Various topics both uselessly general and mind-numbingly specific.
Out West magazine kept this list of great burger places updated until 2001.
See if your favorite place is on it. Mine's not. Sigh.
The guy that runs Out West is living my dreams:
Aboard his 24-foot motorhome-newsroom, Woodbury set off down lonely two-lane roads seeking out great burgers, teepee motels, roadside trading posts, jackalopes, offbeat museums, towns with odd names, and folks with fascinating hobbies.
Yesterday, M and I hiked up Porcupine Creek from Rainy Pass to Cutthroat Pass, in the North Cascades area of Okanagan National Forest.
[img_assist|fid=38|thumb=1|alt=Looking West From Cutthroat Pass|caption=Looking west from Cutthroat Pass down Porcupine Creek valley. North Cascades area, Okanagan National Forest.]
The trail we covered is a 5-mile segment of the Pacific Crest Trail, and the area really should be part of a wilderness preserve or national park.
The hike is mostly a moderate but insistent climb up through the valley, with a number of wide switchbacks at the eastern end. Each switchback seems to get steeper as you climb up to the pass, which connects the Porcupine Creek watershed to the Cutthroat Creek one.
Discovering groundglass.ca, which is a pretty spiff photoblog.
Don't expect this to make any sense.
A mile is one minute of arc in latitude. That's the nautical mile, anyway. The other mile is about 200 meters shorter or so. But I prefer the definition of one minute of arc... It seems somehow less arbitrary. Only as arbitrary as the size of the earth and its speed of rotation, and the decision that there should be 360 degrees in a circle.
A knot, by the way, is one nautical mile an hour, which is a highly recursive definition.
But anyway. A mile is a large unit of measure. It's a semi-big distance. A motivated person could walk 23 miles in a day, couldn't they? So the distance isn't insurmountable.
...just where the name "Mile23" comes from.
Tiny alcohol stoves made out of soda cans: Zen stoves.
Anybody who wants to can get a user account here, subject to approval. With that comes a 'blog and the ability to comment, but no guarantee.
That last bit about guarantees comes from the fact that I'm not sure what's in store for this little web site.
Don't let sean be the only one. :-)
I modified the image module to spit out a ColorInfo tag for IE.
I want to host some image gallery type stuff here, so eventually there'll be a mod to image.module to determine an image's ICC profile and send it out properly, but for now, it's all sRGB, bay-bee.
More info on color management for the web.
Some web sites dealing with Pentax equipment.
Bojidar Dimitrov's Pentax K-Mount Page is a very thorough and detailed source of information about every piece of Pentax K-mount hardware imaginable. The problem is that the information stops at the *ist film camera. Apparently, this site was in jepaordy of being shut down by Mr. Dimitrov, but the hue and cry of his fans has purchased a reprieve. He says he's going to start updating the information and adding new entries, but it'll likely be slow going.
Note: I wrote this a while back, when the *ist DS wasn't three product cycles ago... However, the advice should still apply, even to the K100D, the K110D, the K10D, and the Samsung GX-10. In the case of the K10D and the GX-10, stop-down metering is accomplished with the green button, rather than AE-lock.
The *ist DS is a nifty neeto digital SLR camera made by Pentax.