I’m back. Going to take me a couple of days to get back up to speed. I’ll post at greater length about the vacation when I upload the pictures from it, but in brief it was fantastic – 5 days of camping on the shores of Lake George NY. The sites are only accessible via boat and we had no campers adjacent to us for all but one night this year. The weather was almost perfect – One 1 hour thunderstorm was the only precipitation we got and for most of the days it was north of 85 and occasionally north of 90 degrees. Boating, swimming, snorkeling, cliff jumping, tubing – it was all on the agenda. It was so much fun we’re going to try and do it again the 2nd week of September.

I’ll post a couple of other things today as well.

Combination of super busy at work and just about to leave on vacation. As of tomorrow I’m gone for a week, camping on Lake George. I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post as per usual, my backpackit site has like 40 things slated to go on the weblog. In my absence, check out the new photo galleries which I did finally manage to start catching up on.

Rogers Rock camping trip from early July, which has one of the best photos of Soolin ever taken (by Lisa Goldberg, not me)

Tube trip down the Batten Kill River (starting with the last photo on the first page and going on from there) – with pictures of Andrew’s new black lab pup Stan. Soolin swam for about 3 out of the 4 hours of the trip, her stamina amazes me.

A hike to the summit of peaked mountain. Beautful hike. Probably the best moment of it though was when Soolin ran up ahead of me. Suddenly I heard shrieking – I ran up to see what was what and a couple of folks were freaking out about the dog, the guy had toppled over into a creek in shock. They were from an urban area and when Soolin came running up over the crest of a hill they thought she was a bear attacking them (!!!). It was all I could do not to laugh, meanwhile all I was thinking was ‘I’m going to get sued!’ They ended up being cool about it though. Downside was Soolin spent the rest of the hike on a lead.

That’s it. I’m gone for a while and then back to an intensely busy work scene so this place is liable to be quiet for most of August.

Another weekend in paradise. Funny, I lived in ‘vacationland’ for like 12-13 years, but I’m having more fun this summer than I can ever remember having. Saturday Andrew swung by with his new black lab puppy (Stan) and we went to the hudson with a kayak and the dogs and spent hours swimming, paddling and playing with the dogs. Stan was mostly intimidated by the water but he did hop in at one point and swim his way out to Andrew, and at another point he managed to fall out of the kayak and then swam (with more than a little whimpering) to shore, roughly 10-15 yards. You have to give the little guy credit given that he’s only 8 weeks old and much smaller than say, a football. Every time Soolin swam near him when he was in the water he would lose power and get swamped in the turbulence created by her passage, sometimes only his nose would stick above the water as he tried to get back underway. No wonder he mostly wanted to scamper around on the riverbank.

Sunday was ‘finish building new computer’ day – despite it being gorgeous out I spent the morning working on that (I’ll post about it separately) then I worked out and headed to Andrew’s for an awesome beer-fueled summer barbecue.

So perhaps you’ve come across a few of the articles that have been running lately about folks finding themselves able to make a living off of their adsense revenues. I’m pondering going that route myself – finally going ‘live’ with metamusing.net, pushing it off onto a commercial host, connecting myself to all relevant points in the ‘blogosphere,’ adding the adsense bar, letting it go for a year and see where I get. It will only cost me a few hundred $$$ to try it and from pondering, the worst repercussion I can come up with is my ego takes a beating when the world doesn’t beat a path to my website. I’m not looking to make a living off of metamusing, but if it can pay for its hosting bills plus a few dollars here and there I’d be more than content. I’d have to move it to a commercial host since it’s against Time Warner’s terms of service to host a commercial website on their bandwidth. Anyone going to strenuously object if the adsense bar starts appearing here? I might even go so far as to offer a greasemonkey script for folks who really don’t want to see the text ads google puts in.

It’s hot here, HOT, so I went swimming friday and saturday. Almost had a disaster friday – after work Soolin and I were overheating so I stopped home, switched into swimming gear, then headed to the hudson on spire falls road. We got there, I tossed the frisbee in the water, and Soolin took off – she lost sight of the frisbee and became obsessed with finding it, or simply confused, and proceeded to just swim down river. She got a couple hundred yards ahead of me as I scrambled along the edge of the river in water ranging from ankle to waist deep. I finally ended up falling in and swimming after her. Long story short a guy in a kayak rescued her, else she would have ended up at the dam in glens falls or who knows where. It was pretty scary, I couldn’t imagine how I would have tracked her down if I had ended up losing sight of her, and I’m immensely frustrated with my inability to get her to respond 100% to the ‘come!’ command. Anyway this led to plan b on saturday – no more off the leash for her. We went back to the same spot, this time me with my paddling life vest on and her on a lead. I hopped in and the two of us swam and drifted about a mile or so downriver, stopping now and then along the bank for her to rest. It was like having a little motor on a string – I let her head wherever she pleased for the most part and just floated along behind as she dragged me too and fro. When we got out we just walked back to the car. I need to get something with a little more buoyancy to it before we go next time because at times Soolin wants me to hold her as we drift, and I can’t stay above water with our combined weight. I might get a doggy life jacket and see if she takes to it, otherwise I’m thinking a styrofoam ‘noodle’ or two will do the trick, or maybe this thing would be a better bet since she probably could get on and off it on her own.

Man, this past week was the heart of my summer vacation and there’s still more fun to come. I’ve got 30 days of vacation stacked up and an intent to spend them this summer. It started last saturday, my mom was in town so we went out to breakfast with my aunt and uncle in Corinth. I decided to take backroads home and found public access to the hudson river on state lands and a quick trip later I was back with Soolin to spend the bulk of the day floating and swimming in the hudson. Sunday I got up early and took Soolin to Peaked Mountain, where we spent the day hiking and swimming. It was an excellent hike, I’ll post the pictures soon. Monday we got up and went with Andrew to his mom’s house in Cambridge NY, where we tubed the baten kill river (spelling?) while Soolin spent the day on the farm stalking pheasants and turkeys and who knows what all else. We capped the weekend with a barbecue. Tuesday I worked for a few hours then went home to prepare for a camping trip at Roger’s Rock on the north end of Lake George, and wednesday morning Soolin and I got up and headed off for the hour or so drive to the campground. What a blast we had – hiking to the top of Roger’s Rock, swimming, boating, kayaking, tubing (of the behind the boat variety), and playing with all the clan’s little kiddies – like 6-7 kids all between the ages of 3 and 7. The only downer was that it rained hard for a good piece of saturday, putting a serious damper on what would have been one of the most active boating days, and ending the trip early as we all decided to bail rather than stay overnight saturday night. Still, what a week! I spent all day sunday lounging around recuperating from my vacation. I get to do it all over again in a few weeks when I head off for another camping trip on lake George.

Anyway, this post serves as an explanation for the lack of posting over the last week+, been too busy having fun to sit in front of the machines and work on stuff. I have a ton of photos to post (going all the way back to hikes I took in May!), hopefully I’ll get to at least some of them this week.

So you know how surge protectors, some of them anyway, have input/output jacks for telephone lines? I’ve never had a phone issue in my life and I’ve always ignored these inputs. No longer. Last night we had thunderstorms. Soolin and I were sitting in the doorway watching it all come down when a bolt struck very close to us. I didn’t lose power but there was a surge, I heard a sizzle over my shoulder, turned around and saw a flash then a wisp of smoke come out of my answering machine. It was dead as a doornail, with all the messages on it from when I was away at my sister’s wedding gone. If you called me since Friday last week, I didn’t get your message. Tonight I’m off to get a new machine so don’t bother calling till late.

As an aside – it’s pretty cool how common thunderstorms are here in the summer. I grew up on Long Island where summer thunderstorms were common and it was something I missed when I was in Maine – they were pretty rare there. If anything they’re more common here in Saratoga Springs then they are on Long Island. Of course frequent loss of power is the downside but I’ve got a plan to deal with this.

What if it’s biomass production of hydrogen using new, manufactured cells? We’ll have a sense if this is viable in the next few years. J. Craig Venter, the guy who came up with a novel approach to DNA sequencing, founded a new company to commercialize this. The press release is over on yahoo. Cool, cool stuff. I’ve been watching/wishing for sustainable fusion since I was a teenager. I’ll laugh if it turns out I was focused in the wrong direction all along.

Originally via boingboing

You’re likely to notice a slight change in focus on my site going forward. Not so much a change but an emphasis I guess. My former boss, Peter Schilling, is part of the academiccommons project, a site devoted to sharing resources related to technology and teaching in the liberal arts. It just went out of beta last week and they’re going to be picking up slightly edited versions of a lot of the short product reviews I do here, especially the open source/free/off the beaten path stuff I tend to focus on. This means I’ll be trying to do more of that than I had been in the past, and trying to do it more consistently as well. I’ll still be the same almost incoherent and almost always profane blogger you’re accustomed to here, and I’ll still be covering games and hardware and whatever else tickles my fancy, I’ll just be adding a bit more on the software side of things, especially as it applies to education, and I might be posting more thoughtful commentary now and again.

There’s no need to worry about what you post in the comments section – the two sites are not connected, and anyone trying to google me is unlikely to find me due to the ‘real’ david hamilton. Please continue with your profane irreverence, I enjoy it.

The bonus is there’s a possibility I’ll get paid for some of this, which cracks me up – I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined my ramblings here would ever amount to anything more than something I share with friends and family, and when Peter first broached the subject, mostly I was embarrassed – I didn’t want my professional colleagues to see this stuff. But he convinced me, and initial feedback has been positive so I’m sticking with it.

I’d link over to the section of the site where my stuff appears but as I mentioned they’re in beta and today the links appear to be broken. As soon as things get patched up I’ll post about it.

When I moved to New York the layout of my office caused me to skip hooking my server to a UPS. Somehow I concluded that my gaming rig was more important in the scheme of things. No idea what I was thinking. Anyway last week I really got bitten by this decision as I lost power at least 15 times over the course of three days. Mostly it was for only a few minutes at a time, but twice it was long enough to cause the UPS to go down as well. All this is by way of explanation – this is why my site was down for a good piece of last week. After the third or fourth time of bringing the server back up I simply gave up and waited out the power losses. I stopped by Home Depot this weekend and got a long extension cord and now the server is on the UPS, so hopefully no more nonsense like I just went through. This also means I’m about to bombard the site with a bunch of posts I stored in my backpackit account.