travel

Film’s Last (Hawaii) Hurrah

The camera gremlins were hard at work prior to our recent Hawaii vacation. Both of my working digital cameras were stolen at the Denver dog show in February. I do intend to get another Canon mid-size eventually, probably the G11, but in shopping for new pocket units I found that Best Buy had no Kodaks, and (worse) every damned pocket camera they sold requires that the battery be removed for recharging. The chap there had no idea why this was so, and I still don’t have a good explanation. But that’s idiotic, especially if (as I suspect) it was done to save a quarter’s worth of interior parts in a $500 camera.

My 2005-vintage Kodak V530 pocket camera had both a charger dock and a wall-wart, and the battery never needs to emerge from the camera until you carry it out in its coffin. Alas, the whole camera got carried out in its coffin last fall. My solution was to find a used or (hopefully) NOS Kodak V530 on eBay, and while I looked, I didn’t nail one until just last night, and that didn’t help us with Hawaii. Carol has a Kodak digital camera, but we’ve lost the portable charger, and the only way to recharge it is using her printer dock, which isn’t designed for lugging around.

So about all we could do was dig Carol’s 2001-era Kodak Advantix film camera out of the junk cabinet to see if it still lived. And mirabile dictu! The little CR2 3V battery wasn’t even dead, after not having been used for at least six years.

Wow.

We put a new battery in it anyway, and it handled the bulk of the photography on our Hawaii adventure. (We bought an underwater film camera for our very corkybobby snorkel trip.) Walgreens no longer has Kodak machines, but Target does, and we got the pictures back a few days ago.

It was interesting to compare digital photos from our 2004 Hawaii trip and our 2005 Bermuda trip to the Advantix film photos. It’s obvious why film is barely twitching: The colors were brighter on the digital shots, and the resolution noticeably better. The photo above is typical; in bright light, Advantix does pretty well. (That’s me in the open car of the Sugar Cane Train, waiting to pull out of Lahaina.) In low light, Advantix got very grainy, and the colors lost most of their subtlety.

Carol paid for digital images on CD, which saved me having to scan prints into our photo archives, and that was quite welcome. One annoyance: The digital images were numbered 1-25, but in reverse order. In other words, photo 25 was the first photo taken on the roll, photo 24 the second taken, and so on. I don’t know if a tech at Target messed this up, or if it was an engineering brainfart associated with the machines.

No matter. My NOS Kodak V530 is on its way, and I’ll be getting a G11 one of these days. But Hawaii reminded us that film is mostly dead for a reason: Color, resolution, convenience, immediacy, and probably a few more. There are probably circumstances where film can still shine, but tourist photography is not one of them.

Boy. Keith and I talked about starting a magazine called Digital Camera Techniques in 1996. We didn’t. Talk about opportunities missed.

Report: EntConnect 2010

Mar 30th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

The first thing you see is an unattended and otherwise empty folding table holding a Sharpie marker and a roll of duct tape. A strip of tape reads “Nametag Station” and there is an example. Remember that this is a conference for people who learn fast, do things their own way, and use what they have on hand.

Welcome to EntConnect 2010.

I briefly described the conference in my February 22, 2010 entry. It was a piece of early community building by the founder/owner of Midnight Engineering magazine, the other Bill Gates. Bill originally pitched it as a ski outing, but it grew from there into go karting, skeet shooting, and ultimately conference sessions–and has long outlived Bill’s poor magazine, which like my own has been gone for a number of years. The 2010 gathering was the 19th, and I was no more than ten minutes into the first session when I was kicking myself for not having attended years ago.

It’s not a huge group. I’m guessing 35 people came out, and an amazing number have been there for most and sometimes all of the previous conferences. Nor is it an especially young crowd; I’m guessing a median age of 45 or 50. Nearly all of them own their own technical businesses, and some have owned (and sold) several. That’s the core mission of the conference: to leverage the collective experience of the attendees in working on their own and making a living thereby. The presentations were a good balance of technical and life-experience descriptions. (Here’s the schedule with the names of the sessions.) I shared a table in the conference room with Jack Krupansky, who was a long-time advertiser at PC Techniques and very much a kindred spirit, and met a great many others cut from the same rugged and mostly self-organizing cloth. The dinner conversation was dumbfounding, with ideas and insights whizzing past my ears far faster than I could internalize them.

The sessions were superb, and some were so high-energy that I felt a little drained when they were over. The keynote session from Dave Grenewetzki was like that. Here’s a guy only a little older than me who has lived life at a dead run, having had careers in aerospace engineering, early computer software (back to the CP/M era) and computer games, with several startups to his credit and a longish stint at the helm of Sierra Online. He’s also one of the world’s most accomplished geocachers. His message: Follow the fun. Well, I try, but most of the time the fun runs a lot faster than I do.

Lee Devlin presented a technical and economic overview of 3-D printing, which was not all new news for me, having loosely followed the field since I began studying nanotechnology fifteen years ago. It was, however, the first time I was able to hold in my own hands and examine some ABS parts created on a professional 3-D printer. The parts were much less “fuzzy” than photos I’ve seen online, granting that they were produced on a $32,000 machine (the Stratasys Dimension SST1200es) and not the $1000 Cupcake CNC gadget we’ve been seeing on the Make Blog recently. I have been hoping to learn 3-D CAD for many years, and seeing the Alibre Design parametric CAD software pushed that item up my personal priority list a few dozen spots. Lee persuaded me that this technology is coming into its own (I had been thinking it was still a sort of stunt driven by mechasmic Extropian dreams) and I would love to give it a shot in the reasonable future.

Some of the sessions presented topics worthy of their own entries here, and I’ll come back to them eventually–especially Bill French’s presentation on auditing your own Web site for customer accessibility. I saw some things I probably won’t pursue (like the Flash-based prezi.com presentation software) but think may be useful to others; certainly take a look. Digital photography loomed large (several of the attendees are professional photographers) and a great deal was said about the practical challenges of starting businesses, running businesses, and (courtesy Jeff Schmoyer) getting free of them when you have to move on.

The intensity of the conference was remarkable. Everybody who spoke spoke with the kind of passion that makes problems run screaming. I recall that passion from my early days with Keith launching The Coriolis Group and PC Techniques, and I miss it. The passion didn’t end with the sessions, and in fact I don’t know precisely when it ended because I had already collapsed into bed long before the lights in our conference room went out.

The next EntConnect will take place March 24-27, 2011, at (as best I know) the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Denver, right off the famous 16th Street Mall. It’s already on my calendar, and I’d love to see you there.

The Longest Day

Mar 25th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

The longest day of any vacation is generally the last day, and that goes triple for Hawaii vacations. (More on this shortly.) We got packed up and checked out of the hotel by 11, and went down to Kihei for lunch and some browsing-of-shops. That done, we cruised up the west coast of Maui to Lahaina for more of the same, plus a ride on the Sugar Cane Train, also known as the Lahaina & Kaanapoli Railroad.

It’s a narrow-gauge live steamer that once hauled workers and tonnage between the now-defunct Maui sugar cane plants and downtown Lahaina. Investors bought the line when its longtime owners put it up for sale in 1969, and for 40 years it’s been hauling tourists at ten miles an hour along a six-mile run that cuts through an exclusive golf course where the grade crossings are for golf carts. We waved at a lot of Japanese golfers who didn’t seem particularly annoyed that we interrupted their game. This may be because the train is a huge attraction for Japanese tourists, to the point where all the signs in the station and on the train are in both English and Japanese.

The track is a little rough, and it’s a clattery, noisy run that I suspect beautifully captures the atmosphere of most short lines in the steam era. Alas, the locos are not original, since a well-heeled locomotive collector (specializing in 1:1 scale!) bought whatever the line had been using prior to the sale. What’s there now is a cute little oil-fired Porter 2-4-0 that (sans tender) could fit in my garage. (The Web site does not picture the Porter, which is not as glitzy-glam as the other loco, which was in the shed getting some work done.) There’s a Baldwin 0-6-0 on display on the grounds outside the station, but whether it ever ran on the line is unclear.

We spent the rest of the afternoon prowling the shops in downtown Lahaina and watching the crabs frolic on the rocks along the ocean. After a slightly late supper downing some estimable sliders at Cheeseburger Island Style in Wailea, we picked up our bags at the hotel for the long flight home.

People who don’t go to Hawaii much may not have heard that most flights from Hawaii to the mainland are redeyes: You take off circa 10:30 PM and fly for six or seven hours across three time zones, making for a landing at 7 or 8 AM. This is done for the sake of making connecting flights in Dallas or Phoenix or Denver; otherwise, the plane lands after most of the day’s connecting flights to smaller cities are gone.

I’m an insomniac even in my own bed; sleeping while sitting upright on an airliner is a wistful fantasy. Carol, by contrast, puts on one of those foam sleep-collars and is out like a light. So I sat and read Thomas Cahill’s marvelous Mysteries of the Middle Ages for two and a half hours until I realized that I was no longer taking notes in the margins, which for me generally means that my higher brain functions had shut down and I was now merely scanning words. For the rest of the flight I tried to put myself to sleep via several meditative methods, none of which worked at all. I was mighty glad at the five-hour mark, when the crew put the coffee pot on and I could wake myself up chemically to the point where I could think again.

We changed planes in Phoenix for the 90-minute hop to Denver, where we discovered that a huge blizzard had struck the previous afternoon. Over a foot had fallen (up to 21″ in some places) and the roads were a mess. By the time we got to Denver, I was staggering, and after lunch Carol took the 93-mile drive home in the slushy right lane, while we looked apprehensively at all the cars in the ditch, among them plenty of four-wheelers. Here in the Springs it was a mere matter of two or three inches, and today’s bright sun will melt most of that. More significantly, I slept for eleven hours last night, and thus life finally returned to normal after twenty-odd hours of continuous awakeness.

Much to do here. EntConnect in fact began today, but I will not be heading up to Denver until tomorrow afternoon for the 6 PM happy hour. I’ll try to post updates while I’m there, so stay tuned.

Papaya, Not Popeye

Mar 23rd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

To paraphrase myself paraphrasing George Carlin: What do editors do on their day off? They can’t just lay around…

Oh, you bet they can. In fact, Carol and I had the wisdom to declare at least one day of our impromptu Hawaii vacation a “lay around” day when there would be no scheduled activity whatsoever. None! Nada! Zilch! Eat when we want, get wet when (and where) we want, and leave the car keys in the hotel room safe.

And we made it work. We ran around in the surf, sat in the hot tub, read Thomas Cahill books, and probably ate a little too much, though I can’t imagine (at this point) eating too much papaya.

The weekend just past was another matter entirely. We got up at 5:30 Saturday morning to catch a two-hour whale-watch cruise. As I mentioned in my last entry, the whales were evident from our ocean-view window. The cruise was to see them up close, and we certainly got closer than we did from the hotel balcony. We got to see something else up close, too: big waves and a stinging wind that were (we heard) the remnants of a storm that had scoured the north part of New Zealand ten days ago. I took one look at those wine-dark seas (for wine colored blue-green with streaks of sandy brown, at least) and popped a Bonine nervously. I have warm feelings toward the Navy: As I related here some years ago, when I was 17 the Navy believed in me (and pestered me for weeks to accept a full college NROTC scholarship) for personal enthusiasms that my first two girlfriends considered deranged. (My third girlfriend sat patiently while I explained the fourth dimension to her, and that’s when I knew I wanted to marry her.) All that said, Popeye I’m not, and I gripped the stanchions tightly while watching the bounding main for breaching whales.

We saw a few, and I considered the day a success, even though the berserk surf got bad enough to wash away significant portions of Polo Beach and cause the rest of the day’s cruises to be canceled. I was hours trying to get the wine-dark wobble out of my gait, and I haven’t had any wine for two weeks.

Sunday we got up at 4:30 AM for a snorkel cruise to the collapsed caldera island of Molokini, where the visibility underwater can reach 150 feet. We were smart enough to rent wetsuit tops from the cruise operators and glad of it, as the water was a chilly 72 degrees and the air none too warm either at 8 AM. Temps were the least of it, however: The reduced but still formidable swells had us bobbing like corks and struggling to stay steady enough to watch the fish, who had the sense (and the gills) to remain well beneath all the action. The fish were great to see, but after fighting the rolling water for twenty minutes, people started to bail and climb back onto the 36-foot catamaran. I lasted a little longer (maybe 45 minutes) but Carol stuck it out for over two hours. No surprise there: She’s the daughter of an imperturbable Navy marine engine mechanic; I’m the son of a excitable Army radio operator who was sick the entire trip across the Atlantic on his way to Italy in 1942.

Like I said: Papayas, yes, Popeye, no way.

On the trip back to Maui, the cruise people did an interesting thing: They dropped a hydrophone into the water on 50 feet of cable, and patched the mic into the boat’s PA system. And for fifteen minutes we listened to the whales. It was eerie, and perhaps beyond eerie. We’re not used to thinking of animals as volitional the same way we are, but those guys were clearly doing something down there. Whale songs change a little every year, but generally only one phrase at a time. And thinking about a pattern in which only one element changes at a predictable interval, I can’t help but speculate that they’re counting something: years, generations, intervals until the saucers come back; who knows? There’s a story in there somewhere, though I’m not the guy to do it.

There is a permanent hydrophone in the water near Kihei, less than a mile from where we were at the time, and you can listen to it live. The whales will be around until they begin to migrate back to their feeding grounds in Alaska at the end of March, and will be gone by the end of April.

The boat’s naturalist said that the whales were very close, and almost in answer, two of them surfaced just to one side of the boat. It was a cow humpback and its calf, followed shortly after by an “escort” male. They were less than 100 feet from the catamaran, and the captain killed the engine instantly, as required by law. We watched them play around for another fifteen minutes until they got bored and left.

The remainder of the trip back was like a second (and more successful) whale watch cruise. The water between Maui and Molokini was lousy with whales, and we saw two dozen or more in the hour’s passage. In the shallower water near shore we spotted ten or twelve green sea turtles, which eyed us apprehensively as we cruised slowly past.

So it was a busy and bobbly weekend, followed by a lazy day that I consider entirely successful. What do editors do on their day off? They lay around–so that, when they get back home, they can stand to be editors again. Mission accomplished. (Now I have to research how to build my own hydrophone for our next trip…)

I Plum Forgot…

Mar 19th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

…to tell you that we’d gone to Hawaii. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. But after five years without a real vacation (and by “real” I mean “with a salt-water beach and palm trees”) we just packed up and went, no regrets and little time spent packing. I mean, they have Wal-Marts in Hawaii, so whatever we might fail to bring can be had without much anguish.

No anguish necessary. We brought everything we had to have (like, how badly does anybody need socks in Hawaii?) and Maui suits me just fine: Ten minutes after we got into our room overlooking Polo Beach, Carol was out on the balcony staring at the blue ocean, when she yells, “A whale!” And by cracky, one of them 40-ton bass yodelers had just thrown itself out of the depths and most of the way up into the sunlight. For another half an hour we watched, and they were out there in force, frolicking, flapping their flukes, and finding it all a fine, fine time.

Didn’t expect whales. And after five years, I’d forgotten a certain amount of beach discipline. That blue water looked so damned good after a deep frozen winter that simply won’t end (and still hasn’t) that I just waded in, forgetting I was wearing my expensive titanium-frame prescription sunglasses until a seven-foot wave crested over my head and knocked them off, simultaneously sending twin columns of high-pressure saline solution up my nose. Once I could breathe again I realized that my sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, and Carol and I spent another half an hour examining the ocean bottom during the wave troughs. We found a hotel key card and then somebody else’s sunglasses, as well as a heavily corroded penny and a sea urchin spine, before Carol sang out that she had them. That was a helluva break, considering how the waves were stirring up the sand on the bottom. The lenses picked up a few pits and scratches but are otherwise intact, and that is a mistake I doubt I will make again any time soon.

To celebrate our unlikely victory, I returned to my hard-drinking ways at dinner that evening, and had not one but two margaritas with my grilled walu.

Not much more to report. You all know what Hawaii looks like, and if I had had the presence of mind to install a photo editor on my new laptop before we left, I might have been able to post a picture or two here. The weather has been perfect, if a little windy. The food’s good, the bed’s great, the company sans pareille. I vacation as men might choose, though if I do get to choose, I choose not to wait another five years to do it again!

EntConnect 2010

Feb 22nd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

I don’t know how many of you remember Midnight Engineering magazine, founded and edited during its life by the other Bill Gates, William E. Gates. From 1990 to 1998, the magazine covered the soft issues of technical entrepreneurship and the challenges faced by “midnight engineers” developing and selling products from their spare rooms. Bill and I were in the magazine startup business at about the same time and spoke often, and I wrote an article or two for the magazine down the years. In 1992 Bill started an idiosyncratic ski party and bull session here in Colorado, which grew into EntConnect, a small but intense skull-session kind of conference held every March near or in Denver.

I moved to Colorado in 2003, and Midnight Engineering alum Jack Krupansky has been bugging me to attend the conference ever since. I don’t know why it’s taken so long, but barring rogue asteroids or invading aliens I will be attending, and presenting a short session on POD publishing. Admitting that I’ve never been to an EntConnect, I can’t tell you much about it from personal experience, but everyone I’ve spoken to who’s ever gone says it’s been a wild time and well worth it. Don’t think Comdex. Think a geeky tech retreat with go-karts, trap shooting, snow skiing, and freewheeling interchange among a modest-sized crowd of very smart people who aren’t famous for taking “no” for an answer. (I’ll post photos and a wrapup here after the conference.)

This year, the conference will be held on March 25-28, 2010, at the Crown Plaza Hotel at 1450 Glenham Place in downtown Denver, just off the 16th Street Mall. The full 2010 conference schedule has not been posted yet, but I’ll be on it, along with Matt Trask on virtual machines and Chris Seto discussing recent innovations in tablet computing. Other stuff will be on the menu as well, but the real win I think is just the face time with other people who think small is better.

Here’s the conference home page. You can jump off to the registration page from there, and when the schedule is firmed up that’s where it’ll be.

Now, I’m not a skier, at least not on frozen water, but there will be a ski outing on Thursday, and lordy-lord, we have snow here to spare. However, I should be there for the rest of it. (How long has it been since I’ve even sat on a go-kart? Only my dear sister knows…)

Sounds like a riot. If you’re within striking distance of Denver, consider joining us!

Odd Lots

Nov 30th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Here’s a great graphic strongly suggesting that the much-denied Medieval Warm Period really existed, and was indeed a global phenomenon. (For further evidence, read The Little Ice Age, which predates the worst of the current Global Warming hatefest and thus may be considered reasonably reliable.)
I had not heard this before: The imminent Nook ebook reader from Barnes & Noble will have a Wi-Fi connection, allowing owners to browse free ebook previews that are only accessible through store hotspots. This gives people a reason to come into physical stores, Nooks in hand, spend time, drink coffee, browse the print collection, and leave with a bag full of print titles that aren’t available as ebooks. Assuming it’s true, as a marketing gimmick, it’s brilliant.
The Nook has a slot for a Micro-SD card with a capacity of up to 16 GB. Assuming a typical text-mostly ebook file to be 500K in size (which is very generous; most fiction titles I’ve seen are about half that, or less) a Nook is capable of storing about 30,000 books. If you read a complete book every single day, that will last you for…82 years.
I’ve already seen the Nook e-reader referred to as the “Nookie reader.” Which it will be, trust me.
People are quibbling in the comments that it’s not a self-propelled model train, but screw it: This guy made a Z-scale model of an N-scale model train layout, working effectively at a scale of 1:35,200. He gets serious points for, well, something, and the video is very cool.
And at the other end of the scale, here’s the world’s largest model train layout. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.) Makes me want to go back and work on The Million-Mile Main Street, positing a 1:1 scale model train layout that covers an entire planet, where the trains (each a sort of AI hive mind) run things, and the people are hired actors.
Researchers at Purdue have demonstrated ALICE, a new species of rocket fuel consisting of aluminum nanoparticles and…water. Larger aluminum particles have been used in rocket fuel before (they’re part of the formula in the Shuttle’s strap-on boosters) but the smaller the particles, the more efficiently they burn. As aluminum is common just about everywhere, if you can corner enough solar radiation to smelt the aluminum and dig up some water (guess where, Alice!) you can go places.
Pete Albrecht sent me a link to SeatGuru, which provides detailed floor plans for all major aircraft on all major airlines, including where the power ports and extra legroom are. If you fly a lot, it might be worth a close look. Here’s a good example of a specific aircraft.
This insane vampire business has evidently begun to affect the cosmetics business; the Daily Mail reports that pale foundation and powder are pushing their tanner competitors right off the market.
I stumbled upon the above item after stumbling upon this, which may be the most inexplicable Web site I’ve seen in the last several years. They pay people to put that together? And what kind of organism from what planet reads it?
Word must have gotten out that I’m a liturgical conservative. I therefore find this funny, in a slightly painful kind of way. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)

Letting Bigfoot Go

Sep 11th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

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We’ve thought about it for some months now: Our 24′ Bigfoot motorhome has been out with us exactly seven times since we bought it, all of those being quick weekend getaways that we could squeeze in between frantic trips to Chicago. We might have driven it to Chicago at least once, but neither my sister nor Carol’s sister has any place to park something that big, and we’d have to rent a car anyway for local travel.

The Chicago situation isn’t going to change radically in the near future. So, as much as we’ve enjoyed it, we’re going to have to let it go. I’ve posted a For Sale ad on the Bigfoot owners’ organization site. (Photos and floorplan there.) It was a little small for our needs (although on short trips space wasn’t a horrible problem) and when life settles down enough to consider RVing again, we’re going to look for a unit with slideouts and something approximating a real bed.

It’s a 2006, model 30MH24DB. We are the original owners, and it’s been garaged indoors at a storage place ever since we bought it, figuring that if we decided it wasn’t for us, it wouldn’t have been out in the sun in the interim. (The sun can get pretty intense at 6600 feet.) It’s only got 3,300 miles on it, and there are no scrapes or dents. There is a downloadable PDF from the manufacturer with full specs and lots of pictures, which you can get to from this page. (Find and click the button “PDF Download.”)

Again, we’ve enjoyed it a lot, but we’re paying for the loan and for indoor storage, and if we can’t take it out a full week at a time to see some of the West (instead of short weekend trips within a hundred miles of home) we’re better off putting it in other hands.

The Biggest American Place You’ve Never Been

Aug 8th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

I’m still too groggy to tackle anything cerebral in this space (and it’s uncouth to let your nose drip down into your expensive buckling-spring keyboard) but this self-directed question came up while I was pondering the life I had documented versus the life I remembered: What was the largest American city I had never set foot in?

My guess going in was Minneapolis/St. Paul, but I was wrong, and wrong by a lot. Working from this list of the largest American cities by population, I discovered that the most populous American city I had never visited was…Jacksonville, Florida.

WTF?

Jacksonville is not only larger than either Minneapolis or St. Paul, it’s larger than both of them put together, by almost 150,000 people. I didn’t know that. Nor did I think that Indianapolis was as big as it is (800,000) nor Pittsburgh as small (310,000).

My top three were Jacksonville, Memphis, and El Paso, assuming you don’t treat Minneapolis and St. Paul as a unit. (In practical terms, most people do.) If you do consider them as a unit, the Twin Cities come in third, narrowly ahead of El Paso. Of the top 100 cities listed, I had visited 66. I guess I’m not as much of a hermit as I thought I was, though I’ll admit it took me 57 years to get there.

It’s an interesting exercise, and if any of you are inclined to do the test yourself, I’d be interested in seeing your results in the comments. Now I need to pop another decongestant and lie down again, so that I can get back to real work (of which there is much) tomorrow.

Odd Trip Notes

Aug 7th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Caved-in clay pipe under Gretchen's back yard

We rolled into the driveway here in Colorado about 3 PM yesterday after three weeks away, exhausted (as usual) and me fighting a nasty headcold, which blossomed last night (as usual) once I no longer had to drive 400 miles every day. As soon as I felt my scratchy throat last Sunday night I began taking Zicam Cherry Quick Melts, and while I can’t prove that they held off the cold during the subsequent four days, it’s possible–but it’s certainly true that they failed to prevent the cold entirely. (I also suspect that they give me mild headaches, and I don’t think I’ll be taking them again in the future.)

Just before we left Chicago, I rigged a wrist strap for my pocket camera and took a bunch more photos of the inside of Gretchen’s sinkhole. (See photo above.) It’s pretty clear now what’s going on under there: A section of 24″ clay drain pipe collapsed, allowing ground water to wash the surrounding soil into the storm drain system and hollowing out a large cave under the sod. This is what we figured, and at some point there will be a whole lot of digging going on back there.

Fat Dogs water While passing through western Nebraska, we stopped at a Kum & Go and picked up a bottle of water. All bottled water tastes alike to me, so I bought the cheapest: Fat Dogs from Sandhills Water, which is bottled in Oshkosh, Nebraska, population 887 and the county seat of Garden County. I love the label and may keep the empty bottle. (See photo at left.) Above the logo is the legend, “You are nowhere.” Coastist dorks like Ted Rall may think so, but I kind of like Nebraska, not the least for this sort of self-deprecating humor, which I guarantee you won’t find in New York City.

I-80 travels a little south of the US 30 alignment, which in turn follows the original Union Pacific right-of-way. We stopped for gas at Cozad and drove north to the town center just to get a sense for it. Increased prices for corn have brought a certain prosperity to the town (which contains a monster grain elevator) and we saw three grocery stores, and Ace Hardware, a Walgreen’s, and museums celebrating artist Robert Henri, and Cozad’s location on the 100th meridian. The houses were tidy and everybody was driving recent cars. There are ghost towns in Nebraska, but Cozad is not one of them.

We stopped in Ogallala for the night and spent a couple of hours at Lake McConaughy, though we were too bushed to do any serious swimming, especially with my increasingly runny nose. So we walked up and down the beach together, picking up broken glass when we saw it (as we always do) and hoping to come back when both of us felt better. (Maybe September, when all the kids are back in school.)

There’s still a lot to post about human memory system corruption, but it may have to wait a day or two until I feel a little better. Let’s just say I’m very glad to be home again. I’ve got my own bed, and all the Kleenex my nose would ever want. Everything else will take care of itself.