Whitney

Thursday night after work Jeremy and I hit the road and headed to Mt Whitney. We got in late, set up a tent at 10,000 ft and got a few hours of sleep to start the acclimation to altitude. The next morning we got up and headed to the ranger station. Normally to hike up the Whitney trail you have a put in a request in February. But by 11 am enough people had canceled that we were able to get two permits.

Soon after getting our permits and bear boxes and wag bags (oh, there are some smelly stories to be told about the wag bags, but I'll skip those on the blog). We started off at Whitney portal at about 8,300 ft and hiked our way up to our first camp site at 10,000 ft. The walk up was tiring, but I assumed it was the minimal sleep the previous night. That night I had to force myself to finish my dinner - if you know me, that should strike you as a very strange statement. The next day I really struggled to make it up to the next campsite at 12,000 feet. At times I had to stop and lean against the mountain because I was feeling light headed. Once we got to camp I started feeling nauseated. So I rested for the rest of the day. The next day I took things slow getting up and packed up while Jeremy headed up to the summit. The whole walk up and time at camp I wasn't feeling great physically and was in a terrible mood.

Once I got packed up I started heading down the mountain. Around 9,500 feet I was getting low on water so I found a place to rest while I waited for Jeremy. Jeremy flew down the mountain so I was only resting for about an hour. By time he got there I was breathing well, had my appetite back and most surprisingly was in a pretty good mood. Since after 3 days I wasn't able to acclimate to 12,000 feet I think I'll be setting my sights on lower altitude adventures. While it is possible that if I wanted to I could push through the physical effects, the bad mood kind of ruins the point.

On one hand that was a bit of a downer, but on the other hand I wanted to know how I would do at altitude and now I know.

Santa Barbara

Over labor day weekend I headed down to Santa Barbara (well Jeremy and Emily provided the ride - thanks!). It was great to see my little cousins and catch up with my Uncle and Aunt (thanks for having me over and feeding me!).

We went swimming and got to the beach. It isn't the first time I got to the beach this year, but the first time I did beach stuff. Zach and Zoe were nice enough to let me use a boogie board and Zach showed me how to use it. After that a few times I actually caught a wave and it was awesome! I was also there for Zach's early birthday party. We also spent some good time chillin on the couch and played some board games. Zach and Zoe seem great and are getting tall.

And I was able to catch up on the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana.

Overall an awesome labor day weekend.

Blog notification on twitter

Just set up on twitterfeed so if it works it will send a message on twitter when there's a new blog post. Not sure how well it will work. Let me know if you follow me on twitter and it gets annoying. For those following on RSS there won't be any change.

The Problem With GPS

GPS is awesome for all sorts of reasons. Having it for driving directions is great. And as more devices have GPS included in them there will be an increasing number of cool ways to use it.

So what's wrong with it?

Well, since it is so awesome people will work hard to make it even better, but it reduces the motivation for finding other methods of determining location. Which isn't a big deal if you have GPS satellites orbiting the planet you are on. But what happens when we start moving to other planets? Are we going to have to put a series of satellites around every planet we inhabit? Sure there will be other issues to be dealt with, like terraforming the planet and getting people there in a reasonable amount of time. And yeah humans explored basically all of Earth without GPS. But still, wouldn't it be nice if once we set up on a planet we immediately had precision location information?

That's the problem with GPS (inspired by watching way too much Stargate SG-1).

Really once we hit a certain point of technological progress shouldn't we start back over as cavemen in order to increase the motivation for technological innovation?

Hm, that phrase about necessity is the mother of invention is actually really wrong. I think that if you look at recent history the amount of need has decreased sharply while the rate of invention has increased rather rapidly. Everyone moving back into caves would instantly create massive need and yet severely slow down innovation. Plato, I'm calling shenanigans!