Mikes Thoughts

The I in the McPlace

March 7, 2010 in Subterfuge | No comments

I’m not a Apple fanbois. I gave away a third generation ipod touch to a office colleague. I have a 160gb ipod classic which never is even used. So what apple device will I use? I will use my older ipod video on occasion when I am not using my Archos that is Android powered. I bought the ipod classic in Chennai because my older 60g ipod video died and they had no older models. But it sucketh. It wants to be managed by iTunes. I don’t run either of the OS’es that support that piece of crap by choice. But I can use GTKPod with it. So now I can manage it. What sucketh next? It wants to write everything to its proprietary database. MP3 files become abdqfc.mp3. What da hell is that? Why do they do that? On my 80g ipod video running Rockbox; the file names are all there. The ipod is simply a USB storage device on Ubuntu so I can rsync to it.

Then the 3d generation touch… I had it for 2 days or so. I reset it numerous times. 100k applications but all through one place. Buh bye. Now I am down to my ARchos 5 android device and the rockbox’ed video. The Archos is decent. It plays all my mp3s, stores my photos, and has enough room left over to have movies on it. How do you add music to it? Easiest way on Ubuntu is to rsync music to it or just copy and paste or whatever. Its a simple usb disk drive when you need it to be. That’s not to say that my Archos is perfect. It has its Android moments. Sometimes it gets confused when I tap too quickly. I am learning to be patient with it. I like having everything on one thing though and it runs Linux.

So what do I prefer? The database thing or the simple USB disk drive thing? Seems to me the easiest way to add stuff is when its a USB drive. Linux does things real well in that mode. Plug it in, it mounts. Copy stuff to it or from it. Music comes off clean. No strange db-cursed titles. I still wonder why Apple in their supposed media superiority did things that way. I guess to again lock us mere mortals down to using only their devices with our music that we rent from iTunes. I won’t get started with iTunes though because it took me almost 6 months to get away from it, de-DRM my music, and shift my music purchasing to amazonmp3.com.

I always wonder why MAC users prefer the arguably insane iTunes interface to their world; yet they all complain about Microsoft Outlook or entourage. You’d figure they’d grok Outlook completely after using iTunes for so long. Honestly, the two are not that dis-similar. For me, I don’t use some dedicated application to manage my music besides rsync, a command line, and a simple script.

As I said going into this; I am not a fanbois. No iPad for me in April. No MAC laptop. No i-anything if I can help it. I’ll stick with 3 to 5 year old thinkpad T60 laptops that cost $500.00 US which will take Windows 7 or Ubuntu Karmic in minutes. I’ll also just go ahead and keep my decidedly inferior Android devices which are just USB Drives.

Reaching Out

March 1, 2010 in Travel | No comments

Sometimes things change, lives change, people change. People are left behind not by choice but perhaps by chance. In my case, my mentor, friend, beer buddy, and fellow archeologist RWR was in my life. For whatever reason, I never reached back out to him, never called, wrote a letter. It was too easy to find his phone number and address. Why? Why do we punish ourselves thus? My wife had told me any number of times since about 1995 to call him, to reach out. Now RWR is 67 years old and tonite after reaching a zenith of indecision, I called him. We talked for almost an hour about the things that happened. I told RWR we loved him and missed him and that I would be coming out later in the year to see him. I’m putting a AMTRAK train trip together now to go to Los Angeles and then I’ll drive myself and my 11 year old daughter up to see RWR. She has heard the stories, listened to the private laughs my wife and I still share. She is curious. What could this be like?

The lesson I learned tonight is never do this to yourselves. Its never too late to reach out and I am so glad I listened to an old friend Nan about it. She told me to do it. Women have this sense that we men seem to not. They know what they should do in these kinds of situations and we men misery our way through it.

All I can say now is that I am relieved, happy, and will soon see my dear old friend RWR again. To hold a beer, a piece of pizza, an engaging discussion about prehistory, physical anthropology, life. Remember those old surveys, juke boxes he kicked, hotels we stayed in, and all that beer we drank. Its all good.

Wrap all this up in the Coast Starlight AMTRAK and you have a trip that will engage me, make my 11 year old enjoy, and then the real and true reward is the visit with Rog at the very end. We’ll get on board on the 24th of March and head down to Los Angeles. Have a nice room that night and get a rental car. Drive up to Lancaster and stay a few nights.

See Mike Board the Plane

February 27, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

Flash forward… 10 hours later in Singapore. After sleeping for about 4.5 hours at the transit hotel in the T3 terminal. Mike is ready. Sitting at Gate B2 because B2 is the place for the Hong Kong to SFO action. Full flight I am told. Checking diversions. Mp3 player charged. Kindle ready to go. Sleep mode soon activated.

Its interesting that after so many flights back and forth that I can finally sleep on the plane. First few flights no sleeping at all. Flying from Chennai last night was good. Fell asleep next to this rather irritating Australian guy who complained about everything. Flight 5 minutes late. “is this bloody plane going to take off today or not”. Kid crying. “shut the brat up”. Food not perfect. “what’s this crap?”. So glad to nod off and not let him up to the bathroom until he looked full and round and fully packed. I felt like saying “shut the f up. what the f is the used in complaining? the flight don’t get there any quicker with your stupid mouth moving”. But I restrained. The flight is 4 hours long. Too much time to breed angst with a neighbor. So instead, I slept and he grumbled about the bathroom. I have to admit to pretending to not hear him when he started needing to remove package in the lavatory. I was ipod’ed so volume up with Pearl Jam.

Now on to the next…

Reset the Mode

February 26, 2010 in Travel | No comments

Last day in the office here in Chennai. Spent the day in meetings with the team here and trying to get some time limited work done. This trip has been more about scheduling and finishing some significant work endeavors. I did have a chance to go to the Krishna Restaurant at New Woodlands. If you read this poor excuse of a blog you will remember, I stayed at the New Woodlands for some months before. The food there is excellent and the cuisine is vegetarian. My favoriates are the vegetable curry dishes and any of the rice dishes. Their butter Nan is very good too. I wanted to get to the Copper Chimney Restaurant and Zara but could not. The jet lag thing seems to always get me.

Anyways, getting ready to get ready here. I leave for the hotel at 6pm and then will do the dinner thing, sit around and watch TV in the room for awhile and leave around 10pm. My flight boards at 00:45am Saturday morning and then leaves at 01:15am. I land in Changi at 8am or so and then get my room at the transit hotel until about 4pm when I board SQ 2 for my fllight back home. Turn the clock 14 hours or so and I magically appear around 5pm in the evening on Saturday at SFO.

Travel mode is reset pending a few more hours at the work place here in Chennai.

Almost in Travel Mode

February 24, 2010 in Travel | No comments

Tonite is my last night this trip in Chennai. I fly out on a “red eye” at 0115 or so Saturday morning and land in Singapore at 8am. Then I have to wait 10 hours due to a slight screw-up on my part with the flights. So I am checking in to the transit hotel at Changi so I have a place to crash out for some bit of time. Then I get on the evening Singapore Airlines flight and take back off again for my 15 hour or so whirlwind tour at 30k feet. Looks like I will be back in April/May for a longer time but not sure yet.

It will be good to get home this time. I’ve had this congestion and cough for some days. Same thing everyone had at home when I was there. Not fun to travel with it so I am medicating now and have been.

I will whistle back to the states here in a few nights. Thanks to Chennai as usual for your open arms and great restaurants. Had my share of great South Indian vegetarian and some good chicken, mutton, and other stuff.

All good!

Traveling with Infrastructure

February 23, 2010 in Travel | No comments

I woke kinda early this morning because of that insatiable monster jet lag which seems intent on waking me at various early times in the morning. I got back to sleep until 6am thankfully but wanted to blog a few thoughts about the whole frequent travel and hotel thing.The basic point is:

Hotel Internet always sucks. If its wired, its in a place where you have to sit at an uncomfortable table and they go by MAC address so you are limited to how many systems can be up at a time.
Its its wireless, you can move around but there is still a limitation.

Thankfully my friend Art to the rescue my last trip to Singapore. He suggested one device to replicate wired connections and I settled for another that does the same thing. My solution is a D-Link one here. You basically plug it in using AP Mode and it basically takes the hotel internet and lets you authenticate with the hotel portal but it uses the MAC address of the Dlink and not specific systems. After plugging it and authenticating, I can bring up my netbook running Windows 7 and do work on it that I need while still having my primary Ubuntu-powered laptop running. I can even let my android phone share the IP happiness.

On wireless, I can use internet connection sharing. In this mode, I plug in a second USB wireless card but I cannot seem to get this to a reliable state sometimes. Instead if I share the connection using the wired ethernet port and this howto for doing the work using IPtables its easier. As I’ve blogged earlier, the network mangler one never worked for me at all and not for others that commented either. The IPtables one just works for both wired and wifi. Its not the same type of solution as the first, but I can get two systems up at the same time. Anyone know an easy way with Linux to share a hotel wifi connection reliably?

Anyways, I’m sure you can do all this on other devices; but the Dlink is so small and configurable and works so easily and has no antennas to bend or break. Works for me. Also pack a USB hub, a 4 port travel power strip, and some ethernet cables like a crossover and regular and you have a decent mobile warrior setup.

NO SCALE’ing effect for me

February 21, 2010 in Linux | No comments

For the first time in some years, I missed one of the best Linux shows on the earth. I have always enjoyed the quality location, the quality of the papers, and being able to “rub elbows” with the IBMs, HPs, and others in a true community setting. I hope the show was great and the folks got the usual high quality mix of fun, education, entertainment, and drinking a few beers with the various and sundry attendees.

Hope that Gareth and Ilan had a great show this year and that all my buddies attending had the usual great mix of fun and education.

Were there any T-shirts this year?

Philosophies of sun and sky

February 20, 2010 in Anthropology, Ideas | No comments

This is one of those rambling posts so move on along to here or here if you are not interested. Its Sunday morning here in the Raintree Hotel in Chennai, sun is shining here. Its beautiful outside. I’m here for another 5 days give or take. Got a lot of stuff to get done here it feels like. I sometimes feel like Chennai is more my home than California. I spent almost 7 months here last year total in large clumps of time. I honestly enjoyed it immensely even though by the time each trip ended I felt the need to go back to the US. The US is no big positive sum thing though. Everything is expensive in the Bay area. Eating, drinking, socializing, doing. It all costs and it all sucks sometimes. Family stuff at home sucks off and on still. Won’t go into that in this higher mode philosophy though. The reason perhaps I feel more at home here than there is because there is none of the BS stuff going on here like at home. Here is the work and fun thing and the cost is not so much. But on to the more existential meanderings with a few examples which I will just gently force down your throat:

Barstow, California, 90s or so. Dropped off about 30 miles outside of Barstow on this training range that was used for World War II and after armor and artillery training. The area is described here by a military occupant. Make no mistake, this place is grim and you don’t want to get lost. We heard stories from this small bar somewhere on some road in some alternate reality about a car of tourists which simply disappeared into the desert. A bunch of these unique desert inhabitants took off to find them. Months later they were accidentally found. All dead. One rather stupid person had taken off walking and was found walking exactly the wrong way. We had maps, compasses, two vehicles and a bunch of beer. Well prepared in the archeological sense. But it was hot. The heat mercilessly beat down and sand whirled in the afternoons and our little survey and excavation units disappeared completely sometimes in the whirling dervishes of sand, wind. Our supervisor would summon us back to the so-called “Land Shark” and we sit it out. Often we just ended up back at the hotel at the swimming pool with copious amounts of beer. What was learned? Well, we learned to respect the f**king desert boys and girls. The desert rules and its not a nice ruler. It will subject you to its will, it will drive you mad, it will make you all either God fearing or atheists depending on how you enter. On the other side, its wild and primitive and beautiful and full of the most complex life cycles and coalescing paths of beauty and grimness. I will remember its space and and sun and time forever. Its a philosophical idea with a 125 degree reality.

Edwards AFB, CA. The gunnery range. From here you can see the Rogers Dry Lakebed extending its 20 or so miles and you can remember all the aviation history of the place. I am walking out along a solitary jeep track with two others. One is a botanist and the other is a wildlife biologist. We all walk 30 meters apart with the road path sandwiched in the middle. We have a 4 wheel drive loaded with water, pizza, sandwiches. Its marked on the map as our start and we will end up back here in 4 hours for lunch and then drive to another spot for the afternoon. The desert here is wild and wonderful. It extends to wild looking buttes around the town of Rosamond. North a bit perhaps is another desert ville called Mojave. Both are unique little places. Rosamond is the gateway to Edwards AFB and we used to drive there every day on my commute to work. Here is a memory. Rob Fishman and I worked together there and were driving one morning. It was quiet with only Rob humming along with KLOS FM from Los Angeles. It was the Mark and Brian show I believe. I had this package of 6 donuts with the white frosting or sugar on them. I opened the package with my teeth but was squeezing the package and all this white dust flowed out and ended on my face. Rob looked over at me and did not say anything. For about a minute. Then he started laughing. I looked in the mirror. White donut powder all over my beard and face. He got to work and started telling everyone.

Anyways though, back to the story about the hiking in the desert… You reach a moment where heaven, hell, desert, sky, mountains, hills, buttes all come together into a wild menagerie of reality. Desert scapes beckon all the time to you and you see where they all meet up. Desert dwellers know the feeling. Life just begins and ends as you do the archeology there. Its wondrous and its a sun and sky moment where it all blends into a scene vividly and forever implanted.

So what can we all do to survive in our deserts? Reach to that desert, see it for what it is. I reached there and dwelt in a fantastic spot that I still miss. The stories still flow. Sometime in March or April I will return to the land of sun and sky and revisit some people I have waited too long to get back with. it will be a mix of joy and sadness I fear. Truly said, you can never go back again. But I need to. As Robert Frost commented so well,

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there’s some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

From here

Thanks Mr. Frost. You always remind of the sun and sky moments and that we all have some miles to go.

Saturday Morning Chennai

February 19, 2010 in Travel | No comments

The last few days were a travel blur for me. I left San Francsico on Singapore Airlines Flight 01 which departed at 00:05am on Wednesday. I landed in Hong Kong at around 8am on Thursday morning. Left for Singapore on the continuing saga that is SQ 01 and landed around 11:45am. Had one day in Singapore and one night. I ended doing lunch and dinner with some colleagues in the Singapore office and drank a few beers that evening. Slept for almost 11.5 hours and was rather non-responsive at 7am when I had to get up, eat breakfast, and head back to the airport.

Then it was Jet Airways 9W15 departing at 9:20am and landing at 11am in Chennai. Got to the Raintree Hotel and unpacked a bit and went to the office for about 5 hours here in Chennai. Ate dinner in the coffee shop at the Raintree. Slept again for almost 10 hours. Now its Saturday and I have some work to do that has been waiting patiently for me. I’ll be in the Chennai office for the next 5 work days and then fly back out again at 00:15am Saturday morning to Singapore. Land at 8:15am and have a 10 hour layover which I will spend at the transit hotel at Changi Airport Terminal 3. Then off I go again back home at 5:50pm and get in before i left.

So, in essence, that’s the trip for me. But here in Chennai I have some days to get back to some places in Mylapore I want to go like the New Woodlands Hotel for breakfast and tomorrow I’ll go to the Chennai Citi Centre for awhile and shop around at the Landmark store, look for some stuff for my daughter, and generally rest up. Today is a rest plus work day for me as well.

I’m happy to be back in my second “native place” and the Raintree treats me only too well. The folks here all know me so breakfast always is over-indulging in things like Masala Dosa’s. Tonite, I will eat “above sea level” on the roof at the Raintree! Woot! Its a beautiful day so evening dining under starlight should be cool. The list of places I want to go here:

BBQ Nation – search for it on my weblog. What a great place to eat.
Chola Sheraton and the Peshawri Restaurant – drink at the bar, eat at the restaurant. The bar is very nice there.
New Woodlands Hotel Krishna Restaurant – some of the best South Indian cuisine. Breakfast with the surly but sometimes friendly staff. Land of the overwhelming Masala Dosa, filtered coffee which strikes your senses with a hot stick, and some other great choices.
Copper Chimney Restaurant in Mylapore – Oh yeah! Their Mutton Chello Kebab rules.
Zara Tapas in Mylapore – right next to the “chimney” cold Kingfishers, tapas style food.

There you got it! My recipe to a week of over indulgence bounded by the hotel staff at the Raintree. Yay!

On the Road this Tuesday

February 12, 2010 in Travel | No comments

This Tuesday evening I pull the plug on California and leave for Singapore and Chennai, India for 2 weeks or so. I’ll be leaving on the wondrous Singapore Airlines at midnight on Tuesday and get in at noon on Thursday. Then Friday, off I go to India. My first weekend will be a blur of touring around Chennai to a few places and also getting over jetlag. Perhaps a time or two on the rooftop drinking Kingfisher. Maybe the Cel India support guys will want to meet at Chola Sheraton…

Anyways, will be good to see everyone at those ports of call.