We had a fantastic trip up in the mountains this weekend joining some good friends on a hut trip up to Jay’s cabin in the Shrine Mountain Inn.  We were almost foiled in our efforts to get to the trailhead as Vail Pass was closed  due to weather and accidents until 9:30 Friday night.  We however were not to be denied and piled out of our cars at the top of the pass at 10:30 PM for a lovely moonlight skin into the hut benefiting from a perfectly timed hole in the weather.

Jay’s is palatial accommodations as far as huts go with running water and electricity and lots of space for our crew. It is a beautiful three story log cabin including the walkout basement and sleeping room for 12.  We rolled into the hut around midnight and enjoyed a few minutes in front of the wood burning fireplace before turning in.

It snowed almost the entire time we were there which made for great skiing and provided plenty of inspiration for building a snow cave that included stadium seating and room for 10.  It was hard to believe it was April as the snow just kept coming but it was great for fresh tracks and soft landings off the kicker.

One of my favorite parts of hut trips is splitting up the meals so you are generally only in charge of one meal.  As we had 12 in our group we had to get creative and add a few extra meals (like happy hour hors d’ oeuvres) so everyone could get a chance to show off their culinary skills.  We had fantastic meals and plenty of PBR as we had dragged in a case of tall boys.   Everything about the weekend kept begging the question, does it get any better than this?

P.S. I know I have fallen a bit off the blogging wagon but I am slowly climbing back on.

This past weekend an opportunity presented itself.   With a couple of friends from Minnesota in town I figured why not call my friends at enterprise and see if in Colorado, the land of the SUV the green rubber was hitting the road.  To my surprise it was and this little green beauty was ours for the renting.

This was my first experience in a hybrid and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  We are starting to think about getting a new car and as I tend to be slow and deliberate when making big decisions I also figured this would be a great chance to get some sample data on driving a hybrid.

The car itself performed quite well.  It is equipped with a touch screen that gives you all sorts of information on your energy stats and the ability to control all of the other basic systems of the car.  The interior was spacious (bigger than the Camry I had reserved) and when it came to acceleration it kept up with the crowd.

On the down side I expected more from the touch screen.  It gave basic information but could have done so much more with media, like integrating web radio stations or traffic reports or if we really want to promote efficiency how much gas I could be saving if I was driving the speed limit.  Picky small examples I know but what I was really looking for was a realization of at least some of the potential benefits of a web enabled vehicle.  It also wasn’t that fun to drive when compared to my old Honda Civic that was peppy and cornered like a running back.

I do have to admit the car did finished strong when it came to impressions.  After having the car for the entire weekend and taking several trips around Colorado for a total of  around 400 miles I stopped to fill-er-up before returning it.  Much to my surprise my gas bill for the entire weekend came to $24.27.  Enough said.

As far as I can tell my reluctance had a little bit to do with the fact that I find the interface clumsy and difficult to use but more so that I had this lingering doubt that what I was really signing up for was a big advertising network where advertisers knew a bunch about me and my friends so they could hone their pitches.

Then it happened. I was riding trusty RTD to work this morning and as the snow had slowed us down I found a few extra minutes to play with my Blackberry. While paging through the applications I noticed a new facebook icon on the list and my interest was peaked.

As I explored the mobile application I found it very easy to use and powerful enough to let me do most of what I do on FB. Within minutes I uploaded a picture from my phone, got a response from one of my friends and was able to heckle him back all without having to get email “outside” the system. My phone was even smart enough to segregate the message from my normal email so I didn’t have to deal with them in my inbox.

It is hard to say what I like about it the most but I think the feature I will use the most is the mobile photo post. I am using it like twitter with pictures. Pretty cool, let’s see how long it sticks.

Below are a few before and current pictures to give you a sense for the progress.

What happened to that pretty wall paper?

What about the wall, where did that go?

However in 2002 I moved to Colorado and was able to enjoy the 2004 series from a far as my new hometown team continued to grow on me. It could have been the great young talent on the field or the day this summer I went to a game only to realize that I could have brought my dog but the Rockies were winning me over. Their final run down the stretch was so exciting I couldn’t help but to be drawn in. So when dressing for the game on Saturday night I had decided I was going to leave my Red Sox t-shirt and visor behind and cheer for the Rockies.

The first thing I noticed as we were pulling into a parking Garage at market street station was all the Red Sox gear being displayed in the streets of Denver. The Red Sox nation was everywhere it seemed and after taking in batting practice we settled into our seats to find that two Sox fans from California were sitting right behind us.

Now I tend to be a talkative sort and when one of the Red Sox fans started making small talk about the line up and pitching match up I was happy to engage. He and his buddy mentioned they were lawyers from San Francisco but he assured me that he had spent formative years in Boston and was indeed a true Sox fan. I purposely didn’t mention who I was cheering for and he didn’t ask why I knew so much about the Red Sox so we exchanged a few more pleasantries as the game preparations continued.

As the game started the fan and I began cheering for our respective teams and my very smart wife made me promise not to get in any verbal sparing matches with these two fans as she know my propensity to talk junk on occasion. I did my best but of course there were a few points were I couldn’t help myself and we traded barbs.

The game started to get a little out of hand as the Sox raced ahead to a 6-0 lead. At this point Sox fan #2 had put away a few too many beers and was getting a little combative. During the bottom of the inning I was standing up to cheer as we rallied for few runs and he decided to grab my Rockies towel out of my pocket and throw it around.

While this annoyed me a little it was easy enough to get my future bike chain rags back and get back to the game. Then Matt Holliday hit his 3 run homer and the Rockies were within one run. At this point Sox fan # 2 who had begun calling me Spidy because of my coat was yelling something to me and gave me a little shove in the back. Shove may be too strong of a word as it wouldn’t have drawn a hand checking call in the NBA but it was a nudge and I was not excited to have my space violated. So I turned around and pointed west and suggested he take his inebriated self back to California. To his credit, at this point Sox fan #1 intervened and somehow managed to distract his friend, at least from bothering me.

The next inning started and the Sox began to pile on more runs. At this point fan #2 started to get in a near altercation with the guys behind him. This time it was two guys who seemed to have had a few drinks as well. There were some tense words but nothing came of it and I am back to paying full attention to the game.

A couple minutes later I hear a distinctive cracking noise that it takes me a minute to place especially since I now feel someone starting to fall over down over me. I instinctively put up may hands and with the help of the gentleman sitting next to me we steady what we now realize is Sox fan #2. As I stand up and take a quick survey I see blood streaming from #2s nose and one of the previously enraged Rockies fans looking at him with eyes the size of saucers.

Sox Fan #2s first move is not to go back after the guy or even to try and stop the bleeding that has now gotten all over the guy next to him as well as my seat and a few others, nope he is looking for security so he can press charges. It takes a few minutes but eventually several folks in purple shirts come down and escort both the bleeder and the puncher out of the section. They return a few minutes later to ask for a witness to come with them, but settle for an in the row interview as everybody wants to stay and watch the game.

About ten minutes later the puncher returns to his seat to watch the rest of the game. Go figure…

I didn’t have time (or the desire) to sleep out at the ticket window in hopes of getting tickets so when the Rockies announcement that they would only sell tickets online I was interested. Additionally for someone who used to work for a content delivery company that helps businesses with just this sort of internet flash crowd I started to think about how I would set this up if I knew 8 million people were going to try and rush the front door all at the same time.

The first day for sale came and went and the outsourced ticket vendor got hammered. I had been stuck in a meeting and was a little late to try the site and by the time I tried to load the page it wasn’t even responding. Lucky for me the vendor had to drop the site, admit failure and the Rockies again announced tickets would go on sale later in the week.

This time I was ready. I have been playing with the buy tickets page and noticed that is was linking you directly to a page on a separate subdomain that had been CNAMED to my old company Akamai’s content delivery service. This page was deploying a version of the velvet rope trick we used to use to segment traffic. The name describes the holding pen created by an usher to control flow and only let a certain number of people in to the non-akamaized ticket buying site at a time.

The specific URL was something like http://ak.holdplease.evenue.com/blah/blah/blah and that page was very quickly served from a local Akamai machine and set to reload every 120 seconds or so. Before the reload the page would first test an alternate page, the page of the ticket vendor and if you were lucky it bounced you to that system.

In my case the URL it tested was: http://ev3.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/SEGetEventInfo?ticketCode=GS%3AROCKIES-ST%3APS07%3AWSA%3A&linkID=rockies-st&shopperContext=&caller=&appCode=

When you were redirected to this page the velvet rope had been lifted and you were at the front door to the ticket buying system. The problem with this approach is that your origin site can still get overwhelmed if you over estimate the number of users that can be served.

In this case the ev3.evenue.net was getting more hits that it could take so it was very slow to load. At this point I started to tinker. I figured if there was an ev3.evenue.net there had to be another host active that would serve my traffic as the incremented domain is yet another way to segment traffic.

First I tried going directly at the root, evenue.net, wrong cookie - blocked. Then I tried ev.evenue.net, ev1.evenue.net, ev2.evenue.net all with no luck. My next guess was the winner.

http://ev4.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/SEGetEventInfo?ticketCode=GS%3AROCKIES-ST%3APS07%3AWSA%3A&linkID=rockies-st&shopperContext=&caller=&appCode=

turned out to be the magic URL that let me in a side door and I was able to start buying tickets. At this point my screams of delight did not go unnoticed by my co-workers and before long there were 10 people in my cube. I sent out my new URL to the whole office and most of them hit the jackpot as well.

At this point I started playing with the URLs a bit more and found a way to help another coworker get tickets to game five (it seemed like a good idea at the time). The trick here was to look athte URL when searching for tickets. They had added an event ID to the URL which went incremented took you to games four and five instead of three.

Now that I have had a few moment to think about it. I probably would have used dig to test the whole slew of subdomains and see which resolved as I am sure there were a few more lurking.

This was shot in the newly updated kitchen by Meghan Conway.

We found a great guy to do our floors and after much discussion and research decided not to go with Glitsa on the floors. I think it was the idea that the fumes could kill small animals that scared us off. We ended up going with three coats of poly and it turned out great.

Next came the constant airing out of the place and installation of the stove. What a luxury to be able to cook inside again. Our first use of the stove was to make cookies and a frozen pizza.  It has been so long that we forgot what to cook so feel free to send suggestions.

Now we are waiting on drawer pulls and some other exciting accessories as we weigh our options for countertops. In the downtime we had a great visit with my cousin Scott who now lives in Charlotte. He was in Denver for a conference and extended for the weekend. We took him to all the hot spots including the farmers market and Lake Dorothy in Indian Peaks.

This is the part of the blog post where I would normally display copious pictures.  Unfortunately our digital camera fell victim to our playful puppy and her favorite game of get something in her mouth and encourage us to chase her.  As she doesn’t have the softest mouth we no longer have an intact LCD screen or functioning lens.  To quote Homer, Doh.

Next on the hitlist is refinishing the floor and moving the gas line for the new stove.  Hopefully we will get this done soon but until then we will be happily unpacking our long stowed wedding presents and running the dishwasher non-stop.