don’t panic

I’m a geek, what can I say?

I love the complete coolness you feel from having a cutting edge piece of technology, or being able to amaze your friends and family with the astounding magic you can perform to manipulate light and data into pictures, and sounds, and information. And being a geek truly is a little like being a wizard because you do things that cause mere mortals to simple stare at you with blank expressions of confusion and awe as you… program the clock on the VCR, or… inexplicably cause their laptop to suddenly double it’s speed, or… pull complete driving directions to Disneyland from a small grey device in your pocket.

Today I added a little more magic to my arsenal by hacking my cell phone so that it would double as a GPS device. I pretty much knew it could be done, even though the phone was still so new that there really wasn’t that much information on it out on the web yet. I had read about other phones that could pull it off, so with only a couple of hours messing around, I figured it out. Whalla! I can now find my latitude and longitude anywhere I can get a cell signal. It’s completely cool.

“What would you use that information for,” you ask?

Who cares! It’s amazing! It’s bleeding edge! It’s quasi legal!…

It’s slightly scary when you really think about it.

And it’s shockingly accurate considering that it really isn’t using true GPS satellites. What’s actually happening is that it’s just triangulating it’s position by using the cell phone towers. But I make a single brief call and BINGO… it knows where I am… to within about ten meters!

Holy spyware, Batman!

I can’t wait for my next hike. I’m going to print out a few topographic maps and GPS my way to outdoor bliss. I love being a geek.

I hate politics. It’s a bit like trying to have a meaningful discussion with a spoiled child. No matter what you ask, the answer will always be self-centered. To a child, everything is ME ME ME! They will lie, cheat, or tell you whatever you want to hear if it will keep them out of trouble. Politicians are exactly the same way.

But in November, I have to choose which spoiled child I want to run our country. It stinks I tell you. I don’t like either of them, and I certainly can’t figure out which one is telling the bigger lies. But does it matter?

Okay. If I can’t judge them by what they have done, perhaps I can make a decision based on what they haven’t. Two points in particular have really prickled my hide. The first was the lapse of the assault weapons ban. Forgetting for the moment that the only people in my neighborhood using assault weapons are the gangsters, why let a bill like this simply lapse without doing a damn thing?? I mean, if you don’t agree with the details of the bill, then at least extend it for six months while you figure out what you do need to change. It’s completely irresponsible to do nothing, just so that you can buy the “gun vote”.

The second item is the near total lack of support that Bush has given to the planet as a whole. His position on the environment has been reprehensible right from the start, and his continued support of big oil, in the face of the most alarming global warming predictions in history make me want to puke. Salon.com published an interesting (and obviously biased) article extrapolating on this.

He will spin it to make it look like he’s done more for the environment than any president in U.S. history, but I remember the energy scandal that SoCal endured because of his policy and lack of action. It was big oil then, and it’s big oil now. No thanks.

But Kerry is all wind. He’s done nothing at all except vote in a hundred different directions when it suited his career. Part of me argues that we need to be able to change our minds when the information changes. We all flip flop. It’s how we learn. But another part of me says, “Yeah, but that’s for normal people… Not politicians. Politicians need to be right the first time or they shouldn’t be there. That’s why we vote for them, not so that they can ‘learn’ how to govern us.”

And I’m entirely sick of “spin”. You know, the way that each side of a political argument manipulates the way they give you information in order to make their position look undeniably correct. We get so much political SPAM lately that there’s barely enough room in my mailbox for the “real” stuff. I’d vote for any group or measure in a heartbeat that could honestly say, “Well, this bill would really be great for the following reasons, but it would also be bad because…” Sure, I know it’s our responsibility to make proper decisions, but we do so based on completely bogus information. And we also need to remember that the average IQ is 100. We’re a pretty easy population to fool when taken together.

Let’s hope we pick the right President.

With my daughter being on fall vacation, we have been trying to spend some time doing all-day, physical kinds of things outside. We’ve done a few hikes before, but there was one particular mountain near my folk’s place that she really wanted to get to the top of. A week earlier we tried to hit the peak from the Eastern side, and managed to get about halfway there before the heat and general tiredness turned us back. She is special ed, after all, and doesn’t always let you know how she really feels. You have to sort of take a wide sampling of data and make a best guess. Well, we underestimated the heat (in the high 80′s) and I overestimated her stamina for the day. It also didn’t help that we encountered a four foot rattlesnake five minutes from the trailhead. It was asleep (or possibly dead, but YOU can go find out for sure) and we had to kind of sqeezepastrealquick, but all was good in the end. I knew that I needed her to get past the fear, or she would never ever hike with me again. She’s like that.

So yesterday we decided to give it another go from the Western side. You can start a little closer to the mountain itself, and the day was supposed to be cloudy with a 50% chance of showers. It had “rained” a bit the day before for about twenty minutes, so I didn’t see why this would be any different. This was the first mistake.

I’ve hiked in the rain before, and even some snow, so I wasn’t caught completely off guard. I knew to bring the right gear and bag anything that could get wet. Still, I forgot that California weathermen are about as accurate with their predictions as most palm readers… maybe a bit worse. We packed for a light rain, and possibly a bit of cold wind.

The day started off great. The sun was peaking out between the clouds now and then, and although I could see it was raining elsewhere, it was pretty perfect hiking weather for SoCal. Cool, crisp and clean. And so we made for the mountain. It’s not a long hike, maybe five miles, but the last of those miles is pretty steep as you head for the summit.

My daughter is almost seven, but mentally she’s about four, so the fact that she wanted to hold my hand the whole way didn’t surprise or bother me. She’s sometimes a little unsteady on her feet over rocks, and was still breaking in and getting used to a new pair of boots. She’s light enough that as long as I’m holding her hand, I can pretty much keep her from falling no matter how she stumbles.

We were having a good time, stopping now and then to grab a drink and a few photos, and it wasn’t until we were three-quarters of the way to the base of the mountain that I looked back and noticed that a darker patch of cloud might bring some moisture our way. So we pulled out the rain gear and had just started walking again when the wind picked up and a quick shower hit us. It was pretty strong, but only lasted about five minutes, which was hardly enough time to get the ground wet. More so, we were still completely dry, so I decided to continue on to the summit.

The second rain hit us going up, and wasn’t as bad, but was quite windy. Still, we were so close that to turn back would have been a serious heartbreak for my daughter, and onward we went, with me listening for thunder. I hadn’t heard any that day, but I wasn’t about to put myself or my kid on the highest ground for many miles during a thunderstorm. I may be dense, but I’m not that dense.

Having reached the peak, we did high-fives and yahoos and snapped off a few pictures before we dug into our packs and had a snack or two. There was a nifty old ammunition box chained to the summit pole with a few journals inside, so we filled out a page and were just considering a few more pictures when I caught sight of some very opaque clouds coming at us fast, and at eye level.

I just have to say, that observing weather that is literally at the same altitude you are, is extremely daunting. When you look way up at the clouds normally, they lumber across the sky, and even when there’s some serious wind, the movement doesn’t reflect their actual speed. We were up on the middle of three close peaks, each maybe two or three hundred yards apart with slight depressions between them. When the first wisps of cloud started to slide past in the little gullies, it was instantly obvious that they were moving at a pretty damn good clip. And the wisps weren’t like bits of fog, which don’t really have a form or boundary to them, these were like giant stretched out balls of cotton that were zipping by a few dozen feet away. I was pretty surprised actually, because I had been watching the weather reports, especially concerning wind since I knew that we would be on a mountain, and there was nothing above 15 mph predicted. Then it occurred to me that our mountain was a nice big slope running North-South to a Westerly wind. In other words, there was about a third of a mile high wall of air that was suddenly forced to compress and slide over the top at the exact point at which we were now standing. Oops.

And now that I took a closer look at that really opaque cloud bank, I could already see that it was dropping rain. Time to pack up.

I got my daughter into a warmer coat, and had just zipped zip closed our packs when the peak just to the South disappeared. I turned around and watched as the North one was surrounded by clouds. And then it was our turn.

It was amazing at first. The wind picked up really fast, and it seemed like you could almost reach out and deflect some of the clouds, but the fun was marred by the fact that I could no longer see more than about five meters. Not so good for hiking. And I knew that it was only a matter of moments before that rain I had seen would be pushed right in top of us.

My daughter was both scared and in a state of awe. It was just so alien to her that I don’t really think she understood what she was seeing. We laughed and huddled down against a couple of big boulders so that when the rain hit, we would be in the wind shadow. I figured that would keep some of it off of us.

I was just thinking that we were really having a good time when it was as though someone had suddenly turned a fire hose on us. The water was hitting us nearly horizontally, and I’m sure our rocks made a difference, but it was only a matter of seconds before we were soaked anywhere that wasn’t covered. That was pretty much our legs and boots, but once you get water slogging around inside your shoes, hiking is a bummer, even on a good trail, let alone a rocky sloping trail.

I made a mental assessment of our situation and decided that I had two choices. The first was that I could hunker down with my daughter and wait for a break in the storm. the problem with this choice was that I didn’t know that there would be a break in the storm any time soon, and we were getting wet and cold fast.

My second choice was to cut our losses and get off that mountain pronto. If we were lower, we at least wouldn’t have the wind to deal with.

Choice B was the obvious winner, so we started down… And suddenly couldn’t find the trail.

Coming up, there was a well marked and maintained trail that zigzagged up the ridge line. The park service really wanted people to stay on the trail because most of the surrounding habitat was still recovering from the fires of a year ago. Problem was, with all the sudden rain, those trails were literally washing away as I watched. Foot wide streams of water were running past us even here at the peak. What was it going to be like down near the base?! This was flash-flood country! Oops again.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it, so we struggled on. It took us about ten minutes to relocate the trail further down, but those were some hellish moments as we slipped and stumbled and basically forged a new “trail” down the burnt side of a mountain. I spend about three-quarters of my time just holding my daughter up as she stumbled on loose rock and mud.

In the end, all was well, but there was about a half hour where I was praying like mad that neither of us twisted an ankle or anything. Once off the mountain, it was merely raining, and although I was a bit nervous about flooding, I was a lot more worried that my girl would run out of patience first. We sang songs and made jokes, and basically tried to keep our spirits up, but it’s hard to be joyous while you struggle with ten pounds of mud on each foot and four miles of hiking still to go… in slippery wet boots.

But we decided that other than a few blisters, the “big mountain” hadn’t done anything that a couple of cups of hot chocolate couldn’t fix.

I love Salon.com. They carry such an interesting slice of the news. It’s a little like finding pieces of the National Enquirer in your copy of Newsweek.

This was in this morning’s edition.

http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/18/gayohio/index.html

The picture that they used on the home page showed a smiling man in a nicely tailored business suit sitting in front of a fireplace holding a large sword. This weird combination was enough by itself to get me to read the article. And then I see that the guy is a pastor. Oh, of course. Now it all makes sense.

Now, the piece is about how the churches in Ohio are “rallying” around the anti-gay marriage legislation and the Republican battle cry. Okay, but it shocked me a bit to see pastor Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church trying to look like Mr. Niceguy while holding up Excalibur. Who is he kidding? Anytime you put the words “church” and “weapons” together, you’re going to get trouble, and I had visions of the Crusades going through my head.

“Homosexuals are Hellbound!” is the battle cry of Patrick Johnston, vice chairman of the Ohio branch of the far-right Constitution Party. Great. Here’s an individual that thinks that we should make homosexuals criminals. I wonder how he feels about Muslims? Or minorities? What about those godless infidels, the homeless?

This is another example of how people have completely forgotten the whole purpose of our Constitution, and why we as a people came to the America’s in the first place. We wanted a place where we could worship, and while we were at it, freedom would be nice too. Luckily, we had a few political geniuses with us who knew that in order to stave off the religious wars that had plagued other countries’ histories, we would have to buy the whole enchilada or none at all. That means you have to except everyone’s religion, not just what one individual, or even the greatest majority, thinks is “right”.

This is a REALLY tough concept to get into people’s heads. It works at a governing level, but individual peoples have a very hard time accepting that their next-door neighbor is allowed under the Constitution to worship in a way, or to a god that within your religion you find as an abomination punishable by death. There were problems right from the start. Need an extreme example? How about the Salem witch trials. We were burning people at the stake just because we suspected they were practicing another religion.

And then we figured out that the freedom thing really didn’t apply to just religion, but people in general as well. Oops! You mean we have to release all those slaves that have been picking our fields for us? Big problems.

Once we got past that, we had to deal with the concept of women as people with rights too. We’re still dealing with that one.

So today, it’s no big surprise that our sexuality has come into the picture. But if we found that a person’s religion was protected under the Constitution, and the color of their skin, and even their gender, then why does it surprise anyone that sexual orientation is any different?

Forget what YOU think about whether it is “right” or not, and try to remember that we live in a country that has freedom like no other in the world. The moment we pick up our swords and declare a crusade against a people or group that believes differently than we do, we might as well step back on the boat and head for England again.

Oh, and to Mr. Johnston… You can take Rod’s bigoted cutlass and shove it up where the sun don’t shine. If the Homosexuals are Hellbound, then you two are showing them the way.

This was on the Union-Tribune site today.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20041015-9999-7m15smoke.html

I have to admit that I’m pretty anti-smoking. It’s not just that I think it’s a bad idea for your body, which it is. We do “bad” things to our bodies all the time, such as drinking soda-pop, eating too much, etc… But we do them because we feel that the pleasure we receive from the action is worth the possible risk to our health. Or course, then we complain like bloody murder when we have to pay for that double bypass surgery. So the excuse that it’s “bad” for you isn’t enough to warrant how I feel.

The bigger reason is that I’m one of those closet environmentalist people. We’re the worst kind, because we really really want to protect the planet, but are caught in the eternal cliche that we just don’t have the resources. Or worse, that we are putting our children first. “Screw the planet. If my daughter needs a cell-phone, then I’m not going to worry about where the battery ends up.”

There are a million things I could do to be a more conscientious global-thinker, but there are a million and ONE things that make it all but impossible to do that without radically changing the way both I, and my family live day to day.

However, we try.

That’s damn important. It’s one thing to do the best you can, it’s quite another not to care at all. The “best we can” might not end up being enough, but at least it gives the planet a chance. But there’s a an attitude that has formed over the last few generations that is downright scary when applied to things globally. It’s the principal that “someone else will clean it up,” or, as the Union Tribune article stated, “What are you stopping me for? It’s not that big a deal. Everybody does it.”

Not everybody. I don’t do it. Not ever. It’s so distasteful to me to simply throw my trash out the window of my car, that I would be guilt-ridden for weeks if I did so. I’d have to spend hours down at the beach picking trash out of the sand before felt like I had even come close to reclaiming my dignity.

I see smokers chucking butts out their windows all the time. Forget the people who do things like tossing their beer can out onto the road… They’re hopeless, shoot them quickly and move on. But most of the smokers I’ve met think that littering in this manner is FINE, that these piles of cigarette butts we see along the side of the road while we wait at the measured onramps are somehow going to naturally biodegrade. Well guess what. It IS fine… $350 worth, or more if you happen to be so blindingly stupid as to throw it out LIT. We live in perhaps one of the most fire-ravaged areas in the country, and these idiots are literally flicking around lit embers.

But the amazing thing is that no matter how you point this out to many of them, they just don’t care!

Arrrg! Where’s a fire hose when you need one? I’d like to turn that thing on their face at full force while screaming, “YES, I MIND IF YOU SMOKE!!”

Huff… huff… It’s okay… I’m alright now. Really.