The Kenya trip was amazing, It has now been about a month since I left and I can now justify talking about it in my blog since I finished my retrospective photo-journal.

I’m back at Uni taking Calculus II and working for about six different organizations on campus now (English Dept., Interdiscp College, Dragonfly, Alumni, och.)

Anyway back to Kenya. So kenya. Kenya was, well life changing as everyone I tell about it says “life changing”. I still don’t have that term pinned down. I realized on the plane ride into Heathrow that this would be the first time I’d been to a “developing country”. That alone makes it life changing. A lot of the other guys on the trip had been to either the Costa Rica (a bit of corallary eco-tourism with one of our professors at the college) or the Dominican Republic so we heard a fair amount of contrasting between those experiences.

The first thing we did was climb.
Well, something between a hike and a climb anyway. There was no technical work involved as far as we were concerned though our Mountaineer guide used an ice pick to prevent us from slipping and tripping and falling a thousand feet into the fog. Anyway, it was Point Lenana, Mount Kenya which we summited up to at 16,355 feet. We started from 7,000ft at the park entrance, and at about 8,000 we took our packs and food out of the car where it couldn’t make it any farther up the muddy roads in the steadily strengthening afternoon drizzle. By the end of that day we made it to 10,000ft and base camp.

The next day was a 10hr hike starting at 7:40. It took the porters 5 hours. We hadn’t figured out this whole hiking thing yet. Taking breaks is very bad–breaks lead to longer breaks because of the people who have fallen behind. When I finally make it up to our second camp at 14,200ft I almost collapsed. My stomach was just about putting me into dry heaves. As the only veggie-tarian on the mountain I had exhausted my metabolism. Once I got some food in there I was a bit better off but there was some question about making the Summit the next day!

About 6 of us, of 12, woke up at 2am at the 14k ft camp with various ailements. We had broken an untold number of acclimatizing guidelines and were now suffering. In the plans we had accounted for the extra 500ft to “Climb High”and then back down to “sleep low” but dusk and exhaustion rebuffed that idea both days on the way up. Oops. Oh well, we’re robust College students. I had what felt like a sinus headache but I knew that it probably was the altitude.

The next day we made it to the top. There was about at least 6″ of snow at the summit and on the way back down we had falling snow, essentially on the equator!

All said and done we spent 28 hours on the trail. It still feels like the mountain was at least 50 percent of the trip, it was only really barely 20.

I’ve also been messing with Gimp 2.2 (Open Source Photoshop). Through some combination of my increase in comfort with Photoshopping and some great work by the Gimp Team they have really done something special in these latest versions. Excepting the new glitzy, ground breaking features that Adobe releases with each new point release of Photoshop (e.g. Vanishing Point) Its got most anything and if you know that you can work something in Photoshop you can probably figure out how to do it approximately in Gimp in a few seconds (my experience). Other nifty things I’ve learned:

• Multiply in the layer function is equivalent to Multiple Exposures
• There is a colorblind accommodating filter for people’s eyes that are color deficient. Cool! Photoshop makes you buy this.

I’m pretty excited about the Western Website project to make a dynamic iCal calendar (and web frontend) which is controlled from the listserv by everyone and would be interested to see what other Westerners think of the idea. Basically people would preface events posted to the listserv with the subject of EVENT (date here) (title here) or something to that effect. The listserv is our primary focus of the Western community and I think we risk fading the website to obselecense more quickly if we ignore that.

Obviously there could be abuse and, as I’ve demonstrated with my Western Wiki, I’m a fan of social, err, software (as cliche as that term is). Anyway I think there should be an equal but opposite response to any out of hand or generally wrong posts. So one would reply and add SPAM to the beginning of the subject. In the message they could then take the opportunity to thouroughly redress (cuss out?) out the original poster. Furthur redress (as on the spam accuser) would also be based on social means.

There would be a nice *.ics file which people could sync up to with iCalendar, Outlook and eventually Mozilla Calendar too. It will always be updated and could integrate with their other calendars. This would be in addition to the calendar on the website.

• One of their hacks is use RSS and screen scraping to bring things to you. Wonder how much of this came from JWZ (see last week’s cheesegrater entry)
• “He read from the cards and then threw them like shuriken into the audience” I heard about someone who did this in 2003 Western Senior Presentations via Mr. Duncan who judged it as kind of melodramatic. Was the Westerner copying with the idea that no one would *ever* notice? Ha, really makes me think. You wonder if you “borrow” something from the web or more generally, be it a web design, a few phrases from a billboard advertisment, ideas, or mannerisms, what are the odds someone will track it back to the source?
• “Download your banking info and graph it” Considered doing this during finals week but not enough time, checked CPAN to see if US Bank had any script for scraping, they don’t although others do. I need to learn Perl/Python and I need projects to start on, I have time, I’ll probably do this. I wonder if I should just not learn Perl 5, considering 6 and do Python now. Not very familiar with these for all my linux use, meh.

• The added nimbility of Asterixes for lists and brackets for links sure beats this hard code html
• I wish everyone could have 2 letter subdomains for their user pages on wikis. Makes it easy to sit down at any terminal and get cracking on work.
• Of course, long ago I started my own todo.txt as well, which is still in more or less constant use for things that don’t really need to be on the wiki.

I wonder what took someone so long to come up with a nice skin that had consensus. I also wonder if I should adopt it for my Mediawiki. Maybe a tint to the background like the current version’s icon and header. Is this sleezy? I mean Wikipedia is FDL, the code is GPL so it’s legal at least.

1. I updated Carnage4Life’s .NET Screenscraping code for K5–see here (K5Diary2RSS.cs). Something isn’t quite right with the titles (lots of extra spaces in my reader) but I only read a couple K5 diaries and what I got it to produce is good enough for now. Also, only updated rss v1.0, 0.91 should be same though. I’m sorta doubting anyone else will use it.
1. Couldn’t get it to run on .26 version of Mono which is the only version which was to be found for Debian Stable. Wonder if a newer version would work or if it’s gliched somehow. The error reporting wasn’t very good.
2. Ended up having to do a hack were the CLI binary runs on windows with a shortcut under cygwin and rcp’s my feeds up to my serve. Yay hacks.
2. Also discovered jwz‘s screenscraper-to-rss called cheesegrater and set that up for a few of the feeds it supports.
3. Found XANGA does RSS afterall even if they don’t have it in their header: http://xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=(username) is the format.
4. DiaryLand doesn’t appear to after much searching–I can only say: fascists!

Life itself is good. Calculus isn’t too bad, the new professor–Kullman (we changed at chain rule) reminds me of what Richard Feynman must have been like (only listened to his lectures) . Uses good strategies for lecture–repetitious problems with a main common thread all on the board at once I noticed today. Seemed very effective at reminding me of the content, though none of it is new to me (had Calc in HS).

Spent less at the amazing Jungle Jim‘s uber-grociery (2-3x Sam Club size with more or less all Int’l foods) than at the local Oxford Kroger on pretty much the same amount of food. This supports the idea that the local Kroger is the third most expensive Kroger in the country.

PBase (Photography Base) is pretty cool, visited again. Never any shortage of well photographed albums at high resolution suitable for wallpapering. Now that I have a camera and have taken pictures (esp like the Nature 2,3) to use as backgrounds, not so much of a big deal.

I still can’t get over this rainbow from last years vacation to Denali. Google found it recently and My server’s been treating users of Google Image Search to at least one picture of actual quality. ]]> http://thadk.net/wp/2004/06/01/misc/feed/ 1 http://thadk.net/wp/2003/07/06/dodge-this/ http://thadk.net/wp/2003/07/06/dodge-this/#comments Sun, 06 Jul 2003 05:55:57 +0000 site admin http://www.thadk.net/wp/archives/2003/07/06/dodge-this/