Denver, GTA, Fishing, and too much fruit

CALC summit went without a hitch. The digital poster session went well, there is a lot of interest in the work Chris and I are doing with the Heritirx web crawler and DSpace.

When we got back from Denver Friday night, I went to a local Chinese restaurant for take-out dinner. While I was waiting for dinner, I ordered their specialty drink, a tropic themed Maui, Maui, that got me good and drunk for the walk home to my cabin. (I had walked to the restaurant) The next morning I had a medium hang-over but went away by noon. I went to City Market for groceries and purchased a big bag of ripe cherries and some other food.

I also stopped at Wal-Mart and bought a $10 game, Grand Theft Auto San Andres. I started playing and I while my arcade skills are not the best, I find this game's layered alternate reality California and game play one of the best I have played in a while. The keynote speaker at CALC was Alice Robinson, a post-Doc in media studies at MIT specializing in games and gaming. I have already heard much of what she said but I refused to raise my hand when she asked the audience if anyone is a gamer or if they have played games in the past. She didn't addressed a key concern I have with these large gaming communities such as WOW and the like, is that my avatar, character or whatever is not portable to other gaming platforms or systems. I want to be able to build a character and then allow this agent to play on other systems. IBM and Second Life are working on specification for portability between virtual worlds and I wonder if gaming companies could look at alternative revenue streams by licensing their characters for such intra-world gaming. GTA is a great game though and I will continue to play it through the next week or so. The GTA world is a joy to explore and I expect this type of linear/non-linear exploration game will continue to mature and expand.

Saturday night Jarrett called. He and Lance (a mutual friend) were driving up to fish Blue Mesa and I told him I would them around 7am. I woke up late and rushed out. I couldn't find their car initially and in my rush I forgot a few things including my camera. Blue Mesa Reservoir was beautiful, still low, but after hiking down the lake at a couple of places, I found Jarrett and Lance. Lance had already caught a lake trout and a salmon. Jarrett had just caught his own trout when I arrived. I started fishing with salmon eggs and after about an hour, caught my own rainbow trout. Later in the day, we moved to different section of the lake. I hooked a trout on a green Panther Martin, but about five feet from the shore, the fish spit out the hook and got away. Jarrett and Lance left around 3 pm and I drove home and baked the rainbow for dinner. I also got a deep red sunburn on my arms and neck.

On Monday, I did some cleaning around the cabin, played GTA, and ate those cherries I mentioned earlier. Bad mistake. Last night I was up every few minutes with trips to the bathroom. I am tired this morning and likely a little dehydrated. I was planning on riding my bike to work (I picked it up on Saturday) but now I plan on going tomorrow.

Off to Denver and CALC Academic Summit...

Today after my afternoon reference shift, I am headed to Denver for the CALC Academic Summit at the the Denver West Sheraton. I am taking Chris and we are giving a digital poster session at CALC on Western's Institutional Repository. The weather doesn't look promising, there might be snow on Monarch Pass and we'll have to watch out for flooding (not that I'm worried that any roads will be compromised but stranger things have happened to me)

My mountain bike is in the shop getting its 30 day check-up. Last week I was over at my friends BT and Marc house and we started talking about Aikido and they are both interested in practicing. It looks like I'll be teaching Aikido again. I am thinking of either Tuesday and Thursday, or Monday and Wednesdays like this spring. The best way to prepare for Aikido Summer camp; is, not shockingly, to practice Aikido. I am excited and hopefully this will transition to this fall with a larger group practicing Aikido.

Saturday Road Trip Part II

From Creede to Lake City, there were two passes. I stopped and took these photos of the passes. There was some pretty hairy driving coming down the North side of the second Slumgullion Summit.






It was a long day of spontaneous travel and not too smart given that I am traveling to Denver later this week for the CALC summit. (Sorry for the screwed up photos here in Blogger, I don't want to try to fix these photos. Click on any of them to get a full view.)

Saturday Road Trip Part I

On Saturday I purchased some new shoes at Treads and Threads and then decided to drive out to Needle creek Reservoir. I drove up to the gate but it was padlocked. The road up to the reservoir is closed until May 30th. So, I decided I go for a drive. Here is a Google Map of my route:


View Larger Map

Here are some photos from my over 300 mile road trip. The route I took me through some of the most beautiful areas of Colorado. I forget sometimes how lucky I am to live here in Gunnison. The first photo is right on the entrance of the San Luis Valley looking West into the Valley.

I had never been to Monte Vista Colorado before so I drove through Saguache and then headed south towards Monte Vista where I had a quick bite to eat before leaving North west towards Del Norte and South Fork Colorado.

I stopped and took this photo along the highway to Del Norte, Colorado. This was relatively flat but I noticed from Monte Vista to Creede, there were a large number of nice cabins and houses, some large more as log mansions than anything else.



This photo is an example of the beautiful valleys lined with these expensive houses and development.


Driving towards Creede, I stopped and took this photo of the headwaters of the Rio Grande River.

Biking and no snow...

Yesterday we received about an inch of snow here in Gunnison. This morning is beautiful, the birds were singing and the temperature was just below 40, crisp with no wind. I biked to work this morning. I noticed gas prices here in Gunnison are about $3.85 a gallon, so I bet I'll see over $4.00 a gallon by Memorial Day. Yet, another reason to bike to work. I have decided I'm a fair-weather bike commuter, waking up to snow did not increase my motivation to bike to work.

I am working on a paper to present at an undergraduate computer science conference in October. The paper's first draft is due next week and I am half-way done. The title is "Archiving College Websites using Heritrix and D-Space" and is about my and Chris (the student who has been working with me on this project) experiences with integrating Heritrix (a Java web-crawler) and D-Space (MIT's open-source Java institutional repository). My goal is to finish the first draft by Friday so that I can get some comments and submit the first draft by Monday or Tuesday. Next Friday I'll be in Denver for the CALC Academic Summit where I'll be presenting a digital poster session about the institutional repository. I presented a digital poster session at last year's Academic Summit so I do know what to expect.

Movies and Trout Fishing...

Friday night I rented four movies, watching three at night and then one in the morning. The first movie was Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The main reason I watched this film was that it was set in Gunnison but was obviously filmed in Canada. Gunnison, as portrayed in the film, is much bigger, with actual yellow taxi service and a full, large metropolitan hospital. Much of action in the last part of film revolves around the citizens trying to escape a larger city, nothing like the reality of actually living here. There was even large ferns growing in the pine forests but in the end Gunnison was destroyed by a large (presumably atomic) bomb.
The second film was There Will Be Blood with Daniel Day-Lewis winning an Oscar for this role, more overacting but I still laugh about the Eli, the preacher yelling, "I am a false prophet and God is superstition", and then Day-Lewis yelling back "I... drink... your... milkshake!"
The final movie I watched on Friday night was Juno, which I found entertaining and enjoyable and I liked Jason Bateman's character courage (or dickheadness) to not want to be a father and get out of controlling marriage. I saw much of my ex-wife in Jennifer Gardner's character and how I felt when I was married to her. The next morning I watched the final movie , Before the Devil Knows Your Dead with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, and Marisa Tomei. Good Tomei nudity not so much with Philip Seymour Hoffman. The larger context of flawed human beings trying to short-cut their problems with horrible unintended consequences, is the flow of the film.
On Sunday I went to the same Blue Mesa Reservoir fishing area Dad and I went to last weekend. The water level has risen a couple of more inches since last week. The weather was nice but the wind was still chilly. The first line I threw out into the water with salmon eggs, I caught a seven-inch trout which I threw back into the lake. About a half of an hour later, I caught a 15 inch rainbow trout, which I kept for dinner. I caught and released one more trout before leaving for the day. The wind started kicking up the sand on the lake. I tried to take some better photos of the fish but here is one I took of myself holding up my dinner looking like a dopey dipsh*t.

ELibrary development...

I am working on a Google App Engine ELibrary application that provides a way to leverage Google's infrastructure so that libraries and other organizations can organize and access their electronic and paper materials. I have already built a very simple ELibrary that meets the requirements from a simple ELibrary collection plan I wrote for the library. I still haven't received my full Google App Engine access so I am just deploying the application on the test Linux server I have been developing on.

I am trying to expand the functionality of the ELibrary by creating a Dublin Core data model for resources. I have also began a MODS data model as well. Since I already have a collection of library records for the former Quaker Meeting I attended in Salt Lake, I plan importing them into the Google data model as a test collection for the ELibrary.

Fun stuff.

Aikido for 5/5/2008, Biking, and Apophenia...

Yesterday and today I rode my bike into work. Tomorrow I am giving a tour and I have to return my copy of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I finished reading this novel last night and I enjoyed the quality and story of this novel. This novel introduced me to the term Apophenia, defined loosely as making spurious correlations between events that may or may not actually exist. To large degree, we all share some types of mutual apophenia. Religion, in most of its incarnations, involve a lot of apophenia to create meaning and context for its followers. Superstitions (such as astrology) and much alternative medicine (such as acupuncture and homeopathy) also require apophenia from their respective acolytes.

My struggles in the past have often centered around my own apophenia. Growing up, for me, has been a process of minimizing my random pattern matching and learning to live in the present and not in a world of mistaken beliefs that I reinforce through my own apophenia.

Anyway, I know when I have read a good novel when I think about its larger issues after I have finished the novel. On Monday night Jake and I practiced our last Aikido class for the term. We will advertise more aggressively at the beginning of the term as student are looking for activities. This will be after Aikido Summer Camp, so I hope to be able to bring those experiences to my Aikido training and teaching. Since I won't be teaching a formal Aikido class this summer, my goal is to try through solo ukemi practice and practicing my 13 and 35 step jo katas. Here are the techniques Jake and I practiced Monday night:

• Tskui nikkyo omote and ura
• Shomenuchi shihonage omote and ura
• Shomenuchi kaitenage omote and ura
• Shomenuchi kokyunage
• Yokomenuchi style punch to the face (roundhouse strike) with uki throwing quick follow through punch with the other fist. We practiced a couple of different kokyunages from this attack, along with attempts at iriminage and shihonage.
  

Fishing with Dad...

On Friday, Dad drove up from Grand Junction. We ate at Marios, a local Gunnison pizzeria, and then got up early the next morning. There was a slow leak in the air mattress Dad slept on so it wasn't much a surprise that we got out the door before 8 a.m. on Saturday.

We drove up to Taylor Reservoir in the crisp early morning. I did not realize the altitude of Taylor River and Taylor Reservoir because the lake is still frozen (although I now have another lake to go ice fishing next winter). Here are a couple of photos when we parked and looked at the incredible view.



Because we were not dressed for fishing in the Taylor river, we drove through town and stopped first to fish on the Gunnison River on the way to Blue Mesa Reservoir.
I took a couple of photos of the canyon Dad and were fishing from, there was also three or four geese that fought and I also saw, but was not able to photograph well, a type of pelican. It is time like that I wish I had a better camera to catch these moments.

In the second photo you can see Dad fishing. I love the fact that living in Gunnison means I can get out of town and be fishing on the clear and wild river in mere minutes from where I live. We didn't catch anything here, the water was rushing too fast for bait fishing on the bottom and the fish weren't hitting any of the Panther Martins or other lures I had in tackle box. I rarely have success fishing with lures, most of my success has been with salmon eggs or worms.




We drove down to Blue Mesa and fished for the rest of the day. The lake level is lower than I have ever seen it. We had to hike down to the water's edge. Dad and separated and he walked closer to the bridge. I was at about the same place Jarrett and I went ice fishing. At one point I looked over and say Dad pulling in his second fish, so I went to where he was and caught two keepers for myself; the first rainbow trout was one of the larger trout I have caught, it was over 16 inches and I couldn't reach my hand around the entire fish (although with my mutant small hands, that is not saying much).

I love this second photo of Dad sitting and fishing. For about 45 minutes, Dad and I caught the four fish we took back to cabin for dinner while catching and releasing just as many smaller fish. Dad's first fish looked like a brown trout. The two fish I caught were rainbow. The last two photos are of me and Dad holding up the fish both in iconic fishing poses. I had just finished cleaning all four trout and was ready to get back to Gunnison. My pants had fish gore, salmon eggs, and mud but they don't look that dirty (I am sure my zipper was up, but it is hard to tell from the photograph). I had a great weekend with my father.

Aikido for 4/30/2008 , Flunk Day, and Snow

Last night for Aikido, Jake and I practiced a somewhat randori (freestyle) style where given a particular attack, nage could do any technique. This class showed where some techniques are difficult or awkward from a particular attack. Here are the order of attacks we practiced. This class worked on stamina as well.

• shomenuchi
• ryotetori
• tsuki
  
• ushiro tekubitori
• morotetori
• yokomenuchi
• suwari waza ryotetori

I received an e-mail from Knox College that it is flunk day. Happy Flunk Day world! It was snowing and cold when I left for work this morning. Here is a photo of my SUV with snow on it this morning:

My father is planning to come up for a long fishing weekend tonight. My dad does not like snow and cold so I wonder if he'll drive up tonight or wait until tomorrow when the temperature is supposed to increase. His plan was to fish tomorrow and then we'll go out Saturday and Sunday. I plan on taking him to Taylor Reservoir. He has never been and I know we can grab some big fish out of there. Fun stuff and I hope the weekend weather will hold up. Spring in the Colorado Rockies means snow can come anytime. We still have snow drafts that haven't melted yet.