Reading (For Dummies)

Phish Bait

With all the complaints about Phishing scams going on, why not build a neat plugin for your mailer? Similar to the Filters that Fight Back idea, it follows the link to the Phishing page -- and fills it in with bogus data. Use TOR for the added grin that the phisher can't just do a simple select query on his/her database to delete all your bogus entries. They'll be left sorting out which John Smith actually gave his credit card number, and which one faked it...

Same Freedom, Different Hill

I suppose I need to start going on these things alone. Not that I mind groups, I do enjoy the company from time to time. But it'd be nice to just eat gorp for a whole weekend, instead of worrying about other people's opinions on hot meals. The motivation behind that is, of course, the pudge on my belly. I was shocked to find things jiggling a few weeks ago when I went running. A daily regiment of 5k plus cycling a few days a week has kept things somewhat solidified, but it's scary to think that I need to keep doing this stuff my entire life. I'd rather be backpacking, as they say, so that's what I'm ending up doing a lot.

The plan was to leave Friday afternoon at 2:30, go to Elk Lake that night, hike two miles or so in. Saturday would take us up Hunter's pass to the top of Dix, and hopefully provide us a nice view of a few of the other peaks. Then back down the east side of Dix, where we could camp out on the way back south.

I arrived home at 2:30pm on Friday from a Sun Solaris conference to find my truck with a flat tire. It took an hour and a trip to the parts store to get the wheel off, thanks to rusty bolts (I even broke some Craftsman tools in the process), plus a bit more time to drop the wheel off at a gas station, and even more time to wait and see if a plug would work. It didn't, so I left it to be patched and balanced while I went home and packed.

The mad scramble of throwing things in my pack was fun, if hectic craziness can be considered fun. We got out and on the road around 5pm, and made it to the trailhead at around 10:30 thanks to a wrong turn made by me.

An hour in and we were at the first lean-to, where we spent the night.

Up at 8am, we opted to go up the steeper Beckhorn trail to reach Dix, stopping on the way around 1pm to admire the clouding-up view from Beckhorn Peak. Then it was over to Dix, and back down to Hunter's Pass.

I made the interesting decision to pick up a pair of cross-country skis that had been left on top of Dix. One of the bindings had broken off, no doubt whoever skied up with them had gotten a bit irritated at the prospect of carrying them down. Were I in the position, I would have. So I'll blame the hapless skier and speculate that he was probably Canadian -- it may sound stereotypical, but Canadians often come down to the Adirondacks and seldom clean up after themselves, a sight that I've seen with high frequency.

We didn't make it back to the lean-to until almost 4:30pm, and we were all exhausted. I cooked us up some dinner after Laura and Monica chopped our vegetables. While flavorless, our onion, broccoli, carrot, and couscous stew provided a bit of warmth and let us all tell stories...until the hour of 6pm, at which we all went to bed.

We woke up around 6am on Sunday, packed up, and hiked out. We were on the road before 8am, and back to syracuse around noon. It felt like a workday in that sense. These weekend trips are leaving me refreshed and giving me the motivation to return to work each Monday, so in a deeper sense it did not feel like a workday.

Like Rain on a Wedding Day

I went down to Binghamton to meet Mary for a cup of tea. Crashed on her floor, and woke up at my standard entirely-too-early government time. I'm actually used to waking up at 7am, and even do it on the weekends.

After a few push-ups and some eggs florentine, Mary and I bid each other goodbye and I continued south on 81. Destination: marriage.

My cousin Em recently broke up with her beau of several years, and had her sister-in-law's wedding to attend. I was assigned the role of substitute date. Free food and free booze make Reid something-something.

It was actually a neat little wedding ceremony down near Allentown, Pennsylvania. A tad on misogynistic side (though it seems like all these ceremonies are), the wedding had a nice bell choir and booming thunder from an afternoon thunderstorm. Something about fertility...

I didn't stay too late at the reception, and actually didn't drink. Ever since I started work I haven't had much in the way of alcohol consumption. I have to say that I'm all the better for it; my gut is shrinking rapidly in size thanks to all the running.

Back to Syracuse for a 2am arrival, back to work. Next weekend needs something slightly more adventurous...

We Work Hard, We Play Hard

The new job has actually been super-good so far. I have to admit that I had some dread at working the nine-to-five, but the schedule being rigorous has only served to make me a bit more studious. Rise at 7, to work by 8:30, I study most of the day: research papers on real time operating systems, planar graph theory, with a few hours of each day spent with co-workers debugging their code and tweaking their development tools. My brain is loving having actual stuff to do and learn. The fact that I know how to use a compiler and make kind of strokes the old ego, as well; we're too cheap to pay for commercial development tools (hear that, John Q. Taxpayer?).

The rigor is also getting me in better physical shape; every day I come home from work and run or ride. I can run 3 miles in under 21 minutes now. I wonder where some of my high school friends are...I was always the pudgeball back then that couldn't do 1 mile in 10 minutes.

All the work and exercise fill my days, with just a spare hour or two for cooking, reading, and trying desperately to keep up with the goings-ons of friends and family (something that I seem to be failing at). At least my weekends are maintaining interest. This most recent weekend, a bunch of we merry SUOC'ers went out and explored Knox cave (my first time there).

I only hope I can keep up the momentum. Running on empty sleep-wise isn't something that I care to keep up for too long :).