snow!

...again! this morning i got up and swept a dusting of flakes off my car. i drove in to make my 8am seminar and then i moved my car from the parking lot after seminar (1 hour) at which point my car (and everything else in boulder) had accumulated several new inches of snow. it just won't stop snowing here... there'll be something like 6-8 new inches in town over the course of the day. everytime it warms up a little, and the snow melts, i think it's about to be road-biking season again; i start fantasizing about getting back out on my titus and putting in some early season miles, only to have my hopes crushed by the weight of a foot of snow. i'm going snowboarding.

~t

anonymous code tip

someone left me an anonymous coding tip, regarding my xml/css post about changing the header background image. (who was that?)

thanks for the tip, but i already tried it. i tried a bunch of things. the problem is that the header is blocked into separate frames early in the code, and the background attributes are defined in that section. I can't combine the frames, because they call different references, etc, etc. the easiest thing to do would be to delete the whole section and recode a new title block that was one cell, throw in the background and just format the text with a simple line break. maybe i'll get to it sometime, but for now i should be working.

~t

astralwerks remixes

the music label 'astralwerks', longtime supporters and developers of electronica worldwide, have a website that is chock-full of remixes of tracks from artists they represent. download realplayer to hear them, some are pretty cool.

listen

~t

knowledge out the ears

it's a corny and somewhat obscure sci-fi reference, but my wet-wired memory is overloaded and i'm starting to experience leakage. while i try to absorb as much as possible on western u.s. neogene tectonics, i am still thinking about moab. below are two more pics of me taken by a guy we met up with out there. i'm also kind of sick... my last two weeks of fun and travel have finally caught up with me so now i'm looking forward to a weekend at home, not just working on this project but also recuperating.




~t

pothole arch

ok... so this is a small article about the incredible trail we rode over the weekend... with some quality comments on the consequences of mountainbiking's ever growing popularity.

read the article

in my own version, i would describe the trail a little more; it was described to me by someone who had never ridden it and had heard about it from someone else themselves. we found it (quite easily... perhaps a little too easily) this last weekend and i would have to say for how short the trail is, it's one of the most enjoyable single-tracks i've ever ridden. the spur (an out-and-back) forks off from a major jeep trail in moab and right off the bat throws some technical not-too-challenging singletrack at you... leading along a narrow ledge of sandstone that's maybe 3-5 feet off the ground. it spills over a small rock drop into a sandy wash that transitions into slickrock. this type of trade off, trail to slickrock and back, happens throughout the ride. slickrock sections of the trail are not marked, and sometimes finding where the trail picks up again can be a little challenging. the "established" trail sections are thin ribbons about a foot wide cutting a path through cryptobiotic soils, so staying on the trails is a must. it's obvious that the trail has been created or at least improved by bikers... just about every feature of the trail allows you to play; moderate technical drops will lead onto wavy slickrock , small jumps have been engineered into the trial and even the step-up sections of the trail can be ridden smoothly as an air in some spots. the last sandstone bowl before reaching the end of the out-and-back is a perfect session playground, allowing committed riders to get some hang-time on a wall ride that is magazine photo-shoot worthy. I myself topped out at around 10 feet (not too bad for the first real ride of the season), but while we were there, some guy on an 8-inch travel downhill bike was getting insanely high on the wall (about 20-25 feet) after dropping into the bowl from the top of an adjacent dome.

we only rode the relatively well established section of the trail, but for those who are really gung-ho, i believe it's possible to continue the ride out past the turnaround... and seeing a few tire-trails in the distance confirm my suspicions. the continuation requires riders to navigate slickrock bowls and ridges with heavy consequences (i.e. if you fell, you would be very lucky not to break something, or even die). while we were there, it was getting late in the day and we were already tired, but perhaps next time i will push a little further into the trail, which is alledgedly a loop if you can find the way around.

Anyway... enough dreaming about secret trails. be aware of conditions (don't ride if it's muddy!! you will destroy the trail before the season even begins) and be aware of riding in sensitive (access-wise/biota-wise) areas; respect the trails and the issues of riding in undeveloped areas.

...and for god's sake, if you find this secret trail in moab, ride it like you mean it, but don't publish your gps tracks (mine are safely stored for future reference, but you won't see them on this blog, that's for sure).



~t

dissociation from dream-state

im sitting in the coffee shop located in the north wing of the new atlas building on boulder campus. typing on my somewhat discolored ibook, the pristine white smeared with the oils from my skin, im looking down at a pile of papers on seismicity in the sub-andean belt of peru and equador, another stack on chemical weathering and karstic geomorphology and a third heap (rapidly growing) on neogene tectonics of the western united states.

a couple days ago i was on two wheels carving a high sweeping line across the nearly vertical walls of wind and water carved slickrock bowls under the utah sun. the broad and blindingly white peaks of the la sals mountains lent an eye-popping backdrop to this already surreal landscape. two days spent in the desert, bounded by long drives through the night on snowy roads winding over the rockies, have made me feel as though i've been asleep for a long time. this morning (a full recovery day later) i feel as though im finally waking up from this dream. even blogging in this coffee shop reminds me vividly of spending time in taipei's many starbucks locations, blogging furiously back when i felt i had a lot to write about. the last few weeks have felt odd in general, with what seems like the majority of my energy having been spent on friends and adventures, giving me a slight tickle of guilt over not spending all my free time in the office knocking out figures. my gradual emergence from the weekend has left me groggy and disoriented at the moment... indecisive about what work to attack first... unsure where my dreams of the weekend stop and the reality of my work-week begins. wake-up!



~t

what a weekend!

phew! this weekend was a lot of fun, but i'm looking forward to just sitting in my office for a while and getting some much needed work done. i've been trying to get my schedule into a groove for the last couple of weeks, and it's just starting to firm up... but the last few days were sort of a last laugh in the face of academia for a little while. one of my friends from back home came to visit over the weekend, which entailed going for a couple of short bike rides, ice climbing, snowboarding and drinking beer at local breweries. i got close to zero work done over the last four days. my buddy left first thing this morning, i went to seminar for two hours and then took a break for ice climbing in the middle of the day. the ice in boulder canyon was brittle today, after last night's cold temps refroze the top few inches of previously old and rotten ice. my belayer was dodging sizable chunks of ice falling from 40 feet, knocked off by my axes as i worked my way up the renewed blue ice. the fog in the canyon had frozen to the windward surfaces of all the trees... lending a captivating effect to the sunlit branches and twigs; illuminating them as if they were coated with reflective glitter. unfortunately i didn't bring a camera or even my cell phone, so you'll just have to believe me.

listening to deepmix.ru radio online - good dj set today. cranking through some illustrator files of the taiwanese foreland thrust systems now... lots more of that throughout the rest of the week........

~t

~t

breaking

so i used to break, back in the day. i used to practice a few times a week in a dance studio with a crew and randomly start breaking with crews i'd see practicing or performing. i threw down with some local kids in bali. i spent an evening with a crew breaking in bostons market square. i'd regularly participate in circles at dj-clubs back in ny. i am so (soooooo) out of practice. break-dancing is such an amazing form of dance, it was natural for me to get into after my interest in electronica and hip-hop, and martial arts (kung fu and capoeira). most of my friends who were breakers were also versed in some kind of martial art. the dynamic and interactive nature of this form of dance transcends cultural and language barriers all over the world. i hear tell there is a group in boulder, but i have yet to really track them down.

anyway, i was messing around with the imovie software on my mac trying to cut up an old clip (unfortunately not old enough, this is still me out of practice) into a short demo, and ended up posting this on the web, but i'll re-post it here...



~t

downright creepy

kokoro company (a subsidiary of the hello kitty empire, sanrio) has released the "Actroid DER2 Icon Robot"... a 'realistic' android which (who?) is decidedly female. leave it to the culture that came up with anime (and specifically hentai-anime) to develop what some people have termed an advanced blow-up doll... even though the technology is pretty intriguing, for a host of reasons. this reminds me of a news story a while ago about a man in the uk who is leading the discussion of the idea of morals and personal rights of androids... and specifically rights concerning human/android sexual relations. it's all a bit creepy. the thing that really gets me is that although the public demonstrations of DER2's capabilities have all been quite benign, i just get the sneaking suspicion that the knuckle-heads who chose to make this thing look like a teenage girl probably went ahead and gave it nipples.



~t

i want one of these

check out: the env bike

this is what all major automotive companies should be doing, instead of designing new suv's with 8 liter engines. it seems like if a (relatively) small company can put together something as forward thinking as this, and make it a truly accessible system, large multi-nationals should be using this to completely change the face of global power generation. let's up the price of gas to about 100 bucks a gallon and limit its production to a few million barrels a year, then divert all of the remaining resources of energy production companies into developing and distributing hydrogen cell technology. just a thought.

~t