Five Days To Go

On Friday – just 5 days from now – I will set foot in the Pacific Crest Trail at the Mexican border near Camp, CA.  I will then begin a 200 mile walk North towards Idyllwild, CA that will take me about twelve or fourteen days.  I will walk through a desert and up a mountain.

I first decided to hike the Appalachian Trail in 2000.  The dot-com bubble had burst, and I was out of work and had no direction in my life.  I thought that a pilgrimage on foot might be just the thing for me, and I started getting ready to go with the plan being to leave in Spring 2011.  But then life happened and I never made it to the trail head in Georgia.

Eleven years later, I am in a very different place.  I live in California rather than New York.  I am married.  I have a good job.  I love my life.  But I still want to walk.

The aforementioned good job prevents me hiking the entire trail in one setting, so I will chunk the PCT up into tidy little 2-week and 3-week sections, and hopefully complete the trail in eight or ten years.  That is a span of time that is hard for me to comprehend – I have never done anything for so many years – but on the other hand I have waited longer than that to start and those years seem to have flown by at a break-neck pace, so why shouldn’t these next few years?  It will certainly feel like an accomplishment when some number of years from now I stand on the Canadian border looking back towards Mexico.

I have never spent two whole weeks out-of-doors.  It’s a long time.  I will probably stay at a hotel at least one night along the way, if only to shower, but being out-of-doors more hours of the day than not will be a novelty.  Sleeping on the ground every day and waking up with the sun – or even before the sun, as I expect the case will be – will be new.  Sleeping under the night sky will be new.

I do not  know what will change during the journey or what will be different at the end, but I expect I will feel differently about some things.  Certainly the fast pace of real life will be jarring.  Will I walk more in my normal life?  Will I spend more weekends camping?  Maybe.  Or maybe I’ll savor the annual trip.  I can’t say.

All I know for sure is that I am excited in a way that reminds me of how excited I was to hike the trail the first time.  I really am happy that this is finally going to happen.

Carl Sagan on the Pale Blue Dot

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters – violet, blue and green – and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, p. 6

A Simple LWJGL Interleaved VBO Example

After hunting around on Google for what seemed like ages for a good, fully working example of how to use interleaved Vertex Buffer Objects with LWJGL, I decided to make my own and share it with everyone.  This example draws a simple cube using vertex buffer objects.  The cube rotates on all three axes, and has a different color on each side so that you can better visualize the relationship between the code and the visual display.  On my laptop, I was able to get about 1,700 FPS.  If you want to see what sort of frame rates you are getting, turn on your Java Console.

Simple Interleaved VBO Example

The source is available here.

Henry David Thoreau

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” – Henry David Thoreau

John Nash’s Letter to the NSA

Bruce Schneier has linked to a fascinating blog post about a recently declassified letter that John Nash sent to the NSA regarding cryptography in 1955.  Nash’s letter is fascinating and show just how brilliant he actually is.  It’s interesting to me how he has to try to convince the recipient that he’s not a crazy person – I guess at the time his reputation did not precede himself (or maybe it did) – and how he apologizes for his handwriting.

It hadn’t occurred to me that at the time more correspondence was probably done by hand-written letter than typed letters, especially if you did not have a secretary to type it up for you.  I can’t imagine leaving my boss a handwritten note these days.  In fact, in the five years that I’ve worked at UCSC, I’m not sure that I’ve ever sent any of my co-workers a handwritten note.  I take hand-written notes at meetings just to avoid the distraction of having a full laptop during the meeting, but I usually immediately convert the handwritten notes to an e-mail or request queue ticket and then file the paper away, probably never to look at it again.

At any rate, the blog post does a good job of explaining why the letter is extraordinary, so I won’t bother regurgitating that here but I definitely recommend reading it.

No Wonder I’m So Tired All The Time

Apparently, I’ve been living a double life, and the other “me” is up to no good:

Upset man suspected of smashing car windows in Santa Cruz

By JESSICA M. PASKO – Santa Cruz Sentinel
Posted: 02/03/2012 02:49:05 PM PST

SANTA CRUZ – A man who was apparently upset about his life used a horseshoe tied to the end of a ribbon to smash the windows of two cars, Santa Cruz police said.

Officers were called to area of Rincon and Chestnut streets just after 9:30 a.m. Thursday following reports of the incident, Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Rick Martinez said. There they found two cars with smashed-out windows.

Witnesses helped lead them to Timothy Gustafson, 19, who was sitting on a curb close by, crying, Martinez said. The horseshoe and ribbon were on the ground nearby.

Gustafson was arrested on suspicion of vandalism and booked into County Jail. It did not appear Gustafson knew the owners of the cars, and it seemed to be a random occurrence. The rear window of one of the cars had been smashed, along with the windshield of another. The damage was estimated at $1,000 for both cars, Martinez said.

Gustafson is listed as a transient currently living in Santa Cruz.

As if it’s not enough that I’m also a baseball player, a religious blogger, a musician and other things.