Last year, I no longer had the fear. I still trained, but it was definitely less than the 1,000 miles some recommend. Nevertheless, I opted to ride “The Park,” which is the more challenging route for the first half of the second day. It was awesome — the best part of the ride, hands down. Less crowded, more scenic, and lots of fun little downhill curves. Those come with uphill sections too, but let us not speak of those.

This year I not only lack the fear, I have an exciting new job in Austin. All this travel and excitement has put a serious crimp in my training. I’m not totally flabby — I’ve been jogging a fair amount — but the bike odometer is looking pretty pathetic. A couple of weeks ago I went to ride with the Northwest Cycling Club. I went with the 16–18 mph group and only kept up for 4 miles. Very discouraging.

I concluded that with only 6 weeks to go, I was irretrievably far behind. I told Ed, our team captain, that he should offer my MS150 spot to some other more diligent rider. (This year MS150 registration capped before Thanksgiving so there are lots of people who want to ride but don’t have a spot.) He responded with words of encouragement and pointed out that lots of people on Team Trinity have been slacking off this year.

A bunch of my teammates were doing the 40-mile Tour de Houston, so I registered to see if I could keep up with them. No problem! It was a nice ride despite the fact that the route was crap this year. (The first two years of the Tour de Houston went through West University, River Oaks, The Heights, and other scenic inner loop neighborhoods. This year’s ride featured a trip down State Highway 3 past a Waste Management landfill.) I told Ed that I would keep my MS150 spot after all.

All of this is just a long way of saying that I expect riding the MS150 to be much more challenging this year. On the idea that endurance events for charity attract donations in proportion to their difficulty, my ride this year should be more worthy of support. Right?

The National MS Society does good work helping to fight a horrible disease. The MS150 bike rides (there are three — the Houston to Austin ride is by far the largest) are basically the sole fundraiser for the Lone Star chapter. Last year they raised $11.4 million. According to Charity Navigator, a service that rates charities based on their financial efficiency, they spent 91% of this on program expenses: research, education, and support for MS sufferers. Charity Navigator gives them four stars out of four. The four star rating mainly means that they do a good job of spending donations of their stated mission rather than administrative expenses (fancy offices and Land Rovers) and fundraising (spamming the world with direct mail and other crap).

The goal for this year is $11.5 million with the same number of riders as last year. My goal is $400. Please donate. Thank you!

Yesterday my sister Kara married Garrett Hargrove in the company of family and friends in Austin. Congratulations to them! More pictures to follow.

Update: the photographer has a “questionably hip blog” and posted some very nice pictures on it.

The Kilimanjaro climb was fantastic. We took the Machame route, also known as the “whiskey route,” in contrast with the shorter, easier, and more popular Marangu (”Coca Cola”) route. The Machame route takes 5 days to climb from Machame gate (6,000 feet) to Barafu camp (15,100 feet). These were great hiking days. The mountain is gorgeous, and the elevation change means that the scenery and mix of vegetation changes every few miles. Because we had a team of porters carrying all the heavy stuff, we just had day packs and the hikes were pretty easy. Usually three to five hours was enough to finish the day’s hike, leaving plenty of time for sitting around in camp drinking tea, playing cards, and enjoying the view.

At Barafu camp you sleep only from dinner time till about 11:30 PM, when you prepare for the trek to the summit. You want to reach the summit around sunrise for two reasons. First, the sunrise is incredible from the Roof of Africa. Second, the wind and sun at the summit become very unpleasant by midday.

In contrast to the previous five days, the hike to the summit is not especially pleasant. Barafu camp is above the vegetation line, so there is nothing but rocks to look at. Of course, it’s dark, so you wouldn’t be able to see past the range of your headlamp anyway. The temperatures are well below freezing. I had enough gear on that I wasn’t unpleasantly cold, but still - it’s not warm. Because of the cold, you can’t safely stop for more than a minute or two.

Like most standalone mountains, Kilimanjaro is an extinct volcano. After six solid hours of climbing in the dark, we reached the crater rim: about 18,600 feet. We had a brief stop there to enjoy the sunrise, then we continued along the crater rim to its highest point. Uhuru Peak is at 19,340 feet. It is the highest point on the continent. There’s a wooden sign with a bunch of stickers on it. At this point it was fully morning, so instead of worrying about the cold, we had to worry about the altitude and the sun. We took some pictures and started down.

I don’t know why the route back down to Barafu camp is different from the route up. I would much rather have returned by the original, switchback-based, route. Instead, we got mile after mile of steep scree field. Very tedious. We all fell many, many times. During this part of the day, I was seriously doubting whether the summit was worth it. Why not just enjoy the five-day trek to Barafu and then head down?

From a comfortable seat back home, that’s just sounds silly. Of course you want to go all the way to the top!

We made it back to Barafu camp around 11 AM. We ate some lunch and took a brief nap before continuing down the mountain. Here we had a choice: you can do the Machame route in 6 days or 7. If doing it in 7, you spend a night at Mweka camp, halfway down. If doing it in 6, you skip Mweka camp and leave the mountain on the same day you summit. We were on the fence about which option to take, so we decided to hike to Mweka, see what time it was and how we felt, then figure out whether to camp or finish the descent.

The crew left Barafu about 2 and reached Mweka at about 5, feeling tired but good. Our guide estimated that we could make it to Mweka gate in two hours, so we ate a quick snack and hit the trail. Around 7 it was getting dark and we still had a ways to go. It was too late and too far to go back to Mweka camp, so we put on our headlamps and soldiered on. The gate finally appeared about an hour later. Total hiking time for the day was close to 18 hours. It felt really good to sit on a bench while the guide dealt with the usual African bureaucratic crap to check us out of the park.

If you have a chance to go, I highly recommend it.

I recently returned from Tanzania, Africa, where I went for my sister’s wedding and 7 day safari on the Northern Circuit. I went with her company Duma Explorer who did a fantastic job. I went to Tarangire National Park, Lake Manyara, Serengeti National Park, and the Ngorongoro Crater (the largest unbroken caldera in the world). We saw tons of lions, a few leopards (one walked right next to the car!), cheetahs, elephants, zebra, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, vultures, 10s of 1000s of wildebeests (yes, those are gnus for you geeks out there), and many others. We got to see lionesses hunt, a cheetah hunt, and at one point she jumped on top of our car for a better vantage point! It was incredible.

I have posted a crapload (but a small portion of what I took) here. Check them out and enjoy! If you choose only one park to look at, pick the Serengeti folder - lots of great cat shots in there. Tim is on safari right now with the rest of my family (I had to go separate and come home early to start residency), and then he will be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I am sure he will have some amazing photos so be sure to check back for those.

As you see towards the end of the lengthy (nearly an hour) video, you can mix them together. This means that you can write a query in C# that joins XML and SQL data. The LINQ engine will formulate a real SQL query to get the relational part of the data and send it off to the database for execution, then do the necessary joining and filtering with the XML part and return a set of strongly-typed objects. The amount of code required to do this is quite small, assuming you sweep the auto-generated object-relational mapping code under the rug.

Dough

Mix 3½ cups of all-purpose flour with 1 cup bread flour and 1 tablespoon of kosher salt in a stand mixer with the dough hook attached.

Proof 1 tablespoon active dry yeast in 1½ cups 100°F water with 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil to the yeast and pour it slowly into the flour with the mixer running.

Let the mixer run for ten minutes, then pull the dough off of the hook, put it back in the bowl, and let the mixer run for a couple more minutes. Make the dough into a ball and put into an oiled bowl. Cover with plastic. Let it rise for one hour. Divide it into three chunks using a bench scraper and put each one into a plastic container. Put the containers into the fridge overnight.

Toppings

Toppings vary, of course. Tonight’s pizza had:

• Boboli pizza sauce, since I didn’t bother to make the real stuff.
• “Polly-O Gourmet Mozzarella Cheese” — the best I can find for pizza. It comes shrink-wrapped in 8 oz. balls. I slice up about half a ball per pizza.
• A roma tomato, sliced thin.
• A few pitted Kalamata olives, sliced.
• One garlic clove, sliced.
• One slice of Black Forest Ham (like for a sandwich), chopped.
• A little bit of kosher salt (not much, since the olives and ham are already fairly salty).
• Fresh ground black pepper.
• A drizzle of olive oil around the edge of the crust. (On pizzas that don’t have any meat among their toppings, I also add a light drizzle over the whole thing.)
• A few basil leaves, chiffonade. This doesn’t get added until after the pizza has been baked.

Baking

Preheat the oven as hot as it will go (mine goes to 550°F) well in advance of making the pizza so the stone has time to heat up too. If the dough was refrigerated, give it at least half an hour to come to room temperature before trying to stretch it. Put some cornmeal on the pizza peel, stretch the dough, and put it on the peel.

Top.

Slide it into the oven and bake for 5–10 minutes. You have to keep an eye on it. Pull it when the cheese starts to bubble and the crust starts to darken around the edges.

Commencement for the UT-Houston Med School Class of 2006 was this morning. Carrie’s a doctor now! Afterwards a bunch of family and friends came over to our place for food and drinks. And a good time was had by all.

Update: more photos from the big day.

The story involves an alien language that lacks vowels, so it’s full of unpronouncable words like “Fthshpk” (a holiday) and “thshsh” (a beverage). To record these words for the story, Paul added sufficient long vowels to make them pronouncable, then the producer used an audio editor to delete the vowel sounds, leaving only the sibilant consonants. The effect works very well - it gives the idea of a non-human language while still being sort of recognizable, at least in the sense that when you hear the same word twice you can tell that it’s the same word again. It helps that there aren’t too many alien words included in the story text.

If this is an indicator of the quality of the rest of the Escape Pod recordings (Paul tells me that it is actually “weaker than their normal fare”), then I expect to be a regular listener.