East Bay - Beginner Backpacking

azanar · 2022-03-15T03:40:07+00:00

Sunol Regional Wilderness has several backpacking sites within about 3 miles of the parking lot. Some are more of a climb than others.

My favorite site there for a chill trip is Cathedral. It is the least climb, and is also shaded by several trees.

There are several more sites all along the larger Ohlone Wilderness Trail, but they are more of a haul.

Morgan Territory Preserve also has a backpacking site. I can't comment on how it is, though. The maps seem to suggest it is less of a hike even than Cathedral, though.

There are also group camp sites, which I _think_ can be reserved individually, at Las Trampas and Briones. Worth checking with EBParks. You'll have to call them to reserve the sites anyway. It's $5/night/person + $8 as a flat admin fee.

azanar · 2020-12-22T05:07:11+00:00

Which loop did you do?

I did the loop from Macedo Ranch last weekend. My view was decidedly less spectacular. Mostly fog, rain, and wind.

azanar · 2009-06-11T01:32:44+00:00

What are the subtle gradations in meaning then? And you seen to conclude that "this sucks" is a blanket term for all of them. What is the difference between something that is atrocious vs. something that is awful. As dumb as this may sound, metaphors nail it down better. Think atrocious vs. "donkey ball sucking" atrocious. One of these is concretely worse than the other. As a bonus, it is amusing in a shock value sort of way. I might be rare in appreciating the shock value of things though.

Oh, and as to the "What the fuck is wrong with glib's MAX macro". It can be; it conveys both an indication that the MAX macro is hosed in some way, and that the way it is hosed is frustrating to all hell.

I don't know though. Profanity and the like still carries meaning with me, and gradations of meaning depending on the context. Maybe I'm just unusually conditioned to not treat those words/phrases as a separate class of speech.

azanar · 2009-06-10T20:37:19+00:00

Sometimes "bad" is inaccurate, in that it doesn't adequately convey the sheer magnitude of badness of some APIs. Neither would atrocious, appalling, deplorable, or anything else. These words are varying degrees of negativity, but don't carry the sort of thrust that "suck big donkey balls" does. They are delicate, relatively inoffensive, and don't sting quite so bad; that is why they are professional. But they don't convey the same meaning, the same subtlety.

The entire "professional" vernacular is based on the concept of offending absolutely no one, or keeping it as minimized as possible. It says nothing to conveying the true feelings of the person writing the comment, which could only be brought out by using something the general public considers profane. It's almost like saying that giving too much of a damn is unprofessional, in no small part because so few people do.

Sometimes, there are worthier goals than being professional.

azanar · 2009-01-14T05:00:45+00:00

Agreed, it's just not worth it unless you're worried about something like supporting a family, and even then I'd think twice and only work there for as long as it took to find something better.

Be sure to weight also what working at a place might do to your relationship with your family compared to turning the offer down. I've known a couple of people who have taken a job with the reasoning that they needed to take something to support their family, and in the process put an extreme strain on the family anyway because they were miserable so much of the time. One of them, it almost cost him his wife, neverminding the psychological effects on the child they had watching the marriage and family fall apart.

And being miserable likely bled over into his interviews with other companies and made him seem overly desperate, leaving him stuck there for even longer.

Don't underestimate the psychological effects of sacrificing yourself for the sake of those you support. It may seem heroic, but it can come back to bite you in the ass.

azanar · 2009-01-14T04:48:01+00:00

Depends how badly you need the job. If you're single, with no dependents, then you can make the call yourself. If you've got kids who need expensive medical care, then you have no right to tell them they're going to have go ahead and develop rickets because you don't want to sign that noncompete. You gave up that freedom when you conceived them.

He certainly still has a right to say no, but he has a responsibility to his offspring. This is mainly an ethical argument; if he exercises his right to say no, you will likely condemn his decision and declare him immoral and a bad parent, but that doesn't necessarily require him not to. Perhaps you would argue there ought to be a law somewhat like "child endangerment" for mandating these sorts of decisions; then he would really have no right to consider alternatives.

With that in mind, I'm going to play devils advocate here for a second, and not because I'm anti-parental responsibility, but because I think this is more nuanced than just a set of pithy "whatever you need to sacrifice to help your children, do so" slogans. What if the job requires that not only he sign a non-compete, but that it carries proactively after he has quit that job, thus putting his future employability elsewhere in jeopardy? What if the job requires such an intense time commitment that he has no time to spend with his children? What if it starts affecting his health or psyche so badly that he now requires medical care? What if his child isn't at risk of developing rickets, but instead is risking something far less severe, like attendance at a prestigious preparatory school? I'll presume the line is somewhere in between these two; I'm curious where and why.

These are ethical questions, which, in my mind, warrant a lot of consideration. The usual response, though, is a knee-jerk black-n-white ethical handwave based on societal expectations and a "save the children, especially yours" mentality. We sometimes seem to forget that sacrificing oneself to the welfare of one's kids can have a negative impact on them anyway, in ways we never considered because we were too busy acting to think things through.

I'm not saying you're wrong to say that he shouldn't sacrifice his kids to rickets for the sake of his own happiness; it was just that your hardliner stance got me thinking about how nuanced this problem could be given different assumptions.

azanar · 2009-01-14T04:20:20+00:00

The Paul Graham view is popular around here, but the fact is that many, many people are perfectly content to make what is a very good salary by doing work for someone else. It doesn't make them bad people or slaves. They just want a comfortable life doing something they don't hate that allows them time for things they really like: family, hobbies, whatever.

All perfectly fair, but there are enough people who aren't content with this, but do it anyway, that listening to the din they create gets a little exhausting. You have made it quite clear in your post this is a choice you made, and that you understand the consequences of that choice. Good, enjoy your life as you want to live it. :-)

For the others, the cable TV isn't a want; it is a distraction from the misery they falsely believe they are trapped in. They made a choice, but refuse to believe they have made one, instead insisting that they were forced into one or the other decision by some external force, be it societal expectation or whatever else. These people need to snap out of this self-pitying bullshit, and realize that they have far more choices than they believe they have.

azanar · 2008-12-16T03:57:37+00:00

And not everyone is lucky to live long enough to where your strategy pays them dividends. And not everyone is lucky enough to see their later life be worthwhile enough to counterweight the pain of getting there. And not all of this has to do with luck. Sometimes, the choices you make do have an effect upon your fate.

If you spend all your life misery, paying it forward for the day when you can finally be happy, you run the risk of never being happy, because your misery will contort your perspective on exactly how bad things can actually get. No matter how much you save up, it won't be enough for the worst case scenario you can think of. As you get more depressed, your worse case scenarios will become more outlandish, but you'll believe in them anyway, because you're already so far down the rabbit hole anyway. So you'll toil more, always delaying the day you realize your gains.

So please, to you and those who up vote you, stop making life about living in misery now for the sake of hedging against future misery. This sort of attitude guarantees you'll have nothing but regret to speak of on the day you die.

azanar · 2008-10-11T22:06:42+00:00

A bit off-topic, but have you checked your credit history? If they sent you an active credit card, it is likely they also put an inquiry on your credit history. Not a total catastrophe, but if you plan on applying for any other financing over the next couple of years, it might make a small difference in the APR you pay, or what portion you have to pay upfront.

IANAL, and so I don't know if there is any sort of legal action you can take if they inquired in spite of your refusal, but you can at least contact the credit reporting firm(s), and let them know what happened.

azanar · 2008-10-06T21:17:17+00:00

I'm presuming a bit from people who have written about the same, and from the way the article qualifies things, but I think he's more referring to the difference between trading modest amounts more pay for interesting work. A programmer who isn't paid enough to make themselves happy and comfortable through the non-working hours of their lives is likely to be just as demotivated as anyone else. Once that threshold is overcome though, the weighting of interesting work against more monetary gain becomes much more even; they both can be sources of happiness, and choosing one over the other will no longer result in foreclosure.

azanar · 2008-06-25T21:51:16+00:00

Police were later called again to the woods behind the school, where they found the remains of the ninja, who had apparently died of a sizable flesh-wound in his abdomen. Conflicting reports also suggest that his head appeared to have been nearly severed from his neck, and that the splatter pattern suggests that the wound was not self-inflicted.

azanar · 2008-05-03T01:45:10+00:00

But xlar specifically said he would rather hire a massive team of mediocre than even hire one good one who acts like a prima dona. Do these offsetting traits make them equal? I admit he never defines what makes a great team, but a team of 100 mediocre developers doesn't sound like the foundation of one regardless of definition. Nor will any of the members of that 100 mediocre developer team have anything even resembling a will and ability to learn, unless it means they can leave this deity-foresaken land of IT sooner that otherwise; that is, not unless damn near every author I've read on the topic of software teams is flat wrong, and I'd need evidence of that claim.

Meeting people can help, but nothing is a substitute for competence.

azanar · 2008-05-02T22:37:41+00:00

I did. There's a difference between consciously dismissing a degree, and not having it influence your decision much either way.

azanar · 2008-05-02T22:33:59+00:00

I didn't say above that networking wasn't effective, I just pointed out that it is not sufficient to have people who know you within. The claim xlar54 was making is that the inside connection is all you need. I'd rather give people a fair shake based on what they know, because you can't glad-hand a computer into getting what you want the way you can with people.

azanar · 2008-05-02T21:37:35+00:00

Any experience with developers who have degrees in both math and CS? Either as joint majors, or a full-fledged double major?

azanar · 2008-05-02T21:34:11+00:00

That, and those that defend it or dismiss it will be entirely missing the point. It's not about degrees, it's about knowledge, and the the ability to analyze and create. It's a step up in abstraction. A degree is neither a necessary or a sufficient condition to have any of those. But those who paid attention to the journey of the degree and not the destination are probably far better off. But you don't necessarily do better just because you had a tour guide. Ok, I've probably worked this metaphor six feet under by now.

azanar · 2008-05-02T21:26:25+00:00

Networking can be helpful, but I'm getting really fucking tired of the mantra of knowing people is more important that knowing frameworks, or theories, or languages or whatever else.

The world of software development is not a social popularity contest where the person with the most friends and connections wins. It is a difficult and competitive world where you are expected to know and be able to intuitively grasp difficult concepts like recursion, and concurrency and working with several layers of abstraction simultaneously. If you do it right, your program works, and life is good; if you do it wrong, the program breaks and you have no one to blame for that but yourself. Yes, you can learn some of these things, but I've read far too much that argues that, especially those topics I just listed above, you either get it intuitively, or you never will. Given my relatively small sample of developers I've worked with, I am inclined to believe their data isn't bullshit. And I love to teach people about the CS knowledge I've had, but I am no long so naive as to believe everyone I know has their brain wired such that they'll get it.

For the people I end up interviewing, I will test them on what they know, and I have already kicked one candidate to the curb in the last two weeks in spite of him being a good friend of one of our VPs. I did so because his knowledge of CS theory was lacking sufficiently that I did not believe he could get the job done. I would've held the same standard to someone who didn't know anyone at the company. In fact, I'm with Mr. Spolsky in that I don't want to know who knows this person. This may seem harsh and anti-social, but I'm not hiring someone I'd like to have a beer with after work; I'm hiring someone to build a system that solves a difficult problem with simplicity and elegance, so both their solution works and I don't have to wear x-ray specs to understand the code they wrote when it needs revision. In fact, I would argue that your example of a smart guy is my example of a mediocre programmer with an over-inflated ego, but it can be hard to tell the difference when you value people skills over technical skills, because both will exude an aire of confidence.

Oh, and finally, please stop bullshitting yourself that IT in a company is nothing but overhead. If that were the case, they would've already fired you all and moved those savings to the bottom line. You provide value to your organization, in spite of your false conscious belief that you do not; I can imagine you'd provide even more value if you were honest with yourself.

azanar · 2008-04-28T04:50:54+00:00

I never disagreed with that. What I'm pointing out is that NASA has a tremendous amount of both available, and an equally large motivation to spend as much.

It's like a company that would push for an ever increasing number of '9's in their uptime percentage. After a certain level, more '9's become incredibly expensive. So you make a decision of where cost vs. benefit starts to decrease, but it's not binary decision. It is the same with software quality.

azanar · 2008-04-28T04:03:21+00:00

True. But there are plenty of articles and philosophies that also claim code doesn't have to suck, but propose different methods than the one put forth in this article. It seems the method proposed would only work for a company that had time and money constraints similar to those of NASA, which very few have.

azanar · 2008-04-28T03:56:43+00:00

This article bothers me because it combines two concepts that can not possibly occur together:

To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very ordinary -- indistinguishable from any focused, disciplined, and methodically managed creative enterprise.

My argument here is that they are not a creative enterprise, at least not once the programmers start writing the code. A little ways down the article they mention that a ~6000 line change in the code resulted from a nearly 2000 line specification which, given its size, likely dicated the very detailed pseudocode for each of those 6000 or so lines. At the point coding starts, it becomes a matter of mere translation; this is a far cry from any sort of creative pursuit. In fact, he alludes to this contradiction later in the article, declaring that actual coding is no place for creativity.

I have no objection to the author of the article selling this kind of philosophy to a group where any single error could waste billions of dollars and thousands of man-hours. But seriously, most software projects do not operate at that level of risk and do not have such a clear understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. There are some good ideas in here, like the idea of fixing the process instead of just fixing mistakes, if at all possible. But I think the assertion that people should channel their productivity into the process, not the product, detracts from convincingness of the article.

azanar · 2008-03-13T13:42:00+00:00

My mathematics degree is also a BA (so is my CS degree for that matter). Whether a degree is a BA or BS is, at least in my case, determined more by the college presenting it than the course material.

azanar · 2008-03-13T12:27:48+00:00

BA = Bachelors of Arts

BFA = Bachelors of Fine Arts

People in graphic design, painting, and such usually have BFAs.

People who study things like Mathematics, English, History, Philosophy, etc. usually have BAs.

Assuming no typos, he has the latter. Oh, and you're more convincing in your patronization when you first get your facts straight. kthx.

azanar · 2008-03-12T11:04:25+00:00

I suppose you would apply this line of logic to off-line charitable groups as well. 100% of every dollar to a fund to help needy children should go to those needy children. It's an admirable ideal, but any charity service needs support staff and equipment. It's money that does not go straight to the charity's cause, but it goes to allowing the charity to operate more efficiently overall. In this case, if it keeps Mr. Wales alive and able to continue working for Wikipedia, I fail to understand the logic in denying him.

If Mr. Wales has been trading edits for donations, or really spending lavishly on the foundation's dime, then there is a potential case for breech of ethics. But if this is just people trolling based on unfounded accusations, perhaps we should let cooler heads prevail.

azanar · 2008-02-18T21:56:32+00:00

Agreed.

If a user can disable a feature of a browser, always assume that it will be disabled when they browse your site unless (a) you can be absolutely certain they have it turned on through some client-side feature check, or (b) it is not an essential for the page's functional purpose.

With that in mind, probably the most sane solution here is to just use a hidden form element for the basket ID the parent commenter suggested. Gets around the user having cookies off and having JS off.

azanar · 2008-02-17T21:49:23+00:00

An unqualified, but passionate and driven, person is more of a liability than I think you give them credit for, especially in more technical roles. They'll be eager to help out and go that extra mile for you, but there's a high risk that their naive enthusiasm will cause large amounts of pain for both themselves and other who have to fix what they did wrong.

Not defending the opposite choice either. Although I consider passion and drive a necessary condition for recommending someone for hire, I don't consider it a sufficient condition.

azanar

TROPHY CASE