Kate and I go backpacking at least once a month. We tell our friends and colleagues this and I sense that they think we are hardcore and competent. The truth is that we are pretty good at backpacking, meaning we pack enough food and water to stay alive. However our ability to setup camp is at times a trying affair usually because it is dark by the time we make it to camp. In this case we decided to have a large tarp for our campsite.
As you can see in the following video this is the first time we have attempted to hang a tarp…

Playin around with new camera. The clips timed out to this great Aphex Twin song by random chance.

Appreciate any and all feedback, just learning a new tool at the moment.

This was all done on a Canon 60d with the 18-135 EF-S kit lens purchased from Foto Folio on 7th Ave and Camelback. Shot at midday on August 22nd in like 130 degree heat. Its actually all shot at 720p 60fps as I was going to do some slow motion editing but forgot (maybe I will update but dont count on it).

I thought the water shots were pretty good although I kept playing with the focus too damn much. Getting a proper film rig setup will help reduce this but I am not ready to spend more cash just yet. They say using the telephoto zoom is cheating but in 120 degrees I am all about expediency.

More on the way.

General Halfacat's Chicken

Getting it on till the break of dawn

So we have a new crack tasty recipe that will be getting a lot of rotation on the homefront: General Halfacat’s Chicken. It’s a blantant rip off of this recipe from famed and noted blogger

STEPHANIE O’DEA My name is Stephanie and I have an unnatural obsession with my slow cooker’s Slow Cooker General Tso’s Chicken Recipe

. I’m okay with this because I took the Garlic called for (4 garlic cloves, minced) and increased it X6 by taking the jar of pre minced Garlic and turned it upside down. This allowed me to create an armor coating of garlic all over the Chicken. In essence preparing the carcased warrior one last battle for dignity by becoming my delicious dinner.

Ingredients

If you clicked on the link to the fancy Blogspot™ website above you saw her recipe. I basically took that as my framework and kicked it in the balls:

• 1.5 Cups of Garlic minced
• 3 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
• 2 teaspoons of Ginger dried
• 2 Tablespoons Soy Sauce (Sprouts has good stuff for cheap, get the big bottle)
• 2 teaspoons of Chinese Five Spice
• 1 Chicken (Frys had em for $0.67 per pound, thats quality)
• 1 Frozen Bag of Veggies (Stir fry veggies is a racist thing to say)

Mix up the first 5 ingredients above (thats why I wrote them in that order, more recipes should follow this standard) in a mixing bowl. Take the Chicken out of the plastic and rinse it out. Its a corpse so there is shit on it that you don’t wanna feel slithering down your throat while you fake a smile at your spouse. Put the Chicken in the mixing bowl and make it happy with the special Garlic happy sauce you made in the first sentence of this paragraph. Now place the Chicken into your Crock Pot/Slow Cooker/Crack Maker and pour the remaining happy sauce onto the Chicken. Place the lid on the cooker, set it to low and leave it alone for 5 hours. Add the veggies and kick that shit up to high for 1 more hour. Let sit for a bit, peel the meat of the bones, add to quinoa or something and the veggies and try not to eat it all by yourself. There should be 6 to 8 meals there and for stoners 4.

Kate and I managed to take two dinners to eat it all but the temptation was there to eat everything the first night.

THis probably isnt going to be the most productive way to get this feature installed, but why should I help Google make a better product, easily anyway?

I recently went totally nerd overboard after reading this Lifehacker post on Creating a Unified Communications Center with Google Voice. It was one of those lazy days at work and I felt like a nice big not-quite-productive project was in order so I jumped in head first and created a Google Apps mailbox that has my personal and work emails, my various Social Network messages, my text/SMS messages, and my voice Mail as email with both audio and transcribed attachments. I know right, total heaping pile of the dork.

Anyway one of the key components to lighting this candle is a Google Mail Labs add-on called Multiple inboxes. It lets you make your Inbox in Google Mail look like something from Star-Trek (the new cool and sexy one, not the one with herpes). The only problem is that it is not fully malleable to what I want it to do (damn you genius programmer for not being able to read my mind of thoughts I haven’t had yet!). I am limited to only having 5 boxes and rearranging them requires copy and paste. It would be awesomer if I could have 999 boxes and rearranging them was capable via drag and drop. Please fix ASAP!

Now I have to get back to Infinity Blade and World of Goo. Go click on some expensive Adwords Ads mesothelioma.

Multiple Inboxes in GMAIL

I stole the basic pipe and expanded its search results a bit. Enjoy

The AZ Republic has come out with its endorsements for the 2010 Arizona Elections. If you have not registered to vote AND elected to receive mail in ballots for life I suggest you Register To Vote at the Service Arizona website now. Even if we don’t agree on who should be elected I would prefer that you at least exercise the one right in Arizona that does make everyone an equal.

Here are the AZ Republics Endorsements for the 2010 Arizona Elections that I agree with:
AZ Senate: Rodney Glassman
Rodney is the former vice-mayor of Tucson and has gotten everyones attention with his energy and gameplan. He is focused, young, smart, and intelligent. Four things the Dems and the US all need right now.

A lawyer and JAG officer in the Air Force, Glassman served on the staff of Rep. Raúl Grijalva. He has served on the boards of an astonishing number of civic organizations – a mark of both dedication and ambition.

This guy is pretty smart too: former Ward 2 Tucson City Councilmember (2 years), Ph.D. (Arid Land Studies) and J.D. from U of A, M.B.A. and M.P.A. from the U of A Eller College of Management, B.S. (Agricultural Economics) from U of A

AZ Attorney General – Felecia Rotellini
Felicia is a prosecutor who appears well versed with the law and is unafraid of taking on big dogs and making them pay for their fuckups:

As superintendent of the Arizona Department of Financial Institutions, she slapped $5 million in fees and fines on Western Union for violating laws meant to cut off funds to Mexican cartels. In 1999, she was lead litigator in the successful case against accounting giant Arthur Andersen for failing to protect investors from the Baptist Foundation fraud.

Pretty cool stuff if you have an Android phone. This is a really neat feature for an already badass product.

GPS on Youtube with Trimble on Android

Well I have some good news! in Trimble Outdoors 4.1.0, which will be launching soon on Android, we are going to support full integration with YouTube directly from the handset! There will be a new setting in Trimble Outdoors that allows you to enter a YouTube username and password, and when you do this, your videos will be directly uploaded to YouTube when your trip is uploaded. Of course your videos will still show up in your trip\'s Media Gallery, and on the map on where you recorded them on trimbleoutdoors.com. The big difference is that when you view them, you will get the lightning fast experience that you have become accustom to thanks to the magic of YouTube.

via The Trimble Outdoors Insider Blog: Coming Soon: Trimble Outdoors 4.1.0.

Rogue Columnist: Second time around?.

Solution ideas:

Repeal SB 1070.

Elect Terry Goddard governor.

Throw out the Kook majority in the Legislature.

Raise taxes on the rich and, if the Growth Machine ever revives, enact a real-estate transfer tax and a tax on long commutes.

Stop all residential development outside existing urban footprints (and the extravagant planning maps of Buckeye, Surprise, Maricopa, et al, are not existing footprints). For one thing, there’s not enough water.

Establish a real state commerce department employing best practices to attract high-wage jobs.

Build out the Phoenix Biosciences Campus on a speedy schedule to include a hospital, large med school, pharmacy school and private-sector research facilities. Add a full-court press to lure biomed manufacturing from California.

Eliminate GPEC. Let the cities go their own ways.

Fund the public schools and universities to compete at top levels.

Establish real infill incentives along the light-rail line.

Put a premium on shade, including enhancing and reclaiming the shady oases in central Phoenix.

Reform the tax structure so cities aren’t so dependent on sales taxes.

Create a climate-change emergency plan now and begin acting by, for example, building intercity rail, commuter rail, light rail, streetcars and an integrated, easy-to-use transit system.

Sierra Club Arizona Legislature 2010 Environment Report Card – PDF

Give this a read if you care about doing anything outside of a hermetically sealed room with filtered and chemically treated water. If you believe in science and care about what comes next these are the issues you need to keep at the forefront. This is long term planning for the place we live. If we dont have drinking water there is no point.

Here is how the officials in my area did on the Sierra Club Arizona Legislature 2010 Environmental Report Card:

• Senator Ken Cheuvront (AZ) – Biography – Email - Website - A
• Senator Barbara Leff (AZ)- Biography – Email - Website - F
• Representative Kyrsten Sinema (AZ)- Biography - Email - Website - A
• Representative Eric Meyer (AZ)- Biography - Email - Website - A
• Representative David M. Lujan (AZ)- Biography - Email - Website - A
• Representative Adam Driggs (AZ)- Biography - Email - Website - F

• Governor Janice Kay ‘Jan’ Brewer (AZ)- Biography - Email - Website - F

Way to go Ken Cheuvront for most improved!

Senator Ken Cheuvront (D-15) improved from a “D” on the 2009 report card to an “A” on the 2010 report card. Senator Cheuvront helped point out the silliness of the light bulb bill and stood up for parks and clean water. His grade improved considerably this session, because he missed very few votes. We appreciate his support for environmental protection over the years as leaves the legislature after 16 years of service.