disjoint thoughts

Tail rotor blade from a Sikorsky H-34 or weapon used against the zombie uprising?

Want a CHEAP ipod touch case? Too lazy to order a real case online? Are you just plain crazy? Well follow these easy steps to create a great ghetto ipod touch case…

1. Buy a pack of Dentyne ice gum.
2. Chew the gum, all of it.

3. Remove plastic.
4. Slide ipod into your brand new Dentyne ice iPod Touch case.

5. (OPTIONAL) Cut hole into case so you can control music without removing touch from its case.

6. …
7. Profit?

Pretty sweet case, huh? Huh? I rate it a solid 2 out of 10.

About a month ago Erin convinced me to do Totem Pole with her. It’s a classic Queen Creek route that goes up a free standing spire for about 150ft. Its summit is about the size of a small couch. The climb is good, the summit is pretty damn sweet, and there’s nothing quite like climbing hard, giant, phallic objects.

My friend Jason asked me for beta on the route, and I thought I’d repost what I gave him here:

1st pitch: throw a cam in as your first piece. I think I used the red link cam, so probably a #2 or #3 camalot would work. 5.9 climbing up until the 3rd bolt. Right at the 3rd bolt is the crux of the 1st pitch. There’s a chalked to hell sloper right next to the bolt that you want to use, but don’t. Climb it like an arete with your arms stretched WAY out and work your feet up high. Stand up, and hit a decent ledge. I fell here once trying to dyno off the sloper, the bolt completely protects you. The rest of the pitch is probably 5.8ish.

2nd pitch: walk up a low angle ramp and clip the first bolt. Right after the first bolt there’s maybe 3 or 4 balancy moves on small ledges and crimps. Marty thinks this is the crux of the climb, I was able to sail through it after hanging on the bolt and studying it for a minute. Easier climbing through bolts 2 and 3. After the third bolt you hit the crux of the entire climb. You hit a ledge about 5 feet above the 3rd (and last) bolt, after that there’s what looks like a crack going up to the top. The crack is actually a seam that can only be used to lay back on. Unfortunately I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to lay back on it. I felt the feet just weren’t good enough. I ended up crimping on a shallow mono with my right, gastoning between that and the seam, and bumping my right up to the only good face hold in the section. After you do that you can reach up to a spot in the crack that you can jam a finger or two, then throw yourself at the ledge above and the top.

That section of climbing is pretty scary and insecure. I even scared the shit outta Erin. At that point you’re probably 7 feet from the last bolt. The fall would probably be completely clean though. I put in a 00 c3 a few feet above the bolt and hung on that before I made my attempt. If you bring some small nuts (BD 4-6ish probably), you can place a piece another foot or two higher.

You can get off in a single rap if you bring a 70m, so don’t worry about bringing two ropes. Maybe bring a little webbing to backup the old shit that’s at the top. Good luck!

Check out the rest of my photos from our climb here.

Sunday before last I spent an afternoon bouldering and sport climbing over at the Mine Area of Queen Creek. Over the past few months RCC has begun to restrict access to some of the areas of Queen Creek they own. Here’s a little update on the situation:

The road before the old parking area now has keep out signs…

… and the old parking area itself now has a fence with razor wire, yikes!

It’s not all bad news though. They’ve created a new parking area next to the road. There’s a new trail that someone has cleared from there, up the wash, and to the old trail.

Here’s my latest creation of humorous climbing apparel:

You can get your own via cafepress.

I have another design I’m working on. More of a trad climbing shirt, with sexual innuendo Look for that to show up in the next few weeks.

I love my red chili spirits. They perform very well, and I can wear them all day on a multi-pitch without worrying about comfort. The only problem I had with them was in the toe.

The problem
For some reason, red chili decided to put a sort of toe liner in the spirit. I’ve yet to see anything like this in any other shoe, including other red chili’s. The liner feels like its made of some sort of fast wicking fabric (like many shirts are) probably in an attempt to keep the toe area from getting sweaty and slick. This sounds like a good idea. The toe box of climbing shoes tend to be the hottest area with the least breathability because of the extra rubber that goes over the TOP of the toes to allow for better toe hooking.

It may have been a good idea on paper, but in reality the liner just makes things worse. When your feet sweat (which happens to me a lot here in Arizona), the liner acts like a sock around your toes. The sock just acts as another surface that you have to worry about slowly slipping as you try to keep your toe on a tiny crip. I found myself curling in my toes and lifting up my heel in desperate tempts to keep my toe in place.

The solution
Instead of ditching the spirit and finding another shoe, I decided to fix the problem: I removed the toe liner. The result was almost perfect. The toe stills feels a little sloppy when wet, but nowhere near as bad as it was before.

How-to
Disclaimer! If you mess up your shoes doing this, don’t blame me. Proceed at your own risk!

Here’s what you need to do this to your spirits: sharp scissors and pliers. The general idea is to cut the toe liner as close to where it is stitched to the shoe as possible, then rip out the pieces with the pliers.

The liner is sewn only partially to the top and sides of the shoe, so start by cutting the liner off in those areas. Once you have this done, the liner should flop down to the bottom of the shoe. The next step is to cut the liner along the bottom stitching. The best technique I found was to make small cuts along the stitching and rip/tear the liner out with the pliers. Here’s a pic of the bottom stitching:

This is a pretty slow process. Once you have the majority of the liner out you probably will need to go back and do some cleanup. I was working with size 6 shoes, obviously larger shoes will be easier to work with and smaller shoes maybe impossible. Here’s the left overs from the liner:

For me, the result of doing this little mod was amazing. It went from contemplating getting new shoes to using my spirits for all of my outdoor climbing. However, if you don’t experience any of the problems I described then this modification isn’t for you.

The iPod Touch is a sexy piece of technology. Hell, it better be sexy after I sold my left nut to buy one. By far the best aspect of this iPod is the fact that it has an amazing screen.

From the moment I got my iTouch, I worried about scratching up that pretty little screen. I even rearranged the contents of my pockets so I wouldn’t have to worry about keys putting nasty little marks into the glass. The next logical step was getting some sort of case or screen protector. I choose to go with just the simple screen protector over the case. Full cases are too bulky for my taste, and take away from the form factor that the iPod offers.

After a little googling around, I picked up the “Apple Ipod Touch Premium Ultra- Clear Reusable LCD Screen & Body Protector with Lint Cleaning Cloth” off Amazon for a grand total of $8.97. The shipping was actually more than the protector itself, so I wasn’t expecting anything of great quality.

When I receiving the product, I wasn’t surprised or impressed. “100% Japan MATERIAL” was plastered across the front of the packaging. That’s… great… I’m sure this Japanese plastic is much better than regular plastic. Maybe I should make a shirt for myself that says “50% Japan MATERIAL”. Yeh… that’ll get me chicks like crazy.

Despite the funky packaging. I went ahead and applied the screen protector on my Touch. The installation was pretty much cake. Remove the plastic backing (like you would from a sticker) and plop the thing onto the screen. The fit was almost perfect. So perfect in fact that it was a little difficult to get it to sit directly on the screen without pushing up against the black molding. I ended up not being able to get the protector to sit completely flat at the bottom of the screen, which resulted in a little air bubble which wouldn’t go away.

So how well does it work? Surprisingly well. The protector itself is super thin, clear, hard plastic. It is actually hard to tell that it’s there. The screen looked no different before/after, no lost in color or brightness. The touch sensitivity didn’t even seem to degrade at all. The feel of the screen wasn’t quite as smooth. This is only really noticed while dragging your finger across the screen (such as unlocking).

This thin plastic shield does its advertised job. It does keep the Touch’s screen from being scratch directly. However, after six weeks of use the plastic itself has become way more scratched than the unprotected screen would have. This makes me question the purpose of such a product. If the result is I’m still starring at a screen that’s scratched, then is it really worth the trouble?

The only other issue I had, is the plastic seemed to slowly slide toward the bottom of the ipod. After a month, it had migrated maybe a millimeter. It might have something to do with the way I use the Touch or maybe the way I put it into my pocket head first, I’m not sure. But the result of this one millimeter of travel was the small bubble on the bottom edge of the screen growing much larger to the point where I decided to try to remove the plastic and reapply it. Not a good idea. The adhesive works so well that I had difficulties removing the protector. Once I did get it off and repositioned, it didn’t really sit right in a few places. I think I might have bent/creased the plastic on removal.

Overall I’m satisfied with what I got. For the cost, I was expecting much less. I would give this particular iPod Touch screen protector a 7 out of 10. The only places it loses points is in the ease of scratching the plastic, and the fact that the protector slowly moved off center over time.

The the past few weekends have been filled with deary rain for me. Three weeks ago we were rained out in Cochise Stronghold. The week after, it rained Friday and Saturday. Not wanting to let the rain get me down by spoiling my climbing plans, I went out and hiked my favorite rainy day hike: Peralta Trail. The trail head is located an hour or so from Phoenix (depending on where you’re coming from) on the southern edge of the Superstitions. It’s a very popular trail, with wonderful views, and a feeling of being completely in the wilderness. Here’s the reasons why I like this hike in the rain…

#1 The sound of running water is music to my ears. The trail follows and criss crosses with a wash as the trail makes it way up towards Fremont Saddle. Most of the time this wash is bone dry. When it rains it’s a completely different story. The sound of rushing water follows you through most of the hike. Rock hoping or even wading (when it rains enough) across the wash is always fun too.

#2 Waterfalls. Yes, that’s right. There’s waterfalls in the middle of the Arizona desert. You’ll see dozens of them off the ridges on either side of the trail.

#3 Hiking in the clouds is fun. It can also be disorienting. When it’s raining, the clouds like to hang low over the saddle. It’s awe inspiring to look up and see Zonerland or Weaver’s Needle partially hidden in wisps of mist.

You can check out the rest of my pics from the hike here. Unfortunately my camera somehow got set to low resolution resulting in pics that look like ass. If you really want to see them in high res, get out there and hike it yourself. It’s a great trail.

During the last weekend of July Gina, Justin and I hiked the Grand Canyon and stayed the weekend at Phantom Ranch. All day Saturday was spent fishing the Bright Angel creek for some tasty trout dinner. We ended up with six decent sized trout for dinner (most between 8 and 10 inches). All of which were caught by Justin! It became very obvious that there are plenty of fish to be caught, but only if you know what you’re doing. Here’s some tips that should help anyone wanting to fish that creek:

Bait: Spinners
The Bright Angel creek is small, shallow, and fast flowing in all the areas we explored. The deepest pools were perhaps at most 3 or 4 feet deep, and the water was moving through them very fast. I had brought meal worms as my bait of choice. Rigged on a small hook with a bobber a foot or two up, I wasn’t able to get more than a few bites here and there. I have a feeling that the water was just flowing too fast for live bait, and the fish weren’t even noticing my meal worms. I attempted to add weight to the setup and anchor it in a given place, but this only resulted in snagged lines and meal worms getting ripped from the hooks by the force of the water.

Justin initially tried using power bait, but didn’t have any luck. He later switched to using a Panther Martin spinner, and started catching fish where we had previously though there were none. He pulled fish from the pools we had tried fishing earlier, as well as the shallow, broad areas of the stream where we didn’t think there were fish at all.

Location: Upstream past the bridges or at the confluence with the Colorado
According to the ranger we talked to, the best places to fish the creek is up stream past the bridges in the “deep pools” or down stream at the confluence with the Colorado. We hiked up stream past a couple of bridges and fished the creek in that area. We never found any pools we would consider “deep”, but regardless we caught fish.

Cooking: Salt, Pepper, Lemmon
Ok, this is less important, but I thought I’d add it anyways. I prepped the fish by cleaning them, then sprinkling them with a mix of salt and pepper I had brought down in a small ziplock, and placing sliced lemons in their bellies. We cooked them by individually wrapping the fish in tin foil and cooking them in a small pan over a small camp stove. They turned out amazing.

Anyone who wants to post their email address on the Internet should be wary of spiders picking up their address and filling their inbox with spam. Here’s a little trick that hopefully keeps your email address hidden from spiders, but allows normal users view it easily.

This will actually work anywhere you can get JavaScript to run. In the case of WordPress, there’s issues getting JavaScript to run directly in a post. So what I did was created a contact page. Within the contact page I put:

If you'd like to contact me about anything at all, feel free to email
me at <span id="foo">test</span> or send me an IM on google talk.

<script language="javascript">
    //<code>

    a = ["mai", "lto", "benjamin", "lee", "smith", "gm", "ail", "com"];//
    b = a[0]+a[1]+":"+a[2]+"."+a[3]+"."+a[4]+"@"+a[5]+a[6]+"."+a[7];//
    c = a[2]+"."+a[3]+"."+a[4]+"@"+a[5]+a[6]+"."+a[7];//
    document.getElementById("foo").innerHTML = "<a href=""+b+"">"+c+"";//
    //</code>
</script>

When the page loads, the contents of the span will be replaced with my email address. My email address is pieced together from the contents of an array, which I think obfuscates my email enough such that spiders (unless they’ve started executing JavaScript) won’t be able to understand.

There are also a couple of other hacks going on here to get it to work in Wordpress. The code tags only exist to keep wordpress from touching the JavaScript syntax and escaping things like the greater than and less than characters. The code tags themselves are commented out, so that the JavaScript won’t worry about them being inside of the script tags. And at the end of every line of JavaScript there is an empty line comment, to escape anything that WordPress puts at the end of a line. If you’re not dealing with Wordpress, these things can be omitted.