Rick Wang's Weblog

Participants: 3 (Carl, Dave)
Location: Irvine Ranch Natural Landmarks, Santa Ana Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 10.75 mi round trip (hike, 5 hours)
Elevation: 1000 to 1600 feet
Terrain: Foothills, Grassland, Canyon

It was scorching today. Hit over 100 degrees and the air conditioner refused to work. Not that I wanted to run it anyways due to poor insulation of the Rancho Cucamonga house. Difficulties in getting rid of my sgi pc, victory, continued, with various people being clueless, flakey, or just plain rude. In the end, I did find someone to take it away, but I had gotten so frustrated I mixed two guys up and wasted another person's time. Anyway that is done and I am down to 2 computers, scavenger and delusions.

I escaped much of the heat by using the internet and reading at the nicely air-conditioned public library. I finally finished off Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and was rather depressed by it. One chapter in particular, Down the River, was particularly memorable, describing his adventure down a river canyon that was soon to be lost forever by the construction of a dam. Although I had not seen this particular area, nor am I able to go river-rafting, I felt a strong sense of loss due to Abbey's vivid and passionate descriptions of the wonders of the land. Then I started up on Plato's Republic, but gave up as it was not interesting enough to overcome the weariness of the hot weather.

Also, finally after so many years of being in Rancho Cucamonga, I set aside the time to check out the local J. Filippi Winery. I've always known it was there, and that Rancho Cucamonga produced wine, but I had never tried local wine until today. Wine tasting was $5 to try 5 different kinds. I tried a Syrah, Five Estates, Big Joe, Mourvedre, and Alicante Bouschet Port. Port was my favorite due to my simple taste and the obvious sweetness of a dessert wine; however to me port is something that tastes best on the first sip and progressively worse with each subsequent sip. The Big Joe and the Five Estates were probably the nicer ones, but with my poor tastes I am at a loss to explain. The winery had a nice history exhibit and lounge area. It was also connected to a neat local paintings exhibit. Overall I enjoyed checking this winery out.

After so many years, it is now time for me to part ways with this vintage computer that I had acquired secondhand. I dug it out of its corner in the garage to see if it still worked, and after some time I managed to figure out how to boot it and log in. I deleted any relevant personal data, and copied the original version of my website to keep for sentimental value. The apt repository still pointed to stable, which caused significant problems in updating, so I had to point it to woody. Going from woody (3.0) to current stable (6.0) after all would have been quite a jump. I was satisfied with its condition and offered it up on freecycle as well as over IRC. Surprisingly there was someone local enough to say yes. I hope he has fun experimenting with this machine.

Since my last update, my participation on Brettspielwelt has somewhat declined. I did get to try out Caylus, Drachenherz, Einfach Genial, Pandemic, Stone Age, and Zatre. All of these games were fun in some way except for Zatre, which should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Pandemic is a nice co-op game where players take the role of the CDC and fight against diseases. Caylus is complicated and lengthy but a fun game which I enjoyed due to the lack of randomness.

I also checked out the Humble Indie Bundle #3, donating $10 to the cause and getting all sorts of great games. I dove into the limited time access of Minecraft, finding it surprisingly more fun than I had expected. It is such a good match for explorer-based players such as myself. Of the bundled games which I did not already have, I enjoyed Atom Zombie Smasher and Hammerfight the most. Unfortunately, the steam overlay does not seem to work with Hammerfight and I could not take screenshots of the action.

I have also continued to play a significant amount of World of Tanks, making use of a recent promotion in order to get myself access to the S-51 self-propelled gun, IS-4 heavy tank, and Ferdinand tank destroyer. However, my favorite tank remains the KV-13 medium tank. I enjoy a medium tank's ability to move quickly to where the action is, flanking opponents at aggressive angles to help steer the course of the battle.

After following posts on Low End Box for some time, it became clear to me that I could use a cheaper plan for disasterzone. After all, this is only a personal hobbyist site and does not need the reliability or scalability of business-oriented vps plans. I saw that BuyVM in particular was quite popular, and seemed to always sell out whenever they opened up new offerings. Eventually, I saw on Doesbuyvmhavestock that new offerings were up, and after a short period of deliberation, I dropped $15 for 1 year access to the 128MB OpenVZ plan. I've been tinkering with it since, checking if it would meet my needs.

Lately, I have been spending tons of time on gaming. I thought it might be a good idea to create a blog section so I could write about the gaming and self-analyze in the process. Mostly for myself.

Participants: 2 (Jerry)
Location: Angeles National Forest, San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 7.2 mi round trip (hike)
Elevation: 5000 to 7600 feet
Terrain: Forest, River, Mountain

Participants: 2 (Connie)
Location: Angeles National Forest, San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 4 mi (hike)
Elevation: 700' (trailhead), 1200' (Fish Creek Falls)
Terrain: Mountain, River, Forest, Shrubland

Participants: 2 (Connie)
Location: Angeles National Forest, San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 6.5 mi (out and back)
Elevation: 1100' (Trailhead), 3250' (Jones Saddle)
Terrain: Canyon, Mountain

So I had somehow acquired a tick during Tuesday's hike. Thankfully it was in a rather visible area on my left abdomen and easy to spot once I looked for it. However, I had not noticed it while I showered earlier, and I had changed clothes. At any rate, I was pretty grossed out by the presence of this tick and tried to remember how to deal with ticks. Instead of calmly looking up internet articles, the first thing I remembered (very wrongly) was to try and make it detach by heat. I lit a lighter next to the tick, but this had no observable result other than burning the tick's butt and irritating my skin further. I was confused why the tick was not moving and theorized it was already dead, so I proceeded to use tweezers to remove it. Well, I quickly discovered how hard the tick's jaws held on, and firm steady pulling was not getting the job done. Eventually I seem to have ripped off most of the tick but lost the head. The good news was I remembered not to throw the tick away, and put it in a plastic bag.

Participants: 3 (Carl, Dave)
Location: Cleveland National Forest, Santa Ana Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 6 mi (out and back)
Elevation: 1900' (Trailhead), 3691' (Gate), 3800' (Bedford Peak)
Terrain: Scrubland, Canyon, Foothills

Participants: 2 (with Carl)
Location: Angeles National Forest, San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 10 mi (loop hike)
Elevation: 4900' (Trailhead), 7555' (Icehouse Saddle), 8303' (Timber Mountain)
Terrain: Mountain, River, Forest

Participants: 2 (with Carl)
Location: Angeles National Forest, San Gabriel Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 10.6 mi (loop)
Elevation: 6000' (Manker Flats Trailhead), 10064' (Baldy Summit), 7800' (Baldy Notch)
Terrain: Mountain, Forest

Route Description

Participants: 2/4 (led by Jerry)
Location: Sequoia National Park/Inyo National Forest, Sierra Nevada Mountains, CA, USA
Distance: 22 mi out-and-back (hike)
Elevation: 8360' (Whitney Portal), 10360' (Outpost Camp), 12000' (Trail Camp), 14497' (Mount Whitney)
Terrain: Mountain, Forest, River, Grassland

Although I have been cooking on and off, it has been some time since I bothered taking pictures and posting them on the blog. I decided to have a little fun today and combine different things. The bottom base of potatoes and rosemary was mostly there to use up potatoes that had been sitting idle for a week, while the rosemary was obtained from my herb garden. The tri-tip was marinated in Lucille's Smokehouse Original BBQ sauce for 2 hours. A half cup of Merlot was used for the braising liquid. The tagine was placed in the oven for 5 hours at 300F before taking it out for inspection. Upon inspection, I decided to drain most of the sauces and cut up the meat to put in more BBQ sauce. It was then cooked for another hour at 375F. The roast tasted great but was not as tender as I had hoped. I also felt the BBQ sauce flavor did not penetrate the meat at all, but this was solved during eating by applying the sauces drained earlier.