rebelpeon.com

Blog

  • Another Weekend

    Imagine that, another weekend has passed, and it’s time to talk about climbing! 

    This was the first weekend Colleen and I have actually been able to get down to Jackson for the entire weekend.  It was nice and warm and sunny, etc.  It was just about perfect for a good climbing weekend.  A lil’ warm, but good times, nonetheless.  We headed down Friday after work, stopped for a decent dinner on the way down, then setup camp around 9:30.  We ended up taking off a lil’ later then we hoped because neither of us was really packed for leaving at 5. 

    James and Bill met us down there Saturday at aroun 9.  We were already on the rock when they arrived.  We started on an easy 5.7 (Jimmy’s Chicken Shack).  Both Colleen and I led it for warmup.  Then I moved on and setup a top rope on the new 5.9 next to it.  This route only had 4 bolts on the route, not including the anchors (Jimmy’s, which is the same height, and easier, has 6).  Both the beginning and the end were quite runout (large distance between the bolts, so there’s little protection if you fall).  As James put it, it was ballsy.  What really was great about the route, was the guy that bolted it (Dave), was climbing with us.  Dave’s put up a ton of routes throughout Jackson.  He’s a “local” around the area because of the amount of time he’s there.  Being retired really helps that for him too, since he arrived on Thursday, and was staying later then Colleen and I were.  I then top roped the 5.10b (Venom) next to the 5.9.  To redpoint (lead a climb clean on the 2nd or more try up) Venom is one of my goals of the summer. 

    We then moved on the Express Checkout (10a) which I onsited (lead it clean the first time up).  After that I cleaned (removed the gear from a route) Wishbone (11 something).  Wishbone was a little above my ability in a few spots.  I wasn’t a fan of it.  James and Bill then went on to do some trad climbing.  Needless to say, I wasn’t about to do any of that, but I did do the dihedral (just an example) that was part of the trad route called Chit Chat. 

    James and Bill headed out that night, but Colleen and I stayed the night to put in some climbing Sunday.  She didn’t want to stay very long, so that we could do some stuff later in the day.  So, I decided we should go to the other side of the gorge, and hit up some easier routes that I had done before.  Once again Colleen only led one route, because she gets scared so easily.  That’s ok though, because I feel more than comfortable leading.  She led a very short and easy 5.8, and that was it.  I then led a slabby 5.8 and setup top rope for Colleen.  Mmm, I love the slab.  I then lead (very poorly) another 5.8.  It was my first outdoor fall, and thankfully Colleen had it under control.  I fell going to the second bolt, and what really made it bad was that I fell while I was pretty much at the second bolt.  This means, when I fell, I fell the twice the distance between the first and second bolt, plus whatever the distance the rope stretches.  What makes this fall even more scarier, is that you can easily crater (hit the ground) if you fall going to the second bolt, and the ground where you’d fall has a large boulder waiting for you.  Like I said, Colleen had it under control though, so I was fine minus a little burn on my left boob where it rubbed against the rock as I fell.

    And then we headed back to camp, packed up the tent, and headed home.

    Hopefully we’ll get the film developed sometime before the turn of the century, and I’ll post them here.

    **Update** Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that I somehow got poison ivy on my face, ear, forehead, etc.  Always fun.  Thankfully it’s not nearly as bad as I’ve had, otherwise, I’d be going insane right now.

  • It’s About Time

    Well, I finally bought a new wireless router.  I’ve been dealing with this stupid US Robotics wireless router, pos for too long.  So, hopefully after this comes in, the website will be up more, then, well, it is now.  Hopefully I won’t have to restart it daily like the one I do now.  On a good note, it will be fun to destroy the thing.  I definitely know why I see it so cheap after rebates, maybe it’s because it’s a piece of junk that doesn’t work 75% of the time.  Just take a look at other people’s reviews on Amazon.com.  I’m definitely not the only person that’s had problems with it.  Hell, even Nick has had nothing but problems with his.  I can’t wait.

  • A New Console Challenge

    After playing with the Xbox awhile, I think it’s time to move on.  Now, I’m not saying I don’t enjoy my xbox, but the whole “modding” fun of it has definitely worn off.  Now it’s time to move onto a new challenge: the Gamecube.

    The gamecube is more of a challenge for a number of different reasons.  First of all, there’s no built in NIC, you have to go purchase the broadband adapter (bba).  Secondly, the bba is limited to speads of 27Mbps.  Thirdly, there’s no harddrive that can have software loaded onto it.  And finally, in order to get into the gamecube you have to own Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2 (pso), which is a very hard game to find.

    Now, to get this to work, you load up PSO, and then on the pc you load up the streaming software (psoload, or psul).  Then, you attempt to connect to one of sega’s online servers, but you actually put your pc’s ip address as the server ip.  That way, pso is fooled into thinking it should be getting data from your pc.  Now, the pc software streams the game image to your gamecube.  Sounds easy enough in theory, but it’s definitely hit or miss right now.  What also makes it difficult is that there is practically no community what-so-ever that keeps software updated, or tries new things.  It’s as if when 2004 came around, all developement stopped.

    What makes this even more funny is that I don’t even have a gamecube yet.  I’m working with Aaron Binford and his newly acquired gamecube to all the testing and whatnot.  So far we’ve had great success, but we’re stuck on a couple of games, notably Luigi’s Mansion, which is a game both of us want.  I’ll keep everyone updated because I know YOU want to know 🙂

  • Grillin’ Like A Villain

    This weekend I bought a grill.  It’s a Weber charcoal grill.  It will be more than adequate for Colleen’s and my needs.  To celebrate the purchase of the grill, we had a cook-out of sorts.  For those of you that were hear on Saturday, you probably remember how crappy of a day it was.  That didn’t stop us though, oh no!  We had a few friends over (invited more than actually came over), had some good brats and hotdogs, then went out to Boltini’s.  I’ve never been there before, and I was very impressed.  The prices weren’t that bad, and I didn’t feel like I was surrounded by little kids, as is the case whenever I go to campus bars anymore.

  • Funny

    I want to send a big shoutout to Renice for her great Bush stickers.  I think we should plaster the quad (and everything else for that matter)! 🙂

  • The weekend

    Well, it’s the weekend again, and that means, climbing!!  I’m kinda disappointed that I didn’t head down there early this morning, but I couldn’t find anyone to go with me 🙁  What made it even worse, people were going to Upper Limits today instead of heading down South.  Crazy people.  However, I’m heading down tonight with a 4 other people, so we’ll be climbing hard all tomorrow. 

    Now, I’ve been hearing from some of you, Nick, that when I talk about climbing I leave some of you in the dust; especially with some of the terms I use.  Well, this next section is for you!  I’m going to go through some of the terms I’ve been using so there won’t be as much confusion.  If there’s something else you want me to explain better, feel free to shout out in the comments.

  • Bouldering

      Bouldering is the most basic of climbing.  It is when you find a rock, slap on your shoes, and just start climbing on it.  Normally you don’t climb high, instead you traverse (climb horizontally) or do specific routes.  Bouldering is a great way to learn technique and work on endurance.  It is also the most simple form.

  • Sport

      Sport climbing is what I do when I’m climbing vertically.  Sport climbing is based on permantent bolts on the rock or wall.  Now depending on the length of the route, there are around 8 bolts going up the route, and then at the top there are usually 2 bolts at the top of the route so you can create an anchor.  Now, there are two ways to do sport climbing, leading and top roping.
      Top roping is where a rope is already on the route, and is run through an anchor at the top of the route.  When you go to a climbing gym, this is what you see.  Both ends of the rope are at the bottom of the route, and the middle of it is at the top.  On one end of the rope is the climber, on the other end is the belayer.  The belayer is the one who prevents the climber from falling by using a belay device.  As you can see from the article, there are many types of belay devices, and since rei did such a good job of going through the different types, I’m not going to 🙂  The climber then climbs to the top of the route and the the belayer takes rope in as the climber climbs higher so the fall isn’t as bad.  Then, once the climber reaches the top the belayer slowly lowers the climber down.  Very easy, and is what beginners do all the time in the gym.

      However, if you go outside, there aren’t ropes just hanging on the rock (unless someone was really dumb).  If your party has some beginners in it, you want to setup some top ropes so that they can climb some routes.  Now, climbing a route so you can setup a top rope, is called leading.  With leading, both ends of the rope are again at the bottom and the climber ties into one end, but the belayer ties in right behind the climber.  Now, instead of taking rope in the belayer feeds rope out as the climber climbs.  As the climber climbs, he uses quickdraws and clips one end of the quickdraw (the non-bent gate end) onto the bolt, and the other end onto the rope.  This prevents the climber from taking huge falls by not clipping in at all.  However, falls taken while leading (sometimes called whippers) are always going to be further than if you were top roping, unless your belayer while top roping is doing something wrong.  When the climber reaches the top of the route, he can either create an anchor and setup a top rope, have the belayer lower him down and clean the route (remove the quickdraws) on the way down, or rappell down and clean the route. 

  • Traditional

      Traditional (trad) climbing is our 3rd and final type of climbing.  Trad climbing is similar to lead climbing, however there are no permanent bolts to clip into.  Instead, you essentially put your own bolts in as you climb.  This is done by using active and passive protection.  Active protection is made up of cams, which are active, in that they move mechanically.  And passive protection is made up of nuts and other things that have no mechanical movement.  Basically what you do with active and passive protection, is you wedge and work them into gaps in the rock to create your anchor.  you then clip into the webbing connected to the protection.  I personally haven’t done any trad climbing, nor have I seen anyone do any.  However, I should this weekend, so if there’s anything I’m missing, I’ll update this area. 

    I hope that clears things up for you guys, and like I said earlier, if there’s something I haven’t mentioned or talked about that you want more info about, let me know in the comments section.

  • More Downtime

    I doubt any of you can read this as I’m posting it because Insight seems to be having a few problems.  As of right now, I can ping their gateway, but that’s about it.  I can’t even hit their dhcp server, nor dns servers.  Therefore, I can’t get anywhere out on the internet.  Hopefully they have this fixed soon.  I haven’t called in yet, but I most likely will.  I don’t even know if others can see my website or not because I can’t get out to see in. 

    Then there was the problems yesterday.  Well, I tried to get on my wireless connection yesterday but neither of my laptops were able to find it.  Now, usually what happens is that the laptops find the wireless connections, but can’t get on the internet (just local traffic).  However, yesterday, they weren’t even able to connect wirelessly to anything.  So, I soft restarted my router from the web interface, and still nothing.  I enabled SSID broadcasting, still nothing.  I hard restarted it and that’s where everything went badly.  After I hard restarted it, it started restarting itself every minute or so.  Now, I couldn’t log in nor get on the internet from any of my wired computers either.  I looked at the router, and noticed that the power, status, and wan lights were amber instead of green.  Well, that’s when James came over and we all headed to Upper Limits.  So, it sat like that until I got home at 6ish.  I then setup my server to act as a router.  It was working fine last night…and now it’s not again.  Grrr

    **Update**  All is fixed.  Network connection has been restored.

  • Prince

    Awww yeah, that’s right, I went to Prince last night at the Assembly Hall.  Now, I know you’re all thinking, “Why would he spend $50/ticket to go?”  All I have to say is that I got my 6 tickets for free from work.  Apparantly the show wasn’t sold out, so the athletics dept got a huge stack of tickets.  It was actually pretty fun too.  The short man really put on a show.  I don’t think the audio was setup properly, but that could be because of where our seats were.  We were in the nosebleed section, C26, row 13.  Colleen and I went, and then she invited a couple of her friends.  I tried to get Bree to go, but apparantly she’s too good for that kind of thing.

    He invited people up on stage with him near the end to dance, and a few got to sing a few lines.  Talk about a once in a lifetime experience for those people.  The lighting was pretty good, but the sound, well, like I said earlier, wasn’t right where we were sitting.  The bass was turned up WAY to far.  The low rumble made it hard, if not impossible to hear him singing.  Also, as with the case with all concerts, it was too loud.  I wish artists and concert directors would get that through their heads.  Louder does not equal better.  Oh well, like I said, still a good time.

  • More Updates

    Well, there appears to be a new firmware for my totally crappy router (about time).  It apparantly gives a speed boost from 108Mbps to 125Mbps.  I haven’t looked at the change log for it yet, but it’d be nice if it’d support WPA now too.  Especially since that was promised on the box.  So, between the hours of 12PM and 1PM CST today, there may be some downtime.  Do not be alarmed, it shouldn’t be for more than a few minutes.

  • Better RSS Feed

    Wow, today is just website maintenance day or something.  I fixed up my xml feed.  Now it actually has the same formatting as the website, has links, etc, plus it shows how many comments there are.  Also, for those of you that view my site via rss, all the old links probably won’t work for you because I moved around the file archives, and, well, certain rss aggregators don’t really like to update items they already have (SharpReader is one such aggregator).