Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
A cold, misty morning wrapped around Norwich road like a tunnel as I barreled south from Ontonagon. I was meeting a friend at the North Country Trail parking area near FR630 and was running late. It turned out that Emily was also behind schedule, and we met at the small parking area at the same…
Katie and I met over five years ago at Houghton. We working together for one of Michigan Tech's summer youth programs. After a few months of spending 18+ hours a day with each other we fell in love and started dating in early August (or late July, the dates/definitions were a bit fuzzy back then).…
Over the last few months I've been working on a fun side project to display what music I've been listening to recently. I decided to break this information down by albums and number of songs played over a period of time. While the data itself is straightforward and could be displayed either as a…
A short, bumpy drive along the powerline's service road brought me to a dirt four-wheeler track heading south. I stepped out of my car and immediately felt the heat rising from the ground like a swelling pool of water. Grabbing some water and a few granola bars, I entered the green forest on the…
Finding my way back to the small campsite on the Dead River, where it enters the Silver Lake Basin, was more difficult than I had planned. A maze of logging roads, mostly impassable in my small car, wound their way from the Peshekee Grade (north of Champion, MI) past Wolf Lake Road and over to…
With the advent of Google Plus a few weeks ago, I've found it interesting to compare the differences of the major 'social networks' out there in today's internet. There's been a lot of discussion out there on Facebook versus Google, but I don't think it's fair to compare only these two applications.…
The parking lot for Cascade Falls was surrounded by a warm green mugginess after the morning's rain. It was easy enough to find, just off a well-maintained forest service road, mere minutes from Norwich Road. I stepped out and quickly put on a jean jacket and baseball cap in anticipation for the…
I've always been a big fan of writing my own website frameworks. It's how I learned to code, writing and re-writing a specialized PHP framework in an iterative, agile-like development process. There have been times when I've worked within standard systems (Zend, Code Ignitor, Wordpress, etc) but I…
Nestled north of Red Road and between Mulligan Plains and the Clark Creek Valley, the numbered lakes are perched almost 300' above within thick and wild highlands. Lake 8, 2, and 3 (going from west to east) are each around 10 acres in size with shorelines ranging from deep rocky outcroppings to…
Cliff Lake is a small body of water nestled against the southern flanks of Mt. Benison, located halfway between Big Bay and Skanee. There are two main routes to Cliff Lake: follow Cliff River north from the Northwestern Road past Forty Foot Falls or break off of Erick's Road where it meets Little…