Brett on Stuff

Nigel writes up his TGO experience here.

At 0.8oz, sure is more reliable than rubbing two wet sticks together:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqdT_Mlbto8)

Same-old same-old breakfast getting a bit mundane? Too lazy to try making your own variations?

Give Mix My Granola a try. Pick from a long list of all the yummy ingredients available, and make your granola any way you want it.

You can even get it pre-mixed with Chia Seeds.

Cheap? No. Convenient? Yes.

Nigel on Chicken Tikka backpacking meals and other related musings.

Michael posts about the best places to get Thai food in Bangkok. We ate at My Choice when we were travelling around Thailand with Michael and Kasma.

I think this is the place we went where Theresa tucked into a dish of green beans and then suddenly went bright red as she found the green bean she was munching on was really a whole Thai chili. Thai chilies are *really* hot in Thailand.

If you haven’t already, check out http://www.redtrails.com/. For Seattleites, the amount of trail data in the Seattle area is staggering.

Heaven help the old school Print Guidebook publishers with resources like this springing up.

While it currently appears to be a Geography Thesis experiment, the potential for a site like RedTrails is huge : combined with better trail descriptions, improved organization of data and user-rated trails it might just be a force to be reckoned with some day…

It’s been fun to watch Nigels Live TGO Status page over the last few days.

You can see his intended route in RED and his actual route in BLUE.

The actual route is being reported hourly by his SPOT tracker device.

Given the harsh conditions for the first few days – it appears they skipped some hill climbing on day 2 and stayed low. I suspect this was their bad weather alternative route.

It’s about 6pm UK time as I write and they appear to be well on their way to Fort Agustus. The weather forecast for today was clear and sunny (near freezing temps though!) so hopefully that raised their spirits a little from the brutal start.

Looks like the forecast for Scotland this weekend is 90mph winds and sub-zero temperatures.

“Walking will be difficult, even at low level, with where exposed,
any mobility very difficult on higher areas. Severe wind chill.”

See Nigels post for full details.

Best of luck Nige & Lynn! I hope those shiny new NeoAirs are up to the task, if not – take refuge in a pub somewhere.

My friend Nigel leaves for the UK to start his TGO trip next week. He’s planning on taking a SPOT communicator with him and having real-time updates of his progress available at his blog.

Check out Nigels TGO Map page for real-time progress.

It shows his ‘planned’ route, and all points checked-in by the Spot. If you zoom out of the UK and into Seattle, you can see Nigel has been wandering between Redmond and downtown Seattle over the last few days, and either he swam across Lake Washington or the SPOT isn’t all that accurate

I for one, will be watching like a hawk and living my life vicariously through Nigel and Lynn, while getting fat eating donuts & coffee at my desk at Cisco.

I received my new NeoAir in the mail today. My first impressions are outstanding. Read on for the gory details…

I was surprised at how small the package was the came in the mail. Upon opening, the NeoAir comes nicely packed in minimal packaging and is about the size of a water bottle.

Here’s a shot next to my iphone showing the scale.

After unpacking the mattress comes tightly rolled from the factory. I took a photo, as I thought I would never see my NeoAir look like this again

However, it is surprisingly easy to re-roll into this tight package even after being inflated. I unrolled the bundle and blew up the pad.

When inflated it takes on a slightly wavy shape to it.

I ordered the short model – which is quite generous in length. I’ve been accustomed to my Gossamer Gear Torso pad for some time now, and this new length feels down right luxurious. I can’t imagine why anyone would want the regular length unless they are snow-camping.

The thickness of this mattress is what blew me away – it is a whopping 2.5” thick. Here’s a few side shots:

The weight test? The specs say 9 oz for the small and 14 oz for the regular. My scale showed it at 8.9 oz after being deflated.

The comfort test? On my hardwood floors at home – down right staggering. I think it’s more comfortable than my bed. The thickness feels like a crazy luxury and I can’t wait to field-test it.

My current sleep solution is the Gossamer Gear Torso Pad, which while functional and very light at 4.7 oz (including the extra insulation pad) isn’t exactly a comfortable nights sleep – but I’ve gotten used to it. The ultra plush comfort is certainly going to give me a good reason to re-think my sleep solution and consider a 5 oz gain for a better nights sleep. Although the weight penalty might be higher, as my Torso Pad currently doubles as a my packs back-pad eliminating weight from my GoLite Jam. 

I decided to bite the bullet today and pony up $3 for a 3-pack of Starbucks VIA.

My best option for backpacking so far has been Medaglia D’Oro instant espresso - which isn’t terrible.

So does Starbucks VIA live up to it’s hype?

In its dry form, the instant coffee resembled very finely ground regular coffee, and doesn’t at all look like the typical freeze-dried “granules” of the revolting varieties like Nescafe and Folgers.

The taste test? I wouldn’t go as far as to call it “great” – but it’s actually pretty decent. On the trail – I expect it will be fabulous. It has the grittiness and texture of real brewed black coffee, and almost tastes like the real thing.

I mixed it with less water than recommended to make it nice and strong, and noticed it left a concentration in the bottom that was very bitter where the grounds didn’t completely dissolve.

Definitely coming on some trips with me this year…

I received a letter today saying that our permit for the Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier has been approved. Last year we had to abandon our early season permit due to lingering snowpack. This year, we opted for a trip at the end August spanning over labor day weekend.

I didn’t fancy our odds for a permit in August – but the stars aligned…

Our Camp sites are as follows

• Mowich Lake (Start, No Camp)
• Mystic Camp
• White River
• Indian Bar
• Maple Creek
• Paradise River
• Devils Dream
• Klapatche Park
• Golden Lakes
• Out at Mowich Lake

Oh… and to top of a great start to April – REI is apparently receiving a shipment of Thermarest NEO Air sleeping pads this week.

The company I work for (Cisco), just announced the intent to acquire Pure Digital – makers of the Flip, for a whopping $590m. The CEO of Pure Digital, Jonathan Kaplan, was in Seattle and spoke at our company meeting yesterday.

The flip is a very cool product. I’m not sure my backpacking trips are ever entertaining enough to want to shoot video – but I’m sure some readers might find the idea interesting.

If you haven’t heard of it before (living under a rock?) then it’s a tiny Digital Video Camera – about 4” x 2” and weighs a ridiculous 3.3 oz. It has built-in storage, but it’s elegance it truly in it’s simplicity.

Jonathan was a humble yet inspiring guy - his tenacity on simplicity really shows in the Flip. I’ve wrestled with camcorders, codecs, video problems, fire-wire connections and all sorts of mess in the past. The flip – is insanely easy – you just flip a switch on the side and up pops a USB connector. Plug it into your PC, some simple software runs automatically and hey presto – your video is on YouTube or off to your friends and family via a link in email.

It is truly in the league of an Apple product – something all consumer companies aspire to – but very few can ever achieve.

More info at www.theflip.com.

Great article from backpacker.com on how climate change has impacted Mt. Rainier in recent years. Follow this link to read.

End looks like an interesting company. End stands for “Environmentally Neutral Design”, and they go out of their way to use the greenest materials and processes possible.

More interestingly, is that they have an 8.5 oz shoe. They look more of a street shoe than a trail runner to me, but they certainly peak my curiosity.

REI is stocking some of their shoes, but more info can be found at their website:

http://www.endfootwear.com

Nigel Posts his TGO Challenge Route here.

Windows Live Writer (which I use to post and edit my blog), shipped it’s Release Candidate today as the official 2009 release. After the Vista fiasco, I was starting to loose faith in MSFTs ability to ship decent software. The Live Writer team has given me hope again – it’s been a solid product from the start (with a good plugin-SDK backing it up), but it keeps getting better – especially with this release.

Cool new features?

• They have made my Polaroid Plugin add-on obsolete, by integrating new Polaroid style borders and tilt-effect abilities directly into Live Writer, here’s an example of their “instant photo” effect. Although, I find the ‘tilt’ function buried a little too deep to be useful.

• They fixed their annoying bug where you can now click on a photo and center it vs. having to select beyond the photo.
• The added a wicked-cool “photo album effect” where you can upload multiple photos and LW will auto-generate a ‘collage’ effect for you with a bunch of different layout options. For example, here’s little Chester munching away on his first ever spoonful of solid food at 4 months old:

View Full Album

• The only annoying part is that it forces you to link to Windows Live Photo Gallery vs. your own blog. However, I’ve used effects like this on some of my trip reports before – but it’s been a bunch of work to generate them in Photoshop, so atleast LW now does all the heavy lifting for me.
• They also added the ability to filter your blog posts when inserting links to previous blog articles, together with an ‘auto-link this word’ feature. Both of these are really useful and will save a ton of time.

Kudo’s to the Live Writer team on a great release – I look forward to using it more.

This has been an agonizing decision for me over the last week. Several conversations I have had with Theresa have made me re-assess my current plans to travel to Scotland and hike the TGO in May. There are many many reasons I really want to do the TGO (not least of which, it’s on my Top-5 list), and a handful that give me pause for thought; but it boils down to two major factors:

1. When I initially explored the TGO I viewed it as “200 miles across Scotland”, and in my head, I did the math as “Crank it out in 9-10 days, get the T-shirt, back on the plane, job done.” Since spending more time on the TGO forums and reading several trip reports (especially this one of a newbie TGO’er  who made a similar error), I think this attitude it counter to the spirit of the TGO. The TGO appears to be as much of a social event as it is a challenge, and given that I would likely only hike it once in my lifetime – I think the right way to “do it”, is to take the full 14 days and enjoy the social event with fellow hikers at the end of the trip. With travel time on either end (and a lay-over in Chester, UK to see my parents – they would kill me for going to England without a visit), this is probably at least 12 work days off.
    –
2.  Which leads to my next dilemma… in the US - employers give out a stingy 15 vacation days (20 if you’re lucky) a year. Just four months ago, Theresa and I were blessed with a bouncing baby boy; and as enthusiastic and optimistic as I might be, it turns out raising babies is a lot more time consuming that I expected.  The reality of abandoning Theresa and little Chester for two weeks to tromp across Scotland in my pre-fatherhood modus operandi doesn’t sit well with me; and burning more than my share of family vacation days on a solo trip doesn’t seem fair to them or me either. Plus, truth be told – I’d probably miss the little bugger

So with much sadness, I am withdrawing from the TGO. I am thankful for the opportunity to be accepted onto it this year, and hope that Nigel and Lynn at least (Tim will likely withdraw also given this news) will see their way across Scotland. I very much hope and wish I hike the TGO some day when the planets align to make the circumstances right.

I shall turn my attention back to my top-5 long distance list and pick a long distance hike closer to home this summer – perhaps this is the year for the Wonderland Trail?

I’m so excited!

At a recently family reunion, I got chatting with a relative of Theresa’s from California about Thai Food. I talked about the magic of the Kaffir Lime - to my amazement she proclaimed “Oh - we have a Kaffir Lime bush in our garden.” …

Kaffir Limes are hard to come by in Washington State. The FDA hasn’t approved them for produce sale (According to the grocer at Uwajimaya)  and so at Asian grocery stores - all we can get are the Kaffir Lime Leaves, not the limes themselves.

I even went so far as trying to grow my own tree, but sadly that wasn’t happening in our climate.

When making thai curry pastes, the peel of the Kaffir Lime imparts an intense amazing flavor that really sets them apart from other curries.

Today, I received a shipment of their Kaffir Lime harvest! They are perfect, beautiful and smell so wonderful!

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. After maxing-out on my last plate of turkey left-overs, I’m ready to cook some more Thai Food.

I’m going to make a beef Panaeng Curry from scratch (making the paste itself) in the next few days to take advantage of these deliciously fresh limes.

Wordpress 2.7 is out. Upgrade was trivial - took 10 seconds to unzip and copy the files, it automatically upgraded the database when I logged into the admin site. Staggeringly easy. Nice job wordpress team. I look forward to poking around a bit more in the admin UI - although I don’t really use it for editing anymore as Windows Live Writer works better for  me.