Month: October 2009

I ventured into Gothic Basin today, an impressive glacier carved wilderness of the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. It lies near what was once a mining area.

The way to the basin begins on the old, fenced-off road into the ghost town of Monte Cristo. This bit of trail is littered with signs warning of extreme danger, proceed at your own risk, hazardous materials such as aresenic in the soil, balrogs, and other such frivolities. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about: the trail was wide, level, and well-maintained.

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How does one hate a country, or love one? …I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills, but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I hiked to the top of Mailbox Peak today, near Snoqualmie Pass. The trail has a reputation of being one of the toughest short day hikes in the Cascades: it’s only about 3 miles one way, but you gain 4,100 feet. That makes it a bit steep. The Mountaineers and the Washington Trail Association has this to say:

Wimpy hikers, turn the page. This trail offers nothing for you but pain and heartbreak. If you think you’ve got the goods to scramble up more than 1000 feet per mile, read on. Mailbox Peak brings a serious burn to the thighs of even the best-conditioned athletes, but the rewards make it all worthwhile.

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This mash-up feed still exists, but you probably don’t want to use it. As of May 2010, Twitter feeds are now integrated into the blog and thus are included in the normal feed. The mash-up feed now only mashes the blog feed and Flickr photos

When I first decided to add twitter posts to my site, I debated whether I would rather have them integrated into the actual blog posts or separated. Visually, I like to have the separation, but I always thought it would be neat to pull the twitter posts directly into Wordpress’ database, and so have them integrated into my RSS feed. Otherwise, for those who wish to follow my twitter posts, but are not on twitter, they have to subscribe to two different feeds — both my blog feed and twitter feed.

Today, I had the idea of keeping the actual separation of twitter and the blog, but simply creating a new RSS feed using some sort of RSS-mash-up-aggregator thingy. I thought Feedburner could do something like that, but apparently not. After searching around for other options and not finding anything that really excited me, I decided to just use Yahoo Pipes. After all, this is pretty much what it was made for.

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