Adventure Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

2011 New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year again... When people realize that they've eaten too much food, spent too much money, or just haven't been overly productive over the holidays and decided to make firm New Year's Resolutions. I'm no exception to this annual tradition and have made a few commitments of my own for 2011.

Start working out

Original, eh? I am a pretty skinny guy (been hovering around 'underweight' for as long as I could spell the word), but working all day in front of a computer is not very conducive to a fit body. A few hiking-related knee injuries deter me from a daily run, but I do plan on exercising (standard push-ups and crunches) on a regular basis.
Goal: Be able to do 50 push-ups and 80 crunches in a single setting.

Finish my side projects

I've been working to get all of my sites under my MVC over the past year and feel pretty good about the progress I've made. While there is still the waterfall and hiking map sites that still use old school PHP, there is also a lot of cool features I've added to my ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• my site,
• resolution

Weekend on Mulligan Part B - Silver Lake Basin

The air felt uncomfortably hot as I walked down the trail, away from my campsite, in the early afternoon. My first Mulligan Plains hike seemed pretty easy, a simple trek around the Silver Lake Basin. There would be little bushwhacking with the lake levels still below normal from the burst of 2003. I carried a single water bottle with me, thinking that the hike would be easy and I'd be back at camp well before dark.

Uninviting upper Dead River landscape

After crossing Mulligan Creek I continued south until I hit some recent logging activity. I headed right, westwards up the hill, wandering around the piles of brush and avoiding the ankle-twisting traps left by the loggers. They only made it a short distance up the hill but I was surprised to see even more logged-out areas at the top. A recently widened two-track from the south gave them access to the entire area at the top. Disappointed by the lack of untouched woods, I headed down the sandy road.

The hill I was on is one of the tallest points on the west side of ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• mulligan plains,
• shoreline,
• silver lake basin

Revisiting the Database Class

Several months ago I wrote a blog post describing how to create a database class that would wrap the native php mysqli connection. You can read that post here. Since that post was written I've learned a lot about proper php classes and realized that I made several mistakes in that blog post that I'd like to revisit.

Singleton

The database class that I wrote constructs a new read/write connection whenever it is instantiated. However, there is nothing unique about this connection - it remains the same no matter how many different instances you have of this class. There should be only one instance of this class in this case. If you have several different connections (say, a different user for each of your databases or schemas) then you'd have to look at passing connection information into the class through a factory class, but this case requires a singleton.

A singleton class is fairly simple to make. By making the __construct method private and ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• campsite,
• mulligan plains,
• peshekee highlands

Epic Hiking Adventures Plan

One of my fondest memories of my years in Houghton, MI is the waterfall project of 2008-2009. Even though it took an actual project to get me to explore the beautiful wilderness of the Upper Peninsula, I really looked forward to my hours of wandering through the woods. After the epic adventures of those months, living in Appleton, WI sometimes seems bland. Now that I have a job and regular hours, it seems like the right time to start a new project and enjoy the wild outdoors of the Upper Peninsula again.

When I started to plan out this new project I had several possibilities. I could go back to waterfalls, expanding the radius west to the Porcupine Mountains and south to Wisconsin border. Another option would be to switch to other geologic features, like mountain peaks or lakes, and create a sister site to my waterfalls one to document my visits. However, I decided that numerous hikes would end up being a hassle, especially since these types of projects involve dozens of sub-mile-long hikes and lots of driving in between. Instead, I decided to ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• my site

Lake Superior Idea

One of my favorite parts of the waterfall project of summer 2008 was the planning process. Not only did I enjoy scouring topographic maps and satellite photos to find the quickest, safest, or most scenic route, but I also enjoyed achieving different goals; visiting every waterfall along Silver River or within the Keweenaw. Once the project was complete, I started looking for a new set of hiking adventures that would rival my experience.

Bryant Weathers, a student web developer at Michigan Tech, blogged about a friend of his who planned to spend a summer hiking around Lake Michigan (blog link). Unfortunately, he stopped a few hundred miles in, but this idea inspired a new project for myself - hike around Lake Superior.

This is not an adventure that I plan on tackling soon. With an estimated distinct of eighteen hundred miles, it will take me at least three months to walk around the lake. It'd be nice to have it done within the next six years, or before I'm thirty. Also, there are ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• north country trail,
• superior hike