Test Post

Goofy post!

Just want to check if this is going to work.

Signals From the Dark Continent

Here I am, sitting in the Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge in Arusha, Tanzania, full of stories and tired as all hell. Tanzania's at the end of the rainy season, and absolutely everything here is in gorgeous bloom. We came down into the airport through a magnificent deck of clouds stretching all across the horizon--so beautiful, in fact, that I decided to pull my camera out and document the whole thing right from the tarmac! As I was snapping shots across the horizon and looking generally very ostentatious, a group of tarmac jockeys came running at me waving their arms and shouting. They had me put my camera down, and let me know kindly that it's a national offense to take pictures of government buildings like airports... and that they would shoot me if I didn't put my camera away. That scared me shitless, and the guards here at TEDGlobal have AK-47s, so my peace of mind isn't exactly in full gear. Bedtime for now, and more to come tomorrow--off to the mosquito netting for me!

Prodigal Update

Gahh! So much for updating this blog every day. I've been so busy with school, photos, kayaking, exams and the Squad that I haven't had any time to breathe! My big upcoming task is going to be identifying all of the things that are going to be taking up my time next semester and CULLING the list. I need to shave down my responsibilities, and let myself breathe easier! This girl and what this photo represents is going to help quite a bit with that...

Here's Jamie proudly toting her new camera, looking warily at me as she examines her latest masterpiece. This wonderful girl and I managed to snag a bit of time in the PLP Dining Camp art exhibit lineup, which poises us on the edge of our photographic careers and stands to make us a little bitta cash!

Here's another one I liked... I'll just post it to give it a home aside from Flickr, where the denizens of the net will rate it eagerly and pass judgment on Jamie packing up after her recent graduation from UVM. This post is stunted and odd, like a dwarf in Texas, and I really just needed an excuse to bitch about having to fill endless amounts of hours at the squad and post these cute pics. More to come, I promise!

Home Stretch

Wow. I've been so busy that I haven't posted in days and days, yet have managed to sign on to Blogger and create little templates for all of the fun stuff that I'd like to say to the few people who read this thang. Over at the Pinpoint Blog I've slammed out blog entry after blog entry, yet the creative flow here has run stagnant. So, I'm sorry. I've got a few more assignments to tackle before my life can freshen up, and I can't wait for the day when I can lie back outside and relax with a good book and a glass of lemonade. A cliche of relaxation, perhaps, but I want it so badly! I'm jealous of Lynley, graduating soon with nary a care in the world. Except for the rest of her life, I suppose, but that's not that depressing of a topic of thought (says the boy staunchly cradling in the support structure of school!)

Back to work for now... but keep looking at my Flickr photos, as I've had time to update some of those, and expect lots of entries! I'll modify the dates on them so it looks like I've been productive, but don't you all be fooled. Those entries are brand spanking new, detailing my thoughts on becoming a writer, my recent plane trip to Cape May and my thoughts on kayaking this summer, among other scintillating topics.

The Gay Climber that Could

Last year, I attended an amazing talk by an inspiring climber-- he spoke of overcoming adversity and climbing to the top of Mt. Everest, flying in the face of his disability. Standing out strong from his other accomplishments sat a system of handshakes between him and his brother that could be used to tell if girls were Hot or Not. Here's what Action 7 made of the story.

Wonder

My last post was certainly about a trip, and stress relief, and all of that good stuff that we all push for from day to day--but at heart, what I was trying to get at was the sense of Wonder that permeates our lives, filling in the dark corners of the world and drifting through our daydreams. I took that walk into the woods because I felt pulled by something that I couldn't explain. That odd feeling spawned many little theories and associations within my mind; some of the less creative of these involved me finding a body, or buried treasure up near the top of the hill, while others had me walking for hours and hours, getting horribly lost in the woods of Eastern New York. Hell, I could have wandered for years, the way I was going.

Life is predictable. I sometimes wish that we could die and wake up caught between other worlds, or stumble upon something which no one else on earth has ever seen, or could ever understand. Not the sort of cosmological quandaries which the lonely physicsts here at Princeton and other universities spend their lives trying to decipher, shaving slivers of time off of the earliest known moments of existence and trying to figure out the why of things. I'm talking more about the modern equivalent of magic. Lost appeals to me because part of me wishes that some event like that, some happening of weird, inexplicable magnitude would carry me off on some journey that I could never understand.

Looking back over this post, I don't really feel that I've gotten across what it's like to wish for something New, but I suspect that I'm not the only one who feels that way. A novel is a great way to pour oneself into a strange world...reading gets one foot in the door, while writing opens you up as a floodgate from Elsewhere. I'd like to try my hand at writing someday, REALLY devote myself to it for a few months and crank out some really good stuff. I've heard speculation that the brain is an emotional organ that feeds off of feelings, surviving off of fear and love and all the others decking out the pantheon. Writing is there to pass the time--but it feeds the cravings, too. I'll try to organize this and plaster it up at some point in the future. For now, anyone have any comments?

Clearly, I have a lot of thoughts. Good thing I have a blog, too!

Homeward Bound

So I left Vermont today, getting into my car after a nice walk with my woman through the gloomy afternoon haze permeating Vermont. Jamie took some wonderful pictures in a graveyard near her house during our walk, and the generally crappiness of the day fueled my decision to lend her my D80 and get rid of temptation from homework in the busy days ahead. I only have a week left of school, and I know that that camera would haul me away from work whenever the focus really caught on. And sure enough, just like ray follows doe--or some other clever little simile along those lines--the sun broke free from the clouds and stampeded into the sky, treating ME to the most gorgeous day there ever was on that lonely drive along the west coast of Lake George.

After swerving anxiously around the road for a while, veering right to peer into the gold-tinged trees and left over the brilliant, calm lake, I decided it was time to stop and enjoy the view for a while. I pulled into Sabbath Day Lookout, locked up the car, put on my shoes--and made a decision which may not have been wise, but gave me a story and made me day. I decided to climb the slick, 15-foot rock wall across the road and venture through trees and up a boulder-strewn slope, all to get to the top of some hill in the middle of New York. The whole walk was just dangerous enough, cutting me up and tiring me out over the course of an hour in the way that any good hike will, and after admiring the wonderful view from the top I scraped back down over rocks and slick soil to arrive back down at my car feeling refreshed and invigorated. I don't take hikes like this very often, but I'm beginning to think that I should. Life grinds away, especially during the busy few weeks at the end of a college semester, and I get to questioning my motives in putting myself through these intense four years. A friend pointed out that all we do is focus on the Faraway, sacrificing the present for some distant, intangible goal which may turn out to be worth nothing but brass. College IS important--I've thought hard about it, and I sincerely believe that--but the leisure afforded by a weekend trip to the Pocono mountains, or an hour or two dedicated to paging through a favorite book would lift quite a bit of nervous stress off of my shoulders.

More posts to come, and more regularly... some of these goofy review posts I'm doing over on my Vox blog are giving me an excuse to practice writing, and I'm loving it! Just to clarify, I hate the reviews, but the practice sits sweet.

Check back soon... I'll be better, I promise!

...Like Rabbits

It's been a little while since the last post, but boy, have I been busy! I figure I should start out by fleshing out some of my thoughts on the whole trials process... in fact, i should MENTION that was a bit of a surprise that I ended up making the team at all, what with the sporadic training schedule forced on us by college. Also a tiny bit frustrating in that I'll have to structure my summer around the trip-- but who can complain about funding to Rio? The rabbits in my photo below were everywhere, and impossible to catch. Legend has it that Sprint Kayaker Mike Herbert chased one of them down once, cornered it and kicked it into an unconscious state. He took advantage of this, brought the rabbit over to his wife Krystal, and slept soundly on their fine meaty dinner. Needless to say, none of the maids would come near his room, due to incidents like this and the snakeskins hung all over his wall.



I'm enjoying myself very much up here in Vermont, where I came for one of my last trips to visit Lynley before her graduation in a couple of weeks. We made an appearance at the Pi Phi formal last night... it was a bit wild, and I'm not going to deny the fact that a few people were hauled out the door by various rent-a-cops. Debauchery was at a minimum, but there are always a few outliers.

I hesitantly responded to an ad I saw on one blog or another and signed myself up to write reviews on my VOX Blog, for minimum six bucks per review. As mentioned before I seem to be a bit obsessed with those income trickles, but I'm not gonna lie--it would be exciting to be able to have a blog finance a photography habit, or some silly reviews or Google Local Business Referrals pay for future Four Deserts Marathon training. (More to come on THAT little obsession-in-the-making!) The site that runs the reviews is called Smorty, and after hours of thinking about company names I can safely say that "Pinpoint Etching" beats the hell out of this particular doozy. I make a dollar a day with some of my little sources so far, and five bucks would be fantastic.

Off for now to set up an account at iStockphoto, where I'll try to peddle off my shots for cash. Following in Matt Tilghman's footsteps... unbelievable.

Web 2.0 Thoughts

The company idea is moving forward! We met with Alison Cook today to talk about some options for getting the residential colleges involved with Pinpoint, either by ordering little keychains and other pieces of their own or going ahead and telling the SCI that this sort of service will be wonderful for students in the res colleges. I'm getting more and more sold on networking and its potential...mostly for getting me a job after college... I haven't gotten around to writing my e-mail to Chris Anderson yet and getting myself into TED, but that's probably the best thing I could do to convince Jamie that I'm not a total hypocrite about all of this.

I'm getting more and more excited by the possibilities of setting up a "Web 2.0" identity, both for little streams of income and for getting a company idea out there. Johnny D over at the WCC Training Blog linked to the Pinpoint blog and to my Flickr photo of David crying in the kayak, and both have gotten an enormous amount of hits. This sort of interconnectivity has trashed political candidates and made it possible to get one's voice in wild ways that no one had ever imagined before just a few years ago. I've got that Flickr account, this blog, a series of Squidoo pages and ad links on each of them, and I'm hoping that as I get more time to focus on these things I can start getting my voice out in such a way that I'll be able to spread the word about any new company ideas I have as life moves on. Is this good for entrepreneurship? Is it detrimental? Any comments on the idea of opening up one's personal life on the web to attract attention?

In current news, I'm out here at the EMT squad, working at the same establishment as the two clowns below. Shit.

Google Bombing Nations

John DeRiggi and I had a talk up at trials about Google Bombing, specifically Stephen Colbert's exploits into this crazy hobby. Because of Colbert's personal google bombing efforts, it has now come to pass that googling "Greatest Living American", brings up Colbert's website, right up at number one.

Colbert also translated a Hungarian website designed to accept votes for names of a new bridge spanning the Danube river. He asked all of his viewers to vote for him, and it looks like it's official. The Stephen Colbert Bridge lives!

"Final Vote Counts (Top 5) as of September 8, 2006 2:32 PM CST:

Round 1-

Stephen Colbert híd 17231725 [53%]
Zrínyi híd 2062649 [6%]
Pató Pál - híd 1805118 [6%]
Bethlen Gábor - híd 1735587 [5%]
Hunyadi Mátyás - híd 1478020 [5%]

Round 2-

Stephen Colbert híd 93163 [25%]
Jon Stewart híd 85171 [23%]
Zrínyi híd 83966 [23%]
Eötvös híd 37042 [10%]
Perl-Script híd 17354 [5%]"

Hungarians everywhere were outraged... but take a look at the other choices in Round 2. Jon Stewart? PERL SCRIPT?