I forgot to announce on this site last week that my upgrade to my Cascade climbing site is now complete (I did announce on Facebook).  I used the same technique as I did for the Gore Range Site.  There are also newer movies available on various reports.  I decided to use Vimeo.  I prefer their interface to youtube’s.  Of course, youtube gets way more traffic.  You can click on the “Movies” category to see all reports with movies, by the way.  I still have several to add, including some HD ones…whenever I get around to making them.

I rehired a girl here in China to help me port over the trip reports from my old Gore Range site to the new one.  I used the same effective technique:  Create a special page that described the job and (here’s the key) created a screencast that showed how to do the job.  A “screencast” is basically a video of your computer screen showing what you’re doing on the computer.  I created the one for this job with Windows Media Encoder 9, which has problems (of course), but is at least free.  I’ll be upgrading to Camtasia as soon as I get my new laptop (going to pick it up in Hong Kong early next week!)  They’re running a $99 promotion now for their new version for the Mac.

The screencast is a powerful tool.  My assistant was convinced that this job, using WordPress, etc. was too complex for her.  I told her to just give it a try for a couple of them.  Now, she’s cranking them out in a matter of minutes.

Total price for the website port:  $15

My adventures in the Cascades are next.  That’s a much bigger site.  Maybe I’ll even create a site for my fourteener trip reports.

Hi, and sorry that I’ve been so negligent on the blog. I’ve been in China for just over a week now.  I spent two days in oppressive heat searching for an apartment, and two more days in oppressive heat moving in.  Finally, especially now that the AC has been put in the main room, the apartment is quite comfortable.  Also, thanks to the various typhoon tailwinds that moved in, it rained for a few days in a row and cooled everything off – a bit. Now, it’s only about as hot as Columbus, Georgia.

And, yes, I’m planning on writing trip reports for the various climbing trips, including Mount Monarch, but, I will release all of those climbing trips on my climbing sites, www.cascadeadventures.info and www.gorerange.info, once they’re upgraded to running WordPress.

After the climb of Slippery Slab Tower, I headed into Cashmere to hang out at Robert’s cabin for a short retreat.  The great thing is that there was no internet connection, phone, and so on.  I was planning to stay there for about four or five nights, but ended up staying less after Daniel confirmed a Wednesday departure for a trip to the North Ridge of Forbidden Peak.

Though I ended up staying for only two full days, I accomplished a lot.  Basically, my schedule:

• Wake up, have breakfast
• Dig a little section of trail on the property until about 8:30 or 9:00
• Work on WordPress development
• Have lunch
• Go into town to check email and do a little bit of internet surfing, two hours max
• Work on more WordPress development
• Dinner, read, go to bed

Actually, it was a great break from the usual routine and it confirmed suspicions that I had about my personal productivity.  One of the problems in China was that the internet was so slow that I’d be working on a certain web page, but it would take a little to long to load.  So, I’d tab over and open another page, another site that I needed to work on, investigate, read, or whatever.  Naturally, that page would take a while to load as well, so, I’d open another tab and repeat the process.  Eventually, I’d have ten or so tabs open and rotate to each one as they finish loading.

Switching focus between tasks is undeniably costly.  After a few weeks of this, it became apparent to me that this rapid switching between tasks was costing me a lot of time.  Spending time at the cabin away from the phone and the internet empirically demonstrated that being away from these distractions causes productivity to jump.  So, in only two days I wrote a WordPress plugin that reads a folder on a website and displays each of the files as downloadable links.  This was the first time that I’d written anything in the PHP language.  Not only that, but I also created two admin settings pages that integrate into the WordPress admin panel:  one for uploading files, and one for deleting files.  If I were working on this project in a normal environment, it would probably take me a week to write this.  So, how do I enforce this undeniable law of productivity in a normal environment?  Well, I hope I can qualify this better in the future, but to start with, setting distinct time limits on tasks, in units of hours only, is a good start.  Also, simply accessing the internet at specific times helps too.  I may have to get back on my email checking schedule…

Anyway, thanks, Robert, for the opportunity to stay at the cabin.  I enjoyed it.

I was up at 5:25 AM this morning.  We needed to leave by 6am in order to arrive at the rural high school by 7am.  Jorge works in the education department as an organizer of education counselors.  He arranged me to give a presentation of sorts to all of the teachers on web technology and trends, and maybe a bit on of China as well.  I didn’t prepare at all for the presentation because, up until the day before, it was fairly vague.  But, in the end, it went well.  The school is situated in a pastoral setting in the foothills above San Jose.  We met the director, a colleague of Jorge’s that he respects very much, who took us to the room where about thirty educators and teachers were waiting for us.  Jorge gave a brief introduction and we were off.

For the first part of the presentation, I just gave a bit on my background, how I ended up in China, what I was doing there, and what I had been studying lately.  This was almost exclusively in Spanish, which I hadn’t seriously spoke in seven years or so.  But, it went surprisingly well.  As I started to talk more about technology, my skills broke down and one of the English teachers, Julio, kindly offered to help out by translating.  At this point, probably more than half of the presentation was in English.  I mostly talked about what I had been studying lately – Web 2.0 and social internet technologies.  I talked a bit about Facebook, WordPress, and even Tim Ferriss, but the majority focused on Twitter.  Of course, I had no answers for them about how to best use this technology, but I shared some of my plans that I had for the team in China and some theories about how to take advantage of it.  It was mostly about showing them the technology, sharing my observations on the transformation of Twitter, and some rough ideas on how they could perhaps use it in the classroom.  It’s all about enabling communication.  The teachers asked challenging and thoughtful questions, each of which generated discussion:  privacy, open source vs. Microsoft, and how to train people to be creative are just some of the examples.  All in all, the presentation went about an hour and fifty minutes.

It was humbling and inspiring at the same time; here was this small rural school that obviously doesn’t have one tenth of the funding that a school in the US has, but the passion and potential here is tremendous.  It just goes to show you how many people can end up doing great things, it’s just a matter of the opportunities that present themselves.  Jorge and the director, Isabella, obviously have a good relationship and the potential to do great things.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with Jorge touring this part of the valley.  We hit numerous little sites:  a dam, the ruins of the oldest church in Costa Rica (from the mid 1500s!), hot springs, and more churches (each church we visited had Virgin Mary legends associated with them and relics to help prove the legend).  We breaked for a late mid-afternoon lunch in an open restaurant situated up on a hill with a grand view.  Many restaurants are open like this – basically, there’s very little to constitute the walls, so one feels like very close to nature.  While here, enjoying typical Costa Rican food, the clouds burst and dumped a sheets of rain down on the land.  We stayed longer and chatted while waiting for the rain to ease up.  It did an hour later or so and we headed back to Aserri to rest a bit (I also hit the internet cafe) and get ready for dinner at a famous “chicharron” restaurant.

“Chicharrones” are another typical food of Costa Rica – various cuts of barbecued pork served with different types of salsas, rice, beans, and corn tortillas.  Very tasty, of course.  The restaurant was absolutely packed; this was, according to Jorge, one of the most famous chicharroneras in the country.  Later on, three men started playing a giant marimba followed by a “Cimmarone” band accompanied by “mascadas”, typical clowns of Costa Rica.  They roamed all over the restaurant and danced by rapidly spinning back and forth, causing their fake arms to swing around and around.

I now am needing to learn more about PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and so on. As you may know, this site you’re now reading runs on WordPress software, which, for the most part, I’ve been happy with. But, if I want to add my own customizations or just play around with different ideas to try out on WordPress, running a test site online is not so practical (especially with the pitiful speed of my internet here in China). So, I looked into running WordPress locally on my Mac. I had to hunt down four things to install and configure: Apache, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. I spent four to five hours downloading, installing, and troubleshooting. In the end, it wasn’t so hard, but pulling all the info together from various websites was quite time consuming. So, I spent 20 minutes this morning culling the important information and distilled how I did it into a five-page document.

You can download the pdf file here.

It sure is nice having this set up locally. It’s incredibly fast (obviously) and as easy as editing and saving files in a basic text editor.