Olympic Hot Springs
The camping crew hit the road again for a dayhike on the Olympic Peninsula, this time with a trip to the Olympic Hot Springs. Coming out for this trip was a smaller group than we normally have: James, Jason, Mike and myself. Ordinarily this kind of thing has double that number, but the smaller size meant more space per person in the hot spring itself, so I was all for it.
James planned the trip to be an all day affair: we were meeting for coffee at the Starbuck’s on Olive at 8:45 am, making the trek over to the O.P. for a few hours of hot springs soaking and ultimately returning to Seattle around 10:30 pm. Since it’s still winter-ish in the mountains, the trip was billed as a snowshoeing excursion. So we packed our snowgear, a clean (and more importantly *warm*) change of clothes, the necessary after-soak bath towel, some snacks and as is mandated for all backcountry trips, a full three bottles of red wine.
The morning we left the sky was a misty gray that threatened rain. However by the time we reached the parking area near the trailhead the cloud layer had burned away leaving only crystal blue sky and a very manageable cool temperature. I had checked the NPS website for the trail conditions in the morning, and despite it claiming there was up to four feet of snow in places, from where we parked there wasn’t even slush mound to be seen. It was a perfect cool spring morning.
We started out towards the trailhead leaving our snowshoes behind — at the time it didn’t make any sense to bring the extra weight on a journey which clearly didn’t call for extra snow gear. From where we parked, the walk to the trailhead is an easy 2.5 miles entirely on a paved asphalt road with next to no incline. A little past the first mile we started to see hints of packed snow hidden under the tree canopy shadow. This was to be expected, so we continued on figuring that returning to retrieve our snowshoes would be a waste of time. We reached the trailhead; the snow is now about 9-10 inches deep. Despite this, we make decent time, partly because we are taking a well trodden path, partly because we’re just all fast walkers. We start the hike up to the springs.
From the trailhead to the springs is an additional 2.5 mile hike (also labelled as an “easy grade” but I’m sure that is more applicable when there isn’t snow on the trail). The more we continue up, the more snow we encounter. The snow itself did not bug me at all — even when it became clear that the path we were on was easily 3 feet above the ground. What gave me a little pause were the valleys and rock streams we had to ford. Bear in mind that we are still walking on an ice path about a foot wide surfaced with a quarter inch of wet ice. From this vantage point, now scramble down a 40 degree incline to shimmy across wet rocks and then shimmy up another 40 degree incline. In hindsight, the Eagle Scout in me wonders why my safety klaxon didn’t go off. Finally, we make it up to the hot springs and find an unoccupied, off-the-path spring for us to use.
Now I have never been in a hot spring before, so I wasn’t particularly sure what to expect, beyond it revolving around nekkid soaking in 1) water that is hot, where 2) that water is being fed from a spring. To be sure, both of those points are accurate. What I had not considered were the implications of hot spring water trickling from the underneath a mountain: namely, dissolved minerals. The sheer amount of dissolved minerals gave the water an interesting deep sea-green color. It also made the water feel thick and soapy to the touch (this is, I presume, why water softeners use huge bags of salt). There was, I must add, an odor as well. Charitably one could say the smell was of slightly ripened egg salad (if one were uncharitable, the smell was not unlike a faint flatulence). We remained undeterred. Propping up our bags so they would not get wet, we stripped off our hiking clothes and settled au naturale into the pool.
At the start of our soak, the conversation centered around ideas. We opened the first bottle of wine and passed it around. A while later we were near polishing off bottle two and the talk had progressed to events and current happenings. By the time the third bottle ran dry (and no small amount of alcohol buzz going around) we were down to talking about people. In general: people we’ve slept with, people we haven’t slept with but for whom we would entertain the notion, and finally people we would never touch regardless of circumstance.
Right around this time, a large group of 10 people (about 5 couples) showed up at our pool. We had been making plenty of noise — and frankly shouting out some pretty outrageous things — in an effort to keep folks away. Regardless, a pack of European expats showed up. Upon seeing four grown men in the hot spring, fully half their group went to find greener pastures. The remainder put down their bags (not really daypacks, but *bags*) and started to put on swimsuits. Seeing this James let them know we were naked. The euro-hipsters then opted to go in the buff.
The newcomers didn’t stick around for too long, maybe about 30 minutes. After polishing off a six-pack of beer and two wine coolers, they promptly got out, toweled off and redressed. We continued soaking for a bit until the light had daylight began to fade.
My first app ships for mobile!
Update: Time has started running print advertising promoting the MySI mobile application. A quarter-page ad ran on the 12th page of Time Magazine this week. With a 4-color national release, that’s about $85,000 in advertising dollars spent.
Update: Sports Illustrated has started to distribute the executable! You can download it from their website: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mysimobile.
I have worked in the software development universe for just about going on 9 years total; first in desktop software for 5 years, then in mobile software for the last 4. Just a week ago I experienced something that is a nice milestone in my experience: I actually shipped an application for a mobile phone (my first). Please help me celebrate the world debut of Sports Illustrated Mobile, exclusively presented on Windows Mobile devices! (Some time around July the plan is to release versions for Mobile Java, BREW, RIM, iPhone and Android devices.)
It sounds funny to say it, but in software most of the time actually getting your job done can be quite a feat. An unbelievably high percentage of all software projects fail — a percentage so high that sometimes it’s actually better to quote the number of project that have succeeded — and at last educated guesstimate, the success number was something like 34%. As a result, I’m very elated that getting this project to ship has come to pass. I can’t take much of the credit, in all honesty, there was a team of a developer, two testers and a dedicated project manager doing the day-to-day work of the project. My title here at Action Engine is “Senior Technical Creative Architect” so my role focused on developing the core user stories, writing the initial feature definitions, building design wireframes and handing the initial work with the customer, Time Warner. Still no mean feat, but I give deference to the folks who had to be in the office until 3am to make the ship date.
The total development timeframe from start to release to market was pretty tight, my original statement of work estimated the time as being around a 6 week development effort (even with a reduced feature set from my original thoughts) but in actuality we had to turn the app out in a few days of 4 weeks. Partially this was because of lost time from holidays, and partially this was because of a days we needed to remove from the development schedule to assure logo certification for the application. Needlesstosay, cutting time from a software project isn’t the way to guarantee success, but the team really knocked this out of the park. We’re already planning a feature pack to reinstate some of the things we needed to remove so that we could make the RTM date … I’m hoping that we ship the feature pack by the first week of March.
Here are some of the original wireframes and screen captures of the SI Mobile application as it is today:
