Joe Crotty

Just before the move that partially tore my latissimus dorsi. Note the upper body rotation.

Monday January 18, 2010 I hiked into the remote Diamond Head crag in Eldorado Canyon State Park with a few friends to try some obscure climbs that I had long dreamed about. Just as we arrived at the base of the climb the wind picked up and a fresh bank of clouds rolled in plummeting the temperature 20 degrees. I donned my heavy winter down coat, but my under garments were all wet from the nearly two hour hike and I remained rather chilly. Due to our location at the crag and a lack of any easily accessible warm up climbs we opted to get on Cameron’s Corner . I did a set of 30 jumping jacks before my lead. This was only my second day of climbing since my wife and I took a two week vacation and my body felt great having just recovered from a minor upper back injury to the middle of my right trapezius. 40′ above the ground you climb past a large ledge into the crux corner (.11b) which consist of making a rotating reach with your left hand for a great ledge while holding a chest high right hand crimper. The foot work mostly freezes your hips and the rotation and extension come primarily from the upper back. As I pulled into the move I felt a transverse shooting pain along my right middle back which nearly caused me to fall off. However, I wanted the onsight badly and reset my foot slightly to get a bit more left hip rotation and fought my way through the back pain successfully. Some ten minutes later lounging at the belay I was uncertain of what I had injured or the extent.

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This is probably the third site re-design in the last six months or so, but for the first time I can honestly say this one just might stick. First, let’s give due credit to WooThemes design team for this fabulous free Bueno theme. In the future I’ll be using almost exclusively free and premium themes from ad hoc design shops like WooThemes due to the time saved and my lack of design skills.

Bueno is a simple modern theme that puts the focus squarely on structure and typography that fits well with my general post style. The only theme switch  hassle was resizing all of the larger images which is typical. The only old design element lost was the roll up archives which I’ll make an effort to reinstate at a later date when I tidy up this new theme.  For now we are ready to roll!

Two months ago in early November 2009 Heather, my wife, and I attended our Church’s annual school auction to support Holy Trinity School.  The auction concluded with a hat drawing for the grand prize – an all expense paid cruise to the Bahamas. To our utter amazement we won!  After a few talks with the travel agency we decided to go on our four day cruise January 10-14. Our only expenses would be round trip plane tickets to Orlando, a rental car and a few nights in hotels.  Our grand plan was to fly to Orlando January 7, 2010 rent a car and spend one night in Orlando.  Then drive up the coast to St. Augustine and visit with my wife’s uncle Phil for two days and tour America’s oldest city and by most accounts settlement.  Then drive to Port Canaveral and board the ship for the four day cruise and take a shuttle back to the airport for the return flight to Denver, CO.

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It all started a few years ago when I became obsessed with a new line in Eldorado Canyon.  Eventually, things culminated and I began to set out to figure out how to bolt the new climb.  With a borrowed drill, charged batteries and good selection of drill bits I drove to a semi secluded overpass in North Denver and walked down to a secluded creek bed next to a biking trail and located some suitcase size granite boulders to drill a few practice holes.  Right away I slapped on a 3/8″ bit and went to work.  The action of the hammer drill produces a lot of rock chips flying about as you start the hole and the noise level is significant.  It’s not jack hammer loud, but much louder then your typical hand held home handyman drill.  The hole start is critical.  You have to get the angle correct in the first half inch or less because the rock is totally unforgiving any deeper.  After the 3/8″ hole was down to about 3″ depth I started a new hole with 1/2″ bit which seemed about twice the work.  After about an inch I quit and then just for kicks tried out another 1/2″ bit that looked fairly dull.  This was a total nightmare as the dull bit refused to gain any purchase no matter how hard I pushed.  Keep in mind this is standing on both feet using my full body weight.  I could only imagine what it would be like hanging from a rope on an overhanging cliff side with a dull drill bit.  Feeling confident in my foray I packed up and went home.

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It’ pretty obvious thing have changed. The old is out and in it’s place a new bright blue look is born based on the WordPress Stripey theme.  Really, there are only a few key changes with the new look:

1. Header logo and binary code which adds a cleaner more professional feel.  I plan to add a maltese cross, but ran out of time on this effort.
2. Better search box.
3. Subtle post header meta data changes.
4. Archive posts in the right sidebar are rolled up by year and counts listed for each month.

Shot me an email or drop a comment if you find any bugs or simply can’t stand it!

Website Speed

Recently a web client asked me if I could figure out why their page was loading so slowly. Simple enough question on the surface. Like any sensible web engineer I immediately opened Firefox enabled the Firebug plug-in and went to Net Panel. It was clearly evident after poking around for a few minutes that the WordPress site in question, which I built but didn’t do the design and image work for, was sized at just over a megabyte of which ~50% was images. In the scramble to get the site up and running I just took the images the designer handed me and plugged them in without any further thought then “Hey, those do look very good!” I informed the client that the images were hogging up a good bit of bandwidth and they should have a graphics expert put the  images on a diet via PhotoShop.  However, that other 50% of overall slowness that was not related to the images nagged at me.

Within the hour I had mentally resolved to figure out why the rest of the site was slow and apply anything learned to improving current and future site builds. My basic game plan after googling for a few hours and discovering YSlow was as follows:

1. Serve the HTML gzip’ed and cached
2. Serve the CSS/JS gzip’ed and cached
3. Reduce the number of overall requests by combining CSS/JS files where possible
4. Add Expires Headers
5. Move as many images as possible externally

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About a year ago I applied for a bolting permit in Eldorado Canyon State Park via ACE FHRC to put up a new sport climb on the north side of the canyon on a rock formation known as Lower Peanuts.  The bolting application process was fairly involved requiring me to top rope and clean the route, photograph with tape marking the proposed bolt and anchor locations, and submit a written proposal to FHRC.  Thankfully, two FHRC members helped me out with the write up and even came out to the crag to top rope the proposed line.  The application was approved and a permit issued to me Spring of 2009 by Park Manager Steve Muehlhauser.

Flash forward to the middle of September, about three weeks ago, I came to the stark realization one morning that as a traditional climber of 25+ years I didn’t know squat about bolting.  I had asked a handful of local bolting experts what the specifications for new bolts should be and the resounding reply was 1/2″ stainless steel camouflaged for everything.  No problem, I thought, a few phone calls and I’ll have everything by the afternoon and will bolt the route in a few days time maybe a week tops.  First, I called Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder, CO and was informed they stopped carrying bolting equipment about five years ago.  Second, I surfed to Bent Gate Mountaineering Golden, CO and realized they didn’t have bolts matching my specifications.  Feeling stumped I googled and landed on Fixe Hardware which has been dealing in stainless steel climbing hardware for at least ten years to my knowledge.  After pouring over their online catalog and a few phone calls to friends and Fixe Hardware I settled on the following hardware for the climb:

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Archery Deer Hunting Estes Park Lumpy Ridge Background

Fall Colorado archery hunting big game is all about big views, solitude and sometimes mental anguish. Yesterday late afternoon I drove to Estes Park, CO and parked my truck at Bill Brown’s cabin and started to get on my hunting gear in anticipation of a deer hunt on my friend Robin Randall’s 100 acre spread physically adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Hunting areas don’t get much better then this with views of Lumpy Ridge from the entire east end of his property to Longs Peak and the continental divide on the West side. Not to mention the bugling elk herd bulls that echo up from valley bottoms at dawn and dusk daily mixed with fox, grouse, turkey, falcon, and hawk sightings. Above all else these hunts remind me how small we are in relation to His creations.

However, my pre-hunt ritual was not going well.  I forgot my hunting shoes and only had flip-flops to negotiate the rocky cactus infested terrain. For a split second it crossed my mind to skip the hunt and drive back to Denver.  Fortunately, that split second passed and my senses returned.  I donned the remaining gear and headed out on my usual counter clockwise loop sticking to easier terrain so as not to incur a foot injury.

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Just finished a rather lengthy fresh install of the the latest and greatest Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrading from Leopard. Snow Leopard is considered a maintenenace/developers release that packs few new features instead focusing on beefing up core functionality. By “fresh install” I mean that I didn’t just upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard or use Time Machine as part of the install process to speed up an upgrade, but started with a true clean install and then meticulously installed Apps, configuration files, development websites, etc all from scratch. I was hoping the fresh install would help to clear up some restart and latency problems I have been seeing over the last three months.

The results have been great.  System boots faster, runs faster, consumes less resources, has a smaller foot print and in general seems a bit more stable. I’ll post in another few months what the overall Snow Leopard experience is like but so far I am loving it!

For the last seven years running I have been in overkill mode with my home firewall.   In my desire to learn more about networking I went overboard, as usual, and immersed myself into my own DIY home firewall project.  The objective was a solid firewall built on the tenants of modern network engineering. Basic hardware/OS setup was as follows with number one being the exterior and bigger numbers moving towards the LAN:

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