flew on a seaplane. i saw this:

then i ate at the wallingford pizza house, the home of the dome. followed by dessert at molly moon’s just down the block. i boomed some blox, finished off the beer from this weekend, and then came home to watch the west wing and update my blog template a bit. observe the newfangled twitter link and slightly cleaner interface!

yes, indeed, my birthday week marched out triumphantly.

so it’s now mid-june and i’ve done pretty well with my goal to get outside, carpe diem and utilize my wochenenden.

despite siff’s best efforts to keep me entheatered, i’ve managed to make it out into the woods for three quick camping trips.

mid-may we piled into the volvo with my housemates and drove up to bellingham for mrs. sarah’s 30th birthday bash. i hadn’t been to larrabee state park before so that was a treat. plus we borrowed alex’s tarptent. the whole trip was less than 18 hours but got all the staples - fire, food, banter, sleepin’ under the stars, and of course awesome sunsets:

two weekends later andre and i dusted off the bikes for a s24o out to green mountain state park. we left on the 530pm ferry after work and were camping by 9pm - this time of the year it’s amazing how well that works out. hammocks went up and the campground was scouted for potential band of idiots escapades. once again we hit all of the high points, and andre turned a pile of wet wood into a pretty solid blaze:

most recently, cc and i took a trek up into the olympic mountains. for all of my biking adventures and other outdoorsyness, turns out that i’ve never actually been backpacking. hikes, sure, bike camping, yeah, but carrying my stuff on my back to sleep in the woods? craziness. regardless, on alex and christine’s advice we loaded up the jeep and headed out to lena lake. it was roughly equal time driving there and hiking but it was a good first effort. for caroline it was her first test of her new tarptent and trekking poles. for me it was the first time putting onto my back all of the stuff my bike normally hauls. i’d estimate my load was pretty minimal overall - although somehow i ended up carrying the kitchen and the shelter. i’m sure a titanium pot and a pop can stove will make all the difference in the way my back felt the next day. that and perhaps a better groundpad - while my new hammock pad is quite warm and light, it’s not really what i require for sleeping on the ground. apparently my choice of dress pants and a wool hat went over pretty well - caroline snapped this photo when she thought i looked particularly dapper:

so as possibly alluded to in my previous post, much like my esteemed hermano jsmg, i’ve been wary of becoming a cranky old man in the wide world of social networking and the internet version 2.0.

there’s a constant tension between the present and the past. on the one hand i like to hold on to my old school street cred. you know, the use of pine (an improvement over elm!) and remembering manually putting together multipart mime downloads from usenet using tin. hell, at one point over a decade ago i had a .sig file for usenet posting. i gophered into wisc.edu to download .voc and .mod files. long before wow, when blizzard was just that quirky company that made warcraft: orcs and humans, i was off on bbs’ playing majormud. i used telix and wrote salt scripts to level me up. old school.

funnily enough, that sort of thing doesn’t count for much in the modern era. yes, i have vast quantities of street credit, but internet inflation is even worse than that in the real world. what was sufficient to buy me adulation a decade ago now only pays its dividends in derision. (just because pine’s quoting breaks gmail that doesn’t make pine bad.)

anyhow, in addition to making an awesome podcast, you can also find me on your favorite social networking sites. by which i mean facebook. technically i’m on myspace although i never log on anymore. having more than 5 friends on myspace is a liability because the odds increase exponentially that one f them is going to get hacked and spam your comments, bulletins, and messages with crazy advertisements and invitations to their secret nude webcam.

i’ve also started messing around with twitter though i confess that i can’t quite work up the will to have 140 characters of wit every twenty minutes. i am following some pretty smart (and funny people) though that show how the medium can be manipulated well: r. stevens, of diesel sweeties; lore sjoberg, of wired alt text and formerly brunching shuttlecocks; and john hodgman, of everything awesome in the last five years (but especially his book, the daily show, and being bruce campbell’s literary agent). like my pownce account, however, i’m guessing that i’ll largely be a data consumer and produce very little.

for a slightly nerdier thing that i’ve been working with, i’ve also set up my own openid provider. unfortunately, it seems like everything is an openid provider - i think even your safeway club card provides openid now. unfortunately nobody accepts the damn things, and even those that do seem to do it in this janky, half-assed way. not quite the promise of easy access to a million systems with just one secure login, is it now?

the last new technology that i’ve been playing with is actually an entire company, doing no evil into my life nearly constantly. i’ve googleized my life in a dozen ways: it started with dropping bloglines like a bad habit and switching to google reader - if only for it’s integrated friends lists. similarly i’ve got a couple google calendars, a bunch of files in google docs & spreadsheets, and my very own appspot hello world application.

meanwhile, i’m hopefully contributing to web 3.0, the personalized, decentralized, peer-to-peer world by creating a decentralized social networking application. it’ll be done eventually, although at the current coding rate it’s been… slow going.

maybe i’m still slightly hip.