Zachary Hartley

I was just at the

I was just at the deli and a tourist asked for 200 grams of turkey. The lady behind the counter said, “What’s 200 grams?”

Geocaching on the Florida Hiking Trail

I went for a hike Sunday, March 2nd 2008, with two friends from work, Andrew and Jason. We went to a portion of the Florida Hiking Trail that’s north of highway 20 and between state road 77 and US231. We were on part of the Econfina Creek trail.

Andrew originally mapped out a hike that could be either 4 or 8 miles long depending upon whether we wanted to go further. We choose to do the 8 mile version, but do map inaccuracies (the trail dipped south for a while, then back north, adding a bit of distance) we ended up going 11 miles. I wouldn’t have believed we could do it if we hadn’t, but it was very fun and only mildly uncomfortable on the first part of the way back before I got my second wind.

We were also looking for geocaches along the way. We found five, of which I found two, which marks the first time I’ve ever been the person to find the cache itself. Andrew also created a brand new cache full of all sorts of goodies, including a travel bug.

We didn’t see too many people while we were out there; we met an old couple that lived in the area and got into a discussion about how many of the lakes and ponds in the area were all dried up now. There were many empty lake beds of sand. The old man attributed it to all the new construction in Panama City with too large wells draining the aquaduct. One of the lakes we were stopping to see, Rattlesnack Lake, was still there, but looked like it had lost quite a bit of water.

I have the rest of the photos I took in a hike photoset on Flickr.

Computers are lame

I’m glad that in 2008 setting up network shares between computers is still completely fucked. In this case, the guilty parties are a PC running Microsoft Vista and a Mac running OS X Leopard. The question is which of the two is more fucked. Right now I’m inclined to think Leopard’s is fucked on creating shares for Vista to browse, but it could be that Vista’s share browsing is more fucked. So far I’ve been able to create a share on Vista that Leopard can browse, but not a share on Leopard that Vista can browse. The problem could be that I’m trying to make both shares anonymous because it’s all on the same local network.

Why would I try something apparently so impossible? I’m trying to make it possible to copy music files between the two. iTunes doesn’t make it possible (as far as I can tell) to share the same library on two computers (at least when one is a Mac and the other a PC), so I’ve let the Mac continue to be the central location for music, podcasts, etc. so that I can manage my iPod Touch through it. The problem is that I like to listen to music on the PC while playing WoW.

I’m glad this process is excruciating; it reminds me why I don’t enjoy messing with computers much anymore.

Cruising Facebook for the first time in a while. A bit sad that I don’t talk to a single person from HPU regularly anymore.

I’ve been on a mild Dinosaur Jr. obsession recently, listening to their albums on repeat, especially Beyond.

I went online to find out more about the band and to look for similar sounding music. Most every review I read compared both the singing and guitar style to Neil Young. So I went to Amazon.com’s MP3 store and loaded up 6 or 7 (they’re typically $8 or $9); so far I’ve been enjoying it, though I enjoy the electric songs better than the acoustic so far.

While browsing birthday cards for my father a woman came up to me asking me if I worked at the store. I then realized I was wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants, the exact work uniform of Target.

California

I just heard a funny, but sad story on NPR’s Morning Edition: Neighbor A is suing Neighbor B because B’s Redwood trees cast shadows over A’s solar panels. In 1979, in the wake of the oil crisis, California passed a law guaranteeing the rights of people with solar panels on their houses. As a result, Neighbor A won in court (pending an appeal, natch), resulting in the court ordering Neighbor B to cut down 2 of 8 trees. I’m sure there’s some kind of pre-existing bad blood between the neighbors for it to escalate to this, but I’m still flabbergasted one California hippie would make another California hippie cut down a tree (the segment starts out pointing out how both neighbors consider themselves environmentalists).

Rock Band

I know I’m always the last to the party when it comes to hip new things, but I finally played Rock Band (warning, site maximizes browser window, ugh) for the first time tonight. While the guitar and bass parts of the songs were kind of boring and old hat, the drum set was fun. I really got into it after about half an hour.

That being said, I don’t think I’d ever buy it. It was mainly fun because we had a group of 5 people, which you can’t pull off often (at least, not me at this point in my life, maybe back in college). That and $180 for the game, the drums, and one guitar is too steep for me. The songs available were okay, though quite a few of them were mainstream oldies that kind of bored me. Apparently they are releasing new songs you can download for a couple of bucks every week or so. That seems interesting.

Bring Out Your Dead!

Not much too new in the past three weeks. I got caught up reading The Stand, playing World of Warcraft, and practicing guitar.

The Stand was good, though the first third was the best and the last third not so much. I felt the story was written into a corner and the resolution wasn’t genuine, just something to finish it off. A sense of “build-up, build-up, build-up” and then “that’s it?”.

World of Warcraft has been on-again, off-again for a while. I enjoy the game, but my Macbook’s lackluster performance as a gaming computer has really hindered it, especially since I’ve made it to the later portions of the game which are more graphics-intensive. I’ve been spec’ing a new computer for a while now, but have been waffling on which parts to use, the cost, and the wisdom of building a PC for gaming. I was trying to stay fairly cheap originally, around the $600 mark, but I kept finding that for each an additional $30 here or there that the parts where much better and would not become obsolete as quickly. It ended up being just under $1,000; part list with prices here. I finally bit the bullet last night and ordered the parts on newegg.com, but got an email later saying that my order failed payment authorization. I called Visa and was told that due the volume of orders at newegg that were made with stolen credit card numbers they now always deny authorization until they can contact the card owner. Crazy, huh? I can’t do anything about it until Monday because newegg’s customer support is only available during business hours. Seriously, Monday-Friday 9am-5pm PST for a web site?

Guitar lessons have been going better as of late. I felt I was stagnating for a while there in late November and December. I think it was because I spent too much time playing WoW and not practicing, but given my semi-sabbatical from WoW recently I’ve been spending much more time on the guitar. The fact that my left hand has become more flexible, though still not great, at making chords helps too. I’m still having issues with the mental gymnastics necessary to play, but I’m sure muscle memory and more practice will eventually get me over the hurdle of always having to piece out the scale and count notes on my hands every time I’m trying to make a triad.

I haven’t mentioned work yet because things have been going well, albeit kind of dull. I spent a large amount of time creating a whitepaper for a project at work. I can’t count the number of times I revised, re-wrote, and edited that thing. It only comes out to about four or five pages total, but I doubt a single sentence from the original draft is contained in the final draft. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the finished product due to not having enough information to write with what I felt was the proper about of detail, but I think I did the best I could given the circumstances. I’m a bit peeved because I’m also going to miss a Navy IT conference while they let a contractor attend. It would seem to me that you’d want the government guy who actually works for you long-term to attend something like that, but nobody asks me. I mostly wanted to go to learn about FISMA and hear the discussion about the Data At Rest issue because even in our small group there’s been widespread disagreement about how to interpret what is applies to. Meh, as long as this doesn’t happen when stuff like Blackhat comes up I guess I don’t care too much in the end.

I just finished watching the unfortunately named New Hampshire presidental primary debates (“One night, two parties” (too remeniscient of the Youtube video “Two girls, one cup”)) and all I can say is wow. Good discussion all around, though the Democrats were more interesting (natch, I’m a registered Democrat). I’m thinking a Obama-Richardson ticket would be quite compelling to me. Heck, even Hillary came out looking alright. Edwards still seems like a used-car salesman to me, too populist. I was enjoying the barbs between McCain and Romney. I hope McCain tears that jerk a new asshole. I was surprised at how relatively quiet Guliani was, though maybe I shouldn’t be because he supposedly isn’t really trying much in New Hampshire.