Blake, Andy, and I headed up to Mt. Baldy after a week’s worth of storms dropped 5-7ft on the local Southern California ski area. Roads were restricted, lines were long, but we made the best of the day and got in some stellar runs, including skiing the east face of Mt. Harwood after hiking 500ft up from the top of chair 4.

Don’t miss the 4-day old baby elephant! In my wife’s words, “So little and cute.” It’s all relative I guess.

We carved these last weekend, but at least ours is still alive and kickn’ for the grand total of ZERO trick-or-treaters that came to our door. Oh, and I left the upstairs balcony door open to cool things off tonight, and a cat came in to visit. It was working it’s way down the stairs when I saw it, at which point the scared kitty made for the door. Random.

Nothing as dramatic as last year, but there are a lot more fires this time around and it really does seem like the whole world is on fire here. We’re not in any danger so don’t worry about us. Closest fire was Sunday – about 3 miles away, but moving the other way. Hopefully the wind will die for good this afternoon and they’ll start getting a handle on these over the next few days.

There are about 3GB worth of photos I need to go through. Photos from places like Panorama Point in the Sierra Navada, Death Valley, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, Mad King Ludwig’s castle Neuschwanstein, the Black Forest, Dachau Concentration Camp, and München biergärtens. We’ve had a pretty busy few months. On top of all of that, my lovely wife walked across the stage with her Master’s of Divinity, we’ve move into a new place, and planted a balcony vegetable garden. Many pictures and maybe a few stories are forthcoming in the days and weeks ahead.

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago. I made the big 2-6. Yeah, kinda anti-climactic, I know. Anyway, Katie and my parents were kind enough to pitch in and buy me an airplane I’ve been wanting for awhile. I built it up last Friday, and then proceeded to go camping and snowshoeing in Sequoia NP for the remainder of the weekend, so I flew it first today. It ended up being a Santa-Ana winds weekend here anyway, so it was for the better. With some help from some much more knowledgeable co-workers, I got the plane and controller all set up and threw it off the hill for the first flight. The plane flies great, the pilot needs some practice. I’m very happy I got the model with the motor to save me when I make mistakes, otherwise I would have been doing a lot of hiking up and down the hill. The idea is that you fly in the rising air out in front of a hill looking into the wind. This way, the rising air provides lift and you can glide forever (usually without power required), as long as you’re skillful and the wind doesn’t die. Many people build ultra-light gliders for just this purpose without motors, but since I’m just starting out, a glider with a motor was a practical choice. Here are some pictures a friend took of the maiden voyage with a crummy 2MP camera from work.

I’ve been trying to install Windows Vista since RC1. I have burned 4 coaster DVD’s that would get some percent of the way through the install and then fail with corrupt file errors. I don’t really need Vista, but I wanted to play with it nevertheless. I also picked up an ATI HDTV Wonder PCI with some Christmas money, and without Windows XP Media Center Edition, I’m stuck using ATI’s crummy media center software for watching and recording TV. It doesn’t even have a decent built in program guide.

So, I spent some of Friday night and Saturday giving Vista one more try at installing. I have 3 hard drives in my PC, so i cleared one of the partitions and went to work. I burned a DVD and tried to install from within Windows XP, which is entirely possible. However, I got the dreaded “corrupt file” error twice in a row. After consulting Google, I found out that mounting the Vista ISO using a virtual drive tool like Daemon tools will work for the install, since apparently the Vista installer copies all the relevant data to the hard drive, modifies the boot sector to boot, then does all the nitty gritty install stuff, but at that point you don’t need the install disc anymore.

After updating my Motherboard’s bios and giving Vista its time to install, I had a new machine up and going. Everything on the Microsoft site claims the HDTV Wonder is compatible with Vista, but the first message I got about hardware was that it wasn’t. Later I found out that Vista had installed the drivers for the Digital side of the tuner but not the analog side. I installed the Krams Driver and followed the instructions, but Media Center still refused to cooperate. Browsing the Vista Device Manager, I saw that there was a hardware component that hadn’t installed correctly. I clicked on it and did an auto update of the driver, and viola, the Analog and Digital components of the HTDV Wonder installed. Rebooting and running Media Center one more time gave me live TV, but with much studdering and skipping.

Eventually I found out that when I updated the Bios, I hadn’t reset my CPU clock, so my processor was running at about half horsepower. Fixing this made most of the studdering go away, but not all. It seems that my Athlon XP 3000+ at 2GHz just isn’t enough for Vista and Media Center, even with nothing else running. The same setup nets about 35% CPU usage on XP using the ATI media center. Arrrrg.

So, at least until I get a chance to upgrade my hardware, I’m going to have to stick with XP. My general impression of Vista is that it doesn’t have enough new stuff to warrant a change just for the heck of it, but it is fun to play with and pretty to look at. I’ve had some further problems with the ATI Catalyst Control Center not allowing me to change to the right screen resolutions, but other than that most things have been smooth.

One point to make, but that most who read this far will already know: Vista doesn’t have any major advantages over XP that I’ve found yet. If your computer is working for you fine as it is, you probably don’t have any real reason to upgrade. But, you probably didn’t have to read all of my rambling to figure that one out.

We made it back to California yesterday after fighting with some sickness on the road and L.A. traffic. We had a lot of fun while we were there – thanks to everyone who hosted us. If we missed you this trip, there’s always next year. Pictures and such coming as soon as I’m really awake. Read: sometime later this week.

We made it to my parent’s house last night and got Marco off to the airport today. We’ll be running errands over the next few days like everyone else, but the week after Christmas is pretty open. Give us a call and we’ll hang out. Geekified GPS track and such coming soon.