Sean Colyer – PrometheusX

I read an article today in Forbes blaming high unemployment directly on the recent increase in minimum wage. Despite having heard the same thing in basic microeconomics, the concept never sat well with me. So I decided to reason through the logic and see if I could make any sense of it.

I would argue, like most economists, that the primary purpose of a business owner (theoretically) is to maximize profits. How this is achieved or over what timeframe is irrelevant for the point of thought, the goal in general is to maximize profits.

The argument against minimum wage seems to indicate that wages are kept artificially high, which results in fewer people being employed and a generally lower level of service, or increased costs. Business owners, it is stated, will be unable to hire employees because of their additional cost. The concept seems to almost describe a “salary cap”; an employer has more or less a set amount of money that they can spend on labor and they will buy however much labor they can get for that cost.

At first this seems a reasonable thought, a small business owner (the favorite anecdotal evidence) can’t afford to hire a summer teenager to stock shelves because they have to pay them $7.50 instead of the “market price” (presumably a lot lower).  The poor struggling business owner is barely making ends meet and the minimum wage is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

I think an easy way to look at employees for analysis is to think of the marginal gain that each employee will provide.  It’s easy to see that the first few employees at a store or office are essential – without them there would be no business running at all. An empty space would sit wasting away. If the added benefit of an employee is less than their cost, they will be terminated or never hired.  However, in a world and business environment that is being pushed hard for efficiency, where downsizing is common place – I believe that the vast majority of employers are optimized to provide their desired level of service with the minimal employee coverage that they can.  Employers want a minimal coverage map to achieve their desired level of service, regardless of the wage of their employees.

The largest question remains that if employers are forced to pay their employees more what then will happen to prices and customers? I think this is far more complicated than many would care to admit. A classical argument against the minimum wage would say that businesses would be hurt because if they keep the same level of service, they are forced to charge customers more, which will likely result in their losing of business. I do not dispute this is a possibility, but I do not think it simplifies to something so simple. People who are paid minimum wage are typically least likely to save money, meaning that the increase in prices will be going directly to people who will be spending it. Additionally, I imagine it’s quite likely that many of the people who receive minimum wage spend their money at many of the businesses that pay minimum wage.  Additionally, prices would increase less than the increase in wage because cost of materials would not increase equivalent to the minimum wage (think of the cost in manpower in agriculture which in modern farming is minimal).

Imagine an area affected by minimum wage – fast food. One’s service is focused primarily on the amount of time it takes from walking in the door until food is in hand ready to be consumed. If the line is out the door, the chance of losing customers is very high, the restaurant’s demand is likely quite elastic, a roughly equivalent competitor is usually within reach. Maybe customers will wait in line once, but I would venture their likelihood of returning is pretty slim. On the flip side, if a customer walks into a fast food restaurant and gets their food instantly, they’re probably happy about it, but the owner of the restaurant is probably upset that they’re keeping so many idle people on staff no matter what they’re getting paid.

I recognize that there are derivative issues I have not touched heavily on, but I think I have worked through at least what I preliminarily consider to be the major points. I have tried hard to steer clear of moral issues associated with minimum wage – most business people would write such arguments off as unimportant. However, I believe that the minimum wage is not as cut and dry as economists would try to lead the population to believe. I for one refuse to accept the reasoning that “many economists believe” as valid reason to blindly follow.  Additionally, economics often seems to get tied so heavily in theory and simple graphs of reasoning that it seems to often over simplify the world as it is. What is the real affect of having a society with a huge division in income? In a world where dollar menus are still going strong, it’s hard for me to believe that the minimum wage is causing consumers to pay artificially high prices and turn away from businesses with minimum wage employees.

I’d love feedback — I’m not claiming to know everything or have thought of all issues. Feel free to email me or contact me via some other means!

I realize I’ve still been really bad about posting on here, oops.  I’ll really try to be a bit better. I am envisioning however a change in the site in the (relatively) near-future to a format that I like better. Apologies if you’ve been checking back for updates only to be completely disappointed (haha kidding — I’m not really sure who reads this anyway).

This summer Matt and I went on a huge road trip across the country. In 3 weeks we covered more than 7,000 miles. This translates into lots of seat time. Lots.  Our poison of choice was a 1994 Volkswagen Golf.  I found the car on craigslist for a great price, and it was pretty much the exact car I had envisioned for such a trip. Complete with manual windows and locks and only 3 functioning doors, the car had it’s share of “character” — but I would have it no other way.

From haggling for $45 hotel rooms to coyotes and bison, a rodeo, and the loneliest highway in the world; our trip was fantastic. We saw America in a way many people don’t get to. The opportunity was amazing and I had a blast.

It’s hard to condense all that happened into a few paragraphs. I put together a ~15 minute video summing up our time: http://vimeo.com/13339747 (!CHECK IT OUT!). It’s a combination of photos and video from the trip. It was all shot with the recent Canon T2i camera.  The video was shot in HD at 1080p. The lens of choice was a Canon 28-135, though a 50mm/1.8 was used at points. If you have any questions or are thinking of a similar trip, I’d love to help you out.

Since coming back, I’ve moved into an apartment and started a job. I’ll really try to be better about keeping this site somewhat up to date!

I realize that I’ve been really slow about blogging lately, so I’ll try to give a quick update and then give some more detailed posts soon!  I’ve also given in to Twitter (@seancolyer ) if interested.

It’s my last semester and I’ve been really busy between finishing projects (and my thesis!), trying to enjoy Charlottesville before I leave, and trying to travel a bit and visit friends from other schools. I’ve taken a job in northern Virginia working with a small software consulting startup. The team seems like a really good group, and I’m excited about the opportunity.  I don’t start working until August, which leaves me some time to do some interesting stuff, notably an epic cross country road trip that I will discuss in future posts..

Foxfield. Those within the UVA community immediately have a preconceived notion of the word.  Foxfield Races are horse races that draw a huge portion of students together for a day of socializing. The event has become a signature of Greek organizations around grounds. The emphasis is on socializing more than horse racing, the running joke has become whether spectators even see horses (the course is large enough it’s possible and in fact often true). Presumably from the association with horse racing, Foxfield has also become well known for people wearing their southern Sunday bests; but this often just results in varying levels of seersucker and crazy pastel color combinations. I went for the first time this year, I figured I should partake in the UVA event once in my four years here.

Anticipation surrounding the races were significantly dampened with the prediction of thunderstorms all day. However, the rain held off for virtually the entire day, with the worst rain before most people even arrived.  Additionally, the weather provided a bit of an advantage over some other years where the temperatures often shoot quite high which combining with sun can be quite uncomfortable (I’m told). I had a good time, it was a unique experience and I happened to run into a surprising number of people I didn’t expect to see.

Keep your eyes peeled for new posts..

My desktop machine (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit x64) recently stopped loading icons when I logged in. The start menu and and everything seemed to work except my Desktop.  After scouring the web there seemed to be a few proposed solutions:

1. System Restore
2. Explorer isn’t running/ registry WinLogon or userinit.exe isn’t properly set
3. Too large files on Desktop (I can’t find this link now, but most of these are in multiple places)
4. Create New User and import data from the old profile

These weren’t good for me.  System Restore is never ideal, it’s just rolling back to before you made some unknown mistake, and you’ll probably lose stuff on the way. Explorer was running and userinit.exe was running.

I was also tipped off that this was an issue with a local user profile because I had another user account that was loading fine. I didn’t want to create a new user and import data because there are lots of settings and things attached to this account, it also just seems like a messy way to fix this.

How I fixed it, in the registry:

HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon set FirstLogon to 1

rename HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows to HKCU/Software/Microsoft/WindowsOLD or something like that

Log out and log back in.  This will create most of a clean explorer/windows profile.  The one issue left is preferences don’t seem to save properly (file associations, taskbar, etc…)

The way I fixed this was to export HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer from a clean profile.  Log back in to your original profile.  You have to delete HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer in your registry; As far as I can tell you can’t edit these values regardless of permissions, but it will let you delete the whole directory (Nice one MS). Then import the version you exported previously, log out and log back in.

You will lose a few things — generally settings in Explorer (file preferences, themes, etc..) unfortunately.  I didn’t really feel like chasing down specifically which values got corrupted in mine, but if you were to look within the Windows registry folder addressed above and fiddle it could probably be found without too much effort — I was fine with basically reseting my explorer profile.

Hope this helps someone, if something I said is unclear feel free to ask for clarification.

Over winter break I was fortunate enough to make it to Whistler for some skiing — one of the main locations for the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Even though the Olympics wouldn’t start for nearly a month, preparations were well under way, the resort had an empty grand stand by a freshly crafted chairlift — soon to be filled with eager fans of downhill skiing.

My traveling was pretty ridiculous to get there.. Flight: 7:15AM. Alarm set for 5:15AM. Dad wakes me because my clock was switched AM/PM: 6:00AM.  No way I’m making this flight. Leave the house: 6:10AM. Check Bags, make it through security and to my gate as regular boarding is finished. Phew! +5 Hours, land in long beach for a couple of hour layover.  3 hour flight to Seattle. First trip to Seattle, rainy, of course. +2 hours, bus finally leaves from Seattle, Vacouver-bound. Takes better than an hour to cross the border, uggh. I’m getting tired, and hungry. Make it to the Vancouver airport a shade before 9PM (West coast time), my friend has pressing issue and can’t bring me. Frantically find a bus that leaves at 9 to go to whistler.  ~1130PM roll into Whistler. Liza comes and gets me and takes me to her cabin, my ridiculous day of traveling is over, but we hang out for a few hours to add to it just for fun. Nearly 24 hours, and 3000 miles. Let’s ski.

We roll out of bed hoping to ski by a bit after 9am, closer to 10 we’re on a gondola to halfway up. It’s a beautiful sunny day, probably 25 degrees, no clouds, this is awesome.  Whistler is surrounded by some absolutely beautiful mountains, surrounded by peaks in every direction. It’s beautiful snow, and not crowded, we were having a great time.  We cross to the other major peak, Blackcomb via a new gondola (436m above ground at highest point!), for some new terrain.  We ski across sections of the mountain and spend a lot of time near the peak, cautiously venturing beyond the avalanche warning signs into some wild bowls. Drew, a friend of Liza, is a terrific skier, and challenges us a bit in a great way. At one point we drop off some pretty serious faces, occasionally so steep you can hardly see what you’re about to go over. We ski all day, and it’s amazing. Blackcomb peak is supposed to be just over 8k feet and the base camp just over 2k.

The next day is similar, we don’t venture quite as far distance, but take the skiing up another notch, venturing to create some paths down the peak, and challenge ourselves on many runs.  By the end of the day, we’re starting to drag — this skiing is real exercise. These aren’t the hills of the US east coast, these are world-class mountains.We finish on the Women’s Olympic downhill course.

The next two days other friends come up from California to join us, and the weather by now has worsened into a cloudy, often above freezing arena.  At some points it’s clear at the bottom of the mountain, raining halfway up, and snowing at the top, it’s pretty unreal. Sometimes the conditions were whiteout at the top. These days of skiing had stretches of easier skiing, which by now was a much-needed break. Cam and I conclude our skiing with a “peak-to-creak” run, stretching the whole elevation available.

I had a great time, reunited with old friends, and had loads of fun. My nearly day-long travel return is completely worth it.

*Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my camera for the days of nice weather, and only managed a few pictures.. And a video of the whiteout..

WhiteoutWhistlerPeak

So, yes, I’ve been really bad about updating this — so there are probably going to be several posts in short time.

My good friend, Miles, from high school was graduating from the U of Miami, so a bunch of us went down to visit him.

We showed up in the middle of December, but it was 70s most of the time we were there.  It was bucketing rain when we were first there, but it came around and was nice and sunny for us.  We took a trip to the beach and were playing football at the ocean, which was awesome, even sweeter because it was december. Miles led us through the U, and showed us across town and South Beach.

I made it to mass on Sunday night, and it had dropped into the 60s (when the Miami population starts fearing hypothermia). Wearing a polo shirt and pants put me about a jacket and scarf behind the rest of the churchgoers. On the way out, the priest semi-seriously warned me not to catch a cold — haha, welcome to Miami!

While there, the biggest snow storm in 13 years hit the DC area for a bit more than 2 feet. We were greeted to it when we came back, and it was quite a shocking transition.

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Being home from school for the break I took it upon myself to finally upgrade my macbook from Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) — intended to be a relatively trivial upgrade, I somehow managed to stumble the whole way through. This was the last of my 3 Operating Systems to be upgraded (XP -> 7, Ubuntu 9.04 -> 9.10).

Important and Helpful things I learned or used in this exercise:

Preparation

WARNING: there are commands in here that if used improperly can do serious damage to your install, tread lightly. BACKUP your home directory.  Use an external hard drive and run something like:

rsync -ahv –delete –exclude=/Downloads/ –size-only ~/ /Volumes/BACKUPDrive/username/ From the Terminal in your home directory. (Apple or Command key + Space to bring finder search type terminal in this window).

Running the Snow Leopard disc yielded my major issue: My Mac disc showed a yellow triangle and wouldn’t let me use my mac drive for the upgrade. Following a note I had seen online, I used Disk Utility (on the booted SL dvd) to resize the partition — DOES NOT WORK WELL –  it in fact seemed to mess up both of my other installs (win7 and ubuntu 9.10), uggghhh.

Accepting the inevitable and having backups of my data, I decided to run with this, I took the opportunity to clean all of my installs.

Partitioning

From here, I believe I made two mistakes.  My first mistake was when I repartitioned my drive I created 3 partitions, one large one for OS X and 2 smaller ones for the others, but I didn’t format them, just left them as free space.  For some reason I believe this messed up how the computer decided to boot from them, it was like the GPT/EFI support with MBR got somehow confused.

The way you should partition for triple booting a mac is to use the command line it seems with something like:

diskutil list This should yield the drive and volume number you need for the next command

sudo diskutil resizeVolume diskDRIVENUMBERsVOLUMENUMBER 80G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Linux” 15G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Windows” 15G This seems to be the best way to re-size.

From here you should be able to continue installing your operating systems of choice. rEFIt is the best way to triple boot, it should be installed now if it hasn’t already been.

Installing Linux / Ubuntu

My second mistake: the most important thing to note in Linux is to install GRUB to the Linux Partition rather than the MBR (default).  In ubuntu, near the end of the install there is an advanced options tab which will allow you to install it in the local partition, you want to do this.

If however, you are dumb and mess up like me, you have to fix this later, because windows and linux will fight and will result in only one being bootable.

grub-install /dev/sdaPARTITIONNUMBER will install GRUB to your needed partition.

You will also want to delete the GRUB MBR entry (alternatively, install Windows at this point which will overwrite it without asking). This is a little more interesting:

The Power of dd

dd is a very powerful and useful command, I ended up using it for several different things during this installation. dd provides relatively low level access to disk reading and writing functions. BE VERY CAREFUL TO GET PROPER if= AND of= ARGUMENTS.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1 will clear your MBR. (OS X equivalent would be of=/dev/disk0 however it doesn’t let you do this to that partition.  I saw reference to using fdisk on the /dev/disk0 partition (the 200mb EFI partition), but I’d like to avoid that if possible. DON’T GET THIS ONE WRONG, and backup the MBR by basically inverting making if=/dev/sda and of=/path/to/backup.efi

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/whereveryouwant/DiskImage.iso bs=2048 is a good way to make ISO images of CD’s/DVD’s (use diskutil list to verify if=/dev/disk1 )

dd if=/whereveryouwant/DiskImage.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m    is a good way to make a USB drive boot an image. (use diskutil list to verify if=/dev/disk1 ).  ***This will almost certainly wipe whatever is on the USB drive (/dev/disk2) so make sure you don’t need whatever is on there.  Under OS X this is the best way I’ve found to make bootable USB flash drives.

Back to the Point

Avoiding redundant GRUB entries avoids refit from displaying phantom legacy OS boot options, or extra linux options. Installing windows will overwrite the MBR and you should be able to boot from any of your operating systems.

How to: Bypass Windows 7 Upgrade “Key is Not Valid”

If you do things as terribly out of order and with partitioning as I did that you need to reinstall windows, you might come across a windows upgrade issue.  Windows 7 has a new way of verifying if you are using an upgrade DVD — rather than asking you to input an old CD or DVD, it will look on your system for pre-installed versions of windows. However, having just formatted everything this is an issue.

Solutions: 1) Reinstall XP/Vista (NOT IDEAL). 2) Plug in external or other hard drive with XP/Vista Install (NOT IDEAL).  3) Install Windows 7, make it through the install to where it asks for your key.  If you put in your key (and you’re sure it’s correct) and it says “key is not valid” (Note: this is in the initial key entering, not activating), then you seem to have no way forward.  However, if you reboot and relaunch the installer, Windows seems to detect the install you just created as a valid install, which will let you input your key the second time without harassing you.

Other Useful Tools/Notes:

rEFIt has a partition tool.  This is a way to use gptsync, and this is very useful. There were a few situations I needed it in, sometimes you have to help the computer sync MBR/GPT. It will basically auto correct differences in the table that it detects.

gparted is a useful linux tool for partition management.  I needed this for a few small things and it can help point to where your issues are.  There is a live image or you can find it on most live distributions (ubuntu).

To answer why, after all this I triple boot rather than virtualize… I’m running an old 32-bit Core Duo macbook — I don’t believe they have the Intel Virtualization Technology. More importantly, I use Ubuntu generally for certain low level tasks (i.e. Wifi card in promiscuous mode). I use Windows for (limited) gaming/weird hardware access and most of the solutions that port graphics don’t support my chip (VMWare Fuzion).

I’m sure this process ended up being far more painful for me than it needed to be, but I’m back to happily triple booting.

My school year so far as a non chronological twitter feed…

Ride to school. Get drenched. Sneak to the floor of Girl Talk concert. Go to Chinese. Drop Chinese. Break my finger. Go to student health, hospital, student health, orthopedics, physical therapy, still only a broken finger. Find a thesis topic. Go riding. Weekend in Shenandoah. TV and football seasons come back. National productivity plummets.

Play pick up soccer. Go to work. Get sick. Get better. Celebrate birthdays. Tailgate. Cavaliers lose. Again. And again. And, finally win! The skins lose to the Lions. I stop watching for the season. Look for job. Play racquetball. Note loss of racquetball skills. Make up for Australian-based loss of FIFA time.

While I was in Australia, I became an uncle.  I met my niece a few weeks ago, she’s adorable.

Sorry, these pictures were generally mediocre at best.

First Eliana Sighting

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No, I am in fact not homeless.

Nearly everyone it seems was very concerned about my sandals.  It was rare I would carry out a conversation with someone I had just met or friends I hadn’t seen in sometime without being questioned about my sandals. The story goes like this..

My brother and I were about to go to Europe and I decided I needed some new sandals, I found my way to the Target store and found some I liked.  They looked similar to rainbows, were comfortable, and cost $10, needless to say I was sold. We depart on our adventure.

By the time we get to Rome, we’ve walked many a mile, primarily in sandals, and my left one has started to acquire a hole in the heel.  This is ridiculous, I just bought these, and they cost me a whole $10.  There is no way I’m throwing these out yet. So, I kept wearing them and the hole steadily grew.  They’ve traveled from Spain to London and to Paris and Rome, Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, numerous trips to the beach, a vacation in Mexico, New York City, San Fransisco, Australia and New Zealand. Finally, it was time that they retired, in Australia they had acquired a new whole and the left one had grown to biblical proportions (maybe not). So they were ceremoniously replaced (not really) with a new pair at the end of my Australian experience.

The new ones are pretty typical australian — havaianas are everywhere there.  Hopefully this pair lasts as well as the one it replaces..

My dad came to visit Australia for my last ~2 weeks there.  I also had a final (on the last possible day over the course of a month, haha).

While he was here we were quite busy, he spent some time exploring Melbourne on his own, we also visited much of the city together. I was busy though for a few days preparing and taking my final, so our first real adventure was off to Sydney.  We stayed at the Mercantile Hotel, an Irish pub in the Rocks, and it was surprisingly nice. The bathrooms though shared were quite clean, and there seemed to be very few other guests which left a reasonably peaceful atmosphere — perhaps my favorite part though was the full Irish breakfast cooked for us complimentary every morning by simply walking down stairs.

We happened to arrive in Sydney and wander over to the Opera House at  the perfect time.  An afternoon storm was brewing in the distance, but it provided a beautiful rainbow.  However, the rainbow transformed from a simple rainbow into a double rainbow.  Eventually the primary rainbow started to refract and make smaller copies of itself directly below.  It was a beautiful sight now, the impending rain was not as welcome.

We toured the Opera House, explored the botanical gardens, ate on the harbour, and went to the aquarium.  So, yes, it was a whirlwind of tourist activity, but was still a good time.  The aquarium was a pleasant surprise in that Spongebob Squarepants had come to visit (haha, no joke — look at the pictures). Of course the event attracted a sea (get it?) of school age children frantically running through the aquarium turned amusment park.

We were quickly on our way up north to Cairns, and the Great Barrier Reef. One of the first things at the time greeting us was the abundance of young, American, men invading the city.  Our taxi driver informed us that there was a visiting aircraft carrier and other ship, in port to celebrate the 4th of july. The town was overrun. We grabbed some souvlaki (which is incredibly common in Australia — Melbourne has the second highest greek population in a city to Athens, no other Greek city) our first night and relaxed for awhile. The next day we visit this aboriginal village via gondola.  This had tourist trap written all over it — private shuttles taking you directly there, high entrance prices, and a village far enough away it would deem itself its own price haven. However, I was pleasantly surprised that it was not as bad as I had feared. Sure it was really touristy, but somehow manageable.

We also had an opportunity to go to a sanctuary to see some Australian animals. My dad had been asking about seeing kangaroos, which I realized had already lost its novelty after living in a country where they are generally regarded only slightly higher than rodents (though, when you hit these rodents you total your car). The kangaroo highlights an integral part of what it is to be Australian — a conflict of image, that pride can be derived for a range of reasons.  Vegemite is adored as a truly Australian food and less for its culinary magic.  The story of ANZAC heroes is one of tragically poor UK-led military management. Stories of the outback, the bush, and nature, are often ones of death, of a complete lifecycle, of people being the land.  Some of these were covered in one of my Australian classes — it provided an interesting view of Australia.

But, I digress.. We were at a sanctuary — I got to hold a koala! And hand feed wallabies (mini kangaroos)! Koala’s have claws because they have to dig into trees, but I wasn’t really thinking about that, until it grabbed onto my skin and kept grabbing harder.. Finally, he was adjusted.  It was quite relaxed and content sitting there for a long time. Apparently they’re marsupials and not bears as is often assumed..

We later made it out to snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef.  Snorkeling at the reef, the only living structure visible from space, should be of epic proportions.  It was pretty awesome, but probably not as mind blowing as one might think, it’s almost impossible to see large, varying sections of reef in a short amount of time simply because it is so large.  The coral seemed substantially less colorful than the fish which were the most colorful I had ever seen.  I was blown away by this bright blue star fish just hanging out, it was pretty wild.

We hung out on the beach, headed back to Melbourne and explored there a little more before heading stateside.  The flight back was pretty rough.  I didn’t get out of my chair on the long 15 hour segment because I was afraid my legs would get used to movement and then hate sitting again… United, commonly referred to as companions of the devil, treated me reasonably, all my flights were on time, and my flight was the cheapest option.  Our in-flight entertainment was dreadful (no, I couldn’t choose, yes I know how awesome that is), but I survived.

Landed in LAX. Check. Customs. Check.  Get scam talked by bible-based “helpful” man looking for money for his “charity”. Check. Get stuck by TSA randomly stopping security checking for awhile. Check.  See Burrito and can’t resist. Check.Home. Check.

End of Australia

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I realize that I haven’t been posting much lately (eek!); so I’ll give some quick life updates.

My semester here is quickly wrapping up and I head home very soon.  My dad is out here visiting me and we’re taking a mini whirlwind tour of Australia, at the moment we’re up in Queensland.

Several weeks ago, I decided I would go skiing.  After much investigation I decided the best place to ski (and heli-ski!) is New Zealand, I started to look at flights and how to get around.  Eventually I decided it would be difficult to manage and plan the trip without a definite, interested group.  I started looking around Victoria for the best local skiing and decided Mt. Buller provided a good compromise of skiing/convenience.  Unfortunately skiing in Australia is quite expensive (shared rooms are $60+, lift tickets are $96 or 77 for students, Rental is ~$40, food is at generally resort prices, and transportation is made more expensive by a resort “entrance fee” –  a way of collecting even more money).  That aside, I had my heart set on skiing and so I decided to pretty much just spur of the moment go for it.

With my reservations made a day before I left for my overnight trip, I packed my bags, grabbed some food and was ready for a fun trip.  I made it up to the mountain in the mid afternoon, I explored the resort for the afternoon and got ready for a good, full day of skiing the next.  I wake up early (read: 830AM) and get ready to go.  SNOW   It was great to be back on it, I took my series of chairlifts to the top and proceeded to ski as much of the mountain as I possibly could — it was only about half open.  The skiing wasn’t fantastic, I’ll be honest, but it was great to be skiing especially in late June.  A long day of skiing was a nice change, and I quickly found myself back on the way to Melbourne.

By now, many of my friends from the semester had started to leave, nearly every night was saying goodbye to one of my new friends.  It’s kind of a sad time, but at the same time we all know what a fantastic time we had this semester.

G and I had tentatively planned on visiting one of our friends Tim out in “the country” (a term in Australia meaning everything except one of the few major cities) — specifically a small town called Port Fairy. We hitched a ride with Tim and Flynn and were on our way.  It was a great feeling to be back in someones home — pets! home cooked meals! siblings! Living in student apartments often means some simple things in life are missed out on.  Port Fairy was a great little town, it’s known as a vacation town mostly, a summer-time retreat for Melbournians. Visiting in the winter, the town wasn’t overloaded, but was still a great time. We went fishing (yes, I caught a fish! It was enormous — ok, not at all), learned some new games, played beach cricket, and saw a different view of Australian life. It was a great way to spend a little time (though we might have stayed a bit longer without time constraints), I’m really glad I went.

Mt Buller-June 2009

Skiing Overnight trip to Mount Buller in Victoria, Australia

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Ocean breeze.  You know the smell. The one that makes you feel like a little kid when you finally roll up to the beach.

That was last week.  I went with a group of friends (15 of us in all, wow!) to a tour of the East Coast of Australia.  We fly into Mackay (pronounced in Australian to finish with an I sound, we discover at the airport) and are instantly greeted by the smell of the ocean and warm weather.  The weather in Melbourne the past few weeks has slowly degraded and seems to rain all the time; I personally no longer believe there is a 12 year drought in Victoria. But I digress, we are instantly greeted by warm weather, sunshine, and that great smell.  We hop onto a Greyhound bus, first stop is Airlie Beach, our passageway to the Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef.

Airlie Beach is a quintessential beach town, situated between beautiful beach and small mountain ridges and lined with palm trees its difficult to believe the warning signs of impending death via jellyfish and/or crocodile. Death by over-relaxation seems more likely. The plan is to get on a sail boat the following day, so we spend an afternoon relaxing, playing in the man-made lagoon (safe from the animals) and soaking the sun. Glorious. The next day we get up and work our way to our boat check-in. We gather last minute supplies and head off to the boat. Our ship is the Mandrake, our skipper, John, and our assistant Annie. We set off for a quick tour of the Whitsunday Islands.

We spend the first afternoon motoring to a bay where we’ll be staying the night. We hang out all afternoon, swimming, listening to music, and chatting. The next day we wake up to a surprisingly rocky boat on our way to the famous Whitehaven Beach.  We arrive at the bay of the Whitehaven Beach and dingy to shore.  A short trek finds us on the lookout – wow.  This is absolutely gorgeous, the water is amazingly blue, the sand amazingly white.  Best of all it looks so natural, you know tourist after tourist has set foot on this beautiful beach, but somehow it still looks pristine. We spend the morning goofing around on the beach, playing football in the ocean (an activity we do with surprisingy frequency — and it certainly gives away our nationality…). (If you look at my pictures, it should be obvious which beach I’m referring to). On our way back to the dingy  we are meeted by a crarb army, there are thousands of these small crabs coming out of their burrowed holes and making a run for the new low-tide water line, it’s pretty wild.

We’re soon at our snorkelling location for the afternoon. I could only find one fin that tould fit on my foot, there seemed to be almost exclusively small fins which doesn’t work well for our group. It was fun to be snorkelling again, their was tons of corral and plenty of fish. Unfortunately the water was pretty hazy so pictures were so-so, and also the reef wasn’t the typical nearly artificially ridiculous colors, but it was still fun. We finally got to do some sailing that afternoon and the next morning before we were back on dry land.

We grabbed our rental cars and stuffed our faces (it’s hard work relaxing at sea..) before heading off North.  We hustled our way up to Cairns, an 8+ hour drive, where we showed up still in time to clean up and enjoy a bit of the night life before continuing on North again the next day.  We work our way up to Port Douglas, perhaps the most touristy town I have ever been in.  Port Douglas consists of exclusively hotels and overpriced restaurants. But, I won’t complain for a second because it’s got a beautiful beach and our hostel was roughly a stonethrow away. We relax on the beach for an afternoon and do the usual (see: eat, football…). A fantastic sand castle was made — I napped instead.  Our last full day and we were off to explore the rainforest to the north.

Our first stop of the day was a crocodile tour –  we can’t go to Australia and not see crocodiles! We leave from this small town, the Daintree Village. This town is absolutely stuck in time — the tourists come and go but the town apparently stays the same.  I asked a store clerk how big the town was.. “Let me put it to you like this; our local school has 9 kids in it.” .. Wow, life moves a little differently here.  We’re off on our tour and see several crocodiles, some cool birds, and plenty of trees.  We push on north to Cape Tribulation and the heart of the rainforest. We see the beach of cape tribulation and decide the best way to explore the rain forest is to push on and find our own hiking path. The road soon turns to dirt — now we’re getting somewhere, and we push on until we round a bend and a sign that says “4WD Only past this point”. I look around the corner to see a creek several feet deep — we decide not to push the luck of our small SUV. We park and walk back to a trail spotted on the way. Mike screeches as he sees a huge bird ahead — a cassowary — and sprints off after it.

A cassowary is like a wild turkey.  Only it’s HUGE, the thing was massive, it could have been as big as a person.  The bird took off running into the bush, clearly uncomfortable with what had just happened.  When Mike comes back someone takes the pleasure of informing the group that the bird is deadly, apparently it jumps up and will use its talons to claw ones chest — glad we know that now..  We find the desired trail and head off into the rainforest, it eventually lets us out at a beach. We wander down the beach until it ends at another stream inlet — we do however find some freshly fallen coconuts and bring them back to our hostel as prizes of the day. Our adventure wraps up here as the afternoon is getting late and we have a drive ahead of us back to Port Douglas.

The next day we round up the troops and head back to Cairns where we catch our flight to Melbourne.  The trip we agree, was definitely, definitely, a success.

East Coast Australia-June 2009

43 Photos

This past week, I rented a car with G and his friend, Alex, visiting from home. We were on a quest to see one of Victoria’s famous sites, the Great Ocean Road.  The road was originally built by returned service men of World War I using little more than picks and shovels. The road runs along the coast and shows famous sites, most notably is the Twelve Apostles, a rock pillar formation just off the coast.

We grabbed our car in the afternoon on Monday and went to to our final destination on Monday and decided to see the road on the way back the next morning/day.

The towns along the road seem suspended in time. The people move at a different pace, and fit admirably in the coast side towns we weave through. My favorite interaction though was in our final town, Peterborough. We arrive their just before 9 and throw up our tent.  We realize its just after 9 and we have some time, since we’re in a campsite we decide to go somewhere light, maybe a grab a bite to eat.  Leaving the campground fines us staring at a tavern with the lights on, perfect. I walk in the front door to see one man eating at the bar and no one else to be seen, he looks at me somewhat puzzled.

“Are you open?” I ask

“No, we’re closed.”

“Is there anywhere else in town that would be open?”

He looks at me and can’t tell if I’m serious. “Not at this hour of the night” He chuckles, still surprised I could even think something like that. We walk away, I’m puzzled, I look down at my watch and find it glaring 9:20 back at me. Different pace. At least we were provided a few laughs at our lifestyle clashes…

The next day we start off relatively early, and work our way from the Bay of Martyrs back East. The coastline was generally stunning. The blue-ness of the water was quite impressive, perhaps growing up with the north Atlantic ocean makes other oceans seem that much more impressive. The Twelve Apostles are the most famous site along the road, and are certainly an epic view. They’re created because the pillars are of a harder rock than its surroundings which erode more quickly. We take a few hikes at the various locations, the “blow hole” was pretty interesting — water rushes into this hollowed out section several hundred feet from the rest of the coast, and the waves seem stuck inside.

We hiked to a waterfall later in the trip. The waterfall was in the middle of a rain forest, it felt like quite a jungle, it was an impressive site of natural beauty. The path to this particular waterfall was incredibly man made; a man-made metal pathway with high side railings seemed to be some sort of blend between science fiction and video games. In fact the path oddly reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder , where they had to stay on the path or risk changing the past.. (and future..)

We continue to cruise the coast line and observe the beauty, it is easy to see why the journey is one of Victoria’s famed tourist activities.  We were late returning the car which provided a nice life lesson: don’t be late returning car rental. They wanted to charge us for an extra day which we were able to talk down a bit, but it was relatively frustrating…  The trip was a lot of fun though, and I think it was best experienced by just renting a car and going for it.

Great Ocean Road

30 Photos

Recently, my friend asked me to participate in a rogain. What is a rogain you may be asking yourself — it’s essentially extreme orienteering; they give you points on a map with varying score values, a limited time, and tell you to get to as many as possible and have the highest point score at the end.

This rogain in particular was with the Victorian Rogaining Association, a group of varying age and tatlent weekend warriors who rogain. We were given a 15-hour or 24-hour option, it being our first rogaining experience we opted for the 15 hour competition. This meant that we can use any of the 15 hours between 12 noon on saturday and 12 noon on sunday that we desire. We laid out our course, agreed that we were going to get lost frequently, and took off at a jog for a whirlwind 15/24 hour period.

Our first point is supposed to come after we have passed all the buildings, we pass them and look for our turnoff — we don’t find it, instead we hit the next intersection. Uh oh, we already missed a point, but we decide to cut down to the stream on the map and make our way to our next point. We cut east and find our “waterflow” (we dubbed them “rivers”). There was no water in it.  In fact, it didn’t look like water had run their for some time. There was however large trees, fallen branches, ferns, and a steep hill on either side. We stick with the plan and make our way down the river to the river intersection where our first point will be located.  Several minutes into this plan, we have all fallen, got mad across most of what we were wearing and progressing slow.  It becomes clear this is going to be an interesting exercise.  We finally make it down to the point looking quite disheveled and somewhat annoyed at the amount of unnecessary time spent trailblazing without the apparently necessary machete. Some other groups eye us, their faces say they think our trip is going to be most interesting…

We make our way back out to the road and proceed as planned for several points, we make pretty good time. Aside from one minor detour where we misread the map, we’re doing pretty well. After our aforementioned adventure we revise some of our plans to travel by river and instead decide we might be better suited on trails or roads. This decision highlights one of the biggest tradeoffs in rogaining — when is it advantageous to shoot a bearing with a compass versus stick to established paths? Good question.

As we’re trudging through the forest we have some fantastic views, the path at some points is carved into the side of major ridges and provide beautiful glimpses of canyons and trees. Many trees in Australia shed their bark, which is very hard to adjust to; the trees get so smooth and bark is scattered across the whole forest, it’s definitely something that takes getting used to. There are several flipped cars throughout the forest, it provides an interesting contrast to the otherwise very natural feeling — it also begs the question as to how they got there? It might be tough to drive through sections of this forest..

We found a mine as we were walking along a ridge carved path as night fell. An open hallway in the side of a ridge is pretty spooky, we explored it only very briefly, as the clock was ticking and we wanted to push on. We decided we would try to one more point, 72, and take a shorter path nearby to bring us to the road and home.  This is where we learned how hard night navigating is, we wandered around the area where we thought it should be, finding a path that wasn’t on the map, rivers of course with no water, and the flow it was supposed to be on was quite hidden.  We stumbled upon the path on our last ditch effort before heading back.  We decided we’d skip as much of the night navigation as possible.  Our walk back had few points on it and was very long — by the time we made it back to the camp it was just shy of 10, leaving us 5 hours to work in the morning. We devour food and sleep for a few hours.

6:30. Time to get moving to be out by 7. We have varying paths for the day depending how ambitious we decide to be. We start off at a jog — we’re going big. By now we’ve gotten much better at reading the map and determining which paths are feasible, we still manage to overshoot one turn by a couple hundred meters, but we’re doing pretty well. After grabbing the points on our ambitious plan, we make it back to the hash house (base, food) a bit after 11, leaving us a bit less than an hour (late fee is 10 points/min, read: bad). We decide to finish with a bang, we drop our packs and run to grab the 46 point we missed yesterday (hah! take that!) and add on a 58 point a bit further down the road. We see people heading back as we’re going to grab our last point, we overshoot it mildly but keep our jog up and make it back with 9 minutes to spare.

We won the novice field, but it wasn’t exactly competitive. There was one other team doing the 15 hour competition, and 3 doing the 24 hour (but we think they required as part of a PE requirement or something, so they might not have been giving it their all…). It was a great time: a fun challenge with some friends and nice to be outside in this beautiful country. Using the extremely precise measurement of string based on the path I believe we took (highlighted in maps below, blue is first day, green is second) we did approximately 34km the first day and 27km the second, totally 61km or about 39 miles.

Rogaining

10 Photos