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.

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On a whim I did this time lapse out our front window yesterday. I didn't plan it out very well and I shot it through the half of the window with a screen, but it turned out ok, I think. Look for the tree branches springing upwards as they lose snow, car tire tracks evaporating, and the shadows and clouds moving as time progresses. The frames are separated by about 1 minute for the most part, but I was adjusting the interval in the beginning so not all frames are separated by the same amount of time. For the best effect, make sure the "HD" option is turned on and the video is viewed in full screen. It's 1m20s long.

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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.

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The view from the Peak to Peak highway. You can click on the image to find the full-sized version, and I highly recommend you do!

Fall has hit the Front Range, and the Aspen trees are showing it. I took these photos on my bike ride today, and I could have taken dozens more, but I would have never made it back home! I wasn't the only one out there admiring the fall foliage - traffic was about as busy as I've ever seen it, and I saw many people pulled off to the sides of the roads taking pictures of the trees and views.

Since most of you cannot be like all the people I saw today and admire the views in person, here are some of the more spectacular views I felt were worth stopping for and sharing.

Riverside Drive past Raymond. This is one of my favorite roads in this area. It takes 2 hours to get to, and it's over 7500 feet in elevation, but it looks like this the whole way.

A panorama of Riverside Drive between Riverside and Raymond. Happily, even today the road had almost no traffic. Again, you should look at the full-sized version!

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Last night I had the opportunity to tour the supercomputer recently built here at CU named "Janus" that I've been using. It is a 16,000-core Dell cluster using 6-core Intel processors running RedHat Linux. It was built in an interesting way. Instead of building a machine room in a building and then filling it with cooling ducts, pipes, and power connections, the machine room is made up of standard shipping containers that had all those connections in place, similar to a pre-fab house. These were shipped from the factory (in Canada, I think) on trucks, and then dropped next to each other in a parking lot behind a campus building. Unfortunately, because it was nighttime, I don't have a good picture of the outside.

Below are some pictures I took of Janus.

The machine racks. The door encloses the 'hot' side of the machines, where the air is sucked to the heat exchangers.

The cooling system.

The blinky and hot end of the machines. Lots of wires!

A close up of the back of a compute node. Notice that they have serial ports, which are based on a 40+ year old standard. At least they have USB ports, too.

It was using 415 kW of power. I think it can go much higher than that when the machine is under heavy load on a hot day.

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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?

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Heading west on my ride yesterday I saw this curtain of rain falling in the distance. As it happened, I was riding west and I did get rained on by this front a few minutes after taking this picture. It wasn't too bad, just enough to get my legs dirty from spray off my front wheel, mostly.

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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?

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Seen today from Betasso Preserve on my bike ride. There was no rain or visible lightning, but there was some wind and thunder.

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Above as seen this morning. Compare to January:

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This view is from Walker Ranch taken today, roughly in the center of this map looking south. If you look to the upper right, you can see a few rail cars on the railroad tracks. The tracks lead to the high altitude Moffat Tunnel.

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Yesterday the Valmont Mountain Bike Park opened up to the public, and today I went over to check it out. The park has been discussed for many years, and developed over the last few, so it's quite a moment for cyclists in Boulder. The park is oriented towards rider development of all ages. Each type of feature, such as cross-country or aerial areas, have options targeted towards riders of all ability levels. And even if you get yourself into something you can't handle, there are bailout options to get around things.

Dirt Jumps in the foreground, Boulder in the background.

The park is quite extensive and the designers have taken advantage of all the space they had available. Each trail feature is accessible by shared bike/walk trails, so parents can keep an eye on their kids even if they aren't on a bike. Running down the middle of the park are two irrigation ditches (which is a crude description of them, they are much nicer than that) which splits the park into smaller sections. The smaller sections keeps things more intimate which is good in a park that will tend to get very busy. Nearly all of the single track trails are one way, which is very nice. Right now the vegetation is low so it actually isn't a huge problem, but it is always very startling to come around a corner upon someone coming the other way.

A small section of the park. Click for the full PDF of the trails.

To be honest, much of the park makes me feel like I have no skillz (yes, that's skills with a "z"). Even the Skillz Loop, which is designed to be a place to learn skillz without being pressured by better riders to get out of the way challenges me. I tried most of the trails today, but not all of the technical options, especially stuff like this:

The park has two pump tracks, and I had fun riding one of them (Mesa Top) many times. The other one (Creekside) I did once, but it was very muddy and I didn't want to ruin the pump track or get any dirtier than I was already.

The Mesa Top Pump Park

I'm really excited about this new facility, and I hope to slowly improve my skillz over time at the park. It's only a couple kilometers away from where we live, so it's really convenient even if I only have an hour free. My only complaint right now about the park is it's clear they haven't quite figured out how to do the drainage from the sprinklers, because there are more than a few muddy spots around the park that contribute to trail destruction at an accelerated pace.

The Corkscrew, with steeply banked corners, viewed from the top.

The Slopestyle aerial trails area.

Someday this could be me!

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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.

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In April, Adam:

and today, Talitha (plus Melissa):

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Two days ago it was nearly 30C/85F in Boulder. This morning I woke up to snow falling outside our windows (but it wasn't sticking because it was just above freezing where we live). It's now changed to rain, but as the picture above shows, at just slightly higher elevations the snow is sticking. The forecast says that within a week we'll be back near 30C. Living with four seasons is interesting!

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