[travel] Very Bad Computer

I have spent lots of time extolling the virtues of my EEE PC. Now I'm going to take a giant dump on it.

First off, I somewhat anal-retentively keep all my data in at least two places in case of theft, damage, or whatever other potential calamity I can imagine. My data primarily consists of my 9900 pictures – my near-weightless replacement for 4 1/2 months of souvenirs, my bank of recorded memories that will aid me to recall minute details of the trip years after it ends. This 40gb wad of data is too big to be uploaded to some online location overnight, especially on crappy hostel DSL connections. As a result, I juggle the data between my camera, my 20gb computer hard drive, my 80gb iPod, my 4gb USB drive, and various DVD backups. Subsets of this data wad are sitting in a pile of DVDs in San Francisco, a friend's iPod in Palo Alto, and a friend's external hard drive in Leuven, Belgium.

Anyway, so I'm doing some routine file transfers, and I need to delete a directory containing a few days worth of photos after copying it over to the iPod. However, something in the Eee's customized KDE-flavored Linux file manager decided that what I really meant to do was to delete the parent directory, the directory containing all of my photos. (There is a safer move-to-trash option, but since the hard drive is almost full, I can save a step by just directly deleting the files) As the little progress bar slowly ground along surrounded by a curiously blank window, I suspected something was up and then saw in horror that entire weeks' worth of photos were vanishing. By the time I had cancelled it most of my pictures were gone. Generally you expect the fundamentals of, say, a file manager, to be bug free, but this is not the case with the Eee PC. I spent the next hour with equipment sprawled across a train station bench, copying the backups back from the ipod, USB drive, and camera until all my data was safely in two places again.

So yeah, don't be like that tourist who misplaced her camera's memory card. BACK IT UP! (your data, not your ass, though if you want you can do that too...)

[travel] Extreme Interlaken Pt 1: Canyoning

In Interlaken, I blew a very substantial allocation of cash on several extreme activities, but I worked to get the most from my money by choosing three fairly orthogonal experiences. They were:

1.Canyoning
2.Bungee Jumping
3.Hang gliding

First, I'm going to talk about canyoning:

Canyoning is the act of following a river down a canyon by whatever means possible.  It was the most dangerous of the three activities, the most hands-on, and the longest. I chose the special advanced course, which warned that I would have to be very physically fit and fearless. I had only done canyoning once before in Arroyo Seco with some friends a couple of years back. During that trip, I had enjoyed the challenge of having to perform under fear -- doing difficult jumps into a watery minefield filled with various underwater rocks.

I was the oldest person in the group by probably around 6 or 7 years. My all-male compatriots primarily consisted of fresh graduates from a couple of colleges in Nebrasks and Florida on a parental-sponsored Europe trip. They had the standard macho guy thing going on, with rapport-building conversation topics centered on strip clubs, drinking, sports, and MTV-Jackass style jokes, but it was interesting to watch the nuances of it. For example, it became clear that most of the group was actually scared by a lot of the stuff we were doing, and that much of the bravado was actually the male version of the caring support network that groups of women tend to more visibly form. I managed to sort of fit in and then share some of my favorite memes about how people should allocate their expenditures on experiences and acquiring free time instead of buying more stuff in order to achieve a more lasting happiness. They were receptive.

The actual canyoning activity was centered around a steep ravine carved by a glacial mountain river. The river water is periodically filled with silt from glacial runoff, so it quickly (geologically speaking) grinds deep holes in the mountain. The combination of this grinding water and hard unbroken rock has led to the formation of steep natural waterslides, many of which are exactly the right size for a person to go down. Some of the slides came with instructions like “Keep your arms crossed in front of your face because this slide tends to want to turn you around and try to bash your face against that rock over there.” A couple of slides were so intense and so fast that I ended up not being able to see anything due to water in my eyes.

There were also a lot of jumps into the water. At up to 40ft high, these jumps were substantially higher than any jumps I had done before, and I was looking forward to facing them and having to overcome my fear. However, the guides were experienced in human psychology and needed to keep the group moving, so they gave everyone a countdown for each jump. It basically didn't give you any time to be scared, forcing you to skip any deliberation and meet a very rapid deadline.

Onee of the more intense activities was a combination jump-slide where you had to jump across a small ravine, turn in midair, inelastically collide with a nearby vertical rock face, and then slide down it about 15ft into the water. There was also a Matrix wall, which was sloped 45 degrees and curved. We were challenged to run as far as we could on the wall before falling into the water below.

Overall the experience was very impressive, and I was happy I was able to et a sense for the level of canyoning you can do when accompanied by advanced guides in a less sue-happy country than the US.

Here's the website (with video) of this canyoning course:

http://www.alpinraft.ch/sites/eng/activities/canyoning.html  (You have to click on Chli Schliere to get the video of the advanced course I did to play.)