Several weeks ago Kirsten and Brian came for a visit and we went hiking in the Gulf Hagas area. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I moved to Maine so I was psyched. The trip up took us about 3 hours or so from Yarmouth. We discovered on the way back that we took the wrong route – if you’re travelling from southern maine, definitely take the Brownesville entrance to the land, not the Greenville one. The dirt road in is shorter and much better maintained – in fact unless you’re in some form of SUV/offroad vehicle with high ground clearance, definitely don’t take the Greenville route, your car will be bottoming out and you’ll be buying a new muffler.

Anyway click on the photo if you’d like to check out more pictures of the trip. Gulf Hagas is called the ‘Grand Canyon of Maine’ and while that’s rather grandiose, it is a beautiful area with several awesome waterfalls.

Check out this extremely well constructed 3d representation of the NYC skyline over the ages. This is really well done flash app. Cool interface, awesome subject matter. Several years ago when it was looking like Bowdoin might be working with Columbia we talked in general terms of the possibility of doing something like this. I just wish this one also had good photography of the buildings. Well worth playing around with though, check it out.

Err, busy of course. First of all, despite more than almost a week of solid rain, the ‘good’ weather is here, and I’ve been spending my time doing outdoorsy things instead of spending all my hours glued to the computer. And I’ve been busy on the weekend – Kirsten and Brian came up last weekend and we hiked Gulf Hagas (pics and story to come) and this weekend I’m off to MA and NY. Hence the reduced number of posts. Sorry, it’s going to be slower over the summer as it usually is. That said, I’ll post a few things today before I take off to occupy your attention 😉

I’ve mentioned innumerable times how much I loathe Time ‘Join the broadband revolution, erm, but with no upstream’ Warner. Despite my distaste for them, they’re actually one of the better cable monopolies. The essential problems are that they are a monopoly and they own content companies so their service offerings are compromised by their steps to aggressively protect their intellectual properties. Meanwhile the telcos, who everyone hated in the 70’s, have stumbled about over the past decade or so, unable to formulate and execute a rational strategy to deliver data services to consumers. Maybe things are slowly beginning to change for the better though. Supposedly by the end of this year a portion of Verizon’s customer base will be able to subscribe to 30Mbps dsl (10x faster than cable’s 3Mbps) and Verizon is also dropping over a billion dollars on an upgrade to their wiring capacity, with the intention of delivering fiber optic to our doors.

Sign me up is all I can say. Competition rocks, someone finally looks to be challenging the cable monopolies. One caveat though – goddamnit they better deliver asyncronous upstream bandwidth or at least something close to it at the same time. This isn’t a fucking broadcast medium, what it will take to get these companies to understand that I don’t know, but a first step is weaning them off their intellectual property holdings, it’s compromising their ability to offer service.

Anyway here’s hoping.

Wednesday shortly after I got home from work there was a knock at my door. The only folks who knock on a regular basis are the Jehova’s Witnesses or other brands of jesus freaks who show up now and then, so I approached the door with some trepidation. On the other side of the glass stood a middle-aged woman with a government badge hung around her neck. I had one of those ‘oh shit!’ moments as I tried to parse her credentials – was it the feds, on my ass because of the server break in a couple of months ago where hackers managed to get at my mp3 collection? The fact that I routinely download tv shows and other media off the net, and somehow they got onto me?

In the end it turned out to be someone from the US Census Bureau, and they were visiting me on behalf of the US Commerce Department. apparently, similar to say the Nielsen’s, the Commerce Department surveys US households on a regular basis. My address got picked out of the proverbial hat and from now on they will be surveying me once a month. The data folks like me provide is used to analyze the state of the US Economy. So the next time you hear one of those news lead-ins on the evening news ‘according to Department of Commerce statistics, 24% of Americans now….’ you can think of me.

I added several photos to my Misc. photos gallery, including:

My new car:

And a photo of the spring’s first kayaking trip:

That particular shot shows this very short stretch of rapids that I actually could not make it past on a tributary of the Royal River in Yarmouth. The water speed was not the issue, it was the submerged rocks and the fact that the water was only about 6-8 inches deep, leaving me unable to get a bite with my paddle. I must have tried getting up past this about 20-25 times using various approaches, all to no avail.

There’s also a pic of Nick, who came for a visit a couple of weeks ago, during which we went on a long bike ride over hill, dale, and treacherous swamp:

It’s not the best pic of Nick, but it was the only one I got so it will have to suffice. We followed a power line trail off of a road I bike along often. I was pretty sure I knew where the trail would come out (and I was) but what I wasn’t sure about was if there would be marshland along the trail similar to the trails that are near my house. There was, a lot of it. Nick and I spent about 1-2 miles of the bike ride hauling our bikes from hummock to hummock in the marsh. Still in all it was fun.

There are a few more pics to be had on the 5th page of the misc. photos gallery for each of the above subjects.

So my beloved but well worn 1995 Saturn SL1 is nearing the end of its days. I’ve been shopping for a new car as a result, having settled on a Mazda 3 hatchback after much research. Anyway today I spent my morning at the dealership working out the details on purchasing one. After finishing that up I walked out to hop into the Saturn, go to open the door, and the door handle breaks in my hand. Methinks my poor Saturn is trying to tell me something ;-(