Le Comedie Humaine

The Facebook Travel Challenge

2012-01-06T19:34:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, I friend had me take the 100 places Travel Challenge List on Facebook. I scored 75, which probably means I can die in a few years, but I’d like to add subjective comments and add the places on my personal 100 places to see before you die list.

Here are the first 10. See you in a few days for 11-20.

1. The Alamo

Dude, only if you are Texan. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place and San Antonio—especially the River Walk—is beautiful, but if you want to see missions for the history, you are much better off in California, and if you want to see historic Spanish colonial buildings, go to Mexico or south of it.

Lars’ tip: Walk to Rive Walk up on one side to the Alamo and back the other.

Lars’ alternatives:

· San Juan Capistrano just South of LA

· Sucre, Bolivia. Merida, Yucatan. Potosi, Bolivia. Or most other colonial towns in Central and South America

2. Alhambra

Most definitely—it’s probably the best example of Arab architecture in Europe. Unfortunately most tourist do it as a drive by. Spend a few hours to really experience the rooms and gardens.

If you have a chance walk back down through the old quarters of Grenada, preferably on the south side, and have a paella along the way. It’s wonderful.

3. Andros Island
Haven’t been

4. Angel Falls, Venezuela
Haven’t been

5. Angkor Wat
Worth it, although you won’t see much that you can’t see in Kamphaeng Phet or other Khmer temples in Thailand.

Lars’ tips:

· If you just want to see Ankor, take a flight from Bangkok. Otherwise, carry on to Phnom Penh for a look at Cambodia.

· If you are in Siam Reap, get the 2 or 3 day ticket and visit the outlying temples and spend more time at the main one. Also, there is some fascinating people watching since many holy men travel to Ankor.

From Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos

· Spend an extra day to visit the floating villages on Tonie Sap Lake. It’s a really unique experience—you can skip the fish skin care massage to make time for it.

Lars’ alternative: If you are in Thailand and just want to see Khmer temples, pick one from www.khmer-temple.com

6. Atlantic City Boardwalk

Only if you get bored enough to go to Jersey

Lars’ alternatives:

· Las Vegas—more glitter, less drab, same amount of sand.

· All the old British seaside resorts like Hastings, Brighton, Easbourne

7. Ayers Rock

A must see. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll never see anything as ancient anywhere else.

Lars’ tips:

· Don’t drive, fly.

· If you have a few hours wait in Alice, take a taxi and wander the streets.

· Walk at least a quarter around the rock.

· Spend one sunrise or sunset at Kata Tjuta

8. Big Ben

Meh. You can only see it from the outside and it’s not really that special.

Lars’ tips:

· Take a picture, visit Westminster Abbey and go look at something interesting like the Tower, Tower Bridge, the HMS Belfast or even Buckingham Palace.

9. Bora Bora

Haven’t been

10. British Museum

Absolutely, it’s the place where 400 years of imperial loot went.

Lars’ tips

· Don’t try to do it in one day or on one trip, it’ll kill you. Pick a few exhibits and then go do something else.

· Walk the few feet to Cartwright Gardens for an amazing semi-circle of old London architecture and then, if you must, to the Brunswick shopping center for the WTF is this a grade II listed building?

Lars' alternatives:

If you can't make it to the UK, the NYC Met is amazing and the Art Institute in Chicago is also not far off.

SFO to Hong Kong to Bangkok

2010-06-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

20 hours on a plane. Actually, ever since I can put 16gigs of books, music, podcasts, and videos on my iPhone, it’s far less painful than it used to be. I watched 4 hours of SciFi’s Tin Man which wasn’t bad at all, listened to a few hours of Car Talk, Sex with Emiliy, and the BBC, slept for 10 hours and landed in Hong Kong. Cathy Pacific was nice and on time. One more thing that really helps with sleeping is taking out the noise cancelling in-ear headphones and putting in foam ear plugs. It gets the plane noise down to almost nothing—sitting at the back of the plane far from the engines also helped.The Hong Kong airport was a bit of a letdown, though. From all the hype I’ve heard, I expected some wonder of engineering and convenience, but it’s really a pretty average FRA or ORD-style airport with overpriced and mediocre food and the usual empty luxury stores in a so-so building. At least they had reliable and free WiFi.

Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport on the other hand is a complete knockout—from the tent-like architecture to the food and the stores.

They actually have almost every store twice in the departure hall—Gucci, Prada etc.--one on each end so guests don't have to walk that far. It really recalls a classier time of air travel: spotless, clean, sparkling, and every salesperson dressed to the nines.

Since my 20 year old memory of Bangkok consisted of horrible traffic jams as well as the things I heard about the red shirts and riots, I actually booked an airport transfer for the first time in my life. Big expensive mistake. The trip to the hotel took less than 25 minutes on a mostly Sunday afternoon deserted 8 lane highway. Ironically, just about the first thing I saw on the highway was a 50 foot Kyocera printer ad. Made me really feel at home. Without going to the business center, the only signs were some cops and military camping out on the highway--literally, they brought tents and coolers and gazebos. Given that it was about 42C and 100% humidity probably a smart choice.

Bangkok had changed so much that I had trouble reconciling my memories with the new reality. Instead of a chaotic, exhaust-y mess, the area around the main train station where I stayed for the night was almost indistinguishable from Tokyo or Osaka—clean, no more tuk-tuks, and drivers even sort-of obeyed traffic signs and red lights. Unfortunately, I only had time for a shower and a quick nap before meeting the others.

So, Cambodia and Laos

2010-06-16T16:18:00.001-07:00

Wow, I really haven't blogged in quite a while. I did go to Cambodia and Laos in May, so lets start catching up with an FAQ (or maybe just questions I keep asking myself):

Why Cambodia and Laos?

Basically because I like South East Asia, and both countries are about as far off the map as you can go without supporting the Myanmar dictators. From what I've heard, Laos was like "Thailand before the tourists came". I also wanted to scratch Ankor Wat off my life list.

Why not Vietnam?

I'd love to go to Vietnam at some point, but I didn't have the time. Also, the $100 visa fee was somewhat of a turn off. And since Cambodia is allegedly changing rapidly, I wanted to get there before it was just like Thailand.

Just like Thailand?

Somewhat funny, because Thailand—or at least Bangkok and the few towns I saw on the way to the Cambodian border and the way back from Laos was nothing like I remembered from 20 years ago when I was there the last time. Bangkok nowadays more or less looks like Tokyo or any other large Japanese city. Very clean, very organized, and—at least on the weekends—no more of the traffic hell of bikes, carts and tuk-tuks. The food is still stellar, and the heat and humidity is still amazing. Oh, and the new airport is the most beautiful and impressive one I've ever seen. It makes Hong Kong International look old, dated and dingy.

So, Bangkok, wasn't that dangerous with all the riots?

Not really, it was confined to a few blocks in the business center, and nowhere near where my hotel was. There were no signs that anything was going on, everything was normal and as quiet as Bangkok gets. Also, most Thais I talked to expected this to wind down peacefully. They and I were really shocked when it exploded into a violent confrontation about a week after I got back to the US.

So, is it really different from the rest of South East Asia?

Unbelievably so. Crossing the border from Thailand to Cambodia is like stepping back 30 years or more. For starters, you can't drive across the border, because Thailand drives on the left and Cambodia on the right—and also to cut down on smuggling. So you walk from the air-conditioned Thai border post through a huge French colonial gate to a couple of huts with anemic fans on the Cambodian side while your luggage rides a human powered wooden cart straight out of 17^th century central casting right past the guys selling pickled snails. The next impression is just the emptiness—Cambodia and Laos combined have less than the population of Bangkok. And once you leave Phnom Penh and Siam Riap behind, everything gets poorer and more backward. The biggest shock to the system—apart from S-21—was a rural farmers market that sold everything from live frogs and lizards to 7 kinds of spiders and bugs. Unfortunately all the protein many rural Cambodians can afford, even with the UNICEF food program helping out.

What was the food like?

Well, I stayed away from the bush meat, so I might have missed out on some stuff. Thai food was obviously stellar (unrelated side note: can someone please tell Thai restaurants in the US to cut out the sugar???). The Cambodian and Laotian weren't bad, but a bit monotonous, rice, noodles, ginger, garlic, and a bit of meat. Not very spicy, and after a week it all tasted the same. Still much better than American chain food, though. Thanks to the French, the baguettes are excellent, as well. When we crossed back into Thailand, the guys hit KFC hard and out Thai guide and I did some real damage at the Thai food court.

One exception was a restaurant in Larang Prabang that was owned by the former royal cook—probably the best meal I had in a year. Hard to describe, but it was basically a huge dumpling filled with chicken in a coconut milk mousse with tons of spices. The other thing I've never eaten before were mulberry leaves which were all the rage in Vang Vien. Tasted like blackberry leaves and made awesome milkshakes.

My first week with Windows 7

2010-05-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

I finally got a new company laptop and consequently made the leap from XP to Windows 7. After a week, it's hard to overstate how disappointed and dismayed I am. It might be better than Vista--which I never used on my primary machine, but just on one or more of my test and virtual machines--but the main reoccurring thought is: "Really, ten years since XP and this is the best you can come up with?".

Some of the gripes:

Windows 7 still does a horrible job dealing with changing environments. For example:
When I start a large copy job while on Wi-Fi and then plug in the Ethernet cable, the job will be copied slowly over Wi-Fi instead of Windows 7 figuring out that it would only take 10 minutes over the wired network rather than two hours over wireless.
Every time I plug in my trackball and keyboard, Windows 7 reinstalls the drivers.
Windows 7 detects that my external monitor has a 1280x1024 native resolution, but still sets it to 1152x768 every time I connect it.
Windows 7 got rid of Netmeeting, the replacement is clunky and requires all participants to have Vista or Windows 7. Really a wonderful idea if you have contractors who are on XP.
The compressed folder tool is now incapable of compressing files with Asian characters in the file name (REALLY MICROSOFT???? IN 2010??????)
The entire user interface experience has slowed down compared to XP (and it's not even close to Mac). Even with a fast CPU and tons of RAM, most actions still show a wait cursor for a while.
Even after shutting off most of the Aero candy, most actions have an animation associated with it. Not only is this slowing down things, because Windows don't close until the animation ran its course, it also pulls the eye away from the mouse cursor)
Many actions now require more clicks. For example, in Office 2003, creating a new document was a two click process File -> New. In Office 2010 it's

1 - Click File

2 - Reorient yourself on the big new tab

3 - Find New

4 - Choose a template

5 - Find the Create New button all the way on the right

6 - Click new (unless you selected a web template, then the button is download, then you click the downloaded template, then you click Create New)

Even worse, there is no way to turn this off.
Switching to a program using the task bar is now also a multi-step process

1 - Click program icon

2 - Wait for the preview window list to come up

3 - Try and figure out which one you want

4 - Click it

Newsflash: most people want to go back to the window they last worked on in the app. In other words, the topmost window.

Waking up is still a 30 seconds to one minute process with 3 screens and a few animations. On any Mac laptop, it's: (1) Open lid (2) Done
In a lot of places, it has become impossible to tell which of multiple buttons the default action is. The best example is locking the computer. After pressing ctrl-alt-del, a green screen with a few links like Lock Computer, Log Out etc. comes up, but there is no indication that Lock Computer is the default action.
Windows 7 occasionally asks me to do completely superfluous and weird things. For example, when logging in to a new wireless access point on our company network, it throws up a screen asking me to classify the network as work or home. WTF? Or the Outlook default that it asks you to click a balloon to "reenter your password to send to server" every couple of hours. Since whoever sits in front of the PC doesn't have to know the password, but just click the balloon, how the eff*** is that making things more secure???? Thankfully, that can at least be turned off.
When Office 2010 thinks, it usually thinks wrong. For example, the Recent Documents list only contains documents I created or changed. If you just open a file to read it, it will not show up. This is wonderful for someone who works with a lot of technical references which 95% of the time you only need to read, not change.
In the same vein, how about adding a “correct all” option to the context menu for misspelled words? Do you really think I want to fix one Wifi, and leave the other 8 as is???? Partially related side note: can someone finally explain the difference between its and it’s to Word’s grammar checker?

I could go on, but the bright side, you can finally hide the ribbon in Office 2010.

P.S. Since the built in full text search still can't hold a candle to Google Desktop, thanks a lot for making sure that Outlook 2010 email looses all formatting in the search results.
P.P.S. /sarcasm/Thanks for removing the Desktop button from the task bar. Right clicking on the task bar and clicking on the 5th entry on the context menu is just so much easier. /end sarcasm/

Academic data plans

2010-05-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Charles sent me a fake letter to the NSF. Since it doesn't match my 15 years or experience in and with academic IT, I provide this edited version as a free (as in beer) template.

Dear NSF,

I am happy to respond to your request for a 2-page Data Management Plan.

First of all, let me say how enthusiastic I am that you have embraced this new field of "large scale data analysis". I heard about this at a conference in 1999, and even though it is outside my field, it seems like a subject that could generate a lot of publications, so I have been toying with the idea to put some grad students on this and have them publish with me listed as primary investigator since I am only working on the deep questions in CS theory and haven't touched a computer in decades except for buying things for my wife on eBay. I even have my secretary print out all my email and transcribe my answers that I give her on a Dictaphone tape anywhere from 3-6 months after I get the printout.

Since it now looks like I can get funding from the NSF as soon as the English grad I hired to write my grant proposals is done, I'll get right on it.

I probably just need one big hard drive, if we need more, we'll just daisy chain them to the SGI Indy we have here. Alternatively, I would like to suggest that we combine this with a DARPA grant and acquire a StorageTek 9985V.

The files will be named by the date they were created and the name of the grad student creating them. If more than one file gets generated per day, they will be named sequentially. E.g. charles20100501-1. The file descriptions will be sent as an Excel sheet (printed and sent as PDF weekly). Students will mark the files they need for their work on the sheet, and our department assistant will create one or more custom DVD with the requested sets once a week and send them to the students. All results will be converted to PDF and sent to the department assistant who will scan them, and upload them to the disk(s).

The advantage of this is that the data on the server can't be corrupted by students, and the DVDs also serve as a backup. In case of a server disk failure, we will just ask them to return the DVDs and re-upload the data. Thanks to the ingenious naming scheme I invented above, there will be no file collisions and due to the date+sequential numbering, we intrinsically have incremental backups.

If we can't avoid it, for example because of state and federal law, we will make the produced data available to other researchers under the following license:

"You are provided this data for the sole purpose of reproducing our published results. Any attempt to publish your own analyses of this data will be rejected, if necessary during the anonymous review process, by pointing out all of the data cleanup steps you forgot to do correctly in your analysis. If you succeed in publishing, I need to be named as lead investigator."

The license will be faxed to the other department and has to be returned signed via FedEx.

After receiving the signed license, we will upload the data with the name of the requester, file date and sequential number if more than one file is requested. The files will compressed in the industry standard LZW format and encrypted. For data security, the encryption keys will not be stored electronically, but kept in a secure three ring binder in my locked desk drawer. If a key is required, my assistant has permission to open the drawer and fax the key to the requester or tell it over the phone.

After talking to my longest serving graduate assistant, Larry, he suggested ISO 8859-16 as encoding. Since he has been working in my department for 28 years, I trust his experience implicitly.

Note, we won't be using a version control system since they only add overhead. All the code will be in Python, Perl, C or FORTRAN 99 (Fujitsu/Siemens extensions), depending on the whim of the grad student. All code will be names similar to the data sets above and students and faculty will maintain their custom build scripts on their PCs.

Sincerely yours,

XXX

Professor of Biophysics and Department Chair

I was planning to go to Yosemite

2010-04-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

But the weather here was so nice that we went to Mare Island and the Marin Coast. Mare Island is a former navy shipyard that closed in 1996 and has been slowly falling apart since then. In it's heyday, it build a large part of the Pacific Fleet, the first aircraft carrier in 1911, and a lot of the Polaris and Poseidon submarines.

Here's a picture of the first nuclear missile sub, the USS Grayback.

And the buildings in the background today.

Anyway, lots of great decaying tech and dilapidated buildings. The rest of the pictures are here.

s90 at the Ferry Building

2010-01-16T20:39:00.000-08:00

Not great art, but all inside and without flash

Xanadu

2009-12-27T17:36:00.000-08:00

Wow, 10 weeks without blogging. I might be cured (or just busy). But since the Bay Area weather has definitely taken a turn for the worse, I finally got around to uploading my Thanksgiving pictures from San Luis Obispo and Big Sur.

Nice, tourist free trip and my friends finally dragged me to Hearst Castle, the original Xanadu. I've now come to CA for over 20 years and always passed it and it's $20 entrance fee by. Probably a mistake, because it's really interesting and atmospheric in a big way. Seeing it from the beach, it looked absolutely beautiful, even more so when I got to the entrance, palatial swimming pool and the Spanish-styled guest houses.
But as soon as I got into the main house (modeled after a Spanish church), the walls started closing in: dark wood, dark lighting, weirdly mixed art in the wrong places--for example a quire as a wall decoration, a 14 century wall covering as a ceiling, bare concrete staircases behind medieval hearths--all gave a sense of loneliness, strange ambition, and isolation. The fact that it is built on a hilltop 30 miles from the nearest city doesn't help either. Not even the Christmas decorations and upbeat patter from the tour guides "He loved entertaining.", "the dining room was always full with the most fascinating people like Emilia Erhard and Clark Gable" helped. By the time we hit the billiard room, the entire group had gotten silent and vaguely unsettled.

No wonder his heirs couldn't 'donate' it to the state fast enough. It's amazing, beautiful, and eccentric, but I can imagine that most of the illustrious guests ran like hell after a few days. Even with the free horses, hunting, the zoo and the exotic animals that used to roam the hundreds of square miles of Hearst Ranch.

Since it never snows, Rosebud was nowhere to be found, though.

Anyway, Elephant Seals! I got a 3 foot stuffed toy octopus for my niece, and a huge shout out to Bon Temps Creole Cafe on the 101 on ramp in SLO! I love restaurants that sell six packs.

Off to the races

2009-10-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

By the way, lots more pictures are here

After a classic English breakfast with sausage, bacon and eggs, it was
off to the Rift Valley in cute little AWD Japanese mini vans. In true
safari style, we also ranked a chase bus with the cooks and tents.
Slightly less grand style, the room for baggage was severly limited,
even with only 6 people on a van. And of course there's always one or
two who didn't read the "bring only one bag" in the itinary. But after
some rearranging, muffled cursing, and a photo-off between the DSLR
owners we got going at 8.Still surprised how comparatively empty the parts of Nairobi we drove
through were compared to other 3rd world cities. OK we were in the
really nice parts like the embassy quarter, but it was a bit striking.
The first stop was to pick up water for the next few days at a swanky
mall that could have been in any US town--the only hint that it wasn't
was that the mall security was schlepping AK-47s, but it still could
have been Alabama. Once out of Nairobi, we really hit Hem's Green Hills
of Africa, a lot like central America or southern Italy 30 years ago.
(Damn, writing that makes me feel my advanced age). Only on the second
glance, it started to sink in that the maize crops looked less than
healthy and that a lot of people walking or biking along the road were
carrying water from wells to their homes. Signs of the drought that's
been haunting the area for the last few years.
The drop into the Rift Valley was so much less impressive than I thought
it would be. It really has nothing on dropping from the Sierra into the
Central Valley, or the Andes. Nice roadside stop at a view
point/souvenir stand. Even the Kenyian hawkers are very laid back and
not at all pushy--except the one Elain ran into who got really pissed
when she called him on changing the price from about $2 to more than 30.

Up to this point, the only animals we've seen were the chicken next to
the "interesting" bathroom, but now the first babboons and Zebras
started to show up to everyones great enjoyment. (only two days later,
we implemented an informal: "Nah, we don't stop for zebras anymore"
policy.) The contrast to any other place I've even been to was striking:
if you go to a national park you normally have to look for the wildlife,
here zebras just graze on a main road to Uganda.

At the campsite, a funny pattern emerged: the tourists--who paid about 5
times the average Kenyan annual income--settled into the tents, while
the Kenyan staff sleept in the small hotel rooms that also were part of
the site. The other pattern was that--safari-like--midday was spent
having lunch and taking a siesta. Both because the animals are usually
only out in the morning and late afternoon, and because Kenyan parks
only allow a morning and an afternoon drive. Hot lunch was terrific.
Even more so when it turned out that all courses--tea, soup, curry,
naan, vegetables, desert were done with a few pots, an iron grate, a
steel plate, 5 knives, and a wood fire.

And now the live audio from the drive: Are we going to see animals? A
gazelle! OMG Zebras OMG OMG MORE ZEBRAS O.M.G A R.H.I.N.O.C.E.R.U.S AND
ZEBRAS--GIRAFFES! AT THE TREES!! AT THE CAR!!!
Joking aside, it's really mindblowing. Animals everywhere. And doing
animal things. And more animals.

The only downside was that due to the low water in the lake, there was
no way to drive or even walk close to the flamingos. A pity, because there were so many of them that we had already seen them from the main
road 10 miles away. A big portion of the lake was simply pink. We tried
anyway by getting out of the van and walking--occasionally checking for
lions, and I tried to keep the oldest guy between me and the trees, but
it was still thwarted by the muck getting muckier. The absolute
highlight were the giraffes at the end of the drive (weirdly, the best
animal viewing is always in the last 45 minutes).

What is really striking about Lake Nururu is that it is on the outskirts
of the third largest town in Kenya, barely 3 miles from some pretty
large buildings. I never expected that many animals that close. The part
is about 90 square miles, so obviously not every part is close to
Nururu, but the lake is. Massai Mara, the Serengti and Ngorogoro are out
in the middle of nowhere.

Africa (and a bit of Dutch)

2009-10-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

This might be a lot shorted than my usual travel blogs. Somehow "We got up, mounted the Landrover, drove around and saw amazing animals" doesn't make for a long narrative. Actually, if there's one thing I regret is that I wasn't quite aware how little we saw of the country
and the people.

Other than that, seeing these large animals in the wild was mind blowing, they are so much larger, better fed and active than in the zoo.

SFO to Nairobi

Yeah, very long flight. 10 hours to Amsterdam, 7 hour layover, and another 10 or so to Nairobi. Thank god for the iPhone, Kindle for iPhone, and an extended battery pack that worked all the way to the hotel in Nairobi. I got on the KLM plane is SFO, watched 4 episodes of The L Word, read Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World and slept a bit. [Unrelated side note: How come that KLM can serve edible food on the plane while all US airlines claim that's impossible because tastebuds work different at altitude or some other BS?]

Schipol was as clean, efficient and antiseptic as usual, so I dropped my only bag in the coin locker after some wresting with the non-working credit card locker, walked to immigration in 30 seconds, and got on a bus to Amsterdam to the Rijksmuseum and its Rembrandts.
Nice pictures, but since 2/3rds of the museum is undergoing renovations, the 11 Euro visit was over in 45 minutes. And I really looked at every single piece they exhibited. Outside, Amsterdam is the boring city I remember from earlier visits. Everyone is nice, rich, rides bikes, and
the streets and cute and clean. But like all of the Netherlands, it just feels as if they said "OK, that's it." and stopped developing in the late 1970s. Even the dozens of head shops and coffee shops look dated.

I had some bad herring--since it's a local specialy, and very unusual for me was so disheartened by the other food choices and dejected looking breads and pastries downtown that I ended up having dinner at the Burger King back at the airport. A big plus in Schipol is that they have confy
chairs and places to stretch out and sleep on the 2nd level, so I got in a couple fo hours of sleep before getting on the Kenia Airlines flight [note: they can also serve decent food]. Some more iPhoning, but rather little sleep since the guy next to me flipped every switch on his seat and the entertainment system every minute. I get being nervous about flying, but I dearly wanted to give him some sleeping pills.

Kenia is--like India--very much a former English colony. In other words, the bureaucracy is mind boggling. To count:

1--fill out landing card on the plane
2--fill out 2 page health questionnaire at the airport
3--turn in health questionnaire after folding and ripping off the lower
two inches which instruct you to give it to a doctor in case you get
hospitalized with swine flu.
4--fill out 2 page visa application with the same info you put in the
landing card and line up to give both to the immigration officer
5--watch immigration officer 1 type it into computer
6--watch immigration officer 2 copy it off the computer into a paper
ledger by hand
7--pay $25
8--watch IO3 write a receipt while IO2 enters the $25 payment into a ledger
9--watch IO1 copy your information of the computer screen into the
visa sticker by hand
10--watch IO2 copy the visa number and expiration date into another ledger

Well, at least everyone is employed.

Now, with all the stories and warnings about Nairobi ("MOST VIOLENT TOWN IN AFRICA!!! IF YOU WALK ALONE, YOU WILL DIE!!!") I was a bit apprehensive, but 5 minutes into the taxi ride to the hotel the only thing that came to mind was "This is so much less of a clusterfuck
than Delhi". The traffic was obviously at a standstill, but nobody slept on the highway, only a few hawkers weaved between the cars, there were no cows, rikshaws, or ox carts on the road, and drivers rarely used their horns. On the other hand, it lacks the frenetic energy that's part of the fun of visiting India. Everyone I met in Kenya is very laid back. I'd liked to have seen more, but after checking into the hotel, I basically passed out in my room.

In the evening our group met, had a very decent dinner--including terrific Kofta Curry for me, and discovered to our delight that beer is less then $2 a pint. Both recurring themes for
the rest of the trip. Due to the large Indian community, many cooks turn out amazing Indian or Indian inspired foods.

Black Diamond Mines

2009-09-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I've been really neglecting this blog. Anyway, BDM--about 8 miles from my place. Nice silica mine, so much brighter and cleaner than the coal mines in the same valley.

In the Name of Love

2009-06-28T18:41:00.000-07:00

Pride 2009 in a hot and sunny (for once) San Francisco.

This might explain part of the dearth of eligible Jewish women in the Midwest.
And this why South Carolina hates San Francisco.
And here are the other pictures. Mostly SFW, this ain't the Folsom Street Fair.

Sunday

2009-06-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

And here are the picks of the pics.

Marine Mammal Center

2009-06-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

The new Marine Mammal Center in Ft. Cronkite opened a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't had time to visit yet. Everyone is really friendly and dedicated; and visits are free, but with the recent spate of sea lions dying, they have a lot of work to do.

If you want to donate to their work of caring for orphaned seal, otter, and sea lion babies, go to http://www.tmmc.org/index.asp.

And no pictures from the autopsy room.

Poetry in motion

2009-06-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

Hey, here's a good use of a liberal arts degree--or two.

San Francisco Indie Mart--I bought a killer glass votive candle stand.

PIRATES

2009-06-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

From the annual NorCal Pirate Fest in Vallejo. Turkey legs, gunfire, bands covering Metallica, and saucy wenches. (pics)

So, the weekend

2009-05-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

Was spent caving in Lava Beds NM, snow shoeing around Crate Lake, and driving 5 hours to Klamath Falls and back.

Good times--my knees are killing me, I have a bit of sunburn from standing on 138 for an hour waiting for the helicopter to take off with some crashed dude and stop blocking the road, and serious sleep deficit.

Oh yeah, I got pictures.

Weekend was OK

2009-05-25T19:25:00.001-07:00

The rest of the Tahoe pics

2009-05-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

Are here.

Corporate arghitecture

2009-05-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

Walnut Creek Cheesecake Factory, notice the fountain and fire pits.

The life size stuffed animal display at the Reno Cabelas store

"Ah like me some tax-ah-dermey, please." Right next to the awesome 500 pieces strong pre-owned shotgun rack.

Hangtown cars

2009-05-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

On the way back from Tahoe, I happened on the Placerville* car show and 100+ degree weather. It was at the same time elating (is there a more beautiful car than the 1959 Corvette convertible?) and depressing. All those Chevys and Chryslers and Packards and... compared to the crap American manufacturers put out today.

Yeah, they weren't high mileage, unreliable, and as technological advanced as a trebuchet, but at least they looked good. Just look at the pictures and tell me a current US car that looks like THAT.

*In one of the earliest instances of communal marketing, the city council decided to rename Hangtown, CA in 1850.

Meet Trashy

2009-05-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

Nothing like seeing a black bear 20 feet away when walking across the parking lot. S/he was very nice, though, and only checked out the containers. Now I know why people in Tahoe always double up when taking out the trash.

Some pictures

2009-05-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

I think this was two weeks ago....Carmel and a bit of Big Sur

Amazon, Apple and the partially self-inflicted death of independent bookstores

2009-04-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

On the way back from Big Sur I stopped at the Santa Cruz
Bookstore--together with Powells and Elliott Book Company probably the
best independent bookstore on the West Coast, now that so many like
Cody's have bitten the dust. They're comfy, have a good selection, do
author readings and stuff, and this nice slightly rundown feeling. I
browsed for a bit and found $60 of books I liked. More out of
curiosity, I SnapTell'd them; thinking to myself "I'll pay the extra 8
bucks or so to keep this independent store in business. Turns out the
Amazon price for the lot was $34, with two independent stores selling
one new and one slightly used copy for $16+$8 in shipping.

Etiquette question: am I a bad person for not forking over 36 dollars
for the pleasure of browsing the store for fifteen minutes?

And the larger question--wouldn't it be more economically feasible for
SCB and other stores like this to get their prices somewhat in line
with the online pricing? Obviously, they can't price match Amazon, but
charging 70% more for the same service will drive people out of their
stores who would contribute to keep a local bookstore. I think it
they'd be within 20%, many customers would gladly pay that, especially
in beach front California. I spend $85 at Borderlands a couple of
weeks ago, even though I could probably have saved ten or fifteen by
going through Amazon. And I feel good about it, because it keeps
Borderlands in business.

P.S. I spent the $36 difference at Bugaboo, Gelato Mania, and Chefworks across the street, so they went to local businesses. (I think independent, but I could be wrong about Chefworks)

The fourth estate

2009-04-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write a long post about how the newspapers' and press' problems are more because of lack of quality and the fact that instead of reading the local paper now everyone can pick the 3-4 best in the world, but this picture sums the flight from quality better than I ever could. The 20 red cycles are press photographers, the 5 green ones are protesters.

That's not reporting, that's performance art.

California without the tourists

2009-03-29T17:08:00.001-07:00

OK, there were tourists, but it wasn't crammed like in summer. You could take pictures without a gazillion people in it.
And thank god for aloe.

Saturday

2009-03-28T18:57:00.001-07:00

Hiking, biking, minor sunburn

Sunday

2009-03-22T18:26:00.001-07:00

Froze my ass off on Land's End Trail. When will I finally learn that it's always much colder than it looks out there. Nice picture opportunities, though.
Had lunch at Dosa with some friends. Best Indian food anywhere--including India. And the service is so much better.
Listened to the sales guys at Borderlands rant about Zack Snyder movies and Beowulf for half an hour. They're not fans.

Caring for veterans

2009-03-17T09:28:00.001-07:00

My yuppie/dink/soccer mom gym is thankfully mostly clear of the usual annoyances like the groaning iron pumpers and yelling high schoolers. And the hookers who come here for the after work executives are a nice distractions. Also, except for Batty, the woman who shows up every morning at 6am with two duffels of swimming paraphernalia like three pairs of goggles, four pairs of flippers; takes over a lane for 5 hours and glowers at people for "making waves" two lanes over, it's also mostly free of the certifiably exercise insane.

The one unique danger, especially when the light in the sauna is turned off, is Sergeant Tripod. He's a friendly, tiny, black ex-military guy with a name sake a knee-long appendage. The nicest person ever, but he's also a poster child for post traumatic stress disorder. Anyone opening the door gets greeted by a parade ground quality "Good MORNING, SIR!" after which he resumes his in-sauna exercise regimen of nude pushups, nude squats—punctuated with a growled HUUUUU-RAAHHHHH at the end of every set—and nude power stretches that elicit unearthly groans from him. All the while, he keeps up small talk that can be heard right past the hot tub and the showers into the locker room.

Since he's a nice, shy person, nobody ever says anything.

But this morning, he added squat thrust. So, how long does one have to wait politely before leaving?

Bhopal and Sanchi

2009-02-28T16:57:00.001-08:00

This was actually the third stop in India, but until now, I haven't gotten around to posting the pictures. Bhopal was the first real major Indian city in a sense that it was neither Delhi, nor the somewhat touristified Agra (not that that meant that Agrans didn't carry dead bodies down the street, or had water buffalo roaming the town, or similar. But Bhopal is much larger, and much less accustomed to non-Indian.
Ironically we didn't see much of the town center--except creeping the half mile from the train station to the edge of downtown where traffic broke up at far less than walking pace in the bus. About 200 meters from the station entrance, we got completely stuck and savored 15 minutes of this peculiar Indian trait of not, never, ever, backing up, even if it would mean that everyone, including oneself, could move faster 10 seconds later.After checking in, we hunted down a not completely overpriced tuk tuk to go to the state museum that the guide, the hotel staff and the drivers recommended only to find out that it was closed for <drumroll> Christmas. Obviously, the museum staff were the only Christians within 500 miles.

So we spent the evening at the famous lakes that Bhopal was named for. Since I threw out my knee a coupel of days before I stayed on the shore and watched the paddle boaters and getting my picture taken by the Indians who've come to enjoy and evening on the water. Very cool and very interesting. All the computer science and engineering students wanted to hear about how many Indians work at my company in California.

In a nod to the rising middle class, the lakefront had an amazingly good cafe with great views, fab cappuccino, and ice cream that didn't kill anyone.

Back at the hotel, we got matter-of-fact-ly invited to an Indian wedding. Great times, the bride and groom were from Pitt and CMU, the best man from Linköping, and the rest from assorted universities, and the bankers, business owners and doctors of Bhopal. The hospitality is incredible and slightly embarrassing. I am not confident I would invite 30 Indians who stumble into my reception.

The next morning we left for Sanchi in the morning smog and saw the other side of Bhopal: people camped on the roads under ripped plastic tarps, children stumbling up and down smoldering trash heaps; and right in the middle the new technical university.

Sanchi (pics) was the first of the really historic places in the middle of effing nowhere, and at the end of the IMO worst road we had in India. But everyone on the trip had their particular favorite stretch of Indian road building, so it probably was just middling. So I'll only mention in passing that it took us over two hours to drive the 30 miles.The remaining temples are amazingly well preserved, especially considering that they were build between 300-70 BCE and survived 2000 years of rain, heat, and wind. For sandstone, that's quite an achievement. It was probably helped that they were abandoned and mostly forgotten after India reverted back from Buddhism to Hinduism.

Except for the temples, two of which looked suspiciously Greek or Egyptian, the only thing is the tourist shop where we pissed of one of the proprietors by pointing out to him that he tried to charge twice the government mandated prices that were clearly printed on the packaging.

And then it was back to Bhopal and another 10 hours on the bus to Mandu.

If you find my body, look for this woman

2009-02-24T20:54:00.001-08:00

"Isn't it weird that summer is at the same time all over the world?"

2009-02-22T17:24:00.001-08:00

checkout girl at Trader Joes.

What are these men doing with that horse?

2009-02-22T13:24:00.001-08:00

10 hours into a backbreaking bus ride--on the "good" road, the one from Khajuraho (pics) to Veranasi is so gruesome that we flew the 200 miles the next day--we arrived at the outskirts of Khajuraho and the hotel with the worst service in India. Lunch and check in took two hours, and involved a rousing game of magical supplies: some rooms missed soap, most towels, and some, like mine, any semblance of sheets. As the hotel manager explained so nicely "beds don't come with sheet, we have blanket", scratchy, dirty, moldy blankets that had a few decades on the newish building. After 30 years of traveling, I'm fairly hardcore and quite a few others like the Canadian couple who go hitchhiking in Tanzania even more so, but after near mutiny everyone was at the bus 20 minutes early the next day to get the ef out of there.
Khajuraho's main and only attraction are the famous 10th to 14th century Tantric temples......with their very explicit depictions of the 85 or so positions in the Kamasutra......and a few that Vatsayayana had never even heard off. Some friezes are very embellished. Indian girls must be so disappointed on their weeding night after seeing this:The quality of the work is astounding, and unlike other temples and churches, it's not a bit or relief work here and there, the entire temples are covered from the foundation stones to the roof. Many or most reliefs are actually showing normal life as well or better than Egyptian hieroglyphs, and don't make you go "Done that"..."haven't done that"..."should try that"..."WTF? How on earth do you do THAT?!?".

This one also shows up in Dumbo.The temples that didn't quite make the UN world heritage list are still in full swing and worshipers streamed in for the evening puja.
This being M.P., the temples obviously close at dusk, so we were back on the streets in the half-block of downtown and in the middle of the most annoying touts I've encountered since Marrakech. At one point, a few of us bumped into each other and compared our following. I shared first place for five pushing, shoving and come-my-store-good-bargains yelling youths. Funnily, the best way to escape was going into stores who's owners did their best to keep them out so they could cheat on the commission.

In an amazing show of chutzpah, after pissing me off for the best part of an hour and not heeding a single "fuck off", the most obnoxious "student" tried to charge me 100Rs for the "tour of the city".

Weirdly, this oversold, unfriendly, and overrun town also offered an amazing revue of Indian folk dances at night. Touristy, yes, but the singer and dancers were really really good. Of course, no such event is complete without an elderly German making a complete idiot of himself by repeatedly leaping out of his chair into a prone position in the aisle, moaning audibly from the shock reveberating from his arthritic knees hitting the concrete, to capture the "perfect" shot with a $50 POS camera and no flash.

February

2009-02-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

Flowers bloom
Birds sing

And roads slide towards the Pacific

It's still raining

2009-02-16T20:45:00.002-08:00

So here are some pictures from last week. Yeah, Cindy, this is a jogging path....

I've heard good things about their cakes...

2009-02-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

...they're yellow and pink and smell lemony.

Mandu 2

2009-02-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

With the exception of the couple of dozen tourists per day, the plateau's economy is entirely agricultural. Women go to wells and carry water for miles, and the men fish the lakes (or more probably old palace fish ponds) in small boats or just casting their nets standing in the muddy water up to their chests. In a sign of modernism, they arrived at the pond 3-4 on one Honda Hero motorcycle at a time.Mandu had the friendliest and most open people I met during the trip. Nobody begged, I got invited to sit down with a family when I walked out to the fish pond in the morning...I very selfishly hope that nobody improves the road there anytime soon. As it was, the bus almost didn't make it through one of the gates.

Since it's so out there, the hotel was a typical M.P. state establishment...wonderfully laid out, with a distinct 50s vibe, and partially falling apart even as new parts were built. I'd live to meet the landscape architect who put my bungalow at the end of a natural drainage ditch that the guide and I had to scramble up and down to get from our rooms to the reception/restaurant/bar.

And it was naturally overrun by monkeys. Monkey pee can't be good for walls.

WBTPITMOFN, Part 2

2009-02-15T07:44:00.000-08:00

Mandu, nowadays a tiny town of 8000 and 50% literacy the end of the road, was the Raj and Afghani capital of a large part of northern India for a few hundred years. Like Orchha, it is in the middle of nowhere--at least this time for a good reason its 23 miles of walls and battlements sit on a mountain ridge that make the place both cooler, and pretty hard for mounted troops to assault. Also like Orchha, only the amazing palaces, mosques, caravansaries and graves are left...no sign that normal people lived here. I'd so love to start an archeological dig here.
The Afghani palaces are of unbelievable splendor surrounded by huge artificial lakes and water tanks--both because of the erratic supply and to make the 120F summer heat more bearable.
The Ship Palace, so called because it sits between a lake and a water talk like a huge ship was undergoing restorations...from the concrete mill below, the building methods haven't changed much since antiquity.The great audience hall, stripped of the carpets, gold and decorations...and still very impressive.

Grades of Poverty

2009-02-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me a link to a web site where a precocious middle class trust fund baby chronicles his experiment of living in poverty. He moves to a new city with $25 to check the claim that one could "get an apartment, a car,... by just working hard in a minimum wage job". The author suffers through hardships like not having a cell phone, only being able to watch network TV, and eating Rice-A-Roni, one of the more infamous San Franciscan contributions to the culinary fabric of the United States.

My insensitive response was "everyone who talks about poverty with a cell phone can suck it."

I feel for the poor in the US, but on a global perspective, they are among the luckiest 5-10% of humanity.

But what is poor? I mean really really poor?

One of the first things that come to many people’s mind when thinking about depraving, gut wrenching poverty--if they are not thinking sub-Saharan African refugee camps--might be the infamous Indian rickshaw driver ferrying huge loads or fat tourists like me on rickety bikes for a few pennies an hour.

My education in poverty Indian style started when I hired one for a tour of Old Delhi, and paid him 120 rupees (about $2) plus a tip for two hours of excellent guiding. He seemed happy enough, but it was still hard work. On the tour, I saw carpenters waiting for work on the road side, and porters and flower pickers who clearly couldn’t make a huge amount, but I had no clue how much money they made or didn’t make.

A few days later, I found out that I obviously overpaid by a huge margin. The going rate for Indian tourists who hired rickshaws was about 150 rupees a day. (OK, I also negotiated no shop visits, so that was worth the extras. If you don’t, you’ll end up not touring the city, but carpet and craft stores that pay the drivers a 5% commission on sales.)

$3 for an 8 hour backbreaking tour in Delhi traffic must be about as bad as it gets, right? Turns out, not even close.

Towards the end of the trip in Varanasi, we once again hired rickshaw drivers for a multi hour tour, and I got somewhat of an education from my driver who was the leader of that particular rickshaw posse. The most pushy of my fellow tourists had negotiated a 20Rs/hour rate with the "facilitator" in front of the hotel. (I’ll rant about the "pay local rates and don’t tip" tourists later).

From these 20Rs, 30% went to the facilitator and 20% to the owner of the rickshaw. So, Considering that children were selling 100Rs postcard books to tourists, 25 cents/hour must be as bad as it gets, right? Well, my driver also had a nut fixed by a roadside bicycle mechanic who got 5Rs for his work, and he’s sitting by the road all day and might get one customer an hour. So, 5Rs an hour is really bad?

Turn out, not really. My driver was proud that the 200-300RS or 4-6 dollars he made a lead driver during a 16 hour work day enabled his family of six to live in relative comfort compared to his former job as a carpet weaving instructor that paid 500Rs a month, or 20RS per day.

(Unrelated side note: the really poor in Indian cities don’t beg from tourists. Since you can make a lot more that way, most areas are pretty tightly regulated and swarming with the ones who know a smattering of English, and don’t run afoul of the ones who manage the begging. My come to Jesus moment was on the Ghats in Varanasi when I recognized one of the beggars as the manger of the shawl store Veerle and Carrie had just dropped about 1500Rs. Along Connaught Square in New Delhi, 90% of the ones asking for money were fairly well dressed English students--or kids that claimed they were and asked for money for books.)

So, 20Rs a day is rock bottom? Definitely not, if you make 20Rs, your extended family can probably spend 25 days combined salary on a cremation on the river Ganges. But as I mentioned in my last post, people move to Varanasi to die and get a free cremation because their families can’t afford it. So the ones who live in the ruined buildings charitably called hospices must be poorer than that. And I think you can reasonably assume that a dooby wallah or washer makes less than an artisan like a weaver. A person who makes a living standing in the burning sun in a dirty river doing the backbreaking work of slamming clothing on a flat rock all day must be at the bottom of the poverty scale? What speaks against this is that these jobs are hereditary and enviously guarded, people fight to defend their slots on the river bank. The families literally sleeping on the streets and traffic circles in Delhi would probably kill for the opportunity. But even the families living under tarps along the roads leading out of Bhopal and whose children I saw digging through the smoldering trash heaps in the early morning fog moved there to escape rural poverty and are not moving back.

I think what’s really poor never hit me until we drove through the back of beyond in Madra Pradesh and families were living in 5’ by 8’ straw huts scattered in the fields. Sorry about the image quality. This was shot off a bus bouncing along what was euphemistically called a "main road".

Of course, they were close to a major road and can sell a bit of produce, so there are probably still a few rugs below that on the ladder.

So, yeah, the guy too poor to afford cable can suck it big time.

Nightcap on the river Styx

2009-02-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

Jumping a bit ahead in the chronology, the last stop in India was the holy city of Varanasi aka. Benares. Without going to the less wealthy parts of Mumbai or Calcutta, it's probably as extreme as India gets. The big attraction to Indians is that people who get cremated in Varanasi and have their ashes dumped in the Ganges get a free Don't Pass Go ticket to nirvana. The burning ghats (staircases down to the Ganges) are pretty pastoral with goats and cows wandering past the pyres and easing flower garlands and other leftovers, and remarkable non-smelly. This is largely thanks to the new custom of pouring some vegetable oil over the bodies to get the flame temperature up a bit.

But, it also means that many of the poorest faithful move to Varanasi to wait for the end. How poor? It's mostly people whose families could not afford to pay the 5000 rupees ($100) for the wood cremation, or even the 500 rupees for the electrical. We rode by some ruins that now house the waiting, often for years. Surprisingly, the number of beggars and touts was fairly low—much lower than in Delhi or OMG Khajuraho. And there were, for the first time on our trip, more than enough tourists to go around.The best views of Varanasi are from the river at sunset and sunrise, so we did boat rides for both. The morning one in the fog is especially eerie and in almost medieval silence. No motorized vehicles can make it through the tiny alleys that border the river, and only row and sailboats are on it. In the early morning darkness, it is like floating on the Styx.

The evening has some additional appeal like the candles floating down and the glowing pyres, but the silence is scattered by the huge evening religious ceremonies piping prayers through loud speakers.

Great planning in India, part 21498: On new years day, the road department painted a huge "Happy New Year 2009" across the always congested main road. Then they roped off the two lanes around the inscription, completely choking off traffic.

Busy at work

2009-02-04T20:37:00.000-08:00

Rowing the corporate ship like a bitch
(dear god, let this week be over)

P.S. A huge shout out to the people at NeatImage. Their Photoshop noise filter is amazing. This picture was shot at 1/10 second and 3200ISO about half an hour after sunset. Standing on a rickety boat.

Building stuff

2009-02-01T12:18:00.000-08:00

Bamboo and stainless steel laptop station

23"x18"x1.5" bamboo cutting board on sale at SLT: $25
Adjustable table leg from Ikea: $10
4 drywall anchors, 8 wood screws: $3
2 4" corner braces: $2
10 minutes with a power drill: $0
Buying all the hardware before starting for the first time in my life: priceless

WBTPITMOFN--Or Who Build This Place In The Middle Of Fucking Nowhere

2009-01-28T20:03:00.001-08:00

The beauty of India: colorful dyes for offerings next to cows eating garbage.

Odd fact: many of the formerly great towns we visited are miles and miles from population centers and show no obvious signs that anyone except the kings, maharajas, or priests ever lived there. Orchha, Sanchi, Khajuraho, and Mandu were all capitals of princely states, or important religious places, and all that's left are the palaces and temples, with a few small streets and a few thousand people who would never have been enough to support the splendor and idle rich who lived there in the past. No sign of "normal people homes". In the case of Sanchi, it's understandable, because the stupas are leftovers from 1000AD or so, but Orccha's palace was inhabited by the Rajas and the Mughals well into the time of British India.

Orchha (pics) was the next stop after Gawilor, and definitely the nicest hotel during the entire trip. An old, renovated royal hunting lodge with only 29 rooms and probably twice as many servants straight out Richard Attenborough's central casting. Even the electrical installation and switchboards were 19th century originals.
Sidenote: Indian electrical systems are a miracle of Rube Goldberg design: Every electrical device has it's own switch. If the room has 5 light bulbs, 3 outlets, and a fan, you have 9 switches, and they are arranged in a single panel or a cluster of panels according to the following rules:

Every switch has to be as far away from the device it operates as possible.
Neighboring switches cannot have similar functions.
Lamps and fans need to be connected to more than one switch, so only combinations turn them on or off.

All in all, it evokes a rat-in-maze feeling in every new hotel.

In a nod to modern India, we visited an EU-sponsored artisan paper factory for single women who would have no other means of supporting themselves...at the same time uplifting and depressing. But they were definitely better off than without and the place had a wonderful quiet and purposeful vibe.
The second night in Orchha was Christmas Eve and the hotel pulled out all the stops by hiring a illuminated dance floor and a DJ. If you've never celebrated the birth of the savior by rocking out to Who Let The Dogs Out in Hindi, you haven't experienced the true spirit of Christmas. Our tour guide--who wiped out on a motorcycle the night before--greatly enhanced the production value by demonstrating why you shouldn't mix pain meds with alcohol: He break danced through three or four repeats of the one and only 80s dance CD the DJ had handy.

Gwalior

2009-01-23T19:25:00.001-08:00

After Delhi and Agra, we dropped off the beaten path with an all day bus trip to Orchha (oh my arching butt) on one of India's main roads. A few hours into the shake rattle and roll, we reached Gwalior (pics), and its incredible fortress. The few other tourists were Indian, and it was manned by only a single hustler. Well, given the road to Gwalior, maybe not so surprising, after all. Just for starters, the walls are 3 miles long and more than 30 feet high on a plateau. The mix of Raja and Mughal architecture is is amazing, and in places incredibly playful. I've never seen a ruler who would voluntarily tile his palace with yellow ducks.Large parts of the palace are unfortunately not open to the public--or in a state where one could count on the ceiling not carving in, but the even the accessible parts on their own were just about my favorite building in India. The staircases into the bowels of the fort not so much, though.
Like all other palaces, there are no glass windows because of the warm climate. Instead, intricate screens are carved out of stone.

Great Indian inventions, part 1: according to the tour guide, one room was set aside for the queens to commit suicide after the kings died. A+ for planning, F for equality of the sexes.

Just outside the main gate, huge Buddha statues are carved into the sheer cliff. I was so into taking pictures that I stepped into a nice, soft, warm cow patty. According to both the guide and the driver a sign of good luck that almost every other member of our tour had experienced by the time we were back in Delhi.
After lunch, we watched the inevitable first bad accident when a car ran into a biker*. From then on, we got one per day which makes me doubt the official number of "only" 12,000 people dying in traffic every year.

Slightly shaken, it was back on the bus for a drive that lasted to just about sunset, and the most amazing hotel on the trip--an old royal hunting "lodge". One thing driving at night might be more dangerous, but since the headlights on the bus weren't really on top of their game, it's less scary.

*He was able to walk away...at least to the side of the road where he was swallowed up by a large circle of onlookers.

Winter on Hwy 1

2009-01-21T22:16:00.001-08:00

Winter heat wave in NorCal: 76F on the coast--and waves that make me wonder why they didn't run Mavericks this week.

Agra

2009-01-19T17:27:00.000-08:00

The first "real" Indian city we went to, Delhi is just so much larger that a number of things don’t apply in the same way. Of course, thanks to the Taj Mahal, it is also the largest or second largest tourist attraction in India, so not all things that apply to similarly sized cities like Bhopal and Indore are also true in Agra.(pictures)

The first two things that stand out are the masses of people, and the comparative lack of infrastructure. Agra has between 1.3 and 3 million people, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the city center which is more like a city of 50000 in most other parts of the world: no buildings over 4 stories, one shopping mall, and many things that are falling down. You also start noticing things that just aren’t there.

Agra's real size only became apparent the next day when it took an hour to reach the outskirts in our bus. But it's in line with the other cities we went to in MP and UP--come to think of it, Delhi's city center and infrastructure is maybe similar to Indianapolis or Springfield, IL.

Or things that are just baffling. For example, I never expected to hear the words "This town’s OTHER ATM is down this street." in a city this size. The town’s main ATM only dispensed 100RS notes--about $2. It’s quite a feeling to take out $100 and ending up with a stack of money you can hardly fold in half.
In general, Indian cities resemble ant hills--and I don’t mean this in an disparaging way. The overwhelming impression is dense masses of people, mostly on foot, and apparent chaos that only slowly shows any apparent order. On the other hand, there are old buildings and places of amazing beauty. It's more crowded than other towns in Asia, except maybe Osaka's train station or Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, but also feels incredibly alive. And strangely peaceful and comforting. Crowds like this in the US would end up in a riot in minutes, here it's just a normal day. Nobody yells, people rush past each other without touching, or they move people out off the way with a slight push with their right hands.

The other thing I’ve never seen before is how close the rich and the poor goes together. Even in Peru, there is usually a block between a "good area" and a bad one. Here the squatter city for the people who do marginal jobs for the guests like taking the laundry to the river and washing it by banging it against flat stones is right on the back of the walled garden of the 6 star Oberoi hotel.

The first place to visit in the morning was the Red Fort, a huge areal of red sandstone and marble with an unbelievable amount of decoration and artisan detail. (Some historians claim that it took 1.4 million laborers 8 years to construct in the 1570s.)It is unlike anything you see in any other part of the world: entire halls made of solid marble and inlaid with semi-precious stones, filigreed windows screens carved out of one piece of marble or sand stone, and much more jaw-droppingly beautiful design.

After the fort, three others and I took our first TukTuk to ride out to the so-called Baby Taj. TukTuks are marginally less terrifying than rickshaws. Due to congestion, they also drive slower than their Thai or Peruvian equivalents, but are prone to more abrupt maneuvers, since Indian traffic is even more unpredictable that Thai. The sights include all kinds of animals, children playing real life Frogger, and the occasional dead body being carried on a stretcher.

At the big traffic circle in front of the main bridge, we ran into a particularly ingenious method of traffic control : a few cops standing in the middle of the road and deciding on the fly which lane should move. If a driver ignores the signals—which commonly happens—they don’t hand out tickets, but just hit the vehicles hard enough with their lathis (5 foot bamboo batons) to put bumps into cars and raise welts on cyclists.

In a sign we overpaid for the TukTuk ride, our drivers were eager to wait for an hour until we finished visiting the Baby Taj.

The Baby Taj is the most singularly beautiful building I have ever seen. It is far smaller than the Taj Mahal, but while the Taj seems pretentious, the baby is of exquisite craftsmanship and impeccable design. It seemed even more improbable after we visited a inlay factory and heard that creating a dinner plate sized piece can take a skilled worker a month—I can’t even calculate how many man hours did go into doing this on a 50 by 50 foot building.

On the other hand, semi-domesticated water buffalo were fording the river right in front of it.
After the Red Fort and the Itmad, the Taj, although much larger and probably Asias most iconic building, was a bit of a letdown. The walls are plain marble inlaid only with some large Koran quotations, and very sterile. No wonder Shah Jahan’s son disposed him soon after the building was finished and nixed the plans for a sister building made of black marble.

Trains

2009-01-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

“FOOOOOCK!!!”—Rudely catapulted out of her seat by one of the frequent illegal speed bumps Indian villagers love to put on the main roads, my fellow traveler resumed viciously cursing the Indian roads, the bus’s broken suspension, collapsed upholstery, and the mechanic who removed all the shocks a few decades ago in Flemish, French, and English.

We are on day 3 of our Indian trip, and the first one with a hundred or so miles of Indian highways. It lacks the complete terror of one’s rickshaw cutting off a city bus, the confusion of the same rickshaw weaving through Old Delhi backroads scarcely wider than the vehicle, but adds the extreme discomfort of getting shaken hard enough to dislodge luggage and kidneys. It also goes a long way to explain why the main mode of inter city transportation in India is by train.

Indian trains are slow and crowded, but—except for the last day—more punctual, friendlier, and cleaner than anything Amtrak puts out. You board, settle back in your seat, let the landscape pass by and wait for the chai, coffee, or food wallah to serve you. The food is dirt cheap at about 40cents for breakfast and a dollar for most full meals. Also, when the train stops somewhere out in the open (which happens a lot, because of single lane tracks and no computerized scheduling), it only takes minutes for the kids from the nearest village to grab all available foods, bang on the doors and board the train to sell it until the train starts moving again or they get kicked out by the dozens of railway employees.

Service is an admirable 24-7, the constant shouts of “chai”, “coffee”, “meal” of the wallahs make sleeping somewhat of an art form, though.

Getting to the train is a completely different experience, though. All the stations we went through have seen minimal changes or improvements since the end of the Raj, and are overflowing with people, cows, and various other animals. When leaving Delhi, some workers were resurfacing the platform right between the passengers. The SOP is:

Lay out some rebar on the current platform
Move in concrete bucket by bucket on donkey trains
Pour said concrete on rebar, donkey droppings and the trash that’s been blown up from the tracks
Move on while cows, dogs, and rushing passengers create intricate patterns of footprints in the wet concrete.

Rinse, lather, repeat.Trains are commonly late, really late, not late like Japan's Shinkansen "annual average of 6 seconds" late. And this being India, obviously nobody in the station hierarchy has any idea when they might finally leave, so many Indians camp out on the platforms. One woman told me that she’s been waiting for 16 hours when I boarded the Super Express train from Veranasi to Delhi. By the time we got to Delhi, the super express delay had balloned to 27 hours, turning what was supposed to be a 12 hour trip into a two night ordeal.

Unpacking

2009-01-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

Unpacked, got a haircut, and I'm not smelling of coal anymore. Oh, and I put up the rest of the pictures. Captions and commentary in a few days.

Delhi

2009-01-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

I put up some pictures from the first day in Delhi. Not many, because I couldn't bring myself to take pictures of beggars, people washing themselves in the gutter, and similar things that are typical of Old Delhi.

Like many Europeans, I had this Rousseau-eske fear that India might be too modern and spoiled by modernism and progress. Well, it took only the drive past people sleeping in the streets to fix that. After a 24 hour flight, the hotel with 15 staff members at the reception was a bit surreal, but I only wanted to go to bed. The next morning, I took the clean and punctual metro to Old Delhi--after being cheated by the token salesperson. Stepping out of the station, I immediately got the stereotypical legless-guy-on-skateboard and cow-on-sidewalk. 10 minutes later outside the Red Fort, I gave up and picked the most fluent rickshaw hawker for a of Old Delhi--vastly overpaying him at $3 for the experience. This motivated, he energetically pulled out into traffic and cut off a city bus...totally normal and you get so washed out on adrenaline that it doesn't feel scary after a few minutes.

Three hours of climbing on and off the rickshaw, up and down rickety unlit stairs, and over partially tiled roofs, I had a ton of pictures, two visits to the driver's relatives stores and a lot of stories to tell. Unfortunately, I had to get back to the hotel for the first group meeting. At least I learned my lesson and--like all the Indians--banged on the bulletproof glass at the Metro until I got correct change.

What I took

2009-01-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

Since people keep asking what I had in the backpack:

2 pairs of ExOfficio Buzz off pants
3 t-shirts
2 polo shirts
4 pairs of underwear
3 pairs of socks
Patagonia Capilene 2 fleece top
Cabelas Paclite GoreTex jacket
First aid kit (bandages, tape, Excedrin, Cipro, Immodium)
UV light water purifier
2 books
Canon XSi DSLR with a Sigma 18-200 OS zoom
iPhone, in ear headphones
Chargers, replacement batteries, adapter plugs, 2 8gb SD cards
Slik sleeping bag liner for the overnight trains
Sarong (used as a towel)
sunglasses and case
27oz Kleen Kanteen
1 quart zip lock with toiletries (deodorant, sunscreen, shower gel, insect repellent, Braun battery razor, comb, toothbrush, Woolite...)
Small flashlight and headlamp (yes...both...I'm paranoid)
Copies of all my papers and itineraries
Spork

And I bought a chain to lock the pack on the trains in India.

The big advantage was the low weight and no checked luggage. The only downside was that I had to explain to every security person in Newark, SFO, and Delhi that YES, THIS IS ALL MY LUGGAGE!!!!

P.S. Yes, Tyler, you can get clothing washed overnight in Indian hotels, so I didn't wear a pair of pants for a week.

I'm back (in Terminator accent)

2009-01-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

Three weeks of bumming around central and northern India ended with a 26 hour train ride (thanks for the 14 hour delay, Indian Railways), three hours of sleep in Delhi, and 24 hours on planes back to the US.

Dirty, utterly alien, and overall awesome is what comes to my lack-of-sleep addled mind. You get so used to it that I didn't notice until I stepped off the plane in Newark that all my belongings (see backpack pick below) REEKED of cheap coal and burned cow patties. Somewhat embarrassing when combined with the slowly abating pseudo-croup from the air pollution. I was worrying the entire flight to SFO that the nice woman in the next seat would call the CDC...

Oh, yeah, it was AWESOME. I'll post more when I've caught up on sleep.

Packed

2008-12-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

17 days on the road. If I didn't take my big ass DSLR and lens, I might get away with a smaller bag, but it's not entirely full.

Winter

2008-12-13T20:31:00.001-08:00

It's freaking cold here. Nights in the 40s and days barely crack the 60s. Hard to believe that I used to live in -40 windchill until a few years ago...on the bright side, it's 86 in Delhi.

Fall

2008-11-02T20:50:00.001-08:00

It's officially fall in the Bay Area with the first rain since March-ish--and it was a good one. It cleared up on Sunday, so I wend out and tried my new lens at the old NAS in Alameda. Followed by Mexican lunch in Rockridge and watching the Raiders get their teeth kicked in by the Falcons for the first time in--like--ever.

Pix from da stix

2008-09-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

Or, more precisely, the Marin Headlands at sunset.

George Balmer

2008-08-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

The WSJ reports that Microsoft is hiring Jerry Seinfeld to make the brand more hip.

Makes sense....

Lost Coast

2008-08-17T19:57:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend hiking and driving around California's Lost Coast (pics), so called because the King Range is so rugged that almost no roads lead through it. Even Hwy 1 and 101 veer about 30 miles inland. Full of redwoods, black beaches, dead whales, and the last of the formerly famous weed farmers until they got pushed out of business by the Sierra plantations of Mexican drug lords.

Shelter Cove, the south end of the Lost Coast Trail

Lighthouse Beach near Petrolia in the centerThe hide of a dead sparm whale, the tail fin in the foreground, some vertebrae to the left, a spinal disk sitting right in the middle, and you can see the tooth holes in the upper jaw. About 45 feet long, so either a small or a young one. The smell is not as revolting as week old sea lion, but there's more to go around. Upwind isn't bad, but I could smell it downwind for the next half hour or so.Back to civilization: Victorian in Eureka

I am in awe of Bill's political genius

2008-08-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

It took me a while to figure it out, but now I can predict the Democratic convention down to the tiniest detail.

Monday, August 25th
Seating of the delegates for Florida and Michigan.

Tuesday, August 26th
Rumors about a "big impending Obama scandal" start to circulate on the convention floor and will get picked up by the MSM. Hillary will go out of her way to defend BO. Bill will dismiss the rumors, but point out that "young, unproven candidates have to endure more scrutiny" .

Wednesday, August 27th
Bill Clinton gives the defining 21st century version of Marc Anthony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech. Florida, Michigan, and one Obama state will declare for Hillary. Hillary will dismiss this as ridiculous, endorse Obama, and state that she will obviously do anything to preserve party unity and "do anything to serve the Democratic cause."

Thursday, August 28th
More scandal rumors surface on Drudge Report and FOXnews. Hillary will take the stage and declare that "She is prepared to accept the nomination and enthusiastically welcomes Barak Obama as our next Vice President." Texas declares its intention to 'respect the will of the majority of Texas voters' and switch the votes of the caucus delegates.
Super delegates vote for Hillary in order to "preserve party unity and bring about the change this country so badly needs".

Gravity was last seen riding a stolen motorcycle on I-80

2008-08-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Americans have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. -- George W. Bernard Shaw

Machu Picchu

2008-08-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

Someone just reminded me that I never finished my Peru posts, and--more egregiously--left out Machu Picchu so far.

For some reason, Blogger doesn't let me copy images from my gallery right now, so click here for some pictures

So, Machu Picchu...I'm still sorting out my feelings about that one, but all in all, I didn't quite get the kick out of it that everyone I've talked to before and after seems to have gotten. Part of it is that it's so overwhelming, another probably that after almost two weeks in Peru I was a bit worn out, part was a Chicha and "whatever was in that bucket" hangover, but most of it was that there was no there there. I love history and archeology, and while Machu Picchu is spectacularly situated and impeccably built, there is only very little tangible history here. Unlike Pisac, or Greek ruins, or the Anastazi sites, it was probably abandoned shortly after it was built, and maybe never fully inhabited, so it is lacking all these very little clues and imprints of the people who lived there.

One example of what I mean is this building in Mesa Verde.
Nowhere near as impressive as Incan buildings, but it tells a story, and might help to unlock a mystery. On the left side, the masonry is of better quality and the balcony is held up by double wood braces. On the right, it's held up by single braces. One possible interpretation, supported by carbon dating and placing the trees further away than ones on the left, is that the right side was build during the decline of Mesa Verde after they cut down all the easily accessible trees. It supports the theory that the rapid vanishing of the entire culture was caused by overpopulation, overuse of natural resources, and apparently a devastating drought in what was marginally arable land in the first place.

Anyway, Machu Picchu. Since there is no road leading to Machu Picchu the train ride from Ollyantaytambo, the only access is by train through an unbelievably scenic, narrow, and steep river valley. The trains are fairly new, but move slowly because the drivers have to get off every few miles to set and reset the switches by hand. Aguas Calientes (freshly renamed to Machu Picchu Pueblo) is the only town within miles and consists of the hotels, hostels, and backpacker haunts north of the river, and the houses of the guides, maids and cooks on the other side. For Peruvian standards it's very affluent, and has a reputation as the most expensive part of the country. If you've been to a mid-range Mexican or Italian resort town, you know what it looks like.

Accordingly, I dropped my stuff in the hotel, hooked one guy up with Neosporin and a first aid kit, and went back south to buy some water and snacks for the next day. They turned out to be cheaper than in Ollyantaytambo, which shows what guidebook writers know.
Fortunately, I ran into the preparations for a parade in honor of the anniversary of the World Heritage Site status. So I watched the an amazing display of Peruvian organization and efficiency during the two hours it took them to set up the marching order while getting steadily drunk on homemade corn beer (chicha) and moonshine--both served for pennies by some nice kids in front of the stadium. I didn't bring my camera, but it seemed wrong to take pictures anyway. It was a wonderful show nevertheless with everyone outfitted in local costumes, or Incan fakery. After that, it was dinner, a few more beers, Excedrin, a few hours of sleep, more Excedrin, breakfast, a 30 minute bus ride up dozens of switchbacks and a 5AM schlepp up to the highest point in Machu Picchu for an incredible sunrise over the Andean mountains.

Our local guide did a great job explaining and showing the place to tired and giddy tourists, and then we had many hours to explore and take hundreds of pictures (I clocked about 450 and wasn't even close to the crown). Architecturally, and from the 'how the heck did they get this up here', it's unbelievable. Another strong impression was the organization and the clear social differences: you can tell with one look at the masonry if workers, artisans, or members of the priest and ruling class lived in a building or area. Even after almost 600 years, the stones still fit tight, the stairs are still in place, and if you'd put up a few roofs, you could move right in. What makes the widespread lack of signs on habitation even more eerie.

Anyway, pictures tell the story better than words can.

(Side note: for all their wonderful architectural accomplishments, building consistent stairs was not one of the Inca's stronger points. They range from uneven to rockfall everywhere except in Sacsaywaman.)

I spent close to eight hours exploring in and around, interrupted only by a 45 minute nap on one of the big grass covered terraces to catch up on sleep and metabolize the rest of the moonshine.

Wrap up in a few days.

Sacred Valley

2008-07-27T15:43:00.001-07:00

OK, back to Peru and possibly the best vacation day I've had this decade.

The three of us who were weren't either on the Inca treck--or recovering from having been ferried down from it on burros while passing out from altitude sickness--had a leisurely breakfast at 5:30am, and rolled out with the professor-guide and yet another best-driver-in-Cusco in a brand new Hyundai truck that had some kind of radar that lets you overtake other cars right ahead of blind curves.Today’s trip took us over the pass behind Saksaywaman to the Sacred Valley, the center of Incan agriculture and the fortress cities of Pisac and Ollyantaytambo. First stop was a tourist market, which was actually fascinating since we were there hours before the hordes of other tourists whose tours didn’t eschew meaningless amenities like sleep or breaks. So we saw the traders coming in on bicycle rickshaws, or with their children pushing carts with their merchandise.As a side note, even though the rural areas of Peru a desperately poor, we didn’t see any beggars, or any malnourished people. Even the feral dogs in the streets were amazingly well fed. Also, almost every village had its school or schools and some health services--in many cases the best building in town. But it’s still gut wrenching to see farmers plowing with wooden plows and oxen next to a brand new resort hotel or people haggling over a fraction of a dollar. (One more of my “lets strangle the tourists” moments).
Speaking of which, our next stop, the llama preserve/craft cooperative that set the lone female on the tour into a 45 minute bout of constant cooing, showed the other extreme: amazing handiwork, great designs, but at prices that made my Bay Area accustomed eyes water. Wall hangings for many hundreds or thousands of dollars, baby Alpaca pillows for over $100,.. and so on. Very interesting, but they’d probably make ten times the money if their customers wouldn’t just kneel over from sticker shock. Somehow, in every developing country I've been in, there are these few places where the prices are not only completely out of whack with the local economy--which is basically every store that caters to tourists, even if it's still cheap--but where the pricing is even out of alignment with what 99% of the tourists can afford, are willing to spend, or would have to pay if the same merchandise would be sold at a fancy boutique on 5th Avenue. Most of us don't go to Peru expecting to spend the price of a new car for a 3 foot square carpet.

Next stop Pisac, probably the most fascinating Inca town on the entire trip (I’m looking at you Machu Picchu). It sits high on a ridge over the river and the new town and unlike MP and Ollyantaytambo, you can see the signs that people actually lived there for hundreds of years like groves worn into the stones from people walking over them, buildings from different eras, rich houses, poor houses, barracks and so on. Unfortunately, we only spent a few hours here. Fortunately, the next stop was an empanada stand and the crafts market in Pisac. Here prices were 1/40th of the shop we went to in the morning, and the things way more authentic. I bought some nice silver pendants, and--the coolest thing ever--tiny handmade beads formed and painted like gaudy human skulls at 3 cents each. Voodoo bracelet, here I come.

After a long drive through the agricultural heartland, we arrived at Ollyantaytambo, the last--and unfinished--mayor Inca town that guards the entrance to to valley from the jungle and the Machu Picchu area. Unlike Pisac, it really is unfinished to the point where some of the gigantic stoned are still left of the ramps leading up to the their intended position. On the bright side, it’s also the only place where the Inca beat the Spanish--at least until they came back with reinforcements. The town underneath it turned out to be the only remaining largely unchanged Inca-designed town in Peru and a fascinating place for exploration on the next day, but the vibe that night was a bit dicy. Maybe just because I was totally wiped from the drive and the walking up-and-down mountains thing, or it was that the guide told the two girl joining back up with us in the hotel after one collapsed on the Inca trail.
It’s also here that I had the once a trip OMG WTF moment when I watched the aforementioned ox plow--ironically Ollyantaytambo is also the most overpriced town in Peru thanks to the isolation and the tourists. It even beat Aguas Caliente, the jump off point to Machu Picchu where some overbuilding and competition has driven the prices down to a more palatable level. Dinner at the hotel was the most expensive meal of the trip and it wasn’t even that good. But I got the picture of this hummingbird outside my room, so all is good.

Cobbler!!

2008-07-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

Baking is a very precise art, and bakers shouldn't be rushed. Unlike when you invite someone over for lunch on a whim and are stuck for desert with only blueberries and the stuff in the pantry.

5 minute fridge-pantry blueberry cobbler:

1.5 inches of blueberries in a baking form
1 tablespoon cornstarch
some sugar

top with
1 glug of self raising flour with a bit of baking powder.
1/3 of the flour in brown sugar
1 handful roasted salted almonds (takes care of the 'pinch of salt' in the recipe)
1 egg
milk to thin
3 pieces of butter
all processed in a mini-food processor to "crumbly"

Bake in toaster oven at 425 until done. Server with whipped cream--or if you are out of it like I was, yogurt with agave syrup.

Found bukkit!

2008-07-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

You're too high on a mountain, when helicopters fly beneath you.

The don't have signs like this in Maryland

2008-07-19T21:12:00.000-07:00

On the way to 9628ft......or 9624ft high Sonora Pass
Anyway, steep here.

Come se llama? Llama!

2008-07-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Dressed up llamaRasta llama

As big as Cynthia llama

Camel Lights llama*

Too cute for its own good llama

Prom queen llama

*Actually, that's a guanaco.

Saksaywaman

2008-07-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

After going through the in-town attractions like the sun temple (now part of a Dominican monastery), the Plaza De Armas, and the cathedral, we got up the mountain to Sakaywaman—the big Inca fortress/temple overlooking Cusco. Absolutely fascinating, and looks a lot like Mycenae with the huge monolithic stone walls. Unlike Mycenae, the excavation is still in full swing, and according to the professor, they just discovered that the area is three times larger than they thought.
Sidenote 1: It's actually pronounced sexywoman (yes, there is a t-shirt, and no, I didn't buy it).
Sidenote 2: The camouflaged "refugees from Spamalot" PortAPotties made me laugh.

Natural remedies

2008-07-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

Every hotel in the Andes has big thermos cans of coca tea 24-7 --with our without supplemental leaves. It really really helps with the altitude headaches. I didn't get to chew any, but the Inca trekkers in our group got a wad on the first incline and never stopped until they hit level ground again. Nobody went to the next step: brown guinea pigs and a shaman.

Cusco

2008-07-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

Puerto Maldonado to Cusco is only a 30 minute flight, but drops you into an entirely different world; a semi-desert about 12000ft above sea level. The first thing that hits you is a certain shortness of breath while schlepping through the terminal. The second is the kangaroos: Cusco has a reputation as the pickpocket capital of Peru, and some guides have been suggesting that tourists wear their backpacks in front to discourage slashers.

We didn’t really have a problem, except for an almost comical incident where a 10 year old boy tried to grab a camera. When the owner didn’t relinquish it, he dropped on the floor and hand an angry crying fit.

This is not to say that it might not be a problem; the rich touristy parts and the slum-like areas where the refugees from the 1990s civil war reside are only a few blocks apart.

And the gulf between rich and poor is huge. We managed to get a professor from the university as tour guide—he does the work because he makes more in a half-day of guiding than in a month on his normal salary ($200/month). So yeah, we tended not to o out alone at night.

I somehow imagined Cusco a bit more grand and Incan, but since the Spanish build all their buildings on Inca foundations, so except for the huge mortar less walls, many things are somewhat hidden.

The hotel for example went from 8 feet of Inca walls on the ground floor to Spanish colonial on the higher walls.

Another thing that cut the Incan flair, but at the same time probably decreased the crime rate, is that the Peruvian government banned street vendors from the main square a few years ago. Now all of the crafts vendors are down in a huge warehouse a half hour walk away. We went down there on the second day and stocked up on amazingly cheap hats, belts, scarves, and pendants. Some obviously went a bit over the edge.

Tip for the future: buy clothing items here, but artisan stuff in Pisac. The quality and choice is much better.

Still somewhat unable to get Quechan food: Peruvians seem to live of pasta, fries, grilled chicken and … . On the whole trip, we ate maybe three of the 4000 different kinds of potatoes and quinoa.

Why Tony Bourdain and I hate backpackers

2008-07-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

Thank you Lonely Planet. After almost 40 years of traveling (my parents dragged me out at 5 months), I am still baffled why millions of people spend time and money to go to exotic places just to try and emulate home. Americans storming the McDonalds at the Spanish Stairs, Germans going for Wuerstel and Kraut in Thailand, Brits bemoaning the scarceness of Kippers in the Western Sahara, Canadians going into comas after scarfing down beach side Poutine in 100 degree heat St. Maarten...

P.S. Guinea pig has the taste and texture of bicycle inner tubes. Alpaca's pretty good, though. And raw fish in developing countries doesn't kill you.

Dice onions faster than the CIA

2008-07-16T19:48:00.000-07:00

OK, kitchen dork moment: I figured out a way to dice an onion faster than the French/CIA technique.

Cut off the top and the stem of the onion
Cut the onion in half
Peel off the outer layer, unlike in the stem-on method, it comes off easily in one piece
Put the onion halves on the cutting board flat side down
Turn 90 degrees and slice each half into "almost moons", leaving about half an inch at the end facing away from you.
Turn 90 degrees and dice, starting at a slight angle to get a radial pattern.

What makes it faster:

With the CIA method, peeling each half takes longer, because the skin is still attached at the stem end.
Moons is faster than the CIA stick pattern because you can slice across instead of forcing the knife straight down
You don't have to make the horizontal cuts before dicing
The onion doesn't start to fall apart after the horizontal slices

What makes is safer is that you never slice towards your fingers like you have to when making the CIA-style horizontal cuts.

This works especially well when I do micro dice like for lightning gyros:

Cube some meat
Brown quickly in olive oil in a hot skillet
Pepper, salt, add some oregano
When the oregano gets fragrant, deglaze with a few tbs broth or whatever is at hand. Turn off.
While the deglazing liquid cooks down, mix 1/2 cup of pre-made or leftover tsatziki with a bit of yoghurt, good olive oil, and 1/10th inch diced tomatos, onions, and cucumbers. Adjust salt and pepper. (If you have no tsatziki, use yoghurt and add some crushed garlic and lime juice).
Serve meat on toasted flour tortilas or pita with a bit of the "salsa"

Pictures

2008-07-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

I uploaded about a third of my Peru pictures. I haven't had time for a lot of photoshopping yet, so some pictures look pretty raw.

You call this a vacation? Part 2: Jungle Fever!

2008-07-11T20:12:00.001-07:00

At the end of the day, we hiked 25 minutes in total darkness to reach the locally indigenous-run lodge, an awesome complex of open air tropical wood rooms and salons in a somewhat Thai style. In the best British Raj tradition, we got a few drinks, dined on Peruvian dishes, fired up the kerosene lamps, and had a coooooold shower before heading out back on the river to search for caymans at night. Unfortunately, we didn't find any, but one of the group managed to step on some soldier ants and got a bunch of nice bites. While the outboard engines on the canoes we used for going up the river were pretty standard Hondas, the one on the lodge canoe was an amazing contraption of a 1950s rotary engine, 20 feet of galvanized steel pipe, a few pieces or rebar, and a bent nail to faster the screw. (sidenote: it occurred to me later that driving a canoe up a jungle river in almost complete darkness is not one of the safest activities). The next morning (5:30 or so), the guides kicked us out of bed, force-marched us 20 minutes through the dark jungle and up a 100 foot tower contraption to watch the sun rise over the Amazon. Definitely one of the top 5 sunrises of my life.By the way, sleeping on an open platform in the jungle provides great entertainment with the wildlife noises in the background, after darkness you can let them lull your to sleep as they gradually die down. Unfortunately, the night was a bit spoiled by the woman somewhere in another room coughing her lung out the entire night--I have no idea how (a) she didn't expluse all her lung tissue and die and (b) nobody got up a smothered her with a pillow.

All in all, the Amazon seems less dense and--at least at this time--colder than Belize, Thailand, or Africa. But it has the same amount of biting and stinging bugs. Thankfully, DEET and permethin are a wonderful combination to keep the bite count to dozens instead of hundreds. The rest of the day was spent hiking through the jungle with local guides who did a great job of pointing out uses or local plants, dyes, and other natural resources. We also fit in a short boat ride using a raft with a peculiar Peruvian "cayman tail" rudder of a type I've never seen, but that worked extremely well. In the evening we went for a soccer game/river swim after assurances that the stretch of river was reasonably clear of piranhas, caymans, and these nice little fish which creep up the urethra and then anchor themselves with bony hooks.Lunch and dinner were lavish affairs with pork, local fruit juices, and veggies from the highlands. Ironically, while all the food was great, the far and away best dish was a chickpea stew. They also provided the first exposure to coca tea, which tasted a lot better than the instant coffee that seems de rigueur in all large coffee exporting countries. Couldn't they just keep some of the decent stuff?

Jungle tip 1: If you bathe in a river where you can't see the bottom, throw in some dirt and see if anything reacts before going in.
Jungle tip 2: Don't roll up you pants past the point on your legs where you stopped slathering on DEET. Once group member got dozens of bites on a two inch ring around both legs.
Jungle tip 3: Even if the current doesn't seem that strong, check your bearings every 30 seconds or so.

The next morning we got up at the customary time to take an icy shower and then get back down the river, up the dirt road, and onto a plane to Cusco.

You call this a vacation? Part 1: Welcome to the Jungle!

2008-07-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

I got to SFO at 12:10AM for the 1:45 flight to Lima via El Salvador on TACA (unrelated side note, the TACA and LAN planes were all on time, clean, spacious, and served edible food, including killer Aroz con Pollo. Why can't US airlines match that?) to Lima via El Salvador. Most of Lima is a dump and I smelled the sweet coal fire smog for the first time since my last visit to the GDR 20 years ago.

Nice hotel in Miraflores, a really nice and affluent part of Lima. and we immediately went for food and Pisco Sours with the tour guide to get over the shock that we'd be getting up at around 5:30 for the next few days. The next morning we flew to Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian Amazon, went on a bumpy 45 minute ride on a dirt road to the boat launch, and a 4 hour motorized canoe ride past gold mining rafts,
cargo boats,
and interesting bathroomsinto the deepest Amazon outback. I'm always surprised how not tall most of the jungle actually is: most trees are around 40-60 feets and the real giants are hard to find.

If parts of Lima were poor, Puerto Maldonado was dirt poor and going up the river, the standard of living rapidly went down to pure subsistence farming level. No roads, no markets, and many people cannot even afford the prices to get their products to market on the river canoes. Everyone was very friendly, though, and it's somewhat disconcerting that the same people burned down the governor's building and attacked police with bows and arrows barely a week later. On the plus side, there was also hardly any trash, since even an empty bottle is valuable.

Early morning clouds

2008-07-09T21:19:00.001-07:00

I'll post more pictures over the weekend in a more orderly fashion, but for now.

Offerings

2008-07-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

An ancient Incan fertility offering.

Yes, it's exactly what it looks like
This thing is made out of stone and freakishly heavy...about 4 pounds

Sometimes you just get lucky

2008-07-09T21:00:00.001-07:00

I got this shot walking from my hotel room to breakfast

Machu Picchu 5:55AM Monday

2008-07-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Wake up call at 4AM, breakfast at 5, race up 400 vertical feet at 5:45....worth it.

Quiz

2008-06-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

implausible?
improbable?
impossible?

Haiku

2008-06-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

fifty five degrees
my neighbor's AC churning

lightning strike his ass

Playing with PS Elements

2008-06-16T21:13:00.001-07:00

The weekend

2008-06-15T17:15:00.001-07:00

Rock Creek about 20 miles north of Bishop. A pity that you have to drive through Yosemite to get there. So, yet another picture of Tenaya Lake. ;-)
The rest of the pictures are here. And I am proud to have survived two days above 9000ft without a major sunburn--and it would have been without any if I'd used it on the first evening. Neutrogena waterproof SPF55 rocks.

Stuff from the farmers market

2008-06-08T17:31:00.001-07:00

LOLZ

2008-06-01T23:07:00.001-07:00

Sleep with one eye open, gripping your pillow tight

Loch Levern

2008-06-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

I went hiking in the Sierra and to Nevada City over the weekend. Still more snow than I expected, so not all the way to the higher lakes.The trail is the line in the middle.

Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore. Toto...?

The start of the post holing section

For no particular reason

2008-06-01T18:01:00.001-07:00

Calistoga, CA

Best operating instructions ever

2008-05-21T19:21:00.000-07:00

Use the quick start guide to brew your first cup of coffee.
Sit down with the coffee and read the user guide.

Sticker on Swiss espresso machine.

Boredom meets can't-find-a-bookshelf I like...

2008-05-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

$45 of 1" by 12" by 60" redwood, 60 bucks of 1/2" galvanized steel plumbing supplies, two hours of shopping, two hours of labor. Only thing that sucked was that I had to go back to Home Depot because I forgot to buy the two knees on top.

Smells cool, though. I need to go back sand a bit and put on some beeswax.

A post for Cindy

2008-05-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

Since she had a couple of roughish days, I wanted to demonstrate how some people spend on the idiotic consumerist pursuit of kitchen knives. From left to right:

Wusthoff 5 inch utility knife. I had it for about 8 years, sharp, pretty indestructable, but too long for paring and too light for most other things.
JCK Gekko Damascus GE-1 Petty 140mm. Damascus blade of Hitachi white steel and 420. Brilliantly sharp and it has this really interesting hammered surface texture they leave and don't polish out. THE onion knife. Unfortunately not entirely stainless.
Global 5 1/2 inch vegetable knife. I bought this mostly due to the fact that the 8" Wusthoff was a bit heavy for veggie cutting--and because I read Kitchen Confidential and this was the cheapest one. OK, totally stainless and plenty sharp, just not as much as the two other Japanese knives here.
$20 Cold Steel 7inch serrated knife from a bargain bin in Chicago. Actually, even at full price, this is a bargain. Not very good steel on the face of it, but I've had it for 10 years and it's still pretty sharp. Great bread and tomato knife. My dad ruined the other one by cutting drywall--a lot of drywall.
Hattori 7inch V-10 Damascus kitchen knife. I'd lick it if it wasn't so sharp. Cutting with it feels as if the blade gets sucked through the food. Hard to describe, but it's an incredibly sensual experience. It's perfect for microscopic mirepoix. If a recipe calls for 1/4", I do 1/16", just because it's so much fun. Due to the 15 degree bevel, it's not that robust, though. (Unrelated side note, this is the only one that's completely hand made by a guy named Hattori)
8" Wusthoff Global chefs knife. Can do everything from smashing garlic to trussing a chicken or breaking down beef ribs--it's a total tank. My dead-cold-hands knife. I think I bought this in my sophomore year, has to go for professional sharpening every couple of years, though.
Wusthoff paring knife. Bought it because everyone tells you you need a paring knife and because it was on sale for like $10. I found out that I can do most paring jobs three times faster with the 8" and ten times faster with the Petty, so I hardly ever use it.
El cheapo carbon steel French paring knife from Crate and Barrel, for opening letters, cutting tin foil off wine bottles, packages, duct tape. $5 or so.

Ouch

2008-05-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

I went to Oyster Fest on Saturday and caught the worst sun burn in the last ten years. Cold and foggy != Safe.

The local oysters were very good, but 7 with two pints of Guinness is still my absolute limit. And I probably don't need any until next year.

Here's something fun. The last two images were taken about 20 minutes apart...when the fog comes in, it really comes in.

The world catches up to me again

2008-05-14T07:31:00.001-07:00

A year ago, I mentioned in my blog how US coffee companies over roast their beans. Now the Chron brings up basically the same sentiment, quoting a coffee shop owner saying "the coffee is kind of over-roasted and the barista techniques aren't up to par."

No shit Sherlock! Anyway, read the article, it gives a good overview of how we ended up with semi-burned espresso. As I suspected, it was mostly Starbucks, but interestingly, it started with Berkeley icon Alfred Peet who trained the Starbucks founders.

Another one drops

2008-05-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

My sister had her second baby on Saturday. Three weeks early. Anyway, they are all doing well, so here's the first picture of two year old Katherina and Konstantin. (No, my sister is not a KDE developer, nor does she play one on TV).

Flat head screws

2008-05-11T17:46:00.000-07:00

Don't use them, use Phillips or Hex.
If a plan says to use flat heads, ignore it and use Phillips screws.
If anything comes with flat head screws, throw them away and buy Phillips screws.
If anyone suggests you should use them, hit him in the head and buy Phillips screws.
If your best friend buys some for a project, hit him in the head, make him return them and buy Phillips screws.
If your life period partner brings flat head screws, get a divorce, and buy Phillips screws.

That's all.

If we only had smellevision--a breathtaking experience

2008-05-10T17:48:00.001-07:00

Elephant seals in Ano Nuevo SP. No, they're not sick, they are molting. And they stink to high heaven--imagine a huge pile of dead fish and dog poo.
Funny story about the lighthouse, it was basically abandoned in 1948, because the island was overrun by thousands of California sea lions. They broke down doors, overran the gardens, and were generally driving the light keepers insane. If you click on the picture, you can see a couple hundred chilling out on the beach.

Eejit proof cake

2008-05-04T19:18:00.001-07:00

As a way to apologize for running out on chatting with Cindy to make some cake for dinner, here's the recipe for my 5 minutes or less prep time cake. I normally HATE to bake--flour gets everywhere and I hate wet gooey stuff like batter. But I am having guests over for dinner, so it's back to one of the two cakes I can do off the top of my head. It's adapted from the if-you-don't-have-it-drop-whatevs-you're-doing-and-get-it Silver Spoon.

Peel, core, quarter and slice 2 medium apples (or pear, or cherries, or)
Toss with juice of a lemon and a bit of sugar (not really necessary, but it keeps them from discoloring)
Put 3/4 cups of sugar into a food processor and give it a few whirls to make "superfine"
Add the eggs and pulse until fluffy
Add 6 tablespoons of butter, pulse
Add 2 3/4 cups of self raising-flour and run until you have a pretty stiff batter.
Mix with the fruit slices (I added dried cherries and a bit of rum this time)
Dump in 9" cake pan lined with non-stick aluminum foil (if you don't have it, buy it. Best kitchen invention of the last three years)
Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

The things I like is that I only mess up the food processor and one other dish for the apples and the final mix. And since the apples contain a fair bit of moisture and sugar, this cake is very forgiving against slightly off proportions, over-, and underbaking. It's also not that sweet.

Never were so many so baked by so much so early

2008-05-04T18:25:00.001-07:00

After the farmers market (damn, peas are already almost out of season), cooking a gallon of jam, and putting two slabs of ribs in the oven, I went to the How Weird Faire on Second Street. Since we a living through a cold spell, it was less lively than usual, and some of the more scantily costumed were sporting serious goosebumps, but they had a lot of really good DJs.

As mentioned in the headline, the smell of oregano was permeating the air already at noon and only got stronger by the time the earth shaking beats died down at 5:55. But a grand time was had by all--I think I might still have a second hand buzz.

In any other town, a hard core techno dance-in would probably not be a family event; in the city by the bay it definitely is. And weirdly, 65 year geezers rocking their tie die and Birkies next to neon haired 16 year olds wrapped in aluminum foil doesn't even seem out of place.

P.S. Hand knitted pants seem to be de rigeur amongst the great unwashed this year.

I think they go with a wedding dress...or a bathrobe

2008-05-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

Harley Davidson steel toed boots . Every women should have one pair to ride, wear around the house, and pair with an awesome wedding dress.

Go Arnold!!

2008-05-01T08:47:00.001-07:00

"And that's why I always encourage the legislators in Sacramento, because some of them come from those little towns," Schwarzenegger said. "You know what I'm saying? They come from those little towns, and they don't have that vision yet of an airport or of a highway that maybe has 10 lanes. Or of putting a highway on top of a highway. They look at you and say, 'Well we don't have that in my town, what are you talking about?' So they are kind of shocked when you say certain things."

If he only wasn't so right.

EMF danger in hybrid cars

2008-04-26T08:45:00.001-07:00

The New York times has a fascinating article about EMF danger in hybrid cars. As a physicist who got his advanced degree in the town Einstein was born in, I would like to offer some comments and solutions to victims of this vile new thread to people who put their own physical and mental health (and maybe life) on the line to save the planet.

First of all, it is somewhat comforting to know that DC engines and batteries by their very nature are much weaker emitters of EMF per mass unit than for example radar stations or the 4p->alpha reactions found in stellar bodies. But it is important to keep in mind that a typical hybrid car battery has a reactive mass that is thousands of times larger than a cell phone battery--and we've all seen studies that indicate that cell phones can cause brain cancer, autism, or general malaise.

So, what is an environmentally conscious person to do? Risk life and limb every time s/he gets into a Prius or Chevy Tahoe Hybrid?

Thankfully, there are some fairly straightforward solutions. Most bio-relevant EMF fields can be effectively dampened by water, or a wetted fabric. For a good simulation, there is still nothing better than watching the animation about 10 minutes into the futuristic movie Total Recall. Notice how the agent dampens the electrical signal from the tracking device implanted in his head by wrapping a wet towel around his head. The same approach would of course work with a hybrid car battery, or a cell phone. But while putting a wet washcloth (or even a sanitary hand wipe) between the cell phone and your ear while making a call reduces the risk of EMF induced brain damage by 87% per 100 micron, wrapping a car battery in wet towels is both impractical and potentially dangerous.

All is not lost, because some elementary research online shows that the effect is caused not by the water itself, but by the dissolved salts. It almost sounds too good to be true, but if you are skeptical, you can verify it easily with some distilled water, a bit of salt, and a simple multimeter like this one at American Science.

Simply fill some distilled water into a glass and inset the two probes about 3 inches apart. Note down the resistance displayed on the multimeter (lower numbers means more absorption of EMF. Then add a table spoon of salt (kosher is ok, but sea or rock salt will give you a larger effect). You'll notice how resistivity--the technical term for resistance to EMF absorbtion--plummets.

We now proofed that the EMF absorbility of water is caused by salt, so we loose nothing by taking the water out of the equation.

In summary, the best way to prevent EMF exposure in hybrid cars is putting salt nest to the battery. Normal kitchen salt will probably do, but as shown above, rock salt is superior and also has other health effect. According to my calculations and simulations with Wolfram Research's excellent Mathematica software, about 2 pounds per Ampere hour is the optimal weight. For a 2006 Prius, this would be about 13 pounds of rock salt.

And additional benefit is that a rock salt crystal also improves mileage slightly by straightening out EMF lines and keeping them closer to the battery.

-------------
Since I published this article, I got a number of inquiries, so I will keep updating the FAQ:

Q: Won't rock salt in my trunk cause corrosion?
A: Good question. Most of the chassis of a Prius is made of aluminum which is not very susceptible to salt-induced corrosion. If you are concerned, you can pack the rock salt crystal into waxed paper (do NOT use zip lock bags because they are not biodegradable).

Q: Salt is hydroscopic, so won't the crystal melt?
A: There will be some loss of mass, but since the volume to surface area is very high in a 13 pound salt crystal, it is pretty negligible.

Q: Do I have to change the crystal regularly?r
A: Not really, EMF is fairly light, so the crystal can absorb a lot before loosing its effectiveness. If you are really concerned, weight the crystal occasionally and replace it when it shows a mass increase of more than 4 oz.

Q: What do I do with a used up crystal?
A: While EMF binding in salt is very stable, and it would take a lot of energy and specialist knowledge to extract EMF form a salt crystal, I understand that you don't want to throw a contaminated crystal into the trash or have it around your kids. Contact your local recycling authority. If your town doesn't have one, you can also usually drop it off at your power company who will extract the EMF and use it to generate electricity.

Not quite the Jesus phone

2008-04-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

Here's hoping that the Enlightened One puts an enlightened boot up Nokia's ass.

On junk mail

2008-04-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

After reading Cindy's and Bridgey's posts about junk mail, I'd like to mention that Catalog Choice worked for me. Even if you (like me) don't think it's my job to deal with sales people and phone trees, they make it easy to opt out of catalog mailings. Almost all of mine went through, except for a Mormon outdoor store who didn't do the Christian and outdoorsy thing to remove me at my request. So I had to call them and let them know that I won't buy anything again unless they stop sending paper--which they didn't.

While I am at it, Get Human is invaluable when dealing with companies. The site tells you the number codes to by pass the electronic voices.