alex chiang: web 6.0

In our last exciting episode, I got drunk at Brewfest.

A bit later, I headed out to the Mishawaka Amphitheatre to check out Sound Tribe Sector 9 with my esteemed buds Miguel, Jules, Ben, and Vero.

I’d never seen STS9 or listened to them much, but holy shit, they rocked my nuts. First off, the Mish is an amazing venue. The Poudre river burbles gently by while you groove and move right in front of the stage. The canyon walls provide for some beautiful acoustics, and everybody there is just having a great time.

In any case, the STS9 roadies started setting up the stage after the opening act, and they were out of control. One after another, these giant crystals just kept on coming. I’m talking about those huge quartz crystals that probably weigh about 200 lbs. There was one giant one in the middle flanked by smaller ones arranged symmetrically.

Just when I thought they were done with the crystals, the flowers came out. Again, out of control. The roadies blanketed the crystals with the flowers, and not just haphazardly either. It seemed like each flower had a special place where it was meant to sit, and by god if the roadies didn’t take quite some time with their flower arranging demonstration.

When all was said and done, it probably took twenty minutes JUST for the crystals and flowers. Setting up the actual instruments took a bit of time too, but everyone’s seen that before.

Finally, the band came out, and they just started kicking ass and taking names. Their sound is a crazy blend of outerspace sounding melodies over grooving bass lines intertwingled with drum and bass beats. No vocals, just grooving. It sounds cheesy to say it, but I honestly felt like the crystals were concentrating the energy of the night and the band was just channeling it and blasting it straight into our brains.

Go see them if you get a chance. If you are a woman and ovulating, don’t stand too close to the stage because you might just spontaneously get pregnant from the sheer potency of their music.

From left to right: Jules, Miguel, Vero, Ben, Alex. (click for the big version)

Crazy weekend chock full of fun. Enough for a couple days’ worth of material, so I’ll spread it out a bit and prolong the sweet lovin’ feeling you get when you read my blog.

Drank a lot of whiskey on Friday night. Note to all: Tullamore Dew is fantastic. Goes down light and smooth and wanting more. This activity, of course, led to waking up Saturday with a hangover. And as everyone knows, the best cure for a hangover is more drinking.

Luckily, brewfest was in town, where approximately 30 breweries from all over Colorado set up their booths for the express purpose of getting the entire population of Ft. Collins drunk. A $10 entrance fee gave one the privilege of buying a bunch of beer tokens ($1 each), which could then be exchanged for — you guessed it — beer. Turns out there is an art to drinking beer at brewfest, for these little tokens were only supposed to get you 6 oz. of beer at a time (or half of the complimentary cup provided upon entrance). However, with careful observation, one could make note of which pourers were generous and which were miserly. A good pourer would fill the entire cup. More beer = more better. Duh.

During the course of the debauchery, I was good-naturedly joshing my buddy Boones (or maybe I was being a complete ass — these kinds of details get lost in a fuzzy haze during an event like this). In any case, I had obviously scored a major triumph in the verbal battle of wits since she had to stoop to neanderthal-like physical violence and attempted to push me into a bush.

That got her nowhere, of course, since I outweigh her by a good 20 lbs. or so, and the intensity of my verbal harrassment increased tenfold as I pointed out that not only was she from the dingo kidney state of South Dakota, but she was a weakling too.

Her immediate reaction was to challenge me on the rosham battlefield. “Rosham let me push you into the bush,” was her warrior cry. In my drunken stupor, I accepted, not realizing that it was a one-sided challenge. And true to form, I lost. Turning to a bystander, I calmly remarked, “Could you hold this for a sec?”, handed my beer over, and then turned to pay the rosham penalty with honor.

Squared up and body relaxed to absorb the blow, I was nonetheless taken by surprise by the force that Boones proceeded to shove with, and I flew backwards into a low cedar bush, knocking my head on a giant root.

Apparently, I hadn’t killed enough brain cells with whiskey and beer, so God decided I should also hit my head really hard too. I think the bump will go away in a few days.

Yesterday, as I was leaving my house, a kid came up to me and said, “Me and my friends are trying to make some money and we were wondering if we could mow your lawn.” The first reaction I had was to look at my lawn, and it was indeed in sorry shape. So I congratulate the young entrepreneurs on their obvious skill in targetted marketing.

However, being a cheap bastard myself, I’m always hesitant to pay someone to do something I can easily do myself. My cheapness trumps my laziness almost every time. I also subscribe to the school of thought that says if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.

Regardless, I asked how much he wanted and his price was $15! Sorry kiddo, there’s a lot of PBR to be bought for $15. I mumbled something about doing it myself and took off, slightly embarassed to be denying some kid a bit of cash and contributing to the stereotype that Asians are tightwads. But on the whole, I felt good about saving $15 and drinking a bunch more beer because of it.

After almost four straight days of rain, I escaped the lowlands and sought refuge up on high in Estes. The plan was to climb Kor’s Flake on Saturday, and after waking up early and making the long trek out there, we arrived to find that everything was sopping wet. *sigh* So we turned tail and went to the Pear again.

We did two routes there. Neko’s Route (5.7) was first on our plate, and then we climbed Salud (5.8). Neko’s was alright, but Salud was fantastic. Probably the most fun pitch I’ve climbed in the past month or so.

Sunday, we headed over to the Thumb and the Needle supposedly to do some sport climbing. Upon arrival, we learned that the easy routes we wanted to warm up on were actually trad routes. So Whit and I rosham’ed for who had to go back to the car and carry all the trad gear back up to the rock, and as usual, I lost. Turns out we could only get one route in (forgot the name) before the lightning and sleet made us turn tail and run.

In other news, I can drink beer again, weighing in around 144 or so.

update (9-Sept-2004): I wrote the below one day when I was feeling particularly annoyed. It’s dangerous to be commenting about your employer on the internet, but hey, I lead a dangerous life, ok? For the completely dense, let me spell it out: I work for HP.

The good news is, I can probably help you. So if you found this page because you had a bad experience with an HP product, please let me know either via email or by leaving a valid email address in your comment, and I’ll try to turn your crappy customer experience into a good one.

Warning: nerd rant follows.

Sorry HP, but I just had awful TCE. For those of you out there who don’t work at HP, that stands for Total Customer Experience. It’s supposed to be one of the company’s most important metrics.

I bought an HP ScanJet 3500c and wanted to hook it up to my Mac — a G4 cube running OS X 10.3. The software included on the CD didn’t work, so I had to go download the updated drivers off the HP web site. Fine.

Well, not really. The drivers I needed were 171 MB. Yes, one hundred and seventy fucking megabytes of shit just to get a scanner to work. Now I’m not an apps guy. Most of my work is in kernel land. But I’m pretty sure that writing a driver for an OS shouldn’t result in a 171 MB binary.

Whatever. I downloaded the thing (thankgod for broadband, it only took an hour) and tried to install it. Jesus fucking Christ, the install quits all your running programs AND reboots your computer. Hello, HP! OS X is unix! You shouldn’t have to reboot! Ever! And stop fucking with other processes! Closing iTunes so I had to sit in silence while watching your crappy installer copy about 4000 files sucked ass.

So yeah. Good job, guys in HP-IPG (image and printing group). I have nothing constructive to say to you. Your driver sucks. Your TCE sucks. You should be condemned to a hell of using your own software. To you I say good day.

“Oh crap, not again.” That thought ran through my mind as the sleet started pummeling us while on the 2nd pitch of Batman and Robin (5.6). All I could think about was yet another epic in RMNP and kicked myself for not respecting how fast the clouds were moving in.

Luckily, after about 10 minutes of suckage, the sleet went away and the sun was back out. We didn’t summit Batman Pinnacle though, because we had already started our escape off the back side of the tower via a traverse and downclimb into the descent gully. Maybe next time.

It was Whitney’s first trad lead and she climbed in fine style.

Sunday saw us back at the Pear again with a few newbies. We warmed up on La Chaim (5.7). It turned out to be a nice route, although a bit run out on the first pitch. The next (and final) route of the day was Platinum Stethoscope (5.7) which I didn’t particularly care for. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t great either.

The goal for next weekend is Kor’s Flake. The route description mentions “squeeze” which scares me. A lot. We’ll see how it goes.

There are a few bands that are great to listen to after you stumble home drunk and incoherent. You put them on and lay in bed and listen to great fucking music as you pass out. Sixpence None the Richer’s eponymous album is good, but Mogwai is the fucking shit.

So I was browsing through my web site stats for this month and noticed that I had a bunch of hits for a rec.climbing post about relationships and climbing. Turns out there was a thread over on UK Climbing about unprotected sex in a back alley and somehow my website turned out to house the authoritative answer.

It’s good to know that I can be of service to the internet.

Apologies for the most likely dull entry here, but I decided that I should utilize the category feature of this blogging software, along with the fact that this is a journal of sorts. In other words, I’m going to write some short entries after climbing weekends just noting what we did and whatnot. These are going to be weekends which are not worthy of trip report status, and by definition, boring. But my anal-retentive personality dictates that I record my activities for posterity, and this is my blog, so I get to do whatever I want. In any case, just skip reading future entries in the “climbing” category if you want.

So anyhow, spent the weekend at Lumpy. I stayed at Whit’s house, which made things so much nicer, as she lives in Estes and thus the crag was only 5 minutes away. Saturday, we warmed up on Magical Chrome Plated Semi-Automatic Enema Syringe (5.7) on The Pear, which is the first rock west of the Book group, and it was a really enjoyable 2 pitches of climbing. Next up was Good Timing (5.9) and I thought it was pretty difficult. The first pitch has a runout slab to a 5.8+ roof section that I almost popped off of, and the second pitch involves 5.9 slab climbing past three bolts before escaping into an easy crack. That route just worked us over, and we called it quits after that.

Sunday, still feeling a bit fatigued, we just took it easy and climbed over on the Left Book. We only did one route — Hiatus (5.7+) — and it was mostly mellow with a few tricky spots on the first pitch. The beauty of living in Colorado is that you can just climb one route and then leave without feeling guilty that you’re leaving so much unclimbed rock behind.

Other notes — the approach to the Pear is much more mellow than the Book. Not saying that the Book approach is deathly brutal or anything, because it’s not, but the Pear approach is just that much easier. It’s also less crowded for sure, so I’m thinking we’re going to be climbing a bunch there in the next few weeks or so.

I made a promise to myself over the weekend that I wouldn’t drink anymore beer until I weighed in at 145 lbs. This morning, the magic number is 149, so hopefully this will be a short-lived self-induced torture.