Katie and I finally made it to Mt Baldy.

The girls were with my parents in Glasgow for the week (Camp Ernie), so we used the time off to take a nice relaxing aggressive hike. The M to Mt. Baldy trail is 8 miles round trip with 4,300 feet of elevation gain, rated hard, with a 4–7 hour estimate. Recharging the ol batteries..

Fun fact: this peak has no official name. USGS and Forest Service maps don’t recognize it at all.. “Baldy Mountain” officially belongs to a summit a mile north along the ridge that most people never see and the Bridger Ridge Trail bypasses. It’s covered in trees, with a rock scramble to reach the actual summit.. not bald in the slightest. Locals have called this one Mount Baldy for at least a century (the Baldy Blitz, the Baldy Aid Station on the Bridger Ridge Run), and there’s a standing effort to make it official.

A decade ago we tried this one, took a wrong turn, and somehow ended up on the Foothills Trail.. clueless, sweaty, and nowhere near the summit. I bonked and ate a bag of Doritos on an incline next to the obviously wrong trail, looking up at Baldy from somewhere east of Sypes. It has been sitting on the list ever since.

Got there this time. Clear day, Bozeman laid out below, no wrong turns. No Doritos though.. you can’t win them all

Peloton tried to keep up. Not accurate, but it logged 12.22 miles, 5,081 feet of gain, and just under five hours.

Been there. Done that.

strain noodles: ❌
strain sun: ✅

40%-ish solar eclipse in Bozeman. Time to make crescents.

10 year-old provided jellybean feedback to 12 year-old..

Alex from Peloton likes to say something along the lines of “you don’t have to get ready if you stay ready.” Its pretty good advice.

Along those lines I decided to put together a react app to stay fresh. I’ve been hammering on (gitlab) pipelines and api frameworks at work for most of the year.. time for a project.

It is live on tronswan.com

The goals were to:
- hit some APIs from react
- mess around and build some components
- implement playwright on a project
- write GH Actions to handle build / test / deploy
- POC CI/CD to DigialOcean

Pretty fun project.. I’m displaying weather stuff and doing fizzbuzz via a weird component. Full CI/CD. Take a look if you’re bored.

https://github.com/swantron/tronswan

➜  ~ curl -s https://api.openweathermap.org/geo/1.0/direct\?q\=Bozeman\&limit\=5\&appid\=$WEATHER_API_KEY | jq .
[
  {
    "name": "Bozeman",
    "local_names": {
      "en": "Bozeman",
      "ru": "Бозмен"
    },
    "lat": 45.6794293,
    "lon": -111.044047,
    "country": "US",
    "state": "Montana"
  }
]
➜  ~ curl -s https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather\?lat\=45.67\&lon\=-111.04\&appid\=$WEATHER_API_KEY\&units\=imperial | jq .main
{
  "temp": -18.99,
  "feels_like": -31.59,
  "temp_min": -21.44,
  "temp_max": -15.3,
  "pressure": 1022,
  "humidity": 71
}

1/19/2023 - Bozeman gets Verizon 5G

It is both fast and several years late.

I mentioned in the previous post that the lightening picture would possibly look nice on a canvas, or
“It would, without any doubt, look fucking awesome on a sleeveless shirt if I crop out the neighbors’ houses.”

Here’s the crop..

.. go nuts.

I don’t think there’s a contest, but here’s my entry.

Cellphones are pretty amazing.. that pic was taken through glass via Google Night Sight. The camera operator basically just has to aim at an area and keep the device still for a minute or so. Crazy storm, crazy technology. I would say something like ’the future is here, but the skies are angry’, but that that would sound very stupid.

I don’t know.. the picture might look pretty awesome on a canvas. It would, without any doubt, look fucking awesome on a sleeveless shirt if I crop out the neighbors’ houses.

Welp 1. I finally bit the bullet and fixed the site

The issues were really straight forward.. I had ssl issues after juggling the wordpress install across several (4?) cloud platforms over the past several (4?) years, and a directory issue that took some time to resolve. There are still some broken photo links from the early-early posts, but I can say with certainty that nobody needs to revisit. Assume we all had fun and move on.

Welp 2. I’m still doing software

The issues are really straight forward. You use your brain and get upset by things that really don’t matter. I like it quite a lot. I’ve moved into infrastructure engineering, and spend most of my time pissed at AWS for whatever reason. Unify your goddamned APIs.. it is tiring.

Welp 3. remote work

The issues should be straight forward. Software Engineer and Katie is a Controller. It feels like we are at a pretty big turning point in the field. I really like my wife, really like my daughters, mostly like the dog, and usually don’t hate the chickens. The gloves come off when the dog eats the chickens’ shit, after the chickens have jumped the fence into the dog portion of the yard.. but that is solvable.

Katie and I have put in the work over the past two+ years to get good at working from the house. We’re good.. the kids are good.. things in general are good.

Welp 4. now what (still about work)

Offices are back open. But sad.

Last summer I upgraded the old black crew cab F-150 for a newer black crew cab F-150 with a goddamned moonroof. It used to be a huge flex to roll into the work parking lot with a new truck. That flex doesn’t work if nobody is there.

Welp 5. It’s better (still about work but wrapping it up)

The coffee is much better now. I dump sweat on the Peloton everyday. The commute was pretty unneeded in retrospect. I miss my work buddies, but that ship has sailed. We’ve scattered while trying to keep our shit together over the last few years.

Weird stuff, but glad to be on this side of things.