Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Technology and Society

Commenting Problem

7 Comments

A regular commenter writes:

I’ve been blocked from commenting on your site for weeks now. I’ve tried both IE and Chrome, and I get the same error message:

Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.

If you are a regular commenter or you feel that your comment should not have been blocked, please contact the blog owner and ask them to modify this setting.

As far as I know I’m not behind a proxy, whatever that is. I use the same email addy and computer I’ve always used. If I’ve offended you somehow and you’ve blocked me, I would like the opportunity to apologize for the offense. If there’s a technical issue, I haven’t changed anything, but Win7 updates so many times, I wouldn’t know if it messed up my settings somehow.

As I told him, I have no idea why WordPress thinks that he’s behind a proxie, but I’m afraid that if I don’t block proxies I’ll be inundated with comment spam. I’m not sure how to allow his IP, because while I have a blacklist, I don’t think I have a white one. Any suggestions?

Administrative, Technology and Society

My Five-Year-Old Laptop

43 Comments

…has finally given up the ghost. It won’t boot, or even bring up a POST screen. It just lights up for a couple seconds and dies. I’ve been planning to replace it for a while, but now it’s urgent. I only use it to travel, and not for entertainment, so I don’t need a high-end machine. I’ve been toying with the idea of tablet/keyboard, but don’t know if it will meet my needs.

[Friday-afternoon update]

This look like a pretty good deal to me. Basically, a new version of what I had.

Administrative, General Science

Denali

12 Comments

Heading into the park for the day. I’m check back in tonight. If you don’t hear from me, send out a search party. #Joking

[Monday-morning update]

Hope no one sent out a search party. We got in, not that late, but WordPress was playing its little game with me that doesn’t allow me to log in to post or edit comments.

We went all the way to the end of the road in Kantishna. Fall is happening rapidly up here — you can almost see the leaves on the alders and birches turning yellow in real time, and winter will be here very soon — there was a fresh dusting of snow on the lower peaks on Saturday. It didn’t rain on our trip out and back, but it was cloudy. We saw most of the mountain, in terms of mass (everything below about 12,000 feet), but not the upper reaches.

We sighted several bears, one of which — a big blonde grizzly — was right by the roadside, then wandered around the back of the bus over to the other side, too busy eating blueberries and low-bush cranberries to pay much attention to us. It looked pretty plump and ready to hibernate to me, but it obviously had a different opinion. I may post video later.

Also saw ptarmigan, grouse, ducks of several varieties, a golden eagle and falcon, ground squirrels, red squirrel, several caribou. What didn’t we see? What we most expected to — a moose. Except for one that I might have seen running the opposite direction to the bus through the dwarf spruce, that we didn’t have time to look for at the end of the day.

Today we head up to Fairbanks, and then down to Copper Center, where the red salmon are still running, presumably with accompanying bears.

Administrative, General

Denali

4 Comments

I’ve got Internet, obviously, but we’re too busy to blog. We got a bonus yesterday, driving up to our B&B outside of the park. We decided to take a side trip to Talkeetna, and happened to stop in to a little gift shop of local Alaskan art, when the proprietor looks up from the phone, and asks us if we’d like to land on a glacier for a hundred bucks each. The plane’s about to leave from the field and they want to fill seats. So we head over there, and hop aboard a DeHavilland Beaver with skis, with a 23-year-old pilot with a philosophy degree, head up into the mountains, and drop down between the ridges onto the ice. Unfortunately, the ceiling was only fifteen thousand feet, so we couldn’t see the big mountain, but the others were pretty spectacular. Pics anon.

Administrative

Off To The Land Of The Midnight Sun

28 Comments

Well, OK, not that far — I’m unlikely to get further north than Poker Flats, but I am off to Anchorage. I’ll take a computer, but don’t know what connectivity will be like.

[Evening update from Anchorage]

OK, had a good flight. Flew right over Yosemite and the fire, but unfortunately, things got socked in north of the Oregon border, and only cleared up briefly around Graham Island. It’s kind of dreary here, weather wise, but beautiful. I had dinner (fresh-caught halibut) on the top floor of the Captain Cook Hotel, with a gorgeous view of the Inlet and mountains. More anon.