The Treehouse Blog

Well, that makes the third rattlesnake I’ve seen this year, and this time, there are pictures. Chris and I walked up to the Gunter Valley Dam tonight, and this was on the bridge over the spillway. The road now bears the signs and rules of the State Forest Service, which probably means that they now own it.

Maybe Doug‘s right about pipelines… Walking down the some one we did that night, only this time in the opposite direction and in daylight, I encountered two rattlesnakes (yes, one rattled), and had a little slip-and-fall resulting in a stiff hand and a sprained (that is, hopefully not broken 😉 toe. Other than that, it was a pretty enjoyable hike. The mountain vistas were quite clear, giving an opportunity for the new camera to hopefully show its worth.

Other than that, not too much happening. Still sorting things from the LAN party. Also reading… Chris lent me his Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide, and I’ve been reading it, uncovering many references I’ve heard elsewhere. Realizing that no work on NetMRG has really happened this summer, I’ve also started hacking at that…

School is looming ahead, only next week at this point. Pam (the math department secretary at Ship) added me to the class I was hoping to get into, which should bring me to a 14-credit semester. Things are still looking on-track for a Spring ’05 graduation. I still need to do the math on my schedule, see if Ian and I have any lunch overlaps, and plan the rest of my time.

Despite my mother unplugging the phone line before the storm got very close, my newer ISDN TA got fried hard. The old one is back in place at the moment, all quirks included. I was driving home when it was storming, and a lightning strike was visible directly ahead of me (probably in the field, maybe half a mile away). A second or so later I briefly smelled unhappy electronics smell in my car… nothing seemed unhappy though, hopefully it was the cables along the road. We didn’t have any power problems (except blips) at home, but AT&T had at least one nearby site down most of the evening. Doug called after the storm had passed to say that they had lost phone and power, a good while after the storm had passed them. The tornado potential kept the local news on the air until 8PM.

Despite what Doug says, I really enjoyed most of that hike! Well, except the part about wondering if the road was actually a river. It’d be good if DCNR put out some maps where mountain-sized hills aren’t displayed as two elevation lines. Besides, Ian, Isaac and Chris all have similar stories and I don’t hear them complaining (well, very often, anyway) :).

Monday, Doug and I hiked up to Lewis Rocks, or what Ian calls South Mountain Falls… both names are equally applicable. The lighting was awesome, and we got some great wallpaper photos. Wow, my camera is pitiful in quality compared with Doug’s ;).

Tuesday, the last piece (motherboard) arrived for my Oak upgrade. I proceeded without much problem (except for nearly destroying the processor via misapplied heatsink… my thanks to the A7V8X motherboard for shutting the machine off when it detects the processor is about to melt…). Oak is much faster processing-wise, and transfer speeds have improved, but are not quite at the media-limiting point.

Isaac and Ange organized a Capture the Flag event, which I was able to attend. I think they had 16 people at peak, divided over two teams. We got three games in between around 11:00 and 1:30. Due to the moon, only the last game was *really* dark. And this morning, the family went to the Silver Springs Flea Market. I didn’t get anything except for my usual breakfast sausage… most of my past purchases had been junk for treehouse assimilation, and that pretty much came to an end when I started working.

Chris and I hiked up to a grave on top of a Perry County mountain yesterday in search of a geocache, which we did manage to find. We walked part of a trail in the Hemlocks Natural Area, a very beautiful place indeed. We then trekked up the side of a mountain, walked along its top, and then, about half a mile from our target, we realized that it was on the next mountain over. We had to go through the very narrow valley between, then met up with a trail on the other side. Chris says one mountain per hike is now a requirement.

I’ve been playing with ISC DHCPD a good bit recently. Today I became more aware of the limitations in OMAPI, especially the lack of useful parameters that can be specified for host objects in this manner. This was completely offset by the coolness of dhcp-eval, however.