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i’m just here

Taiweezy streezy.
When it comes to travel, I am a machine. I swoop down on airports like I own the places. I know which security line is usually the fastest, and I have my laptop out and pockets emptied as I saunter up. I have my passport out when they’re gonna ask for it, I know which side of the plane seat 8H is on. I know where you can buy some chapstick if you’re near gate 37 in the Tokyo airport. I know where the airline lounges are in each airport, and even got a familiar nod from the lady that run the international shuttle in San Fran. I think, when airport staff recognize you from your last trip – you’ve officially made earned the “seasoned” tag. When I fly business class, I now understand all the buttons and knobs on the seats. Which one scoots out my footrest, which one pops out the TV screen, where the blasted hidden tray table is, everything. I tuck my napkin in the neck of my shirt to eat my prosciutto and scallops. When I’m traveling, you can’t fade me; you just can’t fade me. And I guess that’s a good thing, since I seem to be traveling a lot this year.

Anyway, if you hadn’t guessed by the exposition – I’m again in Taiwan. I got in Sunday night in the middle of a rainstorm that made for a bumpy landing. I didn’t sleep well my first night, had problems nodding off – which is unusual for me. Maybe my body will actually fight the time change this time, instead of sucking it up like it usually does. But anyway, it’s the morning here and I’m feeling beat. I think I’m going to cut out of the office early to go catch up on some Zs. For the first week I’m here, I’m actually staying at my buddy Eric’s apartment instead of the usual hotel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still at the hotel bar every night. It’s just that I struck an agreement with work to where if I save the cost of Sharaun’s plane ticket out in hotel stay (which adds up to one week), they’ll pick up the cost of her flight. Since Eric was out of town, he and Suzy graciously offered me the keys to their place for that week. It’s a little different than staying in the hotel, but it’s still close to work and is definitely homey.

I’m sitting here listening to this new album by The National, a group I downloaded and mentioned last week – but really only first “listened” to on the plane out. For some reason, walking down the moving sidewalks in the Tokyo airport with this album in the background made it sound perfect, awesome, and now I’m totally hooked on it. The songs are deceptively quiet and subdued, but are all really emotional and in some cases haunting. Anyway, it’s a spectacular-awesome album, really. I don’t know why I didn’t take to it more immediately… but I’m just glad I had the trip over to really sit through it and appreciate it. I’ve been listening to it non-stop since somewhere over the Atlantic… and am nearly ready to call it the hallmark album for this trip. It’s good for that too, kinda has a “Lost in Translation” feel to it. Luckily, you don’t have to take my word for it and can listen to the whole album online at this site. If you only plan to listen to one track, make it “Abel.” If you listen to two, check out “Lit Up.” But don’t be fooled by me throwing you a couple up-tempo numbers… listen to “Karen” for a dose of the lighter (and more poignantly perverse) side of the album.

I don’t know about you guys, but when I have to do a #2 in a public restroom – I use those little tissue-paper seat covers. I don’t know how effective they really are, and by that I mean that I’m not entirely sure what sort of “diseases” can absorb through the hairy skin of my butt and infect my bloodstream. I mean, I can understand catching some kinda skin fungus or something… but it’s not like my actual anus is touching the nasty seat, it’s the relatively thick and protective skin on my butt. Anyway, I use the paper things, even though I’d bet that microscopic “bad guys” that can penetrate my butt-skin could also likely penetrate this thin paper shield. Well anyway, I didn’t start writing this to talk about why I use the things; I wrote this to talk about a problem I have using the things. Here’s my complaint: I go into the stall, pull (first up, then down) one of the papers off the wall above the toilet, carefully punch out the perforated center section, and finally place the cover over the seat with great attention to coverage maximization. Then, I turn around to undo the pants and assume the position – and the damn automatic-flush toilet senses my movement as someone having finished their business. The toilet flushes, and sucks my tissue-paper cover down with it. So I always find myself trying to turn in such a way that the bulk of my body stays in front of the little sensor eye. I turn really fast, turn really slow, even try to hold my hand in front of the sensor… but sometimes you just can’t escape it. Automation is great, except when it automates away my germ-protection.

This cobbled-together thing is getting posted now, just so I can clear the buffer and start with a clean slate.

Posted on

shuffling papers and stuffing envelopes

Stacks and stacks and stacks...
Today was great, for only one reason – I was ultimate-productive. Not only did I have a great day at work, getting nearly all my pre-Taiwan tasks taken care of; but I also got a bunch of personal pre-Taiwan stuff done. I got a haircut, mowed the lawn, rigged up some drip lines to our new potted plants so they won’t die while we’re gone, laundered massive amounts of clothing, refilled prescriptions, and uploaded a bunch of new MP3s to my phone for the flight. It was awesome. The rad thing is, it’s only 10pm right now and I’m done. If I had to, I could pack up right now and be ready to fly tomorrow morning. But I gots one more day y’allz… one more day.

Today at work I was busy preparing for my impending trip. This meant taking care of any outstanding expense reports and whatnot I’d have to file before leaving. In doing so, I found myself shuffling through a large pile of papers, sorting them, paper-clipping them, and putting them in envelopes. It was fairly quiet around as I was doing this, so the sound of paper on paper was loud enough that I took notice of it. In the silence, as I lined up edges and slid on paper clips, the sound was somehow very attractive. In the background, a printer clicked and hummed to life. As the grains on my stack of papers slid against each other audibly, I was struck by the thought of how “business” it all sounded. The smooth dry papers in my hand and the sound, I suddenly felt very “incorporated” and insignificant… some small person in a huge living beast of a company shuffling papers and stuffing envelopes. I don’t get to do much “old skool” office-type work at my job. 99% of my time is spent in front of a computer, or on conference-call meetings (while in front of a computer). Just sitting at a quiet desk working with actual paper and envelopes and paper clips is not the norm – it’s usually much less tactile. I imagined it as a neat throwback moment to the offices of yore, where people actually used paper and other such physical items.

I recently downloaded a rip of a BBC radio show on which the Arcade Fire were the featured guests. The emcee talked to them a bit about their album, and then they launched into a few songs. What makes this rip so awesome is both the quality of the recording and the quality of the performance. The Fire are on point, they sound outstanding… no, better than outstanding. Just hearing them do a scant two songs serves to remind me how utterly effing incredible that album is. There are good albums, there are albums that may even be the best album out of a one-year period, there are even albums which some regard as the “top” of a decade, and then there are transcendent albums – albums which, upon years of reflection, are just head and shoulders above the rest. U2’s Joshua Tree, Nirvana’s Nevermind, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, Radiohead’s OK Computer, etc. I have no doubt whatsoever that Funeral will become one of these albums – it’s just that damn good.

Looks like Taiwan’s gonna be kinda wet. I think I’m going to bed. Goodnight.

Posted on

e

Brought to you by the letter E, and the number quatro.
I went to the bar tonight with Sharaun, she goes most every Wednesday night to meet up with the Wednesday night soccer crew. I’ve been a few times, but usually the prospect of sitting at home on the couch is more appealing to me. I don’t know why that is, because I actually enjoy going to the bar a lot. Wednesday night is “pint night” and you get to keep the glass. It makes me wonder how many other things I miss out on because I’m just unmotivated. She wants me to buy her some pepper spray (we’re talking about Sharaun now). She says she’s deathly scared when I’m away on travel and she’s home alone. So, I guess I will buy her some pepper spray. I could just get her some shells for the .22 – but she’d hate that, and there’s a chance she’d have better luck with the pepper spray anyway… a misplaced .22 round might be less incapacitating. It makes me feel kinda bad, y’know? I mean, I consider the opportunity for travel to one of the awesomest perks of my job. It kinda bums me out that she doesn’t like it. I can understand though, I guess, being that I’m the one off on exciting adventures while she’s left to fend for herself.

I’m gonna talk about comment spam and scripts and robots and other nerd-stuff now. Feel free to tune out.

I have no earthly idea what my latest plague of comment spam is all about, but I think I’ve got it under control. Let me explain: Beginning, oh, about two months ago I guess, I began getting strange comments. They were posted with the name field blank, and contained no content other than the letter ‘E’ as an e-mail address. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no purpose to this kind of comment spam, other than to annoy me and fill my database with crap. I mean, unless it’s some secret spamvertising campaign for the letter E perpetuated by the nefarious Sesame Street gang – I have no idea what the motivation behind such spam would be. There are no links in the comment, no text, no real e-mail address, just one single stupid letter. What’s worse is, because they really aren’t screaming “spam,” they were getting through my comment filters. The other day, I just broke down and added the “word” ‘E’ to my spam-block list in WordPress. I’m guessing this only blocks “whole words” of ‘E,’ and not any comment containing the letter E – and so far it seems to be working.

There are a few things which tell me that these are indeed bot-driven spam comments, and not just someone’s idea of messing with me. They are always on older, seemingly random posts, which is a sure sign that you’re dealing with a spambot. They come in rapid clumps, multiple comments within seconds of each other on different entries. And, they all seem to come from the same stinkin’ IP address: 24.2.95.195. Whois tells me it belongs to a Comcast block in Utah or something – but I’d bet it’s forged anyway. You know, I can understand spam comments that hype penis pills or poker or whatever… but the letter E? Even if your comments got through, what the heck are they doing?

The only possibly explanation I can dream up is that it’s some method the robot spam machines use to test the “strength” of my spam filtering. I would imagine some algorithm that first posts several E-only comments via an automated script. Next, it would parse my pages to see if its E-only comment actually posted where the public can see it. If so – it would then step it up a notch – this time perhaps posting an E-only comment where the E is actually a URL linked to some poker site (I’ve actually seen these “next-level” E-only posts). Parse again, if it made it through – uplevel the comment to full-fledged spam. Then, using the information it’s managed to gather on where a blog’s comment filtering kicks in and starts blocking comments – the robot can effectively mark a “filter strength” field in its site database. Every few days, go out and do the E-test again to keep the “filter strength” field up-to-date. This way, spammers can categorize blogs by how susceptible their commenting scripts are to spam.

And, if the blog-commenting spam business model operates anything like the e-mail spam industry, where people sell DVDs full of harvested, “guaranteed working,” e-mail addresses to potential spammers – then this kind of “guaranteed spam-accepting” list of blog URLs list might fetch a higher price than just a raw text list of URLs. I mean, if the URL harvester can give you some guarantee that your spam robot will get it’s comments through on 80% of the blogs on their harvest-list – as a spammer you may be more likely to fork out the money for their list over another that’s just a bulk harvest of open blog comment-script URLs. So that’s my theory on the E comments. It’s a filter-testing scheme to add value to a harvester’s comment-script URL list. If that’s not right, I have no idea what they are – other than malicious and annoying and taking up space in my database. Stupid spammers, why don’t you leave me alone? I hate you so much.

OK, I think I’m done with that. Believe it or not it’s 11:12pm right now… I should be hitting the sack, but I’ve been staying up later lately. Maybe my brain is subconsciously preparing my body for the timezone switch or something.

I was perusing my server logs the other day, and looking at who’s linked to my pages. I found an oddball reference to one of my 96 Tears pages from some girl’s blog. Thing is, the entry from her site that linked to my pages was great – kind of my idea of what epitomizes a good blog post. Read it, I think you’ll dig it.

In closing, I’m going to give you a shortlist of new albums I’ve been enjoying lately. Some you may have heard of, some not. Either way, here goes: The Cribs : New Fellas, The National : Alligator, The Ponys : Celebration Castle, Great Lake Swimmers : Great Lake Swimmers, Red Sparowes : At the Soundless Dawn, and Hal : Hal. Now, some of those are relatively new and untested – but some have already proven to be leaders from the outset. I’d recommend most all of them, but I need some more time on Hal and The National. Put it this way – if you’re going to buy an album this weekend – buy The Ponys; if you’re buying two – pickup The Cribs too.

Man, I’m fast falling asleep. Need to spellcheck, rearrange, add thumbnail image, and post. Goodnight.

Posted on

off the top turnbuckle

Work, you're goin' down.
Forgive the randomness of the post, I actually had a full entry written last night and just got too lazy to search for an accompanying image and post the dang thing. So there is a mixture of two days’ writings. It’s OK though, because I’ve learned I essentially write about the same crap over and over and over…

I’ll be honest, nothing happened today. I went to work and for eight hours I clenched my teeth and things sped by without me getting a chance to think. I don’t think I’ll have much to write, but I felt like sitting down to at least and knock something out.

You know when you have a wad of silly putty, pinch a thumbful in each hand, and pull them apart slowly, creating a long droopy thread connecting the two? That’s how I’ve been feeling after work lately. Just plain stretched. I don’t know what I was thinking, but a couple weeks ago I agreed to “cover” for a couple of my co-workers while they are out of the office. Turns out I’m covering for two guys this week as well as handling my own stuff, and it’s just about my limit. I’m doing it, and it’s working, and I’m not dying… but just barely. If the person who’s pulling my silly putty decides to do a fast yank instead of leisurely pull – the whole thing may snap clean in two at the center. I usually look forward to my Taiwan trips as small respites from the day-to-day grind, but I’ve got a sinking feeling that this trip will be anything but a lull. The way I see it, I’ve got to maintain what I’m currently doing on top of doing the normal Taiwan stuff… great.

Don’t you hate it when, you’re about to leave for two-and-a-half weeks in Taiwan and, you don’t even have any new tunes to carry you through your stay? Really, because I totally hate that. So tonight, I went a’scourin’ the usual suspects for something kind on the cans. I mean, I’ve got this NIN album, but I’ve been listening to it non-stop now for days. I suppose it might last through the trip, but it sure would be nice to have something else to kick off the trip with. But I got some stuff y’all! I got it. The Cribs, who are a less-afraid-of-pop Strokes (gee, I wonder if this sound is hot right now or something?); and The National, who are more subdued and lusher (is that a word?). Anyway, I think I like ’em both – so I’m happy. I mean, honestly – look at the current Phoenix that is rock ‘n’ roll rising from the ashes – then tell me this little tune wouldn’t eat its way right up to the front of the TRL line to share the laurels with the Killeraveryjetstrokes. Man… I want to make music.

I used to trade CDs online. I posted a wantlist, along with the list of things I could offer in trade, and I’d arrange trades with people who had things I wanted and wanted things I had. It all started out as a way to amass the completist’s Beatles collection, but soon blossomed into a full time addiction. Once I acquired every single Beatles item, I moved on to simply trading for things I needed. In college, and for my first couple “career” years, I was trading at insane volumes. Burning and mailing up to 50 CDs in a single week. I was shipping all over the world, and even spent several days on the job at my college internship writing a custom CD trading database to automate and track the trading process: printing shipping labels, sending confirmation mails, even updating the lists on my website. I can actually remember telling people I couldn’t do something with them because I had to stay home and “burn CDs.”

Soon enough though, the whole thing became more trouble than it was worth. In the beginning, I’d listen to everything coming in. I’d print out all the artwork from the “scans” disc which was requisite with each trade, and lovingly cut them out with scissors to fit them in jewel cases. In the last year though, I got buried. I began shelving discs in the little plastic or paper sleeves they were mailed to me in, without ever listening to them. I wanted less and less to spend my time burning, packaging, and mailing CDs. So, sometime a couple years ago – I quit. I left the pages up, but told the world I was done. And, up until a year or so ago I still had my last few trades in unopened mailing envelopes. I mention this now because I’m thoroughly wrapped up in my migration project as I type this… and tonight I “found” my huge pile of un-listened-t0 and un-cataloged CDs. And, it seemed like the perfect time to me to do some house cleaning. I’m ripping through it now, and simply tossing the discs as I archive them. Feels good, like I’m finally “catching up” on something I’ve let stagnate for several years.

On the way out of work today, I caught myself giving myself a virtual pat on the back for a good day’s work. In my time at Company X, I’ve come to realize that I’m very bipolar when it comes to the “how was your day” question. Some days, I leave that building feeling like I gave work a flying cross body chop off the top turnbuckle – like a damn champ. Other days, I leave the building with my tail between my leg because I F’d up. Something I did was dumb, or worse yet, something I didn’t do/know made me look stupid. I guess, then, that it kinda goes without explanation that I feel best on the days when I feel like I gave work the business. Those are the days I go home feeling like a star. The other days are the days I go home and am already counting the hours until 8am as I’m driving out of the parking lot.

For a random link, did you know Billboard magazine now charts ringtones? Of all things. Crazy.

Goodnight.

Posted on

second guessin’

Rippin'
It’s 11pm now on Sunday and I wrote most of this entry throughout the weekend while I was sitting at the computer. The more I listen to this new Nine Inch Nails album, the more I really, really like it. I mean really. For real. No foolin’. You should get it and check it out, it grows on you something fierce. You should check it out; no, I’m serious.

Since I last wrote about it, my disdain for retrieving and sorting the mail has grown. I have come to dread sorting through the piles of paper that I get every week. My frustrations are compounded by the fact that near 90% of what I get goes straight into the dustbin (What? “Dustbin?” I’m practicing should the Queen Mother mount an offensive to take back her colonies). It’s got the to the point where the things I used to save, the stock statements, the medical insurance statements, whatever – I now just toss them directly. I used to keep them for some reason, and I still don’t know what that reason is. When I can, I’ve switched my billing options to “paperless” statements – keeping only online records. I’ve switched all my bills to auto-debit, and keep track of all my finances online. I really only need the mail for one-off ordered items and very critical stuff. Man how I wish there was some way to restrict the incoming flow to that stuff only… and get rid of the ~5lbs of paper I just waste each week.

I’ve been back at my ripping project lately, finally having the guts to tackle my Beatles and related discs. I purposely left them for last, for a few reasons. First, there are so dang many of ’em. Second, the majority are bootlegs or rare releases, and their information tends not to be in the automatic FreeDB database. See, when you put most commercially available CDs into a ripping program, the program goes and queries the huge FreeDB database and automatically names the disc and songs. Then, when you rip the disc all the files are named and tagged correctly. If a disc isn’t in the FreeDB database – you get a bunch of songs called “AudioTrack01,” and so on. You then have to go in and somehow rename these, which is an extra and laborious step in the whole conversion process. Anyway, I started ripping through the solo and group Beatles material a couple weeks ago, and at my estimate I’m about 20% through the task. Considering I’m already at about 9GB of MP3 – I estimate I’ll end up with somewhere between 50GB-75GB of just Beatles and related. Impressive when you consider that my everything-but-Beatles tally was only ~120GB.

In other news, I waffled once more on the ripper I’m using for the project. I know it seems sorta silly to switch mid-project, because it’s like admitting any pre-switch rips are inferior – but I couldn’t help myself. Partway into the Beatles ripping, I started noticing CDex throwing a few “jitter errors” on some of my discs. Not CD-Rs, not discs in bad condition either. So, for the millionth time in the span of this project, I went online to search for information about jitter errors and ripping. And, also for the millionth-and-oneth time, I decided to re-download EAC and try using it. Turns out, EAC is much better suited to high-quality ripping than CDex is. It auto-detected the features of my CD-ROM drives and actually recommended the drive I haven’t been using as the better drive for ripping audio. It then pre-configured my LAME codec with some research-proven “best” settings for MP3 quality (which, to my surprise, was using variable bitrate encoding – I’ve been using a constant bitrate of 192Kbps up until now). So, midway through my project my MP3s have become variable bitrate and ripped with a different drive and program. Being incredibly anal, you’d think this would grate on me until I finally submit and re-rip the entire pre-EAC library. But no, I’m not doing it. I’m happy with the rips I’ve done so far, and if I ever find a rotten one – I’ll just re-rip with EAC (providing I haven’t yet sold the source CD, in which case I’ll just download it).

Friday morning at work, my little Gmail notifier popped up saying I’d got a new mail. I only needed to see the little hovering summary box to know what it was – Sharaun and I had won the World Cup 2006 ticket lottery. Out of the three individual matches we put in for, we won tickets to only a single match – #7 in Nuremberg. Since a group of friends had also cast their lot in for tickets, I fired off a message proclaiming my success. Almost right after, Ben replied that luck had also been on his side – and he’d scored a pair of tickets, amazingly, to the very same match in Nuremberg. Out of the others who applied, I think only one other couple managed to get a match – and a different one at that. Seconds later Ben was over at the desk delivering a high-five for victory and talking about World Cup Fever. Too bad the thing is a year and half away. Anyway, it has the makings of an awesome vacation… and Pat later sent out an e-mail where we could see what our odds of winning really were, I was even more pumped.

Goodnight.

Posted on

exit strategy

GIS for frantic?
Too tired last night to write. Didn’t feel like it either. This month looks pretty sorry in that little calendar over on the right, so many non-blue days… nothing written. But look below, I’m proud of it again. That means that I was happy with every entry I wrote this week – nothing too crappy. That’s good, because that means I’m getting back into the swing of things. I hope this upcoming Taiwan trip doesn’t wreck me. Charge!

Got a brief e-mail from my mom today, saying simply that my brother had finally got his orders to Iraq. They told him he’ll leave for the sands December 15th, and will probably be deployed for about 18 months. To me, it seems awfully early to be informing troops they’ll be leaving in December. Not because of logistics, I can certainly understand a military deployment being planned 6 months in advance. I just guess it seems like a lot can happen within 6 months, but I understand that the military minds most likely have this planned long-term. I mean, we’re talking pretty long-term I guess, if my brother ends up going he won’t be coming home until sometime in 2007 – which tells me we’re planning to maintain a presence there at least that long. I guess only a simpleton would believe that we could realistically get out of the country much sooner. I read the other day that Rumsfeld said we’d be cutting our troops throughout 2006 – which tells me that it’s likely that my bro’s unit will be replacing more soldiers than they themselves number… kind of an unsettling thought. I think the whole thing really gets to my mom. For my part, I actually don’t worry that much. Perhaps it’s naive, but if I were in my brother’s position I’d be more pissed about having to go into the desert for more than a year without my wife than I’d be worried about being blown up by insurgents. Then again, it’s easy to say that from my comfortable couch in my comfortable house.

I can remember when I was younger, this would probably somewhere around 5th or 6th grade, I would do a lot of thinking before I dozed off to sleep. Mostly I thought of strange stuff… like trying to figure out how to pronounce words if they were read backwards. Yeah I really can remember doing that. I’d also imagine all sorts of things. That my bunkbed was a cave I was stranded in. Sometimes, for whatever reason, I’d try and see if I could force myself to genuinely cry. Not fake tears, which can be conjured up quite easily, but real tears for real sadness. I don’t know why. It will sound morbid and perhaps a bit askew, but I had this “exercise” I’d go through to make it happen. I’d clear my mind, and try my best to imagine the real emotions I’d feel if someone had told me one or both of my parents had died. Sure, your brain knows it’s not real, so it doesn’t have much effect. But if you give into the thoughts, and really try and put yourself in that place… the tears will come. And so, just to see if I could cry, I’d imagine what it would be like to learn of my parents’ demise. Now, as a semi-adult (am I one yet?), I know one day I’ll really have to deal with that emotion. Hey moms and pops, stick around a while, will ya? I’ve got stuff yet to show you.

In gradeschool, we had a trash incinerator near the edge of the playground, at least, that’s what I always thought it was. It was a squat, square brick building with a rusted brown-red roof angled in towards a small metal chimney thing. There was large metal door facing the street, where I guess you put the garbage in and burned it or something. I used to fantasize about taking girls behind it.

Goodnight.

Posted on

el dorado

An industrious people.
It’s 11:50pm and I’m just writing the first words of this entry. This evening was a busy one for me. Dinner with the boss, and then a few post-5pm work-related tasks I had to get done before bedtime. On top of all that, ended up on the phone with a coworker until midnightish, talking more shop. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, I feel like writing… don’t really feel like going to bed – although I know I’ll regret the lack of sleep come morning.

A few weeks ago, I think we were at lunch, Wes mentioned something about some “old Chinese mines” around the area. Intrigued, I asked what he was talking about. Seems that he’d been out Geocaching on his lunchbreak one day, and had stumbled across some tailings and trenches left over from the long-gone Northern California gold-mining days. I don’t know if he’d heard about them before, or if he did some research later – but he went on to explain that the area was a series of old Chinese diggings. Back in the gold-rush days of the 1850s, Chinese immigrants came in droves to Northern California to mine gold. They often lived and worked in commune-like camps. And, since I live minutes away from gold-central, California, there are remains of these Chinese camps all around the place I now call home. Turns out that the tailings and trenches that are minutes from my house are actually the 150 year old remains of a Chinese mining effort, and have remained pretty much untouched all this time.

I told Wes we had to go. I love stuff like this. Do you guys remember the movie “The Gold Bug?” I dunno about you, but we saw it in school. It’s an Edgar Allen Poe story that’s since been made into a TV-movie thing, and I can remember seeing it at least twice during my middle school literary education. From what I remember, it’s a story about a boy and a treasure hunt – and has something to do with a golden scarab. From a young age, I’ve been fascinated with treasure hunting and secret, concealed, magic, or otherwise “awesome rad” stuff of that ilk (I blame the Hardy Boys). This is why things like our middle-school Astro adventure were the apex of cool to me, and is still so memorable to me. But, I digress. The image of rotten wooden doors with rusted hinges and primitive locks sprang into my mind. I envisioned a dark crisscross of abandoned shafts, bottomless pools of endless black water, and all other Scooby Doo-esque mine-cliches. Alas, I had to leave for Taiwan and we were out of free days to go exploring. Then, this Monday rolled around and Wes, Ben and I decided to forsake our lunch hour for an adventure.

Wes led the way. There was a chest-level iron fence around the area, but a gate hung open on one side so we didn’t have to climb. You can actually see the piles of round rocks heaped in the grass from the highway, the whole thing is so close to civilization. Inside the fenced in area there are series of man-wide trenches that cut deep into the rocky earth, some as deep as thirty feet. We walked around on the piled-rocks up top, peering into the trenches for a while – then we found a way to get down in them. Just about wide enough to a man to walk through, the floor of the trenches pitched up and down in little hills, and at their deepest point you could look up and see a ribbon of sun and sky above. There were no rotted doors or dank shafts, but it was still a really fun place to explore. While there, we found evidence that the “ancient Chinese mines” may be being unofficially used for some not-so-ancient activities. We saw beer cans, hobo-hovels, spent condoms, and evidence of campfires. Hey, if less people knew about it, you could totally live at the bottom of one of those trenches and effectively disappear from the world of the surface-dwellers. Anyway, here are some pictures of the outing (Wes’ flash card ran out of space near the end of the expedition, so I had to switch to my cellphone for the last of these).




Looking down the longest and deepest of the trenches.


Ben and Wes, in the trenches.



Looking up.


Someone left us a rope to assist in this steep ascent.

With all the gold-related stuff going on in this entry, I got some more. Today I had lunch over at Pat’s place, where we discussed a new enzyme-filter (or some kinda filter at least) implementation for his large saltwater fish tank. All the talk of siphons and filtering and pumping reminded me that I have my grandfather‘s old (but working) gold sluicing equipment. It’s a little gas-powered dredge/pump attached to a fire hose, that sucks water and sediment from the river and spits it back out down a long sluice box. The constant flow of water and sand/gravel over the sluice box riffles pushes the heavy sediment to the bottom, where it collects on the textured black rubber mats. In gold-miner talk, these contraptions are often called “High Bankers” or motorized/powered sluices. Talking to Pat about the equipment, I think we both got a little bit of the gold fever. When I mentioned that I also had three of my grandpa’s old gold pans, we started talking about actually going out and using the stuff. The little gas pump worked like a charm as recently as last year, and I think I only need to make some minor repairs to the sluice box and motor mount to have a fully functioning highbanker. On top of all this, the very-close-to-me Auburn State Recreation Area allows panning and highbanking year-round without permit and several people in online gold forums mention pulling decent nuggets from the American River there.

Armed with this information, I really want to try and get a recreational highbanking/panning trip together with some friends. This would involve beer and a picnic lunch of course. Sadly, a lot of the places my grandfather used to go for public prospecting are now closed. Convict Flat, Ramshorm, Indian River, China Flat… all closed to the public as of 1996. I think it would have been cool to use his stuff in some of the very same places he used it. Owell.

2am on the nose. Goodnight.