Dyepot, Teapot

It’s been an interesting year.

I traveled. England, Germany, and the Grand Canyon.

I watched a lot of soccer.

My cat died. It’s lonely without kitties, so Lucas and I visited the local Humane Society shelter and found Sputnik and Mudshark.

I hurt my foot in August, which really put a dent in plans for end of summer hiking.

Lucas and I celebrated our third anniversary together.

I switched jobs.

I knit a sweater in less time than I would have believed.

I started attending local user groups and tech meetups, and helped organize FOSCON II: Ruby Rodeo.

I posted many, many pictures on Flickr.

Anne tagged me for this last week, and while I’m pretty sure I did this meme sometime last winter too, here goes.

1. The first piece of music I ever bought for myself was a Tiffany tape. I was six.
2. I studied flute from fifth grade through the end of high school, and then took it up again at the end of college after a couple years’ break. I remember feeling completely burned out on it after I finished high school. Our band program sucked, I was angry that my family couldn’t afford to buy me a better flute (usually you upgrade from your $300 beginner model to a $1200 “step up” flute at some point), and it seemed like kids who did have a better instrument could be completely passionless about the whole thing and still win first chair and all the solos. I’d better stop there, because I could turn this into a whole blog post on its own.
3. I’ve started two businesses. Both made very little money but were highly educational experiences. I want to try again, if I can come up with a plan for enough funding to make it work. I’ve discovered it’s really hard to run a business without any starting capital.
4. If you buy the idea that the choices we make create branches of separate alternate universes, somewhere there are Audreys who are oceanographers, theoretical mathematicians, professional musicians, fashion designers, veterinary doctors, and international development specialists. I often hope to live long enough to give at least one or two of these “wouldn’t it be interesting if I had…” a try.
5. I’ve been wearing hand knit socks for the last three days. I’m trying to build up a week’s supply, but right now I only have three pairs that are comfortable to wear in shoes (as opposed to wearing as slippers). So I’ll be knitting another couple of pairs as soon as I finish one of the other projects.

I think I’m supposed to tag more people to participate, so I’ll go with my mom (if she’s still lurking on here), Matt, another Matt, and anyone else who wanted to be tagged but hasn’t been yet.

The cats are very interested in all the scraps of wrapping paper lying around.

I scanned a couple of rolls of film from the Holga today. Some nice results. There was one that completely blew me away.

See the bird? I don’t even know if I was aware it was there. Sometimes everything just works.

The photo screws up my blog layout, so click the link and view the largest size on its own page. Very neat.

I finished uploading pictures from our Thanksgiving travels to Flickr. The best way to browse it is at http://flickr.com/photos/ame/sets/. The Arizona/Nevada and Grand Canyon sets are new, and there are new pictures in the Vegas and outdoors ones too. I’m really pleased with how some of these came out, so go take a look.

Oregon has been in the news a lot the last month as a place where you can die alone in the snow. In Portland you’re more likely to get a little chilly in the rain and then go inside for a drink, but we have Big Mountains in the middle of the state, and Little Mountains to the sides. Portland misses the worst weather by being in the wet valley in between.

Given the amount of finger pointing I saw when the Kim family went missing (over the highway maps, the unlocked gate on the road, signs that suggest the road they were on was a legitimate scenic route, etc), I can’t figure out why the news reports on the three lost climbers this last week haven’t bothered to mention that Mt. Hood can be dangerous year-round, and deciding to climb the most difficult route in December with minimal gear and no emergency locater beacon is the kind of stupid plan that just begs for something to go wrong.

Even experienced climbers get turned back due to weather, even in the summer. The forest service has radio beacons available for climbers because people get stuck and lost up there every single year. It makes me angry to hear that search and rescue teams are out there risking their own safety to look for people who should have known better.

Here’s what the national forest service site has to say about climbing Mt. Hood in fall or winter (and this info is for the south route, the safer/easier one).

It is not the wisest time of year to climb unless you have exceptional mountaineer and climbing skills. I want to emphasize this because the mountain has yet again witnessed another rescue incident that could of totally been avoided. Mt. Hood is a technical mountain not to be taken lightly. Proper equipment is necessary to ensure your safety for example like a HELMET, CRAMPONS and ICE AXE to name a few.

It is unfortunate that Mt. Hood continues to get dismissed as an easy climb. To be honest it can be considered easy but for someone with proficient mountain skills and has several years of experience. But to someone with out any idea what they are getting into could be a serious undertaking. So be cautious and exercise good judgment. The mountain is always changing so you still need to be aware of the rock fall, crevasses, avalanches, lighting, wind, ice ect.

That the climbers are from Texas and New York fuels my suspicion that people from other parts of the country have no idea what the environment is really like out here. Yes, it rains, but it also snows, freezes over, floods, etc, and the wilderness is beautiful but hazardous. I love it out here, and I wish everyone would show a little more respect.

Somehow I managed to sign up for Twitter the same week it started to get attention everywhere online. I don’t think me signing up and all the other attention is related. I decided to try it because Tara Hunt mentioned that her office now had a Nabaztag, and that they’d set it up with an account on Twitter, which reminded me that I was kinda curious about the service and might as well sign up and see what it was about (I want one of those rabbits too, but they cost money and all this travel has killed my toy budget). And then the next day everyone seemed to be talking about it, which is one of those things that happens to me a lot, and always makes me feel like I’m about 12 hours ahead of the zeitgeist, which is not really far enough to be useful. Instead I get the annoyance of discovering something only to immediately find it on a dozen blogs and sometimes even the NYT or NPR.

Anyhow.

I think it’s a fun little toy, but I’m not entirely sure why it’s getting so much attention except that people like to discover something and then hype it up (er, am I guilty of that too, by posting this?). The idea is that you send short messages, either by SMS or IM or a web interface, that are then rebroadcast to whoever signs up to receive them. There’s also a public timeline of all messages, which is interesting if you ever wonder what random other people are up to at this moment. The entertainment value of that particular feature is probably limited, though.

Services like this have a lot of potential beyond the goofy “huh, my friend Kari is flossing her teeth right now” voyeurism that’s going on right now. If you have a dozen people on vacation or at a conference who want to spend the day wandering around semi-independently, this lets you keep in touch and plan lunch together without having to schedule everything in advance. I could also see it working for a group coordinating an event, where people are off getting things done but need to stay connected without being interrupted by a radio message or phone call. Not all communication requires an immediate reply, sometimes you just need to have a log of what’s going on in your pocket.

Anyhow, there’s a little Twitter display widget on my blog for now, and you can go to http://twitter.com/spinnerin if you want the web page version, or have an account and want to add me. I can’t promise it will be interesting, or that in a week I’ll still be sending updates, but I’ll keep playing with it for at least a bit longer. Maybe until the public timeline gets flooded with new people posting “testing… does this thing work?”.

If I can make time, I want to follow up on this with a post about handling all of the streams of information available to us these days. I’ve been using the internet for about 12 years, and in that time to amount of content we interact with online has increased immensely, as have the variety of ways we can receive that content. I think I might have something useful to say about managing information overload.

I haven’t spent any time on my photos since I last posted. Instead, I’ve been burying myself in several books: Idlewild, The Android’s Dream, Ender’s Game (I never got around to reading it before now), The Cassini Division, and the first 50 pages of Herzog, which is the book club assignment this month, but I’m getting the impression that it’s more style than plot, so I don’t know if I’ll try to finish it.

Work is hectic. My job has changed a fair bit from what I expected when I started, and while I enjoy project management, sometimes it makes it hard to focus on just programming. But slowly I am getting the hang of test-driven development, and the project hasn’t exploded yet.

The lack of sunlight in our office is really getting to me, too. Only one side of the suite has windows, and almost nothing filters over to the developer area even on sunny winter days like today.

I’ll try to post something more interesting soon. I had an idea the other day to talk about how my knitting process is a lot like the way I program. “Do the simplest thing that could work.”