Some non-math stuff in my life
Hiking
I'm an avid hiker. I'm just beginning to explore the outdoor wonders
of upstate New York, but already I'm getting to enjoy the dramatic
gorges, rolling hills, streams and lakes, and lush vegetation. Six
years of living in San Diego was a hiker's paradise, but in a very
different way: within two hours' drive of downtown San Diego you can
get to rocky sea-cliffs, scrub-covered foothills, pine-forested
mountains, or rugged desert.
Interesting places in New York:
- Robert
H. Treman State Park, featuring trails in and above the deep gorge
of Enfield Glen. Also fascinating is the "Old Mill", dating from the
1850s and with most of its machinery still intact. A cool glimpse of
the high technology of an earlier era.
- I've been learning more about the Finger Lakes Trail, and am
thinking about an extended hike on some section of it, perhaps this
fall.
- The Adirondacks
are temptingly close. That will be a trip at some point.
- Come winter, I'm looking forward to doing some snowshoeing
(enjoyed in the past) or cross-country skiing (would be fun to learn).
A few interesting trips in California:
- Starfish Cove, a secluded canyon in the Anza-Borrego Desert,
complete with rare elephant trees.
Photos courtesy of
hiking buddy Kristin Jehring.
- Rabbit Peak. Two days + 8300 vertical feet + howling desert wind
+ no water = awesome! Photos (Kristin again).
- Mount San Gorgonio. Southern California's highest peak at
11500'. A good time had by all.
- The Tahoe Rim Trail
is 165 miles long and encircles Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada
border. Sadly our attempt to through-hike the whole thing was cut
short after five glorious days due to injury. (Everyone's fine, don't
worry.)
Sports
As I'm somewhat lacking in physical coordination, my own sporting
activities are mostly of the kind that only involve putting feet in
front of one another (see Hiking above). But I'm eminently qualified
to spectate. I support the San Diego Padres (baseball) and Chargers
(football, American football that is). I am also the proud owner of a
moderately successful fantasy baseball team, the Ocean Beach Hippies
(getting Albert Pujols with the #3 overall draft pick was a big help).
Unix
I'm a supporter of open-source software, and a fan of
Unix-like operating systems; my current choice is FreeBSD. I try to contribute what I
can back to the open-source community in the form of bug fixes, useful
feedback, and general discussion. I'm interested also in operating
system internals, CPU architecture, computer security, and debugging,
and mangling Unix is a great way to learn about all this.
I prefer emacs over vi, bash over csh, pine over mutt, and neither KDE
nor Gnome (I've recently switched from WindowMaker to the even lighter
awesome window manager).
When I find weird bugs in software I'm using, I look at it as an
opportunity to learn something by trying to fix it, and to help the
community at large by sending in a patch. You might run into me on comp.lang.c or comp.unix.programmer, or one of
the FreeBSD mailing lists.
neldredge@math.cornell.edu
