Cutthroat

Arrr! A pirate blog entry you're thinking, right? Sorry, just a lame-ass 8,050 ft. peak in the North Cascades. Climbed it on Sunday in perfect weather with the route completely to ourselves. It's one memorable sighting as you near the crest of the North Cascades, Highway 20. Mid-5th class most of the way. About 8 pitches up and near 10 raps down. It was fantastic except the the extreme number of raps. Oh, well.

The Ascent

Okay, my play on words will surely make you barf, but sometimes I can't resist. I guess it's the pun syndrome. You think you're funny, but everyone else thinks you're a dork. Oh, well. So after two years as an Account Director at Write Image, I was hired away by a fast growing technology+marketing consulting firm called Ascentium.

I'm responsible for project management as well as business development for the Enterprise Content Management Division. Whew! Anyway, the people are fun, smart and the company is in quite a growth phase.

Grand Teton

Upon accepting a new position with Ascentium, I quickly booked a trip to Jackson Hole and the Grand Teton National Park to climb the Grand Teton. Not having any time, or energy, to research route beta etc., I decided to hire a guide to climb the highest peak (13,770) in the Teton Range.

Really the only guide service for climbing the
Grand is Exum Guides.

It was a wonderful, and successful trip. We summited on a bluebird day, after an evening of, what seemed like to me, very high winds at the 11,600 base camp. It was spontaneous and amazing!

Import iPod to iTunes

iTunes is designed for a one-way transfer of data--from iTunes to the iPod. It is not designed to import from your iPod. I didn't really understand this until I unknowingly accomplished several things:

1. Wiped my iPod and about 5 GBs of data clean
2. Created great anxiety and sweaty palms
3. Had to re-rip my entire song and Podcast collection
4. Then figured out I better backup my iTunes library on several servers
5. Took a day off from work to search the Apple support site

I don't find any clear attempt by Apple to message, what I would call a technology anomoly. Or provide clear answers on how to fix this; or how about a link to iPodsoft? Why would you make a consumer product/application a one way data stream? I don't have the answer to that question but it must be about DRM or something. Nevertheless, I did discover there's a utility tool available for $15 to manage this issue.

If you change jobs, buy a new machine, your machine crashes or any number of senarios where you'd need to reinstall iTunes and upload your iPod data (It is really just a really cool hard drive anyway, right?) back onto your machine, you'll need to know about iGadget.