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One year ago today, I attended my first Wimbledon. It was amazing and everything I had hoped it would be. Well, it is that time again, Opening Day at Wimbledon. Unfortunately this year I am not at Wimbledon, which by all accounts has started in grand fashion with very sunny days and high temperatures (92F!). Well, there is always next year.
Also unfortunately, while Samantha Stosur was back at Wimbledon this year, she again lost in the first round.
In other Wimbledon news, Maria Sharapova will apparently wear gold covered Nikes (literally!) during her matches. In her words “It shines unbelievably”…. Way cool, but unfortunately the $500, 18k gold flecked shoes will not be for sale… oh well.
Having written a blog update and then foolishly rebooting before saving it, I am left with nothing to write about. 🙂 However, JC has kindly written about Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford. It is very, very good. Please go read.
This weekend my friend Jean and I played in a tennis tournament. Unfortunately there were no other NTRP 3.5 mixed doubles teams so we had to play NTRP 4.0, which are obviously better players than we are. The results showed it too. We got double bageled (6-0,6-0) against the best team we played (which was the first match), and then barely won 2 games in the second match (6-0,6-2). The only good news was that matches with scores that onesided are relatively fast, and it was HOT.
Just a quick note. I finally managed to get a hold of Mibu Gishi Den this last time I was in Japan. I had to go to a few different stores in Akihabara, but finally found it in a back alley way DVD shop. A great movie. I heartily recommend it.
On Wednesday I went to Nikko, Japan. Nikko is the home of the Tosho-gu, a shrine that is the last resting place of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the Shogun who united Japan in the early 1600s. He is the same daimyo who James Clavell wrote about in his book Shogun (think Toronaga). I took the subway to Yurakucho, then the Yamanote train from Yurakucho to Tokyo station. Then I took the shinkansen to Utsunomiya, from which I took the Nikko local train to Nikko. At Nikko, I walked to the Shinkyo and then to Tosho-gu. Tosho-gu is quite impressive. The use of gold leaf and the very Chinese dominated architecture makes it unique. It clearly cost a great deal of money to build, but Ieyasu could afford it. His personal fief was in excess of 2.5 million koku, maybe as much as 1/3 of the entire empire’s wealth. I’d say it is more impressive than anything at Kamakura and maybe even better than the Daibutsu at Nara. The weather was beautiful, a clear sunny day with temperatures hovering around 70F. Wandering through the cedars, examining Tosho-gu with the iPod playing classical music was a transcendental experience. If you are in or going to visit Japan, Nikko is a must visit. Photos are up here.
I am once again here in Japan. Today I find myself in Tokyo with nothing to do… my business meeting was cancelled, so I am going to go to Nikko, which has the tomb of the first Tokugawa Shogun, as well as the tombs of a couple of other important people. I was thinkng about going to Fuji-san, but it looks like it is clouding up and I doubt I would be able to see much. Actually, yesterday on the Shinkansen, I finally saw Fuji-san. Unfortunately my camera was in my suitcase, so no pics, but it was pretty impressive. The top was hidden in clouds, but the very symmetric sides are unlike any other mountain. Way cool.
Incidentally, this is the first Japan trip I’ve taken with my iPod. I agree with folks that say that it adds a soundtrack to life. Nothing like Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy on a Shinkanasen platform! Hilarious 🙂
Last weekend I took a trip to Puerto Penasco, Mexico,(also known in English as Rocky Point), with some friends. It was a good time. The beach there, while not the beautiful white sand of Northwest Florida, is still quite nice. The water was fairly warm and nice. In the morning you could see dolphins off of the beach. The beach is not very developed by US standards, which is great because it means less people wandering the beach and very nice dark nights. It was great to hang out with everyone and lay on the roof by the firepit, iPod jamming out tunes, with the Milky Way hanging above you like your own private fireworks. Way cool. The only bad part of the weekend was that I got very sick (probably food poisoning) and missed the entire day Sunday in bed. Despite that though, it was good to go to Mexico and hang out at the beach. Pics are up in the gallery.
Finally got around to posting some photos from Vegas. Almost all are of Tim, since I had the camera and he didn’t. Ha ha! Anyway, share and enjoy!
Well, I haven’t posted anything for a while, because basically nothing much was going on that I could talk about. However, this weekend I went to Las Vegas to hang out with my old college roomie, Tim. We played a lot of tennis (which I mostly lost), hung out at the pool a bit, and did various and sundry fun things. I know the old adage, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, so I will just tantalize you with some stream of conciousness reporting below:
Flamingo, Isla (can you say $53 Chinaco shot?), Rosemary’s, Hofbrauhaus, Studio 54, Red Square (remember the Boaka and the ice bar), Capriotti’s, Stratosphere, and Wynn.
Since I am not up to much of anything useful, I will post a couple of things that I have read recently. With the recent Ohio school board decision to include Intelligent Design as an equal theory with Evolution to teach children about the origins of humanity, I am posting a couple of essays I recently read.
The first one is a good overview of why Intelligent Design is NOT a scientific theory, but instead a belief system like any other religion. However, before you go and accuse me of being a religious hating atheist, in the interest of objectivity I post the second essay.
This essay starts very well (the first three or four sections are VERY good and cover most of the issues I have with the Judeo-Christian God), but unfortunately the essay soon starts meandering into various dogmatic arguments and wishful thinking and thus becomes rather blah. However, the first four sections are worth reading I think.
So read and expand your mind….
Well, I’ve reinstalled Windoze again. Maybe I didn’t have to, but I can’t help feeling the need to every 6 months or so. One thing about reinstalling so often is that I am getting quite good and making sure I back things up and can reinstall everything quickly. I managed to get Thunderbird and Enigmail installed within 10 minutes with all of my previous settings retained, which is pretty impressive (at least to me).
However, while doing so, I ran across a GPG issue that really annoyed me. I needed to re-add my public and secret keys to GPG, but the very obvious
gpg – -secret-keyring `file’
command does not work to do this. The only command that works is
gpg – -import ‘file’
This is despite all documentation to the contary and is very annoying. It always takes me a while to figure this out, so I am posting it here for anyone else who has the same problem.
Well, the last report by the last WMD inspector in Iraq is out and guess what? No WMDs found!!! Shocking! I remember a United States of America where a lie of this magnitude would be enough to cause the government to fall, but not any more. Our bread and circuses keep us so entertained that we care not one whit what our corrupt politicians do as long as we have the chance to buy plasma TVs or a new Dodge Hemi. I’d write more, but I have to go play with my new iPod.
Today I took a hike into the Superstitions to Hackberry Spring. There a couple of different ways to get there, but I decided to take the one that was least difficult to get lost on, which turned out to be the one that is most difficult to walk :). From First Water Trailhead I took the Second Water Trail to First Water Creek and then I walked the First Water Creek bed all the way up to Hackberry. It was an interesting hike, since I basically had to trail find the entire way. The amazing thing is that one can do that IN the creekbed all the way there. You have to get your feet wet occaisionally, but the water is generally less than 6 inches deep (although in some pools it was about 4 ft deep) so it is not too tough.
However, let me say this. Do not attempt to walk this trail without a walking stick. The creekbed is nothing but head and torso sized stones the entire way and I would have easily fallen many times without my walking stick. A lot of times you can get by without one, but this hike is not one of them in my opinion.
About 40 minutes into my hike I ran across a King Snake. Scared the crap out of me too because the rattlers are starting to come out and I was trying to be careful of them, and here I go and almost step on a king snake. That said, the snake was quite pretty. A dark black with yellow rings. I tried to take a picture of it, but it had hidden in a hole by the time I got my camera out and not knowing at the time if it was venomous or not I decided not to mess with it.
I actually missed Hackberry Spring the first time I went past it, despite the fact that someone was camped there even. My map shows a green area near the words Hackberry Spring. I naturally thought they were one and the same, but it turns out they are not. In close up, it is easier to see the words are pointing to a dot on the creekbed, but when I was looking at it on the trail, it was less easy to see. Hence, I hiked right past it for a good 30 minutes before realizing I had gone too far. So I promptly hiked back and rested in the shade for a good bit before heading back out.
I had planned to hike out through Garden Valley, but somehow took the wrong creekbed. However, it worked out quite nicely since I was able to get out much faster than I had planned. I actually walked back OVER First Water Creek without even realizing it and on the way out I realized that on the way in, I’d actually gone past the Windmill and Corral without seeing them. I obviously still need some work on this hiking thing, but hey, practice makes perfect. And it was a lot of fun. Next up will probably be a hike from Tortilla Flat trailhead, which is closer to the Lost Dutchman’s gold 🙂
Photos from the hike are up here.
In honor of finally getting up some photos from Scotland, I am reposting my previous Scotland blog post so you have a better commentary. The photos are here.
We started off our only full day in Inverness by going to Culloden Battlefield. This was the last battle fought on British soil, in 1745. Here Bonnie Prince Charlie lost to the evil British (well, it IS a Scottish memorial) after having nearly been able to march all the way to London. The battlefield has been kept in fairly good condition and they have a nice little museum as well as an example of a house from that time period. I bought some small things from the store, including some great candy. You can’t help but feel sorry for the Scots for losing this battle since afterwards the Brits basically stamped out their culture for 50 years or so…
After that we went to Cawdor Castle, home to the Thane of Cawdor and setting of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. It is fairly certain that Shakespeare had never seen Cawdor when he wrote MacBeth, but he probably wished he could. This was an amazingly beautiful little castle. The gardens were in my opinion the best I have seen outside of Butchart Gardens in Victoria. Got some great pictures here. They also had a hedge maze, which made Christi very excited, but only until she realized that we couldn’t go into it 🙁 . Apparently the hedge isn’t hardy enough to have a bunch of folks traipzing through it all the time. The Cawdors apparently stay in the Castle in winter and open it to the public in summer, which is the opposite of what I would do if the place was mine, but I guess they probably don’t get many tourists in winter in Scotland. We had lunch in the restaurant at the castle. I had some more good beer and even took a picture of the bottle.
Lunch started at just the right time since it started raining right about then. After that, we got in the car and drove south down the Loch to Castle Urquhart. On the way we passed this funky speed limit sign that was digital and apparently had a radar gun in it because it showed your speed and then either a happy face (if you weren’t speeding) or a frowny face (if you were). Frowny face for me and I started laughing so hard I nearly put us in a ditch! Castle Urquhart is the castle one generally sees in those movies and TV shows about Loch Ness. It is a ruined castle on the edge of the Loch, with some great views. We got some amazing pictures here, which unfortunately still aren’t up (sorry). While we were here, I bought dad a “monster dram” of Nessie Scotch. After that we went to the Nessie museum where we were pretty much told that there IS no Loch Ness monster, which made us feel good :). Actually Christi maintains that she saw Nessie on the Loch, so THERE.
After the museum was the obligatory souvenir store and I bought a Scotland shot glass while JC thought seriously about buying a kilt. After all this drove back north along the Loch just long enough to stop and have a drink at a hotel bar overlooking the Loch. Then we went back into Inverness to look for some food. By this time we were getting tired of fish and chips so we went looking for a pizza place. We had to park a ways away and then walk to the pizza place. Apparently pizza is REAL popular in Inverness because we had to wait a while. Took some cool pics of Inverness at 9pm with the sun still out and went home to try to sleep and get ready for Wales.
Well, since the family left, I haven’t had much to post about. I certainly haven’t done much other than work, so I think I will post a mixture of stuff that I’ve been reading lately.
Next is a really good post on Bruce Schneier’s blog about a very big misnomer, identity theft. As Bruce points out, identity theft isn’t really about stealing your identity. You are still you. What it is is financial fraud against credit companies, whose incredibly lax credit controls allow people to be issued credit in your name. In any other case, the credit companies would be liable for this fraud, not YOU, who has committed no crime and has no control over the matter at all. The US Congress needs to put the liability back where it belongs, on the credit companies who allow such poor controls that anyone with a bit of public information can get credit in your name.
However, I hold out little hope for this since the incomparably corrupt members of the US Congress just passed a law that was literally bought by the credit card companies, which makes it almost impossible to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In classic “I don’t care about anyone but my bribers^H^H^H^financial backers” form, the Congress also refused to consider for special treatment cases where people are driven into bankruptcy from medical bills (despite the fact that 44M people in this country don’t have medical insurance and hence when they get seriously ill, they either have to declare bankruptcy or die), where they are US Servicemen or women overseas, etc. Next on the Congressional agenda… debtor’s prison. Hope you like the government you voted in folks. It’s obvious they don’t like YOU.
Well, Mom and Dad and Jay got here on Friday. Friday we had lunch at Los Dos Molinos and then dinner at Grimaldi’s. In between we didn’t do that much. On Saturday we went to the Superstitions to look around a bit. We went to the Superstition Mountain Museum and then to Tortilla Flat where we had some Killer Chilli… or at least Jay and I did. Then we drove up 22 miles of some of the scariest road I’ve ever driven on to Roosevelt Dam. I’d hate to have been a truck driver having to drive some of those grades… After that we went back to Phoenix through Globe and Superior before finishing off with some Chicken Tikka Masala at my co-worker’s Indo-Pakistani restaurant. Very yummy. Then we went to Gila River Casino and lost money. I swear that casino sucks. I’ve never won money there. Pics are up here.
In December 2004, we went back to Nebraska for my Grandmother’s funeral. Despite the very sad occasion, we took a lot of pictures because we don’t get back there often. I hadn’t been there in 12 years. This time back we visited a lot with family, went to the farm, cried a lot and reminisced, both about Grandma Jones and the past in general. During our reminiscing we found our old house in Grand Island, our old house in Omaha and the Burger King I worked at first. God I hate Burger King now. I hated working there so much that after the first month, my mother told the manager that she was sending me away to be with my father (implying they were divorced) in order to get me out of that job. It did instill in me a great desire to avoid that type of monotonous, drone-like work in the future, so despite the short time I had there, I think I learned more than enough.
The photos from Nebraska are up here. An incomplete photo requiem to Grandma Jones is here.
There is a new WWII first person shooter game that came out in mid-March called Brothers in Arms. Prior to this game, Call of Duty was the unequivocal leader of the WWII shooters. However, after playing through most of Brothers in Arms, I can honestly say this game beats COD. The graphics are as good or better than COD, and unlike in Call of Duty, you command your squad as well as fight. This means you give commands to your fire team and assault team. You use your teams to implement the 4 F’s on the Germans. Find ’em, Fix ’em, Flank ’em and Finish ’em. Or, as Patton used to say, “grab ’em by the nose and kick them in the ass”. All this while the Krauts try to do the same to you. The command mode is intuitive and easy to use, just hold down the right mouse button and point to where you want them to go. On top of this, the design team for Brothers in Arms (BIA) modelled the 1944 areas of Normandy you fight in down to the last yard. They took thousands of photos of the area today and thousands of arial pre-invasion photos in 1944 and combined them to recreate how Normandy looked back then. Way, way cool. In addition, Col. John Antal, a writer for Armchair General Magazine, was advisor on BIA, which also means it is as authentic as he could make it.
In BIA you are a member of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. In real life, and in the game, the 502nd PIR was tasked on 6 June 1944 with securing the Utah Beach causeway exits for the 4th and 8th Infantry Divisions, who were landing on Utah Beach on D-Day. Not easy, especially since their drops went wild and scattered many paratroopers across miles of French countryside. Not easy in the game either, but way, way cool. Nothing beats this game for breathlessness as you try to hold off Wehrmacht counterattacks of infantry, panzergrenadiers and armor with the light weapons of the 502nd PIR. A must have game.
Played a little tennis today and did some work (not nearly enough). Bleh. Also tried to clean up this house in anticipation of my parents and brother visiting, which is easier said than done when I have two pets who insist on vomiting on stuff and/or bringing in baby birds that they then chew up on the carpet (NASTY!).
In less gross news, my friend Jean posts on her blog from Naples. She is visiting Europe and Egypt on her sabbatical, so check out her blog for interesting photos of the trip.
In the security field, which has seen a lot of interest since 9/11, biometrics (the ability to identify someone by some biologically unique method – fingerprint, retina scan, etc), has become some sort of holy grail for indentification and authentication. For example, IBM recently released a ThinkPad that has a fingerprint scanner built in. You can use it to get into your O/S without having to enter a password, and similar things like that. However, from the BBC, (via Bruce Schneier’s blog), comes this cautionary tale of what happens when people find out they need your fingerprint to start your car. Not sure my car would be worth that to me, personally.
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