One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.

I should have taken this photo on the road instead of indoors, but I’m waiting for my helmet to arrive so this baby’s parked for now.

How much more walkable is my new home? You might have to content yourself with my qualitative description if it weren’t for Walk Score, a Google Maps mashup that uses a set of criteria to rank the walkability of your home. Here’s my score:

Using whatever metric Walk Score has in place, my home in Utah scored 15 of 100 on the scale, “Car Dependent.”

My new home scores near the top of the scale at 91 of 100, a “Walkers’ Paradise.” I’m not sure what I need to break into the 95th percentile, but I’m content with 91. What’s your home’s score?

I still have my car for weekend getaways, which is a nice luxury. The rest of the time, I’m taking a page from Frankie Valli’s playbook and walkin’ like a man.

Both schools are just a few blocks from the same highway, it’s just 2200 miles between them.

Fortunately I just drove the leg from Salt Lake City to Berkeley this time. My dad and I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday morning on the road. Now I’m unpacking and getting set up in my new home.

Seriously. This is as far as you should go.

When I went to see The Dark Knight—fantastic film, by the way—there was one part that stood out for me. Early in the movie Bruce Wayne and Alfred are planning an operation where Batman needs to board a flying plane from the ground. Alfred suggests a program that the CIA has been working on called Skyhook. After an action sequence, Batman uses this Skyhook apparatus, and given all the other far-fetched technology in the movie, you might think that Skyhook is imaginary too. It’s not. In fact, it’s old school.

My grandfather was a navigator aboard this MC-130E during the Vietnam War.

I know this through something of a coincidence. A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandfather in Massachusetts for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and he showed me some pictures from his days in the Air Force. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather served as a navigator aboard the MC-130, a modified version of the cargo plane. One of the pictures he showed me depicted the plane with a strange, Y-shaped protrusion from the front nose. When I asked about it, he explained the Fulton Recovery System, which sounded to me like something from a movie. Using this system, which is also called Skyhook, a person on the ground wears a harness which is connected by a nylon cable to a giant balloon hanging the in sky. The MC-130E flies into the cable, the V-shaped fork catches it, and the person on the ground shoots into the sky. The plane’s crew then opens the rear cargo bay door and retrieve the person dangling in the distance using a winch.

Although the maneuver sounds dangerous, it was actually quite safe. Robert Fulton invented the system in the 1950’s and in the dozens of years it was in use there were only 1 recorded fatality.

Time Magazine actually has an article in their archives from December 1964 describing the Fulton system.

This frame from The Dark Knight shows an aircraft about to pickup Batman with the same V-shaped fork as the MC-130E. © 2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Batmobile, Batman’s armor, and his other gadgets may be from a time in the future, but his Skyhook liftoff is over 40 years old.

This is my first step towards fixing that, or at least the writing portion. I’m making a commitment to write something for my site at least once a week for the foreseeable future. My goal is to make it more than just an account of what I’m doing; I’d like it to be about things that I think are interesting and that I’m thinking about. There’s no point in posting boring material just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

A new version of this site is also in the works. I have been tweaking a design for the last several months, one that eliminates my superfluous landing page and incorporates things I post at Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious.

So stay tuned. Hopefully as it gets easier for me to write, it will also be more enjoyable for you to visit and read.

I actually wrote about it here at the time, but I can’t be sure that I conveyed the intense rage the situation provoked. Around February, probably the hottest month of the Chilean summer, there ceased to be any distinction between ants outside and ants inside. Our floors were covered with ants and there was no obvious solution. If ants are streaming into your house, forming a black river across your floor, or counter, or whatever, then your task is simple: find what’s at the end of the ant stream, probably an open jar of Smuckers or a torn bag of sugar, remove it, and destroy the ants. Our ants, however, were wandering aimlessly through the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. When the ants are aimless, that’s when you know you’re screwed. You could sweep them all up—they’d form a pile of dirt that moved—and throw them out of the house, but their cousins, or college roommates, or great-grandkids would be back half an hour later.

Ultimately I built my own solution. In fairness to words, I didn’t actually build anything, but I did something equally impressive: I devised a system. It was a deadly combination of Raid and water, mixed with quartz-crystal timing. I would spray and flood, wait, and repeat. After a few applications—and I can’t stress how crucial the timing is here—the ants came to believe that the correct course of action was to evacuate the cracks under our house, carrying their eggs. Then I would wait until all the ants and their offspring were in the open and BOOM—I’d let lose with the hose and then laid down some Raid cover-fire. The resulting massacre gave me the name, Operation Black Rain. It was usually enough to keep the ants mostly out of the house for a couple of days.

Back in the States I’m thankful not to have ants inside. But if they were, it’s comforting to know that I could pull out some skillz from my past.

And for the record, it was a rainy winter.

I remember seeing this double rainbow over I-80 when my dad and I were driving back to college before my senior year. While I was organizing some old digital photos I found this shot and I was surprised by how vibrant the color was. The pavement is as black as I remember it, the sky as deep blue. I made a global levels adjustment in Photoshop, but I didn’t do anything special to highlight the rainbows. Thought you might enjoy the shot.

If you want to see the original, I put together a side-by-side comparison. It might look like I pumped up the blues, but the original has a yellow color cast.

Sometime sophomore year my college roommate Chris and I discovered that we both collected Absolut ads. I can’t say that either of us were particularly taken by Absolut’s product, but between us we had amassed over 100 different ads. All of them clipped from magazines—no cheating by taking them from the Absolut Book. Over Christmas break that year I didn’t have much to do, so I spent time scanning, restoring, and re-cropping the ads. Back at school I printed a batch on 3-by-4 inch cards size and we arranged them in our room.

The year before the big news on Notre Dame’s campus was that student affairs had instituted an on-campus ban on hard alcohol. When the news broke I was working for Scholastic, the campus newsmagazine, and we were preparing our annual parody issue. This issue was our once-a-year chance to pretend to be The Onion. Editors were brainstorming ideas for the cover when I mentioned an idea that just happened to stick.

A week ago I was at Bryce Canyon in Southern Utah with Caitlin where we hiked the combined Navajo-Queen’s Garden loop. The whole area is peppered with hoodoos, strangely-shaped rock formations. As we finished up the two-hour hike I saw an unmistakable rock formation.

I always thought that an Absolut Utah ad would be something of an oxymoron, but maybe that was premature. This thing just keeps turning up in the most unexpected places.