The higher you fly...

My old gloves have finally bit the dust, so I am looking for a new pair. After a fair amount of reading and research I settled down

on REI switchback. They seem fairly lightweight and dexterous and yet reasonably well insulated for my needs. So, I bought a pair at the Seattle REI flagship store. The gloves have a the 'REI elements' membrane, so they are supposed to be reasonably waterproof, right? I decided to do a small kitchen-sink test. If the gloves can survive under water through ten clip/unclip cycles of a carabiner without leaking, I'd call them good. The left glove passed the test, but the right leaked profusely at the base of the thumb. Ok, you can't have perfect gear 100% of the time.

I returned the pair, and bought a new pair of the same gloves, but this time at the Lynnwood store to minimize the chances of a whole batch of gloves being defective. The new pair underwent the same test, and failed in exactly the same manner. One glove holds fine, the other leaks at the base of the thumb. As long as I kept my hands still, the gloves were holding the water out. The moment I started moving my hands just a little bit, the leak developed.

I am not sure if I am asking too much from these gloves. Maybe I am. But I hope not. So, for my third test I am going to get a pair of OR gloves that I have been considering as well and try the same test. The OR gloves are a bit heavier, considerably less dexterous, and are roughly twice the price. But if they hold water (pun?), then they are probably a better choice. I expect the surface of my gloves to be frequently wet.

Update: I ran the third pair of REI switchbacks and a pair of OR Alti gloves through a kitchen sink test. Both passed with flying colors the leak test. Finally! I knew I was not expecting too much! But I noticed that while the Switchbacks soaked up enough water to become roughly twice their dry weight, the Alti gloves soaked up very little.. So, once the gloves dry out, I am going to consider them once again based on dexterity, weight, water retention, and price (probably in that order).

Last weekend Eric & I attempted to climb Mt Daniel. We did not reach the summit But as a consolation I at least got to stand on the East (<100 ft lower than the true) summit.

The climb is rated as a 1-2 day strenuous (S5/T4) scramble. Doing this in one day would be strenuous indeed, two are probably just about right. To make our lives a bit more enjoyable, we split it into three days instead. 

As seems to be commonly the case in my outdoors adventures, third time is the charm.Twice I have failed to get up Guye peak. Both were snowshoe trips. This time we tried a summer hike instead, which was much, much simpler. If I ever go there again, I am bringing a rope to rappel off of the North summit to the middle one (and then climb back up). That seems to be by far the most comfortable route. The alternate route is in this picture -- down a rocky/dirty/mossy gully,  and then up a narrow path/scramble West of the North summit.

1.26 light-seconds!

I had a few spare hours on Saturday. Not enough to actually go to any exciting places, but enough for a quick hike not very far away. The weather was nice, so I ended up going up Mt Si. Again. This time I made it up in 1:29 with a light backpack. Not a bad time for me, though most of my body felt like it could do a lot more. However something in the left side of my chest kept hurting, and I did get dizzy a few times, so I guess I am not quite in shape.

There was only one person who passed me. A lady. She was walking long smooth strides, as if skiing. She cruised right by me as if I were standing still. I finally caught up with her at the top while she was taking a break. I just had to ask her what her sport was. She said that she did not really do any sports. I did not buy that. Eventually she did say that she used to do cross-country skiing, but felt that she was too old to compete any longer. Her time that day was 1:10 (!). Her best was 1:01 (!!!). What kind of shape do you have to be in to go up Mt Si in an hour?

We've all seen the "life takes VISA" commercials, I am sure. Well, over the past couple of weeks I have seen a few examples where life shows utter disdain for VISA, and prefers old good traditional cold hard cash.

• When traveling around San Juan islands we ran into two food places that did not accept credit cards.
• Admission to a fair at one of those islands was cash-only as well.
• Try taking a bus with a credit card
• Yesterday I got a haircut from a peculiar place in the downtown Seattle. Peculiar because when I walked in the personnel and the clientelle was discussing the current prices for cocaine. And they seemed to know what they were talking about. Two of them could not agree on whether the price for a certain amount should be as high as $2600 or $2500 tops. That's a narrow margin in there. I would not have had a clue whether it was $100 or $10000. Anyway, the guy who cut my hair was tattooed from above his hairline to as low as I can see with some fancy weightlifting t-shirt and arms as large as my thighs. No kidding. When he was done I discovered that the did not accept VISA either. Boy, was I happy that I just happened to have $20 laying around in my pocket! The haircut is superb, by the way.

Bottom line: Life takes cash. Especially when that life has some pretty impressive biceps.

For the past couple of days I've been driving a Pontiac Vibe. It's a rental. It was virtually new (<2000 miles). Brief review follows.

Summary - it drives like a tank. In the worst possible sense.

I just managed to catch a beautiful sunset from Whidbey Island. I should've pulled my camera out 30 seconds earlier, so I missed some of the most stunning colors, but what I did catch is absolutely beautiful nevertheless.

Since the weather has been warm and dry, I have finally got around to resealing the driveway. Pressure washing took two days, a gallon of gas, and annoyed at least one neighbor. Getting 30 years worth of grime and oil is hard; getting all the moss out is even harder. Moss is tough. Patching and drying took another evening. Sealing took two more evenings. Instead of the estimated 2-3 pails of sealant I ended up using 7! I guess, the driveway was "thirsty". Hopefully, this will prolong the life of the pavement; otherwise I am not exactly sure why I spent so much time on it. 

The odometer on my ninja 250 just rolled over to some pretty neat mileage. I just had to take a picture.

I got inspired by AlanS idea to wire up a garage door opener to my bike. I wanted to be able to open/close the garage door

without having to fish the garage door opener out of the trunk or rummaging through my pockets. Alan's idea was great, the implementation bit crude, so I decided to see if I could improve on what he did. I had these primary goals:

• I did not want to add any new buttons/switches
• I did not want to loose use of any existing controls because they were now wired up to the remote.
• I wanted to minimize the number of wires tapped on the bike
• I did not want to go shopping, so if I could get away with using only commonly available components that I already had, that would be a plus.

Earlier this month I spent two weekends in a row on Muir snowfield & at camp Muir. Today I learned that the day after I left some hikers got stranded in a storm and one died. And they were not total novices either, having been to Muir multiple times before and some having previously climbed the mountain. This is very sad to hear as it is. But it gets worse. The hikers were stranded right next to where I set up my bivy. If you trust the news reporters, they were just 200-300 feet above my bivy site. I thought I had weathered a pretty bad storm on my bivy night. Sounds like the storm was even worse the day they got stranded...

Kubuntu setup is progressing well.I've got dosbox and wine working. Rhino3D still does not work with wine (I can trick it into installing, but then the license manager fails). So, I had to resort to using a VM again. This time I tried a vmware alternative -- virtualbox. Nice, slick, easy to use, and has all the features I need. I think vmware may need to double-check its prices on vmware-workstation. They've got some very serious competition from Sun.

For a while I could not get the keyboard layout to switch between languages. xkb was being finicky. It turns out I can have KDE handle that for me, without xkb at all (copied from forum posting):

I've been using Gentoo on desktop for the past several years (since sometime in 2001, I think). I've been thinking about trying something different, but never quite got the time or the motivation to actually do so. A couple of months ago I spotted a pretty good refurbished desktop on woot, and got it to deplace the box that I have been using (with upgrades) since the last century. That gave me the opportunity and the motivation to try something new.

The coolest thing on the block today appears to be Ubuntu, so I figured I may as well give it a try. What can I say? Wow! Linux is ready for desktop for some people; for others it's just about there. That's great news. Yes, there is a learning curve with a new distro, and yes, not everything is smooth once you get a bit under the initial polished surface. But in a couple of days I was ablt to setup just about everything I need, migrate my data, learn how to use the new distro, and even fix a couple of glitches that came up along the way. Not bad. And my setup isn't trivial either. If you were to ask me to setup a fully encrypted Windows box -- encrypted data, and swap/temp encrypted with random keys, I would not even know where to start.

Over the past month or so I have been working on the transmission for my '93 Accord. It has been getting noisier and noisier for the past year till it got to the point where I was starting to get quite concerned. All symptoms pointed to a failing input shaft bearing. The most complicated transmission I have taken apart in my life is a 2-speed lawnmower, so this was definitely a new experience. To make things worse, I did not have a manual on hand (I really should've bought one, but I did not).

Executive summary: This is not rocket science, but sure takes a lot of time. No wonder mechanics charge as

much as they do to do this job. It's hard-earned money. All in all, the entire repair could've been done for under $50 -- the bearing cost $23, some seals, liquid gasket, alum washers, cotter pins, thread locker would make up the rest. I decided to replace the clutch since I was at it, and found that my fly wheel was quite cracked, so the repair ended up costing a bit over $300. And a lot of elbow grease.