This hike is definitely the most rewarding with the least effort. It’s a very easy 7 mile round trip hike with only 1700 elevation gain. 

I finished my doctoral program in September 2006. But today is the official commencement. This is the final conclusion of 22 years of education with a PhD. This is a hot day in the valley and sitting under the sun was no fun. But I have worked so long and hard for it. It’s totally worth it. This is a picture of Robin, Martin, and me.

I switched from comcast to verizon DSL recently ($15/month with one-year contract). I was expecting to deal with PPPoE on my OpenBSD based router. I did a whole lot of research and found out that kernel PPPoE support is not very stable in 3.7 (the version my box was running). So I even installed OpenBSD 4.0 on an old box and tried to make a distribution on the Soekris box.

 However, after struggling for a whole afternoon, I figured out that DSL is not using PPPoE! I didn’t have to do any change to my box. What I have is a Westell 6100 box, it’s a DSL modem combined with a router. All you need to do is disable the router (set it to bridge mode) and plugin your own router. Make sure you release the DHCP lease before doing that.

We hiked up Camp Muir and snowboarded down. This is my first backcountry snowboarding experience. I am a new snowboarding, still having difficulties on groomed runs. I was a little nervous. However, the run proved pretty straighforward, although the snow was a little too soft in early June. This is one of my best outdoor experiences so far!

On our way up: 

At Camp Muir, over 10,000 ft high, I was supposed to be pointing to Mt Adams:

On the way down: