Corridor 9

The server backup finally finished today after running for over 3 hours. I’m going to try running the secondary upgrade tonight and hope that everything works as planned. If not, it could take me a while to get the server back online again.

On the downside, I ran a few tests on the server while it was down today and found out that its slowly dying. Some of the memory is bad and I can’t get replacement modules because they are so old. In addition, a few other parts a failing including at least one of the hard drives, the CD-RW drive, and possibly the second hard drive as well. Its not surprising as all the components are over 10 years old.

I’ll be auctioning off some of my body parts to raise funds. These include but are not limited to: 1 kidney, 1 lung (2 lobes only), bone marrow, and possibly left testicle. All items are available immediately, with the exception of the testicle which I need at least till I father a child. Payments can be made via Paypal, Cash, Money Order, or Certified Check. In addition, donations of hardware, or cash would be helpful as I would really like to keep all my organs if possible.

Any amount would help, so if you like reading about my life and adventures, please consider helping me stay online. Click the “Make a Donation” button on the sidebar to help.

Peace!

After 7 days of upgrading, I’ve finally completed the primary upgrade. It took a bit of tweaking, praying, crashing, more tweaking, starting over, and wondering if I was ever going to get this running right. I’m going to have to make a backup just in case I crash it on the second upgrade. Hopefully I can get that done tomorrow and start the upgrade when I come back to work on Monday.

Stay tuned!

Hey guys…. I haven’t forgotten about you. I haven’t been able to post lately because of the site upgrade listed below. I ended up having to rollback to a previous save point this morning, thats why some of the posts from the last couple of days are missing.

I ended up with some files that were misconfigured before and it was preventing me from a proper upgrade. I’ve started it again, and so far I have not been having the same problem. I’m going to finish the primary upgrade today and tomorrow. After that I’m going to create another save point, then I’m going to upgrade the web page information and some of the programs associated with it. Bear with me. I’m working on a computer thats 10 years old, and its finally starting to die. I’m keeping it on life support as long as I can before I have to shell out another $900 for another server to last me 10 years or more.

Peace!

C9 will be offline tomorrow (Monday Jan 23) for scheduled maintenance. Hopefully this will only take 2 -4 hours, but a worst case scenario will have C9 down till Tuesday morning.

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Saturday’s night sleep was much easier than Friday nights. Even though the temperature dropped down to 18 F, the lack of wind and a few tricks I learned from my fellow hikers helped keep me warm throughout the night. I had always heard that the best way to stay warm was to sleep without your clothes on. This way all your body heat is radiated back to you. However, one of the things I didn’t know was that although the radiant heat is what you want to keep you warm, the inside of the bag is rather cold. I threw on a pair of dry socks, a clean shirt, and thin pants in hopes of keeping my warm body away from the cold inside of the bag. To my surprise it worked rather well. I also learned that it isn’t wise to get up in the middle of the night to take a whiz. Instead, just keep a bottle inside your bag and then use it as a foot warmer after you begin to fill it up. It kept my feet toasty for the rest of the night.

After waking Sunday morning we packed up our gear and headed out early. Luckily our gear was much dryer than it was the night before, but there was still a bit of condensation on the bag and sides of the tent. Our group spread out quite considerably for Sunday’s walk. I kept up with the initial party for about 45 minutes till I dropped back to refill my water supply. After that I was pretty much on a solo hike for the rest of the day. It was the most peaceful five hours of walking that I have ever had.

When we got to camp, most of us set out our tent, sleeping bag, and other stuff that was soaking wet from the previous two nights out to dry. Our campsite that evening was on the northern rim of the gulf, and with the air currents coming out of the valley and directly through our site it wasn’t long before everything that had gotten wet the previous two nights dried out. We gathered a boatload of firewood, setup our tents, and prepared our meals.

The second group made it to camp later on that evening after a bit of confusion. There were two ways into the campsite. The trail head was the main way into the site, but there was a shortcut just before the main trail head by about thirty yards. One of the guys in the second group got to the trail head about 10 minutes before the rest of the group did. Unfortunately, the rest of the group took the shortcut into the camp, so the guy waiting at the trail head decided to hike back down the hill to look for them. The only problem was the fact that this hill was extremely steep. It was one of those hills that you are only able to take 10 steps up before you have to take a break to catch your breath. He finally arrived back at camp about 2 hours after the rest of his companions.

All in all, the second day of hiking was much nicer. The weather was a lot more cooperative, the peace and quiet was wonderful, and although the hill at the end of the trip was a back breaker, it was quite a nice trek.

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Sleep came gradually Friday night, but the bitter cold that shocked us from our sleeping bags was painfully quick. It seemed as if the cold had seeped through every possible entry point into my sleeping bag. Having a mummy bag helped a lot as I had the hood wrapped tightly about my face, but my toes were feeling painfully numb. Although I didn’t want to get out of bed just yet, I knew that my only chance to warm up was to get out of the tent and move around a bit.

Prosecutor built us a small warm fire that morning to warm our toes by as we all packed our gear in preparation for the days hike. We shuffled cars around to make sure that everyone had a way to get home, and joined up with Ewker and Jimmy San as they drove in from Nashville that morning. It was around 11 am that we finally got to the trail. Almost immediately the peacefulness of the walk settled in as people gently spread out and strolled through the woods admiring the drifting snow from the previous nights storm. We stopped at waterfalls, bridges, and trail heads where we took the opportunity to snap a few pictures, eat a bit of lunch, and rest our weary legs. It took us between 4-5 hours to walk the 8 miles to the next campsite, but the time passed rather quickly as the views were so spectacular you seemed to loose track of time.

Upon arriving at the second nights campsite, saw mill, we unpacked our sleeping bags and setup out tents before the night fell. We must have had a half a cord of wood for that nights fire, but with the air turning colder, the fire just didn’t seem all that warm. I turned in quite early that night due to the fact that I was cold, wet, and just wanted to get in my sleeping bag to get warm. The temperature got down to 18 F, but I stayed a bit warmer than the previous night because the wind wasn’t blowing as much.

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What a wonderful weekend!

I left Madisonville, heading toward Savage Gulf, around 10 am on Friday morning after finishing some errands that I needed to get done around town. By leaving that early I allowed myself ample time to bum around a number of camping stores for hours on end without having to listen to my wife ask me exactly how many hours we’re going to be walking around the same store.

The first place I went was Blue Ridge Mountain Sports. It was a fairly small store, but they seemed to have a lot of equipment there for hiking and backpacking. I ended up buying a Pack cover because it was raining at the time, and I knew it was supposed to rain or snow the rest of the weekend. Unfortunately I bought a cover for an external frame pack instead of the internal frame design that I have. I’m going to swap it out with dad so I can get one for my pack.

After there I went to Cumberland Transit. This is a large, two story store, with just about everything you could need for hiking, backpacking, climbing, mountain biking, and any other outdoor experiences you plan to tackle. I took almost an hour just walking around looking at everything they offered! I’d compare it to REI any day.

After these, I simply had to stop by REI. I found some awesome deals on clearanced equipment. Unfortunately, in my financially embarrassed state, I was only able to get a pair of nylon convertible pants, and boy am I glad I did! With the temperatures dropping into the teens on the trip, the cotton pants I had would have been miserable, and I probably would have come home with frostbite.

I was going to pick up a fellow hiker at the airport, but the weather delayed his flight, so it wasn’t until around 2:00 pm that I started heading to the campsite. I ended up getting to the campsite right when Wounded Knee, and Prosecutor pulled up from their trip to get their last caffeine fix for the weekend. We all found a campsite, and started unloading our gear and setting the tents up. I’m glad we got that finished fairly early because it wasn’t long after that the rain and sleet started falling steadily. The campfire kept us fairly warm when we could stand the rain long enough to huddle around it, but as the temperature dropped lower and lower into the 20’s, and with the wind blowing quite hard, the only thing to do was retreat to the tent and a hopefully warm sleeping bag.

See tomorrows blog for more on the trip to Savage Gulf!

I’ve finally made it home after my trip. I’ll post pictures and blog more about my trip tomorrow. Seeing as how I’ve only spend one day with Kristie in the last week, it’s probably not a very good plan for me to be on this thing too much tonight.

I had quite a productive night last night due to the fact that Kristie and Kendall were off at a Pampered Chef party. Not to say that I wanted them to be away or anything, but more that I was able to accomplish a lot in the amount of time they were away. {whew… had to rephrase that one correctly or suffer the wife’s wrath }

I finally finished packing for the trip this weekend, and I must say how eager I am to get on the trail again! I think this trip is going to be a lot more forgiving on both my back and knees than the last trip was. When I went to the Smokeys in September, my pack weighed between 55 and 65 lbs. This is a lot to carry on your back for 6-7 hours at a time. After tooling around with different packing configurations, and aquiring some lighter weight gear (Thanks mom and dad!), I was able to shave off a considerable amount of weight. With everything packed that I was going to take, except the water in my CamelBak, I weighed a hair over 32 lbs. I figure when I add the water I should weigh between 35-37 lbs. Thats a difference of between 20 - 30 lbs! I’m hoping that when dad and I go to the Grand Canyon, the split in weight between two packs will allow us to cary between 20-28 lbs a piece.

Now all thats standing in my way is time…. another 21 hours to go!

A fellow firefighter of mine had a daughter pass away last night after a long battle with cancer. Please keep their family in your prayers.

I’m working on changing the logo around again. Please bear with me as I figure out how to get this thing working. Most of you probably won’t even notice a change unless you happen to visit Corridor9 while I’m working on it, but if you do see graphics problems… just ignore them as I’m probably playing with settings.

Also, I know the site is a bit slow to begin with. This is because I’m running this out of my house rather than paying some company upwards of $50 / month to host my website. However, if you notice a SIGNIFICANT slow down caused by the flash animations loading, please let me know so I can adjust the animations accordingly. Thanks.

I’ve been working all day on a new Flash 8 tutorial trying to learn the ins and outs of this wonderful piece of software. I’ve learned so much that I think I’m about ready to redesign Corridor9 and include a bit more user interactive graphics. I’d also like to create a motion-based logo that incorporates a number of pictures that fade in and out, rather than the standard static logo that you see now. Look forward in the coming weeks to seeing the site undergo a complete redesign.

After searching thebackpacker.com for a few trips I ran across one to the Grand Canyon in early March. I talked to dad about it and asked if he might like to go on a trip like this. I figured he’d think about it a while, then decline. Much to my surprise he was more than enthused about going so I looked into booking a permit for the trip. I received the information in the mail today and found out that I had been approved! I’m looking forward to going out west and actually hiking within the canyon!

In addition, my trip to Savage Gulf is coming up this weekend and I can barely contain my joy! I packed my gear up Thursday to see if I could get everything to fit inside the pack. I have a bit of space issues, but as I didn’t pack water, fuel, or food yet I thought it would be wise to try and figure those issues out when I do a final pack on Friday morning.

I finally got fed up with waiting on my laptop last night to the point I was ready to throw it across the room. It had been quite a while since I completely formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system so I decided that today would probably be a good day. It usually takes a few days for me to get everything ironed out as I’d like, but I think I’ve finally narrowed the time frame down to just under 18 hours.

So far everything is running nicely, with no problems whatsoever. I’m just hoping that I can keep it clean for a bit longer than I did last time. If I remember right, I did this whole process less than 6 months ago.

Yesterday turned out to be quite a busy day. I left work about 10 minutes early, when my coverage arrived, to get home as soon as possible. I needed to drive Abby back to Louisville to meet up with Dave and Katie. It was a long trip, but it was quite an eventful one.

Sunday night Kristie told me that Abby saw the Worship Jamz cd on tv and mentioned that she wanted it. That was music to my ears! I bought her a Jaci Velasquez cd for Christmas hoping that it would be music that she would like to listen to. I’m trying to get her listening to more contemporary Christian music in an effort to show her that ll Christian music isn’t lame. I know I myself don’t care for some of the old southern gospel style music, but with the Christian bands developing faster than the secular bands it isn’t hard for me to find something that I like.

As we were driving and listening to the Worship Jamz cd, she started singing along with some of the songs and it brought tears to my eyes. God is so wonderful! I’ve been praying that she would have a good Christian influence in Indianapolis, and it seems God has placed one there for her. Her best friend is apparently Christian, and has been introducing her to the newer music. It was such a joy to hear her singing the songs right along with me as we drove.

I also had my first Chiropractic visit yesterday. It was such a weird sensation feeling all the bones in my spine crack like my fingers do. It didn’t hurt at all, and felt quite good once it was all over. I’m hoping that he will be able to correct the degeneration that is happening in my spine.

I hope everyone had a safe and happy new years eve. May this coming year bring you closer to the ones you love, and may God’s grace and mercy shine down on you.