Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Five years ago I played around with a PHP class to contain my resume content and abstract out optional pieces. This work ended up being unwieldy and largely unused - I had to create custom exporters to get the data out and rarely needed alternate versions of my resume. Shortly after building a few…
The drive up to Lost Dog Wash Trailhead is around an hour from my house - a bit on the long side when you have two impatient sons squirming in the back of the van. We survived the drive with minimal issues, though, and pulled into the parking lot just before Chris. Preparation took some time, as it…
For the last eight years I've embarked on a wide variety of hikes. Most of them have been easy, quick treks less than five miles in length near or in well-traveled areas. Some hikes, on the other hand, have been fraught with danger. Long distances, remote locations, and difficult off-trail sections…
Peter's Canyon winds and twists for a short distance through the northern Superstitions before joining up with Tortilla Creek and emptying into the Salt River. It starts near Music Mountain, drains the north side of Peter's Mesa and the shoulders of Tortilla Mountain, then cuts a deep gorge next to…
To reach Malapais Mountain from Geronimo Head meant taking a zig-zag path while avoiding two canyons. One canyon drains south to La Barge and the other north to Peter's, and of course they don't line up nicely. If I wanted to avoid several treacherous drops I had to do the zig-zag and rack up some…
One location in the Superstition Wilderness that has been on my hiking todo list for months is Malapais Mountain. When Chris and I first ventured beyond Black Mesa to Boulder Canyon and Battleship Mountain it dominated the eastern horizon like a giant, lurking monster. I took one look at the thing…
One of the central locations to the Lost Dutchman story is a small sloped piece of land called Massacre Grounds, within a few miles of Siphon Draw and First Water. According to legend there was a bloody massacre of Mexicans on these slopes during the 1840s that is tied to Peralta mining deeper in…
My plan for the day hinged around one central assumption - that Chris's Subaru would be able to handle Forest Road 213. This three-mile dead-end track reaches down into the Supersition Wilderness from the Apache Trail (88), providing access to the Tortilla Ranch area and several trails. Both Chris…
Hiking in Arizona has become more appealing over the last year. To avoid the hot summer temperatures I can start early in the morning or drive to the higher elevations around Payson and Flagstaff. I've only run into a handful of poisonous creatures and never felt like I was in actual danger. Cactus…
As of a few weeks ago my website used PHP to route static assets. That is, every time a request hit my server for css, js, or the like, a PHP process would kick up to process and stream the response back. This was done to handle versioning and compiling of different assets, which was very helpful…