red echo

I spent a good chunk of the evening reorganizing my music setup. I put away a few gadgets I'm not really using anymore, tucked some wires away more neatly, and switched the black metal mixer stand for a nice little wooden table I've had sitting in storage since I got my new desk. I guess I've been in a spring-cleaning mode lately or something, because I've been doing a lot of sprucing up and rearranging. I keep finding these little projects that need attention. It's nice, though; my place feels cozier than it did a month ago, more like somewhere I'm happy to have people visit.

We had band practice at my place tonight. We usually play over at Greg's house, where we can crank up the amps without worrying about the neighbors, so it took a while getting the levels sorted out. We played a few of our usual covers, noodled around a bit, and ended up writing a song. It was nice seeing all the experimental chaos slowly resolve itself as we picked up on bits of each other's experiments. It still needs a lot of practice - we haven't quite gotten to the point where we can play the whole thing through yet - but it felt great as a milestone. I'm not really sure where this is going to go, what it's going to sound like, or what my role in it will end up being, but it's fun just to play again.

This was one of the most amazing hikes I've ever taken. It was long, but not tedious, challenging, but not exhausting, and the views were a spectacular reward.

The seven of us ended up leaving Heden at about seven-thirty, arriving at Paradise about three hours later. Twenty or so minutes of packing and adjusting later, we hit the trail.

We started out in thick fog, but climbed quickly through the layer of cloud, and came out into a brilliant blue day before we finished our second hour of hiking. Mount Rainier stood thousands of feet into the sky above us, an astounding bulk, while the other peaks of the Cascades barely reached above the clouds at all. Adams and St. Helens were also clearly visible to the south.

We continued up the Muir Snowfield, crunching our way through an increasingly well-worn track, watching people ski and board down the wide expanses of fresh snow on either side of the trail. Our destination was Camp Muir, which is the stopover point for overnight summit attempts, and about the furthest you can go without having to cross a glacier. There's a hut, a tiny ranger station, and a little plateau where the overnighters pitch their tents.

The last few hundred feet were hard. There comes a point where your strength is gone and you just keep driving yourself on by will power. Camp Muir is at 10,188 feet, and the elevation had definitely started to take its toll when I hit 10k. It felt good, though, to push myself: it's been a couple of years since I've climbed anything that offered this much of a challenge.

When we reached the top, a few of the guys changed into tuxedo shirts and jackets, pulled champagne, caviar, and crackers out of their packs, and went around astonishing everyone at the top with offers of a snack. “Why are you doing this?” “Because it's Monday!” Ah, beautiful randomness.

After a few increasingly chilly minutes at the top, it was time to descend. We inflated plastic pool floats and dove down the snow, swishing our way down a few hundred feet at a time. The floats quickly went flat, which complicated the glissading process, but it was great fun and we made it down in about two and a half hours, before the sun set.

I had a great time. The company was good, we had no major mishaps, the weather could hardly have been better, and the place itself was so beautiful it threatened to exhaust my stock of superlatives.

I think the downtown REI has made a mistake by starting to charge for parking; it introduces a time pressure to the experience. I used to just wander around the store, looking at all the gear, imagining the expeditions I might undertake that would give me good excuses to buy all these things, and sometimes buying them anyway. Now I have to go straight for whatever it was I came to buy, and then just leave. Boo!

I had made some tentative plans for a three-day solo backpacking trip this weekend, but the weather has been pretty grim, and my state of mind about the same, so I decided to call it off. Instead, I'm going to join Lars, Leo, Mez, and a handful of others on Monday for a climb up to Camp Muir, on Mount Rainier. It should be a good brisk walk: about 4.5 miles and 4700 feet of elevation gain from the parking lot at Paradise. I've never hiked with this group before, but they're a good bunch of people, and I'm looking forward to the trip.

Ah, music - what fun this all is! I'd forgotten why I bought that red guitar.

I woke up in a spring-cleaning mood and proceeded to tackle a couple of projects I've had ticking away in the back of my head for the last month or two. First I went to the garden store and bought a bunch of plants: an ivy in a hanging basket for me, and some bright spring-looking flowers for that container-garden I promised Sara. The ivy is nothing special, but at least it'll bring some green back into the room, and it should do well in the indirect light my living room gets. For Sara's deck, I decided to use the big deep-blue pot left over from last year's unfortunate clematis project, and picked out some flowers with contrasting orange and red hues.

Gardening complete, the next stop was Home Depot, where I picked up an armful of laminated shelf pieces and some hardware. A couple hours of assembly later, I had a set of shelves sized to exactly fill the curious nook in my living room behind the couch. It isn't what you'd exactly call “fine furniture,” but it's functional, and you can't really see it underneath all the books anyway. And, books: at least the stacks no longer cover the entire length of the wall under my windows, but even after filling all five shelves I have a couple of piles left over. Oh, well: that's a problem for some other time, as is the task of putting them into some kind of useful order.

I went to Vertical World for a couple hours of climbing today, with Rose, Alexis, Laura, and Suzanne. I'm still a bit new to this whole technical climbing business, with ropes and harnesses and all, so my belaying technique can definitely use some polish, but the climbing itself is familiar as ever. I was definitely beat by the end of the session, but in a good way.

I felt like getting out into the trees today, so I drove out to North Bend and walked up to Rattlesnake Ledge. This is one of those classic Seattle hikes, which absolutely everyone does, but I'd never been up there before. I can see why it's so popular; it's close to town and easy to find, and while it goes right up the side of the ridge, it's only a thousand feet spread over two miles, and the view at the top is almost as good as Mt. Si (albeit pointing the opposite direction). The trail winds up on a big rock point overlooking Rattlesnake Lake; yesterday, sunny and pleasant, it was covered with happy people enjoying the sun.

I got home just in time to shower, change, pack up my keyboard, and head over to Greg's place for another musical afternoon with him, Collin, and Dawn. I was tired from the hike, so I wasn't as fully enthused about it this time as I was last week, but we had a good time and played some nice songs.

From Eric Newby's chapter on Fez in “On the Shores of the Mediterranean” comes this astonishing and wonderful sentence:

Behind the souks, many of them reached by the narrowest of alleys, many of them spanned by arches which appear to have the function of keeping the walls from coming together and sandwiching between them whoever happens to be using them at the time, many of them concealing the workshops of the craftsmen, many of them cul-de-sacs, are what appear at a distance to be the great honeycombs of houses in which the Fasi live, those apparently interlocking cubes we have seen this morning from the hill, none of which, despite a superficial uniformity, ever quite repeating the form of another, a lack of symmetry which is an inherent part of the Muslim ethos, and one which manifests itself in every sort of art and artefact, from the asymmetry in the design and even the shape of a Berber rug, to the near perfection of a key-hole arch in a mosque courtyard which is ever so slightly but palpably different from its neighbour, partly because the design was not drawn out on paper but retained in the builder's eye, partly because that was how the builder wanted it to be.

Today marks my fifth year at Real Software. I started out working on a plug-in scripting system and am now in charge of the whole compiler toolchain. This is the longest span of time I've ever spent at a single company. Last year was kind of tough, but this year has been pretty interesting, and I'm looking forward to the projects scheduled for this summer.

I was in a turbulent state of mind this afternoon, so I decided to let the engineering part of my brain take over for a couple of hours while I wandered around Home Depot. After spending long enough looking at pipes and bolts to distract myself adequately, I came up with a new design for the sort of rickshaw-trailer Adam and I are planning to haul around behind our tractor at Burning Man. The prototype we built last Saturday was certainly sturdy enough, and cheap enough for mass production, but its caster wheels were too small and offered too much friction. Today's design uses 8" semi-pneumatic rubber wheels and a frame made of 1" galvanized pipe; I thought of a really simple way to attach the wheels that wouldn't require any precision alignment or extra bearings.

Neither Adam nor I had anything particular planned for the evening, so I loaded up the parts and drove over to his place. It only took us an hour and a half to build this version of the prototype, and much to my satisfaction it rolled smoothly. We each took turns pulling it down the street while the other scooted along on its platform, surfer-style.

This design will definitely work, and it's simple enough that we could knock out a dozen of 'em in a weekend without particularly exerting ourselves, but the more we think about the effect of the project as a whole, the less satisfied we are with its social structure. Our idea from the start was to build something that would encourage people to relax and make friends with their fellow-passengers. The train-of-papasans idea is instantly recognizable and undeniably cool, but it transports passengers separately. At best, you can swivel around a bit and talk to one of your immediate neighbors. So we're going to take a step back and see if there's another way to approach the idea of a larger platform: some kind of mobile gazebo, built from small modular pieces which we can construct and store independently. It should be an interesting engineering challenge; I'm not sure how far we'll get, but at least we have a solid backup plan that will definitely work.