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Wagon Wheel
It’s the first daytime Wagonwheel session I’ve attended for a while. Curtis is the only one there at the proposed 11 am. I roll in at 11:30, then Ted, Randy, and Greg show up. I feel kind of unmotivated, but warm up anyway. Soon I’ve done a problem on the Big Loaf that I’ve only…
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Movie: The Hours
A stark look at several characters throughout the 20th century dealing with depression and insanity, contemplating whether suicide is justfied when life has become unendurable. Although the movie’s message comes through clearly, the story line and the role of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway in the screenplay can be confusing, especially if like me you…
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Movie: Offret (The Sacrifice)
A dense, strange, stilted Swedish movie that follows some high-bred characters as they grapple with isolation after the onset of world war III. Its philosophical monologues and symbolic characters seem to have potential, which kept us watching. Either they never panned out, or didn’t seem worth the effort to follow. In the end it felt…
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Charcoal Kilns
On our way down from the Telescope Peak trailhead we stop to peer at these odd constructions. Designed by Swiss engineers and built by Chinese laborers, these kilns burned piñon pines into charcoal for the Modock mine 30 miles south. They were operated for three years, then left as perches for the ravens and whatever…
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Telescope Peak
When the alarm goes off at 4 am, I have no clue what we’re in for. We throw breakfast, lunch, and gear together in a blur and are in the car by 5 when we discover the car windows are iced and the defroster doesn’t work. Not the sort of thing we noticed while the…
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New Look, New Guts
The folks at WordPress have finally made enough improvements to the b2 blogging software I was using to entice me to upgrade. They ship with a pretty nice looking layout, I think, so I just made a few tweaks to hobo-ize it and called it home. It will require more tweaking I’m sure before it’s…
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Memory Fault
I’m collecting errors on a new platform! This is from Mac OS X 10.3. I’ve gotten the debugger up and am far enough to see that the error happens when the program tries to create a big (512k) chunk of shared memory. Smaller chunks work. In 10.2 I had upped the shared memory from 4MB…
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Movie: Nine Queens
This Argentinian film is about the slickest con artist movie I’ve seen. I’d say it outdoes The Sting. It gave Ann involved dreams about being swindled and deceived.
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Yoga
I went to a yoga class with Ann after work. Yoga makes me feel undisciplined, stiff, and weak. It requires a big effort. But my body is thirsty for it. It wants more.
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Joshua Tree – Runaway 5.10d?
Ann rejoins us and we take off for the climb Ted’s been talking about all weekend, Run For Your Life, 10b. In the book it’s the only bolted route on the prominent face of the Tumbling Rainbow formation, so Ted doesn’t bother even bringing the guidebook. On the approach I experience nervousness for the first…