[today's blog post is by two Scouts, or maybe three, working on their merit badge for Computers at Camp Spencer, BCMSR. The requirement is to write a blog, with publishing optional, but since I have the right gear they can have at it]
food at camp is not the best but it is good enough. camp food is probably cheap because they wouldn't spend that much money on us but its still good.
On Monday we had waffles and bacon for breakfast. For lunch we had ham and cheese with tomato soup. At dinner we had Beefaroni with meatballs, green beans and garlic bread.
On Tuesday we had pancakes for breakfast with bacon as a side. for lunch we had a BBQ pork sandwich with salad. At dinner we had corn, turkey, mash potatoes and salad.
PBJ
The P B & J tasted weird at first but we go use to it and they taste great now.
They haven't run out of bread, peanut butter, and jelly yet. I like their choice of jelly, it's my favorite.
Pizza - party
Tuesday at camp we had a pizza party with Troop 117. The pizza was good while we played cards for camp night.
We also had bug juice, water, and frute punch.
Trading Post
At the Trading Post they have tons of snacks. It is amazing. They have ice cream, soda, candy and beef jerkey.
Salad bar
Mr. Kyle is our wonderful dining pavilion steward. One of his duties is to police the salad bar. The salad bar had condiments that you could also put on your sandwich or other food. It was served at lunch and dinner.
The dressings include an excellent ranch. For a couple days, there was ham and turkey.
Bug juice
The bug juice was only served at lunch and dinner. The flavors included fruit punch and orange. It was mixed strongly and had good flavor. It was always cold too.
Some Scouts thought they saw bugs in the bug juice, but most did not notice. Scouts should drink more water than bug juice and much less soda.
The bug juice is awesome (Mr. Kyle made it) and there was hardly ever a line, except when there was a line
Friday
Today for breakfast we had English Muffins, eggs, hash browns, and bacon. Some said the hash browns were dry and the English Muffins tasted like cardboard, while others said it was delicious.
There might be a guest blog post for day three - it depends on how quickly the Scouts taking Computers merit badge can get their tasks done.
Adding pictures is a pain, because the iPad blanks out image upload on the google blogger site. In order to embed a picture, I have had to resort to transferring images using the PC or Droid phone, figuring out the URL, and adding that via HTML to the content. Not a good lesson to show Scouts trying to learn computer basics. One Scout in the class saw the iPad and said "but it doesn't handle Flash". Religion choices already made at such a young age!
Adding pictures is a pain, because the iPad blanks out image upload on the google blogger site. In order to embed a picture, I have had to resort to transferring images using the PC or Droid phone, figuring out the URL, and adding that via HTML to the content. Not a good lesson to show Scouts trying to learn computer basics. One Scout in the class saw the iPad and said "but it doesn't handle Flash". Religion choices already made at such a young age!
Wednesday night we went to Scout Vesper service, where camp chaplain Scott Gray told the story of "Unfortunate Tao", a tale of an empirical succession in ancient China. Scouts are also collecting for the World Freedom Fund, which is supposed to help improve Scouting opportunities in other countries.
The first two photos below are in Panoramio, taken at a couple sites in Camp Spencer. I shot them with the Nikon cool-pix camera, then uploaded them through the PC to the web. Still trying to figure out how to move images from the iPad to the internet, and assuming the I in iPad stands for me-me-me, not the Interwebs.
The next seven pictures are from different scenes around camp, not in any particular order. One and seven are from trail work. Two and three are from computers and cooking merit badges (should be obvious which is which ). Picture four is a Staff song/skit, something about Junior Bird Men, with appropriate headgear.
Photo five is the Scoutmaster coffee station, and picture six is Zachary picking at some vegetation outside Hansen Lodge, where Troop 117 is staying.
Sunday arrival, followed by health re-checks, and swimming tests.
Typing this at the Scouting Academy, formerly known as the First Year Camper program at Camp Spencer, Broad Creek Memorial Scout Reservation. Leaving for camp Sunday morning was the usual confusion with getting last minute health data, checking phone numbers, and, reminiscent of sandlot baseball team picking, deciding who rides in which car. I should have had a bit more coffee for the ride, as I was beat when we reached Camp Spencer.
Check-in started at 1 pm, and we made it to camp a half hour ahead of that. With staff still shaking down the process, the typical pinball bouncing around occurred before the official time approached. I sidled up next to the registration desk at a few minutes before 1 pm, and was able to get our troop through staff host assignment quickly. The goal of starting medical checks at 1:30 seemed optimistic, given how slowly the site inspection and tent assignment process usually goes. But we made it to the dining hall and through swim checks with little hassle.
Using the newly won iPad and the now venerable Droid 2 as the mobile hot spot while in the woods has presented some new challenges and learning opportunities or, more simply, hassles. The biggest pain has been trying to figure out how to get digital images from either the iPad or a digital camera and then put the image tags in this blog. Blogspot itself has been a little flaky, though how much of that is beginners non-luck and how much actual bugginess I am unsure. Sites like flickr and picasa have each put roadblocks in front of the methods I have used for years to embed images. I resorted to sticking the memory card in the phone, rebooting in the process and other tricks like emailing myself picture linkPs.
(originally published January 16, 2011; retrofitted April 20, 2022 to fix bad links + images)
I've switched from researching/reenacting the Baltimore Historic Trails (though that documentation needs work) to walking the Defenders Trail along the North Point peninsula. There's a great, but somewhat dated and fuzzy, guidebook authored by Buzz Chriest that I'm using to find my way. My hike on January 15, 2011 was more physical exercise than historical research, as I left the book in the car, on purpose, and simply walked along North Point Boulevard. I spotted two of the historic markers along my route.
I began at Saint Monica Drive, parking my car near the entrance to the community of row houses to the west. It's probably called Battle Grove, although redevelopers may have cuter names by now. I wanted to view the site of the defunct North Point drive-in movie theater, which contains only transient vestiges of motion picture audience participation. The location of the screen has concrete footers, presumably cubic yards of the stuff, and rusty sawed-off bolts where the framework was anchored.
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A modern-day construction entrance, complete with gravel intended to prevent soil from leaving the site, stands as a warning that these bones of the 1950s/1960s drive-in movie popular culture icon will soon be taken away for burial or perhaps reuse as road fill.
Heading generally south on North Point Boulevard, I soon reached Wise Avenue, passing the intersection with old North Point Road along the way. The major landmark at Wise Avenue, for as long as I can remember, is Pop's Tavern.
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Between Wise Avenue and the Beltway interchange are many industrial buildings, some off-shoots of the now-shrunken Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point, and other major and minor chemical, maintenance or construction facilities, with a smattering of restaurants and bars.
After walking under the railroad and Beltway bridges, I jogged (meaning shifted, not running) over Bethlehem Boulevard to North Point Road, and the route to Fort Howard. Before the highway build up, North Point Road probably hugged closer to the waters edge, but this has been erased by time.
The Edgemere neighborhood on both sides of North Point has streets named for characters of the War of 1812, including Wells, McComas, Armistead and Ross.
See myedgemere.com [2022: dead link redacted] for more information on the history of these names.
The Aquilla Randall monument is northeast of where I started my hike, so I need to visit that on a subsequent stage.
In front of the Sparrows Point Middle/High School buildings is a historic marker of the Battle of North Point. Of course, it's documented in the "Database of Historic Markers" but here's another view:
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It's another 3 miles or so to Fort Howard, the southern tip of the peninsula, but as the winter day was short, I turned around when I reached Lodge Forest Road. On the way, I spotted this excellent yard art work:
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At first I thought this was a neighborhood snowball stand or something, but I'm not really certain. Whoever created it has flair and technique.
On the way back to my car I took shots of the historic marker on the west side of North Point Boulevard that I had spotted on my way south.
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Besides being nearly embedded in the industrial area fence, it has a curious "overwrite" of the General's first name, on both sides, as if he had been misnamed on the first try and then renamed afterward.
Recent historic photo (1980s?) of the marker, showing the underling first name.
I have at least two more areas to walk - the remaining trail past Lodge Forest Road all the way into Fort Howard, and the surrounding areas near where I parked, including old North Point Road, and these locations:
The Order of the Arrow membership database system is called LodgeMaster, also known as "OALM" once you've said "Order of the Arrow Lodge Master" too many times. I tried out the client / server set up for practice. It works, but there are things to be aware of. Below are many screen shots; I'll talk about them in this beginning text.
Let's see, over 15 images of 50KB each or so, that's 750KB. Should not take too long to download...
Image (1) show what the server screen looks like, once you've switched on the feature. I am not showing the setup screen, but there is a key that is generated which each client will need to enter to connect.
Image (2) shows what a client looks like, after connecting. While the client machine will still have a database running, user screens will be connected to the database on the remote server.
Since clients will use one central database, rather than the distributed databases, I would make sure no client machines enter data except in the server/client connection during an event. Otherwise, no new or changed records on the client machine will be visible to anyone else until after all have synchronized later.
Images (3) and (4) show the error messages if a client machine does not have the server's IP address and current key (which changes on each open and close of the server).
So what about synchronization? Neither the server nor the clients can synchronize to the central database (in the cloud) while either are running remotely. See image (5). Because "all the eggs are in one basket", I would recommend trying take check points during the event, such as late night, early morning, or maybe mid-day. All clients need to disconnect, the remote server needs to be switched to normal mode, then synchronization started. That way, all is not lost should that machine crash, especially since the clients databases have no records of any entries during their remote access time.
Image (6) shows what happens when the server goes back to normal mode.
Most of the remainder of the images were recorded during test scenarios where I shut down either the internet connection, the server, or crashed the client process to see how the client/server behaves. Unfortunately, while one message claims "returning to logon screen" I was never able to re-connect a client process once the linkage dropped.
Stopping the client SQLServer process did nothing to restore a live connection; the MSACCESS process apparently manages the menu screens. That makes sense once you realize the client connects to the SQLServer database on the remote machine.
If the remote server is stopped and started again, a new key is generated, meaning each client will need to start up again with that key.
Some of the error messages are not connection-related, but due to bugs in OALM or Microsoft software. "Invalid object names" seem to be due to broken records inside the database. The "Microsoft Office Access has encountered an error" could be due to a bad call, or just general bugginess. Business as usual in the software world.
Despite these test results, I didn't lose any data or need to reboot either system. Given this will be used in a field situation, with lines of people sometimes waiting for check-in, it's important to practice under adverse conditions to anticipate and avoid problems. Motto of the Scouts, right?
The troop camped at Broad Creek this weekend, where lows on Saturday morning were around 26 degrees F. To get the cheerfulness going, we had a small wood fire, in a commercially available fire pan. We didn't cook in the big pan; we had propane-fired camp stoves to boil water.
The breakfast was "eggs-in-a-bag", with whatever ingredients we had, tossed into a plastic bag, and then boiled until appropriately consistent. I had brought my wood-burning backpack stove, so I took a few charcoals from the troop fire and boiled my own cooking/cleaning water.
Yum! Hot breakfast, Leave No Trace way -- with no cleanup, plus a built-in hand warmer.
This past weekend, I took a Leave No Trace "Trainer" course, offered by the Baltimore Area Council, Boy Scouts of America. In some ways, it was "just another weekend in the woods." In other ways, it was more an eye opener than many camping and/or training events.
I'll summarize only a few of the lessons imparted/shared this weekend, using the 7 principles of LNT, more or less, as headlines.
(1) Plan Ahead + Prepare
We as students had prep work to do. Some of us realized that earlier than others; I read the email in detail a few days ahead and had time to print up lesson papers, hunt down drawing utensils (crayons), and think through the teaching process. There were more students than I expected (like, twice as many), so I had them use the buddy system. I also printed on two-sided sheets, which I guess I didn't explain. The wrap up wasn't sensational, though I think with the hands-on activity the class was more engaged and interested than if I had lectured for 10-15 minutes.
Below is a shot of Tom Willis, the main instructor, handing over the group to Tony and Al for their segment. As you can tell by the projection screen, hanging materials, course paperwork, DVD, candy, and etc. etc. that you can't see (food, training books, props, flotsam, jetsam, stoves, fuel, more food, more papers) Tom and the other instructors planned a lot more than we did.
(2) Travel + Camp On Durable Surfaces
As mentioned above, the second part (camping) was my topic. We camped in 2 areas - front country and back country, though they were literally separated by mere footsteps. Below is a shot as we set tents up in the "pristine" area.
If you observe closely, this is typical Eastern seaboard camping zone, with somewhat mature second growth trees, and practically no undergrowth, young trees or loose material other than leaves. 60 years of Scout camping has thinned out the vegetation and trampled the soil. More later...
The phrase Tom used for the active compaction process was "sacrificial sites", those areas closest to the roads and parking lots to attract the majority of visitors. Large parts of Broad Creek are closed to camping, off-limits for fires, and only accessible after serious hiking. But the most public areas are the most impacted.
(3) Dispose of Waste Properly
We had several different views of waste, including minimization, best practices for disposal, and reviews of animal behavior impacts. This shot demonstrates a lower impact clean-up process than the traditional 3 tub method (wash, rinse, sanitize). It's more like a 1-and-a-half tub method, as only 1 tub gets dirty water in it. The one on the right is supposed to be hot (nearly boiling) water, and is used as a source for the rinse, done by pouring our of the small cup. Don Martin set this up for us (I think), and he had to instruct some of us more thoroughly than others not to dip dirty dishes in the rinse. We're so used to the "dip, dip, dip" process that this takes a little thinking.
Cutting down on the dirty water (also by not dipping plates with food particles still on them) reduces the generated waste and thus the impact of broadcasting that gray water over the ground when the cleaning is done. Or is it ever?
(4) Leave What You Find
This one is hard to illustrate, but there's a simulated artifact (cubical cardboard box) circulating through the class, picking up graffiti on the way. Chris, the segment instructor, took a "before" photo so we could appreciate how the relic was degraded by overuse. Very effective.
Also in this category was a discussion on non-native, or invasive species, led by Mike Huneke, a Forest Service professional and Baltimore Area Council Conservation Committee member. He's holding a tuft of "Japanese Stilt Grass" which I had seen but not recognized as invasive. A couple links related to this species:
We walked on the road for most of this hike, but did go through a campsite to assess its impact.
(5) Minimize campfire impacts
Fire damage - see below.
(6) Respect Wildlife
To the right of the picture below, with the bright reflective strips flashing back the camera strobe, is one type of bear bag (cylinder in this case). Again, hard to illustrate in a photo, plus I missed shooting a video of the rope throw attempts over the rafters.
Very sharp eyes will note the official Leave No Trace stainless steel water bottle. I have one just like it, but that one is not mine. I carried the old, Nalgene, deprecated plastic bad material, with all of the seven principles rubbed off. And my old school Sierra cup, plus my newish spork, with the broken-off caribiner.
(7) Be Considerate of Other Visitors
It might be tricky to spot in this small image, but through the right side of our pavilion you can just see the next pavilion. We're so close that we might have been able to hear our respective snoring, if ours wasn't overpowering loud. The neighboring group had a largish campfire, brought plenty of vehicles right up to their tent sites (road or no road), yet were otherwise well-behaved. We probably should have asked them what they thought about our group.
Campfire impacts: Images From Space
I brought a clipped image of the Susquehanna site to the LNT course, showing it to my fellow students when we talked about campfire impacts. Of the many fire rings at Broad Creek, that one probably shows up the clearest from satellite photos as it is in a large open grassy area, while others may be closer to trees that diminish their contrast. As you look at the images below, visualize the tendency of a large circle to motivate Scouts to build large fires, sitting farther away from each other, and creating more and more ash.
Service projects to reduce the size of the fire rings, cutting down on multiple rings in the same camp site (note the 3 or 4 visible in the Camp Spencer view), and shrink the amount of wood consumed are noble goals. Will Scouts respond? Perhaps more likely if they see these are discernible from miles away, in space!
But don't forget the food! We used several LNT methods for food preparation, including camp stoves, pan fires for minimal impact, and as few pots as possible. The menus were awesome, the portions satisfying, and we still squeezed in a Saturday night cracker barrel with actual crackers. Not sure about the barrels, unless the bear vaults qualify.
