Matthew Kocsis

It’s all gone Pete Tong, the Winter Music Conference and Ultra Music Festival are over, but the soundtrack is still playing in my head.

I just got back from WMC/UMF 08, and all I can say is “wow”. It’s going to take a few weeks to fully appreciate what I was able to see and hear, but right now I can say that it was one of the most amazing trips of my life. Between the actual festival, the beach, and the nightclubs I saw more DJs than I ever thought possible in a 5 day span. I have pictures posted under WMC 2008.

DJs: Mar-T, Erick Morillo, Tiesto, The Bravery, Junkie XL, Robbie Rivera, The Crystal Method, BT, Rabbit in the Moon, Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren, Pete Tong, Underworld, Paul van Dyk, Fedde Le Grand, MOBY, David Guetta, Carl Cox, Layo & Bushwacka!, Sasha, John Digweed, Dirty South, Sander Kleinenberg, and Hybrid. That only counts the ones I could ID.

Overall I’d say my favorite set at UMF was Hybrid, mainly because that’s the electronic music I grew up on. The best live set of the week went to Tiesto at Mansion. I’ve never heard anything so awesome before. As my friend Dheer says, “Tiesto must have a separate bag that’s labeled ‘For Club Use Only’ “.

It’s Grand Canyon Time! Actually, it just was Grand Canyon time. I just got back from an amazing trip out west, involving driving to Moline, flying to Atlanta and then Denver, and then driving to the canyon. It was worth it though, I got to see Utah on the way out and since Brian has a hybrid it wasn’t that expensive.

As usual, I took a ton of pictures… 3.5Gb to be exact. I’ve posted them all online here: Grand Canyon 2008

Day 1 (March 21, 2008): Drive from Denver CO to Grand Canyon Village, AZ. We passed through Grand Junction and then took a detour just past Cisco UT on the Dinosaur Diamond Prehistoric Highway (UT 128). I have no idea why it’s called that, but it’s on google maps. After that we went to Arches National Park, drove through Monument Valley, and then onto the Canyon. I got some great south rim photos in the middle of the night courtesy of the moon.

Day 2 (March 22, 2008): On Saturday we hiked from the South Rim to Phantom Ranch via the South Kaibab Trail. We camped that night at the Bright Angel Campground right near Phantom Ranch. All night we could hear the Bright Angel river which was just 10 meters from our campsite. It was amazing.

Day 3 (March 23, 2008): For Easter we got up and ate… camp food. After a great night’s rest and sleeping in, we packed up and headed up the Bright Angel Trail to Indian Gardens which is halfway to the South Rim (only in horizontal distance, it’s less than 1/3 of the vertical distance up!) . From there we set up camp and headed out Tonto Trail to Plateau Point.

Day 4 (March 24, 2008): Brian and I had a long drive ahead of us, so we woke up early and were on the trail by 6:50 am. We hiked up the rest of the Bright Angel trail and arrived at the Grand Canyon Village at the south rim at 8:57 (Brian was a few steps ahead of me due to my constant picture taking, some slow tourists on an icy spot, and because he’s in much better shape than I am). Overall we were happy with our 2h7m ascent. We bought maps, made it to the car and drove back to Denver stopping by Moe’s in Glenwood Springs for dinner.

On day 5 I went to REI for some equipment purchases and then Brian and I went to the DIA to catch flights out (he was heading to California for business). It was amazing trip and it really reminded me that I need to get that backpack out more often!

It’s that time of year and I haven’t carved a pumpkin for quite some time. Paula organized it (however I was the only one to show up), but we still had fun. After searching for a good pumpkin carving pattern, we finally found a good picture of Bender from Futurama. A little editing, a sharpie, and an hour of carving and here’s the result!

After work today I drove down to Palisades-Kepler State Park. It was great to get out and walk through the woods for a while. Overall it’s not terribly large but I’m pretty impressed – Some nice cliffs and trails. I took some pictures and posted them here: Palisades-Kepler State Park

So it’s been a while since I’ve updated my website. That’s a combination of 2 things: I’ve been busy/lazy; I haven’t done anything worth noting. Here are some recent updates:

Pictures from RAGBRAI XXXV are posted online.

Next week I head to the Great American Beer Festival! One of my college roommates, Brian, just moved to Denver, so I’ll be visiting him, my Grandparents (probably Aunt, Uncle, and Cousins also), and trying beer from all over the country! I will be bringing back pictures.

Today I discovered that Iowa actually does have places to go hiking… I was just looking in the wrong place. Iowa’s State Forests are the places, all this time I’ve been looking at the parks. I am hoping to make it up to Yellow River State Forest later in October. It’s been since August since I did any hiking, so I can’t wait.

I decided to do another ride today. The route included breakfast at the Marion airport for the 2007 Fly-In/Drive-In Breakfast. There were some neat planes and there were takeoffs and landings almost every minute. Again I wish I would have taken my camera along. Afterwards I headed north to Central City, got some Gator-aid, and then turned west and biked the 13 miles to Center Point. There was an easterly south-wind so this was the best part of the trip. At Center Point I turned into the wind and fought it all the way home. Total 46 miles in about 4 hours. My body was not ready for the trip today, so I’m really hurting.

Route Map 

In preparation for RAGBRAI in three weeks I’ve been *thinking* about cycling a bit more than usual. For me the hardest part is leaving; once I’m on the road I’m good. Anyway, today I did a 44 mile loop north of Cedar Rapids going through Alburnett, Center Point, Palo, and then back to Marion in just under 3.5 hours, including breaks.

Gmaps Route

Overall the trip was good, There was a minor wind from the east but it wasn’t too strong. As usual, I got attacked several times by little red and black birds that either liked or hated my also red and black helmet. One neat part of the trip was passing the Palo Nuclear Power Plant. Unfortunately the trip ended rather poorly due to Blair’s Ferry road between Palo and CR. It is 2 lanes, no shoulders, and even though most drivers went out of their way to give me ample space there were those select few who liked to get as close as possible to me. I see why Steve’s dad carries ball bearings on his motorcycle.

I spent a few hours last night cleaning up my basement and sorting supplies. I’m planning on setting up my test station for the DRINK system this weekend. I have the physical workbench set up, however I need to build my water-feed system to simulate flow through our Vision 2000 flowmeters (I also need to add thank-yous to the teamdrink homepage for the companies that gave us free or discounted products).

In addition to the flow simulation, I have need to take a serious look at the code for our ezLCD-001 module, and well as figuring out how to get our bioscrypt biometric module working… I’m still having trouble even getting it to speak to me over a serial connection. I might take a step back and try to get it working using the provided C API instead of trying to cypher the protocol manually. To accomplish all of this, I’m probably going to have to re-build many of the wires that we made for the unit do I can improve reliability and give myself a bit more room to move parts around. Right now the interior of the unit is so cramped that I had to tape the LCD controller to the inside.

Well, the flights might not have all worked out, and I didn’t get all the pictures and wine that I wanted, but overall I just got back from a great trip to San Jose/San Francisco/Napa Valley. I got to see Brian, Ian, and John, and see an amazing city. I’ve posted pictures on my picture page here:

California Pictures

Included are pictures of my flight over, San Jose and area, San Fransisco (including the newly collapsed bridge section), and some of Napa Valley. Enjoy!

So I’m trying to browse the internet, and my new PC is really slow. This shouldn’t be the case, so I open up Task Manager to find out what’s going on. Hrmm, my pagefile is 1.9 GB. That’s a bit high, especially since I have 4Gb of RAM. So, I look at individual tasks, and what a suprise, firefox is using up 1,337,608 KB of RAM. That is unacceptable for any software. I haven’t even browsed through that much internet content yet using it. Great work guys, good job writing crappy code. If this software would have been submitted in my ECE 264 class, it would have gotten a zero.