Some non-math stuff in my life
Hiking
San Diego is a hiker's paradise, no question. Within two hours' drive
you can get to rocky sea-cliffs, scrub-covered foothills,
pine-forested mountains, and rugged desert. Also in range is the
incomparable Sierra Nevada. This accessibility to such a variety of
nature is one of my favorite parts of living in San Diego.
A few interesting recent trips:
- Starfish Cove, a secluded canyon in the Anza-Borrego Desert,
complete with rare elephant trees.
Photos courtesy of
hiking buddy Kristin Jehring.
- Rabbit Peak. Two days + 8300 vertical feet + howling desert wind
+ no water = awesome! Photos (Kristin again).
- Mount San Gorgonio. Southern California's highest peak at
11500'. A good time had by all.
- The Tahoe Rim Trail
is 165 miles long and encircles Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada
border. Sadly our attempt to through-hike the whole thing was cut
short after five glorious days due to injury. (Everyone's fine, don't
worry.) Pictures soon?
Sports
As I'm somewhat lacking in physical coordination, my own sporting
activities are mostly of the kind that only involve putting feet in
front of one another (see Hiking above). But I'm eminently qualified
to spectate. I support the San Diego Padres (baseball) and Chargers
(football) and am fortunate to have arrived in San Diego in an era
when that's a somewhat less pathetic thing to do than it once was. I
am also the proud owner of a so-so fantasy baseball team, the Ocean
Beach Hippies (I should never have traded Joe Nathan), and am having a
promising season of SNRFL with
Team Outstanding Mediocrity.
Unix
I'm a supporter of open-source software, and a fan of
Unix-like operating systems; my current choice is FreeBSD. I try to contribute what I
can back to the open-source community in the form of bug fixes, useful
feedback, and general discussion. I'm interested also in operating
system internals, CPU architecture, computer security, and debugging,
and mangling Unix is a great way to learn about all this.
I prefer emacs over vi, bash over csh, pine over mutt, and neither KDE
nor Gnome (I've recently switched from WindowMaker to the even lighter
awesome window manager).
When I find weird bugs in software I'm using, I look at it as an
opportunity to learn something by trying to fix it, and to help the
community at large by sending in a patch. You might run into me on comp.lang.c or comp.unix.programmer, or one of
the FreeBSD mailing lists.
neldredge@math.ucsd.edu
