Seen going past our front door twice yesterday, a man cross country skiing pulling two little girls in a sled. Snow and lemonade, I guess.

For our trip to the Bay Area for Thanksgiving, we took the Amtrak California Zephyr from Denver to Emeryville. The train leaves Denver at 8am, and arrives in Emeryville at 4:30pm the next day. It's clearly not the fastest way to travel (nor is it the cheapest with a sleeper cabin, which we purchased), but it is far more scenic than the alternatives.

Real utensils! Lovely and unique railroad views!

The train consisted of (in order) two engines, a baggage car, three coach cars, an observation/lounge/snack bar car, a dining car, and two sleeper cars. Our cabin was in the last car. Included in the price of a sleeper cabin are all meals in the dining car. The food is better than airline food (well, that is, was, when meals were actually a thing that airlines did) because it's actually prepared in the kitchen below the dining room and not simply microwaved. The dining car has tables that seat four, and if your party is less than four people, you will be seated with strangers. We met some interesting (using the full breadth of that word) people while eating our meals.

Our "roomette" was cozy. There are four shared toilets in a sleeper car, and one shared shower. The toilets are pretty much like airplane lavatories, but the shower was surprisingly spacious, fairly clean, and the water pressure and temperature was good.

The Zephyr is considerably quieter than a passenger jet, but because it runs on rails that are used primarily by freight trains, the ride isn't always smooth. It was not such an issue when the train was moving at 30 or 40 MPH through the mountains, but when it was going 80 MPH across Nevada in the middle of the night, it made sleeping difficult.

In summary, we're glad that we took the train. It's a unique experience that goes through the most beautiful parts of America that can't be seen from the interstates. We had the time to do it, and it was worthwhile. That being said, we're not eager to do it again anytime soon. We met many people on the train who seemed to love it - they were even on a first-name basis with the train staff. But the train isn't quite for us. Still, we recommend that other people consider trying it at least once. There are many things worth doing at least once, and this is one of them.

The recent snow is very moist and sticky, and since it's still fall, many trees still had their leaves. This caused lots of broken branches, including some that fell on our roof. We think none did any damage, but this one hanging over our front door presented another danger this morning - it hosted icicles directly over our front steps. You can see that our steps are iced over as well. Since I took the photo I have knocked down the icicles and scraped and salted the ice on the steps.

I received a request for more photos of Boulder Creek in October.

October 19

October 26

More colors.

I took this photo yesterday looking down above Jamestown. I took it with the HDR mode of my iPhone, and you can clearly see I did not keep the camera steady. Still, I think it's a cool picture, and the ghosting on the ridges is kind of interesting.

I've decided to modify how we back up our lappies at home. Instead of using SuperDuper! to back them up to individual external drives, I'm now backing them up to the Drobo using the sparsebundle backup mode of SuperDuper! over the network. This actually effectively doubles the number of backups for each lappy, but centralizes them for efficiency. As you can see below, I've brought the hard drives to school, where I've turned them into a striped RAID 500GB array. Making them striped (as opposed to concatenated JBOD) increases the IO speed by roughly 30% over the standard case. Copying a 3.5GB file to any of them individually (or together in JBOD mode) takes about 120 seconds, but as a striped RAID it takes 80 seconds. 500GB isn't big by today's standards, a 2TB disk costs less than $100, but I already had these disks, so it's effectively free. So, why not?

A few days ago, on Saturday September 10, I attended the collegiate American football match between the University of California Golden Bears and the University of Colorado Buffaloes. Although we've lived in Boulder for over a year, and I work in the football stadium, this was the first Buffs game I have attended.

The game was an exciting one. The Bears led for most of the game, but the Buffs tied the game in the last minute of regulation, sending the game into overtime. Quite surprisingly, the Bears managed to win in overtime, something that as a True Blue, I am not used to seeing from my Bears.

This is the first season where the Buffs are a member of the Pac-12. I think they are not quite up to the standards of the Pac-12. Here are some of my observations from the game.

• The security getting into the game was a perfect example of security theater. They patted people down in a very cursory way searching for who-knows-what. Once inside the stadium, I didn't see security officers in the stadium at all until the end of the game. In the closing moments they were positioned in front of the student section in a weak attempt to prevent the students from rushing the field. How are 20 people in yellow jackets going to stop 4,000 drunk undergraduates? In the end, because the Buffs lost, the students stayed put.
• Note to self: For the next game I attend, I'm putting all kinds of goodies in my office the day before the game. No one seemed to notice when I went inside to get my water bottle this time (to avoid paying $3.75 (!) at the concessions for water), so I figure I can store even more stuff.
• The stadium feels a bit dated, kind of like Memorial was before reconstruction. The isles are tight and the access gates are narrow. The loudspeakers are located at one end of the stadium, meaning that they have to be extra loud to reach the other end. The head referee's microphone didn't work, so we had to guess what penalties were or catch the hand signals (which was difficult because he faced the other way during announcements). However, the views of the front range and flatirons are supreme.
• I noticed several times during the game that the PA people are, frankly, rude. I always thought that music is required to be turned off during plays, but the PA people would let it continue into the beginning of plays. Also, at least once when the Cal Band started to play after a Cal score, the PA played music over them. It's one thing to play over the 183rd playing of "Tribute to Troy" when playing U$C, but it's unacceptable to play over the Cal Band.

The only cool thing about CU is the running of the buffalo, Ralphie. I think there should be the running of the bear. How about a 800-lb grizzly bear running across the pitch at Memorial Stadium?

I know it's September already, but I took this on August 26th.

The water has started to get lower, somewhat.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that Rocky Mountain National Park is less than an hour away by car. Having the park so close is certainly a good reason to visit it often. However, there is stuff like this (below) in Boulder Canyon, which is only about 15 minutes away from our place by bicycle. This picture is from this morning's mountain bike ride. I guess what I'm really trying to say is, this is a nice place to live and do stuff outdoors!

Twice in the last two weeks we have visited Rocky Mountain National Park. A while ago we realized "Hey! We live less than an hour from a National Park! We should visit it more often." And so we are trying to do that. Two weeks ago we went with Melissa's brother, Matt, and his lady friend, Kelly. Today it was just the two of us. Here are some pictures from the two visits.

Kelly, Matt and Melissa

The view from Trail Ridge Road

A trail winding through the Aspens

Melissa and Stephen and some rocky peaks

Above as seen this morning. Compare to January:

Yes, that is my gauche shadow.