Astricon 2008: My short and sweet summary

I'm really tired.. really excited about the people I met.. really warm.. really tired.

I can't wait to get home and kiss my girlfriend, pet the dogs, manhandle the cats, and go to bed. I don't know whats waiting for me when I land, but I know that later tonight.. I'll be able to lay down and wake up a full 8 hours later.

It was super awesome to meet so many people I know on #asterisk, and some I never knew existed!!! They were all pretty freaking fantastic.

They are boarding my flight.. but here's what I need to bring with me for next year.

• My own access point, encrypted, on some crazy euro frequency.
• Audio cables
• Duct tape
• A light bulb
• A girlfriend
• A micro server
• Cables up the wazoo, audio, network, powe strips, etc..
  

That should do it :)

Yay and stuff

Sorry, yeh.. I hate titling blogs with lots of strange and wonderful topics...

First of all. T and I found a good place to get hitched.. and it's a secret. It's in Girdwood and we will only be giving the guests GPS cordinates and a date/time. I'm kidding. Seriously, we found a very nice spot to get hitched at a super neat lodge owned by an energetic woman who's gonna take care of a ton of stuff we don't really want to be involved with. I personally want to only deal with the following.

• Find somebody to photograph the wedding
• Find somebody to videotape the wedding
• Find a tux
• Tie skyefoil up in the closet until the wedding so she can't escape (June 2010)
• Find some fancy shoes
  
• Make sure tons of people I know can come

If you're afraid I'm going to forget to invite you then send me email, cause I might.

On another note, today I sold a 2 wheel utility trailer via craigslist. Deal sealed w/in an hour. I took the $75.00 from the sale and put it in my pocket. Later that day neighbor guy came by and asked if I wanted a truck bed toolbox. I reached in my pocket and handed him $75.00 and he installed it with me :)



Tada.

I also started using a bunch of styrofoam that skyefoil collected in the shed to help insulate it, she is attempting to keep her plants in a somewhat better insulated shed this winter, so if you run into a plethora (yay, plethora) of styrofoam I'd like to get my mits on it so I can finish the job. Later this week I'll install new industrial hinges on the door and set up better fastners for the swinging doors which are mostly useless at the moment.

Check it.



When I'm done it should look like an inverse Death Star.

Tootles.

St. Paul Island Part III

I'm working on some Cisco and Motorola gear.. I'm reminded why I prefer other flavors of routers, switches, etc.. I'm going to propose a bit of a network change soon.

A while ago I mentioned to the head of the tribal corp that he should put some geocaches out on Saint Paul Island with a "prize" for FTF (First to Find) tourists on island. That was around 2 years ago. A few days ago I whipped out my GPS in front of a coworker who mentioned his wifes school hid a few geocaches on island. I was sooooo going to find them all.. GOTTA FIND EM ALL!

So I did... it was a pretty night and I was wishing Skyefoil were out here enjoying it with me. I took some pics tho!

From SNP2008

Me with a fur seal sprawled out on the ground behind me. I SO BRAVE!

From SNP2008

Some sort of Arts and Crafts project gone horribly wrong. These are supposed to be "seals" that grow when you put them in water. I'm sure it does, I just don't really want to find out what it looks like when it's larger and sopping wet.

Anyways.. It was a fun night, check out the rest of the photos in the album.

St. Paul Island Part II

Take a peek at my gallery for a few more photos taken today. I went on a little nature drive. A walk would have resulted in me getting chased down and grunted to death by some bull seals.

From SNP2008

Wireless link between the airport and town side has been completely aligned and, due to interference, has a net throughput of 9mbps in full-duplex. I have to connect the backhaul to the corporate and public networks on the island next week and draw up a new network diagram with suggested changes.

I reconditioned my old servers I had out here and plan on putting them back in service. It will be excellent :)

Stay tuned.

St. Paul Island Part I

I got a contract with an old boss to head out to Saint Paul Island, AK. The job is to do say hi to old employees and get a wireless backhaul installed between townside and the airport 3.5 miles away. Not too difficult for most wireless guys to install, however Saint Paul Island (a.k.a SNP) has some amazingly dense fogs and blizzards that make fun of wireless signals and kick sand in their face. I needed strong equipment and decided for an all-in-one inexpensive solution that can be replaced easily enough when it either A: Blows away, B: Rusts off, or C: Falls victim to crazy SNP antics.

Yesterdays flight out to SNP was kinda relaxing. I played "Flight of the Amazon Queen" on my laptop via ScummVM. Ironic since the game is about the survivors of a small crashed plane. I also tossed back a few episodes of "Flight of the Conchords: Season 1".. I love those guys.

I landed, met the old boss at the airport (called poss camp) grabbed keys and booked it to their office to grab the wireless equipment I ordered and configure it for tomorrow. I dropped the equipment off at 106 (the house number I'm staying at) and dragged all my luggage into the house.

By this point, you're bored reading this.. let's spice it up a bit.

While I was at the office I inadvertently got signed up for the Softball game that night. The Company vs the Coneheads. Coneheads? oh.. they wear silly hats.. gotcha..

There was a white dense fog illuminating the area which didn't seem quite right for a game where a hard white object falls out of the sky randomly like a surprise hail ball from hell. But nobody cared so we played our silly little game. I'm a horrible catcher and all the spare gloves were preteen sized so I got immediately picked on for not being able to catch. The team coach, obviously not seeing how poor at softball I am, made me catcher. Last time I played catcher in softball the pitcher did such a poor job I was practically jumping to reach each ball before it bounced past me. Of course they thought I was a horrible catcher then too.. sigh..

I cought a few foul balls that headed my way, I panicked at a few balls that simply hit the ground right in front of me. It didn't seem right so I just stood there.. go me.. I finalyl redeemed myself by getting up to bat and putting the whomping on the ball a bit. I like to hit things. By the end of the night my legs were killing me.

This morning I woke up a bit late.. 10am.. and expected to work till around 9pm to make up for those hours. I configured the wireless devices and headed out to install one of them on a radio tower I needed to take a few things off of first. The fog outside was incredibly dencse, I had to use a GPS to draw a line between the two radio towers and find a visual reference between the two that I can use to align the first antenna with. It doesn't need to be accurate.. but it needed to be close enough so I could read the signal strength from the far radio tower.



Me showing off some fog.

Once I install the far radio and align it as best I can then it's a simple matter of heading back to the near radio and adjusting it's initial alignment until I get the best signal. I've had to use this trick often on SNP due to fog/hail/blizzards/etc.. I remembered an old trick when I was on the tower, trying to align a flat and wide panel antenna to a far off point. Since it has no point to it you have to use symmetry and the pole it's mounted on for the initial visual alignment. you focus past the pole and see where you want to aim it, making sure the symmetrical points on the back of the antenna have an equal distance to their side of the pole. In my case I had two screws on the back of the antenna to use. This gave me a 2 inch reference (between the pole and the middle of the back of the panel antenna) to use as a pointer toward wherever I was aiming. You focus far and see two poles then put the target between the poles. Then focus on the pole and make sure the antennas screws have an equal distance from the poles sides or center, whatever. The error factor is huge, but it works wonderfully for rough initial alignment. Go go magic geometry.

Years ago I installed some really huge radio antennas on the radio towers that made up the wireless backhaul a long time ago.. I had to take those down and the bolts holding them tot he tower were completely rusted.. a perfect oppurtunity to play with my rock climbing harness. I climbed up, crimped in, and froze my butt off while forcefully wrenching the rusted fasteners into submission. My hands and wrists are killing me. It took like.. 20 minutes. I know.. I'm a wussie.



I lowered the hardware to a co-worker and we fastened the new radio in place then headed to the far side. The guy I was with was having fun aiming the panel around while we drove around. I had a dc inverter in the truck so we powered it on and checked signal quality at a few points of interest between the two radio towers. Once we got to the far side we were happy to see, even at ground level, that the antenna was aligned well enough to link up with the far side, woot.

Tomorrow I will be doing the same thing to the far radio tower, stripping it then adding the new radio to it, aligning it the best I can, then realigning the near radio. I'm very confident that I can get 12mbps out of it.

Think about that kids, 12mbps between two locations, no hard line, no need to pay the telephone company, no monthly costs... It's a beautiful thing.

Todays patient method of redistributing wealth.

Ok so yeh, it's human nature to want to help other humans just as much as it is our nature to be greedy little buttheads. People spend tons of money on "mandetory" things like vehicles, petroleum, computers, school, food, and all the other odds and ends that make up our day to day. So there are starving kids in all corners of the world and guilty messages on the TV saying we should donate to them. Outright donation is great, and it strengthens your internal moral obligations to commit yourself to humanity in all aspects. It's not uncommon that companies or people will take their hard earned money and send a good chunk of it off to a charity of some kind.

There is another aspect to contribution that I'm realizing now.. The patient method. So patient that you may have no idea that you are participating in it until it materializes. You get rich first through being smart, lucky, or handsome. Eventually you encourage yourself, or through the encouragement of others, to contribute to good causes because you are so fortunate. I really like that the Gates family started up the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation now that they are more than set for life. This is the patient method. Eventually everybody in the world contributes to the hungry, bored, sick, and less fortunate people in the world through consumerism and monopolies. I feel a bit better about life after thinking about this. It's kind of a shame that if your goal is to give to as many people as possible that you'll first have to take from as many as you can first. In exchange for "goods" sure.. but why isn't everybody just giving?

That said, no I don't feel like joining any relief organizations, hungry child networks, etc.. I'm a prick.

What I plan on doing with my domains.

I've registered an obsene amount of domains in the past two years to hopefully be the new home for commercial entities, ideas, public websites, and organizations that I want to create or at least be part of. I've ended up with the following - for giggles I've also thrown in domains I've had for a looong time. Now A lot of the information below may make you wonder "Why is he sharing all these ideas so publically?" and the answer is because I can't do any of these on my own and the world is as much my audience as it is my cohort.

And now on to the list:

Personal Use:

bogomip.com: My personal domain I use for all things me. Blogs, email, home network domains, temp domain names, silly projects, etc..

Organizations:

gnuak.org: GNU/AK - Alaska's GNU Professional Society. My hopes were to create something similar to the local LUG but geared more toward professionals that use GNU software like Linux at the professional level.

alaskadogparks.org: Hoping to build a community of dog owners. Alaska has an awesome ratio of dogs per household but still a very small percentage of people get their dogs the excersize they need. This site was to help with the public information on dog parks, scheduled dog walks in a specific neighborhood or area, help promote dog parks and reduce conflict with other activities sharing space with the parks. Anchorage AK has some amazing dog parks but their boundaries, accessability schedules, and maintainence aren't well known and would benifit from better public knowledge. It would be kinda neat if there were a lost and found on the site as well, dogs tend to knock things out of their owners pockets somehow.

Large public projects:

wheresmybooze.com: At some point I will be creating the fabric to allow vendors and sellers of "adult beverages" the ability to post their wares on tap, in the fridge, on bottle to a friendly GIS aware website. Users will have the ability to create smart searches that seek out new beverages in the area when they are listed, specific beverages when they become available, and allow local and national distributers and creators the ability to perform advanced queries to analyze competition and get feedback from WMB (Wheres My Booze) users. Wouldn't it be sweet to be notified that McGinleys Irish Pub suddenly started selling Ring Of Fire Cizer? You bet your sweet butt it would. Party at McGinleys!

terrabug.com: This project has been in my head for a year now, and it keeps growing. This, as well as WMB, is going to be based around either GeoDjango (GIS extensions for Django) or possibly a simpler approach toward spatial database queries. The main goal is similar, however more community based than http://www.everyblock.com/ which I stumbled into the other week. I'm a bit miffed that they are so awesome and a bit revved up to compete/collaborate/whatever. My goal is to create a geographically aware issue tracker but it has recently taken me in several different directions. I need to find a good complementary set of directions and start putting some code together. I'd like to provide a searchable, indexable, rss'able interface to the following:

1. Municipal Actions including public notices, inspection reports, geospatial analysis, incedent reports, and information reguarding permits effecting city, state, or federal land.
2. Issue tracking with routing to the appropriate agency. Like reporting a pothole, attaching recordings of construction noise in a certain area, etc.. Eventually, hopefully, getting feedback or an notice that their issue has been accepted. I'm keeping in mind the ability for multiple parties to sign off on an action approval.
3. Publicly submitted information on new bike trail proposals, their own gathered information on traffic count in an area, potential speed bump sites, and up to date information on all requests. Public forums discussing individual areas, or even large geographic areas. I can see situations where selecting a lassod or rectangular area and listing all information in all categories, or single categories, at the top of a discussion thread may be useful.
4. Hopefully this site will be used to break down misinformation by aggregating good information voted on by the community and reporting agencies.
   
5. International support would be awesome, talk about a great learning experience for yours truly.
   
6. I could go on and on, actually... But I'd like to create something that everybody will enjoy using and allow them awesome amounts of information. I hope it will be educational as well and people of all ages will see how busy we in our cities, help people get their bearings in a new city, and become more eco-concious by reviewing changes to our cities and reading up on environmental impact reports effecting all areas of our world.

openbounty.com: Open source code can be profitable. There are several projects aimed at helping open source programmers get in touch with projects that actually pay them to work on them. Asterisk has a ton of bounties, Ubuntu has them, so does the Linux kernel itself. After talking with Toykeeper a bit about how he would prefer a bounty system to operate I found there was a much larger need for a bounty system that collaborated with current project maintaners, project programmers, and the companies or individuals interested in paying for certain features. They key to this site will be review and approval of code changes by a majority (maintainers can have different voting weights as well) of the original or current project maintainers which will usher changes into "trunk" a bit faster. Bounties can be for anything: Packaging for a specific OS, Documentation for newer features, new functionality or simply reviewing the issueing companies code for QA and helping it get into new project releases. I imagine even maintainers can go after bounties, but they forfeit their vote. The biggest role of openbounty will be working with project maintainers when a bounty for their project is created, getting the company and the project maintainers in agreement on certain very simple terms, and advertising the bounty using a clean interface. Escrow will be interesting on this sort of project...

hashnick.com:
hashid.com: When I first discovered the six-degrees of seperation research going on in the world I imagined an ICQ like hashed identity network (ICQ issued numbers to users instead of their preferred handles) where web and jabber clients could view the world as a bunch of connections to other semi-anonymous beings. You could register a nick and put HN:8903 on your business card as you hand them out. Savvy people would understand this and add you to their list as a direct contact and a buddy list seperated by degrees would begin to form and automatically add itself to your jabber client. I thought it would be interesting. I would have loved to offer GIS queries, shouts grouping whatever degree of seperation you intend it for, etc.. It's just a neat way of viewing the world, albiet not incredibly practical. I like the diagrams it creates. :)

Technical Consulting:

brutetechnology.com:
brutetechnologies.com:
brutetech.com: These domains are set aside for my consulting business. Brute fits well. I'm .. well, I'm a big guy. I scare people off when I enter a room. Children find it fascinating to challenge me and see if they can pick on the big dumb guy. I'm somewhat of a brute too - I'm blunt, large, scary, I have myself one mean glare, and I don't mind a punch to the head when push comes to shove. At the same time I'm smart, verbose, friendly, like the ladies, and I imagine I'm quite an odd scene when I see a kitten I want to cuddle. So the name works, and it makes fun of myself a bit too.

brutemethod.com: This is the software wing of Brute Technologies where I will be publishing software releases, doing issue tracking, hosting software related mailing lists, etc..

madmanguides.com: I will be releasing guides here based on a new documentation system I am developing which will compile documents dynamically by situating chapters and sections based on their prerequisite relationships with other sections. It's probably too complicated for me and won't work well with the english style of writing. But would work well, I hope, for technical documentation.

Zines:

tekkake.com: Yes, haha, it's a play on words that is a bit digusting. The motto is "A refreshing splash of technology news". This has yet to go anywhere, however I imagine just like myself it will be incredibly opinionated. I will be hated by the general populous and my google adsense account will skyrocket. Right?

Potential Candidates for my own consulting company:
This list is a bit awesome, stand back.

• cerritec.com
  
• cerritus.com
  
• djinntec.com - I totally dig djinn, but not many people do. Especially Ifrit.
  
• fluxtec.com - Sigh, I didn't realize flux also referred to some very gross bodily issues.
  
• geekmoto.com - I'm not sure why I regerested this/
  
• hackmeco.com - Hackme Co. (haha, like Acme Co., it's funny.)
  
• hack-mode.com - To be in the zone, however it points out how detached I am usually.
  
• haxortech.com - Yes, it's lame.
• hexterra.com
• luckyhex.com
• luckyhex.org

Other projects that aren't worth mentioning until something real happens with them:

• hexcache.com
  
• hexdigest.com

I hope you enjoyed a good laugh at my expense, if you're interested in any of the domains I'm not using please let me know and I will transfer them to you if you have a Gandi ID.

So, really, who am I?

This may be incomprehensible drivel. Just a warning.

I need to step outside myself to see who I really am. Whats going on? My thoughts are all twisted and my body is tired, being creative isn't working, and I feel like I am swimming in a sea of indecision. I know what I need to do, but I want to see what will happen if I do nothing. Sometimes that's a good play in poker, right?

Right now I'm working for two companies at once, 6 days a week total, and it's a bit draining. I made this stupid work arrangement for the same reason I would accept even more work, payback, I expect that my time will free up eventually and my extra effort will be rewarded if I stay true to my goals. By cutting back hours on one job I'm hoping to migrate more hours into a more interesting one. Extra work would be awesome too, if it's interesting. Right now though - I almost want to take a vacation and take my little dog Shila with me to see if getting away from it all will allow me to focus and create the things I dream about. Just like painting, just like writing a book, just like sculpting the lawn I feel I need some solitude - I feel as though I need to get away in order to clear my head and find the few things I want to do that will make me happy. Sure, I could easily see how it looks like I just want to get away from daily responsibilities. I've never been very good at those anyways.

My thoughts lately are fluctuating constantly between my fiance and I, coding projects, politics, psychology, dreams about a more open world, more dreams about things I could do to make it happen, and thinking about how information is, or isn't, important in many different situations. I believe I see how information technology has modified our world and made certain aspects of our lives very lazy. Now of course I'm trying to keep a good perspective on this and entertain thoughts about 'why' we are handling our lives the way we are. Like what is the cause and effect of what we are doing and what are we overcoming? How do we accurately measure the effect? When will we know for sure if our awesome progress, even if it takes several mutations of our ideas over many more generations of our race, will ultimately fail us. At times it makes me upset to think about how basic we still are in spite of what we have achieved. Maybe that's the upwards arrow of progress that I'm just not seeing. Are we are establishing a good, broad, foundation for tomorrow minds. Maybe I'm a bit too narrow scope to see it for all it's worth right now.

Most of my spare moments are spent dreaming up theories on advanced Internet traffic routing, data management, distributed storage and odd network caching techniques. I know I'm not alone in thinking, or dreaming, about any of those either, I've learned that my ponders may sometimes be rare but never unique (and I kind of dig that). The more I look into ideas on data management the more I understand how truly obnoxious DRM (Digital Rights Management) is. DRM isn't just some fancy way for a company to sue you after invading your privacy, DRM also keeps people like me from implementing networks that temporarily store arbitrary data in an attempt to increase overall efficiency for network traffic. It's easy to guess that next generation networks will either be insanely high speed or insanely intellegent compared to our existing infrastructure, and I'm hoping for the later, and the model that DRM subscribes to is the first. Right now Internet2 is hoping to compensate for the amount of unique, protected, non-redistributable media that companies that have to comply to DRM will be pushing out of their servers one request at a time, over and over by implementing a super high speed backbones. You see, the way we designed networks depends on a lot of handshaking over long distance routes that traverse through a ton different networks which rarely ever works as well as it should. Eventually we will hit the physical limit on transmission speed (at least limited for health reasons) and we'll just have to outsmart ourselves and do math we should have done decades ago. I can't help but feel sorry for our future knowing that we will pointlessly lay down millions of miles of cabling containing massive amounts of non-renewable resources simply because we couldn't use what we have set up today intelligently. I hope our global state of mind will change and the progress of information will be distributed in unison over tree-like mixed manycast/unicast networks. It would be wonderful if large static data like images, media, and programs will be easily distributed through cached chunk networks as a standard.

My past is responsible for what I am thinking about now, and it's taken me a while to realize it. Everything I have ever read on the Internet, talked with my friends about, or banged my head up against a wall while trying to figure it all out so long ago is resurfacing and aligning itself into understanding. It's nice to find out I retained more information that I thought, but it sucks that I'm having such a hard time recalling it on my own. I'm beginning blame Mountain Dew and nicotine.

Am i rambling? yes.. THIS IS WHAT IT's LIKE IN MY HEAD LATELY. Incoherent babble that could turn into great things if only I could apply myself and make it all happen. Unfortunately I know exactly why it is what it is up in my stormy thoughts. It's too many thoughts compensation for too many of my weaknesses. That is after all why we create toothbrushes that almost brush your teeth for you, and chime when you haven't used them in a few days. I know I've failed at being a responsible person and completely sucked at setting a good model for my friends, my collegues, and just about any person that's ever spent more than a few minutes around me. I'm talking about *NOT* doing what needs to be done, *NOT* being a more active part in a larger movement that shares your ideas and goals, and definately *NOT* being employed or finding clients that believe in those same goals. I've unknowingly isolated myself away from the type of people I should be a part of by never actively involving myself into societies full of them. Instead I was probably a prick and swore those people would never have anything to do with me because they didn't understand my motives right off the bat, or some equally stupid bullshit. Those people were probably the people that are inexplicably drawn to me reguardless of my nasty mood. If I would have been nicer to them and formed better friendships I would probably be part of the society I want to be in right now.

Thats enough rambling today.

Revampenation

I do believe I'm going to close down all my blogs and make my own Django based blog system. I'm hoping to incorperate some form of SCM/Unison similarly to how Google Code's manages it's wiki.

Stay tuned.

Personal Status Update

Sigh... This is gonna be an "I'm" post.

I'm so tired. Where's my coffee IV drip? Right now I am working two jobs, each 3 days a week. It's a pain but it pays the bills and lets me not be so bored.

I'm twittering a lot.

I'm not geocaching nearly enough.

I'm going to a cabin next weekend for some R&R with a bunch of people.

I'm going to murder the cat who keeps peeing everywhere.

I'm backing up my gandi virtual server.

I'm drinking a lot of girly drinks lately.

I'm a little annoyed with everybody.

I'm wondering why personal experience wins over professional experience.

I'm waiting for my monday pie in the face.

April Fools.

Haw.. I turned yer Internets upside down.

Today is a day when sysadmins can say, easily and without a lot of defensive employees running to their mommas, that they reign supreme. I decided to go with an oldie-but-a-goodie squid url redirector/rewrite hack to flip images around for any web requests leaving the network. Our firewall supports redirecting port 80 (HTTP) to a remote host. In this situation the remote host was my Ubuntu Linux Workstation running Squid 2.

See: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Peoples were confused. I had to put on my usual "I'm present, but I don't like what you're saying to me or understand what you'd like me to do about it" face and just let the masses walk in and ask me what the heck was going on. One of the cool ladies here actually emailed her friend saying "OMG http://www.cnn.com/ IS UPSIDE DOWN!". Her friend must be concerned for co-worker ladies sanity.

A few people got a bit huffy, but I'm used to them being huffy. Most people thought it was a fun prank. I highly suggest doing this if you want to yank your co-workers around a bit.

Free Food Day

Martin Luther King Jr. had a lot to say about freedom. Lincoln got himself shot for his ideas. Freedom itself spawns back even past our first president, George Washington. He didn't know it back then, but his upbringing, presidency, and guidance lead to a remarkable day. That day is today, what I now call "Free Food Day".

Earlier my boss overheard me saying "I'm a grump and I'm gonna go get something to eat". This inspired her to join me in my quest for the munchies. With the "You Fly I'll Buy" law in full effect, I headed off to Subway to order a copious amount of food to fill my belly, all on the bosses dime.

Later that afternoon another coworker dropped by and handed me a Snickers bar. I asked "Wow, for me?" and learned he was on a diet and I'm obviously the type of person that eats candy a lot. Here's some more free food.

I'm thinking of a flag pattern and maybe a float design to honor this great day. Any suggestions?

Test Your Awareness: Do The Test

This is a pretty valid commercial. In Eagle River, the small tiny commuter town just outside of Anchorage, I've already seen several cyclists almost get splattered on the road at one of the few intersections. This is one of the problems of living in a state where the pedestrian has less rights than the drivers.

I almost got creamed a few times in Eagle River at that particular intersection. Not a car moving, nobody going anywhere, then out of nowhere somebody decides score a few points by running me over. Thankfully I heard them coming and zipped out of the way. Instead of zipping I would have much rather been focusing on the cars on the other side of the street who, while still stopped, could just as easily pop their car forwards in an attempt to trip the light.

Thats Silla!

No really, Silla.

I stumbled into that after searching for 595 (for some reason this number is part of the current theme I'm using on blogspot) on Wikipedia and saw it was the birth year of General Kim Yu-shin of Silla. I have no idea who that man is at all but lately I am all sorts of nuts over history. I've been contemplating learning as much Latin and Greek as possible just to understand ancient history. This is mostly thanks to a few books I have been reading lately by Larry Niven. He has quite a gift for referencing the past in books set in the very distant future. I've been turned on to quite a bit of Arabic history lately through his books The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand.

So whats so interesting about this word Silla? Nothing really. Except it can also be spelled "Shilla" which is the ambiguous name of the new white dog. We spell it "Shila" though.

Just my little Wikipedia journey today. One of at least twenty more. I'm pretty sure XKCD: The Problem With Wikipedia says it all.

Photos of American Eagle festivities @ Eagle River VFW

I was hoping to find, and eventually did, photos from yesterday at the Eagle River VFW. Thanks alaskan.explorer for posting some beautiful shots. See American Bald Eagle. My favorite is this one.

It's a Beautiful Day! (tm)

It really is a pretty day. In fact its been a pretty weekend all together.

Yesterday Skyefoil and I went to Beach Lake to walk the dogs. We found the Beach Lake geocache which was 30 or so percent around the lake than where we parked, we walked over the lake for most of it. Sam was of course a good doggie the entire time. Shila, sigh, read all about that here.

The clouds of Saturday were erased from the sky to let the sun shine through on my Sunday. I really should be working today. I have several jobs :(. Instead I decided to get out of the house and take shila on a geocache hunt. We took off, I bought some new sunglasses cause somewhere in Anchorage I lost mine, then I totally missed the turnoff to go to the cache trailhead. I knew I had to go down to the Eagle River VFW and turn around, I pulled into their parking lot and realized suddenly that there were dozens of people with huge cameras pointed up at some trees. I pulled off to the side before I interrupted anything and took a look. There was a similar amount of eagles up in some trees. I immediately thought about the irony of a bunch of eagles having an air show above the VFW post. I also thought maybe they had been baited to be there by old geezers with nothing better to do. The eagles swooped all over the place and chased a few ravens around, huge cameras with huge lenses were snapping away. Shila could't care less concidering how much she hates ravens. Eagles must be out of her scope of things to pay attention to, maybe the rewards are outweighed by the risks :)

We jetted off to the geocache site which also turned out to be an awesome dog walking trail very close to my house. One day I will detail it on http://www.alaskadogparks.com/ in the near future. I own that domain and plan on doing something with it sooooon.. very sooooon.. I hope everybody will be happy with the results.

The cache was Texas Goodies and was located near a trail following Eagle River (the actual river, not the whole town). Shila and I got to sit on a hot rock on the edge of the river and enjoy the pretty scenery with me, she got a yummy chummie for being such an obedient little girl and sitting there with me when I needed somebody to share the moment with. I can't wait to show Skyefoil before it all thaws.

Thats a wrap!

My tribute to the F word

Lets see how long it takes me to just plain spell it out.

Today, I think I may have dropped the F-Bomb at least 20 times. This is somewhat reminiscent of the movie I watched last night, The Matador, where in a particular scene one of the leads wives mutters the the Big-F a few dozen times in one lengthy sentence.

Last week sometime I fell on my knees from a standing position. I turned on some ice while walking the dogs and my feet went behind me, thanks to a wee tiny ice slope I wasn't aware of. My knees caught my fall. I'm pretty sure my F-bucket was to the brim when that happened. My right knee took most of the damage and it has hurt a hell of a lot ever sense.

This morning I managed to trip on the way up the stairs. Looking back it's pretty easy to trip when you have to move a curtain aside (which we use to keep top floor air on the top, bottom floor air on the bottom), jump to avoid kamikaze cats, and run to the door to stop your dog from barking. I made it half way when a similar scenario was forced upon me today - sadly no cats were involved which makes me feel kinda stupid but I was incredibly tired, still am. I hit my left knee really hard on the edge of the top stair which has a metal edge on it. I didn't immediately realize what happened until I noticed I was on my knees, in pain, and now my only good knee was my newest bad knee. F-Roll please. I cursed so hard the dogs shut up, the cats hid and the neighbors probably thought about moving to a less ghetto neighbourhood.

I rolled around on the ground and did a self check to occupy myself and keep my emotions at bay so I wouldn't end up crying like a little girl. Knee, Check, Pain, Check, Can I stand, Check. "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuck that hurts".

I let the dogs in, since I was right next to the door and all, and they ran inside to see what was the matter. Shila's really sympathetic toward pain. Actually she just likes it when you roll around on the floor which gives her incentive to look like a good, loving, lick happy dog. I called my sports injury person, yes climbing stairs is a sport, and they are gonna take a look at it later today. I can't wait to feel them prodding their fingers around behind my kneecaps.

Why me? I ask. I feel as though some sort of Knee Reaper is stalking me after I narrowly escaped knee death a week ago.

Thats enough of me being a cry baby. Hows everybody else?

* In honour of Jen, I'm using references. One of my nephews a long time ago decided "Fuck Bucket" was a sweet word to use. I think it had something to do with my sister or I exclaiming "Fuck It". Mind like a sponge right? He made a little song out of it and rhymed it with bucket.

Poo, Pee, My morning.

I wrote a haiku about this entry:

http://humdrumhaiku.blogspot.com/2008/02/poo-eww.html

Heres the deal. Every morning I wake up and if Skyefoil hasn't beaten me too it, I feed the dogs and cats and let the dogs out for their morning tour de bark. I reminded myself to first put a bark collar on the red dog so he shuts up a bit and doesn't bug the neighbors. Walking into the kitchen I felt a squish. I looked down and saw some kitty turds surrounding the outline of my shoe.

Gross.

I take the shoe off and cuss a bit. Then walk two steps to the garbage in the kitchen which I plan on banging my shoe against until the poo is cleared away. First step - other shoe first into the kitchen. Second step - socked foot right into a nice cold puddle of cat piss. I cussed some more.

Why do the animals feel like the kitchen is prime fodder for their excrement?

So, the rest of my day has been pretty good comparitively. I'm a little miffed that the snow is melting away. I talked to a friend of mine in Palmer, AK - they have no snow. Pisses me off.

I guess this happens every single year when Fur Rondy is in town (see: Jens Blog) the weather turns to slush. Its car wreck season thanks to all the thawed roads freezing into a smooth and well lubricated ice trough. The Rondy folks are setting up their carnival of Alaskana just up the hill outside my window. Jen expressed an interest in funnel cake, I admit I share that interest as well.

/me x's fingers for a better, poop and pee free day.

Happy Belated Birthday!

--- Topic for #lcdproc is 'hardwire - patentable intellectual property is basically a gold rush of common sense'

Topic for #lcdproc set by ToyKeeper at Wed Jan 10 14:57:10 2007

Squattage

So, Network Solutions is becoming guilty of domain squatting based on whois searches on its own website. How horrible.

I've been trying to find a domain name for my own professional use. Many are taken of course and you have to improvise with "tec", "llc" or "ak" (Alaska) being appended to the desired word.

I tried for hectec.com, sounds fun right? Squatter page.. o no!. I emailed them which immediately sent me to a trouble/sales ticket system that refused to put the content of each stage of the ticket into the email, and instead gave a link to you so you had to use their website to reply. I asked if it was for sale.. heres the transcript.


Fun eh.. They didn't bother responding and simply closed the ticket. What should I do now? Throw more money at them? Register myself as HecTec in Alaska and use the UDRP?

Either way, squatters suck ass.. I've attempted to register ifrit.com, several other websites owned by squatters who simply have nothing more than search page set up just waiting for people to make them offers.

I can see how some people get rich doing this, and I hope there is a special circle in hell reserved just for you.

I'm a sick man.

I answered as honestly as I could, granted I kinda wish I had a railgun today anyways.

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