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New Zealand
Late last year, my friend asked me if I wanted to go with him to New Zealand. Originally, he wanted to visit Australia in the same trip, but we decided there was simply too much to do in both countries in one trip, so we pared it back to just New Zealand.
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Nicaragua
Last year, when I was planning my trip to Belize, I had wanted to visit Nicaragua as well but there was just too much to do in both countries, so I pushed off Nicaragua. There were a few cities I wanted to stop in Nicaragua and I needed at least a week to do that. I actually had to limit my stops to 3 and so missed out on some other places I wanted to visit like Ometepe.
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Seattle
I get to attend one conference per year on the company dime, so I chose a Swift conference in Seattle in the last weekend in October. After, I spent one afternoon in the city visiting the Space Needle and Pike Place Market. I’m not really a city person though, so I headed out with a friend into the surrounding areas.
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Portland
I visited a friend who recently moved to Portland for a few days. We did 2 days of hiking and only a few hours of walking around downtown. There are so many great hiking spots in the Portland area, with a bunch concentrated in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
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Yosemite
After missing several opportunities over the years to visit Yosemite, a group of friends got together to go camping in July. We had to book the site in Wawona months in advance, as soon as registration opened. We weren’t able to get permits to climb the Half Dome cables, so we just waited at Sub Dome until we found people with spots on their permits (each permit has 6 spots). The cables are challenging and kind of scary on the way down. Sometimes people will just stop and hold up the entire line so prepare yourself to wait in place for a while.
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Site Change
I’ve been writing occasional updates to this site using the MWeb product (see New Site) and it’s worked decently at outputting static pages. My main disappointment with MWeb is the lack of any advanced scripting or customization features. After looking at various solutions, I decided to move to Jekyll, a static blogging platform written in Ruby. There seems to be an established community behind it, with plenty of plugins (although some are in better shape than others). The best part is everything can be scripted, obviating the need for a specific program to deploy or author pages in. I can now author pages in any Markdown editor and deploy the site from the command line.
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