Reading (For Dummies)

Isolating Showers

After today's news of bicycle arrests and a scream of "Solidarity Now!" I decided to go for a bike ride. By myself, of course.

My last attempt at a ride was down in Ithaca with Ms. Kaitlin. It involved getting a flat about 4 miles out, and leaving my pump in my car. Not a happy ride.

Since then I have purchased a new rear tire for the bike, a 700x25c beast that should prevent me from flatting quite as often. I'll keep the 700x23c in the front and retire the old rear tread, as it is splitting and nylon strands are starting to come out of the sidewall. 1500 miles will do that to a tire.

This ride, I got to Manlius and the heavens opened up, just as a yellowjacket flew into my helmet strap and stung my jaw. Ouch, and a double dose of bad luck!

Nothing like a rainy ride

I was tossing drivers the horns while splashing about through river-like streets. Yikes though, now my bicycle will need some cleaning and drying out...

Biker Rage

There's been a serious crackdown on bicyclists lately. Things started off with the pre-Republican National Convention Critical Mass ride, where hundreds of riders were arrested in a larger-than-normal ride. Critical Mass has been organizing monthly (and more or less peacefully) on the last Friday of each month for years. The police are treating it as coincidence that riders are being arrested this time...who are they kidding? The excuse used is that they were obstructing emergency vehicle traffic, but doesn't that happen every day during rush hour by motorists?

Josh Kinsberg has also been arrested for chalking the sidewalks in New York. One has to wonder why Kurt Wenner has never been accosted by the police. Free speech should be free speech, right?

Of course the Five-Oh wouldn't say why they were arresting Kinsberg in the video. That seems to be a growing trend in law enforcement lately...it makes me think that law enforcement are leaving themselves able to come up with a reason for the arrest later on (possession of an illegal fixed-gear bicycle, perhaps?).

Cyclists represent.

Honestly OK

A cancelled NYC/New Jersey trip has left me wandering euphorically in Syracuse, as I don't have to spent another 10+ hours on the road this weekend (only the third weekend "off" since May).

I hit up my favorite Coffee Pavillion yet again, for some jazz and excellent flirtation with members of the opposite sex. A cute girl, way too young for a guy my old age, walked up wearing a low-cut blouse with a diamond-studded cross dangling inside some very vexy cleavage. She caught me looking, gave a grin. My line: "Sorry, the power of Christ compelled me." She didn't get it. Definitely too young.

Yeah, another one of those nights. Which was fine, as I've been needing some serious alone time lately. Yeah, it's a man period thing. At least the jazz was good.

And we had really good trombonists and bassists this week

I spent most of the evening reading Through the Looking Glass. I've always had this soft spot for Lewis Carroll and his perverse alternate reality's actually sensical logic. I have never gotten to talk to a local logician about the subject, however...

A jam session the other night with Moises left me wanting a bit more of songwriting, so I whacked some of that out too.

I'll never match this 8-year old as a musician, though

The only trouble with the jazz cafe is that is closes at midnight. Far too early. So it was time to go walking around town...

The city is jumping again, with the life of new and returning undergrads. A brief walk with Doug and Dave had numerous people yelling, "Hey Freshmen," at us (Doug has 2 master's degrees, I'm a '3rd year' master's student, Dave has been in school here for about 5 years). I suppose they didn't notice the bald spot forming atop my head...

Anyway it's the good and the bad of cute women walking about campus scantily-clad in 90 degree sticky humid heat. Yeah, that about sums up what's good and bad about it. Just waiting for classes to start and the triathletes to return and get on our training schedule...

Bachelor Party

My brother Jason is getting married on September 17th. He has been in need of a bachelor party, and this last weekend was to be the time.

Erik arranged for a bunch of us to go whitewater rafting in Jim Thorpe, PA, on the Lehigh River. We went with some variety of "professional" outfit, which turned out to be quite fun, if a little on the safe side. The idea was to present Jason with an easy way out of the marriage that wouldn't look too much like suicide, causing him to save face with the family. He didn't take the bait.

After our rained-on and much splashed about whitewater adventure, we did the usual bachelor pubcrawl.

Clockwise from the guy facing the wrong way: Jim, Jason (the guy tying the knot), Brian Silvers, Erik (the instigator, and my other brother), and Bob Allenback

Many beers and cocktails, and much greasy faux-Mexican food later, we straggled back to Jason's car to find a hidden message.

Last chance...

Being the responsible old (er, young) designated driver, I got the kids back to the hotel safe and sound. Some other stuff happened in there too, but I've decided to omit the gory details for a time when I need to blackmail Jason, or at the least roast him at the wedding...

Amazon.com and AT&T Number Portability: The Missing Manual

I recently ordered a new phone with an AT&T contract from Amazon. It was especially intriguing after James' post on the topic of one-way roaming agreements. Indeed, my phone has already roamed over to T-Mobile's network both in Syracuse and New Jersey, seemlessly, and my T-Mobile phone couldn't connect to the AT&T towers in either place.

Anyway, according to the Amazon number portability page, you can't transfer your old number to ATT. This is, however, not the case. Reading the instructions for the other providers pretty much says, buy the phone, and when it arrives call your new cell provider to have them move the old number. I called AT&T ahead of time to see if that would work (called them 3 separate times just to be sure everyone was in agreement ;-)). It was.

So when I got my new phone, I called their number switching number available at the ATT Wireless local number portability site. After waiting 25 minutes on hold, I was told that I called the wrong number, and I was transferred to the sales department (where my call was answer immediately). I gave them my old phone number, my old account number, old billing address, and current address (which happen to be the same). Four hours later, my new v600 got a text message saying "315-395-0160 Number Transfer complete. Welcome to AT&T Wireless." A quick call to my brother and a callback from him verified this to be the case.

So buy your cheap new phone from Amazon, the mony savings are well worth it. And be sure to get a quad band phone so you can roam on all those local network's towers...oh, and avoid T-mobile -- while their customer service kicks ass, they don't get anything like the signal from ATT or Cingular...

That Old Devil Moon

Doug did something very nice last week. He set up an IRC channel on Freenode -- #anize, for all us Anizers.

It's been about 8 years since I have signed on IRC with any regularity, and I must say that I'm loving it. It's re-kindling my interest in computer dork things, and by extension in living. Just this evening I spent some time with the Darwin developers in #fink, and learned a lot about Apple's stupidity. I've been trying to compile tsocks and got pretty far, but came to the realization that Apple has decided to cram a whole bunch of normally separate libraries into libSystem.B.dylib. So when compiling tsocks, a user will have a choice: link with libc and get namespace collision with _connect and other functions, or don't link and don't get any of the functions in libc (including, say, free, memcopy, open, etc). Apple: get your act together and split your libraries apart!

That is all...

Still Not Moving

The last two weekends, I've been bumming in Syracuse. It's actually been enjoyable to not to be on the road constantly for a change. I've been getting things done like helping my new roommate get his stuff settled, help my old roommate leave, and have even been doing some reading and cycling.

Last night I hit up my old favorite coffeeshop, to which I have only been 3 times this summer.

Hooray for awesome High School Jazz

The astute viewer may recognize the painting in the background of above photograph. It is a broken guitar glued to a backdrop of blue sky. This painting used to be hanging in Happy Endings, which as noted is now a dead coffeeshop. Long Live Happy Endings, I guess.

I felt compelled to walk to Armory Square, just to see old Happy Endings again, and the urge was to approach it from some very strange angle. I don't much believe in destiny, but I think the reason my approach was so odd should be quite obvious.

Watch out, all ye peasants

It truly is amazing how ubiquitous Home Star Runner has become.

Welcome, Mitchell

My cousin, Mitch Depew, is the second from our tribe to make it onto Google. Congratulations, Mitch.

His skating group, East Coast Skateboarding, has been churning out a lot of videos lately, and Mitch is looking pretty sweet on his board. That is, until he either lands on his arse or does a face plant.

I made a mirror of his Philly video without any special permission. Hopefully he doesn't sue me. Yeah that's him at the very end, making sure that the sidewalk is level with his chin.

Perseids Bliss

I doubt I'll ever experience last night again.

I went south towards Tully, seeking out the Darling Observatory. I hadn't even looked up directions, though, and got quite lost. So after driving sufficiently far from 81, I just pulled over to the side of the road, and wandered out onto someone's farm, under a tree. Greeted with one of the most amazing sights ever. The Perseids streaming meteors to the south and above, a thunderstorm rumbling and lightning flashing to the southeast, and the warm orange glow of Syracuse to the north.

I sat listening to the cows moo in their barn, perhaps aware of streaks of light in the sky, or distant flashing and low rumbling, and said 'Om....'

Nerd

With only one serious girlfriend ever and 13 serious computers (a Mac IIsi, a IIci, a 486 Canon laptop, a powermac 7100, a g3 desktop, a CenterHauls Winchip 240 (pentium 233), an SGI Indy R5000, a p2/266, a dual p2/333, a p3/500, my first ibook, my current dual p3/1Ghz, and my current ibook), I am a +12 nerd. Hear me roar.

If PDAs count, then I'm in even worse shape.

How much of a nerd are you?

Beautiful Day

Just another one of those gorgeous days in Syracuse. Temperature dropped into the upper 60s, the sky was blue with marshmallow-like puffy well-defined crisp clouds. So it was bike ride time, feeling like autumn bike ride time. It makes me wonder if the southwest is really the place for me after all. Slightly chilly sunny weather is the best for riding. Keeps me moving so I don't get too cold.

So I went down the long loop, to Jamesville, up the Mini Alp d'Huez (as I've named it) to Pompey, but kept going down to Fabius, to Tully, to Apulia, and back to Jamesville. It was just a gorgeous ride, interrupted only briefly by a coyote nearly running into my front wheel as I went up to Pompey (nature provides these fun diversions every once in a while, though I wonder about the poor coyote's health running about in the daytime).

The other puzzling thing lately has been my distances while riding. I am rather new to these devices; since I have bought it, I have ridden much less distance than usual. I'm doing the same routes, just for some reason they aren't as long as they are supposed to be. I believe I will have to write in to write in to CatEye.

So today's ride was a nice 45 mile, 2.5 hour ordeal (with much time spend on Pompey). I think that I should be riding more.

After the ride, I made supper, and after supper I decided to go for a walk. A 2 hour walk through parts of Syracuse that I have not walked through before -- the hill atop Kensington Avenue, small trails winding along Comstock. The walk was to be so long in part because of more wildlife that was to be found in the form of a skunk bumbling around only a few blocks from my home. I think that all will be in agreement that such a detour was not only enjoyable, but necessary.

Indeed I received other good news today -- I have a new roommate by the name of John Maweu. One of Dr. Blair's prize graduate students and paper collaborators, he will likely provide some rounding out in the household as both a master theoretician and amazing pool player. We may even be buying a pool table for the house.

Random Ideas

Every once in a while I feel like a genius. Like today.

Back in my horrible computer security course I dreamed up an idea: a web browser that used the domain name concatenated with what you entered in your password field, performed a hash operation on the new string, and actually sent that as the password. In that way, you could safely use the "same" password (same as typed on your keyboard) for a ton of different websites, and if one of them got compromised and your password stolen, the thief wouldn't be able to break into other sites/services.

It turns out some dudes at Stanford have implemented just that. Now I have to go dig up my notebook where I originally wrote down the idea, just to flaunt it to myself.

What's next, someone implementing a token-based distributed encrypted filesystem? Hopefully not, that's what Karan and I are going to be hammering out starting next week...

Identify This

I've been selling some stuff on eBay recently, in order to raise some much-needed capital that the recent iBook death and new purchase have cost me. Things have sold for a lot more than I expected them to...$370 of sales already and I have yet to sell the CDRW/DVD drive and screen off my old ibook. Quite astounding...

I went to the post office today to mail the first round of items. Not having any cash, I went to use my credit card.

Back up a moment. For years I have been writing "Please See ID" on the back of all my cards. It's a trick I learned back when I used to work for Radio Shack. The industrious Brian Green taught it to me.

Back to the present. The post office lady informed that I could not use the card without a signature. I suddenly remembered hearing this before, so I said no problem I would come back with cash.

I went to the HSBC to withdraw some money, and talked to my friendly teller about the Post Office. "Oh yes," she said, "it's actually less safe to have someone look at your ID. It's very hard to forge someone's signature, but if they get a fake ID with your name and their picture on it, then they can still use your card."

I can only laugh my ass off at this brilliant deduction. It seems like it would be much easier to learn someone's signature than to make a fake ID, as the penalty for making a fake ID is much higher and the likelihood of getting caught much greater...

Here Comes the Flood

My travels have taken me to New Jersey once again, where I rented a tuxedo with my two brothers to ensure that we are looking alike for Jason's upcoming wedding.

The interesting news of New Jersey has been the recent flooding of my dad's town. They received 13 inches of rain in a 4 hour period on July 12th.

Medford Lakes is a series of lakes all connected by roadway dams. Things were hunky-dory for a while with just the usual household flooding, some people with a foot or two of water on their first floor. The problems started up at Beach #1.

Background: previous lake. Foreground used to be a paved bicycle path over a conrete dam.

That dam went, sending a deluge of additional water heading towards Lumberton by way of a normally very small brook. When the dam went and the lake drained, it dropped pressure on one of side of the next furthest up dam...

I used to drive on this road every day after school...

The road above had a sewage pipeline running under it (the brown pipe on the right, which is broken). It also had a gas pipe, which somehow survived (yellow thin pipe in the middle).

Of course, that lake drained out too, dropping the pressure on the next lake up the chain in Camp Ockanickon...

The Ockanickon dam didn't stand a chance...

Being primarily made of dirt, this one went pretty quickly, draining the lake that it was holding back too. The chain goes up to another lake it looks like, and there was wooden debris from possibly another dam break. But alas our bicycle tour had to be cut short.

Aside from having to observe maximum carnage to some lakes, it was a decent little trek down. I came back up early, though, hoping to go sailing today (Sunday), but there are no boat rental outfits on Onedia lake! So I may be keeping my eyes and ears open for a cheap used sunfish, as the wind on Skaneatles is no good at all...

And now, your moment of Zen.

Just to the West of Main Beach, this canoe shows the normal creek level and the flood level.