My UNCG colleague, Jorge, called me last week to see if I’d be interested in a trout fishing trip. He wanted to go to one of his favorite places in Ashe County, Helton Creek. This is one of NC’s delayed harvest streems (stocked from October through the spring, and catch & release until the first of June). I’d never been there before so I said sure! I set the clock for 4:45 to leave Chapel Hill at 5AM, in order to meet Jorge at his house in Winston-Salem at 6:30. I waved (virtually) to other UNCG colleagues as I rolled through Greensboro just before 6AM…

The weather forecast was for thunderstorms, but we were hoping for the best as we rolled west. Stopped in Wilkesboro to grab a biscuit (told the cashiers we weren’t heading to Merlefest ) and back on the road. As we went further north and west (we were heading near the corner of NC/Tenn/VA) we ran out from under the heavy clouds, and things looked promising. However, the weather was moving from the southwest to northeast, so the respite was short-lived. We got to Helton Creek and the water was a bit stained, but visibility was at least a couple of feet. We suited up and moved to the stream. After a few minutes, rain and thunder rolled in, so we retreated to the picnic shelter behind the church where we parked. When the storm passed, we went back to the stream. We worked things hard with a variety of nymphs, but the water was moving fast and the runs where Jorge liked to fish were not working for us. Ominously, we were seeing mud stain the stream from runoff from a nearby farm. We decided to move back downstream just a bit where there was a big, deep pool. I decided to try a big heavy fly, so I found a Bitch Creek in my box and tied that on. Bam! Caught a nice brook trout…caught another. Called to Jorge to let him know what was working. He tried the big pool, and I moved downstream from a small bridge. I picked up another fish. By now, the water was getting murkier. I moved back to the big pool and tried a number of things, and had a couple more strikes but didn’t connect. The rain picked back up, and before long the water was the color of coffee with cream. Hmmm…not good. Here’s a shot of Jorge casting into the pool…

We hung out a while, and ate lunch. More rain. Darker water, now with floating debris Oh well, Jorge wanted to stop at a nearby plant nursery and buy some things to take both home and to his cabin near Boone. We picked up some plants from Foggy Mountain nursery, and then headed back home. Stopped at Jorge’s cabin, propped up our feet and enjoyed the afternoon for a while, telling fishing stories ;-).

It was time to head back to the piedmont, so we loaded up and drove back. A great trip. The fishing was excellent, even if the catching was a bit mediocre…but, that’s the way it goes sometimes. Already looking forward to meeting up with Jorge for another trip!

Morgan Creek winds around our southern Orange County subdivision on its way to the Cape Fear River. It’s a tiny creek, and this time of year, a deep pool doesn’t wet my knees and it’s rarely more than 15 feet wide. In places you can literally jump across. In the summer, it dries up to a trickle in good years, and in drought years, goes completely dry. Somehow, however, fish manage to survive and spread throughout the creek. In years past, I’ve actually stocked a few hybrid sunfish, but I’ve not found that this changes the long-term population.

Today, I grabbed my most delicate rod (a Sage TXL 00-weight) stuffed a few things in my pocket and hopped on the bike. In less than 5 minutes, I stepped into the water, very cool as it splashed on my legs. There were fish in the first good pool, but the sun was high on the water and the fish could see me and that was the end of that. I wandered along the trail, down the creek, and soon caught three small sunnies in a long, flat run that’s always a good one. Even a little fish will bend the 00-weight . Near the head of the run, it’s almost knee deep, but tails out to less than a foot deep below that. The water is too cool for dries, so I used a Syl’s Nymph (peacock herl, wrapped in copper, with partridge hackle).

It’s not “big game” but it’s always fun to fish the back yard…

Nice shad:

Mid to late March is the time. This year, it’s been so warm, I was concerned that I might be a week late. However, it all worked out in the end! I picked up Sam at his house just after 8AM on Friday 3/23, and we pointed my truck toward Weldon, with our two pontoon boats in the back. Arrived at the river just after 10, including a stop for gas and provisions. We rigged up our boats and rowed across the river to try to find a spot in the eddy below the big rapid. The river was low and clear, running about 3500cfs. Several boats had the good spots, so we beached on the rocks and started casting. It was very slow, and by lunch, we’d caught one shad and one little white perch. Action for our fellow fishermen was fairly slow as well, though one boat, anchored in the seam near the main flow was doing well. It’s a combination of current and angle of presentation of the fly, depth, and color. They had the mojo and were steadily, though not continually, landing fish. We tried several places on the rocks, but couldn’t find the solution. I went over the rocks to check out the top of Little River, and tried for about 10 minutes with nary a bite. I did have my favorite hot pink fly tied on, and that would prove to be a key.

After lunch (it’s better to be fishing that at work, even if not catching fish), Sam went back to the rock island at the in Little River, and I walked along the bank on the island (on the far side from the boat ramp). When I saw him about 1PM, he said he’d caught a couple and missed several using an orange fly and a very fast retrieve. Let it sink (we were using intermediate sink tips) for a few seconds, and retrieve as fast as you can, he said. He said the mojo was coming back. While he tried from the rocks on the main branch of the river, I went back to Little River and tried Sam’s suggestions. Caught a shad on the first cast. Orange. Sink. Fast. Cool! By the time Sam got back, I’d landed 5 shad and missed several more. We both stood on the rock and started pulling ‘em in.

In the next two and a half hours, we caught shad until our arms were tired. Each of us easily landed 40 fish or so, and several times, we both had fish on at the same time. Nice fish, big and strong, putting a great bend in the rods. About 3:45, we decided that we better row back across the main river while we still could move our arms . Loaded up and made the drive back home in outstanding spirits.

A most excellent excursion!

I decided to price some RAM, and found that I could get 8GB (8.0GB PC3-10600 1333MHZ SO Kit) from Other World Computing for $47 including shipping. What’s not to like?! This iMac has 4 slots, so I just dropped in the two SODIMM’s, and voila, 12GB of RAM. Runs like a champ. Apps load and switch nearly instantly. As an old mainframe systems guy, I should have known it was memory-starved and not been surprised, but I was…reminds me of the time…

Of course, I used to code in 360/370 Assembler, and you could address 4KB (that’s 4096 bytes to you young whippersnappers) from one base register….

The iTunes U app uses a bookshelf metaphor like iBooks. You can put courses or collections in your library, but I’m not really sure about the differentiation as there seems to be some overlap. However, the point is more about the tool, running on an iDevice, as a portal to a wealth of free material presented in a convenient format. This is likely to be huge in several niches…continuing adult education, K12 home schooling, tutoring/remedial learning in K12 and at the college level. It’s a continuing part of the evolution of academic pedagogy. Self-directed non-degree-seeking (for now), but surely an interesting development on the eLearning scene, and more bites at the heels of brick & mortar education, especially when combined with Apple’s new textbook publishing tool.

Time to get back to the next lecture on iOS development

One thing that really drove home the data/display (view) design was work that Jeff and I did on setting up a calendar. He created a data type for events and a calendar view last summer, but it broke after an upgrade this fall. I found a calendar module I liked better (Fullcalendar) and set that up. I had it query the old event data type, and it worked like a champ. Also, used the ability to bring in a Google Calendar (the US Holidays calendar) so I didn’t have to set those up.

Drupal has all the features you’d expect. Granular permissions for managing content and the ability to extend the model. Distributed content creation. Effective indexing. Easy to patch/update. Diversity of themes to alter the appearance of a site, w/o changing the underlying content. It’s got a huge and dynamic developer community. I don’t know if I’ll ever do any coding on a module, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to.

I’m just scratching the surface in terms of what Drupal can do, but am very pleased with the look and feel and ability to present distributedly-generated content that this tool affords. If you are looking for a platform for a webstite, take a long look at Drupal.

I LDR’d some but eventually got this really nice one to the net…

It’s fun to be able to catch a trout within a 15 minute drive of home!

We assembled at the EI bridge at 4:30.

This was a small flotilla, as I found out at the Captain’s Breakfast on Friday…only about 15 boats, and the Chamber of Commerce was enthusiastic for any and all participants. We followed the Coast Guard as they headed west on the ICW towards Swansboro, as dusk came on.

We soon realized that we’d taken the “newbie” position, next to the “swan” which had a massive array of lights on a swan frame, charged by a generator, and a sound system blasting Elvis and “Blue Christmas.” Next year, we’ll lag behind a few positions . It was really a great time. There were many people on the docks as we passed through Cedar Point, and huge numbers on the bridges, docks and shore in downtown Swansboro. We made three turns through the darkened harbor before heading back to Island Harbor.

What great fun…until we got back to the marina and my Yukon wouldn’t start . We used Susan’s RAV to pull the boat out and back to the house. The Yukon visited the Swansboro Chevy dealer via a tow truck. We pick it up tomorrow, the diagnosis being a failure of the “neutral safety switch.” Oh well!

The Roku is another small black box, very similar to the Apple TV, but a little taller and narrower and lighter. It does have a little tab on it that lets you know it’s a Roku, as does the remote. This is really a very handy feature on a remote, since it’s often confusing to look at pile of remotes and sort them out . The Roku is a nice box, all kidding aside. It does exactly what it says it does, provide Netflix, Amazon, Hulu+ and many other video sources. I use Pandora, and it logged on just fine to my account. I like the weather service apps on the Roku. I’m hoping that Apple will open up app development on the Apple TV (since it runs iOS) but I’m not holding my breath. The thing, though, about the Roku, is that while it works well and the video quality is excellent, the user interface is just plain ugly. It looks like it was designed by 1st year CS student. Contrast that with the elegant interface of the Apple TV. Oh well…

What I’d really like is the flexibility of the Roku, with Apple’s user interface!