I mentioned my favorite hike awhile back. However the hike I linked to isn't actually mentioned (in its entirety) at the link I gave. The reason? Because, as far as I can tell, it is not mentioned at any of the hiking sites that I know about. I call it the Temescal / Will Rogers Hike. It is around 13 miles with a total elevation of about 1100 feet (most of that in the first 2 miles).
The basic path is to start from Temescal Gateway Park heading north. This is the hardest climb you will have during the hike. You get some very nice views of Santa Monica.
Eventually you will come to a fork. You can either go down to the waterfall or you can go up toward Skull Rock. Go to Skull Rock. After you pass Skull Rock you'll walk above a housing development and later on some power lines.
Eventually you will come to a dirt road and you will see this post.
Continue north along the dirt road.
You will eventually see the following sign. It will be facing the opposite way that you are walking and, at times, may be easy to miss.
Eventually you will come to a sign that says Backbone Trail at a 'T' in the road. Head east. There are some very good views of Century City and, later on, the valley.
This is the longest portion of the hike. After around 6-7 miles you will reach Will Rogers State Historic Park. Head toward the polo ground and then head west toward the bathrooms (and drinking fountains!). To the west of the bathrooms the trail continues.
At a point around 1-1.5 miles before completion of the hike you will come to a fork. You can either go up onto a hill or stay down below. Go up onto the hill. The other way is an unmaintained path. I don't know where it goes, but I did mistakenly hike on it for a few hours the first time I took this hike. Big mistake.
PLAYED A BIT WITH Picasa 3 and its companion PicasaWeb today. I was a bit disappointed, but overall it was not a complete loss.
Why was I disappointed? The PicasaWeb integration seems a bit flimsy and it appears to be mostly one way (or at least the docs say so; but there is the Refresh Online Status button). Also, in an attempt to see just how smart Picasa is I did the following: 1) using Picasa I created an on-line album containing a number of pictures, 2) deleted my local copy of the album, 3) attempted to import the album from PicasaWeb to Picasa. I had hoped that Picasa would be smart enough to realize that the photos I was downloading were already in my collection, but, no, it needlessly downloaded every photo and I then had two copies of each of those photos. Oh well.
I am also not crazy about the left hand side bar for Picasa. It shows folders and albums (and probably other things) but there appears to be no way to make it show the albums first. Sometimes they show up at the top of the list and sometimes they are at the end. I can't figure out why this is, but I know that I always want my albums to be first and the folders to come second.
Picasa is still great at simple image manipulation and at categorizing the photos. I hope that someday the web integration is much better than it is now.
Devel::CheckLib: check for the existence of C libraries and their headers. I could have used this at my previous job.