Arches NP

This carefully-framed pic elides the popup camper next door, fully equipped with a generator which ran reliably during all permitted hours. In my simpleness I thought the infernal machine could be run for some period within those hours; but the neighbours believed in the ants' dictum, 'everything not forbidden is compulsory'. Breakfast and dinner were accompanied by its steady brrrr. Otherwise, an excellent site, moderately sheltered from the cruel month's winds, with an unbeatable view across the sandstones to the La Sal mountains. The sand was fine and soft, marvellous below the sleeping bag, not so good as a companion in it.

The boys scampered up the rocks to find a sunny warm spot for re-reading the entire Calvin & Hobbes oeuvre.











A short hike from the campground gets us to Broken Arch, which is not in fact Broken. At kid hike pace, stopping to examine and discuss lizard versus snake trails in the sand, create sandslides, pick up attractive bits of sandstone, etc etc: this hike took nearly 3 hours. On another morning I ran the loop in 18 minutes. Still, the journey's the thing.

Broken Arch from below. There's a goodly bite out of it, and a crack across the narrows so it may not be long. On another day we hiked past Wall Arch which isn't there anymore.










From the top of the arch, views to La Sal. The mountains were clouded and snowy all the time we were there. Somewhere in the dead ground between here and there is the Colorado river. Our last trip on that section is essayed earlier in this screed.


Quoth young C, "I'm enjoying myself in two different ways. It's fun climbing on the rocks, and it's fun making you nervous".






SandDune Arch, good for an hour's innocent amusement. Surely there must be a way to climb up top and teeter precariously above one's aged parent ?





Sunset on red rocks.






We'd planned a nice easy bike ride on the Bar M loop but I managed to snap the rear derailleur cable on the Schwinn Continental. It was only 18 years old, can't imagine why it broke. Of course I had a full set of cables and housing languishing in the garage at home for the last several years, awaiting my pleasure. There was a bucket'o'tools in the car, using for a bit of deck construction in Palisade on the way over, but no cable. We needed to visit Arty the Wonder Dog in town anyway, at his lodgings with the Moab vet, so back to town.

I walked into Uranium Bicycles and waited for the owner to finish selling a $6k Wilier frameset with Dura-Ace tubeless wheels, probably a good $10k overall. Then I asked him about fixing a cable on a shamefully dirty $25 bike. He couldn't do the job before the next day and I didn't want to drive the hour-plus back to town, so he was kind enough to cut housing and sell me a cable for $6. They have some beautiful road bikes for rent, thought briefly of getting one for a long ride through Arches: eheu fugaces, I have children and dogs and a campfire to attend to. I replaced the cable while Arty got a walk through the cow pies at the vets'.

Weather rather shut down over the next few days, windy and cold. It rained the last night, then froze. The drive home as always took place through a blizzard.

gmail offline

James Fallows asks:
" For all of Gmail really to be available and searchable offline, the entire cache of old messages would obviously have to be stored on your own hard disk. That's now a maximum 7+ gigs per regular Gmail account. More if you've bought extra storage. Do I really want to have all of that on my laptop -- which is the main place where offline access matters? From a couple of Gmail accounts? And Google's "Gears" system of offline sync, already in use with Google Docs, seems to create a separate cache for each browser you use it with. So you could wind up with one 7GB cache for Firefox, and one for Chrome, and... Will there be a way to choose how far back you'd like the sync to run?"

Excellent questions all. So, per my investigations:
- yes, a separate cache per browser. Hm.
- no way to choose how far back to go. For one small account of 128M, Gmail says they will back up to 5 years ago. Larger accounts will presumably not go so far back. There's no information I can find on whether the older emails will be cleared out of the offline cache, or left there.
- On the hard drive, the 128M that Gmail says I'm using, becomes 137M.

The Google Gears FAQ tells us where the data is stored for IE and Firefox, but oddly enough not for Chrome. For Chrome, attachments are stored plainly at for example
C:\Documents and Settings\uname\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443\GoogleMail[4]#localserver

The messages themselves are in SQLite databases found similarly
C:\Documents and Settings\uname\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443
The data appears to be binary, so not readable without Gears or some SQLite tool. The files don't have .sqlite extensions, but that's what they are. Open them using any of the handy SQlite tools, for example SQLite Administrator which allows export of tables as CSV, HTML, etc etc.

In my install, a file named accountname@gmail.com-GoogleMail#database is the database. The table MessagesFT_content has the message contents. Interestingly all the email body is in html.

Conclusions:
1. it's still a proprietary format, although SQlite utilities can be used to extract the useful information.
2. the lack of control over synchronization means it's not a good backup solution.
3. I still need to test actual offline operation - is the search as good as it is online ?

more birds

last night I took Artie the Wonder Dog for a run. He pulled me for five miles. When we got home he did a few dozen laps of the yard, then went a couple of rounds with his old blanket. I was exhausted, he was energized. Today my quads feel as if I just ran ten miles down Mt Evans - had to brake on every step against his enthusiastic trot.

There were redwing blackbirds churring in the reeds. That is the earliest I've ever heard them in Highlands Ranch. On the other hand, every year for the last eight at least, the date has been moving up. I know this because it's noted in my training logs. Since we're right on the edge of its year-round residency, I guess that soon they'll be here continuously, and I'll lose my 'first-robin' marker on spring runs. Well, 'runs' for a generously-defined value of run: I'm working my way down to walking.

I suppose I could switch to the American robins themselves. They are thrushes like the rwb (the English robin is considered an old-world flycatcher) so not too much of a leap; but the rwb has this characteristic midday song so that he who runs may listen. It's easier to ID by ear. Then too, the robins are moving fast as well, according to the Audubon report.

The report also notes the meadowlark population is plummeting. Theirs is the true summer note. I always look forward to hearing their liquid trills on the bike in Chatfield.

weighing anchor

a marvellous poem by Seamus Heaney in the New Yorker ends up at:

As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
**

Exactly so. Old, trapped and grounded, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything; a last synapse flares, a spark in the punk; we can still set sail out of the dim caverns of the skull; somewhere there may yet be found
"still green water and clean bottom sand,
..
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals"

Dell and Nvidia

I'm not having much luck with Dell recently. As per the earlier post, the Inspiron 1510 contains a wireless card that doesn't play well with WPA-PSK secured networks. Now the latest Dell Vostro 2510, although a nice machine, turns out to ship with a defective Nvidia GPU that overheats. Hm.

The Dell 'fix' is to change the BIOS so the fan runs continuously, in an attempt to keep the GPU from frying. This makes the machine noisy and reduces the battery life. The only thing it 'fixes' is Dell's warranty liabilities, as it may extend the life of the GPU to slightly beyond the warranty period.

I posted a review of the machine on Dell's site, but it remains to be seen if they'll publish it. I thought I'd publish it here in the interests of transparency.

I was distressed to find that this model 2510 ships with the defective NVIDIA GPU card, but it is not included in the extended warranty.
Don't buy this machine until this is remedied.
See the Dell blog which indicates the 2510 contains the defective GPU.
But the guarantee is extended only to the products listed here.

I've used Dells at work for quite a few years without problems. However this may be the last Dell I buy..

pheasant with my phowling piece

We're going hunting, aren't we ? O boy o boy o boy, I can't wait, let's go, now or sooner if possible, this is gonna be great !

Artie does his job exactly as he's bred to do, runs deep into the weeds and flushes the birds out. I on the other hand frequently don't get my part of the job done, and miss the birds.. Once in a while I do hit, thereby avoiding Artie's ire - you should see The Look he gives me after missing - and he faithfully brings it in.

Pheasants are extravagantly beautiful. They are, as Gierach observed of trout, far prettier than they need to be. On the other hand, for the last couple of centuries it's been a very successful strategy from an evolutionary standpoint: be attractive/useful to man, and he'll spread you far and wee across the world. Both pheasants and trout seem like elementals of air and water, jewels that swim and fly. Then men like me come along to turn them into meat.

In the evening, the birds come in from the cornfields to their evening quarters in the bottomlands. We hide behind the haystack and wait to see who shows up. The trick to recognizing a rooster is the C's - either hear him cluck, or see the colour on his face. In the evening the colour trigger isn't usually visible; luckily they'll sometimes declare themselves by chattering to their harem. This evening, four hens swooped in silently. The solitary rooster dropped into the dense weeds. We went to root him out with the dogs but in the meantime he'd run down into the jungles of the wetlands. Outfoxed by a bird, yet again.

Back at the barn having tea, Artie fell asleep standing up, while I scratched his ears. A thoroughly-well-hunted dog.

Update: 'the last couple of centuries', forsooth. Pheasant arrived in England with Caesar's armies. They'd been moving out of Asia for a few thousand years before that. There are some 30 distinct sub-species of the common pheasant; the status in the wild of all of these is unknown. The common and ringneck pheasant are of course not endangered, being so widespread.

Harold Macmillan on pheasants in England, reported in a letter of Patrick Leigh Fermor's,

"We're very lucky to have them. It's entirely due to the Roman occupation of Britain. The junior officers were very fond of them, and collected them in large numbers. I believe there was a certain amount of rivalry about which centurion had the most or the handsomest birds. In the end, of course, in 410 AD, in the reign of the Emperor Honorious, the order came for all the legions to return to Rome, but they weren't allowed to take their birds with them, so very reluctantly, all the centurions let their birds go. There must have been thousands of them. Anyway, they survived the Picts and the Scots, and the Saxon invasion."

There are some other remarkable pheasants. Bird books usually give a picture plus a paragraph or more detailing the 'field signs', the notable features by which the bird may be recognized while twitching. For the Lady Amherst and the Golden pheasant, one word: 'unmistakeable'.

The Lady bird:

From excelglen's flickr set.

 The Golden:

From Dave Appleton's flickr set.

eragon and saphira

#1 son wanted me to publish his picture of Eragon and Saphira, so here it is..