While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  This is the last entry of an edited version + photo essay of my trip.  ( First entry here) --- 9 Oct 2010 1530

The drive to Phoenix was uneventful.  I did finally get a cactus photo.

I also finally got to eat at an In-n-Out Burger after having heard its praises on the Giant Bombcast and countless other west coast podcasts.

On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.  The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil.  We also quickly learn he believes himself to be set up.  I always find it to provide a very interesting tension when experiencing works of art that begin in the middle.  Most of the time, as happens with Eastern Standard Tribe, the current story is interrupted to tell how we got here.  Of course, this leaves the reader (or watcher in the case of a movie) playing the mental game of trying to figure out how we end up back at the beginning.  You know the main character can’t die (unless it’s a work in which resurrection is allowed - plus some other ways that writers can be tricky and mean) and you know that no matter where he ends up going, he’ll end up in the location at the beginning.  Regular books, as you know, leave you in the dark about where you’re headed.  Doctorow chooses to tell the story in the same manner of Momento, switching between the past and the present, rather than focusing on the past until we’re caught up.  This technique made it fun because even as you see how he ends up imprisoned, you are seeing his plans for getting out.

While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip.  ( First entry here) ---

8 Oct 2010 2051

I feel completely differently at the end of today.  My feet don’t hurt and I’m not exhausted.  I have some mild aches in my legs and very mild aches in my feet.  It’s because today was a much milder day.

While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip.  ( First entry here) --- 8 Oct 2010 0720

Yesterday was awesome and today I have the sore legs to prove it.  My legs have not been in this much pain in a long time.  I’ll get to the cause of that in a moment.  First of all, we went yesterday to see the sunrise3 at Desert View (near the Watch Tower).  Let me stress again that the park is huge!  We got up at 0430 and ended up nearly missing the 0600 sunrise.  We arrived at the inner part of the park at 0520 and I thought we’d be at Desert View by 0530 (my target time to arrive).  But no, from the South Entrance near the visitor center, it’s 25 miles to Desert View!  We made our way through the pitch black roads and ended up in the parking lot by 0550.  The drive was extra nervous as we saw the sky getting brighter and brighter despite not yet having arrived.  Then we had to frantically find our way to the lookout.  It was dark and even the outlook area was huge!  We got there as the sun was just getting ready to peek out.  The sunrise was magnificent, but I’m not sure any of the photos can match how amazing it looked.  Surprisingly enough, there was only one couple there.  A family later arrived.

Apparently I always go to National Parks in Oct, because last Oct I went to Shenandoah National Park.  So all but one of the photos are from that trip.  The time capsule is available online here if you want to see how to setup your own.

While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip.  ( First entry here) ---

6 Oct 2010 2022

Today was both overwhelming and underwhelming.  Overwhelming because of how massive the park is.  We barely scratched the surface and yet we felt very tired at the end of the day.  Overwhelming at how many different nationalities were present.  We heard french, german, japanese, vietnamese, and The Queen’s English.  There was a constant cycling of tourists foreign and domestic at the Grand Canyon Village.  To stand there is to constantly be surrounded by Grand Canyon green horns.  It was also amazing to see so many animals.  We saw a neat type of squirrel, a mouse/chipmunk thing, dear, a woodpecker, and a beautiful blue bird.  It was so awesome - especially the blue bird.  At the end of the day, it was amazing how dark it was and how many stars there were in the sky.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera that could properly capture the night sky.  That’s why I want to get a film 35mm Canon camera.

While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip.  ( First entry here) ---

6 Oct 2010 0638

I forgot to mention yesterday how neat it was to see cacti in the wild.  It’d seen them in arboretums and botanical gardens, but this was the first time I saw them growing in their natural environment.  Biggest impression:  unlike cartoons, the “arms” are not even.  Some of them even have only one “arm”.

While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ---

5 Oct 2010

Tomorrow I get to see the Grand Canyon!  I’ve been waiting to see it for years.  Today was pretty awesome because I got to see another thing I’d wanted to see for a while now - I saw a hummingbird for the first time.  The best part is that it was completely accidental.  We got into the rental car and, as Danielle set up the GPS, I looked up at the some flowers and saw a hummingbird.  It quickly left, so it was just being there at that exact time that allowed me to see it.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me.  Hopefully I get to see it again.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE.  It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE.  Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there.  But there’s this time I was able to look at it.  Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.  Take a look:

[caption id=“attachment_3694” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My KDE 4.4 Desktop”] [/caption]

At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor.  When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog.  You need to go to each screen and manually set the background.  While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way.  You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views.  The taskbar is looking nice and slick now.  The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice.  It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”.  My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner.  If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages.  So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE.  At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again.  I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.”  But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder.  It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index.  When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past).  Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive.  Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2.  I took a look at my old friend, Kopete.  It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin.  I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2.  It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good.  Perhaps there’s a plugin there too?  I’ll have to investigate that.  What I was most curious about was Amarok.  It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.

Once again, here are the most interesting photos as selected by the Photojojo folks and flickr’s interesting algorithms from one year ago.  ( View on their site)