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2010-10-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

Halloween Costume 2010

Many attempted the Chilean Miner look this Halloween. I'm prepared to be judged against my competition. (Unless that competition arrived at their party in a life-sized home made Fenix rescue capsule. They are in a different league.)

2008-11-09T13:35:00.000-08:00

Halloween Costume 2008

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the movie Apocalypse Now

A few more related pictures appear below. As a fun game, try to guess which ones are of me in costume, which ones are of Robert Duval from the movie, and which ones are the 12", 1/6 scale, custom-made Kilgore action figure!

You wanna surf soldier? [Yes, sir!] That's good son because you either surf or you fight.

"Charlie don't surf!"

"Two of spades, three of spades, four of diamonds, six of clubs, ace of spades. Isn't one worth a Jack in the whole bunch..."

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning ... smelled like victory."

"Someday this war's gonna end ..."

2008-05-04T21:52:00.000-07:00

Dad and I at Deception Pass State Park

2008-05-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

Rabbit Rattle Investigation

Any noise coming from my car makes me crazy. Rattles, rumbles, tics and other sounds while driving must be hunted down and eliminated. This photo series illustrates how my Dad and I identified and fixed a rattle in my left hatch tail-light. I'm so happy that it's finally fixed!

2008-04-27T18:12:00.000-07:00

Guerrero Mexico Trip 2008

Parasailing in Ixtapa

John, Lisa, Rachel and Julie

No curfew at Angela's Hostel, Zihuatanejo

Julie on the beach at La Barrita

"Rey Misterio" on the beach at La Barrita

Portrait, Landscape

Receiving a skeptical look in the Combi van

Acapulco!

2008-03-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

Attention!

Noticed at North Broadway QFC Today

One of Eddy's all-stars caught me not-so-stealthily capturing this masterpiece with my camera phone. She asked if I was taking a picture because of the atrocious spelling. My answer was yes, but this home-made sign has appeal on so many other levels.

2008-03-03T23:42:00.000-08:00

Phoenix Weekend Trip 2008

Hiking in South Mountain

Flames over Jets (Coyotes) 3 to 1

Papago Park

Why the Colorado River was diverted

2008-02-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

ipod-Rabbit integration

I used the Brodit mounting system aka ProClip in the USA. The system consists of two pieces: a mount custom-fitted for your car, and a cradle customized for your device. The mount installs in 1 minute just by snapping it on to your dash, and it doesn't leave any permanent mark. The cradle attaches to the mount using two screws. The ipod can slide up and out of the cradle so I can easily take it with me when I park.

The ipod integrates with the car stereo using the Dice i-VW-R VW Adapter. A standard ipod connector plus into the ipod, and the wire runs through the back of the glove compartment to the Dice i-VW-R box tucked behind the stereo. The i-VW-R then connects to the stereo using the CD changer interface. It also includes a similarly wired aux. mini input in case my passenger has a non-ipod music player.

2008-02-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows about fake software, DVDs, watches and designer handbags. But did you know that counterfeit Gillette razor blades are also a huge problem?

The Is it Counterfeit? guide from fakeblades.com can help you check the authenticity of your Gillette shaving product.

Here are some tell-tale signs of fakery from the site:

Blades obtained through reputable retail channels like wal-mart or amazon.com are probably genuine. However, be suspicious of blades sold by third-parties, especially on ebay.
Check that each cartridge in the pack has a unique serial number (!) Counterfeiters often don't bother to imprint serial numbers, or use a larger, cheaper to print font that don't match the official Gillette format (1 letter followed by 4 number and then 1 letter, for example B9083H)
Look closely for signs of poor cartridge quality, like loose, unaligned or dull blades. Other reported signs of counterfeiting include blades covered in rust (!) or hair fibers (!!)
Examine the quality of the packaging. Does it look like it was sealed by hand (irregular glue patterns) or in a manufacturing environment? Compare the quality of the printing and colors on the box to a known-good specimen.

Go to the washroom and check your blades right now! I did.

2008-01-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

At Corona Heights Park in San Francisco

2008-01-14T01:25:00.000-08:00

Winnipeg Christmas 2007

Julie and stuffed dog in attack mode

Winnipeg Art Gallery

In the Exchange District

Quality sister time

In Canada, we like our bowling with five pins!

... and our chips flavoured with ketchup!

2007-10-31T01:44:00.000-07:00

Halloween Costume 2007

"Alex" from "A Clockwork Orange"

2007-10-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

Seattle Critical Mass October 2007

The usual start at Westlake Center. Rode through downtown, SODO, and ...

... up the highway 99 on-ramp ?!?

Enjoying the city scape, and the views of water front from the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Through the tunnel!

Across the Aurora bridge!

And finishing at UW's Red Square.

2007-09-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

Westgate 1997 Highschool Reunion Trip

Matt and the school that molded him

It's spelled Crokinole

AJ and Rea by the fire

Never leave Julie alone with your camera

Man and Bird-Dog

Where is Andrea?

Baseball at the school

2007-07-07T18:20:00.000-07:00

We're famous!

Or should I have said infamous ... ?

2007-07-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

July 4th Hike To Lake Serene

Feats of Strength

Lunch Rock

Jager The Dog

Jager The Mountain Goat

Exploring the Glacier

Heading Back

2007-07-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

Our house is famous!

2007-06-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

Red Army GSHL Div. 5 Winter 2006/2007 Season

2007-05-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

A few photos from my London / Paris trip

2007-04-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

It's hard not to feel guilty about paying taxes in the U.S.A.

2007-04-08T18:55:00.000-07:00

Matt and I went to the Bay Area last weekend to see the San Jose Sharks play at home.

Here's Matt in the Haight searching Priceline for a hotel.

Here's my "window" bed at the Green Tortoise Hostel in the North Beach area.

We had dinner with some startup friends at "Foreign Cinema" in the Mission.

On Saturday night we met Justin of justin.tv by chance at the Matrix Fillmore in the Marina district. Note the video camera on the right side of Justin's head.

San Jose won 6-2 over the L.A. Kings. Our $70 lower bowl seats were worth the price. Getting down to San Jose was a challenge after I slept in too late and missed the cal-train. First we tried to catch up with the train via BART, but it became clear right away that we not going to make it. Instead we got off, rented a car, and made it to the HP Arena with lots of time to spare.

Sunday night we had a light dinner at this downtown restaurant called the "The View"

2007-03-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

This is Jager. I'm taking care of him for a week while his parents are on vacation. The first thing people want to know is what kind of dog he is. I forgot to ask before they left, so I don't know, but a co-worker offered that he looks about half German shepherd and half chiwawa. Taking care of this dog full time is probably my biggest life responsibility so far.

Jager craves love and attention, and now seems to even more so since his parents are away. For example, his preferred place to sit in the car is on my lap, between me and the steering wheel. I decided this wasn't safe on account of the airbags. Similarly, at work, he would rather sit on my lap between me and the computer, than in his more comfortable kennel. If you sit down on the couch, Jager will jump right to you and sit closer than you probably thought possible. If you lie down in bed, Jager will lift up the blanket with his head and crawl under it in order to cuddle with you.

Despite Jager's affectionate nature, his favorite game appears to be wrestling and biting. He likes to initiate this game first thing in the morning, just seconds after my alarm goes off. You know he wants to play when he pokes your hand with this snout and gives you a gentle bite. Jager is harmless, but I find the safest way to play bite-wrestle with him is while wearing hand protection (winter gloves). Unfortunately, these kinds of displays do not encourage confidence in those who are uncomfortable around dogs to begin with, like our house-mate Koushi. Furthermore, Jager also has the habit of growling at those who would come around him before he can even recognize who they are. It is hard to convince someone how friendly Jager is when he is growling and trying to leap out of your arms at the new acquaintance.

2007-02-28T22:05:00.000-08:00

Random Photos off the Camera Phone

Correspondence with the mail-person

A warning sign for the office ...

Curling

The Rabbit turns 10,000 (miles) !

2007-01-24T01:22:00.000-08:00

I'm finally settled in my new "right-sized" room.

2007-01-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

New Year's Party At New House!

This is how the fourth floor of our new house at 13th and Mercer normally looks.

Here's how it looked last night, as "Heaven" for our 2007 New Year's Party (Theme: "Heaven and Hell")

Here's some tortured souls in "Hell" (the basement)

This is our view from that fourth floor room.

2006-11-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

For Halloween I was Mr. Orange from the movie Reservoir Dogs. Note the skinny black tie and gunshot wound to the stomach. But due to FAA regulations and public "brandishing" laws, I am not carrying my gun in this photo. This was taken at the S.F. Halloween Parade

2006-10-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a few photos of my new Shock Doctor™ Power Dry™ System in action. After seeing an ad, and getting excited about the novelty, I picked mine up at Northwest Pro Hockey for $170 (large bag and blower) as soon as it became available.

The idea is that instead of unpacking all your gear and laying it out to dry, you leave it (organized) in the bag and the external and detachable blower dries and ozonates it.

Here's their pitch:

No more wet, smelly infectious gear, foul enough to clear everyone out of the locker room, let alone the Surburban or the house.
The amazing patented* Shock Doctor Power Dry System not only dries, it refreshes, deodorizes and kills bacteria on equipment inside the bag. The bag interior is like no other, featuring multi-vented chambers that organize all kinds of gear to maximize air-flow and speed drying time when the Power Dry System is in use.

Cool idea, and it works, but it's no miracle. The blower doesn't reach every corner of the bag because, well, it's filled with your hockey gear. I find myself running the 3 hour cycle two or three times, reshuffling different bits of gear into the compartment directly attached to the blower. You could argue that this is just as much work as unpacking and laying your equipment.

2006-10-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

Is 1-866-LITTER1 Toothless?

On Monday night, Matt and I were driving home from hockey. About 10 minutes away from Seattle, the rear driver's side window of the green, late model, VW Jetta that was in front of us opened, and a fast food drink container flew out. The container hit the pavement at 65 mph and exploded into a cloud of liquid and debris that the Rabbit drove into a split-second later.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed.

When I got home, I called 1-866-LITTER1 and reported the details of the incident. After hanging up and cooling off, I visited the Washington State Department of Ecology "Litter and It Will Hurt" campaign website to learn more about the program.

I was angered to read the following:

Q: Will the litterer be sent a ticket based on a litter hotline report? A: No, tickets cannot be issued based on hearsay.

Also:

... Those people that complain about receiving the hotline letter and say that the report is inaccurate are sent a letter of apology and assured that the incident does not affect their driving record.

Where exactly is the "hurt" part of this anti-litter program? Is it at most the possible paper cut from opening their strongly worded letter from the department of ecology?

Where is the $1025 fine promised by this ad campaign?

I demand justice!

The occupants of the littering car appeared to be punk-ass teenagers. My only consolation is the hope that the warning letter will be addressed to one of the parents, who, unlike the state department of ecology, will have the authority to bring about the appropriate amount of Rabbit-avenging "hurt".

Similar local "snitch" programs that you should support:

2006-10-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

After waiting by the mailbox for a MONTH, my alloy VW R-line pedals arrived on Friday! How great do they look in the Rabbit?

Installing the brake and clutch pedal caps was easy -- you just pop the old ones off and snap the new ones on. The gas pedal was much trickier. Did you know that it is not mechanical, but electronic? There is a wire that connects the pedal to the car, and it took me a long time to figure out how to disconnect it. Here's a DIY guide that illustrates the process.

2006-10-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

Winnipeg Thanksgiving Trip 2006 Photo Highlights

2006-10-12T23:46:00.000-07:00

2006-10-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

2006-10-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

Winnipeg Thanksgiving Trip 2006 Photo Highlights

2006-07-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I bought a silver 2006 4-door VW Rabbit with alloy wheels, sunroof and electronic stability control. Here it is in front of the apartment.

2006-07-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

Matt, and I, and all the bikes in the back of a truck on the road up to Suntop Trail this Sunday. We cheated and got all the rewards of the trail without paying the "grueling 7 mile 4,000 foot climb" price of admission by tagging along with the Pacific Bicycle Company's Shop Ride. Somewhere in that pile of bikes was my new Specialized Stumpjumper FSR "Expert". Bernard's GPS showed our total distance today as 14 miles, including our return leg via Skookum Flats

2006-04-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

The afternoon of my last full day in Tunisia, I went to a very small place called Korbous on the Cap Bon peninsula. The whole region is only 30km from Tunis, so it was just a half-day trip. I first went to Soliman by louage, then took a smaller taxi to Korbous. As you maybe can tell from the photo, Korbous is squeezed between some cliffs and the Gulf of Tunisia. The drive out was very nice because I was the only passenger in the newish VW Golf taxi and we zipped down the hills on a few kilometers of winding road into town.

I ate a fish for lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the town -- basically just what you see here. The menu promised choices of pizza or steak but "of course" those were not available. No problem I guess. This was a common occurence at restaurants outside of the high season.

That night I was back in Tunis and on a mission to find a souvenir. Naturally I didn't want any of the tourist crap they sell everywhere: baskets, jewellery, leather, pottery, carpets, pipes, beaten copper plates, gypsum rocks, blah! Instead, I wanted something authentic. I was running around trying to obtain one of the propaganda portraits of president Ben Ali that hang in every shop, business, train and bus station in the country. 'Not sure if you would find his likeness in private homes, because I got the sense that most Tunisians don't really like their president too much. Now, at least in America EVENTUALLY someone new gets elected. The photo that accompanies this article about Tunisia's pretend-democracy might give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

I was hesitant to just steal one of these posters off the wall of some public place for fear of being arrested as a political instigator. I set out by inquiring at shops on the street. I'd point at their local image of the president and ask where they got it. Given how many copies I'd seen around, I thought they would just be available for free at some nearby party headquarters. Unfortunately, people either didn't know, thought I wanted to buy their portrait, or gave me directions that didn't lead anywhere. Soon I was joined on my quest by some Tunisian guys who started a conversation with me on the street. We walked around for about half an hour trying to find a source for the poster but weren't doing much better than I was alone. Eventually however we ended up at a frame and photo center in the medina. The guy wanted 15D for the poster with frame! This was outrageous since I didn't want a frame, only the image, but he wouldn't sell it alone. I was in a bad bargaining position since I clearly didn't want to leave the country early tomorrow morning without a poster. I ended up buying the framed version for 13D, and had him remove the image from the frame so I could roll it up and take it in my bag. One of my companions was pretty happy to take home the now empty frame for free.

By the way, my new friends were called DJ Dzou and Sharon. We walked out of the medina to Cafe Paris to have a drink. As usual, I paid for our beers, just to be nice. First off, these guys are still trying to understand why I like their president so much. This took a while to explain but eventually Dzou understood that it was not admiration but basically a joke. They thought this was pretty funny. Next they started telling me about their sex, drugs and techno music lifestyle. I won't get into the details but they were extensive and suggested the existence of a kind of Tunisian woman that I hadn't met on my trip. True or not, this was all pretty entertaining.

Dzou wanted to go back to his 'office' to burn me a CD of his music but there was a bit of an incident as we got up to leave. Sharon had ordered two more beers after my complementary drink, and evidently he expected me to pay for those too! Unbelievable!

And that concludes the trip because the next morning I flew home! In conclusion, ... ?

2006-04-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

I left Taberka on Monday and headed south, into the green hills that I'd been looking up at for the last few days. At Jendouba I got the usual sandwich for lunch (tuna, olives, hot sauce/paste, deep fried egg) and hired a taxi to take me to the Bulla Regia ruins. I told the driver to pick me up in an hour, because that's about what my appetite for ruins runs at. The Bulla Regia ruins are interesting because it an underground version of the classical Roman city. It's just cooler down there I guess. To the left you can see a photo of me chilling in the House of Amphitrite. The floor I'm standing on has the best mosiac of the whole site. I flipped through the LP in search of where to go next. I decided to take another louage further south to Le Kef, a small city on a hill, and take in some views. Unfortunately, the weather was hot and hazy when I got there, but I started walking up to the Kasbah from the louage station anyway. You could really tell this city was pretty backwater because kids would should out "Give me 1 dinar/pen/candy!" This never happened in Taberka, Jerba or Tunis where people on the street either ignored you or wanted to have a real conversation. Up in the heights of the city, you could look down at the surrounding country but the visibility wasn't great because of the haze. I think I found the city's last remaining door through the walls, called Bab Ghedive. Stepping through it, you leave Le Kef and the scene dramatically changes to the countryside. Outside the city walls there were some cool cliffs and a really old cemetery. I warded off some angry dogs here with rocks. Picking up a few rocks for dog defense before entering a town is a trick I learned in Morocco. I didn't see much else to do in Le Kef, so I stepped back into town and took the cheapest small-town taxi ever back down to the station, and waited for a louage back to Tunis. That night I had another good dinner experience on Rue de Marseille. The first night it was Chez Nous, but this night I chose Al Mazar. With wine, my typical dinner of salad, bread with hot red paste, olives, and a tomato and meat stew was about $10. I stayed that night in the Auberge de Jeunesse in the medina. Now there was only one more day left until home!

2006-04-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

Here's some things I did in Taberka over the last few days *besides* walking around on the beach:

Walked up to the island fort that overlooks the city. It was closed but the "guard" poked his head out of a portal 10m overhead and offered to let me in. The fort was littered with pieces of the set from a film that was recently shot there. I guess the idea was to make the place look less ruined and more contemporary for a movie called (allegedly) "The Last Legion." It wasn't easy to tell what was actually part of the fort and what was fake! I tried not to lean on any exterior walls just in case they were made of plaster. On the way out, the friendly guard reminded me how I had agreed to pay him a little bribe for the behind-the-scenes tour. Apparently our "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" deal got lost in translation.
Hacked at some balls at the Hotel Royal Golf driving range. I went with my Tunisian friend Wael because I thought it would be a novel experience. I'm a bit worried that they hire people to collect the balls because no automatic collection machine was in sight. It was weird to see all the distances marked in meters rather than yards.
Went for a dive. Very cool, except there was no instruction and no independence. Basically they suited me up, threw me in the water, and had a guy steer me around 5m below the surface for 30D. First, I had to get used to the idea of not holding my breath but instead calmly breathing through the regulator. Also, the guy scolded me whenever I would use my arms to swim. We would "communicate" using hand signals not established in advance. Now for the good parts: There were a ton of fish down there, including the almost glowing multicoloured ones you see on the discovery channel. The rocks were covered in bright orange ... something. It was also cool to look up at the waves crashing against the rocks while floating motionless underneath.
Hit the discotheque Saturday night. Outside of summer, these places only open if there are enough guests at the attached hotel. (At night we would walk by huge 5 star hotels, that were completely dark and empty) The music was a mix of Arabic, English and other. The patrons were French, Czech and Italian tourists, plus Tunisian men. Also let me note that the idea of a public smoking ban has not yet reached Tunisia. It reminded me of the bad old days in Seattle/Waterloo/Winnipeg.

2006-04-23T07:42:00.000-07:00

In the morning, I walked to the downtown British Airways office as indicated on the LP map. It didn't exist. A guy from a nearby business gave me the new address way out by the airport. I scrounged around in my bag for change for the cab fare out there because I didn't want to change any more money if I would be leaving the next day.

BA was a no-go. The reps would not touch my ticket because it was just too damn cheap. No changes were possible at any price. For the rest of the day I entertained some wild schemes like buying a new one way ticket to London, spending the next week there, checking-in to the TUN-LGW flight remotely on the BA website so the onward segments of my flight wouldn't get cancelled, then catching only the return leg across the Atlantic. Several people in combination talked me out of this -- still not sure if it could work. I was so close to doing it, but the BA.com website makes you pay for your Internet ticket purchase over the phone and the office had closed by the time I called.

OK so I was pretty bummed about the situation and spend a whole day moping around Tunis centre-ville. I felt like I had seen the whole country and wanted to do something new. That night I met a Canadian at the hostel who had just arrived by taxi from Algeria. He told me about the country he visited towards the Algerian border -- green and hilly instead of flat and desert-like. The next day I got on the train to Taberka hoping for something different.

Tunis medina pedestrian traffic tip: don't take Rue de la Kasbah to and from l'Auberge de Jeunesse at rush hour. Instead try Rue Zarkoun which runs parallel but a little to the north. Despite being less direct, it's way faster because it isn't clogged with people!

2006-04-22T03:04:00.000-07:00

I didn't stay long in Douz. The next day I got some photos of me and the dunes then grabbed a louage to Tozeur. The road to Tozeur is a 100km+ causeway across an enormous salt lake (Chokh). Of course there was no water except for a few salt saturated puddles beside the road. The drive there was a sight in itself.

All I did in Tozeur was fend off touts and check out the views from Belvedere rock park. Here's a photo until I post my own. Not sure whose head that is supposed to be (JFK?), but I climbed up there and the sculpture is not stone but just plaster attached to the rock and is hollow on the inside. Someone punched a hole in it and now its full of garbage I think there's some animals living in there. Maybe this is what LP means when they say of Belvedere: "Recent development takes away from the natural beauty."

Basically at this point I had decided I'd seen enough. I wanted to head back to Tunis and change my flight so as to spend the remainder of my time as a stop-over in London (my return flight goes through there). The first step was to get on a louage to Gafsa.

Three twenty-something Tunisian girls arrived to join our louage, all made-up, wearing jeans and sporting pink mobile phones. They kept giving me looks and giggling like crazy. Unsolicited, two of them gave me their phone numbers, passed on slips of paper through a male friend of theirs. When our last passenger arrived, an old woman who didn't want to sit next to me, I ended up moving to the double front seat with one of the girls. Immediately she started with the BFF talk (in French of course): What personality traits do you look for in others? What are your dreams? Are you in love? etc. In her notebook, she showed be a handwritten list of her best qualities (in pink ink) and a similar list requirements for her future husband. All this itself was ridiculous and over-the-top but the final flourish was when she proposed that I pay the louage fare for her and her friends!

In Gafsa it was already pretty late in the day so there weren't many passengers for a louage to Tunis. I met a cool guy Stephane from Cote d'Ivoire who was working in Tunisia at a bank. He was telling me how poorly Tunisians speak French and how it was difficult working in this country because he didn't know Arabic. It was weird how Tunisians treated both him like a foreigner (like me), like for example spontaneously saying "Bienvenue a Tunisie!" even though he lived in Tunis. He didn't seem to appreciate this. Tunisia is not a multi-cultural place so non-arabs are obviously from elsewhere.

Finally, after waiting almost four hours we had enough passengers to leave. I had thought about buying the empty places so we could go earlier but decided against it because it seemed like bad form. This also got me thinking about the economics of the business. Does it ever make sense to make the trip even without a full complement of paying passengers?

It got dark as we drove and was midnight by the time we approached Tunis. The driver took a few wrong turns as dropping people off in the suburbs would take him off the main highway. When this happened, everyone but me and Stephane would immediately shot corrective directions at the driver in Arabic, which would usually prompt a u-turn.

Back in Tunis I was super tired and had a headache from breathing the exhaust that wafted into the passenger compartment over the five hour drive. I grabbed a taxi and asked the driver to suggest a cheap hotel since the hostel was already closed at that late hour. Lo and behold we pulled up at the Hotel Olympic, the very same hotel the airport taxi hustler brought me to on my very first late night arrival. Instead of driving away, the taxi driver came into the hotel with me even though I was carrying my own bags. Gee, I wonder if they have a taxi kick-back program going? Fine. I was going to sleep.

2006-04-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

After Jerba, I headed west via a series of louages to Matmata, famous for its underground homes built into the earth to escape the heat. One especially famous underground complex is the one that played Luke Skywalker's uncle's Tataouine homestead in the movie Star Wars (La Guerre des Etoiles, locally). Today it has become the Sidi Driss hotel. Upon arriving in the hot and deserted Matmata that afternooon I headed straight for it. The hotel is a series of large open pits in the ground, each maybe 5m deep. The pits are connected by tunnels and the guest rooms, restaurant and bar are dug into the pit walls. I checked in and ate lunch off the pit where the Star Wars scene was filmed. The pit area was baked in sun, but the cave-like rooms were really nice and cool! The hotel itself was neat but the movie artifacts were unimpressive. All that was left of the Star Wars set was a decaying rubber lining around some doorways and a space-ish looking gearbox on the pit wall. This was all fine, until the hoards of tourists arrived. The parking lot became clogged with their tour busses and 4x4s. Wave after wave arrived and filled the pits with glamour sunglasses, digital video cameras, bathroom lineups and Italian, Spanish and English. This was all unbearable and it was still early enough in the day to get out, so I walked back to the louage station and left town. I had to backtrack to Gabes to find a louage that would take me onward to Douz. Douz is the desert trekking center of Tunisia. On the way, no less than two authentic Berber desert nomads gave me the pre-sale pitch for an excursion. Even funnier were their warnings about the non-Berber would-be guides who would surely approach me in Douz. They were not to be trusted! Should something go wrong out in the wilderness, they wouldn't know what to do (what with their unknown heritage)! Since I won't know how to distinguish Berber from non-Berber, it would be safer just to book with them. The dunes at Douz were pretty cool, but I wasn't planning on making a desert expedition. More novel to me was the vast palm tree forest (palmerie) beside the dunes. There's a campground among the 1/2 million trees, but I think its mostly an agricultural operation. I walked through the palmerie for a few kms towards the zone touristique. On the way, I chatted with a local student in the stands of the deserted fair grounds on the edge of the dunes. The douz dunes are much smaller than the Moroccan ones I visited two years ago. Here they looked like a big wavy ocean of sand with a few palm trees, whereas the Merzouga dunes where huge mountains of sand. However, neither is considered part of the "true sahara." In fact they both are just isolated pockets of sand, separate from the Grand Ergs of the Sahara. But these dunes are much closer to civilization and tourists, and in pictures you can't tell the difference. It was getting dark on the zone touristique strip, so I wandered into the Sahara Douz hotel. (This is like locating an "Airport Hilton" 100kms from the airport, or an "Oceanview Holiday Inn" 100kms inland) I was pretty proud to negotiate the rate of this three star with pool and buffet down to 56D. Ate dinner, watched some arabic game show in the common area, and went to bed. BTW. With so many louage trips today, I made 3 louage BFFs! Definition: someone you meet in the shared taxi and chat with casually for a bit who suddenly asks for your home address and mobile number so you be best friends forever and help them immigrate to Canada.

2006-04-19T03:02:00.000-07:00

I'm writing retrospectively now. Sunday I decided to engage some transport to better check out the island. The bicycle rental place in town was closed (I waited around for a while hoping it would open) so I grabbed a taxi to the "Zone Touristique" where operating hours might be more enlightened. The zone touristique is a long, very-spread out strip of dozens and dozens of big hotels located on the north shore. Opposite from them are various local restaurants and business set-up to serve those guests who leave the beach and wander out the front gate. My driver took me to a place that rented out motor-scooters so I got one for 30D. The rental guy gave me a helmet, insurance card and some brief instructions: "Have you ever done this before?" "Don't ever touch the front brake" "Accelerate very slowly." After a bit of practice driving around the dirt parking lot I felt ready to get on the road. It took a while to really get the feel for driving because your center of gravity is way different than on a bicycle. After that, driving was really fun! The speedometer on my bike didn't work, but as I was almost keeping pace with cars in some speed zones, I estimate the scooter could go up to 60km/h. Also the gas gauge stopped working half way through, but the rental guy said you couldn't burn a full tank in the five hour rental period. So I spent the afternoon tooling around Jerba on this thing. I went to the eastern-most beach, the marina back near Hoummt Souq, stopped for lunch, and finally visited the island's casino! Only the slots were open during the day, and the place was completely void of gamblers. You can only gamble in foreign currency (probably because the off-shore operators have no use for Dinars) and I left the place $5 poorer. After returning the bike at five, I took another taxi back to the Auberge de Jeunesse, ate Cousse Cousse Royal for dinner and went to bed.

2006-04-15T23:46:00.000-07:00

Hmm Internet access is pretty sparse here, and when you find it, it's very slow and is delivered through a tiny 14" CRT. After my last post, I took the train from Tunis to Sousse, stayed overnight there. Sousse had a nice beach, and while the sun was hot, the wind was cold. The most interesting thing the LP indicated as nearby was the Roman colleseum at El Jem, the next city on the railway south. The train is the ideal means of transport here: clean, fast, on-time, cheap and pretty empty. But that makes this a bit too easy, doesn't it? Instead, I tried to get to El Jem by louage, which is a shared taxi. In Morocco, they have the same thing only it's called a "taxi collective." You arrive at the depot, which is just really just a parking lot, where half a dozen guys each stand around shouting the name of each of the available destinations. The guy shouting your intended destination leads you to the appropriate 20 year old Mercades sedan. You jump in and wait for more people who want to share the ride with you to arrive. When enough people cram into the vehicle (this can take awhile for unpopular destinations) the driver turns on the engine, indicating it's almost time to go. You pay the driver your share of the fare upon arrival. But that's Morocco. Here, they actually have a louage station with a gate, roof and waiting area. And paid-in-advance tickets printed by computer! And you travel in new Mazda or Toyota minivans! So I woke up really early, grabbed a stall sandwich for breakfast, and took a taxi to the louage station. I waited an hour in a minivan for El Jem watching happy Tunisians drive out of the station for other destinations, and not one other person interested in El Jem arrived. This was a waste of time -- obviously only tourists want to go to the colloseum and they just drive there in their giant tour busses! Decided at that point to get back on the train. That's what I did and arrived in El Jem at about 10AM. The colloseum was pretty cool and it kept me interested for a couple hours until it was time to move on. I grabbed lunch and went to the El Jem louage station to try again. This time it was no problem getting a ride to the next town, Sfax. I was the seventh and last person in the minibus and so we promptly left. By the way, the fare is about 3D per hundred kilometers. Highway driving in Tunisia is pretty typical. There's not too much traffic, but we spend half the time driving in the passing lane, staring down an oncoming vehicle. No problem. An hour later, Sfax, seemed pretty generic, urban and crappy, plus I was enjoying my book, so I didn't even leave the louage station and instead got in another minibus to the island Jerba. The drive was along the coast so you could almost always see the blue strip of the Med. sea to the left of the highway. This part of the country is very flat. It's a half desert half green landscape. After three hours driving, the road comes to an end at the water. You cross the water to Jerba by ferry. There are two docks and four boats running concurrently so it didn't take long for our minibus to advance to the front of the queue of traffic. Finally, in the island's main town, I found the Auberge de Jeunesse and payed by 6D for the night.

2006-04-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

Hello from Tunisia! I'm on vacation here (and elsewhere?) for the next two weeks. Nothing super exciting has happened yet -- just the usual planes, hostels, and walking around so far. I flew from Seattle to London a day or so ago, and finally arrived here in Tunis pretty late. The price of arriving in a new place after dark is that the transportation and hotel options are less obvious. I just let the first taxi guy at the airport take me to his "preferred" (kickback) hotel. In the light of the next day you realize that the cab fare and hotel cost 3x what they should, but I guess its no big deal. My sleep schedule is a little screwed up. I basically slept through the previous day in Gatwick airport so that first night I was up late watching TV. On the French channel they were playing a translated version of that "Cheaters" show. Woke up super early the next morning and got the heck out of my 37D/day hotel ($1=1.35D). It just isn't worth it to have your own TV and bathroom. For some reason, developing countries make me very cheap. I sat around in the main square and chatted with a Tunisian named Omar about unemployment, how to get a work visa for Canada, and new car prices. Next I got on the commuter TGM train to Sidi Bou Said which is a blue and white suburb on a hill that has good views of the sea and the coast. Not much was going on there so I headed back a couple stops to Carthage and walked along the water. At noon, I had a chicken club sandwich in a "Fast Food" restaurant (that is apparently something to be proud of here) that was furnished like a lounge. The fries were certified "McCain" brand by the menu. There is a museum and ruins in Carthage that cost 7D to bore me so I headed back to Tunis via the train to find a new place to stay. Ventured into the Medina in search of the Auberge de Jeunesse. It's a pretty nice place and costs only 7D per night including bread and coffee for breakfast. After checking in I napped away the afternoon. Had dinner and beers last night with two English archeology students and my Swiss roommate who wants to bike around the country. Today I need to figure out what my plans are for the next weeks.

2006-03-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

Today we launched the project I've been working on for a looong time: Amazon Simple Storage Service. Mom: S3 is a service that developers can use to store and retrieve files, photos, videos, documents, whatever. Like an Internet hard drive. You probably won't use it directly, but other people will write applications on top of S3 that you might use. For example, photo sharing sites, web based word processors, email applications and who knows what else!

I'm in Santa Clara, CA this week at the SDWest Software Development Conference where we're officially announcing S3. See you at our booth!

2005-12-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

Escape From Seattle

Oops, I went to SFO again this weekend. The local forcast said but for only $200 and 2 hours of travel it could be . Done. And after driving it once, flying was a no-brainer: 10x faster for the same price.

After work on Friday, I bought my flight, jumped on the plane and arrived in Oakland before midnight. There's a bus that takes you from that airport to BART, and BART took me into the city. Oh, there was one small incident on the way: APPARANTLY, the TSA does not permit KNIVES on airplanes. The backpack that I brought along as carry-on still contained my Leatherman tool from my last excursion, and the dozen or so security personnel working me over in parallel in the "extra" screening line had no trouble finding it. Luckily, they weren't too upset about my accidental attack on homeland security, and instead of reserving me a cage in Guantanemo, they just sent me back to either put my contraband in checked baggage or mail it home. Super!

I decided to stay in the dorm at the H.I. Downtown because Natalie and I found it agreeable last weekend. This is a really big place and it doesn't seem like you have to worry about reservations (during the Winter). Also, they have free wireless on the second floor (it looks like someone just plugged an access point into the for-pay internet kiosk's LAN. Nice!)

All I really did today was ride around on MUNI reading my book The Best American Travel Writing 2005 (highly recommended, and there are past years' editions). Spent time in the sun looking at the city at Dolores Park, via the J. Next I rode the N to the beach to catch the sunset.

Finally, one site I'll be consulting frequently while I'm here: Burritophile Burrito reviews for the Bay Area and beyond

2005-12-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Road Trip 2005

2005-12-01T21:18:00.000-08:00

I'm so proud of Seattle's public transit

2005-10-13T23:53:00.000-07:00

Juno is never happier than when his head is stuck out the window of a moving car.

2005-09-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

Camping on Baker Lake

2005-08-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

Me, Natalie, Nick, Jim, a random photo crasher, and Aditya, also at Camp Muir. Check out the rest of the photos from this trip.

2005-08-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

Me, at Camp Muir (3072m), Mt. Rainier National Park

2005-08-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Rahul and I have a new officemate Homer (the dog)

2005-08-02T23:37:00.000-07:00

Bernard's page about our weekend biking trip.

2005-07-27T00:40:00.000-07:00

Everything I remember about my life so far:

When	Where	keywords
Spring 2005	607 E Harrison	Vegas trip, Wakeboarding,
Winter 2005	#308 1514 Bellevue (Ming)	Guatemala trip, San Diego trip
Fall 2004	#202 1514 Bellevue	SQS ships, DC/Montreal trip/visit
Spring 2004	2204 E John	convocation, Mia, San Francisco trip,
Winter 2004	#817 Harbor Steps, Seattle	France/Spain/Morocco trip, leave waterloo,
Fall 2003	161 Erb (Matt,Nat,Robin,Ben)	CS452(trains/illness), CS466, CS456, amzn/ms interviews
Spring 2003	3623 St Urbain, (Devyn,Hillary,Jesse,Val,David) Montreal	ExchangeIt!@NITI,
Winter 2003	161 Erb (Matt,Nat,Kevin,Pat)	CS354, CS486, CO331, CO487, ENGL
Fall 2002	Chez Jean Hostel (Lidia,Victoire)	Phone Integrator@NITI, Foosball
Spring 2002	207 Erb (Emily,Donny,Jessica,?)	CS341, CS360, CS342, CO380, STAT231, MS interview, parents split, overlook-fairtunes-sale-trip, NYC road trip
Winter 2002	Adelaide Hostel San Francisco (Jeni,Nicolas,Marion,Curt)	Timeport/AWES@MobileAirwaves,
Fall 2001	207 Erb (Emily,Donny,Jon,Matt)	CS240, CS246, CO453, CS370
Spring 2001	Phillip St. Townhouses (Langeman)	CS241, CS251, weekend trips to matt/nat toronto
Winter 2001	Orinda, CA (Tan,Jimmy,Colin)	Mob. Airwaves, co-ops fired,
Fall 2000	#2xx Grebel Waterloo (Matt)	Jennifer, drop-out/did nothing, Pixstream fiasco, RIM interview
Summer 2000	Winnipeg	Linnet/housing map project, Fairtunes
Winter 2000	#30x Grebel (Bowman)	CS134, STAT230, ENGL206
Fall 1999	#30x Grebel (Bowman)	CS130, CO350, MATH235, Indonesia trip
Spring 1999		Univ. Winnipeg antimagic research on ultrasparc2s for $400/week
Winter 1999		intermediate calc, networks, applied algebra, number theory
Fall 1998		intermediate calc, combinatorics, graph theory, discrete math
Spring 1998		Powerland full time, summer english class w. AJ,
Winter 1998		Intro Calc, Intro Chem, Mech&Wave, linear alg. Powerland@$9 (Saturdays)
Fall 1997		Univ. Winnipeg: ECON, Intro Calc, Intro Chem, Mech&Wave, Powerland Computers $8
Spring 1997		Westgate graduation, Jonquiere Quebec french program, Ottawa/Halifax bike trip
Winter 1997		Chem,Physics,Math,English,French,Calculus,MennoHist, India/Nepal trip
Fall 1996		Musiplex/Plexxus @ $5.40/hour

2005-07-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

My daily commute by bike from home in Capitol Hill to Amazon on Beacon Hill.

2005-06-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here's what happened this weekend: Lobster ...

2005-06-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

... and wakeboarding.

2005-06-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

Good times ...

2005-06-08T00:19:00.000-07:00

Here we are, hitting all the hottest Vegas spots

2005-06-08T00:18:00.000-07:00

Matt didn't steal *all* my best photos

2005-06-08T00:15:00.000-07:00

Evidently, *some* cities are capable of building a monorail

2005-06-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

Out for an early morning drive ...

2005-05-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

Ming driving, and Matt skiing. Wakeboarding is just as fun as it looks.

2005-05-28T23:18:00.000-07:00

Julie is visiting me in Seattle. We spent today on Matt's boat.

2005-05-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

The fireplace is real!

2005-05-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

Everything in its right place

2005-05-15T23:10:00.001-07:00

Ming on moving day

2005-05-15T23:10:00.000-07:00

View off the deck

2005-05-15T23:06:00.000-07:00

Hallway art

2005-04-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

With the market price at $4/dog, and apparently high-demand areas chronically un-served almost everywhere you look, the Seattle hot-dog market seems, at first-glance, ripe for the picking. But for those would-be hot dog entrepreneurs among us: Why Seattle Doesn't Have More Street Food

Seattle is a shitty town for street food. Citywide, a mere 18 vendors offer hot dogs, popcorn, and espresso from open-air carts ... aspiring street vendors have attempted to set up shop ... find themselves hurdling through an obstacle course of often-perplexing regulations for the right to occupy a five-by-eight-foot space on the sidewalk.

Other cities have it worse.

2005-04-22T20:31:00.000-07:00

Recently, (and very quietly), Amazon Web Services updated Simple Queue Service to Beta 2. What's new since November's initial release:

Random Access to Queue Entries
Improved Error Reporting
API for Number of Entries in a Queue
Entry-Specific Read-Lock

2005-04-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

I was about to write a post about the adventure of putting more RAM in my Mac Mini, but a cursory web-search reveals that's so been done.

If you're willing to be a bit brutal, you can use a pocket-knife to crack the perfect, smooth, screwless case instead of the service-manual's suggested "modified putty-knife (Apple part #922-6761)".

According to the web-rumour mill, opening your Mini does not void the warranty ("unless you break something")

A 1GB DIMM on the after-market is half the price that Apple wants you to pay to have it pre-installed. For sale: One 256MB DDR 400Mhz DIMM ...

2005-03-31T22:16:00.000-08:00

This is normal, right?

2005-03-31T21:27:00.000-08:00

Pictures of the trip are posted.

2005-03-25T00:07:00.000-08:00

For the next stage of our trip, we traveled with our friend Ruth from the 2nd trek to a place called Semuc-Champey. We started on Tuesday morning by taking the bus from Xela to Guatemala city. We stayed at a nice hostel called Dos Lunes for $12. The only choice for dinner in that neighbourhood was a El Salvadorian restaurant where we ate stuffed tortillas called pupusas. It was already dark and after dinner Julie and I had trouble finding our way back to the hostel. The problem was that every building in the neighbourhood is surrounded by a security wall complete with razor wire. This makes individual houses hard to recognize in the dark. Eventually we asked a young guy out walking his dog for help. He took us to his friend's hostel (not the one we wanted) where luckily his friend seemed to know where we wanted to go. So the friend got changed out of his pyjamas and all four of us walked around until we finally found Dos Lunes.

The next morning we set out by bus for Coban which was the next step on our journey to Semuc-Champey. The ride took forever because the bus was very slow climbing the steep and twisted roads through the hills. Also, we stopped to pick up all the passengers from another bus that we came across broken down on the side of the road. From Coban, we took the last microbus of the day to Lanquin and stayed at the beautiful El Retiro hostel.

El Retiro consists of a bunch of unconnected huts beside a fast moving river. The action revolves around the bar hut where reservations are taken, drinks and meals are served, and people hang out. The only room available was a Q180 hut for three with private bathroom. It was very deluxe. We spent the remains of the afternoon swimming in the river. You could also walk five minutes upstream along the bank then jump in the river and float with the current back to the beach area. This was fun but the rocks made it hard on the feet. A popular alternative is to rent an inner tube for this activity.

The next day, we took a microbus with about ten other people from El Retiro to the park at Semuc-Champey, about 10km away. The park is a government nature preserve but just before the park there's an "independant" attraction that was worth stopping (and paying) for -- some caves that this guy allegedly discovered only 10 months ago and named Santa Maria. You pay your money, change into your bathing suit and provided water-shoes, receive a candle for light, and follow your guide underground. The caves were the coolest thing I've seen. This was not disney world -- there would be no light down there if it weren't for our candles, and you are climbing up/over the slippery rocks assisted by with a rope or rope ladder. The cave is an underground river so most of the time you are standing in or swimming through cool water. There were many places where you had to swim across a pool tens of meters long and too deep to touch the bottom in order to advance, while making sure your candle stayed out of the water. Because of all the water, it wasn't possible to bring a regular camera and so I don't have any pictures of the inside of the caves.

The stone was really cool. The cave floor was usually sandstone that even when wet had super good traction. The walls were sharper but possible to climb. The height of the cave varied from 10m to places where you had to watch your head as you squeezed through. It was like a bouldering cave only in real life! We spent probably an hour in the cave and I estimate we advanced at least 500m underground before turning around. At the furthest point, there was a small pool of water and our guide encouraged us to climb about 3m up the cave wall and jump into it. I went first, and it turned out the pool was only barely deep enough for this to be considered safe.

Our guide was the only one tough enough to proceed through the cave barefoot and he also equiped himself with an electric headlamp in case all our candles got wet and went out. The only information about the caves he offered was to periodically point out rock formations that looked like parts of the human body. We saw two pairs of breasts, a penis and an enormous vagina.

After the caves we headed across the river to the Semuc-Champey park. A bridge spanned the river and we were encouraged (again) to jump off it into the river maybe 7m below. Julie scraped her knee on the bottom but otherwise it was pretty fun.

The park was pretty great. It is build around a section of the river that actually eroded a tunnel under itself and now most of the flow is diverted underground for a stretch of maybe 1km. Some water still passes above ground and forms nice pools and waterfalls to swim in. All of this is in a deep canyon that you can hike to the top of and look down from the mirador on the whole thing. We spend a couple hours swimming and hiking there until our microbus took us back at 3. That night at El Retiro we signed up for the BBQ dinner and it was the best meal of the whole trip.

In the morning we headed back by microbus to Coban, where we split up with Ruth. With no spanish-speaking friend we were lost and lame but eventually found the bus terminal just in time. The LP map was useless because of the combination of the following three reasons. 1) All cities are layed out in a grid system with numbered streets and avenues. For example, you might be standing at the corner of 2A calle and 3rd avenue. 2) Cities are split into different Zonas. Road names are unique within a zone, but may appear in multiple zones. So, in the earlier example, there are actually multiple intersections with that address, probably one per zone. 3) In Lanquin, the city is very small but still has many zones. This means that there are identically named intersections, in different zones but within five minutes walk of each other. This means that even if you figure out what intersection you are at (there is only a 50% chance that a given street corner is labeled) you still don't know where you are on the map!

Back in Guatemala city, we had trouble finding a place to stay. We just kept giving our taxi driver address after address out of the LP, but guesthouse after guesthouse that we visited was full. You might think that it might be more efficient to use the phone for this search ... In the residential neighbourhood around the airport in Zone 13 many ordinary looking houses are actually hotels that cater to those with US$20 and an early flight. Finally, by referral we found a place that was not in the book, but was only a 5 minute walk away from the airport door. Now we could relax and spend our remaining Guatemalan currency. Actually we were out of money so we walked to the airport ATM, took out Q500 then took a taxi to Zona viva to spend it on dinner. First, we checked out the mall and found it to be exactly like every other mall in the world. Unfortunately/fortunately most of the stores were closed because it was good friday eve. In the same neighbourhood there is an Italian restaurant called TreFre where, with a little effort, we spent Q400 on dinner. The food wasn't that great -- my allegedly "Inferno" pasta wasn't even spicy.

Back at our guesthouse, we watched a neighbourhood easter procession. At the center of the crowd was float carried very slowly through the streets by a dozen people in robes. Behind them was a marching band, and behind them dangled an electric generator powering the whole affair. All this was surrounded by clusters of people walking with the parade, and some like us watching stationary from the sidewalk. I spent the rest of the evening reading 20,000 leagues under the sea while Julie was wooed by the guesthouse's 17 year old night watchman.

Killer-Mosquitos tormented me during the night. I slept with the light on to better catch them when they started buzzing around my head. Guatemalan mosquitos seem faster and louder than Canadian ones.

At 5 something in the morning we headed out to the airport. One funny GUA airport observation is that you can choose the currency of the departure tax at GUA airport but the nominal amount is fixed. In other words, the fee is *either* Q20 or $20. That's a factor of 7.5 difference in real value between the choices! I guess some people are just really dumb and pay the dollar version.

2005-03-21T09:44:00.000-08:00

Saturday we woke up at 0430 after a night of no sleep due to the loud hostel sex taking place in the next room. Again, we used the ipod as alarm clock which means sleeping with headphones in or in close proximity to your ears, with volume at maximum. There were over twenty people signed up for the Tajamulco trek and we filled the two pickups that took us to the bus station. After a 1 hour ride in the dark, we arrived at San Marcos and ate breakfast at a very long table that could accomodate everyone.

Afterwards, another chicken bus took us to the base of the volcano at 3200m. There wasn't much there so we just started hiking. Immediately the altitude was noticable. I noticed that my breathing was much heavier than normal given the trail. We walked for about five minutes just to get warmed up, and that was all it took for two people to decide that they weren't going to make it. The rest of us did introductions as they walked back to the road to wait for a bus headed back.

The hike to our camp wasn't really far and was at a pretty reasonable incline compared to many parts of the first trek, but it was really hard because of the thin air. For the first half of the day I just felt always out of breath. Lunch was the usual chips, salads, peanut butter and bread and we played some frisbee afterwards. Walking was tough after lunch. I was climbing just baby steps at a time and breathing hard for each one. Usually I hike at the front, right behind the leader, but this time I think I was almost the last one to arrive at the camp.

I had a headache and helped setup the tent in a daze. Just as the group was heading up to the smaller summit to watch the sunset, it started to rain and we all changed our collective mind about doing that. Instead some people played cards in one tent while our guides cooked dinner in our tent. It was really cold up there, but the stove kept our tent really warm. I didn't care to go outside after dinner and went right to bed. However, there were a bunch of other groups sharing the camp site and our Guatemalan neighbours' partying kept everyone at least half awake until late.

When I left the tent during the night to pee, the sky was clear and you could see the clouds that rained on us earlier way off in the distance. The cool part was that you could see lighting flashing inside the storm cloud from so far away but just the faintest sounds of thunder reached you.

We woke up in the dark again the next morning to climb to the summit and watch the sunrise. I was surprised at how fine I felt, and didn't have any trouble doing the final scramble to the top. It was freezing and so windy and Julie stole my toque. There wasn't much up there at the top but rocks and the volcano crater. The best thing to do at 4220m was shelter yourself from the wind behind a big rock, eat the provided cookies and look down at the sea of clouds.

The rest of the day was uneventful -- I felt fine for the easy hike back down. Lunch was BBQ chicken at the same restaurant as the day before. There were extra plates served for the people who dropped out. Also there was a really deluxe bathroom with toilet paper and soap!

Today we're going to start towards a place called Semuc-Champey with our friend Ruth from Oakville, ON.

2005-03-18T17:47:00.000-08:00

After spending the last week getting 1) fat on cheap plentiful food and 2) slothful in hammocks by the water, we are about to embark on trek #2 to Tajumulco, the highest point in Central America at 4220m. Again we are staying at Casa Argentina, the Quetzaltrekkers base.

The chicken bus ride back from San Pedro was fun. The first point of interest was the three-point turns required to navigate the switch-backs that climb up the mountains surrounding Lake Atitlan. Then, at the transfer point, Julie was almost left behind but jumped into the bus through the rear exit as it was pulling away. We later realized this is a standard manouver for chicken bus passengers and especially operators. The money-collector and baggage assitant routinely entered and exited the passenger compartement through the "emergency" exit, even while the bus was moving at top speed. Once onboard, we were left standing in the aisle because each seat already had three occupants. This situation didn't last long enough to lose it's novelty -- after half an hour there was room to sit down. Because we are so lame and can't speak Spanish, we only were able to make it back to Xela by bus with our friend Max's help. There are, however, more expensive shuttle bus alternatives.

The book stores in Xela are a paradise compared to San Pedro. I finished "Life of Pi" a long time ago and today picked up "The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance" So far the book is fine -- lots of good observations about how to be effective at fixing things that I think apply equally well to motorcycles, computers, and software. I tolerated the philosophy at first, but now I'm beginning to think it's all bullshit.

Only one week left!

2005-03-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

We've been lazing around San Pedro for the last couple days but today it's time to leave. This town has it all - plentiful fast Internet, great cheap food, cheap accommodations, the lake, great weather every day, but I must get back to Xela for the next trek on Saturday.

Let’s talk about food. There is a restaurant called Alegre Pub where we have eaten 50% of meals. For breakfast there I have the Full Monty which includes 3 sausages, 4 pieces of bacon, three eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, toast, coffee and orange juice. It costs over $5 but is so worth it. Breakfast hobbyists take note.

One thing lacking in San Pedro is bookstores. There are a few, but at each one all the good books are not for sale but only for lending. I’ve been hesitating for the last few days because I don’t want to be in the position where it’s time to leave but I’m only half-finished my book and can’t take it with me.

This morning there was an earthquake. Too bad I was still in bed and too groggy to fully appreciate it. Maybe we'll get another, or maybe Seattle has one coming!

2005-03-15T09:53:00.000-08:00

The trek is over and we are here in San Pedro on the lake. We arrived yesterday after two and a half days of hiking. Our group consisted of two Canadians, two Israelis, three Germans and our two guides from Quebec and Ireland. We left Xela early Saturday and took the chicken bus out of town into the hills. The roads were steep and narrow and it was amazing to watch the school bus navigate them. The bumpy ride and the grinding of the bus' transmission reminded me of high school field trips. We had pasteries and an egg for breakfast at the end of the road before getting started on the trail. Initially the trail was steep and soon we were high up looking down at the outskirts of the city through the haze and smog.

We didn't find a summit at the top of the thing we were climbing, rather the landscape changed into grassy hills with sparse trees. We had a break from the sun underneath one of them. After the fields, we climbed up into a high forest. We had tomato salad, coleslaw and potato salad for lunch at a great spot that I think was the high elevation point of the day. Just at that moment the clouds moved in replacing our views with solid whiteness over the edge of the path. This wasn't disapointing because it really cooled us off. These clouds were low flying, close up, tangible things that you could watch float up your hillside and you could feel hitting you in the face. We left the forest and spent the afternoon descending through charred fields.

The first night's camp site was a soccer field close to a village. We played some frisbee there in the field while it was still light out, then our guides cooked spaghetti for dinner. Everyone carries a portion of the supplies and you have to dig them out of your pack when called upon.

We each had to bring along three liters of water but everyone's bottles were empty by the end of the day. To replenish these supplies we used a filter device with a hand pump to clean water from the village tap. It took about five minutes to pump 1.5 liters of water through the carbon and ceramic filter. After dark we toasted marshmallows and went to sleep probably around nine.

In the morning we hiked down the road to the next village. Breakfast was beans and rice and eggs prepared for us in a restaurant type place with an ancient and dirty health inspection certificate on the smoke-blackened walls. I found the food okay but the coffee awful. Apparently there were bathrooms in this town but when we talked to the guy about getting the key we found out that the toilet was so clogged with paper from the last trekkers that we couldn't use it.

Leaving the road, we walked through corn fields on a path that clung to the side of the valley. The next event on the trek was swimming in a stream at the bottom of that valley. This was refreshing but the climb back up the other side got us hot and sweaty again right away.

We had lunch at a nice green patch of grass outside a village near a laundry area. The trail was very dusty at this point. It was like walking on the moon and we had to space ourselves out so that you wouldn't be choking on the dust kicked up by the person in front of you. Despite this, we ended up with legs tanned brown with the finest dust.

The next stage of the hike (it was a long 25km day) was following a stream through a different kind of low forest. We crossed the small stream a bunch of times by hopping from rock to rock. Next we climbed out of the trees to a perfectly paved road that took us to town where we stopped for dinner. Dinner was one leg of fried chicken with rice and beans, ordered in advance and eaten in the courtyard of a restaurant/home with lots of kids and dogs. They had a poor toilet with no seat that didn't flush.

But we weren't done walking yet! It was dark but our campsite was still about 45 minutes away. We all turned our headlamps on and headed out of town, trying to ignore the couples that we revealed making out in every corner and doorway.

Finally we got to our campsite overlooking the lake and setup the tents in total darkness. Again we went right to sleep even though it was probably only 8 o'clock.

In the morning we had to wake up super early to see the sun rise over the lake. Unfortunately it wasn't that fabulous because of the mist. We couldn't actually even see the water until much later. Breakfast was called mush -- oatmeal mixed with leftover marshmallows, granola, chocolate, cinnamon, sugar and everything else we had lying around. It tasted pretty good but was hard to wash off our standard issue plate and spoon. It got hot right away as we packed up and started down towards the water. We basically walked straight down the mountain and landed on the beach after a couple hours. The water was nice but was defended by a border of mud that you could sink into up to your knees. After that, the bottom was sandy and suitable for standing frisbee playing. Further out, the shore dropped away very quickly and you could tell that Lake Atitlan is really deep. After an hour or so of swimming, a boat came and took us and our packs across the lake to San Pedro where we all ordered pizza for lunch.

This was the end of the trek and we were supposed to then take the bus back to Xela. However it turned out that Monday was the first day of a nationwide strike in protest of CAFTA and we heard that all roads back were blocked. We sat around for about an hour uncertain of what to do until a the leaders finally decided that they would take their chances and get on the bus. We decided that since we didn't really have any plans, we would rather stay in beautiful San Pedro than risk getting stuck in traffic for hours trying to get back to the polluted big city. The only price was that Julie and I both left some stuff in the Quetzaltrekkers office that we would have to live without for the next while. Other people in our group left more essential things there like money and passports, but we were in a fine position to decide.

So as of now we are chilling here on the lake with some German friends from the trek, waiting for the three days of strike to pass. Our hotel is only Q20/night with beach access. The food here is also really good. Last night I had a super veggie burrito at Munchies and this morning I had a "full monty" english breakfast at the Alegre Pub. Today we might go canoeing or read in our hammocks.

2005-03-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

Julie and I are on vacation here in Guatemala. Our flight out of Seattle left Wednesday at midnight. So naturally, the planning and packing for the trip started when I got home from work that Wednesday. The next few hours were spend mostly on a mini shopping binge at REI. $600-mini, that is. Purchases included (in decreasing order of necessity) sandals, hiking socks, rain jackets, a deluxe multi-tool, and finally those Motorola walkie-talkies.

The 12 hours of flying passed quickly because we were asleep most of the time. We had a connection in Houston's George Bush International Airport where the best breakfast option at 7am was Fox Sports Grill. We ate nasty omlettes and watched 50 TVs simultaneously air reports like "They hate the military. They hate America. Anti-war groups are active and recruiting in schools. Is your child a target? Find out on the next O'Reilly Factor." You are watching Fox -- We are watching Fox! ( hypnotized drone)

I purposefully planned our arrival during daylight hours so that, being fresh off the plane and very green, we would be less vulnerable to scamming. I think we partially succeeded on that front. Our taxi to the bus station seemed a bit expensive but the price agreed with the estimate in The Book. Our plan was to leave Guatemala City immediately for Xela and the trek.

Guatemala seems tame compared to Morocco or Nepal. I was shocked when our bus left promptly after we got on it and was headed to the desired destination. There's less swarming when you get off a bus or plane. The general public doesn't seeme that interested in tourists. Nobody stares, nobody really tries to sell you crap on the street, nobody tries to guide you to their hotel/restaurant/tour.

Security is a big thing here. At banks, stores, McDonalds', etc. there's one or more uniformed guards with a pump-action shotgun and a belt full of ammo. The cops patrol the highway and stopped our bus periodically for no particular reason. Unlike in Morocco, I didn't see any bribes change hands for the privilege of transporting us tourists.

Our hostel (Casa Argentina) in Xela is pretty deluxe I think. We have our own room for Q50/night. The showers are electricly-heated by a device that attaches to the showerhead. Hot water is way better than I expected but the funny thing is the device is powered by a wire that wraps around the water pipe, following it out of the wall. Seems safe to me!

Arranging the trek was easy since the Quetzaltrekkers agency operates out of our hostel. We just had our pre-trek meeting this evening in our courtyard and I'm pretty psyched about it. Of the three options, we choose the 3-day hike to Lake Atitlan because apparantly we aren't acclimatized enough to do the one to the highest point in Guatemala. Next weekend hopefully. All trips start on Saturday which limits us to only 2. Too bad because they also have a rock-climbing one.

So people really don't speak English here. In fact, students who want to learn Spanish come to Xela exactly because of this fact. I made a little cheat-sheet consisting of how to say 1. "How much?" 2. the numbers 1-100 and 3. "I don't understand." in Spanish. Being helpless Anglos sucks and it makes me miss Morocco where most people speak French. We've managed pretty well so far, however.

2005-03-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

Office Essentials, in no particular order

Earplugs
Richard Stevens' UNIX Network Programming Vol. 1 3rd Ed.
iPod mini (blue)
Sopranos poster (season 5)
2 x *Non* Amazon standard issue LCD monitors

Looking out the window, you can see my mountain in the distance. It might be hard for you to make out through the gloomy Seattle clouds and rain.

2005-03-01T21:09:00.000-08:00

It's fun to watch your boss's boss's bosses get richer.

2005-01-23T22:51:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend in San Diego and I'm now writing this down on the return flight. I've been meaning to check that city out for a while now, and finally this weekend flights were offered at the right times, for the right price.

I was stuck in a phone screen late Friday afternoon (I asked the candidate if she had any questions for me, and yes, yes she did) but I had no problem making my 7:15 flight without resorting to a $30 taxi. While boarding the plane, the crew announced that due to possible fog in San Diego we may actually end up landing somewhere else like LAX or Palm Springs. Initially, I thought it was just the discount-airline crew joking around, but the announcement continued: If our flight did end up at some other southern California airport, meals/rooms/ground transportation to our actual destination would *not* be provided. So, if you couldn't cope with this contingency, you should get off the plane now! In the end nobody got off, and it was a foggy landing, but evidently not too foggy ... Still, what a policy, ALASKA AIRLINES!

Upon arrival, I decided to pass on the rental car that was included in my weekend package. My experience is that the car always ends up sitting in a lot the whole weekend even while you pay $40 a day in insurance and parking. Instead I took a cab to Ocean Beach and the Ocean Beach International Hostel where I paid $32 for two nights.

OBIH is located on Ocean Beach's 'strip' called Newport. Surf shops, greasy diners, bars, Mexican cantinas, T-shirt and tourist crap stores are all conveniently in the neighbourhood. At the end of the strip is a place where a lot of people who live in their cars park, and the beach! The beach is actually very nice and home to "California's Longest Pier" and "America's First Off-leash Dog Beach."

I only witnessed one real instance of hostel-drama. Details are sketchy but apparantly a large, loud, and angry hostel resident and self-described mental patient flipped out because ... well, as I said details are sketchy. There was some yelling and allegedly a chess piece from the board on front porch was thrown at a passer by. The cops were called and *six* of them arrived to ensure his ejection from the hostel went smoothly. Having the police show up really completed the socal experience as I know it from watching "COPS" -- it all seemed very authentic. ... 15 minutes after it was all over, the stoner-types emerged onto the porch to inquire "Dude, are the cops still here?"

There were really two highlights of the trip. First, sun. SD's reliably sunny weather a nice change from Seattle, but down there the sun provides not only lightbut heat! It was really nice to *feel* the sun in January.

Although Ocean beach was nice, the second real highlight were the 'cliffs' south of the beach, past the pier. The cliffs were not real cliffs, but the constantly eroding hard sandstone shore. The stone was strong enough to walk on but you could easily break off a ledge with your weight or make a mark in it with a rock. The fine was $250 for carving your name or anything else into the cliffs but that didn't seem to deter anybody. On Sunday morning, my counter-mate at the breakfast diner warned me that the cliffs were the den of the homeless and their drug dealers but ... they all seemed nice. The erosion was really cool. It produced mini-beaches surrounded on all sides by rock, and caves that the water had carved through the cliffs.

Final unrelated thought: Amazon has a funny looking hardware VPN device that "conveniently" velcros to the screen-back of the corporate-issue black HP laptop. Even when the VPN device is not in use, the vecro attachments remain. This makes fellow Amazonians easy to spot in airports and on planes. When this happens, like right now with this guy a few rows up from me, I think it's fun to just say "Amazon!" in their general direction and see what happens. Let's try ...

2005-01-16T20:34:00.000-08:00

Today my friend Nick and I went snowshoeing near Paradise in Mount Rainier National Park. No photos to post, unfortunately, but they wouldn't have been that interesting anyway because we were basically hiking around inside a cloud. Visibility was near zero, a white-out if you will. If you threw a snowball, it would disappear into the whiteness before you saw it hit the ground. I'm actually a little surprised we didn't get lost up there ...

2005-01-05T23:58:00.000-08:00

Wow. Two articles published on xml.com today about Amazon's Simple Queue Service. I'm a developer on this project so it's really exciting to see people writing about it.

In short, SQS is a message queue, designed for scalability and reliability, hosted in Amazon's datacenters, and accessed using web services.

Fun With Amazon's Simple Queue Service is a friendly introduction to the API and includes a sample chat application written in javascript.

How RESTful is Amazon's Simple Queue Service? is an article critical of our REST API. REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer, and is "an architectural style for large-scale software design". The author's answer to his rhetorical title is of course "not very." Point well taken. I (personally) agree that we shouldn't refer to our "HTTP GET with parameters in URL" version of the API as "REST". However, I also don't think we should change it to be more RESTful according to this author's suggestions. Keeping the service simple and accessible to new developers is one big reason. Everyone knows how to use a browser and even the most novice developer can construct a URL to make an ad-hoc call to try out any AWS API. His or her browser will then nicely render the response XML, or he or she could apply a server-side stylesheet and transform it into anything at all. However, far fewer people understand the various HTTP methods or could issue an ad-hoc query as quickly and easily against a "true" REST API. (A previous xml.com article suggests using telnet ...)

Levitt, in the first article linked to above, illustrates my point perfectly:

Using Amazon's REST interface, I could demonstrate the entire API without using a programming language at all. That's because Amazon chose to implement SQS using only HTTP GET requests (no PUTs, DELETEs, or POSTs). I could simply construct the appropriate URLs and put them into my favorite web browser to execute them. While some might disagree with this design about Amazon's non-RESTy choice to use only HTTP GETs for SQS, the fact is that it makes life very simple for developers.

Despite all this, I found Joe's proposed 'more RESTful reformulation' of SQS very interesting. I feel more enlightened about the REST philosophy after reading his article, but I'd like to point out a problem with his proposal. One of the article's main critcisms of SQS's REST API is the use of HTTP GET for all operations:

The Amazon Queue Service does everything through GET, and no, that's not a good thing ... There are some operations that should use GET. ListMyQueues and Read are both perfectly good GET candidates as they only return information. The problem with the other five operations is that GET is supposed to be both “safe” and “idempotent.” The terms “safe” and “idempotent” have particular meanings for HTTP. “Safe” means that GET does not have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. “Idempotence” means that the side-effects of N identical requests are the same as for a single request.

Actually, every operation in every AWS service including SQS can be accessed by both GET and POST. We accept them both so go ahead and use whichever one makes you happiest! But more importantly, this author is mistaken about the semantics of Read.

SQS is designed to support many processes concurrently consuming messages from a single logical queue. If Read always returned the message at the top of the queue, as the article assumes, concurrent readers would duplicate the processing of most messages. Instead, what concurrent readers usually want is to divide up the queue traffic among them. This way you can scale up your message processing capacity simply by adding more readers. To permit this, a Read from the queue actually locks the message read for a limited time while the consumer processes it. By 'lock' I mean that a subsequent Read against the same queue within this limited time period will retrieve (and similarly lock) the next entry in the queue, even though the first entry appears first and hasn't yet been dequeued.

So while SQS's Read is exactly what concurrent queue consumers want, it is neither "safe" nor "idempotent" and therefore according to Gregorio should not be a GET. Since none of the other HTTP methods (HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE) capture the sematics of SQS's locking Read, no API that Amazon could design would satisfy the REST zealots. If we had to choose one method for READ, GET would probably be the most appropriate, but my point is that not every useful operation can be expressed in the REST/HTTP world. Rather than being limited by the methods that HTTP offers, we simply use HTTP as the transport and build whatever operations we care to dream up on top of it.

P.S. Gregorio is not the first to propose a more RESTful queue API. A design and implementation in python was published here just a few days after our initial launch.

2005-01-04T23:05:00.000-08:00

Some house-shares entail just a little too much "sharing" for my taste:

Seattle Craigslist Rooms & Shares: $520+ Includes Rent, Util, and Food: Co-Op on Captol Hill

One room available ... in a beautiful 1908 mansion with 15 bedrooms, lots of common space ... Our dues are: A base amount of $375.00 + $140.00 for food + a 'tax' (which is a form of income sharing) of 7% of income minus base dues, food, healthcare premiums and retirement deposits. Dues pay for just about all of your needs: vegetarian food, utilities, household supplies (including cleaning supplies and most basic personal needs), internet, phone, and subscriptions ...

2005-01-02T22:48:00.000-08:00

Just when you're about to slit your wrists ...

... A clear sunny blue-skied day like today comes along and cheers you up.

In order to take advantage, I picked up a book covering 'winter' hikes near Seattle (describing trails that aren't closed for the season or made un-hikable by snow) and drove up with Matt to a place called Blue Mountain.

The book says that it's possible to drive a regular car right up the steep gravel road to the summit, and the Neon was ready to prove that fact except the road got really icy so after a certain point we just stopped moving forward and started sliding backwards. We parked at the edge of where the ice started and a short but slippery walk later we were at the top enjoying clear views in almost every direction. We could even just barely see the tallest of Seattle's buildings 100 kilometers away.

Really the best of this hike was there at the summit only a few minutes walk from the car, but not knowing this, Matt and I blew the next few hours trudging through the snow following a trail walled by trees on both sides that led pretty much nowhere (and then back again).

One funny thing that we noticed is that people out there in backwoods Washington really like to play with their guns. I say this because it didn't seem like there was a lot of hunting going on (our only encounter with wildlife was a hidden drain pipe whose irregular flow sounded like an animal splashing in a stream) but we saw so many groups parked on the side of the road just, like, shooting at stuff. We gawked at them from the car and they gave us back the kind of look that you give to people in Neons with Manitoba plates when you're holding your rifle and leaning up against your truck. On the trail, shotgun shells and beer cans were littered everywhere and there was a constant echo of semi-automatic gunfire from the valley below. The metal gate guarding the fireroad we walked down had a bullet hole through every square inch of it's surface.

We headed home after dark, coasting down the slipery road in neutral, back towards civilization.

2005-01-01T19:43:00.000-08:00

Go for breakfast at Broadway Grill, 2 units
Walk around Frink park near Lake Washington, 3 units
Get dinner at Red Line, 1 unit
Talk with Jen on the phone, 2 units
Watch an episode of The Sopranos, 2 units

2004-12-31T20:11:00.000-08:00

Seattle Critical Mass

on the last friday of every month in over 100 cities around the world cyclists congregate together to ride in demonstration and in celebration. critical mass has no leaders and no set agenda and people come together to ride for many different reasons.

Highly recommended if you like tooling around on your bike and annoying cars. Tonight's new year's eve ride was my first time although I've been meaning to try it out for a while. There were about 25 of us and we rode around downtown, seattle city center and capitol hill.

2004-12-21T01:42:00.000-08:00

There's been some talk recently about how city X is a dating paradise for gender Y and so on so I decided to collect some data that could support / refute such claims. The first thing that leapt to mind was to compare the relative number of men-seeking-women (m4w) to women-seeking-men (w4m) personals posted on the popular craigslist.org discussion site. I wrote a little script that would count the number of personals of each type, for each city, over the last seven days. Without further comment, let's look at the data:

City            Ratio of m4w/w4m posts for the week 12/13 to 12/20
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
washingtondc	2.54	(m4w = 558 / w4m = 220)
atlanta		2.54	(m4w = 61 / w4m = 24)
austin		2.55	(m4w = 84 / w4m = 33)
lasvegas	2.88	(m4w = 49 / w4m = 17)
philadelphia	3.16	(m4w = 196 / w4m = 62)
boston		3.68	(m4w = 1320 / w4m = 359)
sfo		3.70	(m4w = 3388 / w4m = 915)
portland	3.83	(m4w = 287 / w4m = 75)
denver		3.85	(m4w = 104 / w4m = 27)
chicago		3.93	(m4w = 499 / w4m = 127)
seattle		3.94	(m4w = 355 / w4m = 90)
nyc		4.05	(m4w = 3802 / w4m = 938)
orangecounty	4.35	(m4w = 74 / w4m = 17)
miami		4.88	(m4w = 127 / w4m = 26)
sandiego	5.13	(m4w = 390 / w4m = 76)
losangeles	5.94	(m4w = 2079 / w4m = 350)

Well there you have it. L.A. is the place to be if you are a straight woman looking for love on-line, and D.C. takes the crown as straight-male internet dating mecca (with a mere 2.5 boys for every girl).

The source code for the script used to collect this data can be downloaded here. Cities that that had less than 50 m4w posts in the last week are not listed since I consider that too little data to be meaningful. It's too bad no Canadian cities made the cut, and I didn't even check international ones -- CL just isn't as popular outside of the USA. This study is hardly scientific -- Relocate based on these results at your own risk.

2004-11-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

Last week I took a little break from the daily grind, and made a quick trip up to one of my favorite places. Unconciously I formed a list of reasons Why Montreal is Better than Seattle:

It has reasonable underground public transportation. (Buses in tunnels?)
People are more attractive (including my lovely girlfriend) This is probably because the population is less dominated by "technology" types (like myself).
Better night life / bar scene. Foosball available for play in bars.
The student ghetto is within a reasonable distance of downtown and other fun stuff.
Montreal has the French language and is generally more diverse while Seattle is a monoculture.

2004-11-02T22:21:00.000-08:00

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Beta) Ships!

2004-09-25T23:21:00.000-07:00

Today we did a little biking at a really cool place close to Seattle called Tiger Mountain. No better way to burn off the hang-over and start up a new day than by climbing up a gravel road that ascends 1250 feet over three miles. After a short pause at the top to regroup, we tumbled down the muddy, slippery, root covered and rock littered Preston Railroad trail. My time to the finish line was handicapped by a flat front tire but I was able to fix it in time to avoid being the last to the bottom. The Northwest Timber trail that led us back and around to the parking lot had zero net elevation change but I found it just as fun as the big descent. My old Rocky Mountain hardtail was happier with that trail's better traction and smoother nature. Matt and I drove home that afternoon tired, muddy and happy.

2004-08-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

How cool am I?

Amazon.com has a 'loaner' segway for employees to play on and a couple days ago somebody on our team signed it out. The story goes that it was accidentally purchased by some SDEs working on the order pipeline because they kept pretending to purchase it in as a test case.

2004-08-19T20:30:00.000-07:00

AWS v4 is finally public! For those of you who are new, AWS == Amazon Web Services and the product that just launched is an improved API for programmatic access to Amazon's product data. (I should say AWS4 quasi-launched, because we're still calling it "beta," whatever that means anymore -- everything nowadays is beta)

I had very little to do with this product, but if want a little thrill, you can click here to see the tiny part that I did work on (SimilarityLookup). Clicking the link sends a request to Amazon asking for items "similar" to Joel Spolsky's new book. The difference between the page you'll see and Amazon's regular detail page for this product is that the former is XML which makes it readable by humans AND computers. Most humans will stick with the regular Amazon.com site, but those with great product-data-driven application ideas should look into writing code against AWS!

2004-07-20T00:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick weekend summary:

Things started off on Friday with my favorite dinner at Six Arms: Cheeseburger and fries and Raspberry beer. After that it was drinking at Chapel then Chop Suey.
Saturday we went to "Bite of Seattle" and chose the Seattle Times booth where that newspaper's food critic had assembled. After that we biked the Tapeworm trail in Renton which was hot, dusty and suburban. After eating my favorite dinner AGAIN, we played scrabble, then headed home.
Sunday we made a last minute decision to hiking at Wallace Falls and barely finished the 12 mile loop before it got dark. It was extra fun because I took Mia our house dog along.

Today I'm back at work and thrilled to be no longer on-call!

2004-07-13T23:48:00.000-07:00

Today at work:

John! You should know the answer to this one -- you have a degree in Combinatorics and Optimization! -alv

2004-07-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

Do you ever wonder why the Amazon.com website is always "up" and ready to take your order while other systems like UW's Quest frequently go "down" on weekends and holidays? Yes, one reason is that we at Amazon write much better software than the rest of the world. Another reason is, as I mentioned in above linked post, that when Amazon.com is down, we cannot take orders and the company loses money. FURTHERMORE the employees of the company are accountable to the shareholders of the company who don't like losing money. Now at UW when Quest is down it is only lowly students who are inconvienienced and NOBODY is accountable to students (heaven forbid). Anyway, those are good reasons, but the real underlying root reason is that Amazon always has people on-call to fix production problems as they happen. This past week and weekend one of those people was me.

Being "on-call" means you must carry a pager at all times and respond to pages (at any hour of the day or night) for issues of a certain severity with your group's production systems. I ordered my pager a few weeks ago and it hasn't been easy to fit it into my limited remaining pocket real-estate. Phone, ipod, keys, wallet, and now pager.

Now fitting the pager into your life is another issue. This implies making a few changes for the period you are on call. I think it's pretty clear you can't stray too far from a computer or phone line while on call. So no back-country hiking this weekend. Nobody really mentions this one but, I don't think you can stray too far from clear headedness either. I didn't stop going out this week, but have avoided consuming more than one drink each time.

It was a bit scary to go on call for the first time, but the first time I got paged I remember feeling more proud than scared that somebody somewhere trusted me with the care and feeding of all of Amazon Web Services. Of course these dramatic emotions soon wore off but I'll try to remember them. P.S. I think it should be pretty clear that is my personal blog posting and not some kind of official Amazon.com statement.

2004-07-05T22:07:00.000-07:00

This was the long weekend of hiking. On Saturday Matt, Ben and I did some hiking "lite" at twin falls, 30 min. east of Seattle. The boardwalked official trail was pretty boring so we hopped the rail and hiked up through the bush towards the top of the falls. If you ever go I recommend it because most of the falls isn't visible from the trail -- all the good stuff is out of sight. We jumped around on the rocks for a while, tested out the glacier-cold water and even climbed right to the edge of the chute. Hopefully Matt will post the pictures soon.

Today I went to Norse Peak with my housemate Monica and her dog Mia. The hike was way tougher but just as fun. This trail is about 1 minute away from Crystal Mountain ski resort and at the summit you get a 360 degree view which includes Mt. Rainier. But first you have to hike up a steady 11% grade for 5 miles (3 hours) to the top! Picture coming soon.