Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

When your engineers have 20% of their time to use on projects of their choosing, you get a lot of interesting product ideas. If nothing else, Google is amazingly unshy about pushing these products and services to their users, even if some start out somewhat incomplete and poorly integrated. Enter Google's newest offering, Google Buzz. Unlike some previous Google attempts at social media, this one is going to work in a big way. First, Google integrated Buzz right into Gmail, the reason most of us have Google accounts in the first place. There are plenty of seats at the Google Labs table, but not many projects get to sit at the front with Gmail. Second, your contact list pre-establishes a social network. Third, if you use Google Profile, you already had established information about yourself and the content you create. Fourth, if you create content with Blogger or Reader, your Buzz account is pre-primed with content. Who else could have done this? Nobody. (Even though Buzz is more ...

How's this for an amusing trip down memory lane? Ten years ago, on the eve of the millennium, the big " Y2K ," I was reporting for work in the basement of Gilchrist Hall at the University of Northern Iowa . I was to staff the university's "Y2K Command Center," the strategic hub of UNI's efforts to thwart any disasters due to Y2K. As we now know, very little happened due to Y2K. The fear was that any digital device that recorded dates with only two digits wouldn't know how to properly handle a year "00" and would behave unpredictably. This was a valid concern, but not a surprise so almost all such problems were fixed months ahead of time. Midnight came and went, and things were pretty quiet around UNI. One of our maintenance staff discovered a ventilation fan not working properly (for non-Y2K reasons) and that was it. All the professional staff went home a couple hours after midnight, but Robert Shontz (great student, individual, and c...

Talk about your epic fail today. I decided several days ago that I wanted to ski Christmas day. I got close, but never made a single turn. Let's look at what turned out to be a waste of a day: I was up before 7, checking the weather and road reports, and it's not exactly great. Chain restrictions at the tunnel and Vail Pass make me think twice about going. All I have is my car, as I don't trust my truck with its bad clutch and oil leak. At about 8:45 I get a positive road report from Lubin, who is headed to Vail from the west. I check some more reports and leave about 9:15. Way too late, but I've left late before and had great afternoons. The roads are certainly passable, but I take it slow and arrive at Vail just after noon. I've heard from some that free parking is hard to find in Vail, but others have assured me that it exists and a bus will take you to the lifts. I explored all of Vail's three exits, and none have signs that clearly point to free parking...

It's not difficult to find Iowans in Colorado. We're everywhere. Even more, I'm sure more Iowans are getting ready to move to Colorado right now. As an Iowan-turned-Coloradoan myself, I thought I should provide this translation guide. Coloradoan says... Iowan hears... Denver Des Moines Boulder/University of Colorado Iowa City/University of Iowa Ames/Iowa State University Fort Collins/Colorado State University Durango Decorah Skiing Wrestling Olathe Sweet Corn Any sweet corn you can buy at a street corner from a couple of kids in the back of a pickup The Post The Register The Gazette The Courier "I spent a winter as a ski bum in Leadville." "I spent a summer as a detasseler in Osage." Denver Broncos Football Aplington-Parkersburg Football (based on fan loyalty and news coverage) Pueblo Chile Frijoles Fest Ackley Sauerkraut Days Mt. Elbert Hawkeye Hill Castle Rock Story City Park Meadows Jordan Creek Vail Oko...

I've always been a fan of Wikipedia, and often I'm happy to see a Wikipedia entry as my top search result. As a math teacher, I never had many opportunities to direct students in the ways of research, including how to choose appropriate sources. Several of my colleagues who do teach research, however, not only discouraged Wikipedia use, but banned it outright. Why? The most common answer: "Because anybody can edit Wikipedia, students won't know if the information is true." It wasn't until tonight that I saw how shortsighted this reasoning really is, and how it gives students wrong ideas about research. Let's assume we not only encourage, but require students to use Wikipedia. If a student only finds factual information, then we've preserved the status quo, and nothing really changes. But what if the student finds a mistake? (Or, more likely, you find it for them.) This isn't a crisis, this is an opportunity! First, students see this as a ...

At its very core, linking websites together is what makes the web the web. I've had my own website since 1996, and like many people, we all had a page dedicated to our favorite links. In 2001, my friend Brian Gongol (and he certainly wasn't alone) went a step further and provided not just a list of links, but rather a stream of updates, whether they be sites of interest or news of the day, each complete with Gongol's thoughtful commentary. I liked the idea, and with my adoption of Delicious in 2002, I had an easy way to tag, catalog, and comment on links. Almost 900 links later, I'm still using Delicious, but I'm not sure if anybody has noticed. My RSS feed is picked up by FriendFeed , but not many more people pay attention to it. So what are people paying attention to? Twitter and Facebook , that's what. They each provide audiences I'd like to share with, but neither are good enough to make me leave Delicious behind. Throw Google Reader (my favorite R...

It's back to school time again, and this year I'll be returning as a student instead of a teacher. While the decision seemed sudden, this has been in the works ever since I left UNI. I was so influenced there by Dr. Bonnie Litwiller, my academic advisor, and Dr. Ed Rathmell, my thesis advisor, that I knew someday I'd want to go to graduate school and pursue higher degrees in math education. But first, for reasons of experience and credibility, I went to Colorado to teach, learn, and explore. Six years later, the time has come to pursue that earlier goal. After evaluating some of the best math education programs in the country, last week I visited CU-Boulder and met with Dr. David Webb. He was extremely generous with his time, working with me for over two hours, and by the time I left we had a plan and any doubts about my decision were gone. Not only is CU-Boulder a great school, it makes sense for me academically, socially, and geographically. So I'm a student aga...

Schools reward their inhabitants in two amazingly different ways: teachers get salaries, and students get grades. Not only are these systems vastly different, but I'm not sure teachers would accept a pay scale that's built like a grading scale, nor would students accept a grading scale that's built like a teacher's pay scale. The vast majority of schools pay teachers according to a "salary schedule," a rigid, two-dimensional matrix of dollar amounts with credits across the top and experience down the left side. The more credit hours you've earned, and the more years you've taught, then the more you'll make. I don't feel it's a fair system, but it's a system that most teachers will agree to use, putting it ahead of most any other pay system available. It's a simple system, perhaps too simple. Its simplicity allows us to easily print and read the salaries on a sheet of paper, and I think that's one reason we continue to rely ...

While digging through some old papers, I came across a copy of PC World magazine from January 1998. The headline on the cover reads, "YOUR NEXT PC: What's New for 1998 - and Beyond ." Predictions are fun to make, and more fun to make fun of looking back. Let's see where PC World hit, and where they missed. In one section called "The Desktop Computer in Ten Years," PC World asked Mark Weiser, chief technologist at Xerox PARC what to expect by 2008. Here's his list: The PC will move into a closet, and we can expect gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage. Displays will be flexible and you can fold them up in your pocket. Voice recognition will not replace the keyboard and mouse for privacy reasons. Wires will become built into walls and the furniture and we will have wireless mice, keyboards, and phones. E-paper will be standard for everything from books to business cards. We will have "pocket net computers" that allow us to log on to the i...

About a week ago I replaced my well-worn installation of Kubntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" with the sleeker, newer, Kubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope." I hadn't made the jump to Kubuntu 8.10, the first to include KDE 4, because there were plenty of reports about bugs and incomplete features. After waiting through another release cycle, I figured it was time to stop falling behind the tech curve and upgrade. Surely I had been missing something. Instead of finding a bunch of new indispensable features and conveniences, I'm afraid KDE 4.2 is still not ready for my desktop. My biggest gripe? File management. It's not so much a debate between Konqueror and Dolphin, but frankly neither are doing what I want them to do. In KDE 3, I could hover over the icon of a picture, and a pop-up would give me all sorts of good information: date, owner, filesize, image dimensions, and a little bit of EXIF data. Neither Konqueror or Dolphin do that now, although I've read t...

I've been teaching in Colorado for six years, and there's always been a troubling pattern in our state standardized math scores. As students progress from 3rd to 10th grade, the percentage that score proficient and advanced declines dramatically. Here are the percentages of students scoring proficient and advanced by grade level, averaged over all the years the test has been given (typically 2002-2008): Grade Avg. % P+A 3 69 4 69 5 61 6 55 7 44 8 43 9 34 10 29 The easiest explanation (and the one I've tended to believe) is that students' abilities are, in fact, slipping as they got older. That would be a good assumption if the test at each grade level was equally difficult. But what if the test questions were, on average (and adjusted for grade level), more difficult as students got older? Is it fair to assume a test with increasingly difficult questions would result in lower scores, even with sophisticated score scaling systems that take question difficulty into accou...

Today is my last day of a much-appreciated spring break, one that I spent working on some school work and hanging out with my nephew. I picked Huston up Wednesday night and we went skiing on Thursday at Breckenridge. Huston had never skied before, but, being a hockey player and ice skater, he picked it up quickly, making is 3rd and 4th runs without falling. (We were on Peak 7, easy intermediate terrain.) We skied a ton - everything on Peak 7, including Pioneer twice and Lincoln Meadows four times, Northstar (the toughest for Huston), Springmeier and 4 O'Clock on Peak 8, and Briar Rose on Peak 9. I think that might have been a total of 14 runs. We've spent most of the rest of our time relaxing and watching movies. The list of movies watched in total has grown almost as fast as the list of ski runs on Thursday. We started with "Anchorman" (Dorothy Mantooth is a saint!), "Warren Miller's Fifty" (in preparation for skiing), then moved on to all four R...

So Lubin calls me last night and suggests we go climb something. I'd been browsing Dave Cooper's Snow Climbs book and seen the North Couloir route on Pacific Peak so I suggested it to Lubin. He wasn't familiar with the route, but it sounded good. Our plans were set. I realized after we talked that I never really read the route description all the way through, and I hadn't checked other sources. I didn't have to read long to find out that the North Coulior is a serious climb, with 60 degree slopes, possible alpine ice, and a need for some gear we didn't have. I called Lubin back to give him an update and we decided to head to the couloir anyway. The trip there should be a spectacular hike and if we didn't like the looks of the couloir, we'd find another way to the top. We met just off of Highway 9 at 6:30 and took Lubin's car as far as we could up the road. The four-wheel section is rough but was passable in Lubin's Suburu Outback. We fin...

Somehow, I could feel this coming. In the days following Tim Russert's death a little over a week ago, I repeatedly got this feeling like George Carlin would be soon to follow. I wonder if he got the two-minute warning? I wonder if he'll get blown up? (Listen to "Death and Dying" from Carlin's 1977 album On the Road .) I can't think of any other single person in popular culture that has done more to influence my sense of humor and personal philosophies than George Carlin. It's strange, really, since I'm nothing like Carlin - I don't use profanity, have never drank or used drugs, and I generally avoid controversy. I've always liked stand-up comedy, however, and Carlin has been my favorite ever since I heard Playin' With Your Head when I was in middle school. (Big thanks to Phil Walters, who borrowed the tape from his brother so he could share it with me and others while we detasseled corn.) I understand those who think Pryor was f...

Today I got my first two mountains of the year, Mt. Sherman (14,036') and Gemini Peak (13,951'). I look at these peaks every day out my front window, so it was about time to pay them a visit. I climbed Sherman in 2000, and today's climb made it the first 14er I've summitted twice. I hadn't gotten Gemini on my last trip, which is a shame because the pair make a pretty easy double. Our times were good: I met Peter Lubin at his house at 5:30am; we were at the trailhead at 6:08 and hiking at 6:22. I hiked with trekking poles and carried an ice axe on my pack for glissades on the way down; Lubin carried skis with the hopes of skiing the big east-facing bowl between Sherman and Gemini. We climbed quickly (over 1200 vertical feet per hour, not bad at all for my first time out) and reached Sherman's summit at 8:02. It was windy on the ridge, but we managed to not get swept off our feet. After summitting Sherman we headed to Gemini to eat. Things for me got prett...

Enjoy the holiday (and, if you're like me, the snow day from school) with this little clip:

I've done a lot of things in wrestling without actually having had a competitive match since 3rd grade. (Long story short: injuries ended my high school career after 6 practices.) This year I'm helping coach the proud but few (7, curently) South Park Burros wrestlers. We're a relatively young and inexperienced team, so my lack of actual wrestling experience hasn't been worth worrying about. I just try to rely on my own observations and my experience with the myriad of head coaches with whom I've worked since high school: Rick Caldwell (currently the head coach of Waverly-Shell Rock, IA...more on them later) Leonard "Butch" Wingett (currently teaching at Clarke Middle School in Osceola, IA...coaching status unknown) Steve Price (currently an assistant coach at Johnston, IA...good to see him coaching again) Don Briggs (still teaching at the University of Northern Iowa when he's not exploring the world) Mark Manning (currently the head coa...

When I moved to Fairplay a year and a half ago, one of my major concerns about living here was the lack of broadband. The only options at the time were two I weren't willing to accept: satellite service from WildBlue and HughesNet. It's not that the service they offer is all that horrible, but the service agreements and contracts (you know, all that fine-print stuff most people don't want to read) were just plain ugly to me. So ugly, in fact, that I went with dialup, something I never thought I'd ever have to do again. Fortunately, another Fairplay resident named Jerry Wilson with the same distaste for satellite, similar broadband needs, and greater entrepreneurial spirit decided to take matters into his own hands. He bought a T1, put up a big antenna, and resold wireless broadband to people around town. The service is called Parkspeed, and as you can see from the website , it's pretty low-key and still a way for Jerry to satisfy his gaming habits. Despite som...

A couple nights ago I uploaded a fresh look for downclimb.com, the first I think I've had since January of 2005. I really wanted the front page to be a portal to my growing homes on the web, such as Panoramio , Flickr , and del.icio.us . I think I've accomplished that, although people not familiar with the logos for the various services might think I've sold out to corporate advertisers. (If you're one of those services, feel free to send me cash.) I've also grown fond of Tumblr , the host that provides my tumblog tumbledown . I really like that it catches all my RSS feeds from my other sites. If you don't want to miss any of my web activity, that is the single feed to subscribe to.

My colleague, Peter Lubin, and I got this idea of traversing Hoosier Ridge from Hoosier Pass to Boreas Pass. It looked great on the map - not too long, lots of time above timberline, and easy slopes from peak to peak. It's harder than it looks, but certainly worth the effort. Routefinding was pretty straightforward, and the whole trip can be broken into three basic parts. The first part is west-to-east from Hoosier Pass up the ridge. The ridge then turns north to Red Peak for the second leg. The third and final part is west to Boreas Pass. The first stretch of the third leg is probably the best - you cross bands of sandstone and nice wildflowers while gently losing elevation. The worst part of the climb is at the end. You have to drop down to treeline and then regain 700 feet over the last hill before Boreas Pass. If there had been an easy way around it, we certainly would have considered taking it. But no, the easy way is to go right over the top, no matter how steep it ...