Snozberry
because blogging ain't such a bad idea
To all who may try to call me, my phone has died. It simply won't power on anymore.
Over the last couple of years I have grown to strongly dislike my Motorola E815 - the interface, the size, the flip. Recently it's started dropping calls like an un-watered Christmas tree trying to hold its needles in February. And I guess that whatever was causing the drops finally took down the rest of the phone.
Any good recommendations on a Verizon Wireless phone? I'm also thinking of switching (Cingular/AT&T or T-Mobile).
Cheerio.
It's past my bedtime, but I just cleaned up the blog and feel that it needs to be fed.
A few weeks ago, Jenny and I moved up to Cambridge, MA. The move itself went spectacularly well, thanks to the gracious help from our friends down in DC. The only real hitch was that I needed to rent a larger 26' truck the morning we moved because it was quite clear that everything of ours was not going to fit in a 16' truck I had reserved. This meant being nailed for an additional $600, but in the end I think that everyone who helped us move agreed that it was worth it. Being stuck with a fully packed truck and extra stuff would've been an utter nightmare for everyone involved.
A couple days after we moved up, beefstew.net was up and running and I started working at Arcadia Solutions. That was probably not the best choice from a logistical standpoint, because we're still surrounded by boxes and neither of us can find all of our clothes. On the other hand, from a purely professional perspective I think it worked out quite well. I was able to receive a basic introduction to the firm the first week (when I wasn't at the RMV), travelled to Long Island to be on a client site the first half of the second week, and then to the Cape for a company-wide strategy planning event for the remainder of the week. Jenny came down at the end of that trip for the weekend (that was this past weekend) and we returned home on Sunday evening. This week I'm lucky to be in Boston, working up in Burlington, MA where Arcadia is headquartered.
I can't say that I'm thrilled with my current work, but I met a lot of good people at the off-site and believe that I have successfully involved myself in some interesting development work that wil likely involve talking with people from RAND, of all places. No more details there, I'm afraid - trade secrets :).
To all who have been writing me email, I'm very sorry that I haven't written back, but I've literally been pulling 16 hour days attending work, getting registered with the commonwealth of Massachusetts, schmoozing with my new colleagues, and unpacking. I have barely had time to keep up with Jenny's new Harvard experiences and my strategy for working in a new firm, nevermind such simple things as eating, doing laundry, or co-captaining my fall ultimate team (which I've unfortunately all but completely neglected). My desk still isn't set up, although I plan to get that done this week (doing that requires re-routing the ethernet wires through the basement, which is moderately time-consuming) - and hopefully when that happens I will be able to sit in a more normal setting and bang out some messages. I also have some RAND work left to finish that has sat utterly neglected since the move... Ugh, the TODO list is huge.
Okay, it's really too late to continue (I get up at 0700 these days); until next time.
As many of you who have been here before know (i.e., all of Slashdot), I'm selling the mahogany computer case I built six years ago. Since beefstew doesn't seem to get the same sort of coverage that I think I need, I've decided to list it on eBay.
You can go check out the auction, as well as a whole new gallery page with pictures of what the case looks like now (taken yesterday with my trusty new D70). Please pass this news on to your friends!
Everyone knows it, so why not advertise it a little bit more?
I'm presently searching for a job in the Boston area, to begin in late August or early September. I will be moving to the Boston area so that Jenny (my wife) may pursue a graduate degree at Harvard University.
My interests are in areas that involve the use of computers and technology to increase productivity and create new business capabilities. I am looking for a position where I will be involved in decision making processes, general management, creative design processes, and improving how business is executed.
I'm open to working in a wide range of settings - corporate R&D, consulting (management or otherwise), university/scientific research, policy analysis at a think-tank, product development, making a run with a startup, etc. Seriously, if the work is interesting and challenging I will give it consideration! My general goal, however, is to branch out from the defense analysis that I am presently involved in and explore the private sector while gaining some further exposure to management.
For more information about me, including a letter to prospective employers and copies of my resumé and CV in several formats, please visit Christopher Horn's resumé page.
Fingerprint to Use Library Computers
Spanish Professor Fired for Talking About Legal Use of Peer to Peer Networks
I don't really have any insightful comments to add to these two depressing stories. The world is going to hell in a handbasket and I don't know what I can do to stop it.
So, it appears as if I've been gone for a while; I've been busy.
An update from the world of anti-narcotics: we've utterly wasted $3 billion trying to prevent Colombians from growing coca plants. That's right utterly wasted - the only statistically significant effect has been a slight increase in the avaliability of cocaine and heroin here in the U.S. Yes, you read that correctly: INCREASE.
Yay for irrational policy. If that were some humanitarian assistance program it would've been shut down four years ago (the program has been running for five). These people are idiots; I'll leave you with this:
Even with the contradictory results from the first five years, the Bush administration is asking Congress to extend Plan Colombia for at least one more year. The president's budget proposal asks for another $734 million next year on top of the $2.9 billion already spent.
A senior State Department official who is involved in the Colombia program said, "Give us another year or so and see if there is any effect."
Later in the article...
So, I'm restless. With applications winding down, work as usual and no Ultimate to keep me distracted - I need something to build. I've got a long list of things I'd like to do and a short stack of cash and no shop, so frustration has set in.
Project proposals:
If I'm going to build an amplifier, I need to learn a good amount more about electronics and circuit design. The woofer's cabinet wouldn't really be anything new for me, but it would be nice to make something in the shop; the only problem is that I don't have a shop, just a measly apartment. The big downside to this project is that it may be rather expensive. It would certainly produce a kick ass subwoofer that is dramatically cheaper than retail, but that could still be a lot of money. The Golf project seems the most promising - I'd get to explore my car a bit, the end result is practical, the cost isn't too high and I'd learn how to burn a PIC. The firewall project isn't particularly pressing, but it would be nice to sell a 2U rackmount case before Jenny and I move and to make a device that won't consume so much power (for when I start paying the electricity bill, as it's covered by my apartment now). It's hard to rationlize spending fresh money, though, on a firewall when I have one that already works. The last project, the hard drive enclosure, is actually rather important. I just received my warranty replacement drive from Seagate the other day after it failed (presumably due to being cooked by the external enclosure it lives in). I've already modified the enclosure to make it cooler, so it's unreturnable, but I don't see any way to truly keep the drive cool without fabricating a new case out of a chunk of aluminum. I'd have to figure out where a CNC miller is locally, how much it costs and what format they need the drawing in. If it's a 3D CAD drawing they want, I'm not only going to have to find some software, but also learn how to do it! I've only really ever successfully drawn in 2D before.
Until next time.
I looks like the DoD isn't really cutting its budget - most all of its "cuts" are for spending that will occur in 2006-2011. Here's the scoop from the Defense News:
Defense News
January 10, 2005
Pg. 1
At first glance, Program Budget Decision 753, the budget document that leaked from the Pentagon Jan. 3, seems to presage a landscape littered with popular weapons programs crippled by billions of dollars in cuts.
An aircraft carrier would be retired, the F/A-22 stealth fighter program would be cut by one-third, fewer destroyers and submarines would be built, V-22 tilt-rotors and C-130J cargo plane programs would be curtailed.
But a closer look shows that many of these cuts don’t hit until 2007, 2008 or later. And at least some of the cuts that do hit in 2006 will be covered by a supplemental request to cover war costs totaling as much as $100 billion.
"Most of the cuts are in the out years," said an aide to a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. For practical purposes, that means they can be restored to the budget later without actually affecting the targeted programs.
The sudden appearance of Program Budget Decision (PBD) 753, a 26-page spending plan dated Dec. 23 and marked "For Official Use Only," caused a furor on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, and in defense industry boardrooms around the country.
This document will shape a White House 2006 budget request that is expected to total $418.1 billion, a senior Pentagon official said. The supplemental request will be on top of that.
The inevitability of the supplemental allows the Pentagon to keep growth in the Army budget below the rate of inflation. The 2006 budget request will seek only $98.6 billion, an increase of $1.4 billion over last year’s request to Congress. but roughly $3.7 billion less than the Defense Department’s initial 2006 budget projections for the service, according to draft budget documents reviewed by Defense News. Meanwhile, the Navy and Air Force shares would each grow by approximately $6 billion over the president’s 2005 budget submission, to $125.3 billion and $126.1 billion.
Of the $6 billion in cuts PBD 753 calls for in 2006, $2.4 billion — well less than half — comes from procurement, research and development accounts. The rest is in personnel and operations and maintenance — accounts that are easily rolled into the war supplemental.
The DoD leadership and the services are still working on the budget figures. The final version of the president’s defense budget request will go to Capitol Hill on Feb. 7, and Pentagon officials have been asked to keep the working budget figures under wraps until then.
"It is too early to be discussing figures," said Pentagon spokeswoman Marine Corps Lt. Col. Roseanne Lynch. "We are a nation at war and our first priority is to ensure our men and women in uniform have all they need to win."
She said the budget submission will adequately fund the military’s modernization initiatives.
Hill Reaction
But Senate and House members whose states and districts would suffer job losses were swift to denounce the proposed cuts. Meanwhile, congressional aides pored over the plan, searching for deeper meaning.
The 26-page document leaked from the Pentagon so swiftly that in a matter of hours on Jan. 3, paper and electronic copies of PBD 753 were in the hands of congressional staffers, journalists and defense analysts.
"This circulated very quickly — as opposed to things that this administration doesn’t want to get out," said an aide to a senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
Evidence of a well-planned leak prompted many to wonder why.
"They leaked it because they want to show that defense is paying its share," said a Democratic House Armed Services Committee staffer.
A plan that calls for big cuts in defense may be intended to pave the way for deep cuts in other programs, such as housing, veterans programs and support for national parks, he said.
"It gives the administration cover to take the milk out of school lunch programs," another Democratic staffer suggested.
President George W. Bush "wants to blow people’s socks off with the budget this year," said the Republican aide. "It’s going to be bare-bones to show that he’s serious about getting the deficit under control."
The president "set some unbelievable targets" for agencies to meet by paring their budgets for 2006, he said.
Bush has pledged to reduce the federal deficit, make tax cuts permanent and reform Social Security. But to do so while also paying for the war in Iraq will require substantial cuts in popular non-defense programs, the staffer said.
Dov Zakheim, the former Pentagon comptroller, now a partner at Booz Allen Hamilton, Fairfax, Va., sees the proposed cuts as a serious effort to scale back spending.
"I’ve no doubt the [Defense] department would not have taken on anything of this magnitude and would have resisted these cuts unless there was clear leadership from the White House," Zakheim said. "This marks a clear break from the last several years."
Though many of the program cuts identified in the PBD have been debated for a while — reducing the F/A-22 order and the number of aircraft carriers — external budget pressures forced the Pentagon to act, Zakheim said.
At the end of fiscal year 2004 in September, the U.S. federal budget deficit was $413 billion. According to projections by the Congressional Budget Office the deficit will stay above $300 billion each year through the end of the decade if the Bush administration makes the tax cuts permanent.
"It’s a clear reflection of budget realities," Zakheim said of the proposed cuts in defense spending. "I would not in any way dismiss these actions as a charade."
What ‘Cuts’ Means
PBD 753 calls for $6 billion in cuts in 2006 and $30 billion in cuts through 2011.
But the cuts are to previously projected increases in defense spending, not to the defense budget itself. With the cuts outlined for 2006, the military "would still be spending $12.5 billion more than they are in 2005," said the aide to the Appropriations Committee member.
After making the $6 billion in cuts called for by PBD 753, the 2006 defense budget would be about $418 billion, according to a draft version of other Pentagon budget documents. About $20 billion is earmarked for nuclear programs managed by the Department of Energy, pushing total spending for 2006 to $438 billion.
The 2005 defense budget contains $420.6 billion. The most eye-catching cuts outlined in PBD 753 don’t occur in 2006.
For example, there are no significant reductions to the F/A-22 until 2009. Then, by 2011, $10.5 billion would be cut from the program.
The Virginia-class submarine program receives a $64.3 million increase in 2006 before cutting begins in 2007. One submarine is deleted in 2009 and 2010, with $5.3 billion in cuts through 2011.
The Navy’s DD(X) destroyer program is untouched in 2006 and receives increases of $115 million in 2007 and $78 million in 2008 before cutting begins.
The LPD-17 amphibious ship program receives $140 million in 2006 and $285 million in 2007 before reductions begin in 2008. The tenth ship in the program — to be ordered in 2008 — is cut, along with $953 million through 2011. That could cap the total LPD-17 class buy at nine ships, assuming the ninth ship appears as expected in the 2006 budget request.
Cuts to the Air Force’s C-130J program are nearly offset by increases in the Marines’ refueling version of the aircraft in 2006. Deeper cuts — 20 planes and $1.5 billion — begin in 2007.
Even the aircraft carrier headed for retirement receives an increase of $134.3 million in 2006 before budget reductions of $1.2 billion set in 2007-11.
One reason for pushing most of the cuts to the out-years is that "it’s hard to cut things in the next fiscal year because so much spending is already in the pipeline in the form of advance procurement," said Christopher Hellman, director of the Project on Military Spending Oversight.
"You’re much better able to cut things that are further in the future." Of course, targeting future spending gives program supporters more time to organize a defense, he said.
Protecting Programs
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were quick to defend programs where cuts would hurt their constituents.
On Jan. 4, the day Congress returned to session, while House and Senate members mingled in their respective chambers and new members were being sworn in, staffers who work for Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., were already at work drafting legislation to block the carrier retirement.
Before day’s end, they produced a bill that would require the U.S. Navy to keep "not less than 12 operational aircraft carriers."
Nelson and other members of the Florida congressional delegation fear the doomed carrier is the USS John F. Kennedy, based in Mayport, Fla.
Meanwhile, Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both Republicans from Maine, decried plans to lop two DD(X) destroyers, which could jeopardize jobs at Maine’s Bath Iron Works shipyard.
Members of the Georgia congressional delegation, led by Sen. Saxby Chambliss, fired a letter to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card decrying the proposed cuts to the F/A-22 and C-130J, which are built by Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Ga.
Counting on It
Defense industry officials are counting on that kind of congressional reaction to forestall the cuts.
"Our members have been strong supporters of the president’s defense program. These cuts took us by surprise," said John Douglass, president of the Aerospace Industries Association.
It is impossible to execute a strategy of pre-emption without air superiority, airlift and ships — the very programs the PBD proposes to cut, he said.
If the cuts are enacted, the industry impact would be significant, Douglass said.
But what’s likely to happen is that "Congress will take a hard look at this and make up their own minds about whether cuts of this type fit into the president’s overall program of fighting the war on terrorism," he said. In that case, relatively few cuts would be made.
Pete Steffes is less optimistic.
"It’s very likely that some of the cuts will occur," said Steffes, vice president for government policy at the National Defense Industry Association. War costs have made some acquisition spending cuts unavoidable.
"Republican hawks will want to put money back into these programs, but where are they going to get it from?" he asked.
For the defense industry the cuts would mean "not necessarily a downturn, but the beginning of major defense realignment," Steffes said.
"This not the death knell for the defense industry," said Hellman. "There is not a single program termination in the PBD. There are reductions and slowdowns."
Consider the situation that confronts Lockheed Martin, one of the companies that would be hit hardest if cuts outlined in the PBD were to be approved. Lochkeed’s F/A-22 and C-130J programs would be trimmed by $10.5 billion and $3.7 billon respectively. But Hellman notes the PBD does not touch Lockheed’s Joint Strike Fighter; at $200 billion, it is history’s most expensive weapon program.
Wall Street’s Take
This is why some Wall Street analysts are shrugging off the news, saying the proposed reductions may ultimately have little effect on arms makers.
For one thing, only $2.4 billion of the proposed $6 billion cuts in 2006 would come out of acquisition, research and development accounts. For another, officials at most major defense companies say they expect lawmakers to restore some of the more drastic reductions — certainly, before the bulk of the planned reductions begin in 2008 and beyond.
In a flurry of notes in the last few days, several analysts advised investors to buy defense company stocks, pointing out that post-election profit-taking and the news of budget cuts has already shaved 10 to 12 percent of many defense shares in recent weeks. Many analysts believe that defense companies will be fine in the long term — beyond 2009 — as budget pressures ease and programs on the chopping block survive.
But others say the proposed reductions could force U.S. defense giants to rethink their strategy, sell off poorly performing businesses, and diversify to make up for lost business.
"Is it realistic to believe that somehow money will be found to put Humpty Dumpty together again, or is this a harbinger of a serious fracture that will reshape the strategies of defense companies?" said Byron Callan, analyst at Merrill Lynch, New York.
The cost of fighting insurgents in Iraq, the pressure to cut federal budget deficits, and the billions of dollars it would cost to privatize Social Security are driving Pentagon budget cuts, Callan said.
Callan said defense company strategists are quietly planning for permanent cuts.
"Publicly, they have masked the angst and concern, but this will eventually change," he said.
Callan told his clients in a Jan. 6 note that defense giants might pursue more acquisitions, including non-defense ones; consolidate aircraft production lines, reduce shipbuilding capacity or join hands with non-U.S. firms. One possibility, Callan said: A Lockheed-Airbus team could offer Airbus’ A400M airlifter to the U.S. Air Force in place of Lockheed’s C-130J aircraft.
The short-term effect on small- and medium-sized defense companies that are seeking to sell themselves to bigger firms may not be so great either, said Paul Serotkin, president of Minuteman Ventures, a Boston-based investment banking firm that specializes in such companies. Simply being associated with a weapons program that is likely to be cut could depress valuation, Serotkin said.
Tomorrow I take the GMAT. After that it's all about completing two more apps this week and one no later than the 21st. I'll have that last one in by next week - and then I'm a free man for a bit until I start applying for some fellowship money.
This shit is stressful. I wish I'd made up my mind sooner and worked a bit faster along the way. The wedding didn't help, either. At least the effort I've put in over the past couple months is helping things move more quickly now. It's about time - I'm right down to the wire!
Sorry to keep it vague on the schools, but that's the way this is gonna be. Posting should resume to it's normal crawl in a week or so. I hope you (yes, you!) have a wonderful year.
As promised, we've put up an assload of wedding photos. We're still in the process of ordering and commenting them, but rest assured we shall get the task done. It's somewhat unbelievable - I have a directory with over 2GB of wedding photos! This afternoon it took a few hours over gigE to move them from one machine to another.
If you'd like photo print prints (it seems to be an optical process; the digital prints look just like 35mm prints and are on photo paper), let me know and I'll order you up some. Please keep in mind that not all of these were taken by the photographers (Harvey Vlahos and his wife), so some may be less printable than others. If you want to print them yourselves, you can click on the pictures to get to the full resolution images. If you want to get in touch with the photographer directly, you can call Vlahos Communications at 518.861.8176. They're located in Altamont, NY and I think they did a great job on our wedding.
This weekend I'm up with Jenny at my parent's house. We primarily came up to finalize some of the wedding plans, although seeing my parents and helping around the house was pretty high on the list, as well. The cake is all lined up, the photography is 85% done and the flowers seem all set. Tomorrow we finalize the catering (minor tweaks) and write up a list of music for our musicians to play.
We also managed to help out my Dad by stacking some lumber, helping load a lot of firewood into a friend's truck (our tree) and moving a lot of branches up to the road to be ground up by the town (branches of the tree).
I missed some ultimate and wish I hadn't, but it's good to be home spending time with my folks, talking about politics, tidying up loose ends and enjoying the fresh, relatively cool air of upstate NY. I've also found some time to read my Jane Jacobs book as Jenny and I are sleeping separately while up here (don't ask; it'll all be moot in a couple weeks).
I can't forget to pick up some earplugs before we go to the airport tomorrow.
Who are these people/bots that post penis enlargement and drug links to blogs? Sheesh, show some fucking respect. Talk about the low lifes of the intarweb. I know there's a plugin out there to help me out, but I haven't yet had the time/interest to install it. Now may be that time.
In other, more interesting news, I submitted our wedding invitation design to the printer this morning. We almost went the whole 9 yards, but didn't go for letterpress on account of cost and time constraints. The invites will be offset printed on a nice quality cardstock with a deep brown ink. Jenny drew the artwork and I did all the layout. It should look sharp.
This story about the suspicious behavior of Syrian men on a Northwest flight has apparently developed a life of its own. Sarah showed it to me yesterday and I guess we came upon it a little bit later than a lot of people. Here's a followup story by the same woman.
This stuff is rather scary. It also points out that the FBI and DHS are still not doing thier jobs very well. After a plane full of people reported the suspicious behavior, they apparently checked to see if these gentlemen were on any watch lists. Since they weren't, they let them go. Not much later, it turned out they were in the country with expired visas. Now, I'm no expert, but would really suspicious behavior and expired visas be enough to dig a little deeper into someone's reasons for flying in the U.S? How hard is it to check if a visa is valid, anyhow? Even if you only had suspicious behavior to go on, shouldn't that warrant investigation? Aren't lists and the people who compile them fallable? Aren't there ever any new terrorists that haven't made it to a list yet? C'mon people, see beyond the fucking list.
Also, it's clear that our "intelligence agencies" aren't full of very intelligent people. People who work on planes say this odd behavior has been happening a decent amount. Yet DHS says there's no "intelligence" on whether people are probing our security systems. Absolute hogwash, I say - these journalists were able to find reliable HUMINT that this shit is indeed going on with a simple interview!
Our government's "security organizations" are wasting money. Their new strategy seems to be to try to keep us scared with vague threats, but not actually bother with any work to find out where the real threats are. Common sense still seems to elude these folks and they still refuse to talk to one another and outside good sources of information.
Personally, I'd rather see all the money we throw away to security and defense go into protecting something more tangible, like our environment. Ignoring the threat wouldn't be as bad as most think. After all, you're much more likely to get hit by a bus on the way home than blown up by some fundamentalist nutjob.
I spent the last week up with my parents. I helped out with making built-in furniture for the house and spent the weekend planning our wedding with Jenny and our moms. It was (somewhat surprisingly) a lot of work, but we have a wedding date and location.
We're to be wed on Sunday, October 10, 2004 in Altamont, NY at the Altamont Manor. For those of you not familiar with the Capitol Region, Altamont is right next to Voorheesville - my home town (well, village). The Manor itself is a 10 minute drive (or so) from my house, which is very convenient. It has a very nice L-shaped lawn, complete with view, gardens and wrap-around porch, as well as a large indoor area that can be used in case of inclement weather. We're planning on doing everything outside, so hopefully the weather will cooperate and be nice (i.e., sunny, warm and not windy).
The event is going to be a brunch affair (our favorite meal), with people arriving around 11am. The actual ceremony is currently scheduled to start at high noon and the whole thing should be done no later than 3-4pm.
Holy cow. You thought you'd seen some pretty whack stuff before, but then this (alt: 1, 2) comes along. The INDUCE Act, or "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act" (!), seeks to generally make technology illegal. By the way, doesn't the title of the bill read like something out of the Onion?
As if it's not bad enough that:
(a) "In the case of an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation"1, or
(b) In general, a copyright "endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death"2
Oh, no! Now, implication-blind conservatives want to prevent us from exercising fair use over copyrighted material we've bought (or leased) by outlawing anything that could be used to infringe on a copyright! One of these days, you'd think that these bozos would grab hold of the idea that all these protections are stifling innovation, competition and are eventually going to put the U.S. at the bottom of the world's technology pile.
1,2 "Copyright Law of the United States of America." Title 17 U.S.Code, Sec. 301. 1998 ed. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html
So, yeah, I'm alive. I haven't post here in a while, though.
Stuff that's been going on:
Someone at the Post seems a little punchy today - or perhaps it's just time for some healthy, sharp pessimistic critiques of those in power. Read on for a crack about Kerry, the embarassement that is our President, a posh trip for our Secretary of Energy and malcontent at the Agency Formerly Known as FEMA.
In other news, it's nice to see how well a self-regulated energy and automobile industry can keep our air clean. I swear, if people don't start catching on at the fast one all these big polluters are playing on us all I'm going to go out and... Well, I don't really know what I'll do. I'll probably just bitch about it to a few friends and stew on it for a day before I try to stop thinking about it so I can get to sleep at night. Oh, and in response to the utility industry's claims that "They need the federal government's help" - FUCK YOU. Why don't you consider taking some of that profit you've been raking in and turning it back into your goddamn infrastructure. You mean I'm supposed to inhale your shit, watch you get rich spoiling my atmosphere and then pay for you to only partially clean up your act? My ass. C'mon capitalism boys, stop being such a greedy, lazy pigs who rely on the government dole and stand up straight on your own! Fucking hypocrites.
Okay, now I'm getting riled up. Time to take a step back and remember that people are sometimes surprisingly selfish pricks, but that other times they're prefectly nice, compassionate, selfless individuals with a sense of responsibility. It's too bad that so many of those with power fall into the former category.
Well, I'm up at the University of Wisconsin for Condor Week. Condor is the grid tool we (I) use at RAND to do high throughput computing. The flight was easy and now it's time for some dinner and a beer. I'm going to State St. - where the trendy-looking cabbie who looked my age told me to go.
As an aside, I'm staying at UW's Fluno Center. It's pretty nice. There are Sun Rays all over the place - including the rooms. You're handed a smart card with your room key and presumably you have a stable environment for your entire visit. Upon loading things up (by inserting my card) I was really surprised to see the OS is Windows Server 2003 (looks like XP). I guess the thin client can connect you to anything... but Windows? Popular OS, I suppose.
Okay, time to turn off the AACs and go check out Madison! I think I'm going to go full-on blog style the next couple days and post about the conference as it happens. We'll just have to see.
TEGAM International has sued this poor fellow (who's primary occupation is "researcher in molecular biology in both the department of Genetics of Harvard University and the department of molecular biology in the Massachusetts General Hospital") for revealing flaws in its anti-virus software.
How can you be labelled a terrorist and then charged with "counterfeiting and concealment of counterfeiting" for revealing that a firm was lying about a) the capabilities and b) the implementation of its software? He didn't even reveal the information in a libelous way! I'm perplexed at how the judge could have let this case make it onto his docket; it is pure rubbish and should've been thrown out a long time ago. If anything, the firm should be the one being sued: for false advertising and defamation.
This seems like a pretty biased article to me - nitpicking Clarke's story (which admitedly seems to be slightly embellished for interviews) to the point of trying to discredit him. If these guys were this critical of the Administration's misleading, fluctuating legalese they'd probably be calling them traitors by now!
I am somewhat surprised to see such a conservative viewpoint coming from Time. I don't read Time, well, ever - but it seems to me that they need a lesson on objectivity.
Just in case you were curious what happens to those fine citizens and public servants who do something to anger or challenge the crazy neocons, take a look at this unfortunate story of Jesselyn Radack.
This is a very well written article detailing the neocon takeover of the Pentagon's OSP. Reading this is disheartening, depressing and enraging. In all honesty, if the system of government is being commandeered by these right-wing wackos from the top down, how can anything be done about it? Perhaps voting out Bush would help, as it would in turn lead to the flushing of these unscrupulous political apointees, but much of the damage has already been done.
Jenny, who interacts with "normal people" far more than I, was talking with a cowboy who says that he likes Bush because he sticks to his word (he said he was going to invade Iraq & waste all of our resources on keeping people paranoid and he did). That's fine - keeping your word is an important thing - but what happened to part where you examine the supporting evidence/rationale behind someone's statement of action? I've started learning a bit about Buddhism (more on this later), and one way to make yourself a better person is to think positively about others, but how can I think positively when there is massive amount of evidence that shows most Americans are too shallow to carefully think anything through? Perhaps they are all capable, but they choose not to. The end effect, though is that the American public seems oblivious to complexity and prone to being suckers for over-simplified, unfounded, leading statements.
Bush regularly makes mis-statements that are widely publicized (seeding ideas) and then quietly retracts or qualifies them (which does nothing to weed out false notions in these shallow people's heads). This strategy of initially making misleading statements works wonders on developing support amongst the ambivalent, shallow populous but is so incredibly morally (I debated throwing that word in here) reprehensible that it should be a criminal offense!
Bah. I'm going to have to stop thinking about this now because it's putting me in a foul mood. Anyhow, without further adieu, the article most graciously being hosted by Salon.
After a multi-day outage, beefstew.net is back up!
So, here's what happened. Monday afternoon Comcast had an outage; I don't know exactly what went wrong (they wouldn't say), but sufficed to say lots of people lost connectivity. When they restored connections, the massive upset caused effectively static dynamic IPs to get switched around. At this point, everyone but poor old me had a connection - this was sometime Monday evening.
On Tuesday, I assumed they were still out and called in mid-day. I went home for lunch, and while I was there, spoke with a tech who couldn't think her way out of a box with only two sides. Surprisingly, she was a level 2 who didn't even know the difference between OS 9 and OS X (in addition, the Roman numeral X kept confusing her). I digress. At this point, to make use of whatever troubleshooting ability they had, I plugged Jenny's iBook directly into my cable modem. Even it couldn't get an IP (and because it is far less complicated than my FreeBSD firewall, I knew there was something fishy going on)! This left the techs very confused and they told me I had to call Apple to get it fixed. Yeah, right.
So, I went back to work and fretted over my loss of connectivity. Tuesday evening, I went home and tried to fix things. I called Comcast again and spoke with someone who knew what he was talking about. He didn't seem to know a thing about BSD, or even some small details of packets and ports, but he had a functional understanding and decent mental model of how to troubleshoot these things. We tried, rather civally to get the OS X box to grab an IP from their server. When it wouldn't, he suggested I go turn in my modem for a replacement. To me, this sounded like a great idea. I did that and came back with a new Motorola Surfboard.
Take some time out for an errand (another post) and what ensued was a very late night of frustration. When plugged in directly, OS X now could get an IP. This was good, as it meant that I didn't have to deal with Comcast anymore, but FreeBSD (my firewall) was not pulling one down as it should.
Over the course of the night, I tried just about everything I could - including swapping out a NIC, reconfiguring my firewall, playing with the dhclient command-line and surfing for some answers on Jenny's directly-connected iBook. I learned a bit about how DHCP works - namely the ports and protocols it uses - and what needs to be let through on the firewall for the damn system to work.
As you can see, I'm leading up to the fact that my whole problem (after Tuesday evening) was due to my firewall's busted-ass rules. It was really the informataion on this helpful and informative site that got me going, again. It had information that let me view some informative settings on my cable modem (viewable at http://192.168.100.1) and begin to understand where packets were going and where they weren't. The info on swapping computers on a cable modem really gave me the final inspiration to go to bed with the cable modem powered off and try my new rules (which I was confident in) in the morning.
Sure enough, this morning, after many hours of being off, my DHCP lease expired and the MAC address of Jenny's iBook was forgotten by Comcast's DHCP system (Oracle, I was told). With my spiffy new rules in place, my dhclient was able to broadcast it's plea for an IP and RECEIVE all of the reply it needed to set up my external interface! I can't tell you how happy this makes me.
I'm completely surprised that I could have a functional firewall working along for so long with a faulty configuration. I'm guessing that at some point during the build of my firewall, I had things less tightened down which was when I successfully grabbed an IP. This info is cached and its relevant details must not have changed for over a year - until this big outage when addresses were mixed up a bit. *sigh* I wonder what else isn't working as it should and is either letting in dangerous traffic, or going to fail at some point in the future.
So, I've basically stopped learning higher-level programming structures and algorithms to figure out lower level syntax and other compiling/linking problems. I think I've finally got a grasp of how header and source files are laid out and distribute the code, but I don't think I've worked on "real programming" material for days.
Well, I'm in the middle of a friekin' linker error. What this means is that everything in my program compiles fine, but when it comes time to stick it all together the process fails. Here's a more technical explanation as well as one with pretty pictures.
I've been assured that linker errors are among the most difficult to debug. If you have a spare moment and a touch of kindness in your heart, you can help me figure out what the bloody hell I'm doing wrong. You can do this by downloading this zip of my program, its Makefile and the errors I'm receiving. Then, with your thinking cap on, take a look at the situation and provide a thought or two on what could be going wrong. I'm not asking you solve my problems for me, but any help that bags this bug would be fantabulous.
I'm looking forward to when I progress beyond the CS that is all about debugging; being a beginner is painful.
Addendum: I found a Makefile error thanks to CSII at UMD (the link above): "It's a common mistake to assume that other .cpp files are ever dependencies." Why, yes it is. And I'm very common.
So, after MANY, MANY.... MANY hours, I just finished my first C++ program. I'm not perfectly satisfied with my work. I don't think I wrote the cleanest code in the world, in fact:
...BUT, as far as I can tell what is there does the job with absolutely zero errors.
The program is designed to manipulate polynomials. I didn't quite finish everything (I spent too much time making a generic templated linked list class and then deriving my polynomial class from that), but I was happy enough to hand it in. I taught myself a TON over the past two weeks and I'm feeling much more comfortable with the basics than I was before. That's not to say I feel confident like I do in Perl, just that I'm picking things up. I can't say how frustrating it is to have a professor and TA who do not reply to your emails and are generally not good teachers.
I really just want to take a good CS course, so that someone can tell me how I need to approach these problems. Give me the tools and I'll solve problems for a lifetime. Show me C++ by stupid little examples and I'll never be able to code even a simple polynomial manipulation engine. Okay, I haven't slept much in the past two days, I'm going to continue this story later.
I'm back!
I bet you loyal readers thought I'd died or something. Well, actually - uhh.... no. I've been in a bit of a communications funk, but I think I'm slowly crawling out. It's really been since Christmas since I last typed some stuff into here, so I'll catch you all up.
I visited my parents and Jenny's parents in New York (Albany & Pond Eddy, respectively) for Christmas week. I took a week of unpaid leave from Mitretek and really lived it up, up north. It was great to be home, relax and see everything that's going on. As you probably don't know, my parents are having a bit of construction done. They're growing out their bedroom and the two rooms underneath. Actually, they think of it more as adding a room on the ground floor and getting more space in the rooms above it, but who's keeping track. The upshot of the construction is that my parents now have a proper-large bedroom, my dad's woodshop is going to be much more spacious (yeah!) and there will be a new room that is accessible through what we call the "computer room". Exciting. Pictures can be seen in the appropriate gallery link on your left.
As you probably have heard by now, I'm no longer working for Mitretek. That's right, I'm back at RAND. The change has been great. I've stopped caring about all things biometrics and border control (finally) and have been working on a lot of defense projects. To date, the most prominent occupation of time has been for a project devoted to reforming the way the DoD does its Joint Battle Management Command & Control (JBMC2). You see, there are lots of systems that are currently used to track forces (friendly, neutral and unfriendly - blue, white and red) and generally manage a battle. These systems currently don't necessarily talk to one another and are often run by people who don't necessarily talk to one another. For example, a hypothetical (I really haven't learned much of the real details of what systems do what, but that seems to be on its way): let's say the Army doesn't have a minute-by-minute capability to communicate where everyone is located. This means that fires may be allocated inefficiently, ground forces don't know exactly where their comrades are, or worse yet the Air Force jet that's coming screaming in with four 2000lb Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) may drop them a few hundred feet off position, accidentally obliterating the poor infantry guy trying not to get shot.
In reality, there are systems in place that provide means for Joint Close Air Support (JCAS) - the latter portion of the situation I was describing above - but I was just trying to make a point that the services and their systems could benefit from a network-centric model where they are all constantly sharing information to improve everyone's picture of the battlespace (i.e. improve the common operational picture (COP) shared by ground, air & sea forces and commanders).
My particular task is to help plan the data strategy for this future capability (network-centric JBMC2). One of my first observations was that not everyone needs the same amount, type, precision, or timeliness of data. A tank commander has very different data needs, from a fighter pilot, from a missile defense battery, from a commanding officer sitting 100km away. Therefore, a major component of a successful data strategy will be to be able to send only the appropriate data at the right intervals, keeping in mind data incompatibilities, bandwidth, processing and other constraints. I'm going to leave my discussion there, because this stuff gets sensitive pretty quickly and I really don't want to get into trouble.
In other news, I've started taking a CS course at GWU in DC. I was going to take two, but one was so bad I had to drop it (I was not about to pay $2700 for a professor who could probably not manage formal proofs). As it is, the course I'm in is sub-mediocre. I'm approaching it as though it's a guided self-tutorial to C++ and data structures. It's not a pleasant start to my CS career, but you take what you can get, no?
Enough of that. For those of you curious about my Stylistic LT - I haven't been doing too much on it. I did get the initrd all set so that it mounts the second CF card as root, but I am somewhat stalled in building the root filesystem. I found some cool Debian tools to help me along. Eh; I should've been taking notes so that my trials could save someone else some time! Ah, yes: debootstrap. It consists of scripts that you can use to install Debian to a non-root directory (i.e. install Debian to a CF card). I had to change some of the packages listed in the script (to make it work) and that reminds me I was going to share that fact with the maintainer so that it "just works" in the future.
Okay, my fingers are getting cold and I have to start on a C++ project for class. Cheers.
So, in the world of this machine, lots has changed. Not so much in my personal life (aside from a nice trip home), but lots on this machine. A couple weeks ago, I believe my primary desktop machine (Debian linux; unstable branch) was rooted. As this blog is hosted on that desktop box, when it went away, so did the site. I'm not completely sure that the machine was actually rooted, but there was enough doubt to make the conservative position that, indeed, it was.
In an ideal world, I would've just restored some the system directories from backup and called it a day. It just so happened, though, that the attack occured during my regularly scheduled full weekly backup. This meant that I couldn't trust the integrity of my backup archives. Therefore, the only choice was to reinstall from scratch. This choice was eased by the knowledge that this machine had been running for a few years since a fresh install - meaning that there was likely a significant amount of cruft that would disappear when I put things back together from scratch.
The actualy reinstall of the box went quite smoothly. I didn't have to worry about archiving most of my personal crap - non-system files & non-Debian packaged software - because I keep most all of that on seperate partitions. After a quick burn of my /usr/local and /etc directories, I booted off a Debian CD, wiped root, usr and var directories clean and installed the testing branch from the web. Over the past week, or so, I've been slowly putting everything back where it was (hey, what's the rush?). The X server was first, then Mozilla, then fonts (what a pain in the arse!), then some other basic functionality, like my printer, infrared and Palm support. Finally, tonight was Apache and MovableType.
With everything basically up (ooh, I need to configure my UPS), now it's time to install a good intrusion detection system. Tripwire doesn't seem to be Debianized, so I may look into some other options, but there's definitely going to be something there - not knowing what had changed that morning I realized something was wrong was really painful. Some good did arise out of the ashes, though, I freed up a gig in my usr directory!
I'm going to get my ribs x-rayed this morning. The pain increased significantly last night making it quite painful to take deep breaths (again). The pain had been dying down, but I must've done something to aggravate the problem again. I'm not particularly worried about the result either way, as there's obviously nothing terribly threatening wrong with me (I haven't died in the last 6 days), but it would've been much nicer if this had just healed and let me play in the finals this Sunday.
For those non-M.D.s among us, I found some easy to understand medical information describing the treatment of fractured ribs. Basically, the prescription goes something like this: ibuprofen, a belt of some sort (may work, may not) and time.
So, there you have it, we're engaged! I have a fiancée!
Just this afternoon I picked up a new monitor. Yesterday, while waiting for some code to run (at work), I cruised the for sale section of craigslist.org. Lo and behold, I saw a 19" LCD panel being sold at very low price. It was a Dell 1901FP, quite a nice piece of hardware. When I switched jobs, I briefly thought about buying a new monitor and looked at LCDs, only to decide they were too expensive. This Dell and a Samsung were the only two I would've considered buying.
Anyhow, after a quick email to the guy, I learned that the price was going to be a full $175 less than what Dell was selling it for. I was somewhat puzzled, since the monitor was advertised as being in an unopened box from Dell (which turned out to be true) - but who wants to look a gift horse in the mouth?
I couldn't resist the offer. I took off work early this afternoon (I worked very late last night), met up with Jenny, had lunch, had her get a cashier's check from her bank and went down to L'Enfant Plaza to meet the guy. Everything checked out, and I now sit here typing on this fine new monitor. No dead pixels, it's under warranty and it is damn sharp looking. You can see a pic of it here, or read its specs on Dell's site.
So, I woke up this morning with an acute pain in my left shoulder (under the blade). It hurts most when I inhale deeply, such as when yawning. I wonder what the hell happened last night to cause this; I may go out and get a heat pad.
Also new are some photos in the gallery. There's an entirely new gallery, Sunrise & Sunsets, as well as new photos in the Cool Pictures gallery. You can find links on the left, as usual.
Okay, back to work.
It's certainly been a while since I've posted an entry. At least one of you thought this was because I was spending too much time with Jenny. Au contraire. I've been struggling with a major life decision - if/what/where to go to grad school.
If: I'm as certain I'll ever be that I want to go. So, not really up for grabs, this hasn't been stressing me out at all.
What: As in, what the fuck are you going to study? Well, this has caused me much consternation for the past... oh, year!?! First, I thought economics would be good for me. I knew a friend who was going, we find similar things interesting and I liked it during undergrad. But there was this nagging reminder of the grad students I witnessed first hand in the basement of Robinson Hall the summer I worked for Professor Putterman on a UTRA. And the math, oh the mathematical nature of it all. It seems (I honestly don't know for sure, though) as if you never get to think about economics, because you're too busy trying to figure out a way to represent that with some funky equation! If you know me, you know that's not my style. So econ was out (of course, this decision was only made after I had decided to "suck it (the math) up" and just do the blasted thing).
Economics was replaced by what is basically public policy. For a long while I thought I'd hit the happy medium of math, econ & thought. Perhaps I had, but the number of schools that formally offer the faculty who have experience analyzing technology policy were quite limited. I am still interested in how patents hinder technological progress, what makes Open Source work and a host of other related issues, but that sort of work is not what comes most naturally to me. Please keep in mind that I have already started applying to public policy programs.
This paragraph will now bring you in line with my current thinking - a CS degree. My friend Matt believes I will need to take the CS GREs and really lobby hard to make up for my lack of CS background, but at least Stanford's program page says you don't kneed an undergraduate degree to be considered. This is somewhat heartening. The logic behind CS is that a) it's at the core of what I'm interested in, and b) with true underlying knowledge and understanding of what I currently enjoy working with (computers & networks), I will be able to be a valuable part of many different kinds of teams in many different settings. Of the things I'm looking into studying, grid computing, wireless (mesh) networking and sensor fusion are near the top of my list. An added benefit is that I foresee a demand (and funding) for knowledgeable experts in these fields. Also, at Stanford (can you tell who's site I've been reading lately), there is no formal program - you just take classes that will set you up with an appropriate breadth and focus. This means that I could learn something about the human computer interface, as well as law & technology - both good things.
Where: At each of the three steps along the way, I've looked at programs in depth. I have spreadsheets of places I'd like to apply to, complete with URLs, interesting faculty and "apply probabilities" (basically broad ranks I gave the programs). Now it's time to basically start that again for a third time. At least this time around I'm having a much easier time find things I'm truly interested in - a good sign and one that will make this program search much easier.
I'm tired today.
I'm sitting here at work with not a whole lot to do. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm trying to write a report summarizing the work my firm has done for the Department of State over the past few years. It really wouldn't be very hard if I had actually been here for the past few years, but given the fact that I haven't it's really f*cking hard. All I have to work from is two or three deliverables - and even they don't cover the full extent of what we did. So, I'm not getting anywhere very fast, which is why I don't really have a whole lot to do.
I haven't been blogging recently because I've been busy with life. This week I attended the Biometric Consortium Conference over in Crystal City. It was better than it's been in the past, probably because I went to the more scientific/research oriented presentations. I'm really looking forward to the day when I can choose what I want to work on, because it's going to be different from what I'm doing now. I don't think that I'd mind if I didn't see anything related to biometrics for a long while.
Also, I spent a good portion of an evening developed a disc (Frisbee®, for the ignorant) design for my team, Sundays at Six. I have a copy of a proof up on my web server.
Finally, I've been doing some, but not enough (during the week) grad school searching. I'm looking at public policy programs that will let me focus on economics and law. I don't want to do straight econ because that's too mathematical, but I definitely see the need to know how to model and learn more about people's behaviour. I want to work on innovation policy, figuring out what makes innovation tick and how to encourage it. I don't think that current policies are doing such a hot job. In fact, I think we're largely coasting on work that's been done in the past. Maybe I'm just ignorant (relatively easy to fix), but that's my thinking. Hopefully someday soon I'll start to be able to answer my own questions with some authority.
I actually listened to a bit of the energy debates today in Congress. The Republicans were trying to use this opportunity to push down more money (production of electricity) for natural gas, oil and, of course, coal. The Democrats largely pointed out that the grid failure was a transmission system failure and had nothing to do with generation of electricity. Some were better spoken than others, they all thanked the committee leader too much.
On the ride home, I listened to a wonderful piece on the whole energy debacle on Marketplace. Be sure to listen before it's off the web. Skip in to minute 8:15 to hear the piece I'm talking about (there's also a link to that segment just below the main show link). "Commentator and consumer activist" Jamie Court is right on the money.
I just came home and saw on Slashdot that this guy named George is trying to sell a song he downloaded from iTunes on eBay.
Reading through the discussion on George's blog, he may get shut down by eBay simply because he's not selling a physical good. That would really be too bad, because this is quite the experiment. The issues this raises are right along the lines of what I've been looking to do in grad school.
Fun fun. Now we just have to wait and see. 15 cents says this makes it to the mainstream news in two days (Friday). If I'm lucky, I'll hear about it on NPR tomorrow morning, but I'm not holding my breath.
Good news! Jenny's work trip to Seatlle is officially over. She came back this afternoon and we've had a wonderful evening so far. It was "just" a week and a half, but with starting the new job and all it's been pretty lonely.
With Jenny came the digital pictures of our hike and the prints I had gotten in Seattle of my film shots (which are currently sort of messed up, but that's another story). We'll sift through them and decide which ones are web-worthy. Hell, maybe we won't bother and just put them all up. They came out well.
So, just to fill you all in, in case you missed the news, I have a new job. I'm working for Mitretek Systems now. My two year tenure at RAND was up and I had to go. The work so far is pretty good, but my desk's ergonomics are nothing of what I had at RAND. My shoulder aches and my wrists hurt. I've gotten a doctor's note (very reminiscent of first grade, no?) saying I need an ergonomic keyboard, but they think the Kinesis I've been typing on for the past two years is too expensive. Boo hoo, I say. I notified them of this requirement before they hired me and they still made me jump through the doctor's note rigamarole. It's now been a week or so since I officially submitted the request and still no word. In the mean time, my body is bitching at me for leaving RAND's ergonomic desk, large monitor and comfy adjustable chair. Quite frankly, I'm rather pissed, but that's not going to get me anywhere. So, hopefully they'll soon realize that a comfortable employee is a productive employee. When I have to stop typing ever few minutes to give my wrists a break, I lose my train of thought and over a short amount of time will cost them waaaaay more than a paltry $300. Okay, I'll stop whining now.
Well, I've returned from the great northwest. There's so much to say, I don't know whether I'm up for punching it all in. The trip was fantasitc. There were a few snags along the way, but nothing to spend too much time fretting over.
It all started on Tuesday night. We flew over to Seattle and stayed at a Travelodge near the Space Needle. We woke up pretty early and caught a cab to the ferry. The driver dropped us off at the wrong terminal and we ended up missing the passenger only ferry we wanted to catch. That irritated me, because we could've slept for another hour if we'd been aiming for the main ferry (which carries cars and is slower than the PO one).
So, anyhow, we made it over to Bremerton (west of Puget Sound) and got picked up by the car rental place. Of course they only had one car on hand (that wasn't what we wanted), so we took it and ended up exchanging it for a little piece of crap death-trap without power steering up in Port Angeles. The drive up to Port Angeles was without incident and quite easy.
Throughout the trip I kept noticing the contrast between industry and civilization to the natural surrounding. The land is very beautiful, and really enhances the shoddy/dirty appearance of man's presence (by east coast standards most buildings are of Appalachian or rural NY quality). When you're in rural areas (virtually our entire trip) everything looks quite tired or very heavy-duty industrial-like. And when I say industrial, I mean dirty, messy, rusty & functional. There's lots of evidence of logging - not the least of which is huge swaths of young growth where forest has been clear-cut and then seeded (tree farms). Also, down in the industrial portions of Seattle and the west end of Port Angeles the dirty, run-down fishing, shipping and logging bases remind you of what goes into producing that lumber down at your local yard or salmon in the grocery store.
I've skipped the best part, though, the hike through the Olympic National Park! We went in at Sol Duc (pronounced "sole duck") in the early evening and hiked in a few miles to the first campsite along the Sol Duc river. It was just turning dark as we arrived. The next day we broke camp a little late and started our trek up and over to Lunch Lake. We climbed two or three thousand vertical feet through the various stages of the forest up to the ridge that separates the Hoh River valley from the Sol Duc river valley. There was some snow up there and the view was indescribably beautiful. The whole trip was blessed with great weather - and aside from the mosquitos, flies and painful feet, everything was basically perfect. After trekking for 10 hours or so, we finally made it over to Lunch Lake. Just at sunset, walking along a very narrow path on a very steep slope, approaching the junction of the high divide trail with the hoh river trail, we saw a black bear down a bit on the hillside. It was just ambling along the very steep hillside looking for berries, or somesuch. That was a pleasant bonus.
On the third and final day, we made our way across the rest of the ridge and down the mountain to Sol Duck falls. I'm somewhat hazy on a good portion of the descent because the scenery just didn't compare with that of the high divide or the trail on the way in and up. I did finally take off my boots, though, (which gave me some nasty blisters) and hike in my sandals. This is also probably part of the reason I don't remember the trail as much - I was constantly looking down to make sure I didn't twist my ankle or otherwise mis-step. With 50 pounds on your back and zero ankle support, it doesn't take much to do something stupid that will seriously hurt you. I was perfectly willing to trade the extra calf work and attention, however, for relief of the pain my boots were causing. Poor Jenny, who's feet had been fine for the trip, started to seriously hurt on the way down as her toes kept smashing up against the front of the boot. We tried very hard to be sure their fit was good in the store, but I guess we were a fraction of an inch off - and now her big toe is all purple. It'll heal, but I hope the nail doesn't fall off in the mean-time.
That takes us up to Friday afternoon. We were back at the car by the time we had started on Wednesday - thus completing a 20 mile hike in effectively two days of hiking! We kicked ass! Next time, though, I'm going to not schedule such a grueling trip. Everyone has to learn what they're capable of sometime and we did just that. Our speed uphill (jenny w/ a 35-40lb pack and me with a 50lb pack) was about 1 mile per hour. Downhill and on flats was conisderably faster, for me at least mostly hidered only by pain.
Friday night we stayed at a very nice little hotel (cheap, too) called the Waterstreet Inn in a town called Port Townsend. It was a shame we didn't get to stay longer there, but we had to be back to Bremerton by noon on Saturday to return the car. The rest of the day Saturday was spent dropping our bags off in the hotel (by the airport), taking the bus back into Seattle and wandering (gimping) around town. That afternoon was very laid back and quite enjoyable. We hung out around the public market at 3rd & Union - had lunch at a quite good deli that also served Indonesian food, walked down to Freedom Sqaure (or something like that), bought a couple books at a really big, local, awesom bookstore with very friendly and helpful staff (come to think of it, most everyone in Washington was noticeably more friendly than anyone else most everywhere I've been), took the bus back up past Union, ate a small sushi dinner in a modern restaurant with a homeless woman out front (there were homeless people all over the place in Seattle) and then took the bus back to the hotel so I could get up at 5:15 to catch a plan back to Washington.
So, Jenny and I decided where we're going to go hiking/camping. We're off to the Sol Duc Hot Springs in Washington state's Olympic National Park. Actually, the hot springs are only at the trailhead lodge - we're hiking a 19 mile loop that starts there. We're going in on the Lover's Lane trail (along a river) and then up to the High Divide trail (along a ridge that overlooks Mount Olympia) and back down to Lover's Lane via the Deer Lake trail.
Here's one account of the first stretch of trail. Also, you can read about the trail conditions on this National Park Service site.
I've already got some topos of the area we'll be hiking in (thank you USGS) from a cool printing service at our local REI and some road maps from AAA. When we get to Sol Duc, we'll purchase a couple additional topos complete with campsite markings (ours just have the trails). The trip's schedule has been outlined and now we're on to planning things down to the hour (ferry schedules). Tomorrow we'll start thinking about what to put on the menu! This trip is going to be great! I can't wait!
I'm back in Arlington. This morning I purchased a ticket to Seattle for the last half of next week. I'll be going up with Jenny, who has to be in Seattle for the following week and a half on business. We're planning on going camping, so I'm looking around for trail & campsite info, but got sidetracked this morning surfing around to new places (I don't really do that anymore).
I've found a few neat sites, mostly t
