blog of kaiyen

I’ve upgraded from Wordpress 2.5.x to 2.6.x twice now.  Once to this blog, once to my photo blog.  Each time, I have lost my ability to logon.  My only solution has been to blow away the entire database and start from scratch.  Very strange problem.

The install works much better now – seems faster and more efficient.  But losing so much writing and whatnot is rough…

There is a commercial for Sobe Life Water, starring Naomi Campbell, that is so bad, so stupid, that when I am having trouble waking up in the morning and turn on SportsCenter as some random background noise to keep me awake, I jump out of bed to avoid watching or even hearing it.  It involves her walking our out of the water onto a beach, dripping with water, and then these crazy friggin’ lizards jumping up to drink the Life Water that she is spilling now and then.  It turns into a lizard dance-dance-revolution party of sorts where they all fall out of an umbrella and start groovin on a table.

Now, if a lizard started hoping up like it was on acid to drink water I was also drinking, I’d stop drinking that water.  And if I opened an umbrella and a bunch of friggin’ lizards fell out, I’d go to a different resort or beach.  And if I saw lizards dancing at all’well, I better be on acid, too.

Basalt

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

Perhaps more so than on a cruise to, say, the Caribbean or around Europe, an Alaskan cruise really requires booking a few excursions. Most of the ports of call are tiny cities – Ketchikan does not even have roads leading to it – so getting away from the city to see the surrounding areas is a good idea. In comparison, walking around a city in Europe or lying on the beach in the Caribbean does not require special bookings.

The first excursion that I did on my trip to Alaska was in our first port of call – Ketchikan. As alluded to above, one cannot get to this city by road. Plane or boat only. That tells you that it’s pretty remote, though it’s also a big, big fishing city. So interesting place.

We decided to go on an excursion that took us by floatplane to a ‘dock’ then on a boat through the ‘Misty Fjords.’ Photos can be found throughout our Alaska flickr set , and this one and this one are among my favorites so far (we took a lot of photos’).

This is a short review, but click on ‘more’ to read the rest.

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This afternoon I decided to try a new park and went to Calero County Park, in San Jose.  It’s about 30 minutes south of my home in Santa Clara to the entrance just a bit past the intersection of McKean and Bailey Roads.  Unlike most of the parks in the area, Calero is equestrian and hiking only – no bikes – which means it’s pretty quiet, and you don’t run into a lot of people whizzing by.  It’s also probably why it’s simply not as crowded, even on a nice Sunday.  Since the quiet is a big part of why I like to go hiking, I thought this might be a good start.

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