2007 December

I think of our planned new year’s eve in Vedauwoo as an easy test run to prepare us for more challenging winter outings in the camper. Maybe part of being born in Wyoming is an eternal willful ignorance of her reaction to such assumptions. We’re beggin’ to be whupped like flapjack butter.

I see the first night as a victory rather than a warning. We find a nice pullout away from the freeway, and sleep reasonably well through a low of 5°F and 20mph winds. The truck is a little slow to start in the morning, as are we, but eventually all systems fire up and we embark on our snowshoe outing for the day.

After that the whuppin’ starts. Temps and snow keep falling, and the wind gets attitude. Still, we delight in our ability to whip up a hot meal in our heated camper while we watch the snow race past the windows. Visibility is not so good when we leave. On the highway, it’s worse. Falling snow combines with ground blizzards for a visibility between fifty feet and zero. We make it to the rest stop without hitting anyone, but have to creep around it twice to figure out what constitutes a parking spot. I seriously regret not getting some video of the whipping whiteness, but we’re all wrapped up in it. Once parked, we dig in for a nap. On waking, we find a very quiet rest stop, except for a couple of folks who have broken down and are taking shelter in the indoor area. They inform us that the road is closed.

Our battery hasn’t had much sun to charge it during the day. If we lose that, we lose the furnace that requires a fan to run. The wind rocks the camper like a dingy, and disables our water heater. The three of us (T-rex wouldn’t have missed all this for the world!) spend a restless night of compromise between required body warmth and sleeping comfort. We turn the heat low enough to get the battery through the night, but all our water is frozen in the morning. 0°F and 40mph winds have crippled us. The truck won’t start. Our black water tank is nearly full, and frozen. Despite some promise of sun, we cry Uncle, beg a jumpstart, and skeedaddle back to Colorado.

Near East Albany, WY

It’s a bit cold and windy when we pull into the Happy Jack parking lot, but we don’t have a clue what’s coming. Neither does anyone else – the parking lot and ski hill are bustling with tubers, sledders, boarders, skiers, and snowshoers like us. It gives one some respect for the constitutions of people around here – the wind chill is enough to turn bare skin to ice in a few seconds. We bundle up for our outing.
Improvised Happy Jack Loop at EveryTrail:

The wind is much less apparent in the trees, and we warm up fast. I love this network of trails that make a veritable maze with aspen stands, creeks, lodgepole pine, white fir, and granite promontories at regular intervals. As many times as I’ve been here, I still have no clear mental map of the trail network. I just like to launch myself into it and find my way out again. By the time we do that today, we find a much emptier parking lot. Snow is falling pretty hard while a few diehards get another run in. We sit in the camper and make lunch while the wind and snow increase. Conditions are nearing total whiteout when we’re ready to leave.

My XO laprop is here from the One Laptop Per Child program! it actually came before Christmas, but I haven’t tinkered with it too much yet. I did figure out right away how to install the Opera web browser, because the default Firefox-based browser doesn’t have JavaScript enabled. Too many of my web activities require JavaScript to do without it. Opera has a few quirks, but does the job.

The other learning curve is typing with the very small keyboard. I did manage a movie review with only a few typos, and I’m using it now. Once I get going I can type pretty quickly, but fixing mistakes is still a bit slow.

Wireless networking is handled nicely. Mesh networking with other XOs is built in – it would be cool to try it with other PCs, but I haven’t figured that out yet. There are lots of software toys I have yet to play with, like music editing TamTam, photo and video tools, and lots of other stuff.

Most importantly, a kid somewhere in the world will get an XO just like mine. My first computer at 10 years old changed my life forever, and I hope at least some of the kids in this program will have a similar experience.

I think City of God must have inspired this movie. There are no children in this film, and it takes place in a fictional near future, but the presentation of the effects of violence on the characters achieves a similar gut-wrenching realism. The future merging of the issues of immigration and terrorism is the real center point – the apparent premise of a world gone sterile seems to me to be used as a device to craft a warning about the future of these other, current issues. This kind of movie can easily take the drama and violence too far to retain my suspension of disbelief, and it does, but just a little. Most of it is done extremely effectively.

Certified Fresh

Another surprising performance from Adam Sandler in a character drama. In this one he plays a guy in denial after losing his family in the September 11 attacks. Don Cheadle is an old college roommate who discovers him and helps him come back to reality while coveting his apparent freedom. Many opportunities for clichés are deftly skirted, and the heavy subject matter is punctuated almost perfectly with comic relief throughout.

Thanks to Sean for picking this one so we could poach it while he’s away.

My mom’s been visiting for the holidays, and we’ve spent some our time together redesigning her website. I’m not good with graphics, but I like the result of following Mom’s directions to the best of my ability. We stuck with TYPO3 as the back-end content management system. We considered ditching it for something simpler, but in the end couldn’t resist some of the many features it offers, including the dynamically generated menus across the top, a pretty good WYSIWIG editor, and pretty good handling of images. I hope Beaver Island Arts continues to evolve with all her great projects!

I didn’t know what to expect from a movie directed by a Buddhist lama, and was surprised how entertaining this was. A modern story of a Tibetan enamored with visions of America while isolated in a tiny village parallels a monk’s mythic tale of a man seduced into isolation, where he encounters the dangers behind his desires. Slow paced, with beautiful Himalayan scenery, this film offers a true escape from the rat race.

There are lots of movies about beautiful, damaged people trying to have relationships. It usually works. The beautiful people are fun to look at, and we can relate to the relationship troubles. This film plays the theme even more effectively by downplaying the beautifulness of the characters a bit, and putting them in a palpably rich, out-of-time, down-south setting. They even all have believable means of survival – not just props for the drama. Well done.

Certified Fresh

This small release is a fix for the “Automatically Open the Center Info Window” option. Finding the marker in the center became unreliable in recent versions of the Google Maps API, so I changed it to open a specified post marker instead, even if it’s not exactly centered. Download it, or read more.

The same fix will be in the next beta release, along with a bunch of new stuff.

We liked Trees Lounge enough that we put Steve Buscemi’s next, less well-reviewed film on the queue. Buscemi shows his talent again for finding humor in the most pathetic recesses of life, but it’s missing some of the spark I found in Trees. It’s also a bit too much like You Can Count On Me. Those familiar with Indiana and environs might get an extra kick out of it.