Keeping Peace In The Jungle

This isn’t much of a blog posting, but it’ll have to do.

Back in March, Nacole and I took a holiday and road the Victoria Clipper on up to Victoria, B.C. - and it was pretty sweet!

If you’d like to check out some pictures, click here.

Hackers at the DefCon Conference going nuts at the “LAN Party” table.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,400763,00.html

The following was said in my presence,while at a clinic which shall remain nameless. The comment was in response to a young lady attending college in Florida, who called asking about a birth control prescription (no joke):

“Don’t people go to college to study? All they do is screw! What’s up with that?”

Oh my.

As some of you may know, in early December of 2007 I climbed on board an SAS A340-300 and headed to Norway. And I’ll be honest, I was scared out of my mind.

Not just because I’m not a particular fan of being cooped up in tin cans with wings, not because I had never been to Norway - or even Europe for that matter, not because I was traveling alone, and not even so much because I was going to surprise my girlfriend who had no idea I was coming.

No, it was mostly because I was completely mortified that I would somehow loose the engagement ring in the front left pocket of my jeans.

I had already tried to “forget” it at home just before leaving. Thankfully for mother’s intuition, on the way out the door to head to the airport my mom asked, “Do you have the ring?”. At that point, I said nothing, calmly walked downstairs, and picked it up from my desk. Thanks, Mom!

We took off 20 or so minutes after our scheduled 18:45 departure time, in the middle of winter. Our course set north-east, the so called “polar” route. We crossed over nearly all of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and eventually landed in Copenhagen, Denmark for my layover.

Once arriving in København, as they call it over there, I had to pretty much race to the other side of the airport to catch my connection flight to Oslo (or shall I say, “Oooooo-slow”, as I was corrected at the SAS desk in Seattle). After arriving at Gardermoen, the big airport in Oslo, I made contact with the one person I knew - even if from only just a few E-Mails back and forth.

Inger, Nacole’s teacher during her study abroad trip, was the only person who I had any substantive correspondence with. I didn’t dare tell any of Nacole’s classmates because I didn’t want there to be any chance whatsoever of someone “hinting” to her about my plan. That being said, I knew it would be entirely stupid to just “show up” in a country I’d never been to, where they speak a language I’ve never learned a word of, without at least “one” point of contact.

Inger was awfully excited that I was, well, at least “close”. Oslo, where I landed, is about an hour’s train-ride south of the city (well, town) Nacole was in, Hamar. One problem - I somehow lost a bag.

Even though it was “checked through” to Oslo - and the connection between Denmark and Norway included me - they forgot one (1) of my two (2) bags. This is exactly why I put “half” of the stuff I needed in one bag, and “half” in the other - so If I lost a bag, I’d only be “half” screwed.

Even though you might think that having a bag in a different country would be quite an issue - flights go nearly every 15 minutes or so between Denmark and Norway, and within an hour I was reunited with my luggage.

Then it was on to the train area, thankfully right in the basement of the airport. After a few “uh, um, English?” encounters with some of the indigenous folk at the info booths, I was able to get on the train that I was at least “pretty sure” I needed to be on. Considering it’s an hour ride north, I was still somewhat concerned that it wasn’t the right one - but there wasn’t much more I could do. If I was getting to Hamar, I was determined that the train I was on was the one to get me there. But, I still had my doubts.

This is where I ran into my first big confusion. There is a nice little town called Lillehammer.

Let me further explain why this is confusing:

I’m in “A”, Oslo. The train is heading to “C”, Lillehammer. I want to get to “B”, Hamar. Drat. The one thing I guess I didn’t do my research on well enough. Fortunately the train simply “stops” in Hamar along the way - I was fine. But I didn’t know that, then.

So the entire way up, as we’re stopping in little podunk towns, I keep freaking out thinking I’m going to some city called Lillehammer; instead of Hamar. Now, some of you might ask then, “Well, why did you get on that train in the first place if you weren’t sure?”. C’mon, I’m a GUY… But, I did at least ask.

The lady I spoke with at the airport said that if I wanted to go to Hamar, I need to take the Lillehammer train. It never really occurred to me that there were stops on the way (I know, I’m dumb). So the only thing I could piece together is that Lillehammer = Hamar. I thought that maybe the town’s full, proper, name was “Lillehammer” - and that they just called it “Hamar” for short. Like, “Frisco” for “San Francisco”. I don’t know.

But luckily for me the Vikings decided long before that on the way to Lillehammer you’ve got to go through Hamar first. Nacole had always told me that Hamar was about an hour’s train ride, and I had studied the train route very well before I left. So once we hit about 45 to 50 minutes in, I started to “recognize” things, such as the bends in the track (I’m not kidding) and the bridge crossing the water of Norway’s Largest Lake, Lake Mjøsa. Needless to say, I was pretty overjoyed when the conductor got on the PA and announced “Next stop, Hamar” (yes, after Norwegian, they announced it in English too - Bonus!).

Once I got off at the train station, I got a feel for just how cold and icy Norway in December really is. Up until that time, I hadn’t really been “outside” since Seattle (well, a short, “undercover”, jaunt from the airport terminal to the train didn’t really count). It was pretty cold. And there were thick sheets of ice, everywhere.

Per Inger’s advice, I hailed a cab instead of the bus I had originally planned on taking. It just made more sense with the bags and all. And it’s a good thing I did, because the more I think about it, I may have just went right by my stop on the bus (even though I had looked up the proper routes ahead of time).

Like the nerd I am, I brought my GPS with me - preloaded with Norway maps, no less. Within a few seconds (even faster than here in the states, arrrrg) it found me. I was in Norway.

Next step was to flag down a cabbie. I lucked out and the first one I found spoke “a little” English. I showed him the printed map I had, and asked him if he could get me to “the red X”. He stared at it for a moment, nodded that he could, and we were off.

Now past 20:30 (the next day, mind you) we made our way up the hill. I explained that I was just in from the states, and that I was here to “surprise” my hopefully-soon-to-be fiance. I also told him he had better “hang around” for a second, while I made my surprise entrance to the back door of her host family’s house - just in case I somehow got the wrong one.

It was really eerie as we drove the short 3 - 4 minute drive from the train station to the house. I was expecting every turn. I guess that’s what I get for all the nights studying the route (so if I lost the map I’d still know where I was going).

But the best feeling of all, was when we pulled up to the house. Even though it was pitch black outside, snow and ice everywhere, I knew it was the right place. I had studied enough pictures Nacole had posted on MySpace to know exactly where I was. Even though I was ~4700 miles away from Seattle, somewhere I’d never before dreamed I’d be; I was exactly where I needed to be.

As I walked around the side, I heard the voices in the basement. They were having their last “Taco Tuesday” (which they celebrated every Wednesday, apparently) and that further told me I was where I needed to be. I knocked on the door, and Kyle, one of the guys on the trip, answered. I asked if Nacole was there, and he was witty enough to realize it was a surprise. He told Naocle she needed to come to the door because “the landlord is here”. At that point Nacole’s newly-found BFF came up and started crying on the spot. I held up my finger - “shhhhh”!

Nacole came to the door, and said words I’ll never forget:


“Oh my God… You had to get a passport!”


After that, I spent a few days (just shy of a week) running around Hamar and Oslo with Nacole and her group. We saw lots of interesting things, CNN’s Al Gore-post-Nobel-Peace-Prize “sit-down”, not withstanding.


And on December 7th, 2007 at around 05:20 AM (Pacific Time, that is); I asked Nacole to be my wife. She said yes, and I was the happiest man in the (just south of the) arctic.


Here are some pictures of the trip:

If you want to view more, click here to see the entire shoot.

For this year’s celebratory festivities, Cory, Laurie, Nacole, and Myself were hot-to-trot down to Lake Union for the annual bash. Since crowdage is always a concern, we decided to do our due diligence and scope out some good spots ahead of time. Nacole and I spent the early afternoon roaming the side streets and dead ends all around the lake and came up with five (5) possible targets to setup camp later in the day when the hommies were to roll north from their southern abode.

Later in the evening while at dinner with Cory and Laurie, our somewhat overzealous waiter let us in on a tip, that although somewhat obvious, wasn’t one any of us picked up on before. He said that if you find your way up to the top of Queen Anne hill, and jump onto one of the laterals off the main drag, with a little luck, you’ll plop yourself down into a nice cul de sac that has a spectacular view of the show - all without all the hundreds and thousands of whiny teenagers, pick-pocketers, and legions of drunkards to spoil the event.

Well, after some gallivanting around, we happened upon one such “spot” that did yield us quite a nice view. Sure, towards game time there was a hoard of people that crashed the party, but still *much* less than down in the “mosh pit”. Here are some of the best shots:

If you’d like to view the entire shoot, click here.

Gets the grease, as they say.

Adobe decided to give me grief today about an ‘upgrade/platform swap’ between Adobe PhotoShop 7.0 Upgrade (PC) -> Adobe PhotoShop CS3 Upgrade (Mac) as well as Adobe Illustrator 10 Upgrade (PC) -> Adobe Illustrator CS3 Upgrade (Mac).

Apparently, even though they allow you to ’swap platforms’ - the official rule, per the rep I talked to, is to only do this when the upgrade is completed on a single platform.

Confused? In other words, in this scenario where we were moving both to the new versions of the software AND going from a PC to a Mac at the same time, you have to do a ‘two-step’, if you will.

Upgrade the older PC software to the latest version first, and THEN call Adobe for a platform swap, at which point they’ll send you the CDs for the platform you wish to move to (for free, they claim).

When I bitched, whined, moaned, and complained that just a month ago we did this same process with InDesign and they gave me *no* issues (and after the better part of an hour on the phone), the rep *reluctantly* gave me an exception and provided the challenge/response codes needed to activate the new CS3 versions, on the Mac platform, without using the older (PC) serial numbers.

So, what’s the moral of the story?

Either do it the way Adobe wants you to - or just hunker down and keep whining until the rep can’t take it anymore.

The later was kinda fun

Seeing their global competition in Sweden, according to Engadget, it looks like Comcast, with the help of DOCSIS 3.0, is hoping to bump up speeds for “20% of its [customer] footprint” to 160Mbps down / 120Mbps up - by the end of 2008 (not holding my breath). And as an added bonus, Comcast even says they’ll stop their ‘ol hack the TCP stack method of quasi-bandwidth thottleling (AKA, kill off BitTorrent, and everyone but the seeders/leechers are happy).

Sounds spiffy. Here is my only question/comment/gripe.

Aside from finally (yet, officially not) admitting they were discriminating against BitTorrent use and further reveling they’ll be working with the BitTorrent folks to expeditiously (as in, 8 months) find a better way to “manage” network resources, if you (Comcast) are REALLY going to bump up speeds so much… Totally blow our poor 10/100 cards (well, I run gigabit, so not me - shamless nerd-plug) out of the water and give us a major “Power Boost” (no pun intended); why on earth are we NOT talking about a symentrical offering.

We’ll, I should be fair. It’s not JUST Comcast. Looking at SpeakEasy’s ADSL2 offerings, they will do 8/1, 10/1, and all the way up to 15/1 (if you live less than 3.46 feet from the CO). FiOS (if you can even get it at all) is drinking the Kool-Aid too. According to their manifest, they offer 5/2, 15/2, 15/15, and 30/15 packages. Okay, so they at least have a (single) symmetrical option. But WHY aren’t they all? If it’s about giving “options” to the customer, okay FiOS, do 5/5, 15/15, and 30/30 packages. Okay SpeakEasy, do 8/8, 10/10, and 15/15 price-points. I just don’t see the logic anymore.

The school of thought, I think, was that people do more “downloading” then they do “uploading”. It’s been tried to be explained many times. Maybe at one time this made sense. But in this VoIP-talking, XBox Live-playing, P2P-sharing world - this just doesn’t pass the smell test.

I mean, this is America. We have re-defined family time for the better. Look how much we have evolved. In a sense, we’ve reached the “Gold Standard” in raising our families. We’ve come up with advanced ways to get to know each other. We’ve made ourselves the defacto experts in the ability to focus in on our individual needs. But the pinnacle of our success, where we with out a doubt shine the most, is in lovingly paying personal attention to one another:

Back on topic now. Besides, who turns on their computer to simply visit a “web page” anymore. And how much bandwidth does that take anyway? It’s peanuts compared to the aforementioned services. If anything, dare I be controversial, I’d almost think it should be reversed - A big upload pipe and for those “pesky webpages” a slightly smaller download pipe. I’d just be happy if they just made them all the same, honestly. Could you imagine, in a business if your copying a file on the file server to your desktop took 5 seconds, but your copying the same file back took 50 - 75 seconds. My customers would riot.

I mean, it’s just dumb, honestly. If you give someone, now, access to a 160Mbps pipe, they will be hard pressed to max it out under normal browsing / downloading circumstances anyway. How many non-ginormus companies are paying for the kind of bandwidth needed to max out the down-link of these end-user modems. Who knows, maybe this kind of competition will be the catalyst in driving down the outragious price per Mb for datacenter connectivity (bonus!). If something doesn’t change in enterprise bandwidth pricing, it’ll be pretty funny when/if the day comes where you’re hard pressed to find your downloads bottle-necking at the neighborhood node and it becomes common place where any slow down ends up being at the head-end because companies simply can’t afford enough bandwidth at their datacenters.

The same goes for the uplink. Which is precisely what bothers me so much about this “stcking with the old” mentatlity. In the (relatively) lower speed offerings of today, I suppose I can understand the “value” placed on the uplink, and why for example, your SDSLs often command a premium over your ADSL counterparts. But 160Mbps/120Mbps? It feels like a slap in the face.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help getting this vision of some overly juicy, double-venti oct-shot drinking, and/or otherwise just plain odd CEO kicking back in his executive leather high-back chair giggling to himself over how pleased he is that even with great new offerings like this, he’s “still able to stick it to ‘em on the uplink”.

*Shakes Angry Fist*

I picked up myself a Canon EOS 40D a few months ago and thus thrust myself into the world of amateur photography.

One of the things I wanted to do with my blog was to not “just” blog, but also to be able to tie it in with my Gallery photo site. Fortunately for me, they make a cute plugin for Wordpress called WPG2. Yay!

I’ve been taking pictures with my camera since day 1 back in November ‘07, but I have yet to get them all organized properly - with the exception of one set of pictures. My friend Adam, an aspiring stand-up comic, wanted some headshots done before he moved to New York. Well, I hooked him up, and of course he didn’t want to wait around forever to see them - so I got some up. Here’s a few sample shots:

If you want to see more, feel free to check out the whole shoot.

Welcome to my blog!

This, being my first post, will be about nothing more than a somewhat superfluous introduction.

Technically, I wrote this a while ago, but since I couldn’t decide between which I liked better (Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Enterprise x64 -or- VMware ESX 3.5), this post has moved around a bit. After much benchmarking on my (unfortunately) non-VT compliant Dell PowerEdge 1850, I ended up restoring this post to my newly-created blog on my new virtual server. For some of you, what I just said makes no sense, and that’s fine. For those of you that it did make sense for, ESX won out.

I don’t even know what to do with a blog, really. I just decided that I like to talk (not as much as some people, believe it or not) and I also enjoy to write, so this was the natural extension of not talking the ear off of my fiancée, while still being able to blather on about needless garbage that comes to mind. It’s a win win.

One thing I was worried about, however, is that during the course of my blogging tenure, is the possibility that I inadvertently “offend” someone. Like, for example, if I were to tell the story about the person who called up with a “broken computer” only to find out after some straight forward questions, that in reality the computer’s only ailment was the monitor not being turned on.

But then I realized that if that “person” ever decided to read my blog and was offended, they should know that there was more than ONE person I’ve had to ask that question to. So was it really “they” I was thinking about…?

Out of all honestly though, I’m not in this to poke fun at any person or people (and no, I won’t use names) - because believe you me, I make some pretty half-witted mistakes myself. Alas, I find that if I don’t laugh during the day, it may end up being a pretty glum day. So I try to keep things upbeat, when and where possible. And in the end, I think that most people tend to laugh at the same things I do - albeit maybe a few days after me

Nonetheless, if someone ever does have a major problem with something I blog about - please, just drop me a line and I’ll remove it. I’m not hear to make enemies! Just doing this to collect me own thoughts, and maybe help out someone with a piece of info they scoured to find (a sort of informal “tech repository”), or for the average user (okay, techs too) a small anecdote to boot their spirits.

Yay! So ends my very first blog post!