mmrobins.com

Kim and I just made peanut butter with our new food processor. We made the healthy, needs to be refridgerated kind where you just use peanuts and a tiny bit of salt. You just throw the peanuts and salt into the food processor for about 5 minutes and it turns it to butter. We made it chunky by throwing a handful of peanuts in at the end and then just chopping them a little. Tasty.

Friday night Jacob, Travis, Kim and I took Jacob’s new boat out on Lake Washington. We didn’t do much boating because we couldn’t find a place to dock the boat near a barbeque. Jesse and Deborah showed up later and ate with us too. Then we went back to Jacob and Travis’s apartment to have kind of a farewall Travis party. Anna and Phil came later too.

Saturday, Kim and I went out climbing at exit 38 with Kim’s new girl friend Jesse. I lead four climbs including a 5.10a, and Kim led three. After climbing we met up with Jacob for more boating. This time we got to spend a lot of time on the boat, tubing and sight seeing. I was on the tube for a long time and the water was kind of rough, so I’m really sore today. It’s a really fun little boat that Jacob has. It can sit four people comfortably and it goes pretty darn fast.

• Playing: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
• aktt_notify_twitter: no

Kim, Preston and I drove to an organic farm near Monroe on Sunday to pick berries. We only got a few blueberries, but we got a bunch of marionberries and raspberries, all for $1/lb. When Kim and I got home we made some really good jam. I can’t belive how much sugar is used to make jam.

Jake, Kim and I took off for another weekend adventure near Mount St Helens, this time to go caving. We left early Saturday morning and drove for around 4 hours to get to Ape Caves. There was a tour group leaving as we got there so we joined it. It started out with about 15 boy scouts on the tour but they left almost immediately to do their own thing, thankfully. We first hiked the lower caves section and had to crawl to get to the very end. Then we turned around and headed for the harder upper section hike. There were a lot fewer people doing this section, which was nice, but it still definitely wasn’t secluded. There was some scrambling over rocks and one tall rock wall that was probably the equivalent of a VB gym boulder route. It was fun to hike around three miles underground.

Once we hiked back to the car we drove up a forest service road and found a place to camp. It looks like it was a site that hunters had been using. They had even built their own outhouse out of tarps. We couldn’t get a fire started with all the wet wood, and it was cold for July! It was down in the upper 40′s that night. We fell asleep and heard rumblings from the distance that we were a little worried might be the volcano, but I didn’t see anything in the news about activity. It rained all night and was cold and wet the next morning so we headed back early Sunday.

Fire!

Kim and I went down to Yelm, just a little southeast of Olympia, for the 4th to hang out with Patrick and Arij (spelling?). Arij’s grandparents have a farm there so we had lots of space to light fireworks. We had a water fight, ate good food, and lit of a lot of fireworks with Patrick and Arij and their friends, Ben and Lee, and Todd and Lydia (pronounced Ludia since she’s from Austria). Unfortunately I burned my hand when a firework went off in it. My own stupid fault, but the firework was defective.

http://ncity.net/seokjooseongmi.wmv Who knew Chun-Li and Ryu could dance so well?

Kim, Jake and I drove down to Mount Rainier this Friday to go camping and hiking. We got in a little late and camped at the Ohanepecosh campground, which we found out later you can reserve spot for online. But who really wants to reserve a site before they see it? They don’t post which sites are reserved at the camp site, which is a royal pain. We picked two sites, and both times we went to register and found out they were reserved. Fortunately, the campground is huge, so we went to H loop and finally found a nice spot, isolated but still close to the comfort station (their euphemism, not mine).

Jake’s brother Judd and his girlfriend Sherri met us Saturday morning and got a site next to us. Jake and Judd look and awful lot alike. They brought their two dogs with them, which almost seemed a shame since they’re not allowed on most of the hiking trails. We hiked up the summer land trail, and it was beautiful out. We took our time, enjoyed the trees, flowers, and views of Rainier. On the way down we even saw a black bear a ways off.

Back at camp Sherri and Judd had burrito fixings that seemed gourmet for camping. They were nice enough to share them with us after we used a tent pole with a bungi cord hook to unlock Sherri’s truck, where she thought she had locked her keys (turned out after we broke in that they were in her fanny pack). Jake and I had some opportunities to talk a lot about politics, religion, society, and books, and it was good conversation. Jake is quite a bit more conservative than I am, and it’s rare that I get to talk to anyone politically conservative and still feel that I’m having an intelligent conversation.

Sherri and Judd left Sunday morning, but Jake, Kim and I went and hiked near Paradise. It was a little overcast, but it was still a nice short hike and we saw a marmot like animal and a pretty waterfall. We got back Sunday evening and there were chores to do that I had been putting off, but it was worth it to have a nice weekend outdoors.

After coming home from Kripalu I was reading a magazine on the plane and there was a cool ‘video game’ in an add. It’s called The Journey to Wild Divine, and is played using biofeedback sensors that measure your heart rate variability and skin conductance. It can measure how relaxed or tense you are, so it especially appealed to me after being at Kripalu. I’ve been playing it for a while now and it’s definitely very cool. The plot of the game is a little weird sometimes, but it’s extremely cool to see a video game react to your breathing and stress level. For example, there’s an elevator and if you flex your muscles and shout it goes up, while if you breath deeply and relax it goes down. One of the weirdest parts is a section where two people are involved, each person with a finger in the sensors, and it tells you to hold hands. If you let go of each other’s hands the game recognizes it and tells you. The gameplay is like Myst, with static predrawn scenes that have one or two interactive pieces you can click on. The music is nice and relaxing, but nothing I would listen to on my own. There’s definitely some hard parts too. Some of the challenges require you to be very relaxed, and it definitely takes some practice unless you’re already really good at meditation. Of course, it’s a bit expensive, and they want to sell you all sorts of expansions, but it’s novel enough that I can understand the price. It’s about time video games did something different like this.

Kim, Gabe and I just went to see the new Batman movie, and I’m more than pleasantly surprised. It’s directed by Christopher Nolan, the same guy who directed Memento, which is probably my favorite movie of all time, and his directing skill shows in Batman Begins. Plus he helped write the screenplay. Chrisian Bale makes a pretty good Batman too, and this time, Batman steals the show, not the bad guys. I was surprised to see Batman on the IMDB top 250, but after seeing it, I’m not.

Gabe has a computer that we’ve designated as the media server at our house to hold music, movies and other media files. I’ve always wanted to try to setup a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) to record TV, basically like a Tivo. I got a good deal on a Hauppauge Win-TV-250 TV tuner card and went about setting up the software. This proved more difficult than I thought. I always heard MythTV was cool so I downloaded Knoppmyth to try to get it running but didn’t have much luck. The TV signal didn’t come in and I don’t think there’s any way that it was gonna easily support the wireless internet card.

The server already had Windows XP on it, so I figured rather than trying to download a linux distro with good wireless support and then configuring MythTV I’d try finding some windows PVR software.

The first thing I tried was BeyondTV, which isn’t free but had a trial period. It worked great right out of the install, but it didn’t have a way to play music or other movies off the hard drive. You could configure the remote to control other programs like Winamp or Windows Media Player, but it wasn’t very slick.

So far I’ve settled on an open source piece of software for windows called Media Portal. So far it looks like it does almost everything I want well. It took a little while to get setup, but it looks like it’s under pretty heavy devolopment so I imagine it’s going to improve quickly. I think the hardest thing was getting the tv schedule using XMLTV, which you have to download and configure to use a Zap2it account. It seems a little buggy watching TV sometimes, but the music and movies interfaces are awesome.

I may still try to configure MythTV sometime on Fedora Core 4, but only if I find the time.