Two FTF attempts, zero FTF's

Two weeks ago, I attempted to get a First-To-Find on The Dash Point Case geocache, but was four hours too late, and had to settle for third. Yesterday, I tried to get Brown's Point Part Deux, but again missed FTF by four hours, getting 2TF and nearly losing my GPS in the process.

It's nice to get some new caches out there that aren't film canisters in random parking lots.

Lawyer wins Rock Paper Scissors World Championships

Paper wins and a Toronto lawyer goes home $7,000 CDN richer. See also, Cnews.canoe.ca's report.

Quick poker notes

In no particular order:

• Darthslumlord called the other day. Happy Days has $3/$6 poker tables again.
• I spent the end of my gambling bankroll, with the exception of my lucky $5 CDN bill, on the Port Townsend/Port Angeles Cache Machine, so my poker's been limited.
• I have, however, been playing on NoblePoker.com. I played a 500 player $200 freeroll a couple of weeks ago, finishing 19th, and getting $2 as a result. I haven't played a lot, but I've slowly built that $2 into $3.80 at the 2¢/4¢ tables, and plan on grinding at that level until my bankroll gets to $10, at which point I'll play some $1 tournaments.
• In my last live game, I got really lucky on the last hand of the night, having gotten Q2o on the big blind, and seeing a 2-2-K flop, a rag turn, and a Q on the river. Sucked in some good size money from two others with Kx.

Cat saves Tonya Harding from masked assaulter boyfriends

That's if you believe her side of the story. Read between the very, very wide lines, and it becomes a not atypical day in the life of Tonya Harding.

"Nolan pleaded not guilty Monday in Clark County District Court and was released on his own recognizance." That pretty much explains it all right there.

Dear Onion: 1st amendment is dead. Love, White House

Protecting the Presidential Seal. No Joke. - New York Times (need a registration?)

You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda - stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.
...
"It has come to my attention that The Onion is using the presidential seal on its Web site," Grant M. Dixton, associate counsel to the president, wrote to The Onion on Sept. 28. (At the time, Mr. Dixton's office was also helping Mr. Bush find a Supreme Court nominee; days later his boss, Harriet E. Miers, was nominated.)

Citing the United States Code, Mr. Dixton wrote that the seal "is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement." Exceptions may be made, he noted, but The Onion had never applied for such an exception.

The Onion was amused. "I'm surprised the president deems it wise to spend taxpayer money for his lawyer to write letters to The Onion," Scott Dikkers, editor in chief, wrote to Mr. Dixton. He suggested the money be used instead for tax breaks for satirists.

Helmuth and pocket sevens

I read Phil Helmuth's Play Poker Like the Pros several months ago, and at that time I was convinced that his goal in writing the book was to get more fish at his tables, and to mislead his opponents as to how he plays. In the book, he writes:

To begin with, I recommen playing only the top ten hands and folding on all others. The top ten are, in order of relative promise, A-A, K-K, Q-Q, A-K, J-J, 10-10, 9-9, 8-8, A-Q, and finally 7-7. . . . In general, I recommend playing the top ten hands regardless of your position in the betting order or the number of bets that it will cost you to get involved in the hand. Always raise with these ten hands, no matter what it costs you to get involved.

Pocket sevens? WTF? I thought he was insane.

Fast forward to today...

I'm watching the TiVOed 2005 WSOP main event, day 1, and Helmuth is at the featured table. He's just come back after spending several minutes (and a few blinds) storming around the room after losing to AJo when the jack paired on the river.

He sits down, looks at his cards, and sees AQo. He raises, and to his left, Paul Magriel looks at his pocket sevens and re-raises. Everyone else folds, Helmuth goes all in, and loses when the cards come J-9-4, 9, 5.

Of course, Helmuth rants that only some of the worst poker players in the world would raise that agressively with pocket sevens. Phil, I know a book you should read...

Goblet of Fire: PG-13 (US) and 12A (UK)

(Tip o' the hat to The Leaky Cauldron.) Grown-up Harry Potter is too scary for children:

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has given Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire a 12A certificate. Children under that age can watch only if accompanied by an adult. The previous three Harry Potter films were all given a PG rating allowing children of all ages to watch them unaccompanied.

A graveyard battle between Harry and the Death Eaters was deemed too frightening for some young children as well as a character being dragged below ground by a tangle of plant roots. There are also too many scary spiders, which can cause nightmares, for a PG rating.

The language is stronger than in the earlier films, reflecting the maturation of its central characters, but an interjection of “piss off” did not impress the examiners. The long-awaited death scene may also disturb some.
...
The BBFC said: “The tone of the film is much scarier and darker than its predecessors. We expect most parents will still take their children but they should be aware that youngsters of a nervous disposition might be upset.”

Rumor: Serenity on DVD Dec. 20

Serenity on DVD December 20:

From DigitalBits.com:

Our ever reliable industry sources are telling us that Universal will soon announce the DVD release of Joss Whedon's Serenity for 12/20. Early word indicates that the disc may include Whedon audio commentary, along with at least 4 behind-the-scenes featurettes (Future History, We'll Have a Fruity Oaty Good Time, Re-Lighting the Firefly and What's in a Firefly), a video introduction to the film by Whedon and 6 minutes worth of outtakes. Some of the details on the extras comes from the BBFC website (click the link and hit enter). We'll post more as it comes in.

(link and parentheticals in original) (Edit: title change)

Won't somebody think of the trailer-living highway folks?

Developer seizes land under mobile homes:

A new property owner took over [Lakewood Mobile Court] on Sept. 30 and distributed notices the same day. Residents were told they have one year to leave before the park shuts down.
. . . [M]any of the 30 mobile homes at the park are too old and decrepit to be taken away; half were built around three decades ago or earlier, according to the city. Hilsinger said his probably would collapse if moved.

Some Lakewood leaders fear closures like this one could become more of a trend as neighborhoods improve, making the land more lucrative to developers

Love that Lakewood city government -- living in fear of improved neighborhoods and lucrative development. Sigh.

Netflix download service - dead in the water

Netflix 'indefinitely postpones' online movie download service - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings confirmed during an analyst call yesterday that they had “indefinitely” postponed the test launch of that new online movie download service they’ve been testing.

Wonder no more, but ho hos stay in the northwest

Bakery closure means no more Wonder Bread in Washington, Oregon

A decision by bankrupt Interstate Bakeries Corp. to close a bakery in Lakewood will cut off the supply of Wonder Bread. . . .

The two states will continue to get a supply of [Hostess] snack cakes from a Seattle plant that will remain open.

Chewbacca now a US citizen

(UPI) - Chewbacca actor Mayhew given citizenship

Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca now lives in Texas. Now, think about that. THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE! Why would a Wookiee—an eight foot tall Wookiee—want to live in Texas with a bunch of five meter tall humans? That does not make sense!

(Edit: five meters? what was I thinking? two meters is even too big.)

IMDB - 15 years old today

IMDb 15th Anniversary

The lists that continue to be the backbone of the Internet Movie Database existed before October 17,1990, the fifteenth anniversary date we celebrate this week. They were originally collected and maintained by a hearty group of movie fans who frequented a Usenet group (a text bulletin board) called "rec.arts.movies." The lists included the credits for actors, actresses, and directors, as well as biographical entries for moviemakers who had passed on (known back then as "the 'dead' list"). But we mark the date because on October 17th, our founder, Col Needham, wrote a series of Unix shell scripts which made these lists searchable. The ability to search existing data is one of the key components of the Web experience, and it immediately made the lists more meaningful and useful. Though the new name was still six years off, the Internet Movie Database was, in essence, born.

Wow -- and I thought I was an early adopter, posting my first usenet message in June 1992.

George Bush hates blue people

Yeah, I know the video of the bombing of the Smurf village is week-old news by now, but this blog headline was too good to let pass (thanks, Best Week Ever (Thursday, October 13).)

Incredible Shrinking Poker Rooms

The news is a few days old, but it's big in online poker. Party Poker, who shared the same pool of players with Empire Poker and three other sites (same games, different skins) have booted their four partners. Net.rumors are saying that this is a bad thing for online poker, and a lot of folks are jumping from sites like Empire to the larger crowd at Party, but after seeing Empire's crowd drop from 35,000+ down to it's current 8,433, I'm thinking that the guaranteed money freerolls will be a lot easier to see money in.

2000 pounds of Pong

Engadget spotted this: 334 separate 1970's game systems, for sale on Ebay.

Starving the Timber Beast

From the Cascadia weblog today:

Starving the Timber Beast: The Oregonian today reports on an unexpected consequence of a tight federal budget:  the US Forest Service doesn't have enough money to prepare timber sales in old-growth forests.

From the article:

[T]he administration and Congress are starving the U.S. Forest Service of money to plan sales of the big trees, and fight the inevitable appeals and lawsuits by their defenders. Forest managers say they are no longer pouring their shrinking funds into thankless conflicts they rarely win.

'We can't afford expensive timber sales -- the kind where controversy is engendered,' said Gary Larsen, supervisor of the Mount Hood National Forest. 'We're trying to find those where people can agree on the benefits.'

Road trip - Day 7

Day 7 – July 1 – Pinetop/Lakeside to Yuma

It's laundry day!

We wake up, bright eyed, bushy tailed, and rested, and leave the campground to head into town to do the washin'. We have breakfast at McDonalds (in the same parking lot), which has a newly re-asphalted parking lot -- we can tell by the smell. Laundry's done in short order, and we head south.

Just after leaving town, we hit the easternmost part of our journey, a few miles in to the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. We stop at the visitor center for an hour or so, which is amazingly high tech for being this far from a major metropolitan area. It really reminds me of a smaller version of museums you'd find in Tacoma or Seattle, with the multimedia displays, very professionally done exhibits, and access additional information electronically. This was nothing like I expected (e.g., the DuPont history museum, run by a couple of people out of one room of their house).

Outside, we walked a labyrinth and chased grasshoppers. It was already getting very, very hot, so we headed back into the air conditioned car, and drove through the Salt River canyon and Tonto National Forest. We stopped for lunch at the Country Kitchen in Globe, review the map, and decide that because of wildfires reported in the area (red triangles on the map), we'd head south to Florence and Casa Grande to I-8, instead of going through Apache Junction and Phoenix. We also had originally planned to stay at a campground in Apache Junction, which would make the next day a long, long drive, but because we were going to head west on the interstate, decided to drive untiil we got tired.

We cross Gonzalez pass, and south on SR-79, where we drive thorough what we still refer to as a Ned forest.

Just before we get to the I-8/I-10/SR-79 interchange, we stop for a few minutes to be sure we're going the right direction, and to get some snacks out of the trunk. We step out of the car, and it's very much like opening the oven door to take out a pizza, with a wave of heat washing over us. Yay, A/C.

40 miles later, the Saturn's built-in thermometer is showing that its 111° out. We need a bathroom break, so we stop at the only gas station in a 15 mile radius. Sign on the door says "No restrooms," but Kim asks anyway. They suggst we drive up SR-84 to Maricopa, but instead we hop across the freeway and go behind an abandoned gas station. While there, we check out a huge tangled cactus, and Krys gets skittish because the sound of the wind in the grass sounds to her like rattlesnakes.

We pull off in Gila Bend for dinner, and after driving the business route, don't see anywhere that we'd dare eat, so we end up stopping at a gas station / Subway / pizza place. We sit near a rowdy pre-teen table, but the food's good.

Continuing on into the sunset, I spot a Weyerhaeuser train in Dateland, and we decide to stop for the night in Yuma. We check out five hotels, and decide to stay at the Days Inn. It's dark, but still in the 90's, so we hop in the pool until we get kicked out at 11. Great day.

Miles today: 405
Miles total: 2328

Road trip - Day 6

Day 6 – June 30 – Grand Canyon to Pinetop/Lakeside

Up early, we grab breakfast at the Surly Café, then walk to the Red Line tram to see the canyon before we go.

Surprisingly, we're sharing a tram car with the "Swedish" family we sat next to in Kingsman, 150 or so miles earlier. They -- and several others -- are from a tour group from Iceland. We stop a few times on the way to the end of the line, at one point sharing an overlook with just one other person. It's a 3000 foot drop, straight down, and (happily) Krys is very hesitant to even get near the fence at the edge.

We tram to the end and back, check out of the hotel, hop in the car, and hit the road again. On the way to Flagstaff, we stumble across a gift shop that we'd heard about, and we've really got to use the bathroom, so we stop. Bathroom use costs 50 cents, because they have to truck their water in, but we buy a few trinkets (and a really neat gift for someone). It's dark, too, because their generator's out. We're talking ruu-ral.

We arrive in Flagstaff, and take a left turn towards Albuquerque. We stop at Albertsons for gas and -- you guessed it -- bottled water, and get fixin's for lunch and dinner. Back on the road, where signs urge us -- beg us, please! -- see the meteor crater! give us your tourist money! We pass.

Similarly, Kim was not impressed, but I was looking forward to standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, so I took a detour off the interstate in the hopes that I'd find it. It was surprisingly simple, because it's at the corner of the main eastbound street in town and Kinsley Ave. If I'd have been coming westbound, I don't know that I'd have found it.

I'd never thought about it, but of course your standard intersection will have four corners, and this one was no different. The northeast corner had a Route 66-themed Hallmark store with a wooden cowboy out front. The southwest corner had an Eagles themed gift shop blaring their music across the intersection. And the real corner, the northwest one, has a bronze statue and a trompe l'oeil painting of windows reflecting a girl (my lord!) in a flatbed Ford. (The southeast corner, incidentally, has a visitor information kiosk in a parking lot.) Sadly, the park with the bronze statue is next to a JC Penneys that burned down last fall, so the entire area is cordoned off with a chain link fence.

We hit the drive-thru at Sonic (the first time I've ever been to a Sonic) for a cold drink, and head a few blocks down the road to a rest area, where we can use the bathrooms (locked?! doh!) and eat our lunch fixins from Flagstaff. Krys, for no readily apparent reason, wants to stay in the 100+ degree car, so we leave the doors open while she eats there.

We hit a truck stop for the restrooms, then back on the interstate. Kim and Krys sleep for the next 60 miles as I drive past tacky teepees and metal dinosaurs advertising free cactuses and petrified wood if we stop in and look at the gift shops. No, not this time through. We arrive at the Petrified Forest National Park visitor center, and watch the movie about how the petrified wood was formed, which is a great film until the end, where they preach for about five minutes straight about how never to take any of the petrified wood from the park, or you'll get handcuffed and stuffed into a police car and have to spend the next ten years in a national park prison cell with some furry guy named Yogi.

We buy a few chunks of petrified wood from the gift shop (huh? guess it's OK if the guvmint takes it), leave the visitor center, and enter the park, but not before being warned by the cashier at the gate not to take any petrified wood under penalty of Yogi, and having to declare the rocks we just bought. We drive through the painted desert, and admire rocks that look like Wile E Coyote stacked them.

We stop at the Crystal Forest, read the display (paragraph two again threatens us with Yogi), and check out the wood.

On the way out of the park, there's a stop sign at the cashier's kiosk, which forces us to stop. Apparently nobody called us in, so the guy in the booth just waves us past, and the threat of jail for being accused of taking a rock is over. Whew.

After leaving the forest, we drive through the town of Show Low (main road: Deuce of Clubs Ave., get it?) and soon arrive at Lakeside Campground. Close to the highway, but plenty quiet and warm enough for the night. We fix dinner, play a board game, then head to bed.

Miles today: 301
Miles total: 1923

Road Trip - Day 5

Day 5 – June 29 – Las Vegas to Grand Canyon

A quick breakfast at the Circus Circus bagel shop, a stop at the casino for a few more souveniers, and we're back on the road. Leaving Las Vegas, baby.

But first, a stop at Albertsons to get gas and bottled water, then on to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam. Since 9/11, commercial trucks have been banned from the dam (unless they go through a long pre-screening process and get permits to cross), and cars are "randomly" selected for inspection. Not much of a slowdown today, and we're soon paying $5 for the privilege of parking in the garage at the west end of the dam.

It's dam big, dam hot, and dam expensive to take the tour. We take photos, check out the tomb of the dam dog, head back to the car, and cross the dam into Arizona. Arizona is on mountain time, but doesn't participate in daylight savings time, so we set our watches ahead zero minutes. (I find it's easier to think that Arizona's on Pacific time in the summer and mountain time in the winter, which works, although it's not really true.)

70 downhill miles later, we arrive in Kingman, and have lunch at a 50's style diner on Route 66. At the table next to us, there's a family speaking a foreign language; my guess is Swedish, although they're not punctuating their statements with "bork bork bork". Kim and I discuss how multi-cultural our trip has been so far, with the wide cross section of people we saw in Vegas and now here.

Back on the road, and another 70 miles to Seligman, where we stop for gas and a snack. I'm not sure why it's considered the "Birthplace of Route 66", considering it's not at either end and not really at the center, but it is (really, the sign says so, so it must be true). Route 66 parallels I-40 for the next 18 miles, so we take the dusty two-lane paved road through the hilly desert, and after passing a chain gang cleaning trash, we reconnect with the interstate, and soon reach the turn to SR-64 to the Grand Canyon.

There's a bunch of brush fires in the news -- we're a bit worried about our trip over the next few days -- and we see a couple spots of smoke on the horizon (photo enhanced to show smoke plumes).

We soon arrive at the park entrance, but still see no sign of the canyon. Krys points out, "Dad, it's a hole in the ground. You won't be able to see it from far away." Duh.

We take the long way in, stopping at a few overlooks, and check into the Maswik Lodge and have dinner. The food is typical cafeteria food, but with a really surly staff. Yum. We finish in time to catch the sunset, and watch the entertainment as some fool climbs onto an outcropping where one slip means a thousand foot fall bouncing down the sides of the canyon. He makes it out, and after sunset makes it back. The smoke on the horizon makes for a hazy sunset, but it's still pretty spectacular.

We head back to the lodge, hang out for a bit, then come back to watch the stars come out. They do, we're impressed (hmm...) and head back to go to bed.

Miles today: 298
Miles total: 1612