Meador Manor

Oregon Trail

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Granger Meador

This July I will make my fifth summer trip to the Pacific Northwest. My love for the area began a decade ago when I won free plane tickets for two anywhere in the continental U.S. as the district teacher of the year. My criteria for that was to a) go as far away from Oklahoma as possible, b) go somewhere cool during the hot Oklahoma summer, and c) go somewhere I had never been before. So a friend and I flew to Seattle and also visited Mt. St. Helens and Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. It is a lovely region in the summer with bright but cool days, beautiful vegetation, and friendly folks.

I enjoyed that trip enough that I returned to Seattle in 2005 and then visited Oregon in 2006 with drives and dayhikes along the Columbia River and all the way down its coastline from Astoria to the redwoods of northern California. I was lucky on that trip, renting a Taurus with a sunroof to travel down Highway 101 and enjoy the beautiful Oregon coast, which is thankfully entirely open to the public. What a progressive state! Last year I again received the two-free-tickets deal as the district teacher of the year, so a friend and I visited Washington state and British Columbia. This summer I am planning another dayhike-oriented trip to Oregon.

Oregon Trip 2009

This time I’ll fly into Portland and then drive over to the coast for a series of dayhikes. I prefer staying in motels to camping, with short drives and dayhikes in the morning and afternoon and a hearty evening dinner at a decent restaurant. Since cost is an issue, I’ll be staying at Motel 6s and Microtels for most of this trip. But I have booked more expensive beachfront accommodations for a few days. And around the midway point I booked a room with a hot tub to help me keep pounding the trails.

I’ll be working my way southward on Highway 101 from the Cannon Beach area to hike along the sea and also Saddle Mountain and Neahkahnie Mountain. Then I’ll hit the beautiful Agate Beach area near Newport for hiking at Cascade Head and inland to the Alsea and Green Peak Falls. Another stay at Yachats will let me hike the gorgeous Cape Perpetua area and then I’ll drive inland to Bend for some hiking at the Newberry National Volcanic Monument. I’ll complete the loop with a dash up to The Dalles for a day of hiking along the Columbia River on my way back to Portland.

The hotter it gets here in Oklahoma, the more I look forward to my forthcoming escape to the cool northwestern coast!

[Skip to Hot Time in Portland: Day 1 of the Oregon Trails]

Posted in travel | 4 Comments

Going Cellular

Posted on May 21, 2009 by Granger Meador

More folks are going wireless

With the end of the 2008-2009 school year, I cancelled my Vonage VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone service. I thus joined the 18% of adult Americans (and over one in five US households) who have only cell phones. I’d previously cut the POTS (plain old telephone service) back in December of 2007, but hooked up the internet phone as a backup to the cell phone.

My Vonage plan of 500 minutes for about $23 per month was certainly cheaper than the traditional service and included nice features like Caller ID, digital voice mail, selective number blocks, and having my cell phone ring simultaneously with the internet line. And ditching my old POTS number for an unlisted internet phone cut off all of the political and other annoyance calls that the “Do Not Call” list had failed to kill off.

But I simply am not social enough to chat away on the phone, so I was getting very little use of that vestigial land line. And occasionally the internet phone would go offline, not coming back up until I cycled the power on the Motorola base unit. My iPhone service already costs me over $70 per month, so I decided to save $276 per year and go cellular only. Since my “teacher step raise” for next year will be a whopping $475 before taxes, saving $276 sounds pretty good. If I keep scrimping, I can keep up with inflation…maybe.

I figured that there would be some pain involved with the cancellation, and there was a bit. Vonage won’t let you cancel via the internet, claiming it is for security reasons. But you can do everything else online, so obviously they really just want you to talk to an agent who will try to save the account. After navigating their annoying voice-response switchboard a polite agent offered me a 100-minute monthly plan for $10 plus some fees (said plan does not appear anywhere I could find on their website), but I didn’t bite. And disconnecting the service incurred a charge of $43.19 – sounds a lot like Ma Bell’s old gotchas, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t anywhere near the pain AOL customers reportedly went through a few years back when they wanted to ditch that service, and I’ll start saving money in less than two months.

I’ll have to be more vigilant about having my cell phone charged and handy. But now I have some money I can put toward my favorite summer mental health therapy – a week of hiking along the Oregon coast. And sure enough, cell phone service out on the trail is pretty spotty – thank goodness!

Posted in random, technology | 2 Comments

Not Your Father’s Star Trek

Posted on May 11, 2009 by Granger Meador

The new Star Trek movie seems to be a hit

J.J. Abrams’ take on Star Trek appears to be a hit, easily outperforming all of the previous Trek features in opening weekend box office. However, these days movies have a short life in theaters and rely heavily on foreign markets and rental sales. We shall see how it fares overall later. Paramount finally ponied up some real money for this film, and it appears to have been a wise investment.

I enjoyed the film quite a bit, although it had the frenetic pace, camerawork, and lens flare syndrome that makes for a better Bourne flick than meaningful scifi. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica had a shaky documentary style that worked well for it, but I wouldn’t want to see them go too far down that road for Star Trek.

(Caution – spoilers ahead.)

The standout actors for me were Bruce Greenwood as Pike, Karl Urban as McCoy, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, and Zoe Saldana as Uhura. But Zachary Quinto as Spock and Chris Pine as Kirk also did admirably in roles made very difficult by the quite distinctive acting of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. I was less impressed by how they scripted Scotty and his odd sidekick, although Simon Pegg was enjoyable as an actor. The villain, a vengeful Romulan miner played by Eric Bana, was weakened by a plot struggling to introduce so many characters and back stories and to explain away inconsistencies with over 40 years of previous Star Trek episodes. I do fully embrace the approach of having an alternate timeline – I can think of no better way to resolve the canon issues that were stultifying the franchise after hundreds of episodes and ten films spread across four decades.

Regarding the Enterprise, they should have just used the outlines of the ship from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, since the minor design changes in the new film only detract slightly rather than enhance it. The engine nacelles seem a bit silly in proportion and attachment to the hull. But it is close enough to get a pass and clearly Abrams wanted a noticeably larger ship. It is ironic, however, that the larger scale of the new Enterprise is dwarfed by the villain’s immense vessel.

The new engine room may be a better approximation of the realities of fusion reactors, but seemed more like a brewery redress than a starship interior. The more industrial look is fine, but the rooms were too cavernous and my impression of the floors was they seemed more like concrete slabs than deck plates. But I very much like the redesign of the secondary hull with its many more utilitarian shuttles – that is a design change that is long overdue.

Science-wise, the early explosion of the USS Kelvin with silence after someone was blown out of the hull was a nice bit of seldom-observed accuracy for Star Trek, as were the bumpy shuttle rides. And I loved how the ship seemed to be far less able to “scan ahead” while in warp drive, better reflecting the problems of faster-than-light travel – more like a hyperspace jump than the “fast cruise” of previous outings. The ship’s multiple weapons and faster firing pace is also more realistic, but oddly less satisfying than the old slower long-duration phasers and torpedoes. Battlestar Galactica had a great take on weaponry that appears to have affected the Trek aesthetic, even though they haven’t given up on beam weapons.

I certainly think this reboot was a success, and look forward to more outings with this cast. Abrams is on board to produce the next film, although he has not committed to directing it.

UPDATE:

Don’t miss the concept art Ryan Church created in his work on this film.

2/2011 UPDATE:

The film’s production designer Scott Chambliss later acknowledged the problems with the engine room, saying budget and time issues led them to use the brewery redress. However, I was amused that the set he disliked the most was the bar, which he found too stereotypical yet worked for this teetotaler just fine.

You can see a WONDERFUL series of presentations and interviews with a half-century of Star Trek production designers at the Art Directors Guild website, which hosted Star Trek: 45 Years of Designing the Future.