The recent trip me and Liz took to Utah turned out to be incredible fun. The weather was over 110 most days, and not being 6am starters, we hiked in the heat of the day, but even that was fun in a Man vs Wild way!

We spent our first night camping at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. We were in the middle of a sea of sand dunes, I’d never seen anything like it, especially as the sun was setting. It was an unusual crowd at the camp ground, the park is open for off-road vehicles like dune buggies, so almost everyone else was there for that. It felt very Mad Max! I managed to get a fire lit using flint and steel, after figuring out the knack was to scrape slowly, but with a lot of pressure.

 
The next day, we went to the Wire Pass trailhead, which involved an eight mile drive down a really bumpy dirt road. From the trail head, we hiked about a mile down the wash until it narrowed, and we entered the slot canyon. This was truly something else, in places it was two feet wide, with sheer walls going up several hundred feet. These are carved out by flash floods, and there’s long sections with no escape route, so we were glad to be out by the time a thunderstorm started in the afternoon!

I highly recommend Michael Kelsey’s book on hiking the Paria River area, which includes lots of fun asides, like stories of murderous Mormons, and rants on the BLM’s permit policy, as well as being the best guide to the trails.

Our trip was inspired by pictures of the Wave, but we knew actually getting to it was a long shot, since only twenty hikers a day are allowed in, and there’s only ten permits available by lottery the day before. We went along to the Paria River BLM office when it opened on Friday morning, and were lucky enough to find someone had just cancelled, and so we were able to go right away!

According to Kelsey, the Wave was popularized by a German film in the 90’s, and sure enough most of the handful of people we met were fellow Europeans. The hike there was only three miles, but was across slick rock most of the way, and only an excellent handout from the BLM and our GPS stopped us losing our way. The weather was hot, around 110, and I got through about 1.5 gallons of water in just a few hours!

The Wave itself was like something from another planet, as you can see from the photos, but the whole hike was full of amazing areas. Even if you can’t get permits to the Wave, I’d recommend hiking outside the restricted area, there’s plenty to see. You get there from the same Wire Pass trailhead as the slot canyon we went to the day before.

Saturday was our last day, so we went for a less taxing hike, to see some rock formations known as the Toadstools. It was only about a 1km hike from where we parked, across a plateau to the edge of some cliffs, but it was hard to find our way. The view across the desert was worth it though.

After that, it was just a simple matter of driving 700 miles back to LA! If you want to see more photos, you can check out Liz’s site.

To celebrate Independence Day, me and Liz are taking a few days off work, and heading into the desert. We’ll be camping out near Kanab, Utah, and we’re hoping to make it to the rock formation shown in the photo. It’s actually the reason we’re going, Liz heard about it through a magazine and was fascinated. It’s so delicate, the BLM only allow twenty hikers a day to visit. Since we didn’t book ahead, we’re hoping we’ll get lucky in the lottery for the ten permits they release on the day before.

We’re camping at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, which looks like it has some amazing sights, before heading on to the main town. For the camp fires, I’ve picked up a flint and steel fire lighting kit. It’s not in the same league as starting fires by rubbing sticks together, but at least this will make me feel a bit more like Bear Grylls!

Is Prince Philip an Island God?

There is nothing I can possibly add to this!

Last week I was lucky enough to spend four days camped out amongst the redwoods at Limekiln State Park, on the California coast at Big Sur. With a waterfall at one end, the beach at the other and a creek to camp by, who could ask for more?
 

Sheer bliss.

As sometimes happens, my job has been in crunch mode for the last couple of months, and will be for a while yet. I’ll be updating the blog and site sporadically, but it’ll be pretty quiet until I have some free time again. You can still contact me on email during my hibernation.

As I was driving to the monthly Trails Council board meeting on Thursday, I suddenly heard a massive racket coming from the back of my car. I pulled over to the side, and discovered that a wrench had somehow impaled itself on my rear passenger tire!

I have no idea how that happened, I was going around 40 mph on a busy road, so my only theory is that it was bouncing around on the road and somehow it flipped up just when I hit it.

Luckily I didn’t lose control, and just had to get a new tire. The folks at Discount Tire Centers were highly amused by the sight, and lived up to their name with a good price and friendly service.

I’ve been using Crossloop for the last week, and I give it two thumbs up! As I mentioned in my original post, it’s a remote desktop app for the rest of us. Its strength is its simplicity, the team have obviously spent a lot of time figuring out how to remove the usual clutter of network configuration and the setup dance you normally have to go through to make a remote desktop connection.

This is especially important in the situation I most often want to do remote desktop access, where I’m trying to sort out a computer problem for a less experienced friend or relative. Since my relatives are all 6000 miles away, I can’t be there in person as much as I’d like, so I have to talk them through the problem on the phone. I’d love to be able to see what’s on their screen, but never considered asking them to install a remote desktop application since they’re expensive, tricky to set up, and time-consuming to use. I’d imagine that most computer support lines are also in the same position, they’d love to see what their customers are seeing, but it’s just too difficult to set up.

The first great thing about Crossloop is that it’s free! It’s not only the financial cost that this saves, it also removes any messing around with payment systems or serial numbers, making the download and install process very fast.

To start using Crossloop, you download the application, and run the installer. There’s no options in the install process, which keeps things nice and simple. The only downside is that the app is PC only, hopefully the team will produce a Mac version in the future.

Once it’s downloaded, you launch the app and it shows you a single window with two tabs, one for looking at someone else’s screen, and the other for making your screen viewable by other people. The windows both use large fonts and a minimal layout of buttons and text boxes to make it easy for any level of user to work with.

One key innovation is the use of an ‘access code’ for controlling remote sessions. This is an auto-generated number that you see when you start trying to show other people your screen. The beauty of it is, all the other person needs to do is type that same number into their ‘join session’ window, and Crossloop will locate and connect you to that session. This is a brilliant approach, since it removes the usual hunting around for IP numbers or network locations that other applications require, which is a big hurdle for most users. The metaphor is very much like a phone number, and since it’s long and auto-generated for each session, it’s unlikely that someone malicious can gain access to your screen through it.

When someone joins a session you create, you get asked if you want to allow them, with a simple dialog showing their Windows user and computer names, which gives you another level of security.

I found using Crossloop in general to be head and shoulders above the alternatives for ease of use and speed. There were a few minor things I’d like to see improved though.

One slight down-side is that the Windows firewall sometimes warns about the network communication being done by Crossloop, asking it it should be blocked or allowed. This wasn’t a big problem, but did add an extra step to talking someone through using it.

Going into fullscreen mode, for example with a game, ended the session, which was understandable (capturing DirectX fullscreen mode is difficult), and the session was automatically ended pretty gracefully.

The image compression seemed to produce JPEG artifacts around text. It was still very readable, but it would be nice if there were some way of progressively improving the quality for unchanging pieces of text, as it makes reading text tougher, and got more noticeable in longer sessions.

One clever touch was the addition of a feedback dialog asking you to rate the session after it ended, and offering you the chance to share Crossloop with your friends. Hopefully this will give them some good data to keep improving the product, and spread the word about this great way of working remotely.

Overall, this is a great product that I’ll be using for all my remote trouble-shooting, and I highly recommend it.

Crossloop is a new product that makes screen sharing easy. I heard about it through Mrinal Desai, and I’m trying it out over the next few days.

So far, I’m very impressed by the simplicity of the whole workflow. It’s been set up so that you just download and run the installer, and then when you run the program, you instantly get a window you can either type in a unique ID if you want to look at someone else’s screen, or if you change to the second tab, your own unique ID you can give out to other people to watch your screen.

I love that they’re taking a traditionally uber-geeky area, remote desktops, and democratizing the interface. They’ve removed all the config fluff that’s a barrier to 90% of computer users, and made it almost as simple as dialing a phone call.

That fits with my design philosophy, one that initially grew out of my experiences writing both console and PC games. Console games outsell PC games by an order of magnitude, even though PC games are often objectively better in graphics, and many console owners also have PCs. I grew to realize that PC games have a set of barriers that are invisible to most geeks, but almost insurmountable to the mass-market user. These are things like installing software, minimum requirements, and configuration.

With a console game, you insert the disk, hit the power button, and you’re in the game. It’s like a DVD player or any other consumer appliance, you know it will work instantly and every time. With PC games, you have to spend minutes at best installing onto your hard drive, and there’s always the chance that there’s a missing requirement or plain old driver problem that stops you dead.

Geeks love the flexibility of configuring apps, and thrive on the problem solving that ensues. Mass-market consumers want something that’s reliable and simple. That’s the real strength of web-based apps, no need for installation.

I’ll post a full review of Crossloop once I’ve had more experience with it, but my first impressions are very positive.