Hiking in Zion

Just got back from hiking in Zion National Park. I have my pictures online here. I did a couple of hikes that I had never done before. Saturday, I did the Canyon Overlook Trail and the Upper and Middle Emerald Pools trails. Sunday, I had Easter brunch at the Zion Lodge and then tackled the Hidden Canyon Trail. They were all very beatiful.

Bumbleberries

I am writing this post live from Springdale, UT, just outside Zion National Park at the Bumbleberry Inn. God bless unsecured wireless networks. I just had dinner at the Bumbleberry Cafe where I ordered at slice of Bumbleberry Pie (ala mode, of course). So, what is a bumbleberry? I still don't know.

The pie wasn't bad (it wasn't great), but dinner was atrocious. My experience went like this:

Me: "Hi, I'd like a table for one"
Host: "That will be 30 minutes"

(45 minutes to an hour later)

Hostess: "Here is your booth, sir".
Me: "That's not really a booth; it's only half of a booth. Where did the other half of my booth go."
Hostess: "I'm sorry sir, that's all we have."

(15 minutes later, waitress shows up)

Waitress: "What would you like to drink?"
Me: "I'll have a beer please".
Waitress: "I'm sorry but we don't serve alcohol here".
Me: "Whatever, I'm ready to order. I'll have the New York Steak, Medium."
Waitress: "I'm sorry sir, but we are all out of the New York Steak".
Me: "Well, is there anything that you are not out of that you would reccomend?"
Waitress: "The Chicken Enchiladas are pretty good."
Me: "I'm not really sure that I want to order mexican food from a place called the 'Bumbleberry Cafe'. How about the Chicken Cordon Bleu?"
Waitress: "That's pretty good, but if you look more closely at the menu, it's actually just a 'Chicken Cordon', there is no 'Bleu', sir."
Me: "Fine"

15 minutes later the waitress shows up with my dinner. It consists of a grilled chicken breast, a slice of ham bought from the same section of the grocery store as Oscar Mayer bologne, and a piece of swiss cheese. The swiss cheese wasn't bad. The only good thing about dinner is that it left me hungry for what I hope will be a superb Easter Brunch at the Zion Lodge tomorrow morning.

Dilemna Resolved...

Well, I couldn't pass up the good weather. My sister Marci and I headed down to Canyonlands today to do some hiking. The weather was gorgeous... perfect hiking weather. However, today was a rude awakening of how out of shape I've become since last year. My heart nearly exploded trying to climb back up the syncline loop (which ended up being more of a semi-arc than a full loop). But it was a lot of fun anyway. On the way home we stopped for dinner at Grogg's brewpub in Price, UT. I would recommend it if you ever pass through.

A Weekend Dilemna

To work or not to work, that is the question. On one hand, I feel like I deserve the weekend off. I just demoed the project that I'm working on to the VP of our division today and things went much better than I had expected. It felt like validation of the last 3 months of late nights and working weekends. On the other hand, the success of the demo today is really no reason for reprieve. We still have hard deadlines to hit.

I do really want to go down to Southern Utah this weekend though. Canyonlands National Park is calling me. I was there briefly last summer on my bike. Unfortunately I didn't fuel up before turning off to the park and had to cut my visit short for fear of running out of gas. The weather is going to be really nice this weekend as well. Perfect weather for biking... well, perfect for early March anyway.

Snow covered hoodoos

I stopped by Bryce Canyon National Park on the way down to Vegas this weekend and was treated to some spectacular scenery of red rock dusted with snow.

Blog back online

After several weeks of not being able to publish my blog to my web server, I am finally back online. I've spent the last couple of weeks in Blogger support limbo trying to figure out why I got this error message every time that I tried to publish my site:

005 Unable to connect to SFTP server: Auth fail

The only advice that I got from blogger support was to make sure that my web server supports SFTP. Now, I don't know a ton about SFTP but I was pretty sure that it's just FTP over an SSH connection. My web server most definitely supports SSH.

I finally found the answer here, in someone else's blog. Apparently blogger tries to "tunnel" the password plaintext over the SSH connection (actually this may be part of the SFTP specification and not something peculiar to Blogger). By default, my version of SSHD (the version included with SuSE 9.3 Beta 1) was configured to disallow that. All I had to do was set the option "PasswordAuthentication = yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart the server.

It seems like this is something that should make it into the Blogger FAQ. Until then, I've written this post to give whoever else encounters this problem one more chance of getting information from a Google search.