1……2…….3……..clear!  *Brrrrzap*  beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep….. "………..my God, we’re losing it!  More wattage, please, Nancy, I’m not giving up that easy!  1………2……..3…..clear!" *BRRRZZZAAAAPPP*    beep, beep, ……, beep, ….beep   "We’ve got it back, however faint!  Now the syringe, please…"

…phew, that was close.  This weblog is back from the dead.  Hopefully we won’t have to go through that again anytime soon…

You’d think I’d have posted something in the past few weeks, with all that’s going on.  A new Congress come January, a trip to Vegas in a couple weeks, holidays, parties, etc. 

So I guess I’ll start with the elections.  First, the bad news.  I didn’t vote.  Nope.  Second election I could’ve taken part of, and I didn’t get my shit together enough to cast a simple freakin’ ballot.  Poor performance, Alec.   But in my defense, I’ve moved four times and lived in two different countries since the last national election.  I don’t know where my absentee ballot is, but it sure never made it here.  My fault for not contacting the Lewis County board of elections in time.  So bring on the good news then.  Well, the senate/gubernatorial races weren’t even close in New York (like most statewide elections here) so Clinton and Spitzer cleaned up nicely.  Both congressional districts (here in Monroe county and back home) were won by Republicans, but I couldn’t have participated in the vote here, and McHugh back at home cleaned up by about 2-1.  (On a side note, my district, NY #23, is just hilarious: it’s the biggest district in the state by far, and you could drive for over four hours without leaving it, from Oswego way over to Plattsburgh in the extreme northeast.  And this is in the country’s third most populous state.)  But more importantly, we’ve taken back both houses of Congress.  Thirty more seats in the House and six in the Senate.  The question remains, though:  Will we actually accomplish anything over the next two years or just continue bickering amongst ourselves?  The Democratic party has little reason to pat themselves on the back, they still can’t form any sort of consensus on a lot of issues and don’t have a consistent image in the minds of voters, unlike the Elephants.  It was the President’s unrealistic, unrelenting optimism on Iraq that tipped the congressional scale.  It’s too bad it took two more years and thousands of US soldier and Iraqi civilian casualties for the public to realize this, for now it’s too late to salvage much of anything from the Iraqi quagmire.

That being said, let’s get back to the peephole.  I haven’t posted in almost two months, and regretfully haven’t done all that much during that timespan, so I’ll just hit the high points (as usual).  One weekend in mid-October I headed down to the Catskills to do an overnight hiking trip.  I wanted to do some hiking while the fall colors were still decent, and had so many memories of dsriving through the blazingly red and orange Catskills on the way to New Jersey growing up that I thought I’d give ’em a chance.  The weather turned out to be really nice, in the 40s but clear.  Most of the leaves were off the trees but there were enough still on to make the views really nice.  I unfortunately forgot my camera, but Marcin took a pretty good set of photos to bail me out.  The nice thing about having other people take the photos is you actually get pictures of yourself!  We ended up doing a loop hike of my choice, the Slide Mt-Wittenburg-Cornell range.  It was a pretty long day hike, about 15 miles over 8-9 hours.  We ran into a dusting of snow above 3500 feet that gave the woods a nice frosting.  Ice was still minimal so conditions really couldn’t have been better for that time of year.

Two weeks later, and it’s the weekend before Halloween.  We decided to throw a Halloween party for that friday.  I spent a couple afternoons making the rounds of all the thrift stores in the city, and picked up enough random articles of clothing to become Oliver Twist (albeit slightly taller) for the weekend.  Maybe I’ll find a picture or two to show everyone. 

The party was a success, we decorated (or should I say Adrienne decorated) the place and picked up two kegs for party fuel.  It ended up being way too much so we made a pact to finish one of the two by the end of the weekend so it wouldn’t get warm (the other we could just throw in the fridge).  Well, as it turns out there’s a lot of beer in a keg so Saturday ended up being a bit of a blur.  Endless games of pong led to a trip to high falls to a huge bar/club called Saddle Ridge.  It was pretty fun, I entered a costume contest but lost to a bunch of lame Chippendale’s dancers and Cinderellas.  How clichéd. 

This thursday is Thanksgiving, so I’ll be home to spend the weekend with my family and aunt and uncle.  Should be a lot of fun.  The weekend after that I’m heading to Vegas.  Just an afterthought.

Thus, the next few weeks will undoubtedly be interesting enough to fuel another post or two.  See ya then.

So it’s been a few weeks since my last post.  Well, that’s because not all that much has changed.  I have been doing quite a bit of developing over the past month, both at work and at home, and have a few things to show:

• The redesigned, reimplemented, FGA tour golf score tracker.  Admittedly, the content is much the same, I just added a few more statistics.  The presentation, however, is a drastic improvement on the old version.  It follows the logical layout of a ruby on rails application, with the addition of a few nifty AJAX/CSS tricks.
• AlecLaLonde.com has been born.  I dropped some cash for hosting at Dreamhost, and will be placing all my upcoming applications/sites in subdomains.

And a few things still in the pipeline:

• The migration of this site to weblog.aleclalonde.com.  I mentioned a few months ago how I wanted more control over the presentation and content of this weblog, and will soon be doing something about it.  I have been checking out a few weblog publishing engines, and am leaning towards using Typo.  It’s a rails-based engine, so configuration should be familiar.  Migration of all the existing content might prove difficult, especially how I’m going to deal with all those photos.
• A hiking site.  This will probably end up being more like a subset of my main blog, but it seems like since I have so many postings devoted to hiking anyway, it should make sense.  There I will post all my hiking photos as well as planned trips, checklists, trip reports, etc.

Clearly, I’ve taken an interest in web development.  With all the new, standards-based web technologies, we are going to see the line between desktop applications and web applications blurred.  Just take a look at Meebo, Google Maps, GMail, Sudoku Combat, and so on…

So keep one eye on this site and the other at weblog.aleclalonde.com.  When everything has been sufficiently migrated, I’ll be sure to let you know.  The Peephole 2.0 awaits.

It’s been a real busy (read: enjoyable) past few weeks.  I have been gone every weekend and just about every weeknight too.  Several sports have been taking the vast majority of my free time: climbing mountains, tennis, soccer, and golf.  All I thoroughly enjoy, and all are cheap.  Well except for golf, but just because I have to buy a new pack of balls every 3-4 rounds since I suck. 

I have climbed nine high peaks over the past month in three weekends.  Twice with John, once with my old man.  Last weekend we were detoured around Lake Placid because there was a veritable caravan of cyclists spread out over 50 something miles in the loop between Keene and Placid.  More specifically, it was an Ironman triathlon. 

For those of you don’t know, the Ironman is not your ordinary triathlon.  Imagine waking up at 6 AM on a sunday to get ready for a bike ride.  Now imagine biking 56 miles on unrelentingly hilly roads in a long circle.  Now imagine coming back to the start, and having to do it again.  After the second lap is done, wipe your brow, drink some water, and go run a marathon.  Yep, 26.2 miles.  Get to it.  Upon giving it your all in that last final stretch of running (assuming your heart hasn’t exploded), you are reminded that you are participating in a triathlon.  Tri=3.  You are instructed to jump in the lake, which is nice and cool and feels great.  Unfortunately, you must swim 3 miles over 6 laps.  Merely finishing one of these in a 15-hour span of daylight is a superhuman feat, in my opinion.  Yet there are scores of people out there who do this professionally, 25 of which showed up in Placid that weekend.  Crazy stuff.

So we bypassed the psycho- err, triathlon, and made it to the trailhead for Cascade peak.  Cascade is a joke of a climb, the summit is about 2 miles from the road.  We ran up to the top in a little over an hour.  It’s view is phenomenal, the peak is bald and has a glorious 360° view, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since ascending Dix.  After chatting with a few French Canadian girls, we took off to hike nearby Porter Mountain, another High Peak and less than a mile away.  It took us under four hours to climb two high peaks.  Not bad.  Cascade was my 23rd high peak.  Halfway there baby!

The weekend before John and I knocked off four peaks in the Nippletop range.  Yeah, we were out there in the 90° sun while you were lounging about in your air-conditioning.  And it was awesome.  Pics are at left. 

Oh, and I posted my best panorama yet, of the entire Great Range.  Low and high quality

What do people usually do after graduating college?  Well, sadly, most go and live at home.  I never quite understood that, especially coming from as small a place as I do.  Why would you want to revert back to your high school life, minus the friends that you shared it with?  I have things to see, people to do.  Err…something like that.

So where does that leave me?  Well, I’ve been asking myself that all summer, flipping back and forth as to what I’m going to do after this co-op is over and I finally get my degree.  And no, I haven’t come to a decision.  In my mind I have two options:  Stick around Rochester, enjoying the job security and my circle of friends, or pack up and experience someplace else, essentially starting from scratch.  Various things are pulling me back and forth: my desire to be close to my family and friends, hike the adirondack 46, but also travel, experience the great beyond, and land a great job.

So far I’ve decided a couple things: First, it’s time to take that road trip I’ve been wanting to.  I will be driving across the country after this summer to see a good chunk of the good ol’ USA. If anyone else has had this in mind, let me know and I’ll take you along.  It’ll be real open-ended, off-the-cuff, and completely free of time constraints. Second, I’m not going to be living in this house anymore.  It’s just too damn messy, my room is the size of a closet, and it way too closely resembles the Forman house on That 70’s Show.  So that’s where I stand.  As I’ve said before, the future is bright…almost blindingly so.

No, I didn’t forget about the blog.  Just haven’t had much to post.  Over the past weekend I was in Michigan to attend my cousin’s wedding.  It was great; I met my folks there as well as a lot of relatives I hadn’t seen in awhile.  The wedding itself was short but sweet, and the rest of the weekend a lot of fun. 

A few weeks ago I promised to post some of the stuff I had been working on in the spring.  I had to do a bit of cleaning up and refactoring with my checkers project which took longer than I had thought.  I also included scripts for starting the server.  Everything can be found here, including source and executables for both Mac and PC. 

I also posted my astronomy poster here.  It is the culmination of ten weeks of work, maybe 80% of which was spent processing over 300 astronomical images to create the four displayed on the poster.  The resolution is pretty poor due to the compression of the images in the telescope’s camera, but I think they’re still pretty interesting.  You may want to download the file rather than viewing it in a browser, because it’s pretty big.

The summer’s going pretty well thus far.  I will be doing some hiking in the near future and will be working on some projects (reformatting the PC…) so stay posted!

Oh, and if anyone has pictures from the wedding, please send them my way!  Maybe I can even host them online somewhere. 

I spent most of the evening tonight working on an old panorama photo I started compiling last fall after a trip into the ‘daks.  It is a combination of eight images, comprising the most fantastic view I have experienced on a high peak (from the knife-edge summit of Dix).  Here it is in its full uncompressed glory, and again in an easier-to-handle version.

Foolishly, I used the camera’s auto settings to capture the images, so there are significant portions that were washed out, and huge exposure differences throughout.  However, I think the image is still pretty good.  Yeah, it could be better: give it a shot if you’re a photoshop whiz, for I’m not.

I have graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Well, almost.  As part of my degree, I need four quarters of co-op experience, and as of now I only have three.  After the summer this will have been taken care of, and my degree will be in the mail.

Commencement was overall a satisfying experience.  Hardly any of the CS students showed up for the actual commencement ceremony, but of course everyone was there for the actual graduation ceremony (y’know, the one where they hand you your degree).  The speaker, Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway among many other things), delivered an excellent message focusing on technology and how it can be used to aid people.  We, as degree-holding students in a technical field, are empowered with the knowledge necessary to make a difference in the world, and should strive to do so.  He, of course, said it more eloquently, but the message was largely the same: Use your degree as a means to give back to society, not just to earn a hefty paycheck and accumulate "stuff."

Mom and Dad came up for the ceremonies and we all had a great weekend together.  On sunday I headed back to Lowville to embark on a journey into the wilderness: a thru-hike of a portion of the Northville-Placid Trail, specifically the section between Long Lake and Lake Placid.  We encountered pretty rotten weather along with an army of mosquitoes, but it was still a blast.  Nothing can keep me from enjoying the wilderness, not even a rash of bug bites reminiscent of a chicken pox victim.

So tomorrow, I guess, is the start of my work life.  It feels kind of strange saying that, for I know that there will be plenty of activities distracting me from such work in the near future.  The future is bright, and I’m looking forward to an awesome summer.

Oh, and today’s my birthday.  Happy two-two to me!