was, and then I actually knew how far I was running. It worked great!

Tonight I was walking on the trolly trail with Anya and Chimay (our occasionally visiting poodle). After running this path so many times it was a rare pleasure to just be able to enjoy walking it and enjoying all of the nature that is there. The frogs are croaking away, the birds are nesting, and I even saw a fish in the swamp.
Anya managed to actually corner a groundhog! This is luckily a rare event – usually she chases them, but they magically disappear down on of their networks of holes, leaving a poodle intently staring with a madly wagging tail…. But not this time! She had run off the trail, and was barking and barking. I called her back and Chimay came but Anya continued barking without moving – uncharacteristic for her. I run towards her saying to myself “please, don’t let it be a porcupine!”. Well, no, it was one, brown, vertical groundhog, standing its ground for some reason. Nose to nose. Anya’s tail wagging wildly (does she like want it to play? Who knows!). So I pulled her back and scamper scamper off it goes.
Later on, I found a painted turtle, so I stop and look at it. Pretty thing, about maybe 15 – 18 cm large. Not moving. I sit there and watch, then I notice said turtle is backed up to a small hole, newly excavated. Look a little closer and, sure enough, there they are – a number of eggs (at least four) in the hole, with presumably more on the way. Plop, plop, plop! How she dug the hole I do not know – it had perhaps a 3 cm hole at the top, but was clearly “dug out” below, i.e. wider below ground than the hole itself – you could see the eggs spilling out to the sides! After watching for a while (the dogs weren’t interested it seems), I left her to do her thing. But I left a marker in the dirt to keep checking back as August approaches.
(For some great pictures of painted turtles, see http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/StratfordLandingES/Ecology/mpages/eastern_painted_turtle.htm )

This entry is primarily directed toward our exchange student-to-be, Nina, but for others out there, it gives some views of Perinton and Fairport village - suburbs of Rochester, NY.

Although this is a a photo essay, it does not pretend to be "deep photography".  Indeed, this entire gallery was taken on a somewhat delayed trip to buy some chocolate at Wegmans!

OK - Perinton.  40,000 people live in Perinton.  Let's start here:

Perinton is a township.  What is a township, you ask?  Well, at least in this part of the country,  you start with hamlets (smallest), then villages, then cities.  These are shaped whatever they are shaped like (often sort of roundish), and pretty much match up with the similarly named things in Europe.  Multiple villages and cities in turn sit inside of townships - which are generally rectangular shaped areas, each with its own local set of officials and local government.  Multiple townships are divided into counties, and then multiple counties are divided into states, of which there are fifty (although it would be OK with me if Texas were to split off into a country by itself).

OK, glad we got that straight!  Well, the best place to start is home - so here is the front and back of the house to give you a feel for it:

No, the dog Anya is not trying to eat anyone, it was hot out and she was panting!  The only thing she eats is tennis balls (or at least she tries), dog food, and carrots.

The house was too messy to take pictures of inside, but here is the living room - a very cool room with lots of light.  Sort of like a treehouse!

We pretty much live in the woods, but on a road with other houses.  This is a picture of our street (our house is to the left),

And this is the end of the road where the school bus stop is.  I wish it was warm, green and lush like this all year - but I'm sure it feels differently when the sun is rising over the newly fallen snow in the middle of the winter (while waiting for the bus...)...  Oh well.... back to summer...

Speaking of school, here is Fairport High School.  I won't lie -- it is way bigger than the picture shows, but far too scary if I show the whole thing!

Now just a few pictures of the Fairport.  I know this gets confusing, because Fairport is a village located inside the town of Perinton.  So think "little city of 5,000 people".  This village lies on the famous Erie canal.  Here is a shot of the canal to give you the general idea.  Less than 80 years ago I think there were still horses pulling barges of goods down this canal.

Although much of Perinton is quite modern, Fairport has a bit of an older, more intimate feel to it.  Less than 100 meters from where I took the picture above, here was someone's back yard - OK, not everyone's back yard looks this pretty and rustic (often the are just mowed lawn with a wooden deck and chairs), but I just liked the juxtaposition of this next to the canal:

But back to the Canal.  You can't have a canal without boats. I thought this one looked kind of cool -- it is a real "work boat" that was being used to perform repairs to a bridge in downtown Fairport:

Next (again, remember I was taking this while driving to the grocery store), I thought I should take a picture of a typical suburban neighborhood.  Suburbs are a pretty foreign concept to anyone who has not been in the US.  In Europe, if you exclude the largest cities, you pretty much have a large, densely populated city, and then at the edge suddenly the houses thin out until you have country again.

In the US, it works somewhat differently.  Since everyone lives around their cars, distance is not a major problem.  As a result, you have a city, which although it has quite a few people, more and more it is where all the businesses and some shops are.  But often the people with more money don't actually live there.  You have a large road system going into this city, and then smaller towns and villages pop up within about 30 km of the city.  But in some cases you don't even have a village - instead you have a large area of houses and shopping centers and schools to support them.  They become small, independent communities with no real "need" for a city.  THIS is a suburb, and a good percentage of Americans live in one.

Our house itself is really in the country, not in a classic suburb.  However, here is a typical upper-middle class suburban street and houses just to get an idea on what they are:

Well, here my trip ends.  I have arrived at one of the most common destinations in the Rochester area, Wegmans food markets.  These don't look very impressive from the outside, but they are great markets, and they started here in Rochester.  They have also been voted in the past as the "#1 Best place to work in the United States".  But, I will save this for another story!

 All done!

Today we did something very cool, and lots of fun - I highly recommend it.  In the morning we rode our bicycles to the nearest bus stop, and waited until the bus arrived.  Each bus comes with a bike rack on the front bumper, and we put our bikes there.  Then then got on ourselves, and took the bus into Rochester downtown.  When we arrived, we took the bikes, rode towards the river, and got on the Genesee river loop trail http://www.footprintpress.com/Rochester/geneseeriverdowntownloop.htm.  This trail is part of the Genesee Greenway trail, which recently has been added to to the national trail system ( http://www.americantrails.org/nationalrecreationtrails/trailNRT/GenesseeRiverway-NY.html ).  We rode this trail until it intersected the Erie Barge canal, which also has a trail running its length (actually, the trail runs the full length of the canal, from Buffalo to Albany, over 750 km)  - essentially the same "mule trail" that was used to tow the barges long ago.  This we followed into Bushnell's basin, where we got off and had Abbot's ice cream cones.  From here we rode home on the local roads.

This was a fantastic trip, and leaves me wanting to do more.  The canal itself is very flat, of course, and it feels like you can pedal for miles. You can ride this trail all of the way from Rochester to Letchworth state park - the only question is how one would get home afterwards (buses don't go there).   Our trip was shorter, only about 40 km, we we did in about 2 hours on the bikes.

OK, this is kinda funny.  For my personal email, I use Google "gmail".  Gmail is very cool, and I highly recommend it.  Unlike many free email services, it does not flash random ads in all sorts of colors at you.  But they still need to make money, so instead they took an innovative approach - they take the text of the email you are reading, and use it (with some special artificial intelligence, or so they claim) to select several links (no pictures, just clickable links) for ads which are relevant to the email you just received.

Well, sometimes this works well, and sometimes it is rather amusing.  Take a note I received this morning:

Chuck,

You may be aware of this, but the formatting on the forum is all messed

up and I can't read your latest post.

Steve

And what ad did gmail think was "relevant"  for this?

 Put an End to Bedwetting    !

 

Just got back from an Adirondack trip yesterday.  Masha, a friend Elizabeth and I successfully climbed the combination of Algonquin and Iroquois peaks - the second and I think the 8th highest peaks in NY.  I have actually been up Algonquin three times before (all wonderful, BTW), but this was the first time on Iroquois.  This peak connects with Alg. along a ridge, which also passes through Boundary peak.  It is a "trailless" peak, although there was a well established herd path and even some yellow marks on the rocks.  But the news of the day here was that boggy MUD that one had to traverse to get there.  Actually, it was not mud, but rather a peat bog.  If you stepped in the wrong place, you were sunk up to your knees.  Luckily, I poked with a hiking stick, and never went in above my ankles.

Once we got there, it was worth it.  There was no one else, and the peak itself is "narrower", so you can see all around.  Very cool experience.

No injuries, although Elizabeth did have some non-trivial "toes are too wide for her boots" which caused here quite a bit of pain on the way down.  Overall the hike took 10 hours.  3.5 hours to scale up to the top of Algonquin (with several breaks), 1 hour at the top, 2 hours to/from Iroquios, and 3.5 hours down.  It was surprising that it seemed to take as long to go down as up - since it felt like it was much faster.  But the clock doesn't lie, I guess.  Strange.

Highly recommended.

Last night I was working in the front yard, and from the road I heard a "thump".  I didn't think much about it, but later heard several more - "thonk"........"thlump".....

Hmm.  Now this has my attention.  I watch the road, which is the general direction the sounds were coming from.  Wait a bit.  Swat at a mosquitoe.  Wait some more.  And then....THUNK!  A pinecone hits the pavement.  Well, we have some very tall pine trees that overhang the street, so I look in the top, probably 20 meters overhead and find a grey squirrel - we have lots of them.  He was busily chewing off the stems so the pinecones would drop!  Usually I thought that squirrels grab a cone and eat it in the tree,  but clearly this guy had a different idea.  How do I know?  Well, I looked out this morning, all of the pinecones were gone! :-)