The weather was dreary….

But the hiking wasn’t!

On Sunday Amy and Dave and I went hiking in Shenandoah National Park, at Little Devil Stairs. We left around 9:45, but we didn’t really get, ah, hiking, until about noon. Something about stopping off and trying to get something to eat. The after-church crowd made all the usual suspects massively crowded so we all just got foot-long subs at Subway and at half for breakfast and half for lunch.

I took the GPS and had fun with elevations and trip tracking. I had my digicam with me but every time I tried to get down from where it was to where Dave and Amy were the camera went off first. Is that what they call an action shot?

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Party!

Yes, we’re geeks at the USGS. Where else would you find a liquid nitrogen ice cream party? As if that weren’t enough to tip the geekery scale, it was in celebration of the 5,000th foraminifera sample processed at Sarah and Amy’s lab on the 4th floor.

It all starts with some Nitrogen, liquified. That’s 63 K.

Then, we mix all the ingredients, and add said N.

It’s done!

And don’t they look excited, folks?

The Everglades is a harsh mistress

I spent this week in South Florida on a fieldwork expedition at the Everglades. I flew out of IAD on Sunday afternoon, catching the plane by barely 5 minutes, and returned on Thursday afternoon. Thanks to our friends at NASCAR and the Homestead-Miami Speedway we had to stay an hour further away from the park than normal, in Key Largo.

Long days of working in the heat of the Everglades sun and dealing with the Everglades mosquitos taught me to appreciate the air-conditioning power of an Excursion and the sanity-preserving power of full-body mosquito nets. Check out pictures of the trip over at the Gallery.

Quicksilver, etc.

If you use a Mac, this post’s for you.

Try out Quicksilver. It’s good for you. You’ll like it, even if you’re a weak non-power-user, like me. Just the quick, text-based access to bookmarks makes the download worth it.

If you’re using iChat or AIM or any IM client other than Adium, stop. Go get Adium. It’s amazing. And it blows every other client out of the water.

Both QS and Adium are free. They will make your OS X experience better than before, all for the low price of USD 0.00

Yes, everyone in the blogosphere raves about these things (especially QS) but they’re really worth it. Really. I promise.

On an unrelated note, I’m reading Quicksilver at the moment.

No-news update

I recently vowed to not follow the news so compulsively. It’s been only a short time—just a couple of days, in fact—but I have noticed some major changes beginning to occur.

Let me first outline to what I allow myself to be exposed:

• Blogs of a generally non-political nature, or those that include occasional political commentary.
  • ex: BoingBoing, MetaFilter, dcist
  • no-no: Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Atrios, Altercation
• Sites that follow the major memes of the day’s blogs and sites, even though those memes may be (and often are) of a political nature.
  • ex: blogdex, del.icio.us/popular, popdex, yahoo buzz
• Techie blogs that touch on politics and current events from time to time.
  • ex: lessig, slashdot, groklaw
• Local/quirky news sites.
  • Portland Press Herald (my hometown paper), WashCP, metro pages of WaPo, science news, oddly enough news
  • no-no: Full WaPo, NYT, Yahoo! News

The result of these self-imposed restrictions? In a word, settledness. I no longer compulsively check sites to see if they’ve been updated. (I don’t use a newsreader though I’ve tried many a time; my brain and surfing habits just don’t jive with the way they work.) No more do I seek out the latest, bleeding-edge news. No more cross-checking of similar articles, seeing who reports what. And most importantly, no more welling-up of emotion at every article detailing some new fraud perpetrated against the American people.

update: I had become so accustomed to these feelings of pity, of anger, of sorrow, they had become expected events. What would the day’s news bring? What new atrocity would spring up in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Washington? Who would be screaming about it? Who would be passing it off as another attempt by big media to misinform the populace?

My mind is clearer now. My news fetish, my meta-news fetish, my meta-meta-news fetish: all are gone, or at least in storage for a while. And it feels good.

Today’s hypocrite

I saw this Mitsubishi Montero in the library parking lot.

Wait, what’s that say on the bumper?

Riiiight. I’d rather be fighting global warming than driving my 13 MPG suburban assault vehicle to the library on a beautiful sunny day, too. I’m sure that person must be really concerned about the environment.

And I’m Spent

The whole election thing has left me drained.

Every day for weeks leading up to it I compulsively checked blogs, news sites, polls, and anything else that mentioned the election. Now it’s over. And I’ve had enough. I’m not checking any news sites for a good chunk of time, now. Just friends’ blogs and totally non-mainstream-news related sites. Perhaps it’ll be a week, perhaps a month. But I’m going under the radar as far as the world is concerned. And I like it just fine!