• Java Mission Control (Finally) Released! | Marcus Hirt
  Looks like some pretty nice stuff for ops.
  (categories: jvm ops operations devops java )

Turned 38 this year (holy crap!) and figured that I actually needed to start living a bit instead of just working all the time. For some reason I decided that “living” meant climbing / hiking (relatively) tall mountains so in August I organized a bunch of guys from work to climb South Sister here in Oregon, which was awesome and then just this last weekend some of the same group (and a couple of other guys) climbed Mount St. Helens. One *awesome* twist: we did it at night, mostly because I was out of husband points and couldn’t afford another full weekend away.

We (Alex, Jacob, Joe, Chris, Greg and I) ended up leaving downtown Portland at around 11:40pm, got up to the trailhead (Climbers’ Bivouac) at around 1:00am, attempted to sleep for 30 minutes and then hit the trail at around 2am. It was pitch black (new moon) so we all had headlamps, which made the first mile or so relatively spooky, like something out of a bad movie where all you can see are trees and then darkness. And it was quiet, in fact we didn’t see any other hikers until the next morning when we were coming down.

One of the guys that came with us (hey Greg!) works at Jive and turned out to be a volunteer at the Mt St. Helens Institute, which runs the permitting system and having him on the trip was super helpful. For the first couple miles it’s relatively easy to stay on the trail, since there’s actually a trail but then you hit the rock field and at that point, the trail disappears and you have to look for these 4-6 foot tall posts, which in the daylight I’m sure are easy to spot but at 3am under a new moon are not so easy to spot. Greg (luckily?) brought a really nice spotlight (from his bike IIRC) that was at least 2x brighter than any of the headlamps that we had which he used every couple hundred yards or so to illuminate the next post that we had to aim for. This continued on for awhile and then we started hitting the snow and ice.

Turns out we were super lucky: after the South Sister trip I badgered one of the guys (Alex) to get us some permits for St Helens since he was planning on going. The first weekend that opened up, which we thought would be perfect, was 9/27-28, which, fortunately for us, turned out to be really hard to get permits for (http://purmit.com/) and so we ended up with permits for 10/5. Lucky for us, the weekend of 9/27 turned out to be (literally) record rains for Oregon and Washington and would have made for a horrible climb. The Friday / Saturday that we ended up going was crystal clear and relatively warm but because of the rains the weekend before, meant snow was on the mountain. So the next couple miles, in fact all the way to the top, were full of snow and some ice. Only one guy had the foresight to bring crampons, which, in retrospect, we all should have had. There were definitely some parts of the climb that were dicey, where you couldn’t dig in your toe to make a step and felt like you might slip but the majority of the climb felt mostly safe.

After a bunch of breaks, lots of silent one foot after another in the darkness hiking, we made it to the top around 6:30am, a bit earlier than we had anticipated since sunrise was supposed to happen at 7:14am. I had actually done some research prior thinking that at altitude, that sunrise might happen earlier (which would have been nice) but it turns out (IIRC) that sunrise is affected about 1 minute per 1.5km of elevation, so at 8,300 feet, there wasn’t much to gain. Either way, the summit was amazing and after hiking all that time, a little bit cold. The group of us that made it hung out for a bit, didn’t get too close to the edge (lots of warnings about the cornices at the top of the summit), took some pictures and then headed on down.

Four hours later and after passing a bunch of hikers who were just starting their hike, each of whom asked “are you guys coming down already?”, we arrived back at the car, ready to find to some real food. Or maybe that was just me who couldn’t wait to eat some real food. It was super fun, I can’t wait for the next climb, probably Mt. Adams.

Full set of pictures on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron_n_karen/sets/72157636378932603/

• Thoreau 2.0 – XOXO Conference Talk
  Maciej Ceglowski’s XOXO talk.
  (categories: life simplicity culture security entrepreneurship pinboard )

• Nate Silver on Finding a Mentor, Teaching Yourself Statistics, and Not Settling in Your Career – Walter Frick – Harvard Business Review
  Quote on the best way to learn stuff: "That intellectual curiosity. That bullshit detector for lack of a better term, where you see a data set and you have at least a first approach on how much signal there is there. That can help to make you a lot more efficient. That stuff is kind of hard to teach through book learning. So it’s by experience. I would be an advocate if you’re going to have an education, then have it be a pretty diverse education so you’re flexing lots of different muscles. You can learn the technical skills later on, and you’ll be more motivated to learn more of the technical skills when you have some problem you’re trying to solve…"
  (categories: learning motivation education statistics math )

• All the financial advice you need… on a notecard
  Pretty good summary.
  (categories: money finance )

• What College Rankings Really Tell Us : The New Yorker
  Similar article to one I just read about Car & Driver as to how it ranks cars.
  (categories: statistics ranking strategy education )

• Photo Diary: The Pacific Northwest Farm Scene, Part 4 – Modern Farmer
  Driving from Alaska through Canada to the US… sounds fun.
  (categories: overland travel photos farming adventure )

• Fast Company’s Founding Editor Alan Webber On How Portland Can Become Great
  Quote: "How was it possible, he asked, for the United States to win every battle in the Vietnam War, and lose the war? The answer, he said, was that the United States failed to ask the last question first. The last question, whether for a business or a military engagement—or for a city—is, "What’s your definition of victory?" Or to put it a slightly different way, "What’s the point of the exercise?" Seems similar to the Amazon product release process where they work backwards and write the press release first.
  (categories: pdx strategy war cities culture )

• What do you make as a manager? — This Happened to Me — Medium
  Great story on being a manager.
  (categories: management software )

• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer retires: A firsthand account of the company’s employee-ranking system. – Slate Magazine
  IMHO stack rank is useful in that it forces managers to think about who they really value and who they need to work more with, ie: it’s a good tool but shouldn’t be the only tool.
  (categories: management microsoft )

• Defcon 21: The White Hat’s Dilemma – Google Drive
  Slide 15 is awesome.
  (categories: security nsa government )

• Do Things that Don’t Scale
  Do things that don’t scale at the start so that you do scale eventually?
  (categories: business strategy startups )