First, it is inexpensive.  An annual pass to the park costs only $30 and I’ve had one for the past two years.  Camping is just $10/night per campsite.  I can say for a week at Joshua Tree for the same price as a single night at an inexpensive hotel/motel.  And is an ice machine conveniently located just down the hall really worth 7x the price?

Joshua Tree’s second advantage is that it doesn’t attract large crowds of people.  Last time I spent 3 days camping there, I only talked to one other person and only saw several people in total - it was fantastic.  This time, even with the 100+ degree days and lack of most services (i.e. real bathrooms and running water), there were quite a few people visiting but still nothing like a state park on the ocean.

Third (and most importantly), it has basically zero cell coverage throughout the entire park area.  This allows/forces me to really disconnect from the rest of the world.  I get calls and text messages all day long (not to mention emails) and my morning routine before I even get out of bed is to 1) check email, 2) read facebook, 3) skim NY Times headlines and read any interesting stories, then 4) glance at twitter - only after all those tasks are completed do I even bother to crawl out from under the sheets.  Not so during my time at Joshua Tree.  You realize how long a day really can be when it’s not filled with constant attempts to “keep up” with various, often irrelevant, information.

For this trip, I brought my bike because one of the other great things about the park is that it has an abundance of well-kept paved roads which seemed to be great for riding. I had never actually ridden at Joshua Tree before this weekend, unless you count a miserable attempt about a year ago on my mountain bike to “go for a ride.” That ride went for about a mile outside my campsite up a hill before I gave up and turned around, sweating like crazy and with legs burning from the exertion. That was before I really started riding though, so I reckoned that this time around it would be a piece of cake seeing as how I have a road bike now and that I’ve been riding 50+ miles every week.

My plan on Friday was to get on the road by 2pm to beat most of the traffic out of town. In actuality, I was lucky to roll out of my garage just before 4pm. This meant that I had nothing but traffic on I-10 for about the first 30 miles. That first 30 miles took me almost 2 hours of painful stop-and-go traffic until I finally got past the I-15 interchange and traffic finally opened up. Unfortunately, this meant that I would not make it to the park until around 7:30pm which is just about sunset and I was concerned about setting up my tent and whatnot after dark.

But, when I arrived it turned out that the sun was just setting and the moon was unbelievably bright (nearly a full moon) and I had zero problems getting set up. Because it was so bright, I decided to try taking a few long-exposure shots after dark to see how they’d turn out and wow, I was surprised at how great they looked. People had campfires going and the twilight was beautiful. Got some fun pictures that evening and then crawled into the tent around 9:30pm in anticipation of riding Saturday morning. It was, in my estimation, about 65 degrees at night with a nice breeze blowing through the campsite and through my tent.

One of the nice things about camping in a remote location is that you very quickly acclimate to the natural cycle of day and night. Not much point saying up past dark and the gentle sunrise is an awesome way to awaken. I first woke up about 5:30 as the morning sky began to lighten, but I rolled over and slept for another hour or so while the sun really got going. I got dressed, ate some breakfast (Bear Naked banana crunch granola – yum!) and wandered around to see if there were any good photos to be made that morning. Nothing caught my eye so I walked back to camp and started to prep for my first ride. Filled up the camelback and water bottles with cold water, tossed my camera into the backpack along with a cliff bar and some jerky then applied a liberal coating of SPF 30 sunscreen.

I decided to start heading south which was uphill. My reasoning was that if I’m climbing for the first part of the ride it will make it easier to decide when to turn around and head back to camp – either when I couldn’t climb anymore or if it leveled out, then I would know the ride back would be easier than the ride out. This also makes it easy to ration water because even if I wasn’t tired, I would turn back when my water was half empty (or half full, if you’re an optimist) and I’d know that the water would last all the way to camp. In actuality, this first ride was a gentle upgrade the entire way and after just over 5 miles of that, I had had enough climbing and turned around. The ride back was for the most part very easy with a top speed of over 30mph but against a strong headwind most of the time which negated some of the downslope. But it was a nice 10.7 mile ride by the time I got back to camp, 45 minutes later.

My campsite was right up against some very large boulders which provided some fantastic shade in the morning hours, so I decided to do some reading for about 90 minutes while I rested from the ride. Then I realized that since I driven in so late I had not stopped at the ranger station to pay the entrance fee (and I need to get a new annual pass since mine expired in June). Instead of driving back out to the entrance, only 5 miles distant, I decided to bike it. So at 11:30 I hopped on the bike again heading north. The first mile was basically flat and the second mile consisted of small rolling hills which were quite pleasant. Then the downhill section started and after three miles, I realized that the ranger station wasn’t as close as I realized. “But hey,” I thought, “this is a nice relaxing downhill ride with the hot wind in my face, it’s nice!” When I hit mile 8, I started to worry as I sped downhill at speeds reaching 36mph (coasting). Finally, at mile 10 I reached the ranger station and purchased my new annual pass and took a little break in the shade, contemplating how much I was about to hate my life.

According to the GPS, that final 2 mile segment had an elevation drop of over 500 feet from 4000ft to 3500ft. This puts the grade at almost 5%. This is steep for a bicycle, and very steep for Gooley who until this time has spent most of his time riding in the flats with the occasional little hill. Before I had gone 100 yards, I was already in my lowest gear and still not spinning very fast. My speed was around 6mph – that’s 1/6^th of the speed I had going the other direction. And it was brutally hot and tiring.

The only thought I had was that I should flag down the next pickup truck heading up the hill and beg for a ride. Two pickups passed me and I restrained myself. I now figure that real exercise starts when your attitude changes from “this is fun and I’m sweating, cool” to “kill me now.” It took me probably 30 minutes and 3 or 4 rest stops to ride up those 2 miles, the whole time thinking that walking the bike would be a better choice. But I stuck with it and made it to the top of that section to an official Exhibit and immediately sat down on the curb and drank about 8 oz of water right then while trying to guess how much more uphill there was between me and my camp.

At the exhibit, I met a nice couple from Minnesota who were vacationing in California for 12 days and had never been to Joshua Tree so I tried to give them a few pointers about the best things to see for the remainder of the day. They also asked me for some bike recommendations, which allowed me to play expert for a little while. Over the next 5 miles, we would leapfrog each other – them in their red rental car, me on my white bike.

After I finally made it back to camp, I went straight to my favorite shady place in the entire park with my book and my chair and spent the rest of the day in the shade. Hidden Valley campsite #31 is the best campsite in the park, but it was occupied when I arrived Friday evening. Luckily, it was unoccupied Saturday afternoon so I was able to take advantage of the nice cold (90 degree) cave and read for the rest of the day.

Saturday night was uneventful, I wandered around at sunset and took some pictures that turned out pretty OK. Then I went to bed around 9:30 again (guessing, because I wasn’t wearing my watch). Only problem was that some rock-climbing hippies were banging on their drum circle until late into the night and every so often, one of them would howl like a coyote. But, I suppose everyone is welcome in the desert.

All in all, the trip was fantastic and I now feel very relaxed and ready to re-integrate myself with the rest of the population. But I should probably shave first.

[View my favorite pictures from this trip here]

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. [...]

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

[full essay here]

On a related note, why in the world does Paul Graham not have an RSS feed for his essays??  Dave Winer needs to make that happen.

For an innexplicable reason, Microsoft decided to kill the Export function from IIS7 in favor of this new feature.  But for those of us who don’t trust technology, we like to do things manually and to get a repeatable result that doesn’t update automatically when we least expect it.  Yes, I am the sort of person who wonders why the default Windows Update on servers is to Install and Reboot Automatically at 2am…

In any case, in a simple 3 step process you too can export and import your Internet Information Server 7 websites and app pools.

I will call the target server TWEB (this is the server where you want a duplicate configuration) and the source server SWEB (this is where the current configuration exists).

First, on TWEB make a backup copy of the files in C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config.  I just created a subfolder called “bak” and copied them.  This is very important.  If you forget or skip this step because backups are for sissies, you will be re-installing IIS7 in step 4.

Second, copy the AppliationHost.config from SWEB into the C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config folder on TWEB.  Also copy any application files like your c:\websites folder or whatever over to TWEB in the appropriate location if you haven’t already.

Third, on TWEB open both the new ApplicationHost.config and the backup ApplicationHost.config from step 1 and locate the <configProtectedData> node in the backup.  Copy that node and replace it into the new config file.

Fourth, if you didn’t backup the existing config file, remove the IIS role and add it back, then start at step 1.

Note: if you have custom accounts under which you’re running app pools (cuz you’re not using LocalSystem, right?) then you just need to go into the IIS Management Console and re-configure the passwords for those accounts.  They were encrypted with the other server’s AES keys so they won’t be valid on this server and the pools won’t start.

That’s it.  Hope that helps.  It should work the same for C# .NET applications (which is what I’m using) or just static websites or whatever.  But of course, you shouldn’t trust me.  Test it yourself first.

My new good-karma policy is that if I spend more than an hour tracking down a general bug or wacky configuration thing, I promise to blog the solution.

So I started riding on the super-convenient Ballona Creek trail which is very nearby my office and starts somewhere up in Culver City and goes out to the beach trail.  My casual ride was about 10-15 miles depending on how much time I had.  Best way to describe it was “relaxing”. After a long day of working in a chair in an office, I got to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, and enjoy that proximity to the ocean.

At some point I got the crazy idea that I could commute on the bike.  

I mapped it out on Google Maps and it claimed to be just 16 miles one-way.  The terrain looked pretty much flat.  And the first portion of the commute would take me on the familiar Ballona Creek trail.  The rest of the ride was a road route that I knew very well because I would drive it when the freeways were jammed up.  In the car, with normal traffic, the route took just under an hour.  I estimated that it would take me about two hours on the bike the first time.

So, after deciding to go for it, I drove to the office on a Saturday afternoon, strapped on the helmet and hit the road.  After the first 5 miles, at the end of the trail and the beginning of my road route, I was a bit nervous.  I’ve never done much riding on roads and everyone knows how bad LA drivers are.  But it was a Saturday and thus it was pretty calm.  About 10 miles in, my shoelace got stuck in the crank (amateur mistake) and I almost went down.  Good thing I wasn’t riding a fixie… But after extricating the errant lace and tucking it in, the rest of the trip was without incident and overall it took me about 1:45 to get home.  And it felt great.

The remainder of the weekend I didn’t have a car, so I rode to Subway for lunch and I felt very urban and cool.  

When Monday rolled around, I set the alarm for 7am instead of 8 and started off on the reverse trip.  While riding past USC, it was fun for me when for about 4 stoplights this guy on a little moped would zoom off from the green light but I would catch up to him at each subsequent red light.  I also learned that people who drive small cars *cough* Prius *cough* think their car is much smaller than it really is.  The truck people get way over out of my lane, but the dudes in little hybrids would squeeze by close enough to touch.  But for the most part it was a pretty good ride. Brutal headwinds, but pretty good nonetheless.  Good thing I don’t have to wear a suit to work.

After several days of commuting over the course of two weeks, I decided I needed a new bike that was:

1. big enough for me (I’ve grown a bit since I was 14)
2. not dual-suspension (some % of my pedal energy is lost in the spring)
3. designed for the road (thinner, more efficient tires, etc)

So after much research and many test rides, I bought a shiny new 60cm Cannondale CAAD 9 about two weeks ago.  As of today, I’ve put over 100 miles on the new bike but I haven’t yet taken it on the commute.  It handles so much differently than my heavy steel ‘97 Jamis Dakar that I wanted to make sure that I’m completely used to it before I hit the mean streets.  Also, those clipless pedals take a bit of practice…

I’m thinking that next week will be the inaugural commute of the new bike and I’m really looking forward to it.  It will be a rougher ride for sure than the MTB but it should also be a much quicker ride. I’ve gotten my average speed up to about 16mph over the course of a 15 mile ride, so I expect that the commute will take just over an hour, shaving 30 minutes off my time, due to both my improved fitness and the more efficient bike.  My goal is to commute 3 days a week, which would put me just shy of 100 miles per week of riding to and from work.  Then I’ll probably want to figure out how to do some longer rides on the weekend from time to time.

I get the feeling that this cycling thing can be addictive.

This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent.  I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection.  My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.

Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied.  I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone.  We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later).  But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.

I’ve had a handful of ideas germinating for a while, some of which have made it to concept or design phases.  And except for the one idea was pre-empted by Google (damn them!), they are viable business ideas and with enough effort they might be profitable.  But while “profitability” is on my list of positive adjectives for a a crazy idea, “fun”, “interesting” and “innovative” are higher on that list.

I would rather be involved in something unique than something profitable.

The two full-time jobs that I’ve worked since graduation were both companies that I chose for other than monetary reasons.  In the first case, I turned down an offer for a significantly higher salary to work at a promising small company that was doing very cool things in the area of IPTV and social networking.  Then, when I decided to leave that company, I happily took a cut to work with a company who had grand ideas about how to revolutionize their market.  I saw the opportunity to help the company take those great ideas from concept to execution and that really got me excited.

People who are smarter than me probably already are intimately familiar with what motivates them.  For me, I had some sort of mental block on the whole thing.  So I, rather accidently, went another route.

Recently, I took two very different career/personality assessments.

The first was the Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test - a spoof on that Myers-Briggs personality test.  After twelve questions it announced that I was ICIG (the Entrepreneur) which is defined as

“A bubbling energetic type often with boundless energy and a short attention span. Has a pattern of getting enthused about a project, starting it up and leaving the rest to others.”

I think it totally pegged me – surprisingly for a test written as a spoof – as a person who likes to start something big and leave the details to someone else while I start on something else.  I could never work at a large company maintaining software.  Running naked from an axe murderer in a room full of cacti would be a preferable fate.  This assessment gets an “A” for accuracy and a gold star in the plays-well-with-others column.

The second assessment I took was the YSN Self-Assessment.  This is a seriously serious assessment build by a crack team of authors, recruiters, scientists and engineers (including me!)  It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, but it did distill a few things for me that I hadn’t characterized so simply.  Among other things, the assessment measures your “values” which are evidently the things that motivate you to do what you do.  Based on a 30 minute Q&A session on the website, it tells you how your values stack up.  My strongest value? Uniqueness.  Next? Knowledge.  Ok, next? Anti-Structure.  Money is 5th out of 6. And I think that pretty much explains exactly what makes me tick.

Here are a few choice snippets from the premium version of my report:

• Your creativity is not constrained by criticism from others.
• You have a high energy level and work hard at meeting goals.
• You have a knack for creating solutions sometimes more through personal attempts, calculated risks, and creativity than in the book or established procedures.

Yes - I don’t care what other people thing about my ideas or opinions. Yes - when I’m excited about a goal I will hit it with no equivocation.  Yes - I can’t stand doing things by-the-book.  “A” for accuracy here too, and I can’t take any of that credit because I didn’t invent the science, I just automated it.

So how did both of these assessments actually help me?

Well, I can’t honestly say that they helped me in any concrete way, but they did get me thinking in different terms. They confirmed that for the remaining 209 days of this year I need to be working on things that excite me.  It means no more watching a season or two of some TV show over the weekend.  No more busywork. No more laziness. No more sleeping unless absolutely necessary.

Oh, and maybe I’ll write more blog posts too.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that I may have given the impression that I work for peanuts just so that I can do cool things. That’s not true, I get what I would consider an industry-standard salary for my position.  What I was trying to impart is that there are things more important to me than money when making career and project decisions.  When you have just enough money to live the lifestyle that you desire, then you can really focus on choosing things that make you happy.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have more employement options than some, so I have been able to be picky about what I choose to do.  Money can’t buy you love, and at least in my case, money can’t buy me job satisfaction.

Let the Right One In - not your average vampire movie, exceptionally good story, disturbing only in its honesty.

Choke - while the first 15 minutes remind me of Fight Club (same author), the sheer absurdity of the movie is engaging and ultimately enlightening.

City of Lost Children - french movie, very strange bordering on absurd, but with a captivating story - if you can follow it.

So after a bit of troubleshooting, we came to the following solution tips. These should work for both C# and VB and any other .NET language. Tested on Windows 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Make sure your webserver is 32-bit

PDFLib for .NET does not support 64-bit servers. In theory you could run your IIS worker processes in 32-bit on a 64-bit OS, but I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Make sure you have .NET 1.1 installed

Because pdflib_dotnet.dll is built on 1.1 and you will have this installed on your development box, you will never think about this for your prod/staging servers. If you already have IIS installed before you run the 1.1 installer, don’t forget to register it with IIS:

C:WindowsMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv1.1.xxxxxaspnet_regiis.exe -ir


Put the MSVCR71.DLL into your web bin directory

On your development machine (or wherever you have PDFLib actually installed) the msvcr71.dll will be in C:Program FilesPDFlibPDFlib 32-bit 7.0.3dotNETbin or thereabouts. Drop that into your website bin directory on the server.

Reboot, then check it out.

Taste the sweet goodness of success.

PDFLib produces a great end product (and it should for that much caaaassssshh). But it has many weird cases. Probably because it seems that the .NET version is just a simple crappy wrapper on the C library. Oh well. It’s still the best thing on the market to separate your developers from your designers.

we just launched the beta site - check out my page and then sign up for yourself.