Ciara and I took our first hiking trip in our new car and were both pretty impressed with what you can find in Pennsylvania. After being stuck in Philadelphia for so long, we didn’t think we would be able to find any good places to go hiking but a 2 hour drive to the north proved us wrong.

We hiked the Painter Creek Loop which is 12 miles east of Wilkes-Barre in the Lackawanna State Forest. It’s a 15.6km (9.7 mi) loop that covers a wide range of ecosystems without too much in the way of elevation gain.

We got on the trail at about 3:30 after getting lost trying to find the REI in Conshohocken. Luckily we started on the very tail end of the hottest part of the day (the car’s external thermometer said 93 degrees at the trail head) and it got progressively cooler throughout the afternoon. By the time we finished at around 7:45 it had cooled off considerably.

The trailhead was kind of hard to find, but once we found it, the trail itself was very pleasant and VERY well marked. The loop is part of the Pinchot Trail system, so there are a lot of different ways to go but we just followed our guidebook and got to see most of the highlights. We went through some grassy areas, some deep forest, and saw some pretty wildflowers. The only wildlife we saw were some butterflies and birds which we’d accidentally scare off of the trail. The trail was much rockier than I was used to and we found ourselves scrambling through a lot of small rock patches.

The one thing I was really scared about was being swarmed with people. A couple weeks ago we tried hiking a part of the Appalachian Trail and saw tons and tons of people. On this trip we saw 4 people (2 groups) and that was it. It may have had something to do with the time of day but there weren’t that many cars in the parking lot either.

We both had a lot of fun on the hike and have renewed faith that we can find some hikes that remind of the scenery at home when we’re on them. There were some places on the trail that could have passed for hikes in Washington and Colorado with no problems. Props to Pennsylvania.

Trail: Painter Creek Loop
Location: Lackawanna State Forest
Distance: 9.7 miles
Our Time: 4 hours and 15 minutes (2 1/3 miles per hour)
See The Trip Photos on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalbackcountry/tags/painterloop/

I’ve been using Eclipse for a couple of months, but I have been hesitant to upgrade to the newest versions. This was partly because I know just enough to be dangerous and I didn?t want to mess with anything, but also because I didn’t have any good way to save my plug-in preferences or workspace information.

I saw that 3.1 RC3 came out a few days ago and decided that it was time to bite the bullet and actually upgrade. Lucky for me, there are some smart people out there.

With the help of this post by R.J. Lorimer, I have Eclipse set up so that I can run multiple instances of Eclipse and have my plug-ins and workspaces run independently of any one instance. Now, when I upgrade my plug-ins they will upgrade for all of my Eclipse installations and I can install the newest build without any real interruption in my workflow.

Seriously, if you aren’t using Eclipse, you need to be.

Paul Festa, of CNET’s News.com wrote an article titled Microsoft and Adobe to square off? which I read Monday but didn’t get a chance to comment on.

I think Macromedia is a powerful, driven company and while at first, I had some doubts about the merger with Adobe, I’ve come around and decided that within Adobe’s power in the enterprise and Macromedia’s software vision for the future, there lies a fruitful union. However, when two companies with great ideas and a competitive vision for the future of development combine, people are going to stand up and take notice. When those people are the ones who work in Redmond however, that’s not always a good thing.

I consider myself a student of the internet and a student of the history of computing. I know how ruthless a competitor Microsoft can be (legally or not). They see things that other companies just don’t see and they know how to efficiently go after their competitors. They helped elbow IBM out of the desktop space, they permanently altered the web by cutting off Netscape with Internet Explorer and they made Real Networks almost irrelevant with Windows Media Player.

Microsoft does not mess around, when they want something, they go for the jugular. And in this case, I think it’s absolutely in their best interest to do so. Macromedia has become the market for Rich Internet Applications. The merger with Adobe will bring that market to a wider audience and help shape the vision for many companies.

Rich Internet Applications will be the future of the internet. If pursued correctly they will take over the desktop space 10-15 years down the road. For Microsoft that represents an unacceptable possibility. With Adobe’s clout, Macromedia can do some major damage to Microsoft and now Microsoft is starting to strike back.

I hope that Macrodobe can survive, and I think they will. They simply need a forward looking strategy to compete with Microsoft. In a few years, we will look back at the Adobe-Macromedia merger as the turning point for the web. The seeds of ITs future have been planted, but they must now withstand Microsoft.