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Eileen Spillane and Ajahn Amaro Photo by Ed Ritger

DharmaWheels.org sums up the Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage in this way: "2 Days...137 miles of cycling...60,000 breaths." This is much more appropriate, and poetic than the tag line that occurred to me during the ride, which had something to do with mindfulness of one of the more southern extremes of the body.

Last night I finally got around to ripping, editing and transcoding video of a performance a few weeks ago at Jazz Camp West. Jazz Camp West is "band camp" for adults. It's a gas.

This video is available in a slightly bigger window on blip.tv.

This was my third visit in four years (I went to Stanford Jazz Residency last year). Each day before dinner people have the opportunity to perform. If your name gets drawn for an Open Mic performance

8:15 p.m. on a Thursday evening at the height of a May heatwave. Despite its heavy load Esther's Mini Cooper cuts and jukes through downtown San Francisco traffic like Baron Davis driving to the hoop. I fish out a crusty camelback hose from the mountain of gear occupying the rear 3/4ths of the vehicle - musty sleeping bags, stained parkas, world weary T2 telemark boots, an ample cooler of beer and a smelly bear can. Peering through the sun roof I verify the security of Esther's brand new Voile Mojo splitboard and my battle-scarred K2 World Pistes. Despite the advanced hour of our departure and the miles of mountainous road unfolding before us we gaze out into the east-bound 580 dusk and entertain carefree dreams of perfect turns carved on the spring flanks of Mount Dana, False White and other Eastern Sierra gems.

(Originally posted on TelemarkTips.com)

This past weekend sure was a sleeper. As the Thursday weather reports predicted rain up to 8,000' followed by wet snow, my inbox started filling up with messages titled "Bail!" and "Have you seen the weather???" from my Bradley Hut companions to be. I alt+tabbed back to MS Query Analyzer and wondered if I should just come into work instead of taking my planned Friday off. It looked like it would be that, or another solitary day in the apartment mining belly button lint.

(Originally posted on TelemarkTips.com)

Caption: First flight leaves Kaslo for Carlyle Lodge

Longish introduction which may seem to have little to do with subject at hand:

I've realized that there are a number of obstacles hindering my fledgling
movement to introduce Backcountry Touring as an Olympic event. For
starters, many Olympic host cities will not be able to provide the

Only you can't really tell it's me and my friends. To help you I've edited in the names:

Backcountry Magazine February/March 2008 Issue page 41
(Enlarge this)

Esther at Guitar Center

My friend Esther has the right perspective on New Year's resolutions. Beats the hell out of:

• Save more money.
• Drink less coffee.
• Loose weight.

A perpetual struggle of the human condition is our craving for greater interpersonal connection. We constantly perceive that the connections we have are lacking, and that we cannot escape a fundamental isolation. While on the surface our desire may be for a partner - or for the ability of an existing mate to understand us on a deeper, more intimate level - it may be that the solutions we grasp for in the external world, can only be solved internally. Perhaps our true need is to re-integrate fragmented parts of our personality - or, as the character of Nakata puts it in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore: to find the other half of our shadows.

Start Songbird.

Type about: config in the location bar

Type useragent in the Filter box.

Right click on general.useragent.extra.songbird and copy the value to a text doc on your desktop for safe keeping. You may want to undo this change later!!!

Now modify that value to be Firefox/2.0.0.11. (Version probably not important.)

(Note: setting general.useragent.extra.songbird = Firefox/2.0.0.11 did not work for me.)

Now I can sign in to Rhapsody, but I'm prepared for other things to break because of that edit! If they do I'll change back to Songbird/0.4 (20071226135127).

When I have more time I'll try to investigate their javascript more thoroughly. And upgrade this from "Kludge" to "HowTo".

Reference: http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/2244

Last night I finally achieved a goal I've been doggedly pursuing for - well let's just say "too long." I've got Band-in-a-Box (BIAB) running under Wine (MS Windows emulation) in Ubuntu 7.10. I've been dual-booting Windows and Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T40 for quite a while. One of the main reason I've needed to subject myself to the ugly and soul-less world of Microsoft has been to use BIAB.