I just returned from camping at Lake Tahoe.  We camped at D.L. Bliss State Park which has a great beach and is just a trail away from Emerald Bay.  We hit the beach and some trails including Vikingsholm and Eagle Lake.  Here are some pictures from the trip.

My wife and son at Eagle Lake

Both the best and the worst part of the trip happened this morning during our hike up to Eagle Lake located near Emerald Bay.  The trail to Eagle Lake is 1 mile straight up a steep and rocky mountain, a bit tiring but the view of Eagle Lake was fantastic as you can see above.  Unfortunately, it begain to rain heavily as soon as I took that picture.  By the time we got down, we were very cold and wet.  Brrrrh!

Yesterday afternoon, I stood in my driveway and looked at the black asphalt road passing by my house.  I asked myself what if the asphalt was liquid and the road was a river.  What a river it is, flowing everywhere people live.  Six degrees of separation pale in comparison.

I imagined wading into the river up to my neck which awarded me with a smile.  Not a bad return for playing with imagination a little.  After spending a few more minutes picturing myself swimming in the road, I moved on to what I set out to do.  I walked onto the asphalt road.  Ahhh, there!  A flicker of amazement visits me.  I am walking on water!  With that, I walked safely back to my driveway with an even bigger smile.

There are things that amaze us, but amazement itself is entirely our own making.  What saddens me is how fast amazement fades into mundane.  Things, places, people, understanding — nothing escapes, all fading like photos left out in sunlight — flowers, mountains, Ferrari, Walkman, campfire, my son's little toes, all becomes mundane eventually.

So I am left with cheap thrills like the one I pulled yesterday.  I am still amazed with how stupid human mind is, but I am sure that will fade too.

I won't be able to blog for the next two days.  Find your own supply of amazements meanwhile.

According to Blogdex, my blog is ranked #33 on the list of "most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community".  Huh?  I know I have many readers and my posts get linked widely even crossing language boundaries, but #33 seems rather high up.

Update #1: I am now #79 after being #33 for over a month.  If the ranking is purely based on how widely memes spread, I think this is about right.  While amount of traffic I get is not among top 100, I do tend to post original and often viral memes.

When I wake up each day is a special moment for me.  As consciousness seeps back into my brain like someone returning home from a daily vacation, I often find odd pieces of thoughts.

I am neither gay nor religious, but their issues are interesting to me because they are so complex.  I must have peeled away much of the issues in my sleep this morning because I was woke up with this seemingly clear and amusing understanding of what religious people are basically saying:

Gays are misusing the product designed by God.

Does the customer have the right to misuse, abuse, or even destroy products?  Answer is yes for me.  I don't care if Steve Jobs hand-assembled an iMac just for me.  If I own it, I can do whatever with it and damn the warranty.  This raises the following question:

Am I bought or leased?

If I am just leasing, I can't misuse the product.  Religious people seems to be saying that we are all leased from God.  As for me, I don't care because the supposed owner hasn't pounded on my door asking for rent yet.

Anyway, I enjoyed thinking about these things this morning, enough to wake up with a smile.

I never been to the Burning Man, but I know what I am willing to trek to a desert to see: Monster Bot Wars, car size to building size robots battling each other.  Of course, sand and bots don't quite mix too well…

Thanks to Clay Shirky, I found Mike Reed's Flame Warriors, ongoing attempt to classify participants of online discussions.  It's absolutely hillarious and illustrations are usually perfect.

Here is an example:

Big Dog and Me-Too

"Big Dog is a bully who doesn't hesitate to use his superior strength to intimidate other combatants. Big Dog may be smart, articulate or just plain mean, but in any case he is a remorseless fighter, brutally ripping into even the weakest of combatants. Once Big Dog securely fastens his powerful jaws on a hapless victim, Me-Too will join the attack. Me-Too is far too weak and insecure to engage in single combat, and must ally himself with Big Dog or a pack of other Warriors to bring down his quarry."

It's like a Online Behavior Pattern repository.  I wonder why there is no Idiot in the list though.

While searching for on-demand server-side Java compilers for cellphone, I ran into an interest project at MIT Media Lab by accident.  Simply titled Tiny Projector, Stefan Marti documents his work on building prototypes of his solution to limited display problems inherent in mobile devices.

"The basic idea of TinyProjector is to create the smallest possible character projector that can be either integrated into mobile device, or linked dynamically with wireless RF connections like serial low range transceivers." – Stefan Marti

Stefan provides plenty of diagrams and pictures of circuits, models, and his solderworks.  He looked like he was having hell of a fun time doing it.  Starting from July 2001 to May 2002, his project progressed from this:

To this:

What was the difference?  Cellphone users won't have to twirl their cellphones!  Aside from the coolness of the idea, the paper is a fun look at how technologies get developed at personal level.  I enjoyed reading it.

FeedDemon could have been good, but it's UI sucks at the moment.  It introduces metaphors without feedback nor justifications.  On top of metaphors like Listing and Newspaper, it built too many menus and commands that looks all too similar.

In the latest version, I end up with many default channels like Amazon category feeds without an apparent means to remove them.  I tried the menus in vain but ended up trying to delete one at a time and then gave it up.  I could careless if there was some dialog somewhere.

If I can't find it, it doesn't exist.

I spent a good part of yesterday playing EverQuest.  It was partly a day-long vacation for me and an opportunity to study a phenomenon.  Installation was easy enough and graphics was adequate, but EQ user interface really sucked.

I couldn't believe how bad it was even after all this time.  Windows popping up every where, weird keyboard and mouse controls, confusing map, text colors too dark to see read, the list goes on and on.  All the 3D UI lessons learned by the game and simulation industries over more than a decade seemed to have been thrown out.

Manual was pretty useless also and, even worse, there was little free online information about EQ.  Everyone was selling information, equipment, and items instead.  Pretty weird, I must say.