I’m Advertisment For Macworld Expo
October 8, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
6comments Categories: Castle, Friends, Marketing, OSX, Picture of the Day, Puter Stuff, Travel, Web Design & Dev, iPhone
Tags: Advertisement, Macworld Expo
A friend of mine pointed out that the latest Macworld Conference & Expo emails being sent out showcase a dashing Latino. Second from left (is me) and a friend of mine (far right) along with two guys I met there. See my Macworld post from last year when this photo was taken. I believe I was demonstrating to the lads how to circumvent some sort of authentication or security, who can remember such details.
[Click on the image to see the full size image]
Obviously Steve Jobs is trying to appease the Castle in the hopes I’ll accept a job offer. Keep at it Steve, you’re not there yet.
Buddy Trip 2008 - Off Roading and The Death Hike
October 6, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
3comments Categories: Family, Fitness, Friends, gnash-teeth
Tags: Buddy Trip, Built like the Hulk, Death Hike, Off Roading
For the first three days, each evening we ate pretty well, steak, potatoes, salad one night, asparagus, salmon, salad and French bread another night. We even made pizza on a pizza stone atop the fire, yeah that one didn’t turn out too well. In the mornings of those three days, bagels, eggs and sausage.
[Note: Jason who is on east coast time woke me up extra early. The bastard.]
We had great weather, every day we managed to go exploring, a good portion involved taking Jims Honda where only 4×4 vehicles should be going up the sides of mountains. In some places the “trails” where so overgrown the trees and branches were scraping the side of his car so hard he lost the passenger side mirror and made what he calls Mississippi racing strips on his car. Or was it Missouri racing stripes?
In many places we had to get out of the car to remove trees, large rocks, check the “road” ledge to see if it would support the cars weight instead of falling down a high cliff, and also remove branches that were stuck underneath the car, burning on the muffler.
On Monday I believe it was, Jim wanted to take us to a lake high up in the mountains that he’d been to years before. Nothing too hard for the soft bellied Jason and myself. Well we were out there for hours and hours and miles upon miles, scrambling up and down steep hills at higher and higher elevations. In what was referred to as the Death Hike for the remainder of the vacation, primarily because it was an excruciating hike, I was sweating so bad Jim was worried he’d have to hide my body somewhere.
Jim didn’t “remember” it being this bad, it was supposed to be an easy day hike, so Jason and I only brought one 16 ounce water bottle a piece and no food of any kind. I lost at least 5 lbs in sweat the first hour. Fortunately nature provided for us. Everywhere there was huckleberries and blueberries. I broke off branches full of berries and gnawed at them for the sugar and water. It’s important to note that I don’t like blueberries at all, but this was survival. It was the most brutal terrain and I’m surprised I made it. My brain kept pushing my body, and my body kept telling my brain it was an idiot. That it should lie down and let the scavengers enjoy a tasty Mexican dinner.
I knew we were headed to a body of water, and three times when we stopped for a break it was near a body of water. Yet each time that wasn’t the end of the trail. I was too scared to ask how much farther because it was all I could do to make each foot lift in front of the other. When we finally made it to the lake, which I’ll admit was beautiful I realized we’d have to make it back. I had secretly been hoping Jim would be taking us on a round about way back to where we left the car, that the way back would be easier or perhaps he’d already called for a helicopter, despite that we had no cell phone signal anywhere in this area despite being atop a mountain.
[Note: Most of you who read this know I've been hitting the gym, on the bike machine, tread mill, and crunching weights. Hiking this kind of terrain works muscles machines don't, the high altitude makes it worse and I can say without a doubt gyms are for sissies. Now when I walk down a street I feel like the incredible hulk. I'm consciously careful not to crack the sidewalk with my powerful strides. My legs are things of beauty, muscles rippling like a jungle cats and they're finally, today, not sore anymore.]
That was the worst of the excursions, the rest were certainly hard and at higher
altitudes (7000 or so feet), but we always brought a ton of water and food. When we went through a forest of burnt dead trees, I picked the highest point we could see and we just scrambled up the side of the mountain to reach it. My legs ached and burned, but once we reached the tops of these peaks the view was great.
I’ve got tons more pictures and I’ll upload them to Flickr once I finish going through them all.
Stay tuned for more about the rest of the trip.
Buddy Trip 2008 - Here To Freds Cabin
October 5, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
1 comment so far Categories: Family, Fitness, Friends, Squirrels, Travel, gnash-teeth
Tags: Buddy Trip, Death Cab, Freds Cabin
It used to be that the five of us would manage to get together at least for a few hours around Xmas, but we’re now scattered across the U.S. with families and careers so getting together even for those of us still in Washington is hard. Last Xmas we thought it would be a grand idea to try and do a yearly “Buddy Trip”. To get together for a week on some sort of outdoor excursion. This year marked the first of such a gathering and the planning of the trip, scheduling, arrangements, despite having a year to plan came down to a crunch of only four of us with the final arrangements made only a few weeks ahead of time.
Travis lives in Fall City, Wash. and we’ve been friends and neighbors since kindergarten. I started out by leaving work a little early on Friday to drive down to finally see his house (that he’s had for years), and have dinner with his family.
[Note: On the drive down, I was for the first time in about 8 years pulled over. The overly eager young state trooper gave me a citation for following too closely to the vehicle in front of me. How he 's able to judge this from right behind me I do not know, but he wished me safe driving as I tried to re-enter freeway traffic from a dead stop. Perhaps one of the more dangerous of driving maneuvers. I'm of course going to contest the frivolous $124 ticket.]
His eldest son, a 5 yr old named Tate who referred to me as “Mr. Al” thought I was the cats meow and we had fun playing XBox Lego Star Wars. A giant steak dinner complete with home made apple pie and a whiskey night cap put me right to sleep.
Saturday morning Travis and I left the Benz at his house and drove his Subaru to SeaTac to pick up Jason who had flown the red eye in from Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve known Jason since high school were we were mostly mischievous youngsters. I’ve been fortunate enough to manage more excursions to see Jason on the east coast than I have the rest of my friends. Go figure.
Next the three man crew headed into Seattle to meet up with the one member who wasn’t going to be able to make it. He had an excellent excuse though. Famed drummer for Death Cab for Cutie had just had his first born, a son, only days before. McGerr and I also have known each other since high school, but we haven’t seen each other in about five years. His recording studio business, band touring and album making has kept him busy, but we managed to sneak in a visit to check out his home that he’s been remodeling and see how the new family was doing. After visiting for an hour or so his mom stopped by and we managed to get a group photo which we haven’t seen yet, but it will be the first group photo in probably 10 years. [Updated: Just added the picture] I’ll post it once I receive a copy (and photoshop my second chin off). He sent us off with his GPS that he knew we’d need and of course copies of all his albums.
We then traveled north and met at a grocery store in Sedro-Woolley the last member of the team. Jim transfered into our elementary school in 3rd grade and we’ve been friends since. He’s also the person I live closest to, but see even less than the others. We did some group shopping for food and headed to the first encampment of the trip. A friend of Jims owns a cabin, Freds Cabin, located right on if not practically in the Sauk River.
[Note: It was decided to keep this initial trip low cost, local and outdoors. It is this last point that had me worried. Jim and Travis are hard core mountain climbing, scuba diving, rugged terrain traveling bushmen. The kind that spend more on the latest, lightest, gear and travel the world with it than they do on techie toys. Travis was in the military and now does something technical, requiring security clearance with nuclear power plants around the globe. Jim owns his own flooring business, a contractor who when not working hard lifting heavy objects is in the Ski-to-Sea, hiking distant forbidding mountains, mountain biking and generally the most active outdoors man of the bunch. Jason and I are techies in the extreme. Although even Jason manages to get off his butt more than I do.]
I’d never been to Freds Cabin, and despite knowing Jim most of my life have never met this Fred fellow. Honestly, after so many years of hearing about both, I kind of assumed Fred was a split personality of Jims and this cabin that Fred 
owned was probably a dumpster behind the Black Cat in Fairhaven. I still haven’t met Fred, but I can attest to having lived in a “cabin” for three days right on the river. A hunting shelter, or perhaps a dilapidated rustic cabin, should bring a better picture to mind. It did have a gas kitchen stove, fridge, what once was a bathroom, a bedroom, loft, deck and a wood burning stove for heat. It was packed with a life time of stuff.
Numerous antlers and fishing thingies hanged on the walls both inside and out. This first part of the trip was about “roughing it”, well compared to sleeping outside and taking our advanced age into account it was roughing it. In any case it definitely made the second cabin that much more appealing and we thank Fred for his kindness in letting us use the place for a few days.
And this brings us to the end of the first leg of the trip. I’ll post more soon.
Time Traveling
August 31, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
4comments Categories: Castle, Friends, Picture of the Day, Squirrels
Tags: 1950s, 1980s, flash apps, yearbook
20_Something posted awhile back about a site called Yearbook Yourself. I finally got around to giving it a try. I used two different pictures of myself, but the app kept freezing up so I’ve only managed to save a handful of pictures for your amusement. (My friends should be afraid of me having more free time as I’ll use your pics to entertain myself.)
(1950) I feel like the Beavers dad.
(1952) I look suspiciously like Ross from friends here.
(1982) Grooovy. And Hyde from That 70’s Show
(1984) I dunno, but that hair is dyno-mite.
Smug Kitty
August 21, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
1 comment so far Categories: Friends, Picture of the Day, Squirrels
Tags: cats
One Look?! - Magnum
July 12, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: Castle, Friends, Picture of the Day, Squirrels
Tags: magnum, one look, zoolander
Twas the night before iXmas
July 11, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Castle, Friends, OSX, Puter Stuff, gnash-teeth, iPhone
Tags: 2.0, hacked, IM, iPhone, itunes, jailbreak, jivetalk, remote, social networking
About half an hour ago (current time 12:53 AM), mi amigo David McInnis sent me a link with instructions on how to upgrade the first generation iPhone to iPhone 2.0 software. Of course being on the cutting edge is what we do; so having read his email from my iPhone I quickly powered up the laptop and had at it. Last thing he said before signing off iChat was he hoped his phone rebooted. His Mac may have crashed too, who knows. The iPhone 3G will be going on sale in a few short hours around the U.S. and I know David is going to head down early to grab one. I’m afraid getting up early is out of the question for me, since I tend to not be able to fall asleep until the wee hours, so with any luck he’ll buy an extra one for me.
Earlier today I installed the latest iTunes update. Now after downloading the 2.0 iPhone software and installing it on my iPhone I’m waiting for the 8GB of content to re-sync. This is going to take awhile.
iTunes has the App Store up and running and as mentioned in the above linked article from Wired, there’s already more than 550 apps and of those 135 free ones. I took a quick peek at what’s being offered that’s free and I’m not impressed. Several of the applications have been out for months if you had a hacked iPhone.
- The AIM app doesn’t seem that impressive, regardless I’m not interested in having multiple instant messaging applications. A single multi-protocol application is what I need. So it looks like for the mean time I’m going to keep using JiveTalk (from BeeJive) even though it’s web based.
- Checking out the Social Networking category - nothing off hand that’s lifting my skirt up. A Facebook app? Their iPhone version of the website is pretty good as is. MySpace - not interested. Several Twitter apps, but again the Twitter iPhone page I find sufficient (though I tend to tweet via SMS anyways) assuming they’ve managed to keep their site up.
- Under the Productivity category there looks like one or two (just looking at the names, too lazy to really investigate) that might be worth checking out. Prices are ranging here from 0.99 - 9.99 - one of the apps for 0.99 cents I already have for free - Voice Recorder.
- In the Entertainment section, a free app called Remote sounds nifty. It alledgedly allows you to control iTunes on your computer or on your AppleTV from your phone. That’s worth checking out. The free Movies app also looks promising, I use the iPhone site of Fandango a lot, so I’m expecting similar functionality. Or perhaps a tie in like the Movies Widget on my laptops dashboard which allows me to watch the previews and trailers right there as well as find and purchase tickets via Fandango.
I’m sure future offerings will become more diverse and useful once developers have more time to develop applications. My initial reaction to the apps available is a resounding “meh”. I’ll post more once I’ve had time to check some of the out, but I’m not paying for anything on here unless it makes my Jesus Phone speak in tongues or something.
Update: 1:38am - All my icons are messed up and out of order. I just tried the App Store…app from my iPhone and a couple issues.
- Remote - the app I mentioned previously. There’s no obvious download button. There was the word Free, which I tapped on, but my initial reaction was to search the page for a “download” or “install” link of some kind.
- The App Store asked for my iTunes password, all the letters are rendered as ***** like most people expect. However, the last letter of my password was not rendered as a *.
This Remote app is sweet. Easy setup, can browse my iTunes library on this laptop, control the volume, shuffle songs all the usual features. Very cool. Can’t wait to try it on my AppleTV. (That would mean getting up and I’m too tired for that.)
Prancing Pony Attack
July 9, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
5comments Categories: Castle, Friends, Insider, Picture of the Day, Squirrels
Tags: hackysack, pony, prancing
There’s a handful of people who have witnessed the raw power of the prancing pony attack in real life. (A Jedi like maneuver I’ve been known to do while playing hacky-sack.) And while I always envisioned it more like a baby unicorn coming at you, this is probably more along the lines of what the rest of you actually see.
short notice
June 22, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Friends, Picture of the Day, Science, Squirrels, TimeWaster
Tags: midgets, need not apply, therapists
Shout Out to the Peepguins
June 19, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
3comments Categories: Castle, Friends, Insider, Picture of the Day, Squirrels
Tags: peepguins
Not everyone is pictured here. From left to right I’m thinking Poem, Jed, Karl and Kevin.
