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.

Yesterday I rode my bicycle up Lefthand Canyon Road to Ward (up to 10,000 feet in elevation for the first time in Colorado) and on the way down I saw four Moose. Pictured above are three of them: a standing Juvenile, another sitting, and their mother also sitting a bit farther to the right (the tree is pointing to her). A few hundred meters down the road I saw a bull moose, but I decided to not stop again for pictures because I was already late returning home. Combined with our sightings in Yellowstone last week, I've seen quite a bit of wildlife lately! It certainly beats the month in San Diego a few years ago when I saw (or even worse, only heard) a rattlesnake on every other ride.

Today Melissa and I went to Yellowstone. I have read that only 3% of Yellowstone's visitors come in the winter, and although it's only a month until Summer, the park was still pretty empty. I figure it's for good reason. The park is still very snowy, and today it was windy, nearly freezing, and often snowing.

The internet at our hotel in Jackson isn't very fast, so here are a just a few photos.