Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! (from unemployed loser to...)

(How many "ch"s are there in that lyric, anyway?)

For many friends and family, this is going to be old news, but I'll tell the story anyway for those following along at home...

Back in May, while studying in Granada, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine explaining that a fellow runner she knew was looking for an assistant cross-country coach for the fall. At first, the idea seemed a bit crazy: take a part-time job in the fall?! There's plenty of good climbing to be done in September! Why would I ever commit to being in the city during the week when the weather is pleasant and the mountains are calling?!

But within a week I was starting to think a bit differently.

I had often thought about the idea of coaching. But I'd never had an opportunity like this come up. And even if one had come up while I was working full-time at Microsoft, I probably wouldn't have felt like I could do such a thing. Leaving "real" work at 2 p.m. for a few hours just isn't something that's usually done by Microsoft employees. Coworkers would scoff. Bosses would boo. Why would anyone do such a thing? would be asked.

So here was an opportunity to try something that I'd always wanted to do. I would still have 6 weeks of complete freedom in the U.S. before I'd need to start work: a good deal of time to visit plenty of summits. It wasn't long before I started thinking about fun things to do with middle school runners.

So.... eventually I returned to Seattle, two months later, and after some phone- and e-mail-tag, Joe (the coach) and I talked on the phone... and then four of us met in person (Joe, the director of the middle school, and the athletic director). And that (in addition to a resume and cover letter and references) was all that we needed to make a decision: I would be co-coaching with Joe for the fall!

Which brings us to September. This week I have transitioned from an unemployed loser to a part-time loser, part-time "Middle School Physical Education Faculty" member. Wow! On Monday I attended a few meetings and got a tour of the school and even got to go to my first practice! On Tuesday the entire staff, from cook to head of school, attended a retreat at the Kiana Lodge on the Kitsap Peninsula. What a treat! And today the cross country team had a great game of capture the flag. Talk about fun stuff!

I must admit that working with the faculty from the Northwest School is, um, a little different from working at Microsoft. It's amazing (and perhaps a little scary) how much I seem to have in common with the staff. Shouldn't I have more in common with the people I've been working with for the past eight years than with the people I've been working with for two days?

But the head of faculty whom I sat next to on Monday just so happens to have biked the length of the Danube, and then along the Elbe, this past summer. (I was on the Elbe too!) As we biked home from the lodge (yes, almost 20 of the faculty biked to the Bainbridge ferry and from the ferry to the lodge), I chatted with another faculty member about cyclocross. It turns out that he's raced it a bit and wants to race more this fall!

EJ, on the maintenance team, offered to show me a good route to bike home from the school, so she went out of her way to bike with me to the school from the ferry dock and then up north towards our neighborhoods. And yes, she lives just a mile from me!

When I google'd the head of the middle school to see if I could find any information about her, I read about her climbing Mount Stuart. Not exactly an experience I would expect a school administrator to have...

In sum, I seem to share more with the average Northwest School employee in terms of lifestyle (bike commute!), location (west side!), outside interests (climbers!), and gender (at least half of them are female!) than I do with the average Microsoft employee. I won't try to delve into the reasons that this is the case, but I will say that it made me feel comfortable and almost at home... with a group of people that had been strangers just a couple of days before. One of the Spanish teachers even invited me to join her Spanish I class if it fit in my schedule!

One of the memories from Tuesday that might capture the difference between working at a school and at Microsoft is this: we went around the room introducing ourselves (all 100 of us); just names, roles, and number of years we've been at the Northwest School. One of the teachers was bold enough to try to make an announcement during these quick introductions. Her announcement was that she was pregnant and expecting a baby in February! Everyone applauded, offered congratulations, and in general the mood was festive.

In contrast, I can't even imagine such a scene at Microsoft. Truthfully, only once in eight years was any of my coworkers ever pregnant at all! (Several spouses of coworkers were pregnant, but that's not quite the same thing.)

This may be a cliche sentiment or a bit of an exaggeration, but at Microsoft I always felt like kids and family were things that got in the way of work; at the Northwest School, they literally are the work! It actually feels really good to be in an environment like that.

Cheesiness aside, the transition back to commitments and work has been fun so far, but I'm already feeling restless to get back into the mountains. Lucky for me, Labor Day weekend is approaching and I've got a couple of friends happy to chaperone me on a trip to visit my tall friends. So with that, I'll dust off the GPS, get out the tent, and get ready for one last multi-day hurrah in the wilderness before the summer makes her exit!

A quick observation

Tonight I was feeling the need for a late-night snack and looking at my mostly-bare food shelves, decided I'd try out a PowerBar Gel that had been left over from my last trip to the mountains. I don't usually eat these things, but for the sake of variety I had decided to grab a few on my last trip to REI.

Once I started eating it I decided it was actually pretty tasty (unlike the flavor "orange" that I tried in the mountains last week).

Wanting to remember which flavor it was for my next shopping excursion, I looked at the package.

Here's the thing: the kitchen was dark when I opened it up and threw its top into the garbage. At my desk and in full light, it was impossible to tell what flavor it was. None of the ingredients gave me any hint ("C2 max carbohydrate blend?", "kola nut extract", and "natural flavor"), and without the bit of the label that told me what it was. At first I was thinking it might be raspberry, but maybe it's more of a strawberry-banana. But no actual fruit appeared in the list of ingredients in any way.

It's just another one of those scary not-so-real foods...

Adventures in the supermarket aisle

When you're unemployed, you finally have time to do those things you've been meaning to do for years, including those unexciting adventures in the supermarket aisles.

Well, actually, I was walking through the aisles of REI with (quad-ruled) notebook in hand, writing down the nutritional information and cost for various freeze-dried foods.

At home, I started a spreadsheet of various hiking foods, along with their weights, calories, costs. For the weight weenies among us (and who isn't, especially when packing for a 5-day backpacking trip?), some things really jump out - which I've highlighted in the spreadsheet.

When it comes to freeze-dried foods, the Mountain House Mac & Cheese is a clear winner. I've known for years that it is tasty and packs in a lot of calories. What I didn't realize is that its value in calories per cent, at 145 calories per dollar, is almost 50% better than any other freeze-dried meal out there! (Note that in the spreadsheet I've treated the "2-serving" freeze-dried meal packages as single-serving, since that's how they're usually consumed in the field.

When it comes to snacking, the Trader Joe's Sesame Sticks is the hands-down winner. At almost 1200 calories per dollar, you could (if you had a real stomach for oil, sesame, and salt) fuel an entire day of climbing (around 4000 calories) for under $5! These sticks get 63% of their calories from fat... yum!

One thing that was a bit surprising to me was that trail mix was a better deal than I thought. For its volume, trail mix usually seems a bit expensive, but it's actually very good in terms of calories per dollar, at about 6 calories per cent.

Having said all of this, the spreadsheet is incomplete. I'd like to do some research to add some other trail favorites, such as candy bars, salami, chocolate, and gummies. Another aspect that remains to be explored is the calories per unit volume, since being able to fit more calories in a smaller pack (to keep the weight of one's pack closer to one's center of gravity and squeeze through tight spots) is desirable, especially when travelling off-trail.

I'd also like to check out the value offered by other retailers, such as the bulk sections of Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, and others. I'm optimistic that Fred Meyer will offer good value.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions for additions!

A little funny, a little sad: GeoFlickr

I've put a bit of work into my Flickr2KML tool, which has been fun, interesting, and good practice for me to get my hands dirty in code after some time off. And I thought that I was doign something that no one had done before but would be useful to Flickr-philes who wanted to see their photos in Google Earth.

Today I decided that development work had gone far enough and that I should start putting my code into some kind of repository before I a) accidentally made changes that I would need to revert or b) suffered some kind of hard drive failure.

I checked out Codespaces, as a friend of mine is using that for a current fun project, and decided that I might as well go ahead and give their 45-day free trial a run. And when prompted for a project name, I thought about using "GeoFlickr" as a name instead of "Flickr2KML", since I recently realized that my tool could be used for more than just Google Earth integration (i.e. KML-file generation).

Before using a new name, I of course Googled it to make sure that it wasn't taken. Ah, the irony! "Geo Flickr" is an application, made by Ravensoft software! And yes, it brings Flickr photos into Google Earth! Egads!

My first reaction was to feel stupid about the fact that I hadn't discovered that someone had already done what I was working on. But two things made me feel better: 1) A Google search for "flickr google earth" doesn't find Geo Flickr (at least, not in the first 4 pages of results), so it's not that I missed something completely obvious, 2) the app wouldn't start for me (I've e-mailed the creators), 3) I'm not sure if it actually does everything I want anyway.

Incidentally, during this recent searching, I did discover www.trippermap.com, which seems to do a lot of cool stuff with Flickr photos on maps, including bring them into Google Earth. I'm optimistic that it does most or all of what I want it to, and am awaiting the results from its scan of my photos! One problem that I have discovered with trippermap is that it only works with public photos; another missing feature is that it doesn't allow you to look at friends' photos. My Flickr2KML supports both private photos and accessing friends' photos. On the other hand, trippermap is a beautiful website that seems to do a lot of great things!

Adventures in Geotagging

I have a GPS that records where I've been at what times. I have a camera that takes pictures with timestamps. It seems logical that I should be able to plug both into my computer and - as my host at a B&B in France was so fond of saying - voila! - I should be able to have a map of my route with photos on it, no?

Or at least, I should be able to quickly embed the latitude and longitude (location on the planet) of each photo into its EXIF data, right?





I knew that there was software out there to do such things. I didn't expect that it would take several after-midnight hours of banging my head against my desk to achieve the desired results.


So here I blog, to hopefully save some other likeminded souls from similar agony.



Long story short, here is what I did that actually did work:

1. Download your photos from your camera to your computer. (I'm assuming you already know how to do this.)


2. Download your tracks from your GPS to your computer. I used Garmin's MapSource software to do this. I have this software installed because I normally use it to upload topo maps to my GPS. It's also pretty decent at managing waypoints, routes, and tracks.


3. Delete any data from this file that you don't want displayed on your map that you want to share. For example, we drove between two trailheads in my recent 5-day trip; since I only wanted to show our hiking/scrambling route and not our driving route, I deleted these extra tracks, as well as some old tracks that were still on my GPS.


4. Save the file as a *.gdb file. For some reason, MapSource v 6.15.4 (what I have installed currently) crashes if you try to export as a .gpx file (one of the few standards out there).


5. Use GPSBabel, a free utility, to convert this .gdb file to a .gpx file.


6. Use Microsoft Pro Photo Tools (ironically, I had never heard of this application while I was working at Microsoft!) to geotag your photos. The UI isn't completely intuitive, but the two buttons you'll need to find are "Track Route: Load from File" and Track Route: "Place Images". You should see a route after loading the .gpx file and you should see pushpins representing each photo on the map after clicking "Place Images". Note also that you need to "Save All Images with new data" after these first two steps to store the latitude and longitude information in the EXIF data for each photo.


7. Import these photos into Picasa (I'm using v. 3) and upload. Note that using the online web tool to upload photos to Picasa will strip out the latitude and longitude information that's embedded in each photo, so you must use the desktop application for uploading. Note also that Flickr will ignore this EXIF data, which is why I finally tried using Picasa.


8. View your newly-created Picasa album online and click on "View map". Then click on "View in Google Earth". Note that it's also possible to view these photos in Google Earth directly from the Picasa desktop app, but the results are better if you go the online route.


9. Now that you're in Google Earth, you can import your .gpx track that you created in Step 5. And - voila! - you've got your pictures in their appropriate locations around the globe, and your route there, too!
10. Try out the coolest part of the whole thing: flying from photo location to photo location. The terrain appears to be 3-dimensional during the fly-by!
    

Long story short: I expected that this would be a simple process, but it still has too many gotchas and pitfalls along the way for the average consumer to handle. One of these days I expect it will be easy enough, but until then, it will take a bit of work! Note that I had to use a total of five software applications* to achieve my goal, and I'm still not completely happy.

My main issues that I'd like to resolve (or see resolved by the appropriate parties)

1. I'd like to continue to use Flickr. I'm already paying for an account there; I'd rather not pay to use Picasa. Flickr allows unlimited uploads for $25; Picasa can get very expensive (on the order of hundreds of dollars per year) if you upload thousands of photos like I do. However, Flickr ignores the GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude EXIF data. I have already started working on the problem in the tool that I'm working on (Flickr2KML), but I'm not sure if I'll be able to fix it easily or not.
2. I wish MapSource didn't crash.
3. I can import a .KML file from Google Earth to Google Maps, but Google Maps won't display all of the photos for a set at once; it only displays about 20 items at a time. I don't want to force people to use Google Earth, though... I want them to be able to click on a link and see everything in their browser, without installing yet another application to their machine.
4. I'd like the photo thumbnails in Google Earth to appear larger when a user zooms in on an area. Currently the user has to click on a photo to make it more than, say, 30 pixels across. At least it is possible to click on each thumbnail to make it bigger.
5. The "Play tour" feature in Google Earth is very very very cool, but not very smart. It seems like each photo should get bigger when the tour is visiting it. Or the tour should just make one stop for each group of photos taken at a particular location.

Happy geotagging, folks! Have fun with it!

* Note that it's possible to skip steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 and import tracks directly from a GPS unit into Google Earth, but I wasn't able to figure out a way to geotag photos without a .gpx file.

It's good to be home

Even if I was looking forward to arriving back in Seattle, I wasn't particularly thrilled about the trip that was required to get there: 2 trains, 2 plains, over 7 hours of waiting between said trains and planes...

... but it was one of the best long-distance international trips I've had. I met some great people along the way (it seems so easy to talk to people when you know they probably speak English fluently!) and even arrived a bit early in Seattle and made it to Carkeek Park in time to watch the sun set behind the Olympic Mountains.

I seem to be in "I want to get everything done at once" mode -- hence being awake at 4:40 a.m. -- but I think that a large part of it is that I'm genuinely excited to be here.

Note: I know it's time to head home when looking at a photo book of the USA, in German, in a German bookstore, about the United States gets me a little choked up. (In my defense, it's a pretty cool book...)

Time off the bike: time with mom and mountains

The last time I wrote a post, over two weeks ago, I was getting ready to meet up with my mother in Prague. Why haven't I written since then? Has it been a lack of time? Internet access? Motivation? Things to write about?

I'd have to say that it was a combination of all of the above. When travelling with other people, I personally find it hard to make time to write. I felt bad enough that I was leaving my mom alone for an hour or so each day so that I could get in my daily run. And then there was the problem of go-get-a-coffee-while-you-wait-for-that-page-to-load slow internet access. Besides, without those hours of meditative time in the bike saddle, how was I going to come up with anything interesting to write?

I had heard that Prague was an amazing city, and a beautiful one at that; in this respect it didn't disappoint.

I had been nervous that the language barrier would present some new challenges. Up to that point, I had travelled only in countries where Germanic or Romance languages were spoken. Czech, a member of the Slavic language family, has little in common with English. Some "modern" words, such as "internet", etc, look similar, and it's not uncommon to be able to remove the "y" at the end of a word and figure out what it means. But as it turned out, Prague's old city has turned into such a tourist destination for Americans and Europeans that English on signs and menus is more common than any other city I've seen in Europe.

Announcements in the train station, are in Czech, English, and German, and people working at hotels and restaurants that we met were fluent in English. Not surprisingly, though, the prevalance of English is inversely proportional to one's distance from the tourist center of Prague.

What I didn't expect was how useful my knowledge of German would be during our 2-day excursion to Northern Bohemia.

In retrospect, it makes sense. It's a beautiful area near the German border, and German tourists flock to the area's trails to take in the scenery. The best part was that since German was also a second language for the people I was speaking to (at pensions, restaurants, etc.), I could actually understand them! They didn't speak too fast, their vocabulary was no more extensive than mine, and good times were had by all. Hooray for those years of German classes in high school!

Prague's tourist area is gorgeous, old, perfectly clean, and feels very quaint. The roads are confusing (a map is a must), which adds to the charm as long as you aren't in a hurry to get anywhere.

Not surprisingly, though, the areas further away from this center, feel a bit rougher. Plain-looking apartment buildings, graffiti, and run-down neighborhoods become the standard. Smiles seem to be more rare, parks less-attractive, and the streets emptier than other European cities.

The train ride to northern Bohemia (we spent a night in Decin, and another in Litomerice) was both beautiful and a little sad. The train ran along a river through beautiful green hills, but for every quaint building we saw, it was matched by a run-down Soviet-era factory or building. In no other country that I've been to have I seen so many industrial sites in the middle of otherwise-beautiful countryside. Another interesting anomaly is the prevalance of above-ground water pipes in some areas, looking something like this. It seems that during the Soviet era it was preferred to put the pipes above ground rather than tear up roads.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the Czech Republic was the theft of my mother's wallet on the second-to-last day of our stay in Prague while she was travelling by Metro (I happened to be making the same trip at that time, but on my bicycle). On the down side, she lost cash totalling about $200 USD. On the plus side, she still had her passport and a daughter willing and able to serve as her personal ATM/credit card for the remainder of her stay.

On Monday July 6 my mother headed back to Boston and I boarded a train back to my home-away-from-home in Freiburg, Germany. Unfortunately, not all German trains allow bikes to be carried (in contrast, they are welcome on all Czech trains). Especially disappointing is that the fastest trains, known as "ICE", or Inter-City Express trains, do not carry bicycles. Instead, cyclists must rely on slower, and in some cases, less frequent regional trains to travel across Germany.

As a result of this, instead of the Prague-to-Freiburg trip taking 9 hours, it required 15 hours and 5 different train rides. Fortunately, trains and train stations in Germany are comfortable and can provide endless eating and reading opportunities (I even picked up a book in English in Karlsruhe). I'm also lucky that I had learned my way around Freiburg from May 5-8 well enough that I could navigate my way to Ralph and Susann's apartment when I arrived at midnight on July 6!

During the next two days I recovered from the Prague trip (that is, did laundry), went with Uta to my first German climbing gym, and prepared for the next few trips: July 9 I would travel to Stuttgart to meet with my friend Jenny who I had studied with in Granada, and July 10-16 were reserved for 2 climbing trips in the Swiss Alps.

The plan was to return to Freiburg the evening of the 16th and take off on the morning of the 17th, which meant that I had to have my bike and other gear packed as much as possible.

As it turned out, the weather for Wednesday the 15th wasn't looking so good, so we rearranged plans so that we would attempt the Nadelhorn (a 2-3 day trip) instead of Finsteraarhorn (a four-day climb) for our second trip. Although we were all disappointed that we wouldn't be able to attempt Finsteraarhorn, the Nadelhorn turned out to be a fun challenge and had the added benefit that Uta would be back in Freiburg to celebrate her boyfriend's birthday with him. And of course, I would have an extra day to pack and prepare for my return to Seattle.

Long story short, the trip to the Alps was great. Ever since my hiking trip to the Alps last summer, I had looked forward to returning with ice axe, crampons, proper boots, and climbing partners that would make a trip to the top of some of these mountains possible. A special thanks to Uta for organizing both trips. I wouldn't have been able to do these mountains without her work!

Yesterday I returned once again to Freiburg, this time to heat and humidity that I hadn't believed possible in Germany, despite the claims of the locals. Today was a pretty relaxed day of running, cleaning, hanging out with Uta for a bit, packing, souvenir- and postcard-shopping and generally wandering around Freiburg. If you're ever in Freiburg, I highly recommend taking the S-Bahn into the town center and then running on the trails in the Schlossberg. After an hour and forty-five minutes of running, there were still plenty of trails that I hadn't explored!

Which brings me to 9:24 p.m. in the internet cafe across the street from the S-Bahn stop. In 8 hours I'll be taking that S-Bahn to the train station, and after 24 hours of various forms of transportation, I'll be back in the United States. Am I excited to return home? Absolutely! Will I miss Europe? Yes. Ten weeks on a different continent is a unique experience. Thank you, Microsoft, for helping make this trip happen... even if that wasn't the intent on January 22.

What's next?

Stay tuned... I'll let you know when I find out!