I recently discovered this online, collaborative catalog of “wondrous and curious places”, The Atlas Obscura. It’s a great source to find odd things to see and explore both near home and afar. Browsing the listings, I found plenty of little local surprises in addition to the places I had already seen or been. Check it out in your own area or the next time you’re traveling somewhere!
The first one Darlene and I ended up checking out was The Statues of Ken Fox in Auburn. I’d seen the giant sculpture of a gold-panning prospector along Interstate 80 in Auburn, but I wasn’t aware of the artist/dentist’s other, similarly massive creations in town. Here’s a more complete backstory on Ken Fox and his creations.
We also went hiking around the intersection of several historic routes (wagon, train and automobile) in the Sierra Nevada, at Donner Summit: the first wagon trail to California, first transcontinental railroad, first transcontinental highway.
While visiting with Darlene’s family in Wisconsin/Minnesota, we went for a Segway ride and tour in La Crosse this past Sunday with Shel, Dan, Kathy and Shelly. It was my first time trying one and it was a lot of fun. The handling is very intuitive and responsive – to the point of being a little addictive! If you have yet to try one, look for a tour or rental in your area (like La Crosse Segway Tours) – it’s definitely worth it!
Click through for the full gallery of pics and video:
A short, 75-second video montage from our Segway ride in La Crosse, WI.
A little while ago, after reading “Ready Player One” again (Spielberg is making a movie!) and after seeing a couple of tech talks by old Atari game programmers, I was lamenting that I sold my old Atari VCS so many years ago. Well, Darlene jumped on this comment, found a bundle someone was selling on eBay and surprised me with an early birthday gift. Yup, an old Atari VCS/2600 (four switch version), a set of controllers and a bundle of game cartridges. Sweet! (I think my brother and I actually had the six-switch, Sears-rebranded version, but still very cool!) Thanks, Darlene!
I immediately had to go fill out the set of 40 cartridges with a couple of other games I remember us playing a lot. Of course then was the challenge of hooking it up: the Atari outputs an analog RF TV signal… on an RCA-plug cable. You can use an adapter like this one to go from RCA plug to coax TV cable input. I don’t have a TV tuner, so rather than pulling a VCR out of a box in a closet, I hooked it up via my old USB EyeTV tuner/video converter to my MacBook – success!
Yeah, you can play any of these games via emulation on a modern computer, or even a smartphone/iPad, but there’s something very different about jamming the physical cartridge into the old physical console and handling that classic Atari joystick. (And having to use cotton swabs and alcohol to clean the contacts on all of the Activision cartridges to get them to work again!)
It’s been fun to pick these up and rediscover old visual/procedural memories, like the admittedly-simple path through the Adventure maze. Some titles are only vaguely familiar until you plug them in and see the game again and then go “aha!!”
So… to paraphrase Atari’s old marketing… have you played your Atari today?
Darlene’s hometown friends, Vicky and Diane, joined us this weekend to participate in San Francisco’s “Bay to Breakers” run and craziness, plus a little sightseeing….
Pictures from a four-day backpacking trip last week with Darlene, Laura and Rachel into the Ventana Wilderness, south of Big Sur and below Cone Peak – click through for the full gallery:
I haven’t posted an external link in a while but this is a great recent find I wanted to share: Wait But Why. Tim Urban puts together some really brilliant, fascinating and in-depth posts about a myriad of topics. I stumbled on it by way of his amusing post about his unexpected call from (and subsequent visit/tour/lunch with) Elon Musk (“The World’s Raddest Man“). I later found myself up late, still caught up in his fascinating, two-part exploration of the current state (and potential, future existential threat) of artificial intelligence.
There’s an archive of posts to explore and upon subscribing for updates, you’ll receive an enticing list of popular articles to sink your time into, including these on “Science, Philosophy, Space and Anything Mind-Blowing”:
The Fermi Paradox – “The mind-twisting discussion of whether alien life exists and why we’ve never seen evidence of any. The post I get the second-most emails about.”
The AI Revolution – “A long, two-part post that took me six weeks to do—a full overview of what everyone’s been talking about with AI and the reasons I believe this is the most important topic in the world right now.”
Putting Time in Perspective – “An infographic that starts with today and works its way backwards, in increasingly large time increments, all the way to the Big Bang. Good way to put all of history in perspective.”
For Darlene’s birthday last week (mid-April), I took her on a ski trip to a surprise destination: Banff, in the Canadian Rockies! We stayed for five nights and skied at Sunshine Village and Lake Louise. We also spent a little time exploring the national park: hiking in Johnston Canyon to see the ice falls, up to Lake Louise to walk out on the mostly frozen lake and out to Lake Minnewanka. We were super lucky to decide to go revisit Lake Minnewanka after dinner on our first night because not only were the skies clear but the aurora borealis made a pretty good showing that night. It also happened to be the first time either of us had ever seen an aurora in person!
Aurora Borealis over Lake Minnewanka, near Banff, Canada.
Click through to see the full gallery and video montage:
I was worried about the snow conditions when we arrived because there was no hint of snow in the valley around Banff (and the previous times I was there in the winter there was tons of snow everywhere). There wasn’t even any snow on the drive up to Sunshine on our first day. However, Sunshine is actually up pretty high and you take a gondola to get to the runs from the parking area. And, even before the weekend snow, it was great conditions and good coverage.
We went to the lower elevation resort at Lake Louise after the storm came through and I’m glad we waited because there were plenty of clues of how nasty and frozen the snow was on some parts of the mountain underneath the new snow. It definitely gets warmer there than in Sunshine. This was mid-April of course.
Compared to Whistler/Blackcomb, Sunshine (Banff) and Lake Louise certainly have a better chance of snow and cold weather, but they’re not as convenient. Sunshine is like 15 minutes from Banff and Lake Louise like 40 minutes or so. You don’t have to drive as there are free shuttles (with resort passes) to/from Banff and the drives are very pleasant. And there are other things to see and do if people want to take a day or two off from skiing.
Short video montage of our trip.
Sunshine and Lake Louise are both fairly large resorts, with plenty of terrain to explore. Their trail ranking is pretty strange at both resorts: lots of green runs and black diamond runs which would be rated blues in Tahoe. At times it seemed pretty arbitrary how the runs were ranked. You had to just go and check it out. You couldn’t trust the ranking at all. (Didn’t try any of the double-blacks: just assumed they were super steep chutes.)
One negative is that Sunshine has a few large portions (maybe a third) of completely open terrain above the tree line. Not only are these areas open to a storm but they also don’t let you feel like you have anything to explore in those areas. It’s just one big open expanse that feels the same all over, rather than many runs to check out. This certainly isn’t true all over the park, it’s just a couple chunks of it. Also a couple of sections of their acreage are special, restricted areas where you have to partner up and carry avalanche gear.
Similarly, as big as Lake Louise is, most of the backside terrain is double-black diamond: presumably chutes which Darlene and I didn’t try. But there are lots of other fun blue and black runs. Unfortunately, we found our favorite run after lifts closed on our last day!! D’oh!
I think it would be easy to enjoy five days skiing between the two resorts. There’s also little Mt. Norquay but we didn’t bother. It looks much smaller than Sugar Bowl (here in California) and I like Sugar Bowl.
