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So often when I go up to Snowbowl, the ski mountain just outside Missoula I see the valley floor socked in. It seems that one would only have to hike the M to get above the fog, and into what usually is blue sky and a sunny day. Most of the people in town (including me when I'm there) think that it's a cloudy, foggy day, but we don't realize that a sunny day awaits us 100 feet above our heads. Curious what makes an inversion happen? Learn why here. I've gathered a few of my favorite photos of the Missoula Inversion here, I hope you enjoy them:

My buddy and I had an email back and forth that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the newly released iPad.

On Jan 27, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Flavio Loetscher wrote:

Apple once again shows the well elaborated line between user and hardware. A beauty of an iPad, I gotta say. It must be super awesome to read books on that device, share videos & pics, or even read the NewYorkTimes and use the apps. Starting with 499$ this is a great deal but in my opinion a bit unnecessary for iPhone users... having an iPhone is awesome, linking to your mac is even better - iPad truly is a new category of devices... it's pretty much luxury to watch videos on iPad when you could watch them on your macbook. And to type longer messages, I am not really optimistic with the iPad. Furthermore the apps will need to be updated in order to make them look good on the iPad.
I am really really looking forward to holding one of those babies in my hands. I kinda see a easy-going sunday in front of me - purchasing a book from the ibookstore, checking out newspapers and watching videos with it, nothing more. Or a great tool for conferences or in the kitchen for recipes... I am still very very happy with my Macbook pro and iphone which perfectly fit together. I see iPad as an additional tool for luxury. No money right now but if I bought one it would just be for fun :)

Recently, I noticed that Glacier National Park had started putting out updates on Twitter. I love that park, live a few hours south of it in Missoula, and have been planning on going up there to snowshoe. So, naturally I became excited that there was a point of contact there that I could ask advice. I shot out a couple tweets asking where we could go and received no answer, much to my dissapointment. So I posted out this tweet:

Am disappointed that the updates coming from Glacier Park (@glaciernps) don't seem to have a human listening on the other end :(

About an hour after that, this message came in through my site's contact form:

David Restivo sent a message using the contact form at http://evanlovely.com/contact.

Hi, Evan.

I saw your Tweet regarding our participation in communication on Twitter. I didn't want you to think that nobody was listening in on the other end. I had seen your posts and questions regarding snowshoe and ski recommendations, so we tweeted where people could find that informaiton on our Web site. At this point, the park has decided to use Twitter as a one-way communicaiton tool only. Our social networking media page on our Web site better explains how we use each tool. http://www.nps.gov/glac/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm

I'm really starting to like geolocation and it's many uses. Recently I've been checking out the different things that my iPhone can do with it's GPS. Yesterday, I let iTrailMap 3D run while I boarded around Montana Snowbowl. It's really interesting to see where we went through the trees and where we still had to yet to hit. At one point I even took it out to see where I went last time, so I could pick the next line better. It's great cause it has a "you are here marker". Two improvements I could see would be better map resolution and being able to have a you are here dot on the trail map section. A little expensive at $5, but still really cool.

So I discovered a disappointing fact about Flickr just now: if you are using the free account, you only have access to your 200 recent photos. The user's photostream, the recent photo feed for Flickr users, only goes back 200 photos. That's not too bad, but as soon as photos get past that 200 recent photos mark, they get taken out of every Set (basically an album) and even though it seems they retain there tags, you can no longer use your Tag Cloud found on your page to get to these photos. They're basically marooned. The only redeeming fact I could find is that if you have the direct URL to the photo, then you can still access it. However, the fact remains that all associations from the user's page to the photo are cut. There is no way that I could find that you can go to a user page, then find a photo that's older than 200 photos. I find this frustrating and disappointing. I've even had a Flickr Pro account for a year, uploaded many photos to it, then decided to not renew my Pro account with them. Afterwards, it was the same thing, all my photos were cut off from me, I have no idea how to get access to them. So basically Flickr wants you to have a Pro account for life: it's the only way I can see that a long term relationship can happen between this service and it's users.