Windows was deactivated??

I picked up a copy of Windows Vista for my home PC just before leaving Microsoft a few months ago.  My goal at the time was to convert my PC into a Media Center and hook it up to my big TV.  But since then I discovered that you can’t buy 3rd party Cable cards, which means that you can’t record HD-quality video, and I also heard many people warn that using a mouse or keyboard from 10 feet away just doesn’t work.  So, I gave up that idea, but I kept Vista on my PC.

As an OS I think it’s OK.  At first I thought sidebar was pretty cool, but now I don’t find myself really using it much.  So, in terms of features, there’s not much new practical stuff for me.  At the same time, some of my old hardware doesn’t work with Vista (e.g. my scanner), and the overall performance is really bad — I’m getting really tired looking at that spinny wheel.

So, recently I broke down and decided to get more memory.  (did you expect me to say “broke down and bought a Mac”?  I’ve been thinking about it…).  My computer had 1 GB, and I know that this is at the bottom end of the recommended range for Vista, so I figured I’d do something about it.  I bought 2 GB more.  I installed this memory on Monday, and since then my computer has been noticeably better (though still not as fast as with XP).

Well, this morning I found the following message on my PC: “windows was deactivated due to a hardware change”.  It went on to say that if I don’t reactivate, Windows will stop working.  WTF??  Apparently it’s in the license agreement, but I just would never have imagined that there’s any problem with upgrading hardware — isn’t that what PC’s are all about?  OK, I tried to click the button to automatically register Vista, but it told me that my registration key was already in use!

I searched the web and found a bunch of forums where people discussed this issue, and in most cases the solution was to call Microsoft.  So I followed suit — I called the 800 number on the activation screen.  At first it had me read out loud a 54-digit string of numbers on the activation screen.  That took a while, and it didn’t help.  At the end of it, the automated lady told me that the number was not recognized, and I was transfered to a live person.  I didn’t have to wait very long — that much was good.  The live lady asked me to repeat the same number, then asked me on how many computers Vista is installed (one), and then gave me an equally long confirmation number to type into the confirmation screen.  Now Vista is happy again.

This whole thing baffles me.  Why is Vista trying to keep people from upgrading their PC’s?  And what kind of piracy protection does Microsoft gain if I can simply call the activation line, tell them that Vista is installed on only one PC, really, and have them reactivate my copy?  Why go through all this hassle?

Hot Air Balloon + Glider

Last year Pnina and I participated in a charity auction, and we had the winning bid on a couple of adventure trips: one was a hot air balloon ride and the other was a glider flight.

We were planning to do the glider flight ourselves and to give the hot air balloon ride to Pnina’s parents.  The second half of this plan kept falling through — each time Pnina’s parents visited, it was too late in the season for them to go on the balloon ride.  The vouchers were set to expire soon, so we decided we’d better just use them both ourselves.  Last Saturday morning we did both the hot air balloon ride and the glider flight, back-to-back.

We did all this in the Portland area because that happened to be the closest available location, and also because we had already planned to visit Portland for my grandmother’s 94th birthday.

For the hot air balloon ride we had to wake up at 4:30 AM and drive to a small airport in Aurora:

There were a total of 9 passengers on this balloon, plus one pilot.  We spent the first hour just getting the balloon ready for the flight — unpacking it from the truck and filling it up:

Once it was vertical, we all climbed into the whicker basket.  The basket was divided into six compartments — four for passengers and two central compartments for the pilot and his gear.

For the most part, the balloon ride was incredibly peaceful and quiet.  I didn’t even notice when we took off — I was looking through my video camera and before I knew it we were off the ground.  The notable exception is that whenever the pilot pressed the lever above his head to light the fire, that sounded like a jet engine.  We all got special pilot’s headphones to block the noise, but only Pnina and I ended up using them the whole time.

I have to admit that I felt a little bit of vertigo up there.  There’s something about being way above the ground in a not-fully-enclosed compartment that gets to me.  At 6’2″ I was the tallest guy on the balloon, and the edge of the basked was slightly below my hip, which gave me that I-could-easily-tip-over feeling.  It wasn’t a huge deal — I just ended up leaning inward most of the time.  Pnina had no such problem   She loved it up there.

It was really cool to see the view from above, and this area around Aurora was gorgeous.  We saw a great sunrise, several mountain peaks, and random patterns in the farms and lakes below us.

The landing was probably the best part.  The thing with balloons is that you can’t really control where they go very well.  All you can do is make the air hotter to cause them to go up, or lay off and allow them to drift down.  The pilot had all kinds of GPS equipment and electronic charts that told him which direction the wind was blowing at different altitudes, so by making the balloon go higher and lower, he could sort of try to get the balloon into the right direction.  But this process is not perfect.

We were planning to land in a different airport, but instead we landed in some random guy’s farm.  We even brushed against a couple of pine trees on the way down.  This farmer guy happened to have some kind of family reunion going on, so he and his family were sitting outside in lawn chairs, drinking beers and chatting, when our balloon touched down in their yard.  After we landed (but while the balloon was still vertical) our pilot called out to him asking if it’s OK for us to land there, and the guy said that it’s fine.  Our pilot said that in 11 years of ballooning he’s only been turned away 4 times (in those cases he simply took off and landed in some other, more welcoming place nearby).

After we landed, and after the ground crew (with the van) found us, we packed the balloon back into the truck (which is sort of like deflating an air mattress, except a lot more), and we drove back to airport.

On the way back, one of the other passengers told us that she saw a news story on TV the night before about a balloon that caught fire in Vancouver BC (here’s the story).  Summary: the balloon caught fire when it was still tethered to the ground, ready for takeoff.  The pilot asked everyone to get out and most of them did, but two people were still onboard when the tether broke.  My guess is that as more people got off board, the balloon had a smaller net weight, which increased the chance of the tether breaking.  Our pilot told us that he occasionally takes skydivers up.  The first time he did, he had four people jump at once.  This caused the balloon to switch from 700 feet / minute downward to 600 feet / minute upward, and gave him a big scare.  Anyhow, back to Vancouver, the balloon was now engolfed in flames and it shot 400 feet into the air before it collapsed from the flames and landed in a park nearby.  The two people onboard died.  This is the story our co-passenger heard the night before going on a hot air balloon ride!  Our pilot asked her not to discuss it until after we landed.

Back at the airport, the pilot and his wife prepared a toast of memosas and a nice brunch spread.  Pnina and I didn’t know food was included, so we brought a huge picnic lunch of our own (that mom prepared — mom, you’re awesome), and we ended up sharing it with everyone.  The pilot and his wife were really happy to have different food for a change.  Needless to say, everyone loved the hummus.

Before the toast, the pilot told us the story of the first hot air balloon ride ever.  It took place in Paris in 1783, with various dignitaries in attendance, including Benjamin Franklin.  Back then they believed that it was smoke that caused balloons to go up (as opposed to simply hot air) so they built smokey fires underneath the balloon.  This caused the passengers to become black with ash during the flight.  This first flight landed in some random peasant farmer’s field.  The peasant naturally assumed that these were a couple of demons come to destroy his home, so he took his pitchfork and set about destroying the world’s first balloon.  Since then, balloon pilots made a habit of bringing a bottle of champagne with them to give to the landowners wherever they happen to land, as a way of proving that they are not demons.  Our pilot had a bottle of champagne for the farmer in whose field we landed.

I discussed a bit of the economics of ballooning with the pilot.  It was particularly interesting because he used to be a software engineer.  A balloon like this costs about $70,000, and there are additional expenses: the truck, fuel, etc.  Altogether, it’s about $100K.  He gets over $1000 of revenue for each flight, so in theory he can make it all back in 100 flights.  You can only fly in the summertime, but you probably still have enough flights in one season to recuperate your cost, and the balloon has a several-year lifespan.  The pilot said that he doesn’t make as much money as he used to, but he doesn’t consider this to be work either.  He’s up at 4 AM, but by 9 AM he’s done with work and he has the rest of the day off.  Also, he gets the whole winter off.  Not a bad deal.

If you’re interested in going on a hot air balloon ride, I highly recommend this company: http://www.portlandroseballoons.com/.

By 9 AM we were done with the hot air balloon experience, so we drove over to McMinville, home of the Spruce Goose (see map above).

We had the option of going up together, or of going on separate flights.  We chose the latter because that gave us each the opportunity to pilot the glider for a short time in the air.

The glider itself is a very light, engineless, 2-seater plane.  Everything is simple and mechanical — one pedal for each foot, a yolk, and four gauges.  A different plane (a small powered sesna) pulls you with a ~ 50 yard tether.  When you are up in the air (around 5000 feet), you push a big red button to release the tether and you’re off on your own.

The pilot sits behind you, and up front you have a big glass dome canopy and a beautiful view all around.  It’s very quiet and in our case it was also very smooth: we had an exceptionally windless day.

I tried my hands at piloting the glider, only for about 30 seconds or so.  I managed to do two turns to the left and one to the right.  I found that I had a tendency to pull the yoke back during a turn.  This causes the glider’s nose to point upward, which apparently is not the right thing to do during a turn.  But otherwise I did OK.  After these few turns I gave control of the plane back to the pilot behind me.  I figured that with all my messing around we were losing altitude, which makes the flight that much shorter — no good.  I could definitely go for taking glider lessons in the future, though.  My pilot, Jim, told me that he learned to fly powered planes first, but he thinks that you’re better off learning gliders first because it forces you to understand how wind moves and how to make a plane react to it.

The flight was only about 15 minutes, much shorter than we expected.  But it was fun anyhow.

Also, they didn’t allow any cameras onboard.  Why?  Because the glass canopy is fragile and too many passengers before us put nicks and cracks in it with their own cameras, so the owners put a moratorium on taking cameras up.  It’s too bad because the views were great, but at least we got our aerial shots earlier in the day on the balloon.

If you’re interested in taking a glider flight, this is the info: http://www.cascadesoaring.com/

I have to caution that the owner of this place, Joe, is kind of a jerk.  When we talked to him on the phone (e.g. to ask for directions) he always hung up as we were saying “OK so we’ll see you soo…”.  When Pnina was up in the air with him, he made some moderately chauvenistic remarks.  So, we can’t give a huge warm recommendation to this company, but the flight itself was great.

If you’d like to see more photos…

Hot Air Balloon: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8678601@N04/sets/72157601769072865/

Glider Flight: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8678601@N04/sets/72157601763007568/

Redfin is *not* an ad-based business

When I tell people that I work at Redfin, at least people in Seattle, they often say something like “oh cool, I like your website”.  They often follow that with “how exactly do you make money?” or “so you’re competing with Zillow, right?”.  Many people don’t realize that Redfin actually has Real Estate agents and that we make our money by helping people buy and sell homes.  I think this is partly because Redfin has been around for a few years, but we switched into this business model relatively recently (in the grand scheme of things).  I also think that people are starting to get what we’re about now that Redfin for-sale signs are becoming more and more common around town.

Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, has a post on the Redfin blog where he talks about how our company is an odd-ball for taking on a business model that is not focused 100% on page views.  It’s a good read:

http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2007/08/the_web_is_becoming_a_gigantic_lead-generating_contraption_for_business-as-usual.html

Why men don’t write advice columns

(I got this one from James Kauffman…)

Walter’s Problem Page

Dear Walter:

I hope you can help me. The other day I set off for work leaving my husband in the house watching the TV as usual. I hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards down the road when my engine conked out and the car shuddered to a halt. I walked back home to get my husband’s help.

 

When I got home I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was parading in front of the wardrobe mirror dressed in my underwear and high-heel shoes, and he was wearing my makeup.

 

I am 32, my husband is 34 and we have been married for twelve years. When I confronted him, he tried to say that he had dressed in my lingerie because he couldn’t find his own underwear. But when I asked him about the makeup, he broke down and admitted that he’d been wearing my clothes for six months. I told him to stop or I would leave him.

 

He was let go from his job six months ago and he says he has been feeling increasingly depressed and worthless. I love him very much, but ever since I gave him the ultimatum he has become increasingly distant. I don’t feel I can get through to him anymore. Can you please help?

 

Sincerely,

Mrs. Sheila Usk

Dear Sheila:

A car stalling after being driven a short distance can be caused by a variety of faults with the engine. Start by checking that there is no debris in the fuel line. If it is clear, check the jubilee clips holding the vacuum pipes onto the inlet manifold. If none of these approaches solves the problem, it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low delivery pressure to the carburetor float chamber. I hope this helps.

Walter

Threadless

Here are a couple of awesome t-shirts my friend Sasha from work has:

In case of emergency, break dance…

Robot dance contest…

These shirts are made by a company called Threadless (www.threadless.com) that is all the rage down in San Francisco right now.

Add this to the list of cool t-shirt companies, along with www.tshirthell.com (where the shirts are far more offensive!).

The Grandma Trick

In two weeks my grandmother Rachel, who I call Omama, turns 94.  I’ve been thinking about what would make a good gift for her.  I know she likes family photos so it would be great if I could share all my digital photos with her.  But my grandmother is not tech savvy at all, so I need a way to share photos that is completely hands-off from her end.

A few months ago I discovered that there are some new digital photo frames that have wireless capability.  This means that instead of just displaying photos from internal memory or an SD card (which would require manual intervention whenever there are new photos to display — not something my grandmother would do), these frames can stream photos from your computer or (even better) directly from the internet.  The idea is that I could post new photos on the internet and they would automatically show up on my grandmother’s photo frame without her doing anything.  My friend Bryan at work calls this “the grandma trick”.

I believe Ceiva was the first company to do this concept.  Ceiva’s frames look pretty slick, and I trust them because they have more experience.  But Ceiva frames can only stream photos from the custom Ceiva photo sharing site, and to get your pictures there you need to pay a $9.95 monthly fee.  Forget that.

My next thought was to get a Momento frame.  This frame is designed to work with Vista, and the look of the frame resembles the new windows look (glassy edges).  It does charge a monthly fee to stream photos from their servers, but the monthly fee is much lower (I believe it’s $2 a month).  Also, this frame has the ability to display side-show gadgets, so you can have weather, stocks, etc., on the frame, not just pictures.  I actually pre-ordered one of these frames from Amazon around Christmas 2006, thinking that I would give it to my parents for their anniversary.  The package didn’t arrive in time.  Amazon sent me an e-mail saying there were problems with the shipments and they would be delayed a week.  Then the package was delayed another month, and finally Amazon admitted that they can’t deliver the Momento and the order is canceled.  This experience made me suspicious about how real Momento really is.  Since then I’ve read blog posts from people who got a Momento saying that: 1. it basically works, 2. they were able to stream photos from their computer but they didn’t try to stream from the internet, and 3. they never managed to get the side-show feature to work.  People were also surprised to learn that the side-show widgets that Momento supports are not actually the same as the Vista side-bar widgets, which means that the selection of widgets available for Momento is much smaller.  Well, my grandmother doesn’t care much about widgets so that doesn’t matter, but I had a bad taste in my mouth from my first attempt to order a Momento, so I decided to pass.

Next I heard about eStarling.  This frame has the ability to stream photos from many standard photo-sharing websites: Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, iPhoto, SmugMug, AOL pictures, etc.  They don’t require any kind of monthly fee — they simply pull the photos from the RSS feed.  They have a separate website, SeeFrame.com, that you can use to control which photos show up on your frame.  You can stream photos to your frame from the photo sharing sites by adding one or more RSS feeds from those sites to your SeeFrame account.  You can also just upload photos to your SeeFrame account and they are added to the mix.  The brilliant idea here is that it’s easier to do photo management on a website than on a photo frame, no matter how sophisticated the frame’s UI is.  Even cooler — this would give me the ability to log onto my SeeFrame account and control which photos show up on my grandmother’s frame!  eStarling did another cool thing by posting a couple of widgets on their site that emulate what the actual frame would do.  You can create a dummy SeeFrame account and upload photos to see them display in your frame widget.  I had moderate success with these widgets.  The Yahoo widget never worked.  The custom eStarling EXE widget did work, but there were all kinds of kinks and delays before the photos finally showed up on my frame widget.  I emailed the eStarling tech support for help and to their credit they replied within 24 hours every time with real technical advice, although the English in their responses was less than perfect (I suspect that there are Chinese people involved in this operation, judging at least partly by the fact that this page — http://www.seeframe.com/index.aspx – gives you a Chinese-language 404 response

For shits and giggles I tried to add an RSS feed for one of my Twango photo albums to my test SeeFrame account, even though Twango is not listed as one of the officially supported photo sharing sites.  To my amazement, it worked!  The only problem was that the photos in the Twango RSS feed are the low-resolution variety, so they don’t even fill the screen (I pointed this out to Twango here several days ago, but I haven’t received an answer yet — I’m starting to suspect that this startup won’t move very fast now that they got acquired by Nokia).

On top of this, eStarling lets you take pictures on a camera phone and email them to your SeeFrame account, which means that wherever I happen to be, I can snap a picture and have it show up moments later on my grandmother’s photo frame.  How cool is that?

Anyhow, I was this close to purchasing one of these eStarling frames, but then I started seeing some bad reviews.  For example, Gizmodo talked about how the eStarling “ruined the Christmases of thousands of people who were sucked in by its false allure”.  They say that the problem with eStarling v1 was that its wireless connectivity was horribly flaky.  The second generation eStarling apparently fixes these problems, but the picture quality is still crap.  So, off went that idea.

For a while I considered whether I should just buy my grandmother a laptop and set it up as a photo frame.  I found that Google has a great screensaver that can stream photos from an RSS feed.  I’ve been running this screen saver on my home machine, pulling photos from my latest Twango album.  It totally works and it looks great.  The question is, can I get a cheap enough laptop?  Also would it look stupid sitting where a photo frame should be?

I found a bunch of articles about cheap laptops, mostly centered around efforts to create laptops for children in poor countries, such as One Laptop Per Child.  This OLPC laptop was supposed to be $100, but with each year of development the anticipated price is higher (I believe the latest quotes are more like $300).  Plus it looks like it’s made for kids and it won’t be ready for a while.

I also found a bunch of articles about the Medison Celebrity, supposedly the world’s cheapest laptop at $150.  But then I also found various rumors about how this Medison company is shady, that the laptop isn’t real, etc.  There’s a whole website dedicated to discovering whether Medison is a real laptop or a scam.

So, I decided to give up this idea of a cheap laptop.  It would probably look stupid anyways.

Then I found one last photo frame — DigitalSpectrum‘s MF-8104.  Like the eStarling, this frame doesn’t require a monthly fee and can stream photos from a few photo sharing sites, including Flickr.  This frame is much more expensive ($350, or less if you’re lucky enough to find it in stock at newegg).  Also, this frame is hard-wired to pull photos from a few select photo sharing sites; you can’t simply pull any old RSS feed, so Twango is out.  Also, when you use Flickr, you have to enter your username and password to pull photos from the site — you can’t even view other people’s photos!  But the reviews I read were all positive, and this frame appeared to have just enough of the right functionality, so I decided to say “fuck it” and splurge on this frame.

I placed the order on Friday.  It was supposed to take 5 business days to arrive, but it only took 2.  I just unpacked the box and put everything together, and the short story is that everything really does work.  Within 15 minutes I had the frame set up and showing photos from my Flickr account.  Wow — it just worked!  You don’t get to say that often with technology these days.  Plus my pictures look pretty good on this 800×600 screen — no obvious jaggies or anything like that.

The frame automatically detected my home wireless network (I use a Linksys router).  It was a bit of a pain to type my WEP password using the remote control and the on-screen keyboard, but at least the instructions were clear.  Next I had to type my Flickr username and password.  I was given a choice of albums to display (AKA Flickr “sets”), or I could choose to display them all, which is what I chose.  Within seconds, the frame showed photos from my account.  Nice!

Next — a few of the photos needed to be rotated, so I used my home PC to log onto Flickr and make some changes.  Then I looked back to the frame to see what kind of delay there is before the changes are synchronized to the frame.  There was no delay!  As soon as I turned around, the frame had the updated photos!  As another test, I uploaded a new album to see what happens.  The frame automatically picked up the new photos as they became available on the website.  Very cool.

OK, so that was all the good.  Now the bad…

The frame came with a sticky plastic protective cover on the screen.  When I tried to remove it, it left a mark on a couple of areas on the screen, as if by removing this plastic sheet I caused a protective layer to be stripped off the screen.  When the frame is displaying pictures you really don’t notice this, but it’s obvious when the frame is off.  I’ll have to talk to Digital Spectrum about that.  Also, the frame feels a little bit plastic-ish — just doesn’t have the industrial design and feel of an iPod Nano.  The frame has a bunch of cheesy transitions between photos, but it doesn’t have a basic fade/dissolve, which is the only one I really want.  I ended up changing the frame to do simple cuts from one photo to the next.  Finally, there’s an issue with the “display all photos” option for Flickr — as I load more and more albums, the set of photos it has to display will be so large that a full cycle will take forever.  I need a way for the frame to automatically display just the most recently created album/set, or something allong those lines.  I think there might be a way to do this but I haven’t dug deep enough yet.

So, there you have it.  A few problems, but altogether a pretty good frame.  If you are considering getting a photo frame and you want to do “The Grandma Trick”, I recommend the MF-8104.  It seems to be the best of what’s available right now.  Eventually Apple will release a photo frame and it will blow all of the rest out of the water in terms of style and quality.  But for now this will do.

Kayaking on Lake Union

On Saturday, Pnina and I went kayaking on Lake Union with our friend Navia.

 

The original plan was to paddle our way to the Ballard locks and then go through them, which we heard was possible (Pnina’s brother Haim did that once).  But when we asked the kayak people whether this was possible, they said “not in our kayaks”.  I guess they had one too many people damage the kayak in the process.  So instead we did a more traditional trip.

First we paddled our way through some of the floating house neighborhoods:

 

 Then we made our way towards Gasworks park.  We paused at a shipyard to watch huge commercial boats being fixed:

We also saw people setting up tents at Gasworks park.  When we got close we asked one of them what it was all about and they told us “a private party”, without elaborating.  We noticed there was also a barge in the middle of Lake Union set up for fireworks and guarded by police boats, so it must have been a big affair.

When we made our way through the Montlake canal, the water became really choppy.  This picture doesn’t quite capture the bumps we went through and how wet we got in the process:

 Then we went into the Washington Arboretum area, for which we had to go under the Highway 520 bridge:

We found a small island that we named Blackberry Island and we went about picking as much as we could from the boat:

Then we crossed the lake northward, to take a closer look at the rich people homes along the shore:

This is one of the better named yachts I’ve seen in a while:

We noticed that a couple of these mansions were for sale, so when I got home I couldn’t help but look them up on Redfin.  For example, there was this $5.5 pad: http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/printable-listing?listing-id=352847.

After hours of paddling our shoulders were dead and we were a little bit sunburned, so we took a break on the way back at the Ivar’s Salmon House.  This Ivar’s has a dock so we came up to it from the water side and pulled our kayak onto the dock.  The food was fantastic, which was very surprising to me — maybe I was just that tired and hungry.

If you want to see more photos, go here: http://www.twango.com/channel/Shahaf.2007_08_11

By the way, these photos were taken with one of those disposable waterproof cameras.  I find it hard going back from digital, getting used to not being able to review the picture after I took it, remembering not to snap away carelessly because there’s limited film, and then having to wait for the photos to be developed (and paying $10 for it!!).  Hurray for the digital revolution.

Stock Trading Anomaly

I have a stock trading account with Fidelity, and I get daily e-mails from them that report significant changes to stocks I own.  One of these stocks is MDC, a real estate company.  This has been one of my under-performing stocks and I’ve been looking for a good opportunity to get rid of it.  Well, in today’s e-mail I saw this:

MDC

M D C HOLDINGS

49.20

+0.80

+1.65%

Significant News
	MDC Holdings Inc up 99.73% to $96.67	Wall Street On Demand	08/08/2007
	MDC Holdings Inc sets a new 52-week high	Wall Street On Demand	08/08/2007

I thought: “that’s weird — the stock is up only 1.65% for the day, but at the same time there are news stories today about it shooting up 99.73%??”

I logged into Fidelity and I saw exactly the same thing — a moderate uptick for the day, and the same two stories about huge gains.

I called Fidelity and spoke to a stock trader.  It took a while to figure this out, but eventually we found that there was a weird spike sometime before 10 AM today:

 

The Fidelity representative had access to better tools than are available on the public Fidelity site, so he looked into it.  Apparently there was a trade for 100 shares of MDC at $68.35, then another trade for 100 more shares at $96.67.  The Fidelity guy guesses that the second trade was supposed to be $69.67 and it was either screwed up or misreported.  Either way, $69 is way too high compared to the stock’s value for the last while.  This trade happened between two brokerages, not on the public market.  I’m not sure exactly what that means.  These trades set off a few more piggy-back trades in the upper $50′s, and eventually the stock settled back down to it’s normal (shitty) price.

I guess if I was a stock trading fanatic, I would have caught this opportunity and shed my MDC shares, but unfortunately I have other things going on in my life.  Maybe I should have had an ongoing limit trade order.  Nuts!

I’m really curious to know what caused these unusually high trades, whether some buyer out there is really pissed off for getting ripped off, and whether the SEC is looking into this.

Royal Basin Hike

Pnina and I went on a hike in the Olympic Peninsula this weekend, to a place called Royal Basin.

This map shows our itinerary.  Green is where we drove and blue is where we hiked.

(To see the original national park map, go here: http://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/upload/wildernessmap.pdf)

We left Friday evening, taking the 8 PM ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island.  It was too late for us to attempt to set up tent on the trail so we decided to head to a random campsite near Sequim.  The campsite took no reservations and by the time we got there they were full, so we had to improvise.  We found a large parking lot for what appeared to be a steakhouse.  There were already a few RV’s there for the night, so we figured it wouldn’t be a big deal if we parked the car and slept there.  In the morning we discovered that: 1. the parking lot filled up around us without us noticing, and 2. it was actually a golf course.  Well, the folks there were nice enough to leave us alone when they saw us sleeping in the car in our sleeping bags.

On the way out of Sequim we saw a sign for a U-Pick Lavender farm so we decided to take a detour to check it out.  It was really beautiful.  Here’s one of my favorite pictures from the trip.  If you look closely in my sunglasses you can see who took the picture…

 

Then it was off to Royal Basin…

The drive in took us over a twisty gravel road for miles.  My Grand Am was up for the challenge, but it took its share of dust:

The hike to the lake was about 7 miles, consistently uphill, with a total elevation gain of about 3000 feet.  The first part of the hike went along a river inside a forest, so it was a pleasant hike but the views were limited.  Towards the end we started emerging from the forest here and there to get a peak at the surrounding.

Eventually we arrived at Royal Basin lake, which was beautiful:

Unfortunately, this place was crawling with musqueetos, clouds of them!  When we got the first view of the lake and I got the first view of the musqueetos, it really freaked me out.  I tried to run down the path, hoping that the blood-suckers are concentrated in one little section and that maybe I can just bust through it.  In doing so, I lost my footing and fell, right next to an older couple idling the afternoon at the edge of the lake.  They saw my grand entrance and made a joke about how they don’t often see people as clutsy as they are.

Pnina and I were beat, so we set up camp and took refuge in the tent.  We made a nice Rice-a-Roni meal and then put our food away in a special bear canister outside the tent.  This was required by the park.  The park ranger, Bridgit, told us that bears have no chance getting into these cans, and no way to drag them off, so eventually they give up they idea of getting food from humans.  Some bears still try, though.  They might kick it around like a soccer ball for a while (I’d love to see that!).  So you have to choose a spot that isn’t uphill from the water.

 

Later that night we realized that we were out of water, so we headed out to find a stream to fill up our bottles.  The air was cooler now and this drove most of the bugs away.  Not far from the lake we entered a meadow and noticed a deer.  This deer was so curious and unafraid of humans that it walked within 10 yards of us.  Awesome!

The next morning the sun was out in full force and the bugs were gone.  A perfect day.

Several people told us to make sure to visit the upper basin, so we left our gear at the campsite and took a daytrip out.  The hike took us over another meadow and eventually up a steep path towards a glacier lake.  The water in this lake was an incredible blue:

 

 We also saw a few animals along the way: another deer, some wild turkey, and several marmots:

It was a gorgeous place and it would have been nice to stay and relax…

…but the bugs started coming back in full force, and we had to start making our way back to Seattle.

The hike back was all downhill, which is good on the muscles but tough on the knees.  Kudos to Pnina for putting up with my increasingly agitated mood – after about 4 miles, I was really ready to be back at the car. 

Still, we saw some cool things on the way back that we didn’t notice on the way up, like this purple mushroom:

I swear I did not doctor this up in Photoshop.  In fact, in real life it was an even darker purple.  There were also a bunch of beautiful flowers:

Eventually we made it back to the car and we capped the trip with a stop at Mora’s in Bainbridge Island for ice cream.

To see the full set of photos from the trip, go here: http://www.twango.com/channel/Shahaf.2007_08_03?newsince=2007.8.6.7.13.5

Washington Arboretum

Yesterday the weather was perfect and Pnina was not scheduled to work.  This is a very unusual combination of events.  Pnina generally has the worst luck — if she has the day off, it’s usually crappy weather.  If both she and Dvora have the day off, the odds are even higher.

So, Pnina and I decided to take advantage of it.  At first we thought about taking a kayak out on Lake Union, but we found that the rental place closes at 8 PM and we didn’t want to kayak for a short time.  So, instead of we just took a walk in the Washington Arboretum.

The Arb is huge so we had some choices of where to go, and we opted for the paths around lake Washington.  The path took us under Highway 520 towards the water, and eventually the trail became a series of floating bridges.  This place is really beautiful.  I’m surprised that after 5 years in Seattle this was my first visit.

 Eventually we were joined by Neville, and we capped the night with dinner at Chutney’s.