Hiking in Shenandoah

This weekend was a good one, especially Columbus Day, which as a contractor to the U.S. Government I thankfully had as a paid holiday. And what better way to celebrate the beginning of the eventual extermination of an entire people than to head outside and do some hikin’?

After some persuasion, I wrangled two of my USGS cohorts Sarah and Amy into making the trip to Shenandoah National Park, about an hour’s drive from here. Armed with my newly-purchased Hiking in Shenandoah National Park (I clearly didn’t read that first review before I bought it) we picked a hike that started at mile 22 of Skyline Drive.

It was cool, clear, and beautiful, and our hike was about five miles, which included two waterfalls and a stunning panorama of Massanutten Mountain and its surroundings.

Sarah and Amy are both geologists, and it was fun to have them stopping every so often to look at particularly interesting rocks. I also got a running commentary of the large geologic features of the area. Go science geeks! (The best I could muster in their company was a recommendation on a wireless card for Amy to buy :)

Kinda chilly and windy in the morning.

The View™

The ever-popular USGS spike.

Handy Windows utilities

I recently got a new computer at work, and I’ve been setting it up just the way I like it over the past couple of weeks. It’s a Dell Precision 340 running Windows XP.

My job includes a lot of data wrangling, and my preferred environment to do that sort of thing is a Unix-style system of some kind. The only Linux box I have access to is a somewhat-aging Dell that serves the web site for my group’s project.

What’s a Windows user to do? Grab these useful utilities, of course, and make Windows more Unix-like!

• UnxUtils—native Win32 ports of a bunch of GNU utilities. No need for screwing around with Cygwin.
• ActivePerl. I first learned about this about seven years ago in high school. The goodness of Perl on Windows. Life is good.

Any other cool utilities that you can’t live without?