Home for the Holidays, Thanksgiving!

Once again heading West to sunny Vancouver for the holiday. During the 80s and 90s I generally spent Thanksgiving up in the Thompson Plateau enjoying the cabin and getting ready for winter. The best time of the year in the mountains is April thru June and then September and October. The summer months can be very hot and not conducive to meditating or translating. Mid November is the average point for the first real snow and then after that it can accumulate pretty quickly. I remember one night going to sleep with the outside temperature at 25 F and waking up in the morning thinking the door had somehow come open. The outside temperature was -5 F. A nasty cold front had come through and stayed. Although usually the weather turns cooler and the winds start to come from the North in mid October - watch out past mid November. Thanksgiving is guaranteed good weather - global warming considered of course.

I hope to head up to the cabin on Tuesday or Wednesday morning and spend at least one night with a roaring fire, a gently splashing creek and a big wide starry sky. With luck I will be woken in the night by the howling of wolves or coyotes, maybe the nocturnal visit of a bear foraging in the dark. The water will be cold, there are 11 crossings. At this time of the year some of those crossings are shallow and there are enough large dry rocks to jump onto and cross without getting wet. If it is raining on the way up it is better to stay in the water for the crossings and avoid the slippery rocks. The last crossing is the most treacherous because it is the narrowest and therefore potentially the deepest water. The path must be picked carefully. Past that point it doesn't get any easier as there have been serious rock slides in the last ten years. Steep rock faces on the Western side rise over a thousand feet. Twenty minutes past that and the trail becomes easier although seriously over grown, especially in the last 10 years. The cabin is not so far after that, but if you don't know where it is, it will be very difficult to find.

Yes I have used the Mountain Goat image once before. The first post ever for this Travel Blog was decorated with this photo. I like it, but no it was not taken at the cabin. The largest animal I photographed at the cabin was a female moose and boy was it big. Never get in the way of a moose. The Mountain Goat was photographed several hundred feet above the cabin. I was meditating in a cave when I chanced to look across the gorge and saw a Mountain Goat looking directly at me - probably wondering what the hell I was doing. Snap, I took the photo.

A Beautiful Day In Vancouver

It was a beautiful clear day with a bright - deep - blue sky and flowers everywhere, summer flowers, and a bumble bee going about its business. The variations of green were especially soothing to the eye and healthy for the mind.

Vancouver Bound for American Thanksgiving

Well here it is again, the American Thanksgiving Holiday. I have spent the previous 10 years in New York City and enough is enough. My boss invited me once to his home for Thanksgiving and then I spent several years going out with Gene Smith to I Coppi, a restaurant in the East Village, for Thanksgiving dinner. But, aside from these highlights it is dead boring here with everything closed on the THURSDAY and me just working everyday all the way through the weekend. Why not go home? What a thought. So here I am about to get on a Cathay Pacific flight out of New York, bumped to Business Class. They are very nice at Cathay. The best airline in the world. On my recent marathon trip to Beijing China in October they also bumped me to Business Class on the NY to Hong Kong portion of the flight. They are truly old fashion and professional. My favourite airline. But enough about them.......

Today the HAR website has moved to a new hosting server that is faster and more secure. It is also more Apple friendly. Although 6% of the computer world that claims to be better than all the rest of us has never been high on my priority list. I have been using a personal computer since 1984 and I have never had a rash of computer crashes due to software, Windows, DOS or otherwise. In the last fifteen years any serious crashes have been due to incompatibility between hardware components because I have built the computer or had someone else build it based on my specs. Obviously wrong.

It is likely that the entire notion of PCs crashing all the time is a marketing creation of Apple. I cannot count the number of times I have sat through a business meeting where an Apple is being used to give a presentation and the user tells me "I don't know what happened it has never done this before". Apples crash, they crash a lot, but the users have been brain washed into saying "OMG this has never happened before." Hogwash, Grow Up, Apple is only in business today because Microsoft bought a huge interest in their stocks so they wouldn't go out of business. The day Apple goes out of business is the day the US Government steps in and divides up Microsoft for being a monopoly. It is in Microsoft's interest, not marginally, but totally, to keep Apple alive and viable. Enough about Apple. Apple is BIG BROTHER technology. With PC technology free thinking computer users can create and work within a free environment.

HAR has changed serves and the upgrade should be marginally noticeable in speed and performance. I say marginally because most people don't pay too much attention to those things. If we went back to the early 90s with the real consumer beginnings of the Internet then YES, we noticed changes in performance. Dial-up modems, what were we thinking. Come on now, what were we thinking? Were we cutting edge? What about cable modems? Wi-fi? Things have changed.

The HAR site for some people will be faster, it might produce results slightly quicker. What is important is that it is a more stable server, not that HAR has had a lot of down time in the last year. The Coldfusion platform is newer and we will be taking advantage of the best that Adobe Software has to offer. Sure, why buy into Coldfusion if you can use Php, free, no charge, open source. Well, can you say crap shoot, maybe you didn't hear me CRAP SHOOT. Php is great, open source and all that - whatever it really means. But, who do you have setting standards? If you build a site then how easy is it to have someone else, after the initial developer, come in and figure out what is going on? What modules and libraries have been used? What are the shortcuts, back doors? All I can say is crap shoot.

Some might call this a rant. Some might call this a rave. I call it a positive release of stress from New York in anticipation of a weeks rest in a civilized part of the world - Vancouver.

Back to New York - Again & Again & Again!!!!!

Well it has been a very relaxing stay in Vancouver for the past two weeks. I managed to get away up to the cabin for two nights. That was a great trip. The trail is really over-grown. No wild animals to be seen, but the bears got into my equipment again. They didn't damage very much because they already did that last November. It is making me re-think how I hide necessary equipment - not from the bears - but from people. Nobody had been in the cabin, from what I could tell, since the last visit which wasn't that long ago.

When I say relaxing what I really mean is having the opportunity to get a lot of work done without distraction.