Once again, it’s been a while. Since my last blog, I’ve gotten a bunch of immunizations, went to a New Year’s party, had good ramen, had a New Year’s dinner, helped install a carputer, and hiked in the redwoods. The immunizations were for my trip to Africa and included: yellow fever, influenza, hepatitis B and typhoid (pills). The New Year’s party was hosted by Jeff, but we were late due to the aforementioned carputer installation (to be covered on my Geek Valhalla blog). The New Year’s dinner was at Mary’s parent’s house.

My friend Greg arrived in Oakland (from Anchorage, AK) on Thursday (2/22) morning. I picked him up and we drove up to Humboldt Redwoods State Park. We arrived in the late afternoon and it was cold and wet. We even passed through a couple hail storms and saw snow along the side of the road. Even so, the park was still beautiful. On the day we arrived, we checked in to the Redcrest Resort and did a short, 1.7 mile hike around the Drury-Chaney Loop Trail (picture on the left). For dinner we drove up to Eureka to eat at my favorite place in Northern California, the Samoa Cookhouse.

On Friday we did a more ambitious hike. We drove up Mattole Road to the Grasshopper Multiuse Trail. From there we hiked the 10.7 mile Johnson Trail Loop. The trail follows Bull Creek Flats Trail to the Giant Tree area. From there it follows the relatively new Johnson Camp Trail to Johnson Camp, a nearly 1600′ climb. The Johnson Camp Trail was completed over 3 years and earned an award in 2005. This section of the loop winds through old growth redwood forest, and is absolutely beautiful. From Johnson Camp, we followed the Grasshopper Multiuse Trail back down to Mattole Road. We took around 5 hours, including time for lunch along the trail. It was raining, a bit chilly (there was snow beside the trail in a few places) and a little longer than we were shooting for (this was my first hike since re-injuring my knee), but it was a definitely worth it.

On Saturday we settled for a short walk through Founders Grove. This is a short loop jam-packed with redwoods. This is probably the most popular trail in the park, but with the cold, wet weather, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. After we finished the loop we drove along the Avenue of the Giants which parallels highway 101 through the park. We had to make a slight detour since the road was closed between Weott and the park visitor center due to a fallen redwood. We then got to drive for nearly 5 more hours in the rain to get back to San Jose. One saving grace was finding some awesome brownies at the Peg House near Leggett, CA! Mmmm… brownies.

More pictures from Humboldt Redwoods State Park in my gallery.

Today, Mary, Greg and I went to The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. We spent a couple hours there including a viewing of the IMAX movie called Hurricane on the Bayou. The movie followed a couple local musicians who were working on a project to save the Louisiana Bayou when Hurricane Katrina hit. It provides some information on the useful qualities of the wetlands and how they could have helped protect New Orleans from Katrina. After the Tech, we drove Greg up to San Francisco and had dinner at a Mesopotamian (read: Iraqi) restaurant called YaYa’s. It was very good. Now I’m back home blogging and getting ready for another week.

Actually, Valentine’s Day is almost over. Mine was pretty good. Mary and I made a salad and some lasagna for dinner. We also had some baked sweet potato and some wine. It was all pretty tasty. For desert we melted some chocolate and dipped strawberries and bananas, fondue style. All in all, it was a very nice dinner. As a Valentine’s present, I “adopted” a pygmy elephant (picture on right) in Mary’s name from the World Wildlife Fund. It came in a cute red bag with the WWF logo. You can “adopt” other animals on their adoption page.

Over the past week we have been making our final arrangements for our next big adventure. Next month (March) we will be traveling to Africa! What started out as a group trip involving 8 people ended up with just 3 of us going: myself, Mary and our friend Virginia. The trip will be 3 weeks with two major legs:

1. Serengeti safari in Tanzania
2. Primate safari in Uganda and Rwanda

I booked the tours through Good Earth Tours & Safaris based in Florida and Tanzania (thanks to Joe of Good Earth for all the help!). I booked our main flights from San Francisco to Nairobi (Kenya) using my miles on United. We leave SFO on March 12 and pass through London and Zurich. The connections aren’t great, but it sure saved us some money. We booked our intra-Africa flights with Kenya Airways. We will fly from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro/Arusha, Tanzania.

We meet up with our Tanzania guide from Good Earth in Arusha. We will spend 8 days on safari in the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara. We should have ample opportunity to witness the Wildebeast migration as well as lions, leopards, cheetahs, elephants, zebra, giraffes, etc. We may also visit a Masaai village and perhaps the Olduvai Gorge, “the Cradle of Mankind.” We end the safari back in Arusha, then fly to Entebbe, Uganda.

We meet up with our Uganda/Rwanda guide from Travelust African Safaris (booked through Good Earth) in Entebbe. This will be the starting point of our primate safari, the pinnacle of which will be two treks to see mountain gorillas! We will visit a few parks in Uganda and one in Rwanda. We should see other primates, including chimpanzees. To make sure we see chimps, we will go to the Jane Goodall Institute’s Ngamba Island Sanctuary in Lake Victoria. We will end our primate safari back in Entebbe, then fly back home via Nairobi, Zurich, London and Washington D. C.

Whew! What a trip that’s going to be!

I had my follow up appointment on Wednesday to get the results of the MRI for my knee. Basically, the doctor said the MRI didn’t show any significant damage and that there is probably no need fir surgery. Based on the MRI and the previous X-RAY, he’s not sure there’s anything worse than a sprain. That said, he has still referred me to a sports medicine orthopedic specialist to see what he thinks. I have an appointment on February 28. I’m guessing he will prescribe some physical therapy or something.

We’ve had a leak under the kitchen sink for a while now. It seemed to be in the faucet and it was pretty small, so we hadn’t done anything about it other than put down a small bowl to catch the water. A few days ago we could smell paint in the house. It turns out a small can of paint under the sink had rusted through. Apparently the leak came down in a few places and wasn’t hitting the bowl anymore. I took the faucet apart and determined the leak was in the core canister (picture on left). I didn’t have the tool to remove the canister, so I decided to replace the faucet. This turned out to be more trouble than I realized. It seems the Moen faucet that I have requires a special wrench to remove the nut securing the faucet to the basin. The nut is attached to a threaded pipe where the sprayer hose attaches. The pipe is about 3 inches, so a socket wrench won’t work. There is also a collar around the nut which prevents the use of any standard wrenches (picture on right). New faucets come with a long, hollow tube with a hexagonal wrench on one end. I did not have one for mine. I borrowed one of these tools from Mary’s dad, but it did not fit my faucet. I checked at Home Depot and they steered me to a shower wrench set. None of them fit. Next I got a basin wrench, but it did not fit inside the collar. Eventually I managed to break off the copper pipes, remove the sprayer hose and bend the collar so I could get a grip on the nut with an adjustable wrench while Mary’s dad turned the faucet from the top. We eventually got it off. What a pain. Now I have a nice, new American Standard faucet. You can see the before and after pictures below.

Old Moen faucet

Ashish and I did a bench test of his carputer on Saturday. He had a standard PC power supply which he set up so we could use it to emulate the 12V car battery. I brought over and old light switch to emulate the ignition. He has a pretty nifty power regulator from CarNetix. It generates the 19V needed for the PC and 12V needed for the LCD and has some nice start up and shut down logic. The motherboard is an Intel Core Duo Mini ITX with a Xenarc touchscreen LCD. He’s going to be running Windows and probably StreetDeck. You can get a lot of this stuff from Mp3Car. We managed to get everything wired up and running and nobody got hurt! Now we have to plan out how to install this in his car…

Ron and I are making progress on the new website. He’s done most of the programming this time around while I’ve contributed some graphics and helped with testing. Since this site will have mostly user generated content, we’re spending a little more time on the look and feel. We hope to be able to launch it in the next week or two. I think it will look much nicer than the Review Summaries site.

I need to install a bunch of modules on the North Star site still. I think I’ve pretty much settled on which ones, I just need to get it done. Then there will be some final configuration and a lot of testing. We still need to finish up some static content as well.

So I’ve had this electrical problem in my house. There’s a switch box by the front door that has 3 switches in it. One controls the light outside the door, one controls the light inside the door, and the third controls an outlet near the door. They used to work fine, but after some time they were intermittent. Eventually they stopped working all together. Around this time, we also had a leak in the roof which caused some water damage above the front door. I thought they may be related. I borrowed a signal tracer (the Fox and the Hound) from a friend and took off the face plate and started tracing all the wires. I was sure I located the problem wire, and I thought I knew where the problem was. Unfortunately it seemed like I was going to have to knock a hole in the wall to fix it, which is not something I wanted to do. Fortunately, I double checked the connection at the last known working outlet in that circuit, and sure enough there was a loose wire. I connected the wire more securely and everything is working now. It only took me about 3 years to figure it out, and I almost got out foxed by the Fox and the Hound…

Other then that, I’ve been working with Ron on our new site. We’ve made a lot of progress in a very short time. I’m optimistic that we can launch the site in the next week or two. From there’ it will take a lot of user contributions to really make it fly…

Still no basketball today. I have an appointment with the doctor on Wednesday to find out what’s wrong with my knee. In the mean time I’m still going to the gym 3 times a week, but I’m only doing upper body weights.