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adventures

adventures / family / I do not know what is happening. / links / running / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Jun 14

A river runs through me

Yesterday I learned a bit about your basic fly fishing cast. I grew up fishing for bass and bream and catfish so this is all new to me. My father-in-law is an old pro, though. So I got the motion down in a yard yesterday. This evening we stood in a chilly stretch of river and threw little tiny bits of plastic and hair at hungry fish.

Here I am, showing off how good a pair of borrowed waders can look:

Here’s Bob, showing us where all the good fish are:

The Yankee got one. Her dad got one. I had one on the line early, but I couldn’t get him in. I spent most of the time just making the fish hungry for the guy a little farther down stream, who was catching everything in site. Fish from other rivers where getting in to this water for the pleasure of being on that guy’s hook.

Things to read … because reading is always worth a nibble.

Mastering the Internet of everything:

The IoE is about the intersection of people, processes, data, and things. Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a framework for making sense of data, information, and knowledge flows. Processes, data, and things are relatively easy to control, but people are complex adaptive systems in their own right. How can people be part of the IoE but not be overly controlled by the other three dimensions? What new skills will be needed to master the internet of everything?

Much of PKM is about finding balance. This will be even more important with the IoE. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possible, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. What happens when we add processes and things to all these data sources? Will it make things easier, or perhaps less visible? Our networks of people may help, as long as they are diverse enough, as we will be ever decreasingly able to keep track of [the internet of] everything.

We will have to get skilled at constantly lumping data and things together, then filtering and categorizing the changing landscape. We will have to become adept at breathing information in and out, able to only make sense of a small portion at a time. Our reliance on other people for sense-making will increase.

Will algorithms do that for you? There are only more sophisticated questions coming as we swap paradigms.

How Not to Pay the Price for Free Wi-Fi:

Part of globe-trotting nowadays is flitting from one free Wi-Fi network to the next. From hotel lobby to coffee shop to subway platform to park, each time we join a public network we put our personal information and privacy at risk. Yet few travelers are concerned enough to turn down free Wi-Fi. Rather, many of us hastily give away an email address in exchange for 15 minutes of free airport Internet access.

So how to feed your addiction while also safeguarding your passwords and privacy?

Ever wonder how some historic football team would fare against their modern counterparts? Check out this infographic on player size and you’ll see, they’d be mauled.

Two media prospectuses:

The Pricewaterhouse Cooper Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2014-2018

Ericsson predicts tenfold increase in mobile data traffic in five years

Ran three miles today. My mother-in-law, who is a thoughtful and giving lady, picked us up something called the Arctic Chill Towel which … oh, let’s let this enthusiastic corporate spokesman explain it to us:

Felt pretty great around my neck on the track today and it should come in very handy this summer.

adventures / Alaska / Monday / video — Comments Off
2
Jun 14

Back from Alaska, animal videos

We made it back to the continental United States, and to the east coast. We landed at JFK, were picked up by my father-in-law and then spent most of the day just trying to stay awake until it was time to go to sleep.

All red eye flights should be discontinued by Congressional vote.

Here are the last two videos from our amazing Alaska adventure. This first is the moose we saw eating on the side of the road in Denali. I got within 15 feet or less. When I got to close, the moose would just amble away.

This one has to do with the puppies you found here the day before yesterday — or three weeks ago, whichever it was. This is four-time Iditarod champion Jeff King telling the visitors to Husky Homestead, the kennel where he raises his dogs:

Alaska is a great trip. You should visit. I hope we get to go back!

But not on a red eye.

adventures / Alaska / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
1
Jun 14

So long Denali and see ya Anchorage; leaving Alaska

I forgot this panorama yesterday. It is almost like I felt you might have, perhaps, seen enough of this beautiful scenery and didn’t want to burden you with any more of Denali. Who could get tired of this, though?

As always with panoramas, click to embiggen.

We left Denali today, drove back to Anchorage, cleaned most of our clothes and repacked, this time for the airport. Our Alaskan adventure has, sadly, come to an end.

Cheers to our good friends and wonderful hosts:

They are sweet people and have been wonderful to us as always. And they are terrible enablers. We would have done none of this adventure without them. They’ve only been in Alaska for about five months and they already come off as experts, at least to us. Adam’s work keeps his attention far more than a 40-hour work week, but I hope they get to go and do and see more and more of the area; it is surely beautiful.

Today, Adam is already in France and now Jessica is joining him there. He’ll be jumping as a part of the D-Day anniversary festivities next week, which is some incredible news for him. To catch up, Jessica will be flying with us to Seattle. We are due back in New York at around 1:30 tomorrow. Her trip will, really, be just getting underway. Leaving from Anchorage after midnight to fly to Paris and take two trains to the English Channel is just about the worst red eye flight you could imagine.

If my math was correct she’ll be traveling for almost 31 hours. Of course, she’ll make it halfway around the world, but still.

Her layover in Seattle is ridiculously long, so we bought her way into the Delta club. I insisted. Better chairs, more plugs, no crowds, free snacks, private restrooms. The one in Seattle has showers, apparently. For all of the driving around and putting up with us she did, she deserves to not spend almost eight hours as an airport refugee.

As we’re sitting in the airport, waiting on the plane, listening to these guys talk about their work schedules on the north slope — the real frontier — I realized something: This is the first time that I have seen darkness since Tuesday of last week in Wilton. Every waking moment it has been daylight or something vaguely resembling twilight. It wasn’t creepy until just this moment …

Anyway, here are the last of the scenic Alaskan pictures — I have some random shots that’ll land on the Tumblr site eventually — but these are the last mountain shots. It has been a wonderful trip, and they tell us we have to come back to see the other Alaska, the winter Alaska. Wouldn’t that be neat? I bet all of these mountains would look different then!

The only two bears we saw:

But this guy was the best animal in the entire 49th state:

adventures / Alaska / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
31
May 14

Puppies! Err, Visiting Denali, Day Two

We booked a tour at Husky Homestead, home of Jeff King, the four-time Iditarod champion, and his many dogs. At first, I was a tiny bit skeptical. Learning about the Iditarod would be interesting, but Jessica and The Yankee were more interested in seeing the puppies.

They did not disappoint. And they’ll win you over. Cuteness follows. You step off the shuttle and they thrust dogs right into your hands:

Those puppies are all about six weeks old. We’re told we are a part of their training. We’re socializing the animals. They should be paying us for our help!

This is Chase, he gave us the general idea of the place, introduced us to a few of the 60 or so dogs there, including a couple of champion huskies and told us about their general life with the mushmaster. Some turn into competitive sled dogs, others get passed along to a more domestic lifestyle. For now, they’re all pulling stuff. In the winter they drag a sled. Right now, as we were there, they hooked up nine or 10 to a four wheeler and the dogs ran like the kibble bowl was on fire. The rest were loudly jealous.

The short version: they’ve got it pretty good.

This dog is already a champion, and at a young age. King said she could be one of the best ever before she’s done.

This one is a couple of months old. Each litter is given a theme name. This litter is named after Jeeps. This is Cherokee. Or Wrangler. Hard to keep them straight:

King has a nice patter as he talks about running the races. I have some video of this I’ll be putting together in the next few days. Be sure you come back to check it out. It is informative and entertaining.

In the afternoon we went out riding four wheelers. There’s a large parcel of land that abuts the national park that is private land. The story goes there was a coal operation there when the park was federalized. And that was in a time when the government wouldn’t just snap things up. So the mining continued. When that played out, the land stayed private, and now there are ATVs.

And this guy is our guide. What could go wrong?

He was good, a personable fellow, a fine guide. He didn’t drive fast enough.

He took us up close to views like these, though:

We saw the train on our way back to the lodge:

More mountains:

And a moose — unconcerned on the side of the road. I walked to the center line on the road before the moose would worry about me. That’s, what, 15 feet? Not a bad evening find.

Tomorrow we head back to Anchorage and, much later tomorrow, back to the lower 48.

adventures / Alaska / Auburn / Friday / friends / iPhone / photo / video — Comments Off
30
May 14

Visiting Denali, Day One

We are visiting here for the weekend, which requires a drive about four hours north of Anchorage.

That means that just over … there … somewhere … is Mt. McKinley, the highest point in the country. Jessica drove us to Denali because Adam is on his way to France for work. Some kind of life, no?

The drive was, of course, beautiful. Lots of verdant scenes dotted by small towns and pure-Alaskan wide spots in the road. We saw some wildlife, but not the bigger animals we were seeking:

Also, there are mountains.

I’m taking a lot of pictures of mountains. I’ve noticed. But I’m not the only one:

Today we took a hike alongside the Savage River, which we saw at an elevation of 2,780 feet. Here’s The Yankee:

Perhaps she was taking pictures of a small thing:

Here’s what the hike looked like:

The water, snow melt that was probably 15 minutes old, was perfectly clear.

The rock formations through this little valley are some of the oldest on the continent. The Outer Range of the Alaskan Range are thought to be somewhere between 600 million to more than a billion years old. That little river is believed to be even older than the mountains.

The rocks feature schists, blended ribbons, of quartzite, mica, slate, marble, greenstone and phyllite.

OK, fine, one more mountain shot.

Oh, last thing. We had an Auburn family reunion today. I put the picture on my War Eagle Moments blog. I also met a nice lady from Birmingham as well. She goes to church, she said, with some of my Samford colleagues.

It is a small world, even in big Alaska.