Reading (For Dummies)

Hong Kong Exploration

Steep car ride

I've managed to get out and about a bit more in China's better half. After hitting up the Buddha Statue, I took a cable car to the top of Hong Kong Island. The car trip is quite nifty (and the hill is quite steep).

View from the top of Hong Kong Island

I was lucky enough to find some fellow tourists not interested in stealing cameras to take my picture at the top of the Peak Tram. We had quite a few spectacularly clear days for sightseeing. I was certainly glad to get out of the concrete canyons to see what Hong Kong really looks like. It is a city of about 7 million people. I would consider myself to be a bit of a city person (at least, I like good coffeeshops, live music, and the other amenities that the city life provides). Hong Kong is a bit much for me. It is a great place to visit, but more than a month of living there might have me ready to spend some time in the desert.

Victoria Harbo(u)r

Finally, I got to take the famous Star Ferry ride across Victoria Harbor -- at night. Power consumption in Hong Kong must be something spectacular. Not only do most shops have open fronts with A/C blasting, but a nightly light show entertains the tourists.

I go back to Hong Kong in just a few weeks, and hope to check out some of the more nature-y things -- perhaps I'll get to rent a bike and check out some waterfalls.

Mirror World

Fate has placed me in Hong Kong, 15 time zones away from home, literally on the opposite side of the world (well, same hemisphere but 12 time zones) from where I grew up.

The streets

The Mirror World* is a fascinating place. The streets are narrow, the buildings are huge, and my pedestrian collision avoidance algorithms are perfectly mismatched for the locals. I believe that this last observation is due to the natives driving on the opposite side of the road. No doubt this influences more aspects of human behavior than we commonly give credit to. Perhaps I will travel to Great Britain or Australia some day to collect another data point.

It's a hot time of the year to be in town, with daytime temps usually about 32C (90F), with humidity somewhere around 105%. I joke that to deal with any water shortage, you could just put a still on top of every roof.

I managed to hit up two 'cool places,' for an electronics geek that practices atheo-buddhism. The first is Apliu Street, Hong Kong's answer to Akihabara (I've never been there, but I hear that it's better and so I want to go). Shops sell cell phones, ham radios, oscilloscopes, bench vises, and tools needed for reverse engineering electronics equipment. There are repair stands on the street...walk up with a broken cell phone and these guys will put it under a stereomicroscope with a solder rework station and patch it up for you while you wait. The closest that the US has to this kind of store is Fry's, but even that is somehow more, "clean consumerist," than Apliu. I prefer the Apliu, "maker," style more, probably because I love tearing things apart to learn how they work. I wonder why there isn't a book called, "Zen and the Art of Electronics Repair," or something similar.

False Idols

The second cool place is the Tian Tan Buddha, a giant bronze statue. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek, because Buddha statues have always bothered me a little (a physical object to serve as a reminder of the impernance of all things?). Also, there is a gift shop literally inside the Buddha. Quite odd. The cable car ride is pretty nice though, with a cool breeze flowing through the car on a hot day.

I had some weird preconceptions about going to China, none of which turned out to be true. I'm able to connect to my home VPN server and route my web traffic through it just fine (and yay, a home computer is recording all the traffic coming through from China). Getting 3G service was really really easy...I purposefully left my iPhone unpatched and jailbroke it for the trip out, including the carrier unlock. I use a prepaid 3G SIM from 3. US$30 gives me my two weeks of 3G data service so that I don't get lost while walking the streets.

Hong Kong Currency

My last libertarian observation was that the currency is printed by Hong Kong's major banks, which are contracted by the government to do so. Some day, maybe the US will have privately operated printing presses? Who knows...

PS: Mirror World is a fun term that I heard from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I first imagined the term to be one of jet-lag. Later, I thought it referred to the left-right driving paradigm. Finally, I came to understand the augmented-reality definition of the term. All of these definitions apply to this trip.

Career Moves

I've recently decided to leave a great company and to start work for the best small security research company that you've never heard of. Digital Bond has been doing vulnerability assessments and security research since the late 90s. Since the early 2000s, the work has focused solely on industrial control and SCADA systems.

Part of my work will be taking apart appliances, analyzing protocols, and finding bugs (as a previous worker summarized his position in Digital Bond, "I broke stuff."). The other part of the work involves assessing the security at sites all over the world, including pipelines, refineries, utility control centers, and the like.

I've increasingly become a bits and bytes person, teaching myself assembly languages and digital logic design -- skills that I hope prove useful in the new position. Already I am thrilled, learning to use some nice pen-testing tools that I never had the time to learn before. The future once again looks amazing.

Mount Hood

My brother was lucky enough to take a mountain biking vacation on the Umpqua River Trail in south Oregon, and I was lucky enough to meet him and his girlfriend in Portland for some city and mountain life.

After exploring more of Portland (and trying out some of the local vegan fare), and stopping by approximately 0.000237% of Portland's breweries, we left the heat of the town for air of a decidedly thinner, crisper nature.

Erik (bottom center) contemplates going for it

Laura, Erik, Carla, and I spent two nights at Tilly Jane, and hiked up the Cooper Spur Trail to touch Eliot Glacier. It was a nice and relaxing backpacking trip, and one of the few times that I've ever had a backcountry campfire (always a treat, especially with my thinning hair and forgetful nature -- I had not remembered to bring a warm hat).

Left to right: Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams

I hope that, before I leave the Northwest, I get to summit a few of these gigantic peaks. For now, I'll take my Zen off the mountaintop and back to the garage, where a tired motorcycle begs for my attentions...

First Contact

Something that has pleasantly surprised me is how forthcoming electric utilities are these days. My mother often spends time at a cabin next door to the CEO of the Sullivan County Rural Electric Cooperative. The cooperative puts out a nice news magazine full of info on the goings-on of the local electric grid, energy saving tips, and even general life advice for living in rural Pennsylvania. For a rural coop, that's pretty darned nice and informative for their customers. Way back here on the west coast our own local utility, Avista, has a great blog and some wonderful community outreach people.

I've finally had a bit of time to sit down and play with my home's new Smart Meters. The meters installed on my house are Itron's "OpenWay" series.

First Contact...

I'm using a Freakduino Chibi board programmed to sniff in promiscuous mode with their open-source WSBridge software to do the sniffing. It's quite nice to have frame decoding in Wireshark. Following the frames is a way better way to get a feel for a protocol than just reading the standards (registration required).

I'm still not talking to the meters for fear of destroying them in the process. This is a nice first step, though.