Hey all,

I've only posted two videos "embedded" on my blog here.  There are a handful of others though if you're interested.  Just go to http://smthng.blip.tv for all of them.  I didn't want to clutter up the blog with a week's worth of videos, but it seems that the ones posted here have gotten the most hits.  I'm guessing that people don't know they're all on Blip.tv.  Just thought I'd let ya know.

BTW... I just *might* have some motorcycle videos up next week if all goes according to plan. ;)

I know it's been a while.  Nothing real deep or exciting, just a relaxing recap of my last weekend in the woods.  This may be the first of many.  Enjoy!

I only broke it a little bit, but that'll be at the end of this mess...

Last weekend (11/15/08) I went out to one of our local wheeling spots with a bunch of the other Off-Camber Crawlers for one of our last runs of the year.  Fortunately, the weather wasn't quite as bad as previous years and we generally had a good time.

Friday was me setting up the Go (more on that in another post) and getting a couple hours out in the Jeep.  We ran several trails we were all familiar with, but then go misdirected to a trail that gets pretty nasty.  Chris got his YJ hung up pretty bad, so I started winching him.  Either he got impatient or didn't hear me telling him to stop, so he punched a pretty decent hole in his oil pan.  That was pretty much the end of his day, other than getting him back to camp.

Saturday was a "short" day, since it was also the first day of hunting season.  We had about 4 hours where we were promised we wouldn't be shot, so we made the most of it.  We started on one tough but manageable trail, got seriously rained on, then started another "unknown" trail.  It turns out the unknown trail was about as much as we could manage.  There were several spots that I'd have bet money on that we wouldn't make it.  But, we persevered and managed to get our vehicles a seriously long way up a stream. ;)  We then came back to camp and cooked a LOT of food, consumed frosty beverages, etc.

Sunday was supposed to be an easy day, but I ended up leading a group with two Grand Cherokees, which don't have a lot of clearance.  One was bone stock and wouldn't go into 4-Low, so I ended up guiding them on some easy trails.  It turned out to be a long day, but was still a good one.

All in all, a good weekend out.  But, I think I managed to break a control arm mount or smthng.  I haven't exactly found out what's going on, but the back end of the Jeep wants to step out sideways every so often.  It's, uh, disconcerting. ;)  I'll work on that this Saturday when I head over to a friend's to help install his new skid plate.

Ok, more like life IN the Go.  The "Go" is my new Sylvansport Go trailer/tent/camper thing.  I picked it up with the Jeep last Thursday in Sidney, OH.  I then towed it to somewhere outside Lancaster, PA and set it up for the night.  A couple of folks have been asking my opinion of it, so here are some initial thoughts...

Towing...  It's pretty much a dream to tow.  I have a 2006 Jeep Unlimited (not the new four-door version, the older two door).  It's basically a Wrangler that's been stretched about 15 inches.  The towing capacity on Wranglers is ridiculously low compared to other SUVs, so the weight of the Go was a big part of my decision (I think the max towing weight of a Wrangler is smthng like 1500 lbs).  In the Unlimited, I would notice that the Go was back there when I hit a bump or when trying to take off quickly (like turning onto a highway), but otherwise it was pretty much a non-issue.  It just sat back there and didn't make a difference.  I think it actually improved my gas mileage, but that might have just been because I wasn't taking off as quickly from stop lights.  Regardless, there really aren't any negative issues to deal with when towing it.

Set up...

Not terrible, but I did have some minor issues.  None of the issues were with the Go itself, but were more related to my not being familiar with it and trying to decipher a relatively "light" manual.  It doesn't explain one or two important points.  I made do, but it wasn't until I got home the next day and went through the setup video (on Sylvansport's web site) that I realized that I didn't have one or two parts of the tent attached to the frame correctly.  Everyone who gets one of these things should plan on having a "practice run" before actually needing to set it up.  Other than the one or two minor issues, set up is a breeze.  It goes together about as quickly and easily as my 4-person 3-season tent.  Take down is almost as easy, but it takes some patience and determination getting the tent back in it's "box".  Just be patient and be prepared to lower the roof a bit in order to reach stuff easily. 

Another thing to note is the stabilizing system.  Four "legs" are used to level and stabilize the Go.  They aren't intuitive.  Again, you pretty much have to watch the video to get it right.  It's not complicated, but it's one of those things that if you don't know the tricks, it doesn't make sense. 

Use...

Compared to a tent, this thing rocks!  A flat, clean floor, with no rocks or roots sticking up...  Waterproof... flat sleeping area...  plenty of room to set stuff up and move stuff around...  Excellent ventilation if you need it (I didn't... it was cold).  It's a big unit with a high ceiling though... expect to use a lot of lighting if you really want to see stuff at night.  I have a tent light I normally use that hangs from the ceiling of my tent.  I used that, plus an extra emergency one I had in the Jeep.  I could have used two more to get it really lit enough to read or smthng.  I'll probably go snag a few more before I go camping this weekend.  It's just a big space... one or two wimpy tent lights aren't going to cut it.

Another thing to keep in mind is heat.  I use a portable tent heater in the winter.  I brought it along and tossed in 4 extra bottles of fuel for it.  I can normally make do with one bottle of fuel all night in a decent sized tent.  In order to keep the Go warm, I ate up all four bottles!  I'm sure a lot of this has to do with how big the Go is.  It also doesn't help that the thing is off the ground.  You don't have the ground as an insulator.  If you do any winter camping and expect to run heat, expect to use a lot of fuel.  I'm converting from the little disposable propane canisters to a 10lb refillable bottle (swiped temporarily from my barbeque grill).  That should be plenty.

Finally, keep an eye on condensation... it's a tent.  If you have heat running or people breathing in it, there will be condensation.  Most of it was in the roof pod for me.  It's just smthng you need to keep in mind.  Expect to give it time to air out in the morning or plan on drying it out back home.  There's no way I'd leave it packed up damp, it's too much of an investment to risk mold and/or mildew.

Overall...

I'd be lying if I didn't say that this thing rocked. ;)  It really is the bees knees for vehicle camping.  I've got a three day Jeep trip this weekend.  I'm just as stoked about using the Go as I am about getting the Jeep out on the trails.  Being able to bring a lot more camping gear is going to make a huge difference to my comfort (I can tow it all on the Go instead of cramming it in the Jeep). 

I'll post up some more detailed pictures and descriptions from that trip after it happens.

One more thing...

I'm sure each state it different, so check what your requirements are for titling and tagging it.  I had a really hard time dealing with Virginia's DMV.  At the DMV office, they wouldn't give me a temporary tag to go get the Go because I didn't have a title for it.  Duh... I don't get the title until I pick up the trailer.  It turns out that you can just print a temporary permit from the DMV web site right here.  No VIN or title needed, just make sure you get a bill of sale or delivery receipt. 

Same goes for the real tag and title... The DMV folks normally won't do it without a bill of sale stating the paid purchase price and date.  Luckily, I got a rep that was exceptionally cooperative and just said "It's okay, I'll let it go this time" whenever I didn't have smthng that was needed.  Trust me when I say that this is the first time I've EVER gotten a cooperative DMV rep.  Don't bank on it happening to you.  You need the Certificate of Origin signed by the seller and assigned to you.  You also need a completed bill of sale showing price and date of purchase.  That should be sufficient for your purposes. ;)

I go wheeling with OCC on a regular basis, but I figured I'd start posting some of the info up here... at the worst, it'll give the Googlebot something else to chew on.

I met with 5 others in Manassas at 8:30am.  One hopped in with me and we left a few minutes after 8:45 because another had to mess around with his dead CB for a bit before we left. ;)  No parts fell off and we made it to the gas station on route 55, where we met up with the rest of the group.  Top off gas, recycle some coffee, quick drivers meeting, we headed out.
This wasn't actually my ride to lead, but the OCC member that set it up had some issues with his CJ that we couldn't fix in time, so I'm filling in for him.  Unfortunately, that means I didn't check anything because I thought he'd already taken care of it all.  I found out the error of my ways when I pulled into the turnoff for Stateline/Tuscarora and was greeted by a huge steel bar across the entrance and a big sign that says "Road Closed".  I radioed the rest of the group not to pull in and to find somewhere further up the road to pull over.  I joined up with them after checking to make sure the gate was truly locked.  Luckily two of the members said they knew of another trail in the area, so we put them in the lead and headed out to it.
We took a few turns on rural roads near Star Tannery and eventually got to the other trail.  We stopped at the base of of a hill and waited for one member-to-be to air down a bit.  The rest of us decided not to, as the ground was pretty much frozen solid and we didn't expect to be spinning any wheels.  We then headed up the trail.  The ride was relatively uneventful, but enjoyable. There were a few limbs that we had to scrape by, a few logs we had to negotiate and a fair amount of trail being held up by 20 foot retaining walls.  It was a bit tight at times, but no one had any issues, with the exception of one TJ, which lost a CB antenna somewhere.
We stopped on the back side of the hill for lunch and a bunch of us decided to go find a Geocache that was in the area.  I'd been somewhat insistent on that, as it's the main reason my passenger decided to join me in the first place and I didn't want the day to be a total bust for him (I wanted to find it too).  We ended up climbing 200 ft higher via a pretty rocky and steep area where the powerlines run over the mountain (the same power lines that eventually cross Stateline) and found the geocache at the top.  We did some swapping of stuff and my passenger got a very nice Jeep compass (N/S type of compass, not the Compass vehicle) that had been left by the cache owner.  We left a travelbug, and took some pictures at the summit.  We were only the second people to find the cache, which was kind of cool.
We then headed back to the rigs to eat.  That's when my passenger started dropping rocks on my Jeep and decided to lay down in the dirt for a bit. ;) 
We headed down the trail, passed a new housing development (which means trail access may be impacted when they're done) and headed into Mt. Olive.  We eventually found Love's truck stop, where we all decided that we were done and would head home.
The trail (OCC members will know which one I'm referring to) is an easy trail, but it's a bit tight and a full-sized truck would probably leave some paint behind if they attempted it.  Otherwise, it's about the same kind of difficulty as Peter's Mill.  A bit less rocky and bumpy, but a lot tighter.  There is no room for error... if you do something silly and manage to slide off the trail, you're pretty much done and everyone else would have to drive down to the next switchback to pick up the pieces.  Of course, you'd have to be doing something really "not smart" to get in that much trouble in the first place.
All in all, it was a good day, even though we didn't end up running Stateline.  I'm glad we were able to at least salvage a ride and not have to drive down to Harrisburg or something.  Pictures may or may not follow...  I completely forgot and I don't think anyone else took many, other than from the top of the hill when we were Geocaching.

Hrm... got just a few things I feel like posting up here today.

We'll start with a comment by none other than Seth Harwood himself!  On my blog, no less.  Where, you ask?  Well, go find it yerself!  I'll give you a hint...  It's the most popular and linked entry on this thing (I know, that's not saying much, but it should be fairly obvious to any who frequent my little abode).  For those who don't know who Seth Harwood is... he's a podcaster, crime novelist and an all around cool guy.  Go clicky on the link above if you want to know more (warning - some of his stuff is not safe for rugrats or the office).

Hrm... what else.  Oh yeah!  The Amondotech / light debacle is over... they sent me my stuff.  The coolest part about that whole thing was watching the Jeep club guys when I gave them the lights.  It very quickly turned into a bunch of grown men acting like 12 year olds blinding each other.  Always good entertainment there.  B)

Work is currently a nightmare.  We've got a really strange Exchange issue that no one (including the SEVEN support reps at Microsoft) have figured out yet.  Unfortunately, this is also happening during one of those high-profile, world leader conference type events that we have every so often, so it's a bit of an issue.  I pulled over 56 hours last week. :(  Hopefully this week will be a bit better.  I'm a bit burned out right now, which is why I'm blogging at the office instead of doing something useful.  Ok, I'm really waiting on the queues to drop so I can start messing with stuff again.

My Florida motorcycle trip is off.  I'm still not in good enough shape to enjoy it.  I'm going to go beat on the doctors a bit more and see what else we can do.

I might be posting up a few photos tonight from a recent ride out to Skyline Drive. Depends mostly on whether or not I can be bothered to pull them off the camera.

I still need new tires for the Jeep.  The JeepWobble™ is getting worse.  Might do that tonight.

I ordered a Sandisk Sansa Express MP3 player.  It was dirt cheap and I needed something a little more "durable" than my Zune.  The Zune is good and all, but I get a bit nervous taking a 30 Gb hard drive on Jeep trails.   The Express is small, recharges off the USB port, is built like a thumbdrive (so I won't need to carry around a cable), has 1GB of flash memory and can take microSD cards to expand it.  Did I mention that it was dirt cheap? ;)  You can check out a full review over on Anything But Ipod - excellent site!

I'm getting very sleepy.

L8rs!

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:26 AM

Ok, my Flickr stream is now thoroughly hosed up with tons of Jeep (and other 4x4) pictures...  356 of them to be exact!  If you really want to check out what a bunch of Off-Camber Crawlers members do on weekends, go check out my stream right here.

But, I gotta toss out a disclaimer...  I sucked these puppies directly off the camera, ran them through Elements to resize them and exported them.  I shoot in RAW mode, which means there is absolutely no post-processing here...  No sharpening, no white-balancing, no auto-leveling, no exposure compensation or anything else for that matter (digital cameras generally do all that stuff unless they're shooting in raw mode).  What this means is that most of them won't look very good...  colors will be washed out, some pictures will look over or under exposed, etc.  I'll reprocess them all later, but I wanted to get them up real quick like so the OCC member could tell me which ones to process first.  As I get them fixed, I'll replace the ones up there.

Just to whet your appetite, here's my little beastie...

...and here's a bit of trail carnage to go with it...  ;)

Back to werk for me, see ya!

Just a quick heads up to those who check out the site regularly...  I'm about to totally clutter up my Flickr photostream.  We went out to an off-road park this weekend and I'm going to be uploading all the shots to my Flickr account so that others in the club can snag the ones they want.  They're going to be "naked", which means no correction or editing right now...  Just a big ole' dump of 400 or so pictures of dirty vehicles.  If some are good, I'll correct them and repost them in all their glory later.

I'll edit this post with a link to the set once I'm done exporting and uploading it.

Update: My work machine couldn't handle importing, converting and exporting all that stuff, so I'm starting it on my home system now.  I'll get them uploaded as soon as it's done crunching (probably late tonight or early tomorrow morning).

Warning: This is another one of me just spouting stuff off.  It's probably going to be long and wander all over the place.

I really am not sure where I want to start this post, so I'll just jump right in and see where it goes.

It's almost a guarantee that if I'm in DC and taking pictures (especially at night), someone will ask me if I'm a photographer.   My normal answer is "No, I just like taking pictures".  I don't know why people ask me this...  it might be the camera bag (which I don't often have), the camera (not that impressive, looks like just about 90% of other decent cameras, IMO), or maybe it's just that they see me taking pictures of stuff other than the usual tourist targets.  Anyway, the reason I'm going on about this is that I was thinking today about being (or not being) a photographer.  Note to wife: Don't worry, I'm not talking about a career change or anything.

When exactly does one consider oneself "a photographer", as opposed to just being a geek with a camera?  Haven't really come up with any kind of decent answer for that.  The reason I was thinking about it is because of my train ride this morning.  Occasionally, I'll get on the train and think about which side I want to sit on, in case there's a decent picture to be taken on one side as opposed to the other.  I think "Photographers" think about stuff like that all the time...  Geeks with cameras rarely do.  If I were a "photographer", I would have been thinking about that this morning and might have been able to get a picture of one of the most incredible sunrises I've ever seen in DC.  Hence, the title of my post... 

If I were awake enough to be thinking, there's a small chance I would have remembered to sit on the right side of the train.  The views on the left are fairly boring, especially in the morning.  The right side has a nice view when going over the Potomac.  Even if the windows are dirty (which is usually the case), you can generally get a decent shot if you use a wide aperture.  However, I was barely moving, let alone "awake", so I didn't think about any of that until I saw an absolutely incredible picture waiting to be taken that I missed.  Theoretically, being awake might have been a good thing this once.

Warning: Sudden topic change below!

Here's a few of the "technical difficulties" I was talking about in my previous post...

Starting tomorrow, I'll be in the woods with a bunch of other peeps driving over and through stuff, trying not to break my Jeep.  Unfortunately, my Jeep hasn't been behaving very well, so I've had a lot of work to do on it this week.  Hopefully, I've done enough to make sure I'm not stuck in the woods with a broken Jeep.  If not, I'll have spare parts and friends with me. ;)  So, I've been busy wrenching whenever possible.

Unfortunately, that has been interrupted repeatedly by work.  We're on our third messaging server failure this week (and it's only Thursday!).  The first one wasn't that bad, and was easily fixed by beating up our virus scanner.  The second one was critical (one step short of complete meltdown) and took a lot of time to fix.  Today's crash we're still investigating, but it looks like a simple memory leak that has gone undetected till now.  Anyway, troubleshooting and fixing all this stuff has sucked a fair amount of time as well.

Add Shmoocon to that and I've pretty much got no time left at all.  On top of all that, toss in a computer that doesn't want to recognize my USB reader and the chances of getting some pictures up are pretty much gone.

In spite of the universe conspiring against me this week, I have a full 2GB card and a half full 4GB card of images from my camera!  I'll see what I can do to get at least one up today...  Might be able to pull a few off during lunch.

See ya!