Cathedral Summit, deux.
This past weekend, Zac and I successfully climbed and summited Cathedral Peak. This was the 4th time I’ve tried Cathedral, the 2nd time I’ve been successful, and the 1st time I’ve pulled it off without any disaster. (hmm..power of 2 pattern emerging there)
The trip went perfectly… Zac, Jaime, and I left SF @ noon, got up to Tuolumne and despite only having a reserved permit for 2 people for Saturday night, we were able to change it to a permit for both Friday & Saturday night for 3 people.
We hiked in along the climber’s trail, and ended up camping virtually at the base of the Southeast Buttress. It was warm enough that I decided to ditch the tent and save some weight by just bringing the sleeping bag and tarp. This would have worked out perfectly if there weren’t a million mosquitoes around… at 9700 feet, no less! After slathering on the Jungle Juice, we finished consuming our gigantic Safeway $5 sub for dinner, and went to sleep. My only thoughts for that night were that the moon is insanely bright at that high an elevation. I thought there was someone shining a flashlight in my face.
I woke up at 5am to the mosquitoes, and slathered on more Jungle Juice and started arranging the rack. Jaime & Zac made breakfast (bacon!!) and we racked up and got started. The plan was for Zac and I to climb, me leading the whole route up, Zac following and cleaning gear while Jaime hiked up the backside to meet us up top. We ended up doing the Supertopo C variation (mostly 5.6 with one section of 5.7), and according to our EXIF data, summited at 11:14am PDT.
Throughout the climb, we noticed clouds far off in the horizon. By the time we summited, they’d gotten significantly closer… from all 360 degrees. Given my last experience climbing Cathedral, I was wary of the famous Tuolumne afternoon showers, so we spent about 5-10 minutes on the summit debating between the sketchy downclimb descent versus leaving a nut and sling to rappel off of. I took one more look at the clouds, left a nut and sling and we rapped off the backside.
We met up with Jaime who led us down the backside scramble around the eastern side of Cathedral where we stopped for a quick one-pitch lead (for me) and top-rope (for Jaime) so she could get some climbing in, and then headed back to camp to pack up. We hiked out, noticing the overcast clouds the entire time, and about 10 minutes from our car thunder clapped and the storm broke. Hopefully that nut and sling I left up at the summit was useful for anyone up there needing to escape in a hurry.
Our climb victorious, we drove to the Evergreen Lodge for the most well-deserved blue cheese and pancetta burger before driving back home.
I’m psyched we climbed Cathedral without incident, I was really happy with Zac as a climbing partner - he kicked ass and climbed great. We’re looking to go to Castle Crags up by Shasta for July 4th weekend now where they have a ton of climbing - up to 6 pitch 1000′ climbs!
[tags: Climbing]
2 comments 2008 June 25, 21:02
best firefox 3 launch press article ever
seriously. i love firefox as much as the next guy… but this article cracked me up.
i love the accompanying photo - but is that really the best accompanying photo they found to run it with?
screenshot here in case the article changes:
5 comments 2008 June 18, 21:56
overstuffage
i’m packing for this weekend’s camping/climbing trip and my pack is exploding - and i’m not even bringing a tent. i’m trying to go light… minimal food, no tent (just a tarp + pad + sleeping bag). fortunately the weather looks good (all sun, no Tuolumne™ showers in store, and lows in the 40’s, possibly 30’s depending on elevation)… and yet my pack is stuffed.
it’s hard to go minimal when you’re packing climbing pro. i’m sitting here staring at a 2.5″ piece thinking “hrm, i can probably skip this” while the other voice in my head is picturing me pumped staring at a 2.5″ crack thinking “darn, that extra 2.5″ piece sure would be handy right about now”. i tend to err on the side of caution (okay okay fine, i probably don’t need 10 slings), but… well… it’s my life, right? 
the “luxuries” i intend on packing: toothbrush and cards
cards are awesome. they’re fun… by yourself you’ve got solitaire, with groups you’ve got other games, they make a decent fire starter, and if worse comes to worse, you’ve got a place to scribble down your dying man’s last thoughts. (wonder what card i would choose to right on? probably ace of spades… how unimaginative)
[tags: Musings]
Add comment 2008 June 18, 21:09
i’m a craigslist and climbing junkie
i’ve been craigslisting stuff like mad lately… old snowboards, old furniture, basically anything i can find in the basement that we’re not using i’ve put up on craigslist. it culminated this weekend with me selling my Audi A4 (which, mind you, was NOT in the basement)
i was hugely bummed when my A4 blew, but i’m glad i found a good home for it. the guy who bought it clearly knew cars, knew about VW/Audi’s, and is going to rebuild the engine himself and get it running again. that helped assuage my conscience a bit for selling my first car i ever loved (the ‘87 Thunderbird i totalled in high school doesn’t count)
zac, jaime, and i went to Castle Rock State Park on Saturday and climbed Castle Rock Falls. i’ve climbed it once before, but this was the first time i lead the main falls climb (100 feet of 5.8ish) up the face. i’d forgotten how beautiful and aesthetic a climb it was… we got out there early in the morning and soaked up the sun and had a great time. this was the first time i’d been belayed by zac on a lead climb, but it felt pretty good and pretty comfortable…. so hopefully we’re all good for next weekend’s climb up Cathedral Peak.
i’m really really psyched to go to Cathedral. i’m determined that this year will be the first year that doesn’t end in disaster of some kind. cross your fingers for me.
3 comments 2008 June 16, 19:58
200 days of uptime, yay!
grommit just passed 200 days of uptime! (please don’t take this as an invitation to attack my machine now. it’s been a fairly cruddy day otherwise, and i have no energy to fend off an attack at the moment)
[tags: Grommit]
Add comment 2008 June 12, 19:50
euro and beer
two of my favourite things in the world… and they go hand in hand.
for what it’s worth - my money is on portugal or the dutch. if i had to choose one, i’d say the portuguese. but, given that england ain’t in it (curse you steve mcclaren!), i’m rooting for the dutch. (how can you not root for a team willing to go out and duel it in oranje?)
the dutch proved themselves well today with a sweet 3-0 drubbing of italy.
i’m loving this weather we’ve been having the past few days. wendy and i just got the house re-landscaped, so we have a beautiful gorgeous house… which reeks of mulch/compost. especially nice with the heat wave… mmm… chicken manure anybody? i spent a good chunk of saturday fighting the good fight against our bamboo jungle in the backyard. we have a gorgeous bamboo grove, and i wanted to pull out some of the dead bamboo in the middle. i got whipped quite a few times by some harsh slaps of bamboo for my trouble, but managed to thin out the grove a bit.
saturday night we had dinner at a wonderful Chinese Muslim restaurant that had fantastic food, but served no beer. (name/location left out to save one of the few restaurants that’s gone above and beyond the call of duty and deserved their tip) i went and asked the manager if i could go next door to the Chinese supermarket and bring in some beer. without skipping a beat, he told me to bring in a 6 pack and he’d put it in teapots and bring it to our table. 7 minutes and $5 later (really! $5!!!) i had a frosty 6 pack of Tsingtao. 3 minutes after that, we were pouring ice cold beer from a Chinese teapot. we left a big tip for those guys.
on sunday, zac, jaime, and i did some climbing at the local gym in preparation for our attack on Cathedral Peak coming up in a couple of weeks. we’re planning to hit up Castle Rock for some leader belay review for zac to make sure everything goes smoothly this year. i’m hoping this will be the year i finally tackle Cathedral with enough time to also do Eichorn’s Pinnacle at the top.
[tags: Musings]
3 comments 2008 June 9, 19:33
Bugzilla DekiWiki extension
One of the things we’ve been tackling at Songbird is migrating from our existing three (yes, 3) wiki systems and integrating them all into one system. Our two old public wikis were stale, decrepit, and unloved. In fact, none of us knew the admin password for one of them - and it seemed like we all had to edit through mig or mattc’s account. Craziness.
Anyway, we’re big fans of Mozilla (duh), so we started following avidly when Eric blogged about MDC moving to DekiWiki.
With all the nest work we’ve got lined up, we figured we might as well migrate the content and flip our DekiWiki live rather than blocking it on skinning/theming it, so last week we made our wiki live, and I moved all our developer site content over to it.
One of the things I’ve been screwing around with lately is learning DekiScript; I figured I’d start with a simple Bugzilla extension. I just posted it to the DekiWiki site in the hopes that it will be useful to others. Basically it lets me do:
{{ bugzilla.link(7800) }}which will create a link to the Bugzilla link, update it to reflect state of the bug (strikethrough represents a closed bug), and give it a title/tooltip with the summary of the bug. You can see it in action here on my test page or here on our Feathers update guide.
I’m a huge fan of DekiWiki’s extensibility… granted, writing extensions in XML/DekiScript is something new and different… I keep tripping up over it, but it’s been an interesting exercise and it’s always fun learning something new.
[tags: Songbird]
7 comments 2008 May 30, 21:51
Creative Commons Technology Summit
We’re big CC fans over here at Songbird, so I’m looking forward to attending CC’s first Technology Summit on June 18th over at the Googleplex in Mountain View.
I’m going to be participating in a panel covering “Digital Asset Management on the Web & the Desktop” (wow that’s a mouthful) if anyone feels like throwing tomatoes at me from the crowd.
[tags: Songbird]
2 comments 2008 May 27, 09:50
glorious double
spent lunchtime @ kate’s today shouting and screaming at the TV rooting for my team. i can’t believe yet another CL final went to PK’s, and it was a real nail biter all the way to the end.
the game was fantastic… scholesy’s little backheel to wes brown for a fantastic cross to ronaldo’s headed goal was an absolutely sublime move, and rooney’s huge huge cross to ronaldo was fantastic. it definitely wasn’t a boring match, thankfully - though the pitch looked shitty (leading to van der sar’s slip up on lampard’s goal, and terry’s botched PK).
so that wraps up an awesome season for manu - a glorious double. what to do now that manu’s season is over? hrm. the USA has some intriguing finals coming up against England, Argentina, & Spain. those should be great, and i guess i can get back to following our local Earthquakes & MLS.
[tags: Football]
2 comments 2008 May 21, 21:30
busy busy busy
man, it’s been a hectic past week. i’ve been swamped at work with my usual stuff plus building a cool Shoutcast directory add-on for Songbird that i’m hoping will make it out wiht Songbird 0.6 in a couple of weeks.
we’re close to launching our new developer wiki, and our new add-ons site which i’m super psyched about. our current add-ons site has…. some issues, and our new one looks fantabulous. plus i’m hoping once we get that out, our nest team can turn some eyes over to figuring out just wtf is going on with our translation/localisation site. man, that site needs love more than vanilla ice.
to all my p.o.o.-lovin’ friends, one of the things the new Songbird add-ons site will have is support for other platforms… including both OpenSolaris x86 & SPARC. so you guys who have emailed me asking how you can install add-ons will some love soon enough. even you SPARC desktop users… seriously.
in more fun news, we’ve been talking with our friends @ mozilla (hi mary!) for a few weeks, and are now planning an über cool party with a bunch of other peeps at OSCON for july. we’re still working out the details, but it promises to be pretty rad.
in other random personal news, i finally got the ’stevel’ username on twitter. cheer. twitter customer service FTW.
alright, that’s all. i’m off to go make more ice cream sandwiches. many thanks to danielle and henry, you guys rock. anyone who gets invited over for dinner and brings champagne, lychees, fresh ice cream, and cookies either truly loves us or wants us to die a beautiful yummy death. regardless of what your motives were, dessert was (and continues to be, with the leftovers) delicious.
[tags: Food, OpenSolaris, Songbird]
1 comment 2008 May 20, 21:55
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