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So I still remember my sister and brother-in-law dragging me down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk when I was a kid and so those memories were there when Lisa and I headed down there with our own kids this week.

Ryan, just like on our adventures in Disneyland, couldn’t wait to go on the log ride and it didn’t matter that it was still 60 degrees and foggy the first thing in the morning.

Katie, as it turned out, was pretty much open to any ride she could go on. She especially liked the rides for kids her size that she could go on by herself. It was quite a hoot to watch her riding rides all by herself.

Curiously, the Amazing Chinese Acrobats were there which is weird because they were in Reno when we were there last year. Reno, however, had fewer butt cracks in attendance, which by and large was a good thing.

We also got up to the Mystery Spot which was mildly entertaining. The engineer in me was not overly impressed, but it made for some fun and now I can say I’ve been there.

Also cool on this trip was the use I got out of my new iPhone. We used the GPS and maps application pretty extensively when navigating around Santa Cruz and it did pretty good for what we asked of it. It found the afore mentioned Mystery Spot for us and even found us lunch on the way home. Yes, the 3G coverage was crap and the phone refused to downshift into EDGE (where the coverage was excellent) and therefore battery life on the first day sucked pretty bad. Manually switching it to EDGE solved all that and from there on out the phone behaved great. I do hope Apple gets its 3G act together on the iPhones.

The camera on the iPhone isn’t all that bad for what it is and I got some decent shots off it (like the shot of Katie to the left).

Finally, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are “family outings” and there are “photo outings” and they are not necessarily the same thing. Lugging multiple lenses, strobes and other photo knick-nacks off to new locales is great for “photo outings” but sometimes even a “plain” D300 and an 18-200 bouncing off your hip while herding kids in a crowded amusement park can be a bit much. I’m thinking that something along the lines of the Canon G9 might make a good surrogate for when kid herding is more the order of the day.

Anyway, a good time was had by all.

More photos from Santa Cruz 2008…

Editor’s note: I promised my niece her own post (and photos) here on my blog, so here ya go Mon…

So this last weekend we packed up the kids and managed to get out of the smoke and half way across the country to Kalamazoo, Michigan (or “K-Zoo” as the youngin’s call it) of all places to watch my niece renew her wedding vows (now say “awwwww” everyone).

Now we would have gone to her actual wedding last year, but nooo, she ran off and got married somewhere in New York and apparently, if the alcohol induced speech from her best friend was any indication, may or may not have consummated her marriage on her best friend’s couch.

Sheesh, these kids today…

Anyway, kidding aside (or not…), it was a heckofa time. Lisa and the kids got to dance to “Le Freak“ (c’mon, sing it… you know you know it…) and got to see fireflies for the first time (the bugs, not the TV show). We also got to learn that Michiganders use the left lane on the freeway only as a passing lane which is really, really weird to us Californians.

In a kinda cool twist of time and space, my kids slept in the same playroom beds — now at my brother’s house — that once graced the playroom in my parent’s house and as one of my nephews pointed out they’ve now joined all the other grandkids who’ve slept in those beds as well.

Also since we recently toured the capitol building in Sacramento, we decided to tour the freakishly skinny capitol building in Lansing. Unfortunately, aside from the fact that the Michigan capitol needs to suck down a few more cheeseburgers, the buildings are stunningly similar in design and the kids quickly tired of that nonsense (“…seen it!”). And besides, Uncle C and Aunt K had a basement! You so can’t compete with that.

Alas, we also got to experience the joy that is modern American air travel. Three of our four flights were delayed for over an hour (or two) and usually with us already on the plane (enjoying the spacious seating and the wonderful selection of peanuts). It was lovely. Our kids were great through it all and even though we arrived after midnight both coming and going the kids were real troopers.

More photos from the Michigan state capitol building…
More photos from Monica’s “wedding”…

Nine years ago today my wife called from the hospital at 3 am, “They gave me magnesium, we’ll know in about 30 minutes if it’ll stop the contractions.” She was one day shy of 28 weeks along and she’d been in the hospital for 4 weeks.

“Ok,” I said groggily, “gimme a call in 30 minutes if it doesn’t.”

“Ok,” she said clearly as groggy.

Wait. It takes 40 minutes to get to the hospital… and that’s if you speed. I call her back, “I’m leaving now,” and I got there in 30. The magnesium did it’s thing, however, and I plopped into a chair and watched her nod off to sleep.

I awoke at 9 am — still in the chair — and offered a sleepy, “G’morning…” She answered with only two words, “Uh, blood.”

Instantly the place snapped alive. There was some unintelligible announcement on the PA system that used the word “stat” and suddenly, the nurses and doctors who were only seconds before dressed so casually magically appeared in scrubs and masks. They flipped levers on her bed and rolled her away.

I uh… just stood there… very much alone.

Fifteen minutes later they rolled a very red, very tiny, baby by on the way to the neonatal intensive care unit where he’d stay for another seven weeks.

“Dad, meet Ryan.”

*whew* We’re back from Disneyland and with all our fingers and toes and kids and suitcases and, well, our sanity mostly intact.

Me and the family met up with the in-laws for a 5 day Dizzy-Land extravaganza that included, breakfast with Goofy, dinner with Gorillas and even an awfully expensive-but-worth-it dinner on the Bayou for us big kids. There were 4 kids and, thankfully, 6 adults to keep eyes on them.

I think we could have used more adults… or maybe just more adult beverages.

All in all, though, a good time was had by all. I shot photos like a madman, but oddly while looking over the 600+ photos that I kept I can’t escape the feeling that I missed a lot. I had grand plans to blog the whole thing with daily updates, but being fat and outa shape I had all I could do to download the day’s photos to my laptop without drooling on the keyboard while I nodded off at the end of the day.

Ryan had a lot of fun with his favorite ride this time clearly being Splash Mountain (see the YouTube video). The new Jack Sparrow-ized Pirates of the Caribbean was a close runner up. I quite enjoyed watching him run amuck through the caves on Pirates Lair/Tom Sawyer Island.

Katie was a little small for most of the rides but she got to meet Winnie the Pooh and rode the Winnie the Pooh ride about a zillion times (a fact which Mom I’m sure wasn’t too thrilled with).

The weather in Anaheim was “interesting” with it being warm there on out first full day (Tuesday) but left us freezing our patookies off every day after that. Cold days do wonders in keeping the lines short on the water rides though.

For reasons that escape me some of our gaggle (not me, I had camera gear) decided to ride the Grizzly River Run ride at California Adventure and got soaked though. What made this extra special was the freakin’ Arctic breeze that hit us on the huge Sun Wheel ferris wheel.

Anyway, I’ve a Flickr set online where you can see all the photos and some YouTube videos up as well.

Now I’m off to go tend some blisters.

Ok, so if you follow me on Twitter you probably saw my digs at the OLPC folks for their somewhat slow delivery of my G1G1 XO laptop. Well, it finally arrived and after a few days of serious OLPC geekin’ I handed it off to its intended recipient, my 8-year-old son.

First off, if you were thinking (like I was) that an XO would make a cool grown-up geek toy, you’d be wrong. First off, it’s small… really small. The membrane keyboard is icky and to put it bluntly, the system is — lets face it — slow. Oh, and you look dorky carrying it around.

But it’s still neat.

It’s got a whole bunch of built-in applications (called “activities”) like a word processor (based on AbiWord), web browser (based on Gecko) and a number of programs that are all clearly educational, most of which I haven’t checked out yet. I did dig the sound sampling Measure activity and of course I found the Terminal activity most useful since the whole thing is Linux based.

By far the slickest feature of the XO is its collaboration abilities designed primarily for use in a classroom setting. This allows you to share almost any activity with anyone else. The problem here is that although its possible to configure a stand-alone XO to “collaborate” over the ‘net at large (it uses the Jabber protocol for this) I wasn’t sure setting this up on my kid’s computer would be such a good idea.

Anyway, I’m getting off track here. I gave the thing to Ryan and after pursuing the Record activity (the XO has a built in camera and mic) and some of the audio activities, he found the EToys activity which is a sort of a SmallTalk/Squeak development environment and he’s working (with some help) through the tutorial challenges.

“Can we play ‘cars’ again, Dad?” Aw hell yeah! Brings a tear to the eye, it does.

At this point I’m not really sure how long his interest will last. Will it really catch on (”Look, Dad, I’ve created the logic here in SmallTalk so if Santa comes through with some Mindstorms…”) or will the XO will go to that place where all the Leap stuff has gone that we’ve gotten over the years?

Fun to watch though.

Ok, I think new year’s resolutions are dorky, but this is more of a challenge. I purchased my first DSLR, a Nikon D80, on January 5th of last year. Since then it says I shot 6545 pictures (I’ve only kept 4343 of them).

So, lets aim for 10,000 “shutter actuations” in 2008 with a commensurate keep rate. Should be fun.

If you go by the Rescue Fire department you can get these nifty license plate frames that say, “Where the hell is Rescue, CA?“. It’s funny because, as anyone who lives in Rescue will tell you, you get a lot of “Where there hell is…” when you say you live there. Now that’s cool and all, but what I’d like is, “Where the hell is Skinners, CA?“.

See, the US Postal service says I live in Rescue, CA. Anyone driving by would say I live in Cameron Park, CA because while Rescue is mostly rural I live in a slice of suburbia that borders Cameron Park and is pretty much indistinguishable from it. Turns out they’re both wrong, I live in Skinners, CA.

Never heard of Skinners, CA? Don’t worry, neither had I until first Google and then Yahoo maps enlightened me.

So what’s this about Skinners? Welp, near as I can figure, in 1860 (James?) Skinner set up a vineyard about a mile up the trail from the then brand new Pleasant Grove House Pony Express stop. Today, vestiges of the old Skinner winery are still visible at the nursery at Cameron Park Drive and Green Valley Road, which also happens to be the centerpoint of Skinners, CA on the online maps. Go figure.

In the 1950s roughly 5000 acres was sold to Larry Cameron and later slowly sold off to developers (and I assume something about a Park was also involved ;)). Now somehow ol’ Larry retained top billing rights and James got relegated to cartographer minutia.

It wasn’t until I started messing with the online map engines a while back that I discovered this “Skinners” guy and looked up the history.

Now it’s a lot of fun to put in “Skinners, CA” in various online services knowing that most people — even people who know where Rescue, CA is — will look at it and go, “Where the hell?!?” but most computers will be able to pinpoint it within a few feet of the nursery up the road.

A great example of this is Flickr’s new places feature. When you put in “Skinners, CA” what do you get?

So now you know where the hell Skinners, CA is.

Ok, so this is kinda cool. Over the past, oh I don’t know, couple of months we’ve been noticing our house lights flickering. It was always hard to nail down. Was something on? Did you just hit the garbage grinder or did the drier just go on? Furthermore it was only noticeable with the remaining few incandescent lights we have left (florescent lights, compact or otherwise, are usually too slow to register momentary voltage changes).

Finally I decided to check the UPS I run this server on. Once I realized that I’d never updated it’s network settings after my last network rehashing and reconfigured it to properly page me on power “events” we were good to go.

The result was immediate: we got 15 power spikes in 24 hours. So last night we decided to call PG&E and to our surprise they sent someone out w/in an hour.

The PG&E guy hooked up a “glorified hair drier” to our house power. “Yeah, there’s a problem.” We were spiking and dipping almost 10 volts (due to the nature of the APC SNMP module I have it would only page me on dips of over 14 volts so I missed those). He then opened up the junction box that serves both our house and the neighbor’s house and found that the ground (cable) was both loose and corroded.

Geez, man, no ground? It’s a wonder we still have any working electronics in the house.

So after some cable cleanup — and a planned power outage or two — both our house and our neighbor’s house have clean power once again.

Props to the PG&E man and the UPS logging capability.

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight…

Today being Veteran’s Day I took the day off (I’m a veteran, I can do that) and finally hit one of those ever present TODO items on my mental list: to go scope out the old, abandoned Titan 1 missile bases in the area.

Or put another way, I went off to examine various gates and fences and ponder all the implications of the phrase: “Violators will be prosecuted”.

In short, it was a bust.

My first target was the former site of the 851st Strategic Missile Squadron base at Live Oak. After beautifully scenic 2-hour drive around the north side of the Sutter Buttes (aka, the middle of nowhere) I got quite close.

To illustrate just how “middle of nowhere” I was, I received a call from my boss (yo, day off here) as I was trying to watch the road and my maps but there wasn’t enough signal to complete the call. Can you hear me now? No.

Finally I reached the turnoff from the main road. An encouraging, bullet riddled sign read: “Private Road: use at our own risk” which meant that maybe no one cares and the site would be accessible “at my own risk”. A few more feet and there was the original USAF sign frame, I was almost there…

Then came the gate with the sign, “violators will be prosecuted.” Damnit, so close.

I perused my maps, I was maybe a half mile away if that. I was prepared for such a situation as I’d packed my Army rucksack and some water and had on my trusty boots. Except there was this house, right there, and a guy out front chopping wood. Hmm, mulling over the phrase “prosecuted” in my head I tried another tack, I moseyed up to the guy and asked about the silo.

Apparently I’m not the only one who comes by looking for the site. Yes it’s all on private property and he gave me the guy’s number who owns the land. No, he said, the guy probably wouldn’t let me on. When you think about it, it makes sense: abandoned silos are great places to get injured or killed and the liability must be a nightmere.

I thanked the guy and drove off considering my options. It’s was not outside the realm of possible to just overland it, I was very close and a hiking few miles through the countryside was really an inviting idea (I’m serious, it was quite beautiful up there), but that whole prosecuted thing… I decided to punt.

Next on my list, the boobie prize, was the 851st site in Lincoln. I hadn’t actually planned to go there at all because I’d read it was a parking lot for Placer county vehicles or something (read: local government types with locked gates), so I didn’t bring any maps of that site. I just knew it was near Highway 193 just west of Lincoln and I happened to have it’s grid coordinates in my notes. So I popped the coordinates into my trusty GPS and went for it.

It’s actually really easy to get to, yes it is right off Highway 193, just outside of Lincoln… and yes it’s a parking lot for Placer county vehicles or something. I pulled up to the expected locked gate with the mean, angry signs (”violators will…”) and peered in. Again, so close.

Much like the Live Oak site, while the place was deserted (Veteran’s Day) there was a fire station just right there. Even though I could literally hit one of the silo doors with a rock (the air vent railings were clearly visible), hopping over (”violating”) a county fence within direct sight of a fire station would almost certainly lead to “prosecution”.

Damnit again.

So, the journey wasn’t a total loss. I now have contact info for two of the three former 851st SMS bases (Chico, the site of the third base, was a little too far to drive) so if I ever have a reason better than “Uh, I just want to look around,” I’m sure I can finagle authorized access.

I also got to drive through some beautiful Northern California countryside.

Edited to add:

There are more photos from the above mentioned sites available at SiloWorld.

I got a reply from one of the Rangers at the Orange County parks department:

Fortunately the firefighters were able to spray fire retardant foam on the majority of the buildings in the canyon, and I am happy to report that the house and outbuildings are still standing. The meadow, as a clearing, provided a good amount of protection, as well. The grounds at Arden look remarkably good.

Minor I know, compared to the massive losses people have experienced down there, but very cool just the same.

I posted about my last visit to Modjeska and I recently updated and tagged some of my images from that trip on Flickr.