A Done Deal - Mum and Dan Bought the House

I am happy to announce that my brother and mother closed on the purchase of the house they've leased for the past several years in Concord, NH. In some way this is a relief to me. Every man who loves his mother should want her to have a home in which she can be secure and comfortable. This is the first house my mother or brother have owned. They got a great deal on it from the kind elderly woman who has leased them the place for several years. This is a good move for both of them, an opportunity to make the place their own, for my mom to have a place to host visiting family, my brother to have a base for whatever he may choose, and an investment that should reward both of them, whether they both stay there or later sell the place or they part ways at some future point.

Rounded Corners/Drop Shadow deconstructed

Presenting rounded corners on buttons and text areas in Web pages is, I have recently learned, the Holy Grail of Web UI programming. There are many ways to do it, none are very succinct or simple. They all feel like hacks. You can use Javascript to draw the pixels on the edges, Cascading Style Sheets to combine background colors with images of rounded corners, or you can just use an image creation tool to create buttons and background images with rounded corners. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and all of them attempt to solve a cosmetic problem that wasn't an issue in the early days of the Web and that should be solved neatly when CSS3 is supported by mainstream browsers.

This topic has come to my attention because the UIs we have on some apps at work are a little clunky and inconsistent and we're close to the release date. So a few of us have spent some time looking at ways to spiff them up a bit. When the product manager sent Visio mock-ups of the pages to us, and I had the buttons to work on, I had no idea the rounded corners would be such a pain. So far I am leaning toward the button image route or recommending we drop the rounded corners idea and have square buttons, which are easy to do with CSS. CSS-based buttons will be easier for customizers of our apps to deal with if they want to localize the button text based on the browser locale.

Anyway, in my Web research on this problem I happened on this guy's blog article, which captures the life of a smart, under-achieving Web developer very well (and also has some discussion of the rounded corners issue): Rounded Corners/Drop Shadow deconstructed.

I started my interest in computers as a self-taught Web developer back in the late 1990's while I was still a student of Classics in college. But I didn't know I would be a computer programmer at the time. I got deeply into Web development personally, but never did much with it professionally, other than sample and test applications for books and work. I ended up getting more into server-side Java programming. This rounded corners problem has been an interesting diversion and a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Campaign to End Fistula

I read an eye-opening article in the New York Times today. You need a (free) login to access it online, but here's the link: Nightmare for African Women: Birthing Injury and Little Help.

Here are some excerpts:

"What brings the girls to Dr. Waaldijk - and him to Nigeria - is the obstetric nightmare of fistulas, unknown in the West for nearly a century. Mostly teenagers who tried to deliver their first child at home, the girls failed at labor. Their babies were lodged in their narrow birth canals, and the resulting pressure cut off blood to vital tissues and ripped holes in their bowels or urethras, or both."
[ . . . ]
"In Nigeria alone, perhaps 400,000 to 800,000 women suffer untreated fistulas, says the United Nations."
[ . . . ]
"Obstetric fistulas are easily prevented by Caesarean sections. But in sub-Saharan Africa - excluding the region's richest nation, South Africa - the average doctor serves 6,666 patients and villages are often linked by little more than dirt paths."
[ . . . ]
"Dr. Waaldijk remembers one patient well. She managed to push out only her baby's head before collapsing from exhaustion in her hut, he said. Her brother carried her, balanced on a donkey, to a road, where a bus driver demanded 10 times the usual fare to take her to a hospital. She half-stood, half-sat for the trip, her dead baby's head between her legs, her urethra ripped open."
[ . . . ]
"Were it widely available, the United Nations agency states, a $300 operation could repair most fistulas. But Mozambique, with 17 million people, has just three surgeons who consistently perform those operations. Niger, population 11 million, has but six, the organization reported in 2002."
[ . . . ]
"More than a third of his patients are 15 or younger; another 30 percent are between 15 and 20. His records indicate that most were married at 11 or 12, before menstruation. Nearly all bring with them tales of hardship, suffering and rejection."
[ . . . ]
"Safiya, 23, was in the post-op ward after living for a year in the hut of a traditional healer who tried to cure her by stuffing potions into her vagina. Daso, 23, said she had leaked urine and feces for five years. Her husband divorced her."

It seems there are so many problems in this world. God is defunct. It's up to you and me to make the world a better place. What a cliche, eh?

The online article was accompanied by a link to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA), which has organized a Campaign to End Fistula. Please donate if you can.

One More Robot Learns to Be . . .

Great tune by the Flaming Lips off their outstanding 2002 album, Yoshima Battles the Pink Robots. The throbbing bass line ascends and descends under ethereal keyboards and rippling sound effects weaving together over the techno beat. It makes me think of human beings and emotion and love; how some people are like cold machines the way they treat themselves and others, and how people, like the 3000-21 robot model in the song, can awaken, change, feel and love.

One More Robot
Unit three thousand twenty one is warming.
[It] makes a humming sound . . . when its circuits duplicate
Emotions . . .

And a sense of coldness detaches . . .
As it tries to comfort your sadness . . .

One more robot learns to be . . .
something more than a machine . . .
When it tries the way it does . . .
makes it seem like it can love . . .

'Cause it's hard to say what's real . . .
When you know the way you feel . . .
Is it wrong to think it's love . . .
When it tries the way it does?

Feeling . . . a synthetic kind of love.
Dreaming . . . a sympathetic wish.

As the lights blink faster and brighter . . .

One more robot learns to be . . .
something more than a machine . . .
When it tries the way it does . . .
makes it seem like it can love . . .

'Cause it's hard to say what's real . . .
When you know the way you feel . . .
Is it wrong to think it's love . . .
When it tries the way it does?

Tall Mountains of the U.S. and the World

A sampling of tall mountains in the U.S. and the world, for comparison.

• Mt. Everest, Nepal/Tibet border: 29,035 ft
• Mt. Nowshak, Afghanistan: 24,557 ft
• Mt. Nanda Devi, India: 25,643 ft
• Mt. Muztagh Ata, China: 24,757 ft
  
• Mt. McKinley, Denali National Park, Alaska, tallest mountain in the U.S.: 20,320 ft
• Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, tallest mountain in Africa: 19,335 ft
• Mt. Fuji, Honshu, tallest mountain in Japan: 12,388 ft
• Mt. Hood, tallest mountain in Oregon: 11,239 ft
• Mt. Olympus, (Mytikas peak), Litohoro, Greece, tallest mountain in Greece: 9,570 ft
  
• Mt. Mitchell, tallest mountain in North Carolina and East coast: 6,684 ft
• Mt. Washington, tallest mountain in NH and northeast, 2nd tallest on East coast: 6,288 ft
• Mt. Katahdin, Baxter State Park, tallest mountain in Maine (5th tallest on East coast): 5,268 ft
• Ben Nevis, Scotland, tallest mountain in Great Britain: 4,409 ft
• Mt. Greylock, tallest mountain in MA: 3,491 ft

Fourteen mountains in the world are taller than 8,000 meters (26,427 feet) and they are all in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges in Asia.

According to some quick Web research on the tallest mountains in the world, the first one that is in North America is 107th, which is Mt. McKinley in Alaska. The first 106 (and most of the first 180 or so) are in Asia and South America.

For comparison, the tallest man-made structures are not even close in height to any of the tallest mountains or even a mountain like Katahdin:

• Canadian National Tower, Toronto, Canada: 1,815 ft
• Ostankino Tower,Moscow, Russia: 1,762 ft
• Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan: 1,670 ft
• Empire State Building, New York, NY: 1,250 ft

The Empire State Building sure seems taller when you're up on the observation deck, though.

Mt Katahdin Hike, September 2005

Moose cow and calf on Sias Hill Road, after Greenville, not quite to First Roach Pond and the cabin where I'd be spending the weekend and using as base to travel to Baxter State Park and Mt. Katahdin.


View of Katahdin, 50 miles northeast, from the porch (with 105mm lens) of my grandparents' cabin on First Roach Pond.


Closer view of Katahdin from Baxter Park Rd, a disintegrated "paved" road to Baxter State Park.


Once inside Baxter State Park you have to stop at a gate and pay $12 for day use of the parking lots and campgrounds. They take your name and license plate number and ask you for an emergency contact number. From there I drove to the base of the Abol Trail, the oldest trail up Katahdin and one of the most dangerous, at Abol Campground. Last time I didn't have enough cash on me and I walked over 5 miles from the park gate to the trail base. That time I only made it about half way up the mountain and walked most of the way back in the dark. This time I was prepared with cash, flashlight, water, camera, etc. After hiking up through deep dark woods, rocks, tree roots and mountain streams for a couple miles you make it to the Abol Slide -- a wash of granite boulders, rubble and gritty sand formed by avalanches. That's when the hike gets hard. Eventually it gets steeper and steeper and you realize why there are no small rocks -- everything but the largest boulders has already been shook loose and slid down the side of the mountain. You are pulling yourself up and over car-sized, algae-covered boulders as you climb higher and wonder when it will end. Looking up you have some idea of where it ends, and you can't see past that point, which isn't the peak, but more like a the edge of a table . . .


The view gets better and better as you climb. It's dizzying to look up, down or out at the panoramic view, which is just impossible to capture with any normal camera lens. This is just a shot looking back down toward the southwest from near the edge of the top.


At last you clamber over the last boulders to flat land. You can stand and see some kind of two-tone rust and green sedge or grass covering the ground in front of you. To the left the Hunt Trail comes in across another ridge of boulders, the last leg of the Appalachian Trail.


To the right is the last mile to Baxter Peak, gradually rising 800 feet or so to the tallest point on Katahdin. But first a stop at Thoreau Spring, streaming out of the ground, to refill my water bottle with cool, clear water.


The view of Brother Mountains, the Owl and other mountains from Katahdin is amazing.


With the general purpose lens I brought, I am afraid I wasn't able to capture the beauty that well, but I like this picture with the western mountain peaks peeking over the ridge of the rust-colored table land.


After a mile along a rocky trail marked by regular cairns, gradually hiking up over rocky tundra-like terrain you reach the peak, which is marked by a large, weathered sign (obligatory photo follows) and a seven foot cairn (not shown).


Coming from the southern side of the mountain it is only when you finally get to the peak that you can see the famous Knife Edge -- a steep, narrow ridge that follows the peaked ridge of Katahdin from Baxter Peak to the slightly shorter South Peak and finally to Pamola Peak. The Knife Edge is beautiful, dramatic and scary.


Up close you can make out some hikers making their way across the Knife Edge. It's amazing how putting an object such as a person in a picture like this clarifies the scale of the scene.


Actually, at the size allowed by the blog, you can't see them. Here's a cropped photo from the middle of the photo above. You can make out hikers at this scale.


The north side of the mountain is a large basin with a pond near the center. There are roads and trails through the park to camp down there and hike up to the peak from different angles.


Here I am on top of Katahdin, composed rather than smiling because I've got braces on both my upper and lower teeth now and am self-conscious about it.


After hanging around on the peak for a few, taking pictures, catching the view, watching a hawk, and tripping and denting my camera lens barrel I decided I was fairly tired, it was getting close to evening, and I knew I had about three hours of hiking ahead of me to get back to my car.

The hike back down the rock slide seemed more dangerous than coming up it. Once I was back in the woods I was comfortable and moved along quickly. By the time I got back to Abol Campground bats were flitting right in front of my face and campers had their camp fires going strong. I drove out of the park very happy. I had a long drive, about one and a half hours, half over paved road, half over dirt roads, to get back to the cabin and rest. Soon after my return to the cabin my father called. We had a good chat. Then I relaxed on the porch and listened to loons calling longingly in the night.