well, it’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from vacationing in Montana, and I still don’t have all the pics I want to post in the Montana gallery.

That’s for a number of reasons, which follow:

• I’m posting more pictures than in the past. This is not necessarily a good thing (it means I’m posting more pics that have sentimental/informational value, as opposed to “good pics”)
• It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work
• It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work, and I pretty much (first pass) hand process pics before I post (when I have a pic to post, I then load and ImageMagik makes the full and thumb; uploads same. Home-grown tool: Linux/PHP/HTML/ImageMagik).

This means little to almost everyone but me.

This post is for me!

And – after I’m done with the Montana gallery, I want to break this out so all the Glacier National Park pics are also in a separate gallery. Glacier was, overwhelmingly, the photographic high point of the trip. I could spend a year there with a camera(s)….

t’s late after a long day, and – of course – I’m still coding.

Night is a good time to reflect, especially as you are watching the tail -f on a script you just fired off for the billionth time.

Quick notes – Tech memes without legs, so I can be on the record as incredibly incorrect:

• Twitter — I just don’t get it. Geek love; I understand. But no legs. Even the younger geeks I talk to dismiss it.
• GreaseMonkey — Love the concept, but buying into the MS ActiveX camp: Must have X browser with Y extension installed. Nope….
• OMPL — Dave Winer – whom I respect – is behind this all, but – as with Twitter – no one I know (geeks) get/grok/care about it
• Ruby — Nice language, the Rails framework is nice. But…why? Slow, based on Python (which is wicked fast) and competes, basically, with PHP (FOSS and fast) and JSP (sorta OSS; compiled fast but a clunky language).

Am I totally wrong?

Of course!

Just jotting down some notes about how I feel right now.

History will judge…

Well, today is the official end of my vacation for this year – it’s Sunday, and we just got back from about four days in Montana on Friday.

I’m furiously trying to get the pics together in my gallery, but it’s going to take awhile.

In the meantime, a teaser of what’s to come is posted here.

That’s Lake Saint Mary in Glacier National Park – part of a breathtaking drive over the continental divide called the Going Into the Sun Drive. Pretty amazing.

I’ll explain later, but I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotations – the last graphs of Norman MacLean’s brilliant novella, A River Runs Through It.

It’s worth reading if only so you can truly appreciate these last graphs, and be able to go back to them from time to time. That’s great writing.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Artic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.