Amazing Google Primer
Friday, July 30, 2004

My friend Eric Wolfram has written a really amazing little primer on how to work with Google in terms of getting your information to score higher, including proof of he's done it. The short story? Make a good site with useful, objective and high quality information and you'll move up.
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 7/30/2004 08:32:00 AM



Wednesday, July 21, 2004



Grand Monadnock Mountain

The bald rocky top of Monadnock Mountain has been flitting in and out of my field of view since I arrived in Keene, NH. It's about 3000 ft. and has an unusually bear rocky top which should by all rights be covered in trees. I was curious about that but in the often typical understated manner of New Englanders, I'd only ever heard snipits of info around town such as, "good climb" and that it had "a pretty good view, depending on the weatha." I didn't know it was in contention for the most climbed mountain in the world with 125,000 people going up each year. Seems that bare rocky top is very attractive and a perfectly challenging day hike.

So I climbed it last Sunday and took some pictures (it was a harrowing solo assent due to buddies being called into work.) I took the less popular Marlboro Trail which is about 2 miles long and took about two hours up. At times it's quite steep, but no need for ropes and kids to stout grandparents were on the trail. It was a hot and overcast day with thunder boomers milling about the state watering things.
Arriving at the balded top was like entering a bit of a party. Lots of people milling about, including a ranger who was fielding questions, the most popular being "will it rain?"

"Storms are down south," was all he said (It started pouring right as I reached my car on the way down and it was then that I realized he hadn't said it wasn't going to rain.) Talking to the ranger more revealed that Monadnock is quiet the little mountain!

First of all there's not trees at the top because it seems that back in the late 1800s the wolves and bears who lived up messed with the wrong local farmers. The farmers got angry lit the entire top of the mountain on fire and just cleared it to the rocks. It's coming back slowly they say.

It also happens to be generally considered the second most climbed mountain the world after Mt. Fuji. Or the first if you want to debate some folks on technicalities. The ranger said some folks out in "Califonia' would say Mt. Whitney was, "but they'd be wrong."

And the name Monadnock, an old Abnacki Indian name has been revitalized by the mountain and kept in the English lexicon (Definition) to mean any lone mountain rising above a plain.

• Official State Park Site
  
• Location
  
• Dancers on the mountain
  
• 3rd Party FAQ
  
• Trail Conditions
  

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 7/21/2004 06:05:00 PM


Shawn Shea
Saturday, July 17, 2004

Chatted with this guy in Keene today as he was writing his latest book,
Happiness Is . He seemed pretty happy.
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 7/17/2004 02:37:00 PM


The sound of flying through a gap in Saturn's Rings
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Yes, really. Scroll down.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/cassini_dust_040712.html
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 7/13/2004 11:34:00 AM


Suspicious in Gate and Manner
Friday, July 09, 2004

One of my favorite students, lets call him "Josh", from my time teaching at a little experimental public school, lets call it "Charter High", just sent me a great email. Josh is barely 15 and a chronic liar, suspicious in gate and manner and and seemingly lives on Mountain Due and coffee with 20 sugars. He trusted me because I started things off by saying I that I'd trusted all my students implicitly until they proved to me this was a mistake. He would lie by instinct, but I would always ask him things a few times and look him right in the eye. He usually ended up telling the truth or saying he couldn't say. Jose asked me several times a week if I smoked dope, hated my boss, every did this or that. I'd always say I would not answer him because it was not professionally appropriate, and that fascinated him I think because I wasn't lying, or telling the truth, I just wasn't saying.

Josh didn't do much work and was angry, victimized, untrusting and constantly trying to work around the system and rules. His home life was shit, everybody except him diagnosed and medicated for something with both parents working full time. His father drunk in the garage after work, giving his kids money if they brought him beer. The land behind their house had a trailer and lots of woods where parties we'd hear of happened unsupervised and people often stayed for days. We heard rumors of lots of explosives and guns at the parties, with 4X4 mudding and all kinds of drugs and the occasional cat torturing. This is not uncommon in the more woodsy parts of America as far as I have seen.

His big brother was kicked out of Charter High earlier in the year and ended up crying like a baby on the way out the door. He had been stealing and causing trouble as a big tough guy. He is getting arrested more and more we hear.

Josh, the younger of the two, was kicked out this June. He cried a little too.

Both boys don't know how to function in a trusting community at all. Both are smart.

Josh is a hardware and software whiz, script kiddy, and gamer. He can fix anything and when he did study, it was a breeze. He is a grade ahead without trying. He reads and writes very well. And to my endless surprise Josh has an amazing sense of people and social dynamics. He would often comment to me on some interaction I'd had with an adult and be spot on about what was really happening just form body language.

The day sent in my last end of year assessments I bumped into Josh. I'd just written up the narrative part of his assessment and been very harsh, he it is:

"Comments
Josh didn't do much work this quarter at all despite starting lots of projects and appearing to work on them. He has the intelligence to graduate a year early without breaking a sweat, but he didn't even get close to getting out of phase. This saddens me because I feel he has a rare combination of smarts. He is perceptive and aware of people in their social interactions, while also being naturally good with technology and computers. This combination is much valued in society. But he has yet to become aware of himself and where his self-destructive behavior comes from, so he is still doing his best to sabotage his future, engage in fruitless fights against systems that are trying to help him, and subverting those same systems in constant small ways. I will miss his perceptive remarks about the world around him and his computer help."

So I'm walking home down the sunny summer main street of this small NH town after finishing my teaching contact and the last assessments when I see Josh and another of my former students sitting on bench in a side ally in that high school way - just sitting, not talking, and just sort of hanging out waiting as if for a super model to fall off her bike in front of them, or a bag of really good dope to fall from the sky.

I take a seat and we chat a little.
Josh asks me, "so did you ever smoke dope?"
"Oh yeah!" I say without skipping a beat, "I went through that phase," the teacher in me adds.

Later on when Josh gets the end of year assessment he emails our director all pissed off. I respond that I stand by every word and didn't want to hide my thoughts from him.

And he sends me this email written in IM slang (he could write clean when needed):

"Caleb,
thats cool that ur wokring somewhere u like n all charter high is a big fucking energy consumer. and hey im not pissed off or nething bout the essesment its cool, besides got to ask [the director] why shes always such a bitch lol...oh hey i finaally figured out why i was at charter, i was really stoned the otha night and was thinkin, and figured out some shit, for example i was at charter because at monadnock all of the stuff i learned was totally unimprotant to me and i didnt think it would help me at all in my future and at the time didnt give a fuck about it, so i went to charter as an alterative, but eventually figgured out most of the things there i didnt give a shit about and wouldnt help me, but i did learn more there that will help me in the future than i did at monadnock...it dont matter though im gonna go to monadnock for a while till i decide weather or not to graduate or what the hell to do, its cool though.

hey i g2g"
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 7/09/2004 04:54:00 PM


4th of July in NH
Monday, July 05, 2004

Happy Fourth

I just came back from my first 4th of July in the small NH town where my Grandmother lives. I was always busy during summers and never visited her in the summer until now. Surreal? Yes. Real? Also yes.

Pictures

Just a gaggle of white families a breedin' in the country. Horses, working canons, bells by Paul Revere, lawn mower tractor pullin'. The best moment was when we were eating BBQ chicken in a mess hall and started talking to a young couple with a 1 year old. The mother had a "Martha's Vineyard" shirt on. My grandmother saw it and said,

"I was there as a kid during a flu outbreak for months while it passed here in town. We were neighbors with the Indian tribe out there and our family station wagon was the first real car they had ever scene!" We figured that was about 1918 she was 7 or so.

Is it true? We'll never know. My uncle Binny (short for Winfield in these here parts) was the keynote speaker at the tiny fairgrounds, as his grandfather was once before. Of course time changes things as my uncle is a composer, Buddhist, and paraplegic and my great grandfather was a gun collecting shoe salesman. Bin did a great re-telling of the constituional convention, focusing on New Hampshire's role. They were 9 weeks late because the state treasury had no money and nobody wanted to pay for them to go.

Bin's best line, "nothing's changed much here, we still don't like paying anything to the government. Maybe our motto should be "Live free, or die trying."

It's changing fast for everyone else too. Houses 200K and up. Locals being priced out. Commuting yuppies coming upstate to spawn. Same in Kennebunkport, ME. Folks I know are moving out of town and renting their 3bd/2ba houses by the week for $1600 and they're two miles from the beach in rough woods.

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 7/05/2004 01:57:00 PM