Reading (For Dummies)

A Whole New Winter

In New Jersey, the land of the weird

I hadn't seen my mother in a year, so I figured it was high time to get my butt to New Jersey to visit some people. I still managed to not meet up with a lot of the people whom I had meant to, but at least doorways to lost friends have been re-opened a bit.

Some things I probably shouldn't have seen...

Never drive past your old house when visiting home. The people that move in will never do it good. I think I liked my dad's decoration style better than the new people that own his house...

Laura even came up to visit for a day. She is doing a little genetic experimentation on mice at JHU for winter break, and had to go up to NYC for a day anyway, so...

Naturally I had to take her for a walk in my childhood stomping grounds

There was the usual aura of being tugged and pulled in a million directions, of course. I particularly enjoyed receiving an average 4 phone calls per hour my first two days in state.</sarcasm> I usually get about 4 phone calls a month...

All in all good fun, and I tape recorded enough Random Thoughts of Reid to spawn a few rants. w00t.

And now, your moment of Zen...

Funny how the best gift is literally the only thing you asked for...

Last Supper

Stephen, long time pal and Unix mentor, odd events partner is leaving Syracuse on Monday. I saw him for the last time, I won't say ever, but at least for a while, as he moves out to Seattle for a new life. I hope it's a better one than Syracuse can provide...I have half a mind to follow him to the left coast. Hopefully I'll be able to do that in another 2 years.

Someone's missing...

What was going to be the Last Supper for him turned out to be a lot like the Last Supper for Jesus. Jesus wasn't real, you see, and couldn't have been at the Last Supper. So naturally there was an empty seat.

Wanted: New Hosting Provider

I've outgrown my current webserver and am looking to start or join a server co-op. If you're reading this and know where I can find a nice server that gives me storage (~10 gigs), bandwidth (~25 gigs per month), and the ability to mess around with configuration files, drop me a line.

Mount Marcy^WColden

Jithka and I planned a trip for Mt. Marcy over the weekend. It would be a great way to work through some of the stress that work has been putting me through lately. Fortunately I've been re-discovering my sense of humor with the asinine nature of government work, so my psyche is even more intact than usual. This weekend's multiple brushes with death certainly helped a lot...

We took off Friday afternoon, taking my truck because it was snowing something fierce and I have 4wd. Except when we got to the part of the road that wasn't plowed anymore, my 4wd wouldn't engage. Teh suck.

So we're driving up the dirt road to Tahawus in rear wheel drive. Fortunately it is plowed, but it still has a nice layer of ice and snow on it. My truck is handling nice, and we're getting there around 5:30, so I'm going 20-30mph. We crest a hill, and start coming down, and at the bottom, a tree is across the road. Some expletives were shouted by Sean, Jithka, and myself in our respective native tongues as I jammed the brakes, trying to make a decision: ditch or tree. I cut left, where the tree was slightly higher off the road, hoping it would only smash the roof down rather than catch my windshield dead-on. A loud crunch, and only a bunch of scrapes in the paint tell the tale of that little escapade.

We got to the Upper Work parking lot around 6, had a swig of whiskey, and thanked the Flying Spaghetti Monster for letting us live. Then we strapped on our snowshoes, shouldered our packs, and hit the trail for Uphill Lean-to.

The hiking was slow. Sean fell into a stream about 20 minutes into the hike, but we pressed on. We were breaking trail in a few inches of snow, moving about 1 mi/hr. I lost one of my water bottles on the way, on one of the several times I fell over. We stopped short of our goal and camped in the lean-to near Lake Colden Dam. "No problem," we thought, "if we go one mile an hour tomorrow we'll make it up and down Marcy with time to spare before sunset."

Where we would eventually go: Mount Colden

We cooked breakfast and started melting water in the morning, but our stove quit. Plenty of fuel, it just wouldn't stay lit for more than a few minutes. Unfortunately someone put the wrong instruction manual in the stove bag, so we weren't too eager to go taking it apart. So we left in the morning after a good night's sleep, but only 3.5 liters of water for the three of us.

We hiked up towards Marcy but the snow got deep. Like 2' deep. And we were still breaking trail. I was smart enough to forget gators, so my boots were quickly getting wet on the inside. We slowed to about a half mile an hour. We reached a fork where we could go 2.2 miles up marcy and then another 4 back down to our campsite, or 2.9 up Colden and and another 2 to our campsite, so we decided to do Mount Colden.

We didn't reach the base of Colden until 3pm, with 3.3 miles left to go. We were going to turn around and just go back, but we ran into some luck: the trail was broken ahead!

We started up Colden with renewed vigor, until about 30 minutes later when the previous hikers had decided to give up and had turned around. "We're already most of the way up, for sure," we figured.

3 hours later, exhausted, we reached the top of Mount Colden. By then it was dark, and we had a lot of trouble finding the trail on the top. That, and the trail goes right over the big slide on the Marcy Dam side. I tried not to look down...

Jithka took a few photos at the top, of me looking bewildered and hypoglecimic (will backpost those as soon as I get them).

The funniest thing about being as cold and as exhausted as we were was that we could barely talk. My voice was weak, my jaw couldn't move, my tongue was numb (so were my toes...that water in my boots from earlier? Very cold and worrisome). We were all actually a bit worried up there.

We did find our way down (obviously), and hiked back to camp, landing sometime around 7:30pm. Of course, our stove still didn't work, so we had to eat snow and cold bagels and gorp for dinner, and shiver ourselves back to warmth in our sleeping bags. We woke up Sunday morning with mostly stiff clothing (at least, the stuff that we couldn't fit in our sleeping bags). My boots were blocks of ice. The socks I had taken off hastily and left on the lean-to floor were quite difficult to pry up. But hey, we hiked out and we're alive, so I ain't complaining too much.

People ask me how I stay sane working for the government. Now they have half the answer...

Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad, and far away from Home

Just a classic shot of CNY in Flight

Just another TDY, this time to meet Scott Mcnealy. On a personal level I found him irritating...Given the CEO's presence, I can't help but shake the feeling that Sun needs the government more as a customer than the other way around...

Sun's strategy used to be accepting Linux (which imho [and that of some of Solaris' developers] is a far better kernel), now its strategy is distance and bashing. Some things Solaris does better, sure, but they're wholly irrelevant for what our group does. There was more FUD coming from McNealy's mouth than I've heard from most of the Microsoft guys I've talked with (to their credit, Microsoft has realized its last Common Criteria evaluated system was done in 2000 or so, and they're not going to break into the high assurance server market without the TPM). Laying on the Fear about the GNU Public License was even more amusing to me, as Sun is incorporating the GPL'd Xen into Solaris soon. The question I bit my tongue on is, "will that make the Solaris Kernel GPL'd, Scott?" The answer is, of course, no.

Just another license plate which makes me wonder how offended I should be

Odd meetings aside, the trip was a riot. We missed our flight back after our fearless leader decided to have three too many beers. A long drive and a fistfight in the hotel later, we got back just in time to be summoned back into work (on 4 hours sleep) to discuss research proposals for 8 hours.

Yes, I'm still looking for a new line of work...