Ansel Adams Wilderness Plans

A view of Mount Ritter, from Mount Ritter.

I managed to get the last two Labor Day weekend backcountry permits for the section of the Ansel Adams Wilderness that I want to share with Doc. Hooray! That area is so unbelievably beautiful that it makes my heart ache.

The last time I was backpacking in the area, it was to climb Mount Ritter. A gorgeous mountain surrounded by lakes and rugged beauty. This was also around Labor Day weekend, I believe. But: Ritter was a pretty technical mountain to climb, so Doc and I will just be milling about and enjoying the scenery. No mountaineering on this upcoming trip. I will mention, though, even if you don’t summit any mountains during your trip, this area is completely rewarding!

Breakfast under Mount Ritter, shrouded in fog
Up, up, up! Making for the summit of Mount Ritter.
I’d invite you guys to come with, but I snagged the last two permits for the area!

Farmer Steen

On Monday, I learned more about farming than I ever really wanted to. Except not modern farming. This was like… Medieval farming. We had to plant 15,000 seeds by hand, and since I did not want to injure my back, I ended up doing squats more or less continuously for about 12 hours. My thighs were in agony for a week afterwards.

When a Good Nexus 4 Goes Bad

I accidentally dropped my Nexus 4 off a cliff, and now its touch screen does not respond. I can see that I am getting calls/texts/etc, but I cannot interact with the phone in any meaningful way.

The touchscreen has also become unglued, so I started pulling it away as far as it could go. This resulted in a snap, and some pretty cool glitch patterns.

When a good Nexus 4 goes bad...
Here you see the touchscreen being removed from the rest of the phone (while the phone is still on, of course).

Luckily I was able to get everything off of the phone, because everything is working perfectly… except the touch screen. It figures that the first phone I have ever destroyed also happens to be my first keyboardless phone.

When a good Nexus 4 goes bad...
Here you see the glitch effects I caused by not caring about the phone anymore, since the touchscreen wouldn’t work anyway.

Since the peeling off glitch screen is such a thing of beauty, Doc and I decided to photograph it and make smartphone wallpapers from it. The resulting glitch wallpaper looks absolutely beautiful on my Nexus 5.

Glitch Android Desktop
Here is the Nexus 5 with its glitchy Nexus 4 wallpaper. This is how it appears in its “locked” mode.

Glitch Android Desktop
Here is the Nexus 5 with its glitchy Nexus 4 wallpaper. This is how it appears in its “unlocked” mode.

I gave some of the photos to Doc for him to touch up, and we plan on making the wallpapers available for anybody who wants to make their phones look like a Nexus 4 that got dropped off a cliff. Doc suggested taking an Android icon, and glitching it out as part of the wallpaper. I told him “That would be too confusing, unless you used an icon that I would never ever click on… like the Google+ icon.”