Chauncey placed 4th in sport and 3rd in speed climbing at the USA Climbing nationals in Sunnyvale.
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I still haven’t found a good screen capture tool which can capture directly into iPhoto. Grab, SnapZ Pro, and the built-in OS X screenshot tools will not snap directly to iPhoto. What’s worse is if If I snap with the built-in tools and use the command sequence for saving a snap to a file, it will automatically save the shot to the desktop (something I hate with a passion.)

Use OnyX to change the default location of the builtin screen shot save directory. Read More...

What a difference a couple generations of Mac makes. Here’s a side by side comparison of my parent’s eMac with the iMac they just got:

Ali’s been learning to ride a motorcycle....a Yamaha YZ-85 to be precise.

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My buddy, Steve Woods, was kind enough to shoot some shots of Chauncey in the ABS finals - her debut in the pro/open category. I put a link to the gallery of these shots on the left "ABS9 2008 Nationals". There's also a very nice pictorial video of the event up on the Climbing Magazine web site.

We just got through with the American Bouldering Series nationals in Boulder, CO at The Spot. This year Chauncey and Taya both qualified. Chauncey's in the 16-17 year old category and Taya is in the 12-13 year category. The climbers were culled through a regional championship process and came from all over the country and even some from Japan and Canada.

This is from The Spot's web site and gives a panoramic of a crowded night at the spot.
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Tags: climbing, abs, bouldering

I started experimenting with reporting wind data through the CWOP (Citizens Weather Observer Program). Using OSCirrus, my open source wind speed and direction package, I've been collecting wind data for a long time (nearly a year) but have never contributed the data.

CWOP is an organization which uses a ham radio data protocol called APRS which has provisions for reporting weather data either through a ham data channel or directly through the internet. Since I'm not a ham operator, the internet channel was obvious.

I created a Ruby program which reads the wind data feed my device pushes to my web server. It then tracks average wind speed and maximum gusts over the sample period, formats the CWOP data string and sends it to the CWOP servers. Those servers in turn track the historical data for a time and it's possible to see a web page of graphs divvied up by various time intervals.
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Tags: Wind, Weather