We made a trip to

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We made a trip to Death Valley yesterday, and I took some digital pictures. I'm happy to report that we all made it out okay, and that even in March, it was already on the warmish side there. This is a flower on a cactus:

This is a crazy old timer who looks after the Rhyolite ghost town. Behind him is a house built entirely out of bottles and mud, back around 1906 or so. Rhyolite used to have thousands of residents, with three different rail lines connecting to the town. Now, it only has him:

This is a part of Death Valley known as the "Artist's Palette" due to the number of different minerals near the surface, giving it so many colors:

This is Badwater, in Death Valley. They were re-doing the whole parking lot area, and there was really no place to stop, as the whole road there is under construction, but the yellow arrow in the picture is pointing at a sign marking sea level, so you can see we were well below it:

It's easy to forget how

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It's easy to forget how the "other half" lives. You know, the people without broadband? I've been on this 26,400 baud connection for about 24 hours now, and it sucks. Things I do in seconds now take hours, and some are just about impossible. For instance, I put up a couple of 9MB TIF files on my web site before I left, but the person who is supposed to retrieve them can't, and asked me to just convert them to JPG and e-mail them. No problem, except that it'll take me 3 hours to download the files so I can convert them. Fortunately, a friend back at UNI is doing it for me, where it takes merely seconds, rather than hours...