 gaaf.com is the personal website of Christian Kohler (web /at\ gaaf com). About Me |
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I am in Portugal with my parents to celebrate my Dad's 65th birthday. I am not checking email very much, but SMS/text messages to my dutch cell phone number are a good way to get in touch with me. It has been fairly rainy and cool, but we are having fun cooking lots of good food. Monday I'm flying back to SF. There are a lot of things I want to fix and change in my house, but there is also quite a bit that I've already accomplished, a lot of it with the help of Howdy. Last night he came over and we replaced the gas valve on my living room heater. A few weeks ago we had done the same job for my bedroom heater. I bought a Robert Shaw 710-502 gas valve from a commercial supply place in Oakland. This valve sits between the gas line and the gas supply to the burner. It has a thermostat input, and a thermopile (generator) input, to check if the pilot is on. It also provides a small gas tube for the pilot light. I hadn't done any work on gas lines before, which was a bit scary, but it all went well. The heaters put out a lot more heat now, partially because we blew a lot of the dust out of the burners. Some other things that have been accomplished: - Alarm system installed (including wireless sensor on the shed) - Rain water catchment system connected to toilet flushing - Washing machine hook-up - Replacing the shower drain and sealing the perimeter (until I get a new shower) - Adjustment of sticky doors The biggest project that is waiting to happen is redoing the bathroom. The floor is rotted and needs to be replaced.  Today I went for a hike in the Point Reyes national seashore with Kurt, Lesley and Laura. It started off quite foggy, but the last hour it was sunny. Unfortunately it was too cold to go swim in Bass lake, but we did go down to the beach at Alamere Falls. Here are the pictures.  I started a separate blog where I write about some issues related to my house. It is partially a historic record for myself, so I know what I did when, but I think some people might enjoy reading it. The stack of boxes on the left is actually in my living room and is about 2 meters tall. As an update to the previous post about the Cultural Student Center Scala. I just got an e-mail today that they are having a moving party at the end of this month. All the cultural student groups are moving back to the big old ugly concrete building they used to be in. It was nice that they got to spend 11 years in the building, but of course I'm a little sad that their time is up in that building.  I noticed some people coming to my blog when they googled "Christiaan Kohler" which is a misspelling of my name. When I searched for it myself, I came across an old edition of Cursor, the newspaper of Eindhoven University of Technology (TUe), where I used to study. I used to take some freelance pictures for them. The article referenced here was from April 1996 about Scala, the cultural student center I worked on before I came to the US. It is a picture of the demolition. It is on page 5 of this PDF. Yesterday I overheard the following conversation while walking to the cafeteria at my work (LBNL). "Hi, how was the South Pole?" "Good, how is your car running on natural gas?" These are the kind of conversations you get when you put 3500 scientists, engineers and geeks together on a hill. One researcher had just come back from the South Pole, probably to work on the South Pole Telescope project. The other one has recently bought or converted his car to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and was complaining about the lack of places to fill up. On other days you might see one of the two nobel prize winners that are currently at the lab.  I'm in the process of buying a house. Actually, the loan is funded, all that is left is the recording of the deed tomorrow morning. Six weeks ago I was like everybody else complaining that I could never afford to own a house in California. But a little over a month ago I stumbled upon this cute cottage in Berkeley. I went to the open house on July 15th, and tomorrow August 15th I'm closing escrow. It has been quite a busy month, but everything kind of worked out perfectly. Now I'm trying to figure out what to do in the bathroom, because the floor needs work, which gives me opportunity to re-think the bathroom a little. Yesterday I went looking for sinks, and there are some cool ones out there. I really like the ones that look like a washbowl sitting on a counter. Here are more cool sinks that I found. Of course given my last name, I'm mainly looking at Kohler brand sinks. Today is Bike to Work day, and I thought this was a good opportunity to write a bit about my biking. I've been biking to work every now and then over the past few years. But when I saw An Inconvenient Truth (the movie by Al Gore on global warming) I decided to follow his suggestion to at least once a week bike to work (or take public transportation). Slowly the biking once a week turned into driving once a week and biking the other days. In October I got a Garmin Forerunner 301 bike GPS bike computer from the REI Scratch & Dent sale. Most of the days that I bike, I use the bike computer. So far I've biked about 400 miles (650 km) between October 15th 2006 and May 17th 2007. My ride to work is about 4.5 miles (7 km) if I bike all the way up the hill. Today my average heart rate was 145 bpm which means my heart beat about 4500 times during my ride. My maximum heart rate today was 183 bpm, which is quite high, given that the rule-of-thumb calculation of maximum heart rate for me is 185 bpm. You can find detailed data on my ride here. Augusta is busy today with the San Francisco Bike Coalition which has Energizer stations all over SF to cheer people on and get some snacks. I just read this interesting article in the New York Times about people's height in relationship to their success in online dating. I assume these heights are for American's since Europeans tend to be taller and Asians tend to be shorter. They found that a 5-foot-8 (173 cm) man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer (183 cm) if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 (157 cm) man, the number was $277,000. (relative to the average man’s income of $62,500 per year). For women in the online study, shorter is better. A 5-foot-6 (168 cm) women would need to make $59,000 more than a 5-foot-0 (152 cm) or 5-foot-2 (157 cm) woman to do as well. She'd need to make $50,000 more than a 5-foot-4 (163 cm) woman. Of course I had to go check my own height, and I am pretty much exactly 6 feet (183 cm). Then again, I've never done any online dating.... According to this website, 15% of American men are taller than 6 feet (183 cm). After 16 days in China I'm back home. Coming back on a Saturday morning at 8am is really nice. It gave me a full weekend to unpack, do laundry and meet a few friends. I have some 5 hours of audio and 2 Gb of pictures, and I hope to process these soon. I know if I don't do it soon, it will take a very long time. One thing I really learned on this trip is to not shy away from contact with other people. Especially during my Tiger Leaping Gorge hike I noticed that whenever I saw new 'westeners' I would not be inclined to talk to them. But the moment I did start a conversation, there often was a great connection. Just in the 3 days in the gorge I met Udo and Detlev from Germany, Corine from French, Erol and Katrina from Sweden and Mick from Australia. With all these people I hiked or talked for many hours, and it was always very interesting and fun. For most of them I don't have any contact information, but it is sometimes very nice to just spend time with people and then go on with your live, without clinging to contact. Some of the highlights of this trip were: - Hiking on the Great Wall - Hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge - Spending time in Beijing with Tao  This blog post is for you Tao, the most loyal reader of my blog in China. It was very nice to meet you tonight, but very strange how much you knew about me from reading my blog. I wonder if there are other people out there that read my blog as carefully as you do. And I think you should give those books to Piero. Steve Chu, the director of LBNL (where I work), gave testimony at a congressional Hearing about China's energy use. You can read the full testimony online. The numbers and facts he quotes are scary. Almost half of the worlds CO2 emissions are from China and the US. "China's addition of 90 GW of coal-fired power plants installed in 2006 alone is expected to emit over 500 million tons of CO2 per year for their 40 year lifetimes. This compares to the entire European Union’s Kyoto reduction commitment of 300 million tons of CO2." I'm hoping that the Window Energy Labeling effort that I'm involved in here, will make a tiny difference in the energy consumption. I've uploaded some travel sound recordings I made. You can download a woman singing and subway sounds. Music at the Temple of Heaven, and some sounds of the market. These are MP3 files, and they sounds best if you listen to them on headphones, since they are special Binaural recordings. I've also uploaded about 28 pictures on my pictures website. I will try to keep adding more, but I will start traveling without my laptop tomorrow.  I went to the Temple of Heaven on Saturday. It was realy nice, the air quality was a lot better then on Friday. Lots of people spending their day in the park. Playing music, singing, and wandering around. On Sunday I went to hike on the Great Wall. From Jinshaling to Simatai. It was very strange to realize that I'm walking on this ancient wall, that I heard about as a kid. It was a 10km hike, and parts of the wall were in such bad shape, that it was almost more like climbing then walking. It was supposed to take 4 hours, but I did it in 2 1/2. At the beginning I went extra fast, to get away from the 'guides' and people selling stuff. It was nice to be outside of the city and be hiking. On Monday I traveled to the place where I'm now. About 1 hour north of Beijing, in a resort like compound where we are having our meetings. The meeting rooms are very modern and hi-tech (i'm blogging from the high speed connection in the meeting rooms), the bed rooms however are very rundown. My batroom has this old bathtub, with gold knobs etc, but the shower head is leaky and falling apart. I'm teaching 60 people, most of them only understand a tiny bit of English, so it is quite a challenge. Friday I will be flying to Yunan province to go to Tiger Leaping Gorge I'm in Beijing now at the Courtyard Marriott. The flight here was good, but long. I did get a bit of sleep in. The air quality here in China is terrible. The visibility is terrible, about as bad as when Berkeley is covered in fog. I guess it is fairly common here in winter. I've never experienced anything like it before. Not in Mexico City and not the last time in was in Beijing. Today I'm going to take it easy and do some touristy stuff, tomorrow I'm planning to hike a section of the wall. I got a chinese cell phone, and I can receive calls and text messages on it. I don't seem to be able to send text messages yet. The number is +85 135 204 180 62, feel free to give me a call. Cheapest way is probably to use Skype. Christian Blogging from the plane. Taking off soon non stop to beijing. Got upgrade to business class which is very nice on a 12+hr flight -- I'm about to leave for China for 2 weeks, and I realize how digital my travel has become. I'm carrying around 3 Gb of storage for my digital pictures, 4 Gb of music, 24 Gb of empty space to record sounds on, and 2 Gb of USB memory sticks for documents. During the work period of my trip, I will also have my laptop with 80 Gb of space. I'm going to Beijing, where I will be teaching our software for a few days and then to Tiger Leaping Gorge, for some hiking I had a nice weekend, with various activities, and still enough quiet time so it wasn't rushed. Friday night I went with Alissa to see Steven's "Yellow Fever Express" show at the SF Fringe festival. I helped him with a projector and setup. After that I met Augusta at Ticouz for tea and a wonderful french crepe with fresh figs, white chocolae and ice cream. On Saturday I went to the Power to the Peaceful with Luis, Allisa and Gary. I discovered a new band called Flipsyde. They were very cool, kind of Beastie Boys meets Santana. It has been a long time since I heard live scratching by a DJ on stage. Very cool. Saturday night I watched dutch TV via the internet. I use a program called WM Recorder that lets me record the whole show in high quality and then watch it. I can also watch it as streaming media, but then the quality is much lower, and sometimes it has to pause for buffering. Later that evening I read up on build-yourself-amps on a Swedish website, and I ordered one kit. I also found out how to use your PC Soundcard as a Real Time Analyzer and osilloscope using TrueRTA, this seems very cool. On Sunday I went to a tour of the Scharffenberger chcolate factory in Berkeley with Annica, Colby, Luis and Janice. It was a very nice tour, with lots of information. At night I went for a short climbing session at Berkeley Iron Works followed by a nice session in their Sauna. Afterwards I bought some Superlite Raw Colostrum, this is raw milk from cows after calving (3-4 days), and supposedly contains lots of nutrients. Let's see how well my digestion likes this milk. All in all a very nice weekend, with lots of different activities. This summer has been a chance for me to go backpacking. Previous to this summer I had only backpacked twice (not counting the three snow camping trips). For the fourth of July weekend I went with Annica to Ansel Adams Wilderness near June Lake in the Eastern Sierra's. Here are pictures. Then on July 28th I went to Toulumne Meadows in Yosemite, again with Annica. We hiked towards Waterwheel Falls, but only made it to California Falls. Luckily the mosquito's were not very intense. Pictures. And then on August 12th I went with Gary, Susan, Sara and Tina from Sangha back to Toulumne Meadows to hike to Ten Lakes. Our campsite was on a rocky ledge with an amazing view. Pictures from this trip If you do a search on google for 'kohler keele virus' you'll find this link: http://www.phreak.org/archives/The_Hacker_Chronicles_II/virusl4/virusl4.17scroll down, and you'll see evidence of me being on the 'internet' in 1991.  My blog has been lacking updates for quite a while, but I couldn't let this occasion go by to write something. This month it has been 10 years since I moved to California. On May 30th 1996 I left from Eindhoven Airport to fly via Amsterdam airport to San Francisco. So what has happened in those 10 years.... Here are some random facts: - I've lived in 3 different houses (El Cerrito, Berkeley, Oakland) - I've had 5 different cars (Honday Accord, 2 1965 Cadillacs, Acura, VW Beetle) - I've bought 8 projectors, and sold 5 of them - I've had lots of opportunity to travel (India, China, Tibet, Vietnam, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Hawaii, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Italy, Germany, France and of course Holland) - I've had girlfriends from Hungary, Mexico and the USA - I've hiked all over California and the Western US (Mt Whitney, Mt Shasta, Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Grand Canyon rim-to-rim, Arches National Park, Exit Glacier in Alaska, Mount Hood etc) - I've learned to scuba dive and rock climb - I've become 75% vegetarian, and 95% non-alcohol-drinking - I've been on about 10 different meditation retreats since September 2003 - I've suffered for about 3-4 years from Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), of which 1 year I worked without a mouse or keyboard, only using voice commands. So the above were just some random facts, but it makes me realize what a blessed and diverse life I've been able to lead over the past 10 years. I left Holland just after Scala, the cultural student center opened in May 1996. This was a big project for me, and working on it was the highlight of my student time in Eidhoven. During my first year in Berkeley I met Piero Scaruffi and hiked and camped all over California with a gang of crazy au-pairs. This went on for about 7 years. I shared a house with Daniel for the first 4 years. In 2003 I went to a meditation retreat led by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in Colorado. I very much enjoyed it and have been actively meditating and attending retreats since then. Last year I co-organized a Young Adult Retreat here in California. It was a big success, there were about 40 young adults and 4 monastics (2 monks, 2 nuns). In August of 2005 I started rock climbing. During the years of my RSI injury, I was always wanting to rock climb, but when your hands hurt so much that you can't carry bags, the last thing you want to do is hang from a wall by your finger tips. The turn around for my pain was this webpage. In the mean time I have received my green card, so I can stay in the US now as long as I like. How long that is, is an often asked question. I honestly don't know. I really like my job and friends/community, but the job is very dependent on funding. If it ends, I might well leave the US. My first big hike after Vietnam was last weekend. We went to the Western Sierra's. Most of the hikes take place on the Eastern side of the Sierra's, but there are a few places where you can access them from the West, around Fresno. Piero and I were going to hike from Florence Lake to Lake Thomas Edison, a long hike (44km, 27 miles). We didn't make it. I turned around after 16 km (10 miles) and Piero probably after 21 km, shortly before the half way point. I took some pictures and created some 3D images from Google Earth. After a long delay of no posts on my blog, some people started wondering if I never came back from Vietnam. Well, I did come back, but I got quite sick after my last post in Vietnam. I thought I was all over my flu, but a few days later my coughing got worse and it turned out that I had "walking pneumonia". Regular pneumonia can be life threatening, especially for older people. The version I had is called 'walking' because you are usually not sick enough to end up in the hospital, but still quite miserable. I had the great fortune of having Ava Avalos in our group, who is a doctor from LA working in Botswana. She took care of me in a wonderful way. I spend most of my time after that in bed, and around the hotel. But I was very well taken care off, people would stop by and bring me food, water, fruit and all kind of funky medication. Ava would tell me what medication was OK. After I got home I spend about 1 week at home, resting and then started working 50%. It took a long time, almost 2 months, for me to get back to full strength. I'm still glad that I went to Vietnam, even though I spend a lot of time in bed there. I've finally found a place to upload some pictures which are at: http://kohler.smugmug.com/gallery/463462 It is still hot and humid out here, and we are going through long days with 2 dharma talks a day, they usually last around 1 1/2 to 2 hours, which is quite a sit in the heat. But sometimes some sweet older vietnamese lady will cool you with a fan. At the end of my previous message I wrote that I was about to go to Halong Bay and that I had a sore throat. Well, these two things didn't go together. I got a pretty serious fever later that day, and so I wasn't able to go on the 2 day Halong Bay trip. I stayed at the hotel with Anna taking care of me. At the worst point my fever was 103.8F / 39.8C, which was quite miserable. After 3 days it got better and I was able to fly to Bin Dinh, where we are now. It was a flight plus a 5 hour bus ride. This place here is great, it is so much greener and cleaner then Hanoi. We saw the whole rice harvest happening as we drove through the area. Very little machinery involved. Our hotel is on the beach, and so much quieter then Hanoi. Today is saturday morning, and I arrived on monday morning. Time flies and the number of new impressions is amazing. As to be expected I got a sore throat and a bit of an upset stomach but nothing to major. The air quality here in Hanoi is terrible. People cooking on coal on the street, and an amazing number of motorcycles buzzing around. We've heard 3 dharma talks by Thich Nhat Hanh (www.plumvillage.org), and they've been very interesting. The talk yesterday talked about the hunger of young people here for wealth and goods. But he was telling them that even some of the Fortune 500 CEO's who have come to retreats having told him about their unhappiness and misery. The talks are very well visited, with upwards of 300 people, many of them professors, embassadors etc. But also plenty of 'normal' people, that know his name from before he left in the 60's or through the underground movement, since his teachings were banned here by the communist. It is quite strange that when we where our grey delegation robes (see pics), lots of people are bowing. But they are not bowing to us personal, but to the greater delegation. Tomorrow morning at 4am we are leaving for Halong Bay, where we'll be till monday night. I've added some pictures to the previous set I made it to Vietnam last night. The first day was full of great impressions. I managed to not get run over by scooters, but it is fun to cross the street. The exchange rate is 15000 dong for a dollar, so you get very good at division and multiplication of 15000, $15=d225000 etc. Here are some pictures. After working for 4 days at a NFRC conference in a fancy Hilton resort, I moved to a Bed & Breakfast in Captain Cook on the Big Island. I did some snorkeling and kayaking, you can see some pictures at the end of the previous Hawaii pictures My first stop on the way to Vietnam is a work conference on the Big Island of Hawaii. I'm staying at a swanky resort called the Hilton Waikoloa village. The locals call it Disneyland. The weather has been a bit overcast, but sleeping with the patio doors open and hearing the ocean instead of Air Condition is priceless. >  Here are more picturesAs many of you know, in a few days (Sunday March 13th) I'll be going to Hawaii for 1 week for a conference (and some fun) and then on for 3 weeks to Vietnam. While I'm traveling I will try to keep this blog updated. I will mainly use a seperate e-mail address while traveling : christian.vietnam *at* gmail.com I will upload pictures where possible to kohler.smugmug.com and post them to my blog. A few weekends ago I went snow camping with the Sierra Club. This was the second weekend we went. The first weekend Howdy and I dug a real snow cave and slept in it. This weekend we dug a hybrid snow trench/cave. It is great to sleep in a snow structure when it is nasty outside. >  Here are more pictures"No Taxation Without Representation" was a rallying cry for advocates of American independence from Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Today, it feels very true for me. I do pay taxes, but I can't vote. My friend Howdy Goudey made a good point last week about the elections, "Half of the US population is going to be unhappy after the elections, whatever the outcome is". This really worries me. I just saw some interviews on TV, with people saying that "It would be the end of the world if Bush wins". There is so much hate, disbelief and lack of understanding at this moment in this country. Actually not just this country..... In Holland today the outspoken film maker and column writer Theo van Gogh was murdered on the street. He was putting the finishing touches on a movie called 0605 about the murder on the dutch politican Pim Fortuyn a couple of years ago. There is a lot of hate and misunderstanding in the Netherlands these days as well. Tonight Daniel and I went to watch the lunar eclipse from Tilden Park. Armed with a hot Zachary's pizza and some warm clothes we went to watch the Lunar Eclipse. See the picture below.  (Mount Hood)This message is coming to you from mt Hood in Oregon. Currently at 5289 ft. Cloudy and light rain. Got wet feet :-( Tonight we had another outdoor movie night. This time it was Danny's backyard in Oakland. It was a perfect setting in his backyard, with quite comfortable couches etc. We projected on a sheet, 94" (240 cm) wide. It worked well, but I would like to get some bigger and more reflective material. We watched 'The Imposters", which was a hillarious movie. Some suggestions for next time included "Dark Star" and "21 grams". Here are the pictures. They are a little grainy, but are taken by moonlight, with a 3 second exposure at f 2.8 and ISO 1600, so this is the best I could do. After much gentle pressuring by John, Luis and Josh, who have been doing some jamming on the roof at work, I finally got a guitar tonight. Gary lent me this cool guitar which is as he describes an american guitar, that is not about "wine and cheese" but more about "beer and pickles". It is a very cool guitar, see the attached pictures. Now it's up to me to actually learn to play it.  Last night we did our first real outdoor movie. We had a great spot right next to the bay (5 meter away from the water) in the Berkeley Marina. 12 people showed up, and we watch Cinema Paradiso preceded by a historic Popeye cartoon and some shorts by Thomas Edison from 1901. It was amazing to watch a movie in that setting, a view over the Bay Bridge, San Francisco and the Golden Gate. I've been wanting to do outdoor movies since I saw an outdoor screening at Plaza Futura in Eindhoven, Netherlands in 1995, and I was very happy last night to finally make it happen. The location and movie choice were 'secret' until a few hours prior to the movie and were disclosed through an 800 number. Here are the pictures. Tonight we had a surprise party for Shizuka. As you can tell by the pictures we had lots of fun with balloons. Here are the pictures. This weekend we (Rodney, Soad, Peter and I) went camping in Toulumne Meadows and the Eastern Sierra's. Friday night we camped at our favorite spot on Evergreen Road, just before Yosemite. Saturday we did an 11 mile (18km) hike up to Ten Lakes. Amazing views of Yosemite. Saturday evening we camped near Mono Lake, a nice spot that Rodney discovered earlier this year. On Sunday we did a hike that started near Silver Lake on the June Lake Loop. We hiked by Agnew lake and on to Clark Lakes. About 10 miles roundtrip, up to 10,000 ft (3050m) of elevation (starting at 7,300 ft, 2200m). Afterwards we soaked in my favorite hotspring (Wild Willy). This area around Mono Lake and the Eastern Sierra's is my favorite, and I'm happy to have made my 4th trip to the Sierra's this summer. Pictures are here. We had our first 'off-the-grid-movie-night' tonight. We watched "Catch me if you can" outside my house with 7 people. It was completely battery powered. So now we are ready to take the movies to the road, everything is portable (screen, batteries, projector, speakers, laptop). A really cool place to start would be the Ford Assembly Plant in Richmond. Tonight, Howdy brought 2 6Volt golf cart batteries and a 1Kw inverter. We connected my new laptop, and a simple subwoofer+2 speaker system. The laptop was playing the movie from an .ISO file that was mounted using Daemon Tools. The projector was my little Infocus LitePro 580. The screen was my portable tripod mounted 60" wide screen (with a 16:9 aspect ratio). This was a long movie, the projector was on for about 2hrs 45 min., and we still had power at the end. I just came across this interesting article in the SF Chronicle newspaper. It states that "According to the WTO, workers in the USA get an average of 12.4 days of vacation a year. (...) The average German gets seven weeks a year, the average French worker seven and a half, the average Italian eight and a half." Now here is the interesting part: " The average American planned not to use three of his vacation days this year, according to a study conducted in May by Harris Interactive for Expedia.com" The article goes on to describe the health benefits of vacation. And I though that I was doing bad with my 15 vacation days a year, and yes, I do take them all. This weekend we finally did our long awaited hike across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Piero hiked from the west to the east, Howdy and I hiked from east (Onion Valley) to the west (Roads End in Kings Canyon). It was a great hike, and swapping the carkeys in the middle worked. On the day before the hike (saturday) Howdy and I did a small hike in Tuloume Meadows (Yosemite), later in the day we soaked in a hot spring (Wild Willy) in the Eastern Sierra and visited the photo gallery of Galen Rowell (an amazing nature photographer) in Bishop. It inspired us to take lots of pictures the next day. Galen Rowell writes in his book High&Wild: "After exploring on all seven continents and reaching both poles in the nineties, it became ever more clear to me that the Eastern Sierra is my favorite place on Earth". Here are my pictures and here are Piero's pictures. Just came back from Kings Canyon. We did a giant hike (42 km, 13 hours, 2100 meter elevation gain). It was a bit much, considering I wasn't in very good shape, and Piero kept a good (or should I say ruthless?) pace. Lots of walking on boulders, tallus and crossing creeks. I was glad I brought my hiking poles. Sunday we went to visit "My Sequoia", it is a symbolic adopted tree that I got from Piero and Shizuka for my birthday last year. It comes with a map that shows where the tree is. We visited it, and it is HUGE, about 2000 years old. You can see it all in my pictures. Piero also took pictures. This weekend we (Piero, Sandra, Lars, Virna+friend) are camping and hiking in Kings Canyon National Park and Piero and I are doing a big hike to Sphinx lakes, and maybe on to Mt Brewer. You can see a route that we might take on this picture. You can read more about the Sphinx lakes and Mt Brewer on Piero's pages. We got to Sphinx lakes last year, but now we'll try to go further. This is really strange, I was reading an e-mail from a friend of mine about all the recent security problems with Internet Explorer. I read the message using Gmail (Google Mail) on Internet Explorer. I wrote her a message back stating that maybe I should install Firefox the latest browser from Mozilla (what used to be Netscape). This is the major competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I couldn't send the message, look at the screenshot below. Kind of strange, that IE prevented me from sending a message about switching to Firefox/Mozilla. Is the browserwar alive again? 
I visited a couple of national parks in southern Utah: Arches and Canyonlands. The scenery in both parks is amazing. I camped, even though the weather was hot (95F, 35C), but it was great. These pictures are taken with my old Fujifilm mx2700 camera, because my current Fuji Finepix F700 is being repaired (sand and dust problems). My mx2700 has had 3 years of abuse, from the beaches of Hawaii, Mexico and Florida, to the glaciers of Alaska. It even spend a few minutes underwater. But it is still working great, and taking nice pictures. This shows where I am right now: detailed location or the overview. I'm somewhere in the center of the map. This weekend I was in Canyonlands in southern Utah, somewhere on this map. These maps were generated by using the coordinates from my GPS combined with Microsoft's Terraserver I found this nice tool at world66.com that let's you create maps of where you've been. I created on for me, just for fun. I didn't count places where I just stopped over on a flight.  |
