The day the mountain fell down

September 16, 2022

Excluding landslides caused by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes or dam collapses, the Oso slide is the deadliest single landslide event in United States history.

See the slideshow of the rescue efforts below:

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I was contracting at the time in Western Washington state when on a particular Saturday morning, a mountain near where we were living fell down.
We had left Texas upon after working on FEMA houses after hurricane Ike and landed in Western Washington state. Upon our arrival to Washington, we were looking around for a place to lease for the period of time we were to be there.

We found a few places in Darrington, Steelhead Haven in Oso, and another place just out of Trafton up Jim Creek Road. We settled on the Jim Creek Road place because of it’s proximity to Arlington and the work I was doing.

We had enrolled our son in the elementary school in Arlington. We drove him because though the bus ran to Oso, it didn’t run beyond Trafton up Jim Creek Road.
Both I and my wife worked, and sometimes her schedule conflicted with her picking our son up from school. Since I could do pretty much what I wanted with my schedule, I opted to pick our son up from school most of the time. There were however, those times when I would be working over in Bremerton, and I would have to deal with Seattle/Tacoma traffic — there were times when I would sit for two hours during a ten mile drive.

I was sort of complaining about the traffic one day when we were all waiting for class to get out at our son’s school when Katie Ruthven offered to pick our son up along with her son (both boys were in the same class) and look after him at their house on Steelhead Drive until either me or my wife could pick him up after work. I thought that would be great and offered to pay her and her husband Shane for the effort. She didn’t want payment however and told me to call them if I wanted our son picked up.

Long story short, we never had Katie look after our son after school. We just worked it all out so our son didn’t need for them to pick him up.
I’m sure that our son would have had a real blast if he ever went out to the Ruthven place, because he was already good buddies with their son Hunter.

It was a very rainy Friday afternoon when we were standing under cover at the school waiting for the kids to be released. I remember Katie telling Wyatt (Katie’s 4 year old son) to pick up Hunters jacket that was left on the playground that day, and her wringing it out. Never really ever thought about it all until Saturday morning when there were reports of a house sitting in the middle of SR530 at Oso.

It was a brilliantly sunny Saturday morning when we learned that Steelhead Haven was totally wiped of the planet.

The mountain behind Steelhead Haven had totally collapsed.

We lost our friends on that morning. — Mudslide Claimed Three Generations of One Family

Steelhead Haven was a beautiful place and the house we might have leased there was only 4 years old — but I had to be practical with regard to work and select a location that would cut travel time down and put us closer to our son’s school.

—

The March 2014 landslide engulfed 49 homes and other structures in an unincorporated neighborhood known as “Steelhead Haven” on the south side of the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, approximately 4 miles east of Oso, Washington. It also dammed the river, causing extensive flooding upstream as well as blocking State Route 530, the main route to the town of Darrington (population 1,347), 16 miles east of Oso.

The natural rock and mineral formation (referred to by geologists as a “geological feature”) with the most recent activity in the area of Oso is known as the Hazel Landslide; the most recent landslide event was referred to in the media as “the Oso mudslide.”

Windows 11 install for TPM 1.2 machines

Alan

September 11, 2022

It seems that Microsoft is allowing Windows 11 to install on machines that may not have the required TPM 2.0.

Trusted Platform Module (TPM, also known as ISO/IEC 11889) is an international standard for a secure cryptoprocessor, a dedicated microcontroller designed to secure hardware through integrated cryptographic keys. The term can also refer to a chip conforming to the standard.

On the Microsoft website there are instructions pertaining to the modification of the registry configurations that would allow the Windows 11 installer to bypass the TPM 2.0/cpu check.

Here is the registry edit you’ll need according to Microsoft:

Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup

Name: AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU

Type: REG_DWORD

Value: 1

Microsoft doesn’t recommend that you install Windows 11 on a machine that doesn’t meet it’s strict requirements, but the installation is allowed — It’s strongly advised however that you should at least have the TPM 1.2 existing on your machine if you plan to install Windows 11 anyway.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ways-to-install-windows-11-e0edbbfb-cfc5-4011-868b-2ce77ac7c70e

Some older machines will function pretty good, while yet others may not — it all pretty much just depends on your processor.

I’ve been running Windows 11 on an HP laptop from the very beginning through Microsoft’s insider program and I haven’t had any trouble with the build.

The specs for the (very slow) HP laptop are:

Intel Core i5-4300M CPU @260 GHz
12GB RAM
64bit
1.2 TPM

This laptop is the oldest/slowest unit I’ve got and I’ll figure it to be a starting point for Windows 11.
My much faster ASUS unit has an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 w/6 cores, runs out at about 32GB RAM, and it thinks that Windows 11 is the Bees Knees.

Yellowstone National Park update for Cooke City and Gardiner

Alan

September 10, 2022

The park entrances at Gardiner, MT (North) and Cooke City/Silver Gate, MT (Northeast) are closed to visitor vehicles.
These entrances are open to approved commercial tours, bicycles, and foot traffic.

Slough Creek Access

As of September 8, visitors no longer need a Slough Creek Day-use Ticket in order to drive the section of road between Tower Junction and Slough Creek.

Improvement Project: Old Gardiner Road — View Current Photos

Current Park Road Access

Access	Accessible To	Details
North Entrance (Gardiner, MT)	Foot traffic, bicycles, commercial tours	Access for 1 mile to Rescue Creek.
North Entrance (Gardiner, MT)	Commercial tours	Access between Gardiner and Mammoth Hot Springs.
Northeast Entrance (Cooke City/Silver Gate, MT)	Foot traffic, bicycles, Commercial tours	Access for 2 miles to Warm Creek Trailhead.
East Entrance	Vehicles, foot traffic, bicycles, commercial tours, stock outfitters	Full access.
South Entrance	Vehicles, foot traffic, bicycles, commercial tours, stock outfitters	Full access.
West Entrance	Vehicles, foot traffic, bicycles, commercial tours, stock outfitters	Full access.
Tower Junction	Vehicles, foot traffic, bicycles, commercial tours, stock outfitters. No vehicle day-use ticket required as of Sept. 8.	Access from Tower Junction to Slough Creek.

Fall is definitely in the air

Alan

September 10, 2022

Upon after having the 90-100 degree days over the past weeks, it’s nice that the days after Labor Day are being true-to-form.

I scrambled to take care of a few clients that required some out-side work be done before the weather turned and I was able to make it on the Tuesday after Labor Day.
Now the temps are much lower. We’re seeing the Montana summer give way to the fall season without any (so far) sharp extremes.

What I mean by sharp extremes is that a few years ago, the weather turned so sharply that all of the green leaves on the trees froze hard. So much so that we didn’t have the gentle turning of the leaves from green to yellow/orange. The leaves froze, and fell later on as green leaves.

Logan Pass sits at 6646 feet. It is the highest elevation reachable by car in the park. (tap or click image to enlarge)

We may have one or possibly two days of the warmer 80-90 degree days, but for the most part our trend will be mid 60’s to mid 70’s for the duration of the fall season.
Logan Pass actually saw snowfall yesterday and I’m fairly certain that the going-to-the-sun road will close on schedule this year. As far as Logan Pass is concerned, it seemed to take a little longer this year to open the road due to the copious amounts of snow that needed to be cleared in the spring.

We had a rather long period of cool weather this year during the spring, so the snow stayed for a much longer period in the high country. The late melt caused many of the boat launches on Canyon Ferry lake to remain high and dry until later in the season.

Today we’re sitting at about 55 degrees and it’s 11 o’clock in the morning. Forecast 90 degrees for Sunday, but it’s going to cool off again right away after.

Though I’m not real big on getting the coolest fall pictures, I might stand somewhat of a chance to grab some with this new phone. Dumped the Android for an iPhone a while back so we’ll see how it all goes going forward.

I snapped a picture the other day of a rainbow over town and it turned out pretty good, so at least there’s some hope for more really cool pictures to come.

In home internet of things

Alan

September 10, 2022

Sometime in the very near future I’ll be building our new house.
Building or otherwise acquiring your brand new home can be an exciting thing, what with all of the latest building techniques employed throughout, coupled with some of the latest technological advances incorporated into the home — what’s not to like?

Last year a friend of mine installed a brand new air conditioner at his place. This thing had all of the bells and whistles that included an app for his phone that allowed him to either turn his new air conditioner on or off from clear across town. He could even set the temp remotely — Pretty cool huh?

Another friend of mine installed a security system at his place, and now he can answer the door remotely regardless of whether he is across town or across the state. He can see who it is and have a real-time conversation all from the comfort of his own phone.

When people talk about IoT (the internet of things), one of the first questions that pop up is, “What about privacy?”.

Most who hook the internet up to their refrigerator, dishwasher, or door bell usually aren’t even remotely concerned about privacy until something goes wrong. As far as security is concerned, IoT devices are the very least secure out of them all, second only to webcams.

If you’ve already set up wireless IoT devices in your home, the ship for concern about privacy has already sailed — you’ve missed the boat. Now, about the only thing you can do is worry about the security. I mean, the security on these devices is so poor that if breached, one can turn your refrigerator totally off while you are away, and all you’ll have left when you come home is warm beer.

“A recent survey of 2,000 UK adults, commissioned by Studio Graphene, showed there was a clear preference for simplicity. More than half (60 percent) said there is simply too much new technology, with little thought applied to whether it is really necessary.” — betanews

When it comes to building our new home, it will have all of the latest in technological advances when it comes to appliances and cooling/heating. What will be very conspicuously absent however, will be the internet of things. Though I might be able to, I still won’t allow my new appliances to play on the internet. There won’t be any of those fancy apps on my phone that will tell the house what and what not to do while I’m away. No one will be able to set my thermostat from a remote location.

Though the processes for control are currently voluntary in some areas, it wouldn’t be that much of a leap to make those same processes for control mandatory:

“Thankfully, smart thermostats have the ability to alleviate some of these power consumption woes. You see, not only are these connected devices convenient, they can be controlled by the power companies during power usage spikes. With your permission, the power company can adjust your air conditioning slightly so that blackouts and brownouts can hopefully be prevented. Sometimes you will even be compensated for participating in such a thing.” — betanews

About the only thing that will very possibly be remotely controlled, will be the new electrical service that has to be upgraded. I’ll end up having to get a digital meter for the service, and it very likely will have the sort of internet capability to allow the power company to control the service from a remote location.

By and large, innovation can be a good thing. Computer operating systems are a marvel all on their own. What muddies the water on technology however, is the ever present urge to include things no one needs. Doesn’t make much of a difference really, every operating system is chocked full of garbage that can’t be deleted because someone, somewhere, pretends to have your best interests at heart. We have phones these days that will track you regardless of whether you’ve turned tracking off or not. Vehicles that can be controlled remotely on a whim. Refrigerators that won’t know you from Adams Off Ox and will do whatever they’re told by anyone, anywhere.

Most people would just love to have a smart home, what with all of the goodies, gadgets, and gizmos — to go right along with their smart car, smart phone, smart water, and smart bread.

I, on the other hand, would prefer that intelligence be the order of the day, in that by not allowing my new home to play on the internet, it could very well end up being the most intelligent home on the block.