Moab Day Three

Posted on by Jordan

Yesterdays Moab post got a little verbose, so I will try and keep this one short and to-the-point.

First off, where Heather was sleeping:

On the morning of day three, ( Sunday ) we basically just packed up camp and headed back to Grand Junction. The drive was pretty, although the scenery was pretty much the same as what we had been seeing all weekend. Back in Junction we had lunch and watched football until it was time for our flight. For the record I would rather not ever have to be that tired on an airplane again.

To recap, I really want to emphasize how much fun Heather and I had on this trip! It was so good to get to introduce the woman I am going to marry to some of my best friends. We also got to see some of the most amazing geological formations out there, in perfect weather conditions, under a relaxed time line that let us just enjoy everything we did. We really owe a lot to Josh for pushing to make this trip happen, and to DJ and Vanessa for being amazing hosts and guides!

One last shot of the guys, for good measure:

-Jordan

Hybrids

Posted on by Jordan

I read this article first thing this morning, and realized I had a pretty bad understanding of hybrid state-of-the-art.

  1. Current production hybrids still allow for the gas engine to directly drive the wheels
  2. The lithium-ion battery in the Volt weighs well under 1000 pounds.

On the first point I am still sort of torn on, it seems really dumb to have the extra drive-train for 2 engines, when you consider weight to be your number one problem for staying efficient. Even with the dual drive option, you are looking at using the gas engine outside its optimal operating speed at least some of the time.  On the other hand, charging a battery is extremely lossy… it seems like 20-30% is the number I read not to long ago. Running your engine at optimal RPMs, you’re still bleeding energy all over, losses when you generate electricity, losses when you charge the battery, losses when you discharge the battery. I am really fascinated by the trade-offs there, I really wish hard numbers were more available. (Maybe they are and I just haven’t looked)

On the second point, I am really impressed by the performance they are getting out of a fairly small battery weight footprint. My personal experiences with lith-ion batteries haven’t been all that positive, but I think its because sooner or later my cell phone runs dead, and I hope that preventing that will extend battery life substantially. Its also interesting to me that they aren’t really charging the battery with the gas engine, just putting in enough power to keep the battery above 30% charge, so hopefully avoiding a lot of waste in the explosion –piston -coil/magnet-wire-chemical _reaction system they have to go through to charge the battery on the road.

I am still highly skeptical when it comes to the long-term viability of a battery powered car, the article claims they are shooting for 150,000 mile lifetime on the battery packs. If they make that, I suppose it’s loosely comparable to automatic transmissions.

-Jordan

Moab Day Two

Posted on by Jordan

(ok, so the picture was taken on day one)

Day two, Saturday started off setting around the campfire some more, while eating bagels and whatnot. The fire was completely unnecessary, but if your going to go camping you just as well include fire whenever possible. After breakfast we hit the Moab farmer’s market thing in the park. The market included things like “Ultra Organic Peaches” and other things that seemed a little… hippie-esque. I suppose when you arrive at the market riding in a 1970’s era VW bus, you can’t say too much about hippie-esque appearances 🙂  We bought some amazing non-organic peaches and played frisbee in the park most of the morning. After a stop at the visitors center, we headed back to camp for lunch. Interesting note at the visitors center, the desert is hot, and people wanting to venture out in it should take water, or so the signs repeatedly told us. The other thing we discovered was that there were plenty of places to shower for a few dollars a head.

After lunch, we headed back into Arches National Park with the rough idea to try a longer hike and seeing some arches deeper into the park. We started out on the trail to the “Landscape Arch,” and discovered that the trail was an amazing walk through some towering rocks. Being on the shaded trail almost the entire way out to the arch was really refreshing, with some neat stuff to look at along the way. The arch was more than a little impressive; the picture doesn’t do it justice.

After a little while just looking at it we headed up the more primitive trail that continued past the arch. Trail is almost charitable… it was just a few markers along the giant slabs of rock climbing out of the valley below the “Landscape Arch.” Given those conditions it seemed natural to just climb out on a kind of pinnacle of rock overlooking the valley once we were most of the way out. We then proceeded to kill huge amounts of time posing and shooting pictures. I should credit Josh for being mostly willing to frequently operate a camera once one of the couples had a picture idea. The sad thing is (and I should have known this from other trips) that you cannot tell how high or precariously balanced people are in pictures for the most part. We have lots of pictures with nice arid mountain backgrounds, without any real record of the stomach clenching drop-off we are next to. I should probably post the shadow pictures we took now, but I will leave you in suspense, simply knowing that we took pictures of our shadows, also that the pictures look cool. We never actually made it to any other arches, and headed back into town to try out one of those rent-a-shower places we got information about earlier in the day. Despite being a graveyard for dead RVs the showers at the place we went were rather clean, although our standards might have been affected by our overall cleanliness. Suffice to say a shower feels really good after 2 days of hiking around in the desert.

We had supper at a neat little pizza place in Moab, and then headed back to camp. We broke out a deck of cards to complete the Medicine Valley recap by playing 13-point pitch for an hour or so. Sadly the best place for Heather to participate was in the top bunk of the Bus, meaning she stayed awake for maybe 15 minutes. I suppose given the shower and heavy meal that’s pretty good for her 🙂 When we packed up the card game we realized that the bedding for the other bunk was behind Heather. As I predicted at the time, Heather has no memory of being woken up and helping me get the bedding sorted out, but everyone else felt bad about having to do it.

Next up, Day Three! 🙂

I can’t wait to have kids

Posted on by Jordan

It seems then I will have somebody to play games with in the house 🙂

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D937U9BO1&show_article=1

* edit a few minutes later *

for those of you who didn’t want to read the entire article, here’s the key quote:

“Ninety-seven percent of young respondents play video games. That’s 99 percent of boys and 94 percent of girls”

-Jordan

Moab Day One

Posted on by Jordan

I am going to spread the Moab trip over a few days worth of posts so hopefully it wont be as huge as the DC post, and so it wont take so long to write 🙂

We drove from Grand Junction out to Moab after breakfast and packing our gear into the “bus” and Josh’s car. The drive is roughly 100 miles, but the bus only dose about 55-60 mph and the 2nd half of the drive is mountainous enough to make it take a while.  We stopped somewhere along the road once we were into the valley next to the Colorado River to take a few pictures ( like the included illustration ) and watch DJ climb to up the side of the valley. I would post pictures, but he’s so small at the top you cant tell it’s even him.

After the stop I got to drive the Bus, leaving Heather and I to man the bus. It was fun, but let’s just say that power steering and power breaks make driving on small winding roads easier. After some searching we found a really cool campsite, tucked in against a rock wall, so we had shade all day long. We bought food for the trip in Moab, had a very late lunch back at camp and then headed over to Arches National Park.

At this point somehow the entire day has slipped away, and we were racing against the clock to get to the delicate arch in time for sunset. Heather and I discovered that her ideal all-terrain speed isn’t nearly as fast as some of the other people in our group. A certain amount of stress was created between the two of us while we figured this out, but we made it to the arch in time after all. The view was well worth it! Catching the last few minutes of sunset, with a bright full moon behind the arch was amazing. It was incredibly crowded, as it seems quite a few people, and about $100,000 worth of cameras also wanted a look at the “full moon + arch + sunset” combo.

Back at camp we made (“foil dinners” / “hobos”) using virtually no flat space, 2 swiss-army style knives, and exactly the amount of foil we needed to cook all the food. This was Heather’s first exposure to camp cooking (motto: “the dirt adds flavor!”) so I was a little bit worried, but aside from some comments about “health code violations” she was enthusiastic about the whole thing. The food came out almost perfect, and then I think we kept the entire rest of the camping area up listening to us recount dumb high school moments for hours. In short a great night, and a great way for my fiancée to get to know some of my friends better.

-Jordan

Back from Moab

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I had an amazing trip over the weekend + Friday, out to see DJ, Vanessa, and Josh, and go camping in Moab.

First off I should say that Heather did really well camping! I am really proud of her for just jumping in and having fun on her first camping trip.

I hope to get a full recap of the trip, and maybe some pictures up soon… For now all I can say is that it was an amazingly fun trip, but today has been one of the roughest Mondays in a long time. Somehow sleeping on the ground for 2 nights, and then getting to bed after 1 last night was more than my body wanted to do.

-Jordan

Comments

Posted on by Jordan

I was somewhat caught off guard by actual comments here, so I dug through the wordpress settings and made it a lot easier to post comments. We will also see how well the anti-spam plugin works, but then again I think for now this site is safely below everyone’s radar, meaning the spambots shouldn’t be a problem 🙂

also, I really want to build one of these: Ruben’s Tube

-Jordan

Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC

Posted on by Jordan

I should really cheat and back-date this post somehow…. but anyway I wanted to throw up a recount of this trip before our next one starts, so here goes:

Heather and I took August 29th through September 1st to travel to Baltimore to visit her brother and be tourists in the area for a few days. It was an amazingly fun time, we really enjoyed our time with Todd and Susan, as well as getting to see some really cool things.

Day one (Saturday):

we walked down to the museum, where the featured display was something like “Real Body 2.” It was interesting, but got a little overwhelming in places where people were packed in tight and you felt sort of trapped with the dead body. Later that day we went into the IMAX of “The Human Body,” it was a cool experience as well. Between those 2 events we walked up to the park overlooking the harbor, for an amazing view of the city. It may sound like a bit of a biology overload, but we had a lot of fun!

Day two (Sunday):

We drove out to Philadelphia, leaving … not really first thing, but we got there before noon at least 🙂 All the historic sites are surprisingly close together there. I mean even if they did have to walk everywhere, we parked farther away than any of the local founding fathers would have had to walk to pickup the fancy new flag and show it to the guys signing the constitution. What we did see: The liberty bell, The outside of the Ross house, The historic church everyone went to, Benjamin Franklin’s grave, Constitution Hall. Things we did not see: The inside of the Ross house (aka the place the flag was made), the Art museum steps “Rocky” ran up. The first because the house was tiny, and I decided making Heather mad would be a better idea than paying $2, and the second because it was on the other side of the map, and we didn’t want to walk that far. Instead of walking anywhere we had philly cheese-steak sandwiches for a late lunch, and sat on a bench behind Constitution Hall for a few hours, it was again a really simple, but pleasant time.

Day three (Monday):

We drove into DC Monday, after some checking online to see what kind of things we could do on a holiday. We settled on a plan where we would rent bikes, and just see what we wanted to do from there. First off let me say “bikes are THE WAY to do the capital mall” I have been once before and I got tired of walking long before I saw everything I wanted to. The Bikes forced us to take longer paths sometimes because the direct-path sidewalks had a lot of people walking on them, but travel was so much easier we still could go wherever we wanted to go without being worn out. Under those conditions we hit pretty much every monument there, and got some cool pictures including the one in the masthead. After lunch we headed to Georgetown, a few miles from the capital mall area. Somewhere along the road out there a pedal started to fall off Heather’s bike, so the afternoon was less ideal. I could go into detail about Georgetown, but this is really long, so lets just say it was pretty and historic, then we got on a plane, landed in KC, and drove to Omaha, wrapping up an incredibly full, incredibly fun weekend.

-Jordan

Me:1 Google Maps API: 0

Posted on by Jordan

This might be more honestly considered the rematch, after things did not go so well for me Saturday, but I have a fully-functional map on the directions page now! I am not too impressed with the documentation in the google maps API, they give you some helpful example code, but don’t explain what anything dose. When I took the time to go through it line-by-line I realized what was going on, but good grief I write more descriptive comments into code that nobody will ever see at work than they did into their public *EXAMPLE* code </grumble>

I am really excited to have that in, it means one more thing off the list, and a somewhat more involved task than the ones before it. I will ask you to kindly ignore the allignment mess at the bottom of the directions page, and refrain from pointing out that all I did was copy-paste some code into a CSS template while I bask in this accomplishment.

next up: the RSVP page, aka “lets point out how little Jordan knows about PHP”

-Jordan