Tuesday, July 26, 2005

St. Joseph's Hill


St. Joseph's Hill Summit
Originally uploaded by /k.
I had to be in the South Bay (Santa Clara) yesterday afternoon, so I thought I would wait out the terrible rush hour traffic by revisiting some of my favorite Los Gatos biking trails.

I started out on the Los Gatos Creek Trail (map1,map2) in Vasona Park riding towards downtown Los Gatos and then climbed the hill towards Noviate and Saint Joseph's Hill (google map). Saint Joseph's Hill looms of Los Gatos and Lexington Reservoir County Park as a complete spirit crushing bike ride. It's only 3 1/2 miles long but covers about 800 - 1000 ft of vertical (PDF map). While the climb sucked (30 minutes of steep grade rocky trails), my bike really excelled on the downhill (7 sweet minutes).



Los Gatos Creek Trail
Originally uploaded by /k.
The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, but it was nice to fuel up on High Tech Burritos and see my old neighborhoods after the big climb.

You can see a few other photos from the ride over at my Flickr page.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Server Closet


Just after Brian left this morning, I figured that I need to clean out my den. A week of Brian squalor piled atop of a year of my uncleaniness might bring sanctions from the local health department. (The rest of this is technical/geeky and can be skipped)

I am on a big "silent computing" kick lately, so I've been investigating ways to move my Shuttle (small but loudish) out of my den -- leaving just my Sun Ray (no fan) and Mac Mini (external power supply so very quiet/small fan). I have a closet to move them into (I use the server as a Tarantella/Solaris server), but didn't have anyway to get network access to them (Solaris -- my Unix -- doesn't support many of the proprietary 802.11G cards avaialble).

However, Apple saved the day. I have a Apple Airport Express extending my wireless network to the porch and I found out that it also functioned as a Ethernet <-> Wireless bridge. Sweet. I moved my Shuttle server into the closet, plugged it into my Airport Express and I am now computing in blissful silence.