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Kim and I took off with Preston and his friend Chris Saturday morning to do some snowshoeing. Preston and Chris just bought snowshoes, but we were a little worried that we wouldn’t find a place to use them since snow has been so hard to find lately. We initially wanted to do a route near Skykomish, but there didn’t seem to be any snow below 4000 ft so we kept going to Steven’s Pass were it was just barely cold enough for snow. Kim and I had already done a lot of snowshoeing on the north side of the highway, so we found a route in the book that went straight through the ski resort. It followed the Pacific Crest Trail, but it’s covered in the winter and passes through a lot of the ski runs so it’s hard to find.

We ended up hiking too far east and didn’t go the route described. We got to the top of a chairlift thinking that it was the one we wanted, but it turned out to be a different one that went to the top of the double black diamond runs. Thanks to Chris and Kim’s perseverance (aka stubborness), we decided to keep going up the very steep slope. After a LOT of hard work, we made it to the top and took some pictures of the nice view and the sunshine. We sat down to eat and enjoy the view and saw a huge wall of fog coming. Next thing you knew we were in the middle of a cloud and it had started snowing.

When we got back I was wiped out and Kim and I decided not to go out and play poker with Preston and Chris. I’m glad I didn’t, because I slept 10 hours and think I could have easily done more.

Last minute Friday I decided to see if anyone wanted to play cards. Brian and Bridgid were the only ones who showed up, so with Kim and I we had just enough people to play pinochle or Eukre. We started trying to play pinochle, but soon found out that Brian had different rules as I’m sure most people do with this game. There’s a lot of variations. We were going to try playing a couple different ways, but ended up settling on eukre instead. After a couple games of that Jacob sat down to play so we did five person hearts. We all had a blast playing, and people got a little rowdy but all in a good natured way. Kim really likes rowdy card play, so I think we might be having more card nights soon.

I tried acupuncture for the first time today.  I’m not as impressed as I thought I would be.  The lady only put four needles in me, three in my shoulder where I said I hurt, and one on the outside of my wrist.  I barely felt them go in.  The one in my wrist throbbed a little while it was in, but everything else wasn’t noticeable.  My shoulder doesn’t feel any better two days later either. She says that sometimes you need multiple sessions before you notice any result, but we’ll see how much my insurance pays for before I try that again.

Kim and I took the afternoon on Friday to spend some time helping out at the University District Food Bank. We sorted through food and and brought food up to the food line until some other volunteers left, then we moved up to hand out food in the line. Most of the other volunteers were teenagers. I forget the name of the guy who was supervising the operation, but he seemed like a really cool person and I admire his commitment to such a worthy cause. It always surprises me how many people are in need of something as basic as food. I’m guessing about 150 people came through just in the few hourse we were there. It makes me realize how fortunate I am and wish I could do more.

Lately Kim and I have been using a neti pot. I first found out about these devices when Kim and I went to Kripalu yoga center this past summer. Kim finally bought one, and despite my skepticism over flushing water through your nostrils, I love it. I never realized how much more clearly I could breath – through both nostrils!

Basically you pour water through one nasal passage and it comes out the other, flushing out all the crud in between. Much more effective than even a good nose picking. I’ve been using it whenever I feel even a little clogged, which is most mornings in the winter.

Kim and I went to go snowshoeing near Mt Pilchuck on Saturday, but there really wasn’t enough snow to call it that. It was, however, a gorgeous day. After a slow start in the morning, we bought another year of the Northwest Forest Pass at the ranger station to park at the trailhead to Marten Creek. We hiked for a while and it looked like spring, with no snow on the trails and warmth in the air. Then we got higher and hit some snow but it was crusty and packed so we didn’t need snowshoes. We probably hiked in 2 and a half hours, and then stopped to have lunch. We sat on a log in the sun and had hot mushroom soup with bread and cheese. We hadn’t seen anyone to this point, but some older fellows who started earlier hiked back down past us and one guy who got a late start caught up to us and turned around at the same spot.

I had a heck of a time setting up Apache on Windows with fastcgi so that I could run a Ruby on Rails app on a production server. The best guide I found for doing this was http://electricvisions.com/rails.html. I used XAMPP for Windows so that I wouldn’t have to download and setup Apache, MySQL and PHP all separately. It’s not too hard to do if you want to do it separately, but after all the uninstalling and reinstalling of those apps I did while trying to get FastCGI to work, I got sick of going through the steps.

I had already installed the One Click Ruby Installer earlier when I was just using Webrick to develop my ruby apps. After installing XAMPP I just ran the FastCGI Installer from the electricvisions guide. I had to copy the mod_fastcgi.so file into the apache modules directory since the installer didn’t find my apache directory in XAMPP automatically. I come to find out later that mod_fastcgi.so is really just mod_fastcgi-SNAP-0404142202-AP2.dll renamed, which is downloadable from the fastcgi site.

Anyway, after that I followed the instructions, made the changes to the httpd.conf and .htaccess, and started up Apache. It looked like fcgi was working! Then I tried to open my rails app and got this in the Apache error log:

[Wed Dec 14 12:02:06 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:11 2005] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] FastCGI: failed to connect to (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: something is seriously wrong, any chance the socket/named_pipe directory was removed?, see the FastCgiIpcDir directive
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:11 2005] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:16 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:26 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed

I looked up a ton of crap on google to try to fix it to no avail. Finally, I deleted the dispatch.cgi and dispatch.rb from my public directory, leaving just the dispatch.fcgi, and tried again. It seems to work!

It seems like fast cgi is enough in demand that it ought to be included as an Apache module by default, or at least in XAMPP. Maybe someday soon.

For Jessie’s birthday she got together a big group of friends to go to Mamounia’s last night. Kim and I weren’t hungry, but were required to order food, so we got an appetizer and some soup. Later the waitress came out and told us that they would have to charge us each an extra $5 since we didn’t order a meal. Very lame. I had already spent $20 on drinks. So we got a couscous dish. The only price on the menu was for the $18 five course meal, which was just too much.

Aside from the lack of prices on the menu and the inflexible ordering options, the place was really nice. The couscous dish was tastier than I expected (it sounded boring on the menu), and the belly dancing was awesome. Jessie got up and danced with the belly dancer and it looked like she had practiced. I didn’t know anyone, but the group of people Jessie assembled was really interesting and fun. There were so many people our age who also loved traveling and working for good causes. It really makes me want to just pick up, and head out traveling right now, but I need to wait just a little longer until this wedding thing is settled.

I found a few great little items, the PicoPad and the Utilikey.

The PicoPad is a pen and paper that fit in your wallet. I’ve always wished I had a writing utensil on my, but I can’t stand trying to carry a full sized on around. I’ve already found it useful a few times, but it’s hard for me to remember that I have it since I’m so used to just being without pen and paper wherever I go.

The Utilikey isn’t as cool as I had hoped since it’s hard to open, but it is nice that when it opens it detaches from the keychain easily, which is a must when trying to use the screwdriver in hard to reach places. It’s just nothing compared to my leatherman micra, whose only fault is a crappy bottle opener.

I already carry around my keys, wallet and cellphone, and I think that’s too much already, but if something can fit in my wallet, like the PicoPad, or on my keychain, like the Utilikey, it might be useful to me.

Nathan convinced Kim and I to go climbing at Vantage on Sunday. We were skeptical that it would be cold and miserable, but it turned out great. It was a bit cold, but not so much that climbing wasn’t fun. I was totally out of shape for climbing after not having done it for so long, and my arms were pumped after 3 climbs. We didn’t even start until 2 PM and I thought that we weren’t going to get enough in before dark, but I was about finished after the second route. My poor forearms.

• Reading: Getting Things Done by David Allen