Motorcycle trip - day 3, Weston, WV to Richmond

The last day of the trip was Monday. We wanted to get an earlier start to the day so that we could get back to Richmond at a decent hour, since I still had to get back to Manassas and we both had to work on Tuesday. So we were pretty much ready to go before 8:00. The complimentary breakfast that the Comfort Inn Weston was meager, but the waffle iron was serviceable (although it required some convincing to release our waffles) so we stuck (ha ha) with that. I think Chris would have preferred that we eat at the Sheetz across the street though.

As we were getting prepped for departure, we were chatting with one of the other guests who was marveling at the Florida plates on the bikes, and so we explained where we were going and why. He related that he has a bike as well, but he doesn't really take it on trips like he used to because it's not so comfortable for he and the missus anymore, but that they were actually on a road trip currently, with no particular route or place in mind, just driving to see what they could see. Reminded me of someone else I know...

Weather reports looked clear, if a bit chilly. It was in the mid-50s and quite foggy, but we decided to forgo the rain gear. That turned out to be a mistake. I had to stop after less than 15 minutes on the road and put on a long-sleeve shirt because the combination of damp and chilly air was really going right through my summer mesh riding jacket. Our route had us on US-119/33 for about an hour. It was good that we were on a fairly straight divided highway, because visibility was very low, less than 1/2 mile most of the time. We even used the flashers on the bikes on more than one occasion. It was damp enough that we may as well have been riding in the rain, as I was collecting every bit as much water on my helmet shield as I was while riding in an actual rainstorm.

Just as we were getting off of US-33 onto WV-29, we rode out of the fog and into a nice mostly sunny day, and it had also warmed up a good bit. Good thing, because WV-29 is a FUN road! Pretty much as soon as it comes out of Elkins, WV, it gets curvy and starts climbing up into the mountains. You pass through a couple of small towns, and then there is a section where the road curves and climbs about 1500ft in the space of 1/2 mile, and then moves into a section of nice sweeping curves, and even some real switchbacks. The road is in nice shape, and there are passing zones every so often so that you can continue at an appropriate pace. From there, we hit US-250, which is quite possibly even better than 29. If you look at it on the map, it's pretty obvious why. This website is where I found the route.
US-250 took us through both Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, and so the road wound through the trees,with an occasional view of the valley below. The elevation was such that we were able to enjoy the slight touches of color starting to show on the leaves, and the sunlight was just slightly filtering through the tree canopy. The temperature was perfect too. I can't think of a much better way to spend a day. It was absolutely fantastic! The roads were curvy, and we kept a brisk pace, but not so brisk as to be challenging on a Harley. The nice thing was that the pace allowed for me to truly concentrate on my lines through the turns, and I started to see what people are talking about when they say that you "string the turns together." You would start to see the line that connected one turn to the next, and could ride quickly, but still very smoothly. I could have done it faster on my bike, but it would have been much more tiring and less relaxing, because I would have been riding much closer to the limits of my skill.

We rode through Staunton, and then headed for Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National park. Skyline has a $10 entrance fee, but it's absolutely worth it. We rode on Skyline for about 35 miles, took some pictures at 3900 feet, and then headed towards US-33 to get us back to Richmond.
We got into Richmond around 2:30, and the final mileage on the bikes read 969.6 for the trip. We (very briefly) considered going another 30.4 miles so that it would be an even 1000, but then decided that it wasn't all that important. Chris and I hopped in his car and headed for Manassas, where he joined us for dinner to wait out the traffic before he headed back home.

All in all, it was a great trip, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Perhaps with a different bike, but otherwise an awesome experience. The roads we traveled, especially on the second and third day are some that I would recommend to any driving/riding enthusiast.

Motorcycle trip - day 2, Greensburg, IN to Weston, WV

Day two dawned cloudy, but definitely better weather than Kenosha the day before. It appeared from the weather reports that we had gotten ahead of the storm, and it had turned north while we were headed south, so it appeared that we were going to stay dry. After breakfast compliments of the Hampton Inn, we headed outside to pack up the bikes and get moving. It was a good bit warmer this morning than the day before, and we were surprised to find that there was no morning dew to wipe off of the bikes. We dispensed with the rain gear, only to see a few raindrops on the bikes. Fortunately, that was all it was, and we stayed dry today. We realized now that we were able to see the surroundings of the hotel in daylight that it was somewhat strangely located. It was literally in the middle of a cornfield! There was a grain elevator across the street, and a cell tower behind it, but as far as you could see in nearly all directions, it was corn, grain elevator, corn, grain elevator. We were both anxious to get away from the cornfields and into some more interesting riding.

Also, September 19th is the annual observance of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" so I posted all of my Facebook status updates whenever we stopped in some form of Pirate speak.

We headed out on US 421, and picked up State Route 48, which skirted us up north of Cincinnati. It was a nice rural road, with some curves and even a few hills. Chris and I were both amused by the sign when we came onto a part of the road which warned trucks not to use the road due to steep hills and dangerous curves. Sounds like fun! Outside of Cincinnati, we picked up I-71 to get to US-35. 35 is still a divided highway most of the way, but it goes through some cool towns along the way. We stopped in Chillicothe, OH for lunch, for my first experience eating at the Steak 'n Shake. Burgers were good, shakes were better.

From there, we hit State Route 327, which eventually connected to US-50, and both were really great roads. This was really the first of the nice curvy, mountain roads we were looking forward to on the trip. A brief stop for fuel and rest in Coolville (how could you *not* stop there??), and we were on our way again.
From there we caught State Route 47 in West Virginia, which is an amazing road. I found it using this website, and it is strongly recommended for both the scenery and the drive! One thing I will say about the late Senator Byrd and his ability to bring home the pork... WV's roads were in a completely different class from the comparatively awful roads in Indiana and Ohio - almost no frost heaves, and nice smooth pavement even on these little secondary two-lane roads. 47 ended at US-119, which took us into our landing point for the night, Weston, WV. We stayed at a Comfort Inn there that was obviously a converted motor lodge of some sort - still had the external entrances to the rooms, but they had built a new building in the front to house the check-in and breakfast area. We went to the plaza next door to the hotel and grabbed some "Italian" food from a place called Genos. The food was passable, the beer was cold. I ordered an Italian Sausage sandwich, but instead of your standard tube-shaped sausage with peppers, onions and maybe some tomato sauce in a bun, this had sliced sausage, peppers, onions, and the entire thing was covered in cheese, like a pizza, but on a sub roll. It wasn't bad, but definitely not what I was expecting. We arrived a good bit earlier tonight than we had last night, so we were able to get to bed earlier in preparation for an early departure the next morning so that we could get into Richmond in the early afternoon.

I can honestly say that a lot of the roads we traveled today more than made up for the relatively boring, tiring freeway slog that we did the day before.

Motorcycle trip - day 1, Kenosha to Greensburg, IN

Day one dawned bright and sunny and beaut... oh, wait, no... we woke up to a thunderstorm! Just exactly what you hope for when you're setting out on a 900+ mile motorcycle ride, right? So, we set ourselves to packing the bikes and getting ready for the trip, hoping that it would blow over. In fact, it actually got worse for a time, but fortunately by the time we were packed, and had met Heather's sister at the Coffee Pot restaurant for a hearty breakfast (great Corned Beef Hash!), it had mostly stopped raining and the roads were just wet. Either way, it was still looking pretty cruddy, so we suited up in our rain gear, and packed our clothes and electronics into plastic bags to keep them dry. We got a later start than we thought, probably around 10AM, but given the weather, I'm not sure that was a bad thing.
This being the first time I have ridden a Harley (that happened to also be someone else's bike), I was less than thrilled with the idea of starting out in the rain. However, apparently I've gained enough XP for my motorcycle riding skill that I was able to manage the -10 rain and -5 unfamiliar motorcycle modifiers and keep the shiny side up. This is not to say that it was exactly easy. I definitely had a couple of close "saving throws" (ok, I'll stop with the gamer references for a while, I promise) where the bike fishtailed or the front tire tried to lock up on braking, but it didn't put too much of a damper on our travels. Once we got into Chicago, we headed towards Lakeshore Drive, and were able to see the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan, including Navy Pier, the McCormick center, etc which was really nice despite dampness and intermittent actual rain. Our rain gear kept us reasonably dry, and we drove out of the rain as we got out of the city. As an aside, by the end of the riding day, really the only part of me that was wet was the part of my jeans that stuck out of the bottom of my rain pants, which in turn had wicked moisture down my socks, making my boots pretty damp. Guess there's something to be said for overboots.

One thing to note, because we were avoiding interstates, this also had the practical upshot of allowing us to avoid Chicago and Indiana's repressive toll road system, with one small exception, where we were on a toll road for all of 2 miles to get from one secondary road to another. Chris had an EZ pass, but since I don't have one, I had to pay cash. The smallest bill I had was a $20, so I ended up with 18 one dollar coins as change - fun!

After we got out of Chicago and into Indiana on US-41 and 52, unfortunately the roads were pretty stereotypically midwestern. That is, flat, straight, and flanked by corn. As I will cover more in my actual post on my riding impressions, these are not bikes that really make a 1+ hour run at 75 mph exactly comfortable, so we were squirming a little between stops on this section. The one highlight was that we drove through a portion of the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm. While I have seen wind turbines before, this is the first time I was able to see them from a short distance like this, and it really did give a better impression of their size. I honestly don't understand why people are so worried about the aesthetics of a wind farm - I think they're sort of graceful and beautiful in an industrial sort of way.

We stopped for lunch (and gas - with a 3.5 gal tank, this is a regular occurrence) a bit late, but since we had gotten a late breakfast, we weren't really hurting for having pushed along for a few hours first. Lunch was White Castle. Since neither of us live near a While Castle, I was pleased to have found one right on our route - it's like going to In-N-Out Burger on the west coast - you gotta take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself. A bit further along the path, we encountered a car show in a car dealer's parking lot, and decided we had to stop and wander around for a few minutes. It was pretty cool. They had the usual cross-section of muscle cars, but they also had a first generation Honda CVCC, which I'm pretty sure is smaller than a first-gen Mini, and a couple of nice choppers. We only spent about 20 minutes wandering around, but it was a nice diversion.

The second half of our trip brought us through the middle of the Purdue campus in West Lafayette. Another unforeseen upshot of getting a late start is the fact that we didn't come through Purdue until well after the football game was over. I don't know how Purdue is in terms of traffic pre/post game, but if it's anything like PSU, we would have been stuck in bad traffic. As it was, traffic was slow on our way out of town because of 2 or 3 different accidents.
Next stop was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This was mainly a place to allow us to stretch our legs, especially since we were mainly on the Interstate and there was some pretty major construction and traffic outside of Indianapolis, but we did take the obligatory pictures in front of the main entrance. From there, we headed for Greensburg, IN and our reservation at the Hampton Inn. It was well after dark, probably almost 8:30 by the time we arrived, and we were quite happy to be done traveling for the day. Last order of business was to find some food. There wasn't a lot of options, because Greensburg isn't exactly a huge town, but we ended up at Buffalo Wings and Rings, which had decent wings, good beer, and TVs where we could catch up on the day's college football action. We splurged and had dessert in celebration of my birthday, and then headed back to the hotel.
Preemptive Advil applied, we dragged ourselves into bed and enjoyed some needed rest before the next day of traveling. Day two would see us headed for Cincinnati, covering pretty much all of Ohio, and then a portion of West Virginia.

Road trip!!! - the beginning

These next few posts are going to be about a fantastic road trip that I just recently took over the weekend of my birthday. This will serve as the introduction.
Logistics were a bit... interesting. First, I had to fly to Chicago to meet my traveling companion. He had flown to Chicago from Richmond earlier in the week, met up with his wife in Michigan, driven to her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, where we would actually set out on the trip, headed for Richmond.

I was able to use my frequent flier miles on United to get a super-saver ticket, which only cost me 8750 miles plus $5. The only downside is that I misread the times, and booked what I thought was an 11AM flight that ended up being an 11PM flight. Doh! While I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to meet my Uncle Mark (who lives in Chicago) for lunch, for a free flight, I guess I don't have a lot of choices. Side note - I tried "Mobile Check-in" for the first time, which had me using my smartphone's web browser to display a 2D barcode that could be scanned at TSA and upon boarding. I printed a paper pass too, just to be safe, but didn't end up having to use it. Welcome to the future!

Friday night found me going through airport security wearing steel-toed boots and carrying a motorcycle helmet under my arm, which went surprisingly smoothly. I refrained from making any "this is my insurance in case the plane crashes" jokes until we landed in Chicago.

So, I should probably pause here and explain how this all came about, and why I'm carrying a motorcycle helmet (and jacket) on an airplane bound for Chicago.
Chris, my best friend from college, has been living in Orlando, Florida for the past few years. He met his wife there, and they were married last year. He and his wife both have motorcycles, specifically Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. However, when his wife moved to Michigan to start grad school (MSU, but we won't hold that against her), they moved most of their stuff and the motorcycles to be stored at her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, with the assumption that Chris would move into the general area once he found a job up there. Chris just recently got a new job in Richmond and moved up from Orlando in early summer. Not exactly close to Michigan, but closer at least, and definitely closer to me, which I'm ecstatic about. So, I've been after him to bring his motorcycle back down so that we could maybe ride together sometime. However, he wasn't really keen on having to load the bikes into the in-laws' truck and trailer and drive them down from Wisconsin, especially after already having to do that once when he moved their stuff down to Richmond. I suggested that they could ride them down, but he didn't figure that his wife would be overly interested in riding all that way. I immediately volunteered (assuming that they were ok with me riding one of the bikes, of course), and so that rapidly became the plan - we just had to figure out what weekend to do it. Well, coincidentally the best weekend for all concerned was the weekend of my birthday, and my very understanding wife agreed that this would be a most excellent birthday present even if it meant she had to be a single parent for a few days, so here we are.

Chris picked me up from the airport late Friday night in the in-laws' bright orange Ford Mustang GT convertible, and despite the fact that it was probably only 55 degrees out, we rode back from the airport with the top down (and the heat blasting). Nothing like romping on the throttle of a big V8 with an aftermarket exhaust while driving under an overpass with the top down to put a big, stupid grin on your face!

With all of the pre-trip traveling covered, I should talk about the actual trip planning a bit. It's pretty easy to get on the interstates and haul yourself across a couple of states at best speed in a day or two, but a real road trip is as much about the journey as the destination. So, I decided to take a page from my Dad's book on road trips and plan a more interesting route, one that avoided the miles and miles of tedium that most interstate travel represents in favor of secondary highways, small towns, etc - actually see the country instead of just driving past it at 80mph. So instead of just plugging everything into Google Maps and hoping for the best, I started doing some research.
I found two great websites, here and here that had maps/gps coordinates of scenic drives or otherwise interesting roads. I started with a list of candidates from all of the states/regions that I knew we'd have to go through in order to get between Kenosha and Richmond. A number of the routes I found on the Open Road Journey website were actually day-trip style loops, so I had to figure out which part of those to use in order to make forward progress, and then set about changing the route on Google maps to string those together and get a rough route laid out.
Once I was mostly happy with the route in Google Maps, I had to find a way to extract that as something that my GPS would understand, as I wanted to at least try using the GPS instead of a map and paper directions. Google has a button that says "send to GPS" and I thought, "AHA!" Well... all that does is send the destination address, which is pretty much useless. None of the multiple waypoints were coming over, so it was time for plan B. There are websites (little script bookmarklets, actually) that you can use to extract Google Maps directions to a file that your GPS understands, which worked like a charm. Once I had that, Garmin has this cool (free!) program called Base Camp that will use the maps in your GPS and allow you to import and export routes, change waypoints, as well as load the route to your GPS's memory. There was a lot of tweaking to be done, because I discovered that once I actually got zoomed down far enough a lot of the waypoints that Google generated were not technically on the road, so there was a lot of U-turns and doubling back to actually reach them that I had to fix. After all of that was sorted out, I was able to play back the route to determine stopping points based on distance and time so that I could figure out where we were going to stay each night, possible lunch and fuel stops, and the like, based on the fact that we'd basically have 3 days to make the trip.
Highlights of the route included riding along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, through West Lafayette (Purdue), past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, through parts of the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, and a bit of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It took me a good portion of Labor Day weekend to hack on this and get the route the way I wanted it, but looking back on it from this end, it was totally worth it! Next post - Day 1.

Postcard from Manassas

My wife and I were out washing and detailing our cars yesterday, and while we were doing this, my neighbors were doing some shadetree auto mechanic work that I figured you'd find entertaining. It certainly entertained me...

A few months ago, they bought an older BMW 3 series (maybe early 2000s-vintage) for their daughter to drive. It appears to have some sort of a fuel-injector or spark issue, or some sensor (crank position, throttle position, etc) that is out of whack. I still have no idea what the actual problem is, other than it appeared to be misfiring occasionally, at least at idle. I would have asked, but I couldn't think of a way to ask that wouldn't make me sound like a jerk. Either way, every so often it starts doing something "wrong" requiring him to apply his "expertise" to "fix" it.

What's funny is that it's pretty obvious that they don't have any idea what the problem is either, because since they've gotten the car, I've seen them do the following, repeatedly, with the most recent occurrence being yesterday. This was the first time I got to see the whole exercise, instead of just being annoyed at them for making noise that I can hear from inside the house. 

So, documented here for your reading pleasure...

Please complete the following procedure with at least 2 men, more are better:

1. start car
2. open hood
3. peer at engine looking for obvious problems (engine replaced by hamster wheel, major components on fire, significant fluid leak, large electrical sparks, etc)
4. let car idle for indeterminate period of time
5. while step 4 is in progress, repeat step 3 periodically
6. apply throttle to hold engine at 4000+ RPM for at least 5 minutes, periodically going to wide open throttle and bouncing the engine off of the rev limiter
7. if problem still exists, repeat steps 3-6
8. close hood, take car for test drive 
9. repeat steps 2-8
10. turn off car
11. go drink beer

As far as I can tell, this is the automotive equivalent of "if it jams, force it; if it breaks, it needed replacing anyway". In other words, abuse the engine until something breaks, and hope that this was the cause of the original problem. I guess it's a testament to BMW engineering that the thing was happy to sit in 100+ degree heat at 4K RPM without overheating or throwing a rod or something, though the miss did seem to get worse the longer they flogged it. 

 

The really strange thing is that these folks aren't slouches when it comes to fixing cars, during the downtime between steps 10 and 11 they did a brake pad swap on another car and recharged its A/C, so I can only conclude that this troubleshooting and diagnostic procedure makes some sort of sense to them...

 

Never a dull moment out Manassas way,

Advanced home computer geekery

Apologies in advance if this one doesn't interest you, it's pretty hard-core computer geek stuff.

Some time ago, I inherited my in-laws old PC when they upgraded. It wasn't all that old, a Gateway mid-tower with a 2 GHz Pentium 4 and 768MB of RAM, and a couple of servicable hard drives. For those that don't know, despite being someone who does computers and networking for a living, I really don't have a huge amount of gear at home, mainly because I don't have a great deal of time or space for hobby computer projects. Beyond the standard-issue wireless routers, we have one desktop, one laptop, plus a Cisco router that is serving as my IPv6 gateway until VZ offers it natively on FiOS.
Either way, I've been wanting to have some sort of backup/file server for a while, both because I was running out of disk space on my current external drive for media, and because I needed something better than the "when I feel guilty about it and burn a few key files to DVD" backup method, and so I decided to use this box and build my own NAS (Network Attached Storage), basically a headless file and media server with multiple disks in a RAID. Why build instead of buy any of the hundreds of available pre-made NAS boxes? Well, flexibility for one. Most NAS boxes either run some very specialized UNIX variant that is little more than the kernel, and you can't really do anything on them except what the manufacturer intended, or they use Windows home server, which is limited in a whole different set of ways. Either way, most are just glorified hard drive enclosures with a network port unless you pay a lot for fancy features. They also typically have the absolute bare minimum hardware required to support their intended purpose, and so performance sometimes suffers. I've had bad experiences with trying to use the built-in server in my Linksys WRT350N and a USB hard drive - it just didn't have enough horsepower. Also, most of the consumer-grade NAS boxes don't have particularly robust RAID support, and the ones that do what I wanted (a RAID10 using 4 drives) started getting expensive, which brings us to my other reason for building it myself - price. Since the basic computer was free, I was able to build this for just the costs of the disks, the SATA card, and the Gigabit Ethernet card, which was about $350.
My parts list:

• 4 1 TB SATA-II hard drives ($70 ea) - I bought 2 different manufacturers/models in order to try to insulate against the problem where disks in the same manufacturing batch fail from the same problem in rapid succession.
• 1 Syba Sil3124 4 port SATA "RAID" card - RAID in quotes because it's one of those fakeRAID cards that doesn't actually have dedicated RAID hardware support, it just does the underlying disk build and uses the computer's CPU for the work. It's mainly a Windows thing, but other folks I had talked to and research I did indicated that the chipset that my card had would work on UNIX.
• 1 cheap Gigabit Ethernet card
• The PC doesn't support PCI-X, so these are all PCI cards. I figured I'd go cheap to start with, and if I couldn't deal with the performance hit, I could always swap the motherboard later to upgrade.

A case fan, SATA power and data cables, and I was done. Fortunately, once I pulled the floppy drive, the case had enough 3.5" bays to fit the 4 new drives, and the existing drive that I was planning to put the OS on went in place of the CD burner I no longer needed, using the motherboard IDE, so I didn't even need a new case.

My first try on the software/OS side was FreeNAS. It's a pre-packaged OS, based on FreeBSD, and includes a very straightforward web-based GUI, support for windows file sharing, UPnP/DLNA media server, iTunes server (which I don't care about, but some people do), Web server, FTP, etc. Pretty much everything I'd need for a home file/media server and more. It also supports running the OS from a USB stick or directly from the CD. Including downloading and burning the CD, I had the system up inside of an hour, and the managment of the system was via a very intuitive web GUI.

Setting up the RAID did not go nearly so well, and ended up being the reason that I ultimately abandoned FreeNAS. The first time around, I tried to use the RAID setup built into the SATA card, but FreeNAS didn't recognize the drive, and the documentation I found said that this rarely works unless you're using a true RAID card that is explicitly listed as supported by your OS (mine is neither). Ok, no problem, same document says that you can do it using the card just as a SATA controller, so I made the appropriate changes and started again. The FreeNAS website had a great document on how to set up a software RAID, and after 30 min or so, I had my RAID 1 pairs built, set up as a RAID 0, and formatting away. I mounted the drive, set up the windows shares, and copied over some files. Then, I needed to move the server a little, and I accidentally unplugged it. When it booted back up, my RAID was gone. I thought that perhaps it was because I didn't shut it down properly, cursed my carelessness, made a mental note to buy a UPS, and rebuilt the RAID. After rebuild, it worked again, but when I needed to reboot for another reason, the same thing happened again. I found some more documentation on the FreeNAS site that indicated that I might have missed a couple of options in the RAID setup, so I rebuilt the RAID for the third time using the recommended magic incantation. RAID mounted up just fine...until I rebooted. Same problem each time- RAIDs all show up as fine and happy, but won't mount. This time, I was able to just reformat and it mounted, but that's sort of useless as a fix considering it destroys all of the data on the drive. After several hours of fairly fruitless research (other than people saying "don't use the Sil3124/sofware RAID on BSD", which I wish I had found BEFORE I chose this particular card), I more or less decided I had to find another alternative. Specifically, I was reading more and more about how BSD really hasn't kept up with Linux when it comes to a robust software RAID implementation, and if I wanted to do software RAID and not use Windows, I needed to use something with a Linux kernel. So, back to research.

I looked at Openfiler but it has no media server support (it's really marketed as a file server for small businesses), and is based on some relatively unknown variant of Linux (rpath), meaning that it may not be easy to get add-on packages without having to compile them myself (um, no), and there is virtually no online support - it looks like most of their support is for-pay.
I also looked at MythTV which has several pre-built OSes with the software built in (Mythdora, Mythbuntu), but it's really more of a DVR solution, and from what I read didn't really have great support for the PS3 media streaming that I wanted to do since I'd have all of my media in one place.

In the end, I decided on using Ubuntu, specifically Ubuntu Server 10.04. Server is the same as the desktop version except that in the name of resource conservation, it doesn't install a lot (well, any) of the slick GUIware that makes Ubuntu so popular. It also adds some additional server features that I'm not going to use and don't really care about, but it's a better choice for something like this with a lower-end CPU and less than 1G of memory.The lack of a GUI worried me a bit, because I'm not a UNIX geek really. I have managed my own Solaris box at work for a number of years, and I know my way around the OS as a user, but managing a modern UNIX desktop primarily involves interacting with pretty useful GUIs, so I'm pretty much a n00b when it comes to setting up a complete system via command line only.
Fortunately, the install is pretty straightforward and menu-driven. It allows you to choose what you want to install, so I was able to add the stuff I needed like openssh for remote management (this box is going to be headless and in my utility room), samba (windows file sharing), etc. It even gave me an opportunity to define my software RAID during the install, and it set it up as a part of the install. It was up and running within about an hour, but I should note that "up and running" means something a good bit different here than it did on FreeNAS. On FreeNAS it meant I was ready to use the box for its intended purpose. Here, it meant I had a command prompt blinking at me. Mounting the RAID took almost another hour, not because I didn't know how to mount a drive, but because the instructions on how to set up a software RAID during install assumed that I was installing the software to the RAID (I wasn't) and said that the installer would format the drive for me. I chased down a lot of error messages dealing with mounts and RAIDs before I figured out that the damn drive wasn't formatted. Why there couldn't have been an "you can't mount an unformatted drive, moron" error message instead of the cryptic ones I kept getting is beyond me. But after that, it mounted up like a charm.
With that sorted, it was on to setting up samba to share my newly built disk, which I was able to do with the help of a good tutorial I found on setting up a basic NAS using Ubuntu. Long story short, I was able to copy files, and the RAID persisted after a reboot, so I'm already ahead of where I was with FreeNAS. As a bonus, I'm getting significantly better throughput on Ubuntu for disk access over the network too.

While I was waiting for the format to complete (and as a diversion when I got stuck), I also worked on:
Enabling IPv6 on the box using a static address
Downloading and installing the Linux version of the power management software that came with my UPS
Using the built in package management stuff (aptitude) to install SMART disk monitoring and apply some updates to my existing system
Downloading and installing PS3 Media Server using this tutorial. There are other alternatives such as Fuppes (which is what FreeNAS uses, I think), Geekbox, Mediatomb that are all UPnP/DLNA media servers, so if for some reason I don't like this one, it's good to know I have options.

And I'm still not totally done. I still have to go through and shut down some unnecessary services and generally lock the box down from a security perspective, finish setting up PS3 MS, and upload all of my data, but at least I have a functional server after less than a full weekend's work.

Overall, so far I'd recommend FreeNAS if you're not doing RAID, and Ubuntu if you are. Maybe someday BSD will fix their crap software RAID support, or FreeNAS will get ported to Linux, but until then, I guess I'm going to be rolling my own.

Japan Adventure #12

I made it to Narita in plenty of time, and there is a nice shopping mall area outside of security, so I went to grab some lunch and a few souvenirs in order to get rid of the rest of my Yen. The food court I found had several options, but there was a good Japanese Noodle stand, so I got some Soba noodles in soup with Tempura on top of it. It was quite tasty, and I’m pretty pleased with myself at how good I’ve gotten at eating noodles with chopsticks. There are displays on the table that definitely have some more good Engrish, including calling the Garden Gourmet the “Garden Groumet” in one place on the menu but not the other, and “please refrain from bringing food into the table.” I wanted to take a picture, but the signs were under a rubberized coating on the table, so I got some strange looks when I removed the placard to take pictures.

Security was security (except that I didn’t have to take off my shoes – I’m pretty sure the US really is the ONLY place that makes you do that particular bit of security theater – I didn’t have to do it in London or in Stockholm, or in Vancouver). To kill time until boarding, I sat and read the “Daily Yomuri” which is the English version of the local newspaper that they gave us every day at the hotel in Hiroshima. It’s nice, because you get the Japanese perspective on world news, along with some selected stories forming a double-page special edition within the paper from the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Shortly before I boarded, I saw a bird hanging out in the terminal. I had to show my passport again before I was allowed through the boarding gate, and then it was time to head back home. Nothing to report about the plane ride really, other than I got to see a fantastic sunset both while we were taxiing and then from the air after we took off, and I had a bulkhead seat. I still didn’t sleep, but I think that helped me get over jet lag quicker. It was an interesting bit of time traveling I did, since I left Saturday at 4:05 pm, and arrived back at Dulles on Saturday at 2 PM, despite traveling for 12 hours. Dulles has recently opened a new area for international customs, but unfortunately they still use the mobile lounges to get you from the gate back to the customs area, and it takes at least 2 of them to empty a 747.

Japan Adventure #11

Friday was my last day in Hiroshima, so bright and early Saturday was checkout day. I grabbed the streetcar around the corner from my hotel, and headed for the JR Hiroshima station. An aside, the local streetcar system, called Hiroden, is sort of a museum of streetcars. There are some on the system (like the one I had when I arrived) that are obviously every bit of 40 years old, and there are some (like the one I had this morning) that are nearly brand-new. My car had a placard in it that said 2005. I arrived in the station about 30 minutes prior to my train’s departure, which is more than enough time since there is really no security – you just buy your ticket, put it through the turnstile, and go. An aside – the turnstiles in the train stations are pretty neat. They have RFID readers if you have a reusable pass, but they also have ticket readers. You insert your tickets, which could be printed tickets for something like Shinkasen, or could be a fare pass for the local metro lines with a fixed Yen value printed on them. The reader accepts the tickets inserted in any direction, orients them, reads them to determine validity and proper value, and usually stamps them and returns them, or if this is your final destination, retains the ticket. This is even if you have to insert multiple tickets for a multi-train trip, such as the one I am making which involves the Shinkasen to Tokyo and the N’EX to Narita. Pretty high-tech compared with something like the DC Metro’s farecard readers.

When I went to purchase my train ticket back to Tokyo and Narita, I found out that the train I wanted to take was sold out of reserved seats. Fortunately, there are 3 cars of non-reserved seats, so I had the attendant book me on a non-reserved ticket. An unknown (to me) upshot of this arrangement is that the ticket is several thousand yen cheaper, and it is not tied to a specific train. So, when I spied an N700 series (newest series of trains) train on the platform destined for Tokyo, I could hop on, even though it was an earlier train than the one I had planned to take.

I found a seat in car 1, which is apparently far enough removed from the smoking car (3) that there was no smoke odor. On this train, car 1 is actually in the back of the train. Japanese trains make a note to proudly proclaim which series they are. This is groups of trains which were manufactured based on the same design and as far as I can tell, the cars are numbered based on the series number (ie 600 series means car numbers are 6nn and so on). Usually the series of train identifies features and configuration more than differences in speed. All of the Shinkasen Nozomi superexpress trains travel at the same speed, but the N700 series, for example, has AC power near some seats. So, I’m sitting on the train, tapping away at my laptop with 100VAC feeding it, so that I don’t have to worry so much about finding a plug to charge it at Narita before boarding my 12 hour flight.

One of the nice things about being on the train during the day is that I can actually see some things out my window. Well, I can when we aren’t in a tunnel, that is. Apparently, the area near Hiroshima is fairly mountainous, and so we have spent a lot of time inside of tunnels. Often we’d exit one tunnel at the base of one mountain only to enter another into the next mountain a few seconds later. The tunnels really aren’t lit on the inside (one light every 7-10 seconds), so it just goes black. Once you leave the tunnel, the speed is more obvious, but it still doesn’t feel as fast as it actually is. I’m going to try to capture some video when we get a long stretch outside the city that may give an idea of the speed.

Once we get outside of the cities, you start seeing lots of rice paddies and other types of gardens next to individual homes. I have noticed that there are quite a lot of solar panels, both PV and hot water on both homes and high-rises here.

The girl came through with the food cart, and I chose some snacks, since I had to skip the hotel breakfast this morning. I grabbed some “Smoked Salmon Dry Chips” which are basically the equivalent of Salmon jerky. They’re good, less salty than most beef jerky, a bit more fishy tasting than fresh salmon might be. I noted that the outside of the package definitely has a nice example of Engrish on it – “Quarity and Natural” but the actual logo from the manufacturer has “Finest Quality” spelled properly. I completed my breakfast with some chocolate covered almonds and a drink.

Wow, that was nice. The train has just stopped in Osaka, and a lot of people boarded. The man in front of me turned around and warned me that he was going to be reclining his seat, so that I could move my laptop back and avoid it getting caught in the seat. The Shinkasen seats raise to fully upright – perpendicular to the floor, so you have to recline them a little in order to be comfortable, at least if you’re my height. They definitely recline further than airline seats, so I imagine it’s easier to sleep on a train like this. I definitely have plenty of legroom – a full foot between my knee and the seat in front of me, even at maximum recline. Approximately $200, 4 hours travel time – I say again, US, UR doing it wrong! I’m pretty sure that the electronic display is currently saying something about the train being good for the environment, as I just saw CO2 and ECO interspersed with a string of Japanese characters. I think it may also carry some news headlines, as I just saw NASA scroll by as well. Unfortunately, many of the messages on the board are not translated into English – so far, only the destinations and a security message (report suspicious activity) have been in English. The Japanese use of English is very inconsistent. While many official things (trains and airports) are bi-lingual, things like maps posted in public places, street signs, business signs, are often only in Kanji. However, if you watch Japanese TV, many of the commercials, brand names, etc have English words interspersed with the Japanese. And this is not just for words which don’t have a Japanese equivalent, it was common words as well. Common Japanese brands – Toshiba, Panasonic, Fujitsu, and even Japan-only brands I have never heard of often have their logo and corporate motto in English, often announced at the end of the commercial in English. Then there are shops and businesses that use English words that, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, do not mean what they think it means. Plus, they pretty consistently use Roman numbers, despite the fact that there are Kanji equivalents.

Japan Adventure #10

Breakfast is included in my hotel fee, and so every day I go one of two places – the hotel has a French restaurant Le Platine on the top floor (22) of the hotel, which has fantastic views of the city of Hiroshima. They opened for breakfast specially for IETF, and have a mainly western spread. It has been interesting to try the Japanese take on things like French Toast, bacon, sausage, etc. All have been quite good, but just slightly different. The French Toast was less sweet and more eggy than you would expect, and there is usually an option for things like salads, cheeses and other savories, even at breakfast .Where I have ended up most days is the restaurant in the lobby, Frutier, which also has a buffet, but it is a mixture of Western and Japanese-style breakfasts. While I didn’t eat much of the miso soup or other very traditional Japanese breakfast items, (rice gruel doesn’t sound particularly appetizing). I did have several interesting things. They had multiple types of fish, such as small sardine-looking fish that looked to be heavily salted, and usually some cabbage, rice, etc. Their version of smoked salmon is much less salted and smoky, and more like salmon sushi – almost raw, and very delicate in texture.

One thing that I found I liked a lot was Chawanmushi, or egg hotchpotch. It is a steamed egg-custard, usually with some vegetables in it. Another was a “Japanese Omelet” aka Tamagoyaki. The hotel doesn’t appear to make it in the traditional way, cooking a thin layer of eggs, rolling them, then repeating, but rather cooking a well-beaten (frothy) set of scrambled eggs into a brick, and then slicing into near bite-size pieces. I also had boiled fish paste, which is another item cooked into a brick and sliced. It has little “fishy” taste, but it is a bit strange in that it has roughly the same consistency of very firm gelatin. One thing that was nice is that they always have fresh Kiwi fruit, usually cut in half and with the end cut off, so that you can basically scoop the fruit out of the skin with a spoon.

Japan Adventure #9

Tonight, we went to another sushi restaurant, Sushi-Te. Not much different about this place, except that we sat at the bar, and the chef served us on banana leaves. It was amusing that all of the staff would literally yell a greeting when anyone came into the restaurant. We had a really excellent sushi roll that had crab meat plus scallions, and one of the sushi platters that we ordered came with this huge piece of eel. Normally, eel is served just like any other type of sushi – a more or less bite-sized piece with some rice. This one was about 4 bites, approximately 1 foot long – I think it was the whole filet (if that’s the correct word) of the eel, with rice under one bite’s worth, and the rest just eel. It was good just like the eel is normally, it was just an interesting presentation. There was also a sushi roll that consisted of the standard rice and seaweed, but was topped with marscapone cheese. It was savory and creamy, not sweet like you’d think of marscapone in an Italian dessert. Very tasty.

Japan Adventure #8

Today, I had dinner at the hotel’s teppenyaki restaurant. Instead of beef, tonight I chose to have seafood, so I ordered a Scallop, which came in a Japanese basil sauce, and a shrimp, as well as a rice soup with sea bream. The chef started by sautéing paper-thin slices of garlic in lots of oil. This had two purposes – one is that it gave you these nice crispy garlic chips to munch on, and two is that it infused the oil with the essence of the garlic. He collected up all of the oil on his spatula and put it into a pan for use throughout the cooking process. The scallop was fairly straightforward. The cooking of the shrimp was more interesting. First, he started with a live prawn. He put down some oil, then either some water or rice vinegar and covered the whole thing with a copper bowl. This quick-steamed the shrimp, while searing the outer shell. I'm not sure how long the shrimp survived, but it probably was not the most humane of deaths. He then trimmed the shrimp, and further cooked the end of the tail tail and flattened the body (except the head) so that you could eat the rest of the meat available in those parts. This was served with a single leaf of Japanese basil, fried until crispy, a slice of lime, and Japanese sea salt, which was pink, for garnish. The sea bream soup was somewhat build your own. He kept the broth hot in a little earthenware teapot while he lightly seared the sea bream. He then put the bream on top of a scoop of rice, and then I got to pour the broth over everything myself. Quite tasty. We finished the evening with some dessert, which was a semi-sweet chocolate cake served with sweet cream, vanilla ice cream, and a mint leaf. The meal was a bit pricy, at 10000 yen/person, but quite good.

I walked off dinner by spending some time looking at and taking pictures of Hiroshima’s Dreamination, which is a display of lights (like Christmas lights, but not formally affiliated with the holiday) that they put up every year along about 4-5 blocks of Peace Boulevard for about 6 weeks. This year, Hiroshima prefecture decided to put out their display 2 weeks early so that it would be up while the IETF was here. They really have gone out of their way to be welcoming to our group! Among the highlights, there is a pirate ship, a carousel, a solar-powered Christmas tree, laser lights, and a 30M high Christmas tree called the Miracle Tree.

Japan Adventure #7

For lunch today, I went out to a restaurant around the corner from our hotel. It had a buffet lunch special, which was 1000 yen per person. This is the same that I have been paying for a box lunch at the hotel, so that’s a good price, given the variety of food available. There was a noodle dish, some sweet and sour-style chicken, salad, miso soup, and a few other things. The food was good, but I don’t think I had anything all that new and different.

Tonight was Sushi. In a lot of ways, it’s not that much different from the standard US Sushi place, except that we went to a small place that we had mostly to ourselves, and had to take our shoes off and sit at a low table, somewhat like I imagine a traditional Japanese home might have. The restaurant had an English menu, so that made ordering a bit easier. They had a great selection of the standard sushi fare and rolls, but we also had a few things that are not as common. We had squid, which is one of the few types of sushi I have had that I didn’t really enjoy. It’s not that it tasted bad – it has a pretty neutral taste, but the very chewy/slimy texture was pretty foreign, and hard to get past, especially compared with the butter-soft, melt-in-your mouth texture that many other types of sushi has when it’s very very fresh. I had trouble suppressing a gag reflex, solely because of the texture, but I eventually got it down. We also had some sushi rolls topped with salmon roe, as well sea urchin, which was very soft and buttery, and light brown in color. We were able to get a plate of sashimi, which included Toro (from the fatty underbelly of the Tuna), and something I have never tried before, truly raw shrimp. While I have had sushi-style shrimp plenty of times, it is simply cooked, trimmed, and served cold, sort of like shrimp cocktail. This was shrimp served whole, on ice, and the body was split so that you could simply pull the tail out and eat it. It has a very different texture than the cooked shrimp, almost like a noodle. It tasted a bit more “briny” than a cooked shrimp, and the fact that I haven’t had any gastrointestinal distress (I’m writing this two days hence) tells me that it was VERY fresh. Topped that off with a good bit of Asahi beer, and it was a good evening. Given the quality of the sushi, 13700 Yen for 3 people including beer is pretty good in my opinion.

In Honor of Veterans' Day

Today, I found myself with some free time because I didn’t have any sessions I needed to attend immediately after lunch. So I took the opportunity to walk over to the memorial set up for the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which consists of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Peace Memorial Park, and the A-Bomb dome. Little did I realize what an effect it would have on me. I started out by being mildly amused at the irony of visiting this memorial on November 11^th, which is the day set aside to honor our war veterans in the US. It stopped being amusing nearly as soon as I set foot on that hallowed ground. I have some mixed emotions, because I do have a WWII veteran in my family. My grandfather, Wesley E. George, Jr. served in the Navy aboard the USS Sigbee, which was attacked by a Japanese Kamikaze plane, and nearly sank. He survived, but that made this somehow all the more powerful.

As a citizen and representative of the country responsible for this unspeakable act of violence, that caused death and destruction and impacted so many innocent people on such a massive scale, I somehow felt like my mere presence was an affront; that I was intruding on something very private, like walking into the middle of a stranger’s funeral. This isn’t because of anything anyone said or did, it was just the way I felt – very much a foreigner, stranger in a strange land.

My only hope was to learn about those who suffered and died, to honor their memory, and to absorb the spirit behind the memorial – one of peace and in support of abolishing nuclear weapons so that those many thousands of people did not die in vain. I walked through the Peace Memorial garden, looking at the different monuments and statues erected to honor the dead. At the Children’s Peace Memorial, which is to honor the children killed in the bombing, there was a school group (one of several that were touring the area) assembled, and singing a song. I have no idea what the song was, or what it meant, but it just felt…right.

Across the river is the A-Bomb dome, which is the ruined outer structure of one of the few buildings left standing after the bomb. This is near the hypocenter of the bomb detonation, and gives a real sense of the destruction that the bomb created. Nearby is a statue and some gravestones which were exposed to the heat and radiation, and have obvious permanent shadows and damage to what was previously smooth stone.

As I was struggling to take this all in, and make some sense of something that really seems senseless, all the while still feeling like an intruder, something happened which helped to set things right in my mind. As I walked through the park, I was repeatedly approached by groups of schoolchildren, probably late primary or early secondary school-aged, who wanted to say hello, ask where I was from, what was my name, etc, in order to practice their English. They would then want to shake my hand, and have their picture taken with me, giggling all the while at the funny way English sounded and the nervousness of talking to a tall stranger in a foreign language. They were even more amused that I attempted to say a few words in Japanese. You can’t help but smile, and be encouraged that the emphasis of this memorial – peace, was found in that small way.

From there, I went into the actual museum. I didn’t have time to walk through the entire thing, but there was a special exhibit in the basement, featuring two things. First was a series of pictures taken at different points after the bomb – immediately, a few years post, and approximately 10 years post. It showed the desolate wasteland, and its transformation as the city began to rebuild.

The next exhibit really struck me. It was a collection of drawings from the survivors of the bombing. It included notes that they had written on the back, and each one was a picture and a first-hand account of the absolute horror, talking about those who survived only to die shortly later in agony, thirst, and either alone, or in the company of those who were powerless to help them.

I couldn’t even bring myself to take pictures here – it felt like a desecration. However, I can say that some of those images will haunt me for a long time to come.

There was a map which showed the hypocenter, as well as a radius – you would never know that my hotel was less than 1 Km from that point. Hiroshima now is a vibrant, bustling, beautiful city.

I can only use this as a reminder of how lucky I am – that this, the Holocaust museum, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, are probably the closest I have ever really been to the hell that is war, and the evil that we are capable of inflicting on our fellow man.

I know of no better way to close than this – Thank you to all of the Veterans who have suffered and died that I might know peace, and thank you to the people of Hiroshima for inviting me to understand in some small way what they went through, and to honor their innocent dead. I pray that this will be the last time such methods will be used, no matter the cause.

Japan Adventure #6

Tonight, it was pretty much pouring. I waited in the hotel lobby in the hopes of catching a couple of attendees that were not planning to attend the social event that I could maybe join for dinner, but was unsuccessful. I debated just eating at the hotel given the weather, and the lack of dining companions, but I knew I would regret not getting out into town and having some authentic food, especially since lunch the last two days has been grabbing a quick box lunch at the hotel. It is authentic Japanese lunch (I haven’t been getting the Western-style sandwiches they offer as an option), such as Teriyaki chicken, beef or pork sukiyaki, etc but still, getting out is part of the experience.

So I asked the concierge to recommend an okonomi-yaki restaurant. All of the tourist literature says that okonomi-yaki and the local oysters are a specialty here in Hiroshima, so I figured I would go for that. Map in hand, I was off. I figured it wasn’t a big deal to get wet for the few blocks I would have to walk, but apparently the bellhops would have none of it. They literally chased me down the block to hand me an umbrella, which I was glad to have, because I would have been VERY wet by the time I got to the restaurant and back. I passed a gas station (one of the landmarks the concierge gave me) and almost didn’t realize it was a gas station – it didn’t have the standard pumps like we have, mounted in cement islands. Instead, I think in order to conserve space, it was just a parking lot in front of a building, and the pump handles and hoses were hanging down from above on those spring-loaded reels like they use at the Jiffy-lube for the oil fillers.

Anyway, there were 3 places that the concierge recommended, but there was a slight problem in identification, because my map was in English, but the establishments all had signs with only kanji on them. The concierge had written the kanji next to the names, but I was coming up dry in trying to match printed and stylized characters from the signs with her handwriting. I ended up choosing the only place that had an English sign, named after the food that they serve. It was a pretty small, hole-in-the wall kind of place, but I knew I had chosen correctly, because it was full of locals, even at 7:45pm on a rainy Tuesday night, and as far as I could tell, several members of the same family were working there (likely the owners). Fortunately, they had an English menu to go with the sign. The place was something like the teppanyaki restaurant, in that the griddle was right out in the open, and if you wanted, you could actually sit at the griddle. I chose a table, but noted while I was watching them cook that when they served people at the griddle, you actually ate right off of the griddle, probably in order to keep it warm. Okonomiyaki starts with a freshly made pancake the thickness of a crepe. They put noodles, meat and vegetables on top of it (piled high), then top it with a thinly scrambled egg, fresh green onions, and some sort of brown sauce, probably fish sauce or something. They served mine on a heated cast-iron plate. I got one with squid, prawns, scallops, and green onion. It was quite tasty, and huge – I had trouble finishing it.

Japan Adventure #5

Had dinner at a teppanyaki place tonight – this is the place where you sit around the griddle and they cook in front of you. It’s not quite like Matsutake or Benihana in the US, where it’s dinner and a show, but the chef did light some alcohol on fire at one point. I had Hiroshima Beef, which is apparently somewhat similar to Kobe beef, in that it’s unique to this region. It’s not raised the same way as Kobe (massaged cows, etc), but it is quite tender and flavorful.

Japan Adventure #4

Had lunch at the hotel’s Japanese restaurant, which was called Unkai. It was on the hotel’s 5^th floor, and the interesting thing about it is that they had a lovely Japanese garden on the roof, so that the windows of the restaurant overlooked the garden. In another “hi, I’m a tall foreigner” moment, I had to duck to enter the restaurant due to a curtain hanging from the doorway, and then the relationship between the base of the table and the height of the chair (which was still too low for me to be comfortable) caused me to have to sit with my ankles crossed, because if I sat with my feet flat, my legs hit the base of the table. All of the waitresses were dressed in traditional yukata or kimono, and I had some soba noodles in broth, some tempura, and some Japanese pickled vegetables.

Tonight was the IETF’s welcome reception. The hotel put out all sorts of food, some western, some Japanese. It was all good, but nothing overly notable or out of the ordinary. I did get a chance to try several Japanese desserts, which are typically rice balls with different types of flavoring, as well as a cup with a coffee-flavored gelatin, some cream, and a bit more either strong coffee or coffee liqueur on top. Since I’m not a big fan of coffee without lots of sugar, it was a little bitter for my taste. I was able to enjoy some very nice sake. One of the host sponsor’s representatives gave a toast, which in Japanese is “kanpai!”

Was examining my JPY coins last night, and was struck by how light the ¥1 coin was. I had to go look up the coin composition, turns out that the coin weighs 1 gram (vs other coins weighing 3-7g), and is made of 100% aluminum instead of the more standard brass/copper/nickel alloys. It almost feels and sounds fake (like plastic). I have had Yen coins in every denomination (¥1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500) including both versions of the ¥500 coin. The newest version of the ¥500 coin has ridges in the zeros of 500 on the face of the coin, and if you hold it just so, you can see "500" and the Kanjii character for Yen printed in the ridges. Wondering how they strike that with any level of repeatable success.

Japan Adventure #3

The Shinkasen has lines on the platform for people to wait to board each car, and if you buy a reserved seat, you have a specific car and seat you are assigned to. I was in car 4. The doors don’t open until right on the button of when it says on the ticket and departure screens, and you’re given maybe 2-3 minutes to board before the doors close and you’re off. Car 3 is a non-reserved seat, and though my car is non-smoking, 3 is not, and the entire car smelled pretty strongly of smoke from the adjacent car. There are a few stops in the Tokyo metro area, and then it gets up to full speed. The display said that it tops out at 300 Km/h, and other than when it was decelerating for a stop or in a metro area, it seemed to be doing that pretty consistently. I could feel the train leaning a few degrees during turns, but the ride was very smooth. There was no real-time speed indicator, and it was dark, so I don’t have a great frame of reference. Each stop on the Shinkasen, instead of a tone to start the announcement, they actually play a jaunty little tune (2 or 3 measures) over the speakers, and then make the announcement – I’ve found this on some of the other trains as well.

Once underway, a woman came past with a food cart. They sold Bento-style boxes, plus drinks. The menu was in Japanese, and I couldn’t determine what most of the things in the pictures were, so I just chose one at random. It turned out to be some miscellaneous vegetables, smoked salmon, and I think some marinated tofu, as well as some gelatin, plus sticky rice and a few pickled veggies, and some very sour (pickled, I think) stone fruit. It was filling, but not exactly flavorful. Later I had some Pocky (Japanese chocolate covered cookie sticks).

I got to Hiroshima station, and was able to find my way down to the street cars, called Hiroden. A 10 minute ride on the street car, and a 2 minute walk to the hotel. The streetcar doesn’t announce every stop, and what stops it does announce are in Japanese – with one notable exception: The stop for all of the conference hotels for IETF had a recorded English announcement.

My room here is nice, but quite small (much smaller than the Hilton, where I had a queen-size bed). I have a bed that is somewhere in size between a twin and a double, and a small desk facing my window, which is basically an air shaft between buildings. The bathroom reminds me of a cruise ship – very compact, and it looks to be modular, as if you could replace the entire bathroom as a unit. The ceiling is lower in the bathroom, and there is a step up into the bathroom, and then the tub is slightly higher still, so while in the shower, my head is probably 2” from the ceiling. One thing of note – my toilet is one of the stereotypical “fancy” Japanese models with a heated seat as well as several *ahem* cleansing functions. Decorum dictates that I’ll just leave it at that, but if you must know more, this will tell you all about it. J

The mirrors in both of the hotel bathrooms I have been in have something (probably a small heating element) to keep a portion of them fog-free. Also, the shower pressure in both has been excellent. I have a feeling this is not exactly a “low flow” showerhead. If it is, all I have to say is, “US, UR doing it wrong!”

Everywhere I went today, from the Airport onward, lots of people wearing surgical masks. I don’t know if they do any good, but probably 30-40% (more in the airport) were wearing them, even outside. I’m not sure if H1N1 is any worse here, but they take the precaution.

Japan Adventure #2

Got on the shuttle in the morning, decided to take the shuttle to the JR station instead of back to the airport. At first, I thought I had made a mistake, but turns out that you can catch the Narita Express (N’EX) here as well. Met a girl from California who didn’t discover until she got to Japan that apparently Americans need visas to get to China, and so was trying to make the best of her trip. Said she did research, but I feel that is a fairly fundamental first point of research. Anyway…together we found the platform we needed, and made it downtown.

N’EX has displays that show advertising and the upcoming station, as well as any outages on the JR and Toyko subway system. Lots of interesting ads, including several for WiMAX. While I was coming in on the N’EX, I saw several little league teams playing baseball, plus people playing tennis, basketball, soccer, etc. I also got to see some freight trains, and the thing I thought was interesting is that instead of having a lot of specialized cars, tank cars, refrigerated box cars, regular box cars, etc., most of the cars were actually flatbeds, which could take shipping containers, but also there were self-contained modules for things like liquid tanks that could be mounted to the same car, several on a single car. The only specialized cars I saw were for loose raw materials (coal, ore, and the like). I didn’t see any of the engines, so I’m not sure what they use, but thought that the modular shipping system was a neat idea.

Tokyo station is HUGE. Makes Grand Central/Penn/Union look tiny by comparison. Had to quest for an ATM so that I could get Yen, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get by on just credit cards. That took me more wandering than anything else, because the maps on the exit of the terminal were unclear, and the entire old side of the terminal (the original building) is under construction, making it hard to get where I thought the map was telling me to go. After about 45 min of wandering, I found the ATM, and headed back to the station to find a coin locker to dump my suitcase into for the day, and buy my fare to Harajuku station on the Yamanote line. Fare purchase and ATM both had an option for English, so no problems there.

Got some water and a Pocari Sweat (had heard about this from friends, it’s like Gatorade – I don’t know who Pocari is, but his sweat sure is tasty!), and headed out.

Yamanote has the same displays so finding my station was easy. Harajuku has a huge shrine to the emperor Mejii and his wife Empress Shoken, so I started by wandering back through that. It’s hidden back inside of huge trees that form a canopy over the path. There are several gates that are made of wood poles so large I wouldn’t have been able to get my arms around them.

There were many young boys and girls (3-7) as well as some women dressed in traditional garb headed back towards the shrine. I’m not sure if there was a festival, or if this is common. There was a whole display of Chrysanthemums, as well as bonsai, and a display of wine casks that were donated from different regions of France – apparently this emperor was trying to embrace the best parts of Western culture – started dressing Western (no topknot), drinking wine, etc.

From there, I headed along the edge of the park to get to the ’64 Olympic stadium. There were a bunch of street vendors hawking food, and I realized I was starving. I had what I think was an okonomi-yaki (Japanese pancake pizza), and it was fabulous. The Cirque du Soleil was in town, so I walked past their tents, and on to NHK plaza. From there, I wandered in what I believed to be the general direction of Shibuya. I am not sure I took the most direct possible route to get there, but I definitely made it there without having to double back, which is pretty amazing given my usual sense of direction. Shibuya station is home to one of the largest street crossings in Japan. Even on a Saturday, when the lights turned red, the entire intersection just filled with people. I have some great pictures, including some from the second floor of a huge Starbucks. I took a picture next to Hachiko, the dog. I had two nice folks from NHK stop me and ask if they could see the pictures that I took of Shibuya, so I let them copy my pictures (they had a little chip reader thing), and they briefly interviewed me, don’t know if it’ll end up on TV or not, but I signed a release form, the other end of which they gave to me, but is all in Japanese. Something I found interesting is that smoking while walking or “just anywhere” is frowned upon. They had designated outdoor smoking areas, and there would be people dutifully clustered around them. It’s not that people don’t smoke other places, and there’s nothing really special about the smoking areas, other than ashtrays, but they’re placed at regular intervals, and actually have a map indicating where other smoking areas are located in the general area.

I set off to wander through the alleys near the station looking at stores, etc. Lots of tiny little stores that were selling clothes, food, blaring music, people standing out front to call you into the store. There were some department stores, including one that had a 30-person choir performing an enthusiastic version of the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” complete with choreography – random! I wandered around in Shibuya until about 2, then decided to hop the train back to Tokyo station. Man next to me started talking to me, I guess to practice his English – asked where I was from, what I thought of Tokyo, President Obama, what kind of work I did, etc.

When I got off of the train, I still had some time to kill, so I wandered towards the Imperial Palace. You can’t really get to the palace itself, but there are several “outer gardens” where you can wander around. While I was walking the street at the edge of the gardens, I saw a police car and a police motorcycle. The cars are Toyotas, but I don’t remember the model, the motorcycles are Honda VFR Interceptors, in white. Other interesting carspotting today – I think I saw a Porsche 959, definitely saw a Honda (Acura) NSX, one Skyline R32, and a mid-80s Camaro IROC-Z. Motorcycles are common, but scooters, both the small-displacement (think Vespa or Honda Cub) and the larger displacement ones that can handle highway speeds (roughly equivalent to a motorcycle, just with automatic transmission and a flat place to put your feet) are far more common.

By the end of my wandering, I was pretty tired. I estimate that I walked 6+ Km, and between my bag and the fact that I don’t normally walk that much, I was pretty worn out. I took a breather at the fountains near the Imperial gardens, took some pics of the sun dropping behind the trees (not much of a sunset tonight, I’m afraid), then headed back to the station to get my bag and hop on the train. A side note, it gets dark quite early here – 5 pm it was already dusk. I noticed that it started getting light at around 5:30 AM.

Side note – according to the roaming guide on Sprint.com, I was supposed to be able to get CDMA service in Tokyo, but not Hiroshima. I turned my phone on in several locations while roaming Tokyo, including near Narita, and if there’s CDMA service in the region, my phone couldn’t find it. I have pretty much decided to go old school and dispense with a mobile for the week. The time difference makes it extremely unlikely that I will be getting or participating in phone calls for work, and I have Skype plus a webcam for calling home, so I can’t really justify the expense of renting another phone, especially since I bought a 2G GSM phone while in Stockholm this summer (it doesn’t work here).

Japan Adventure #1

Flight out of Dulles was diverted to Chicago, because one of our pilots called out sick. They need 4, we had 3, and apparently there were no acceptable backups at Dulles. Flight crew said 20 minutes. Ended up being more like 120, after refueling, swapping some food carts that apparently didn’t stay at correct storage temperature, and sitting on the tarmac waiting for departure clearance. Very glad I grabbed a Potbelly sandwich before I got on the plane, because this significantly delayed onboard meal service.

Food was, well airline food – sustenance, but little else. Chicken & rice or Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes, was the first meal. Later, a small cup of ramen noodles. While convenient for the flight crew, I’m just not keen about someone pouring boiling water on something sitting in my lap on a plane prone to sudden turbulence. Last meal was pasta, either Japanese noodles or rigatoni. Figured this was not a good time to try Japanese noodles, since I could find better examples elsewhere.

Flight arrived after 6pm local, or 3+ hours late. I was never so glad to have decided to stop my travels for the night – lots of folks missed connections and got put up at hotels, or had to run to try to make their connections.

Customs was a breeze, they have a machine that fingerprints both index fingers and then snaps a digital picture of you, in addition to the scan of your passport.

Hotel shuttle. It was a Hilton, nothing much to say. Late dinner of “Japanese curry beef” over rice, which was actually stir-fried beef with brown gravy made with soy sauce and a bit of spicy. Good, but by no means amazing.

Theft of sensitive information

A bit of a diversion from the standard environmental stuff today...

I've been seeing more and more news items involving stolen laptops that contain people's personal information, social security numbers, etc.
This absolutely blows my mind, especially given the companies that have been involved...
The Veterans Administration. ING Financial Services.. These are companies/agencies that should know better.

Fact #1- Laptops are rediculously easy to steal because of their mobility and reasonably small size, and even easier to fence for a quick buck.
Fact #2- The average computer user barely knows how to safeguard their own personal information from being stolen and used fraudulently. Why would they be trusted with someone elses?
Fact #3- Even if the laptop in question isn't physically stolen, there are plenty of ways to break into either a data stream or the hard drive itself by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Operating system, or by sniffing unencrypted packets out of the air when the owner is using wireless at Starbucks.

Given these three facts, why on earth would any systems administrator allow sensitive information to ever leave the doors of the office??
The answer? There are plenty of sysadmins out there who have never given any serious thought to their information access policies, or have been shot down by people above them who wanted their people to be able to work remotely and weren't willing to spend the money necessary to implement proper controls.
What scares me is that the government hasn't stepped in to fix this problem yet. I guess maybe some senator has to be victim of an identity theft before it becomes his concern.

To that end, I propose the following rules:
Treat the social security number like classified information. The government has plenty of spook agencies that know how to deal with classified information, and even more government contractors that have this down to a science. There should be a required Information Security training course for people who access things like social security numbers to make sure that they are aware of proper handling procedures for sensitive data like this.

The general rule of thumb for classified information? Background checks for anyone that needs to access it to do their job, so that you catch people who might misuse it before they do so. Information access is on a need to know basis. If you don't need access, you don't get access. This includes use of partial numbers, such as last 4 digits. Storage restrictions- This data must be stored in an encrypted, password-protected form. It can not be copied in whole or in part from the secure location(s) that it is stored in except for backup purposes. Any need to access the data for analysis or manipulation must be done by linked access, so that the data only leaves it's storage area in encrypted form, and only exists on the user's local machine in encrypted form, so they (or anyone else) can't directly get to it. When they disconnect from the network, it stays on the network, and not on the laptop that they tote home with them, or the USB drive attached to their keyring that has all of their work files on it, or other removable media. If they need to be able to access the data from outside the office, proper procedure should be followed, such as using a server that is only reachable using an encrypted Virtual Private Network, a SecurID token, and a password, so that this isn't something your average hacker can find his way into.

Further restrictions on the use of such information. If you don't NEED to have a system key off of the social security number, you can't use the social security number. Basically, except for things involving a person's finacial records, the SS# is not to be used as an identifier. Any user who is being asked for their SS# as a login to a website, or otherwise suspects that a company or person is not observing proper security measures in handling the SS# can report the asking party to the FTC's Identity theft folks for investigation and prosecution.

To ensure that this is immediately followed, penalties will be stiff. Depending on how egregious the violation (number of people compromised, willful vs. accidental, individual vs. corporate), fines can range from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars, assessed on a per-violation basis. This will add up very quickly when you're dealing with a database that is accessed every day, or with a huge database.
If an employee violates existing company policy and takes information home that they shouldn't have, like in the case of the VA person earlier this year, the company will be held partially responsible, since they obviously had a hole in their policy that provided opportunity, but the individual will be held personally responsible as well, for civil and criminal penalties. This seems harsh, but if people believe that they will not have anything worse happen to them than that they lose their jobs, and the company will take all of the heat, there's not much disincentive there. If they are worried about going to jail, and being in debt for the rest of their life because of fines, they might think twice about bending or being ignorant of that particular set of rules.