This weekend is shaping up to be a busy one. The Mile High Music Festival is back for it’s second year, and once again Kim and I will be attending both days. After the prices went up a bit from last year, and the lineup didn’t appear to be as good, we had a hard time deciding if we should even go. But after I found some weekend passes for well below face value on craigslist, it was an easy decision.

The festival starts at 11:15 tomorrow morning, and I plan to be there at that time. This may be a bit excessive, but I’ve put together a spreadsheet that breaks the entire lineup into fifteen minute intervals. I added highlights to each row, to prioritize what I’d like to see at that time. Green is the highest priority, followed by yellow, orange, and then red at the bottom. I’m curious to see if this helps at all, or I end up throwing it out after the first fifteen minutes. Either way, good times are definitely in the future.

What a frustrating game of hockey last night! We had terrible officiating and couldn’t stay out of the the penalty box for the second half of the game. I didn’t have any penalties personally, but some members of our team got called three and four times. And it wasn’t just our team getting penalties, the other team was too, just not as many. I’ve never seen so many penalties called in one game before, which I told one of the refs (along with a few other things) at the end of the game.

We were dominating the game in the first half. I believe we were up 3-1 at the end of the second period. But it all went downhill from there, and we played nearly the rest of the game shorthanded. Our opponents took advantage and put in goal after goal. With just a few minutes left to play, they had taken the lead and extended it to 5-3. At that point, we were really frustrated and never got another good shot on net.

It probably didn’t help that we only had two regular defense-men at the game, and that is counting myself, who prior to this season hasn’t played defense since before high school. With this loss, we could potentially drop back into second place. I hope that we can rebound and win the next two games to take back the top spot before heading into the playoffs.

One of the last space shuttle missions ever could happen today. That is if it isn’t scrubbed like the first five launch attempts. According to the list of space shuttle launches this is the 8th last shuttle mission. The final mission is scheduled for September 16, 2010. The goal is to have the International Space Station completed at that time. The shuttle will then be retired and eventually replaced by the new Orion spacecraft.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. One of the astronauts on this mission, Commander Mark Polansky, has been posting updated on his twitter account and will continue doing so from space. This will not be the first time this has happened, as Mike Massimino also was updating his twitter account on the previous shuttle mission. I later read that the updates are not actually real time, the messages are sent down to earth where the are later posted, but it’s still pretty cool nonetheless. I will definitely be tuned to NASA TV at 6:03 PM EDT for the launch.

In other NASA news, tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. This mission placed the first men onto the surface of the moon. An amazing slide show of pictures from the mission can be seen at this link.

While Kim’s brother Chip was in town, we also went for a hike on Saturday morning/afternoon. Kim and I have been wanting to hike a 14er (mountain peak over 14,000 feet) for awhile. We figured that Chip was probably in better shape than us, so he should be able to hike this high and far despite not being as adjusted to altitude as us. I chose Mt. Bierstadt from this list of the easiest 14ers based on it being close to Denver and one of the shortest hikes listed.

We arrived at the trail-head on Guanella Pass around 10:30 and started the hike. According to the route description the hike is seven miles round-trip, so I figured we could reach the summit in an hour and a half. The hike starts off fairly flat for the first mile or so. After that it quickly picks up and gains a lot of elevation very fast. The hike was definitely tiring but not impossible. We made it to the top in around two hours.

The view from the summit was awesome! We took a nice half hour break at the top, and then decided to start heading down after that when we saw some storm clouds rolling in. The last place you’d want to be in a storm is at the top of one of the highest mountains around. The hike down also took us about two hours to complete. I was thinking it would have been faster, but the steep descent is not very easy.

I used my iPhone to track our hike, which can be viewed here. I had to update a number of the points, which appeared far off of the trail. I’m assuming that this was due to a weak GPS signal at the time of the snapshot. I may try another software package the next time we are out hiking. I already have a few other applications downloaded to my phone. Below are pictures I took along our exhausting hike.

Yesterday I went whitewater rafting for the second time this summer. Kim’s brother Chip was in town visiting and she wanted to take him out for a day of adventure. Rather than driving all the way out to the Arkansas River spots we’ve rafted twice before, we opted for a trip on Clear Creek. Not having any prior experience on the creek, we opted to take our trip with the Clear Creek Rafting Company.

Our neighbors and a friend of theirs joined us in the boat for the intermediate half day trip. According to their website, “This exciting stretch of the river is Clear Creek’s most popular trip! Continuous class III and IV rapids will thrill guests throughout the run. Surge over Nomad, power through the Phoenix Holes and take on the class IV climax, the Outer Limits.”

I will admit that it was not near as difficult as our trip through the Royal Gorge earlier this summer, but it was still a great time. There were a few exciting rapids, as noted in their quote, and we spent the rest of the time doing spins along with surfing a couple rapids. We definitely made the most of it, but I feel like we could have easily done their advanced course, something I’ll have to keep in mind for the future. Regardless of the difficulty we had a great day out on the raging water.

I received an email stating that Yahoo! will be shutting down GeoCities on October 26, 2009. That will be one sad day. I used GeoCities for years, starting sometime in high school, to host all sorts of various websites. So I need to start downloading all of my old websites from their servers so they aren’t lost forever.

First was my personal page, geocities.com/edpaff_jr. I’m pretty sure what is currently there was the very first layout of this page. Archive.org also has another version of the site from 2002, but I’m afraid that design may already be lost forever.

Then there was geocities.com/ed_paff, which I setup as I graduated high school. I set it up to try to keep our friends in touch as we all headed off to different colleges and jobs. This site hasn’t been updated since July 12, 2000, making it fairly short lived.

The Pig-Fest website was also hosted on GeoCities at one time, but the files must have already been deleted awhile back. Some various designs from the past can be seen via archive.org, so I guess it’s not permanently gone. This is how the website looked originally. Notice the constant use of frames early on in my design.

There was also a website that my brother and I made back in high school for the Moeller ice hockey team. I don’t recall the actual URL though, and I’m having a hard time finding any traces of the site. I really wish I could find that one.

We had another exciting hockey game last night in my adult league. Unlike last week, we did not need a shootout to claim yet another victory. The game went back and forth throughout, but we eventually pulled ahead 7-5 late in the third period and put one more in the empty net to seal the deal at 8-5. I didn’t add any goals to my stats, but did have another assist. I am now tied for third in the league for most assists. Our team record is 7-2, which puts us solidly in first place. The second place team is now three points behind us with three games left to play. I’m smelling a trophy in our future, or more likely a championship t-shirt.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot, or at least much more than I ever did before. So far I’ve read the first two books in James Patterson’s Alex Cross series, Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls, and I am waiting for the third book to be ready for me to pickup from the library. I really enjoy the thrilling detective stories in these books, and with fourteen books total, I’m sure to be enjoying them for months to come. Who would have thought that I would ever enjoy reading this much, but it really helps pass the time on my lightrail rides to/from the office.

Before leaving rainy South Dakota many of the group who visited Rushmore the day before headed off to Custer State Park. Originally we had planned to hike to the top of Harney Peak, the highest point in South Dakota, but later opted for a shorter hike in hopes of getting back to Denver at a reasonable hour. The hike we did was a strenuous mile and a half up to the top of Little Devil’s Tower. From the top we had amazing views of the Cathedral Spires, Harney Peak and entire southern hills.

After the hike, we drove the Needles Highway through the park and spotted many deer, a few elk, and some amazing rock formations. We didn’t have time to drive the wildlife loop, though if you do you’ll find 1500 free roaming bison. After leaving the park, we stopped in the town of Custer for a quick lunch, and then drove by the Crazy Horse Memorial. This rock sculpture is a work in progress and when completed, it will be 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. We decided not to pay the price of admission to get a closer view and snapped a couple of pictures from the highway.

Black Hills and Badlands on Dwellable

Over the holiday weekend I added another state to my list of states visited, South Dakota, which takes the count to 40. We left after work on Thursday and drove up toward the southwestern part of the state driving through some pretty good storms along the way. We arrived at the Crooked Creek Campground around 11pm and set up our tents in the drizzling rain. We went to bed that night hoping for some sun the following day.

Unfortunately, when we awoke on Friday morning it was still raining. But the worst part was that it never really stopped. We ate a quick breakfast at the campground, packed our cars full of the necessary supplies for a long day and drove off toward Mount Rushmore. We arrived before 10am and found that thousands of people were already there and there was a huge line to get into the parking lots. One of our cars decided to skip the line and found a spot along the road toward the park, where the other two cars later joined.

After standing around in the rain for a couple of hours, the rain picked up and forced all of us inside of the cars to wait it out. Once it finally settled a little, a few of us headed down the road to buy a couple of tarps so that we could attempt to stay dry outside. We put the tarps up between a couple of cars and a couple of trees and waited. Waited for what? The fireworks over the heads of Mount Rushmore, supposedly one of the best fireworks displays around.

At one point the rain died down enough for a few of us to take a hike up the road 1.3 miles to the entrance of Mount Rushmore. We walked up to the main gates, snapped a few pictures, and eventually wound our way back down to the cars. In hindsight I’m glad I decided to take this walk, as some of the members in our group never saw the faces. Later in the evening when it was nearing the time for the fireworks display, we all headed back up toward the entrance area, just in time to watch a thick fog roll into the area.

We waited with our fingers crossed that something would happen, but the fog just got worse and worse. The fireworks were supposed to start at 9:20pm. At that time they lit off a test firework, which provided a bang and a flash of light in the dense fog. We were all thinking that the display was either going to be delayed or canceled completely. Within fifteen minutes an announcement was made that the display was going to start soon. It was great to hear those words, but we all knew that it was going to be very disappointing with the fog so thick that the faces of Mount Rushmore could not even be seen.

And that’s exactly what happened. The fireworks were shot off, but all that happened was that the fog became lit up in various colors. At one point the fog cleared just enough so we could actually see parts of a few fireworks explosions, but still no faces ever became visible. The crowd was very disappointed, but there was little that could have been done. I read that if they would have waited until 10:20 that they would have been canceled completely due to high winds. And there was no option of postponing until the next day, so that did what had to be done. At least we were able to gather with friends and celebrate.

South Dakota on Dwellable