jam∙at∙registration∙roller

 It’s official.  My graduate student salary needs a boost.  I just stole Aaron’s pictures from the past month and they served as a painful reminder that I do not have the means to support my hobbies.  Exhibit A: Torrey’s Peak.

 While I was perfectly comfortable making Class III moves up Kelso Ridge to the top of Torrey’s in my trail runners, I also realized that to wear them up a Class IV route would be next to impossible, not to mention dangerous.  Fine, I accepted that and purchased mountaineering boots.  Now to do this in winter, I just need crampons, better gloves, a breathable water- and windproof hardshell, softshell, and pants, and an ice axe (oh wait, I already bought that), at the bare minimum.  Shit.  I haven’t even mentioned the backcountry skis, bindings, skins, and boots that I hope to one day carry up the mountain with me.  On to Class V climbing:

 While climbing the third flatiron, I realized that I have the great fortune of having friends and coworkers who own climbing gear.  In the above picture, I am donning a helmet, harness, ATC, and climbing shoes that I own, but I am also using a rope, slings, locking carabiners, and relying on a trad rack, all of which I one day hope to own.  I suppose I could start soloing routes, but then I’d have to add a life insurance policy to the bill.  OK, I’m not done yet.  Enter bouldering:

 Notice the sexy Organic crash pads protecting our falls?  Yeah, three people I climb with own them, but they are all leaving in the next year.  Last weekend I was also saddened by the hole that is forming in the toe of my left climbing shoe.  I taped over it, but they need to be retired in the next two months.  I want to replace them with two pairs, a technical bouldering shoe and a more comfortable shoe suited for longer climbs.

 Sigh.  I’m headed to REI later this week to buy my season ski pass.  On the bright side, I think I’m set in terms of ski season gear.  As my mom would now encourage me to do, I shall get back to work and studying, because I’m not going to have the time or need for any of this if I fail out of grad school and am forced to leave Colorado.  Send money Mom.  And the rest of you.

 Last night, I was shocked to see a clump of brown shit, not only on the ledge around my deck but splattered on the screen of my kitchen window.  Cooking dinner wasn’t the same with this crude distraction blocking my normal view out the window.

 I am still pondering (a) what exactly this is, (b) where did it come from, and (3) how did shrapnel end up on my screen, over a foot away? 

 I’m waiting on some pictures (I forgot my camera) from my weekend adventures, but in the meantime I wanted to state that the readership of this blog sucks.  In fact, I’m a little depressed that I have so few friends, and by few I mean one.  For a limited time only, I’m offering a referral bonus for recruiting new readers.  The fine print: (1) no spamming, (2) referees must post a comment to this post stating the name of the person who referred them, and (3) new readers must revisit the site at least twice, with 24 hours separating the visits.

 What do you, oh loyal reader, get in return?  A check in the mail (I need your address) for each new reader that you recruit.  New visitors to Jam at Registration Roller get the satisfaction that comes from reading my nonsense and the joy of pouring through the archives in search of more reading.  Grow little referral tree seed, grow…

 My research group is taking a trip to a Rockies game later in September.  One of the perks to being a large group and buying lots of tickets together is a complimentary scoreboard message.  Suggestions?

 The rules: (1) no advertisements, (2) must be 33 or fewer characters, including spaces and punctuation.

 Aaron, Brandon, Kenny and I recently spent a couple days climbing near Boulder.  We spent our first day in the area climbing trad routes in Gregory Amphitheatre.  Most of routes went up the 2nd Pinnacle, but we did climb one route up the 1st Pinnacle.

 I crossed several firsts off of my list in the amphitheatre; first (1) trad climb, (2) chimney, (3) simulclimb, (4) rappel in ~10 years, and (5) multipitch(ish) climb.  We had to watch out for poison ivy.  Aaron was convinced that every green leafy plant was poison ivy, but a picture of the real deal is below.

 We revisited the area a couple days later to climb the Third Flatiron.  This slab is a very popular climb near Boulder and seems to draw out all of the crazies (the standard east face has been climbed in rollerskates).  The faint outline of the letters ‘CU’ can be seen, as it was painted on by students over 50 years ago, scrubbed off, repainted, scrubbed off, painted over, etc.  Check out the video below for a brief history of the CU debate.

 We reached the trailhead parking lot around 9:30, hiked to the base of the flatiron, and climbed the Standard East Face in two teams over five pitches to the summit.  The views of Boulder and the surrounding Flatirons were amazing.  Add soloing the Third Flatiron and climbing it by moonlight to my todo list.

 We rapped off the back of the Third, set up a top rope, and climbed Friday’s Folly.  Hiked back to the car, grabbed some burritos at Illegal Pete’s in Boulder, and ate them at Left Hand Brewing in Longmont.  It was an awesome weekend in the Flatirons.  Back to work.  I suppose I need to get something done this week.

10:28 AM      "Jeff: i didn’t realize this until today 
                     http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/plugins.html?sr=hotnews"

 Jeff inadvertently contributed to my lack of productivity today when he sent me the above message.  Basically, Apple’s nifty little piece of photo editing and organizing software "Aperture" has a bunch of plugins available for download.  I took a quick glance at them and did a double-take when I saw the flash album creator.  I lack the time and knowledge to create a custom, dynamic website, not to mention the money for a host that I would need to support php.  There are quite a few pieces of software available that can automatically create a web gallery (flash or html), but I have been largely disappointed by the outcome.  I built the galleries for my photography website last year using Adobe Lightroom and was impressed by the result, but frustrated by the lack of control that I had over modifiying the standard layout.  Enter the Flash Album Exporter plugin for Aperture.  While I still only have 5 layouts to choose from and a limited set of options, this plugin quickly pieced together a sexy flash gallery.

 I jumped back to the plugin tab to close it out and noticed the Aperture BorderFX plugin for creating batch custom borders.  It took some fiddling with to figure out all of the options, but I soon created a look that I was happy with (what do you think?).  My main gripe with BorderFX is that it crops my pictures vertically a bit when adding the border.  I can’t find a way around this, and had to go through one by one to adjust my picture within the frame.  Why can’t it just tack the border on the top and the bottom?  It isn’t clipping the sides at all.

 It didn’t take much time to figure out that this was the quick and easy way I had been looking for to update my year-old website.  I did a few trial runs, selected a look I was happy with, and started whipping out new, updated galleries.  Here’s the final look of the wildlife gallery:

 I ended up keeping the same homepage, but I had to change around some of the links.  This required a quick on-the-spot Flash refresher course as I tried to create a new, matching button.

 The new plugins still lack the control I would like to have.  I am still unable to add anything to the flash gallery layout, such as a logo or link back to the homepage.  Whatever.  I just updated my site in less than half a day.  It should be easy enough to keep up-to-date.  Click this link to check out the new look.  Let me know what you think.

 My weekend can be summed up by the word ‘rock’.  Friday night, I rocked the Art Walk in Denver, heard some Rock ‘n Roll at the piano bar, slept like a rock for just over an hour before heading to the Torreys Peak trailhead to climb some rocks, was violated by some rather large rocks while tubing down the Poudre River on Sunday, and finally dried off and climbed the rock wall at the gym.  Tasks that were not accomplished over the weekend having nothing to do with rocks: laundry, cleaning, reading, lab work, and sitting on my ass.  I’ll focus on Torreys Peak for now as (a) it is the only adventure that I photographed, and (b) it was the most rewarding of my rocky adventures.

 I woke at 4:15, a mere 1.5 hours after getting back from Denver.  After an eventful drive up the road to the trailhead, we donned our packs and were on the trail by 8:00.  The large parking lot was full, and cars were parked along the road for the 1/4 mile leading up to the trail.  Grays Peak loomed ahead of us, as did the hordes of people.  After about 20 minutes, we had a great view of Torreys Peak and our route to the top via Kelso Ridge.

 We ditched the masses and peeled off toward the class III ridge.  Aaron was once again skeptical about my trail runners, but they out-performed my expectations as I climbed a steep chimney.  We met a duo of Nebraska natives heading down the ridge, a feat which I would be very weary of attempting.  A decent amount of route finding was necessary to avoid the scree slopes in favor of more solid footing.

 Along the way up, the masses of people on the summit of Grays Peak and on the ridge between Grays and Torreys were visible.

 We soon reached the "crux" knife edge just below the summit.  Chatter on internet forums hyped up this 20′ of the ridge to be insanely exposed and to exceed the class III rating.  All three of us crossed the anticlimatic dull knife edge without incident and scrambled up some scree to the peaceful summit (14,267′).  The ridge took just over 2 hours to ascend. 

 We reached the saddle with hopes of continuing up to Grays Peak, but the dark clouds rolling in convinced us to keep heading down.  The view of Kelso Ridge was great from the main trail. 

 After seeing the crowds on the two peaks, I think I lost any desire I have to summit Grays Peak.  Kelso Ridge was a great climb, but I saw no real challenge in summitting Grays.  I was home by 5:00 after a stop in Denver for dinner.  Now I just need to make the drive to WY to try on some mountaineering boots so I can move on to class IV climbs…