Pictures and video from this year’s annual Pirates of Cache Creek event with the Outdoor Adventure Club – click through for the full gallery:
And a short video montage (130 seconds) of the weekend:
Author: Chris
National Automobile Museum
Darlene and I visited the fantastic National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada (“The Harrah Collection”) recently. This is a cool place and definitely worth a trip to visit, even for non-car aficionados. It’s super-easy to get caught up and lose several hours in this place checking out the hundreds of vintage vehicles. It’s fun to see and learn how things evolved so haphazardly from the original notions of the “horseless carriage”. It’s quite an amazing collection and full of surprises.
Atlas Obscura: A Dentist’s Creations
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.
Click through for more pictures.
Riding the Segway
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:
“Have you played Atari today?”
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?
Bay to Breakers
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….
Click through for the full gallery:
Into the Ventana Wilderness
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:
Wait But Why
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.” |