Round-the-World Trip

Last Fall I was planning a trip around the world, but instead opted to go only halfway around the world for a few weeks. During my planning, I came across the most amazing company called AirTreks that allows you to build your own round-the-world trip itinerary (powered by WebObjects!) with open-ended tickets. This means that you can plan your trip, buy the tickets, and then spend as much time as you want in each location before deciding to go to your next departure point.

Most of the tickets are bought via consolidator prices which allows Airtreks to offer incredibly low prices (for instance, my itinerary shown above was something like $3500 for all of the flights combined - the grey lines are overland travel like train/automobile). I ended up calculating a rough round-the-world budget of about $10,000 for 4-6 months of travel, lodging, and food.

The Island Chronicles

Mark Frauenfelder is moving his entire family to the South Pacific. My dad did exactly this to our family in 1980 and I spent two wonderful childhood years living in the tropical paradise that is called American Samoa. I can't wait to read about Mark's and his family's adventures in Polynesia.

I am still trying to decide what I want to do this summer, but there is a very strong chance that I'll be writing Camworld from the nature wonderland that is south-central Siberia for a couple of months. If Mark can do the Island Chronicles I will certainly do the Siberia Chronicles.

Which reminds me, I still need to build a slide show of my trip to Malta and Moscow back in November/December. Gah, too much to do sometimes...

Also, I have plans to get the family's slides from the 1970s and 1980s scanned into digital form so I can post some of the funnier and wackier ones online. If there's enough good stuff, expect retro slideshows of the South Pacific, Northern England, South Dakota, Yellowstone and some of the other places from my childhood.

Apartment Hunting

Ssssshhhhhhhhh....Be vewy vewy quiet. I'm hunting apawtments...

Today's Recommended Links

• The Making Of The Sitcom
• Two Steps From Heaven (Complete novel online)
• Soviet-Afghanistan War photos (in Russian and English)
• Russian language tongue-twisters (In Russian, scroll to see English translations)
• Photos of pets with their heads in bags of food!
• American Song-Poem Music Archives

Books I am Currently Reading

• All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland
• Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era, Stephen Kotkin
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
• Fat Bald Jeff, Leslie Stella
• Spaceland, Rudy Rucker

Panorama of Lake Baikal

I forgot a had these sunset pictures of Lake Baikal I took during my trip to Siberia last September. They weren't easy to work with because I did not have a good light meter or a tripod for my little Canon Elph, but I stitched them together anyway.

» View the full-size panorama

» View the old slideshow from last Fall

Cost-of-Living: NYC vs. Siberia

For the past few weeks I have been trying to decide what I want to do this summer. After some thinking I pared it down to two options. The first is to stay in NYC and continue to freelance and look for a full-time job. The second is to sell a bunch of stuff, put stuff in storage, buy tickets to Siberia and go live there for three months. To help me decide, I built a cost matrix that displays side-by-side how much it would cost me for both options.

	New York City	Krasnoyarsk, Siberia
Plane Tickets/Airport Transfer	N/A	$1100
Plane Ticket to CA	$300	$1200
Rent	($850/mo) $2550	($150/mo) $450
Sec. Deposit	$850	$75
Living Exenses (Food)	$500	(for 2 ppl) $500
Public Transportation	(Subway/Cabs) $150	(Buses) $75
Utilities	($100/mo) $300	($30/mo) $90
Internet Access	(Broadband) $150	(250 hours dial-up) $200
Cell Phone	($60/mo) $180	($20/mo) $60
Entertainment	$300	$150
Credit Cards Interest	($200/mo) $600	($200/mo) $600
NYC's $-fly-out-of-wallet Fee	$450	N/A
Mini-storage	N/A	($60/mo) $180
Total	$6330	$4680

Some things to keep in mind:

• I have a strong job lead in California that I may need to interview for sometime in July. Add an extra $1200 in plane tickets cost for that.
• Being in Siberia for three months does not make me available for job interviews.
• Freelance work in NYC is harder to acquire if I am overseas since I wouldn't be able to meet for interviews with new potential clients.
• Living in Siberia would give me the time and peace and quiet to focus on my personal web projects, away from the distractions of NYC. Some of these projects have potentially strong income possibilites in the future.

The NYC "$-fly-out-of-wallet fee" refers to a saying that most New Yorkers tell their visiting friends and relatives, "When you get here be ready to watch $20 bills fly out of your wallet" and "In NYC, everything costs $20."

At this point I am leaning towards staying in NYC for the summer since it seems like the more repsonsible thing to do even though it costs me more financially.

Libido Photos

In March, I attended the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I had just returned from my long trip to Siberia and decided to stick around after the interactive conference for the film conference. One morning at my hotel while waiting for a taxi I befriended a guy named Jorge Arriola, who happened to be the manager of a Peruvian pop band called Libido. When he learned that I was from New York he invited me to come see them play in early April at S.O.B.'s. So that is exactly what I did, having become addicted to their music on the long drive back to NYC from Austin. A few days later Jorge invited me to hang out with the band while they roamed the streets of New York.

The photo on the left of drummer, Jeffry Fischman, was taken in the lobby of their hotel, the Gershwin Hotel in the Flatiron District.

The photo on the right is of the lead singer, Salim Vera, and was taken during a late-night drinks and food run to the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village.

Trinity's Hack from Matrix Reloaded

Lots of buzz among the hacker community about the hack Trinity performed in Matrix Reloaded that shut down the power grid. Here's the shell transcript:

           state       service
22/tcp     open        ssh

No exact OS matches for host

nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanneds
% sshnuke 10.2.2.2 -rootpw-"Z1ON0101"
Connecting to 10.2.2.2:ssh ... successful.
Attempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32 ... successful.
Reseting root password to "Z1ON0101".
System open: Access Level (9)
% ssh 10.2.2.2 -l root
root@10.2.2.2's password: 

RTF-CONTROL> disable grid nodes 21 - 48
Warning: Disabling nodes 21-48 will disconnect sector 11 (27 nodes)

        ARE YOU SURE ? (y/n)

Grid Node 21 offline...
Grid Node 22 offline...
Grid Node 23 offline...
Grid Node 24 offline...
Grid Node 25 offline...
Grid Node 26 offline...
Grid Node 27 offline...
Grid Node 28 offline...
Grid Node 29 offline...
Grid Node 30 offline...
Grid Node 31 offline...
Grid Node 32 offline...
Grid Node 33 offline...
Grid Node 34 offline...
Grid Node 35 offline...
Grid Node 36 offline...
Grid Node 37 offline...
Grid Node 38 offline...
Grid Node 39 offline...
Grid Node 40 offline...
Grid Node 41 offline...
Grid Node 42 offline...
Grid Node 43 offline...
Grid Node 44 offline...
Grid Node 45 offline...
Grid Node 46 offline...
Grid Node 47 offline...
Grid Node 48 offline...

Siberian Desktop

Back in early March I took this photo of some trees in Siberia. We had just finished sledding down a giant hill and I found myself laying on a snow bank looking up at the trees. I quickly snapped a picture. I've been using it as my Desktop image ever since.

The second picture was taken from a popular cross-country skiing trail outside the city of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Through the trees you can see some of the houses that are part of a village.

» Download a 1600x1200-pixel image for your desktop

The Sweet Hereafter

I watched for the second time tonight, Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, a haunting but beautiful film that chronicles the aftermath of a tragic event in a small Canadian town when 14 children die in a schoolbus accident.

This movie brought back one of my strongest childhood memories, which I can't quite place. I remember reading a book when I was about eight or nine years old about a kidnapper who hijacks a schoolbus and then holds the children hostage in a semi-trailer buried underground, forcing them to deficate in a corner and eat nothing but boxes of cereal while he negotiates the ransom. I think this book was was also made into a movie in the 1970s and possibly was based on a true story.

Out of simple curiosity I want to re-read this book and experience it from the adult perspective; and possibly also to put my childhood demons to rest.

What is the name of the book/movie that I am remembering?

I found a few things online:

[Reference] Frederick N. Woods, one of three men who kidnapped and buried a busload of school children in 1976 for a $5 million ransom, was denied parole Tuesday in his 10th bid for freedom.

Woods was arrested about two weeks after he and brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld, all scions of wealthy San Francisco Peninsula families, commandeered the bus on July 15, 1976, near Chowchilla in the San Joaquin Valley.

They transferred their hostages to two vans, drove about 100 miles north and put them in a moving van they had buried in a quarry owned by the Woods family in Livermore.

While they were trying to arrange for the ransom, bus driver Ed Ray and some of the older boys dug their way out of the truck and summoned help.

Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in six days after the kidnapping. Woods and James Schoenfeld were captured six days after that, Woods in Canada.

All three were sentenced to life in prison.

CL: Tourist Season Alert from B.T.E.S.M.P

Attention all New Yorkers. The Bureau to Eradicate Slow-Moving People (i.e., tourists) is warning all New Yorkers that Tourist Season will hit New York hard in the next few weeks. This service advisory extends until New Year's Eve; New Yorkers are to proceed with their daily lives with caution, especially if they live and/or work in the following areas: Penn Station, 34th Street and Herald Square, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Fifth Avenue, Christopher Street, SoHo, and Broadway between Union Square and Canal Street. The aforementioned people flock to New York from the following places: New Jersey, Long Island, Texas, North Dakota, Italy, Japan, and England.

Read the rest of this funny Craigslist post...

James Howard Kunstler Interview

I saw Jim speak a few weeks ago at the Good Experience Live conference here in New York. He opened my eyes to the world of terrible architecture in America and introduced me to the New Urbanists movement that that seeks to revamp the strip malls and shopping malls of America and replace them with environmentally stylish, friendly, and open places of commerce.

Mark Hurst has published a recent interview with Jim that discusses New York City, Savannah, and the unfortunate popularity of Starbucks.

Matrix Posters For Sale

Well, it looks like I'm moving again, so it's time to purge some items that I no longer want.

If you live in the New York area, I am selling some of the Matrix posters I've had for several years.

See the ad on Craigslist.

I will also soon be listing some of my DVDs, a TEAC bookshelf stereo system (very good brand), a 400 Mhz 15" Apple Titanium Powerbook, a 17" Viewsonic monitor, a Sony 900 Mhz cordless phone, and a whole bunch of books.

Archives Imported, Neat Perl Script

With the help of Morbus Iff, I was able to scrape my years of archives and get them into a format that MT could import. I thought about assigning every entry an ID number but instead opted to treat each day's entries as a single entry. This reduces the load on MT when rebuilding. Currently, with nearly 1000 entries in the database, it takes a full 20-30 minutes to rebuild all of the individual archives.

For those who are interested, I've written up the process Morbus and I used to get my archives into MT.

To start, you need to read the MT import instructions and understand its formatting and syntax. This is what you need to know so that the Perl script can output a correctly formatted file that will then be read by the Import/Export utility in MT.

The Perl script that is being discussed is here. It can be easily modified to scrape any site that has flat-file archives stored in a uniform format.

Once you have modified the Perl script (get some help if you need it) to match your flat-file archives format, you should change the full path to the directory your archives files are being stored. For instance, my 2002 flat-file archives (an example) were located in:

/usr/www/users/username/includes/archives/2002/

This path can be changed for every directory you want to scrape each time you run the script. Because I did not want to overload my server I scraped one year at a time, changing the path to match once I had successfully output a formatted MT import file for each year.

To run this script, go into your shell and run the following command from the directory you have saved the Perl script to:

perl converter.pl > mtoutput.txt

Because there is a one-second delay (so as to not overload the server) between reading each .html file, this may take a few minutes. When the script is done running, you should have a file in the same directory called mtoutput.txt.

Move this file to a directory inside your MT install called /import. Then, go to the MT Import/Export utility and configure it. For my site, I chose to check "Import entries as me". Choose a category and a post status, and then click the "Import" button. If everything is correct, you will see the utility print to screen the status of each entry it has successfullly imported (look for an ID number and the word "ok").

Make sure there are no other files inside the /import directory or the MT Import/Export utility will try to read them as well and most likely generate errors.

Repeat this process for each archive directory you want to scrape. Note that you should delete mtoutput.txt (or move it and and save it to act as a backup) once you have imported it ito MT or you will end up with duplicate entries the next time you run the Import/Export utility.

Separation of Databases in MT

I've been playing around with creating multiple weblogs within MovableType. It's a great feature. Up to this point I had been installing multiple versions of MT, one per domain, because I knew that I had to keep the authors of each MT blog completely separate regardless of whether I was hosting the domain or not. This overhead also allowed me to store the data for each blog in separate MySQL databases.

However, now I have a need to run multiple blogs under the same installation of MT but also keep separate databases for each blog. I don't see any easy way of doing this because a single installation of MT uses the same mt.cfg file regardless of how many blogs it owns. Am I mistaken? Is there a way to use MT to run multiple blogs but also assign each blog it's own MySQL db?

Some discussion on this in the MT support forum.

Update: More research informs me that a single installation of MT can only write to a single MySQL database. If I want separate db's I need separate installations of MT. I have been told that my request has been added to the to-do list for future versions of MT.

Wocka Wocka Wiki

I'm encouraged to see the NY Times publish an article on Wikis. I haven't looked at Wiki technology in years but I know there's been a flurry of renewed interest ever since the concept of weblogs hit the mainstream.

Parthenogenesis

Very interesting. Scientists are taking the concept of "virgin birth" that is found among snails and fleas and applying it to the human being. They want to trick an egg into thinking it has been fertilized, not to create a human clone, but to grow stem cells to use for research purposes. If they succeed it will get around the stem cell and cloning controversies because no human sperm was used. I wonder how long it will be before the religious right and the Bush administration notice and amend their campaigns to cover this as well.

Trip Report: Part 5: The Moscow Circus

(Note: Please read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 first)

A few days before I was scheduled to fly back to Malta to catch my return flight to NYC via London (yeah, crazy flight path) Lena and I decided to go see the famous Nikulin Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, an easy walk form the flat I had rented from Moscow Rick.

I hadn't been to a circus since I was a kid (one of those crappy traveling circuses that criss-cross the Midwest every year) so I had no idea what to expect. This was a real circus, with a real ring, inside a building specially designed for a circus. We arrived and after buying some expensive Pepsi and cotton candy, found our seats. One of the funniest things I've ever seen was a performer dressed up as an American tourist in a trenchcoat who, about 10 minutes before the show started, would start looking for his seat by making the entire row get up so he could get past. Halfway down the row, he'd look at his ticket, shake his head and say something in English (sometimes German) to the audience members nearest him. He would then back out of the row, making everyone get up again, climb up the stands to another row and repeat this process. He had done this about three times before I even realized that he was part of the act, and not some bumbling clueless tourist. His act was that believable.

The circus act began with an amazing group of trapeze fliers, these guys would swing and fly around the ring on ropes at amazing speeds. At one point, they used these long elastic ropes to fling themselves into a net at about 30 miles an hour, tumbling the entire way. I managed to snap a picture of one of them hitting the net. I was only able to take a few pictures before the ushers told me that pictures were not allowed but I grabbed a few later by leaving my camera sitting on my leg and leaving the flash off. I wish I could have gotten more pictures of the light-show and dancers. Amazing stuff.

The circus act was about 90 minutes long, and well worth the $10 or so the tickets cost. Despite the high cost-of-living in Moscow, the prices for entertainment are still lower than when compared to places like New York City and London. If you ever get to Moscow, I recommend the Nikulin Moscow Circus.

Soon, the time for me to leave came. The week I spent in Moscow with Lena was a memorable one. If and when I go back to Russia, I think I'll spent some more time in Moscow but as much as I hear about the beauty of St. Petersburg (celebrating 300 years this year), I might skip Moscow and go there instead. I also thought a lot about taking the Tans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing this summer or fall but it depends on my job situation and funding.

The morning we had to leave, Moscow Rick arranged a car service to take us both back to Domodedovo airport so I could catch my flight to Malta and Lena's to Krasnoyarsk. Even though our flights were about 6 hours apart, I ended up sitting at the gate for most of this time while they tried to de-ice the latch to the luggage compartment on the plane. I befriended a guy named Marc who worked at the Maltese embassy in Moscow and was going back to Malta to visit his family for the Christmas holidays. When the plane finally arrived in Malta more than seven hours late, Marc's family gave me a ride to my hotel.

I had about 12 hours before my flight to London, so I dropped my bags off at the hotel and went to the nearby casino to lose another $100. In Malta, the casinos play a version of poker called Oasis Poker that is pretty easy to learn. I found it interesting that the casinos in Russia also have Oasis Poker tables, but nothing like Let It Ride or Caribbean Stud which are prominent in most of the casinos in America.

I eventually caught my flight back to London, which landed at Gatwick airport after midnight. I needed to transfer to Heathrow but unfortunately all of the buses and trains between Gatwick and Heathrow stop running after 11:30 PM, so the only option was to take an expensive taxi. I knew ahead of time that this was going to be a problem, so I stayed alert and ended up finding an older Australian couple who had the same problem so we shared the cost of a taxi to Heathrow. They were extremely nice too and insisted I come visit Australia, since I had never been there.

I've been back in NYC since the middle of March, and even though I still have a bad case of wanderlust I know that I cannot travel again for a little while. I need to re-focus, find a good job, rebuild my finances and figure out what exactly it is that I want to do with my life. I'm in the middle of re-launching my weblog, am working on a number of freelance projects so I can pay my bills and have a contractor in Siberia writing some back-end PHP code for me to drive a web site idea I've been sitting on for a few years now. All told, I am happy I made the decision to travel. It opened my eyes up to a world I had almost forgotten from my childhood travels.

For the July 4th weekend, my twin brother and I are traveling back to Michigan to attend the wedding of our older brother. Packed away in my mom's house are thousands of slides and photographs that our father took during the first 13 years of my life. My plan is to buy a slide scanner, get all of these pictures transferred to digital, and build a web site for our family. I will also publish some of the better ones on camworld. I feel that doing this will reconnect me with my own past and help me understand myself. I'm a little giddy at the thought but I know it will be a fun personal project. I can't wait.

Linked In - Six Degrees of Schmoozing

After some gentle prodding, I have finally registered at Linked In, a new online social network that promises to link people together and increase your odds of making the connection that will get you that job, that deal, that venture capital funding, etc.

The easiest way to get over the initial barrier-to-entry is to request a connection with someone that is already part of the network. Once that's been confirmed, you can browse through the social network for your friends and colleagues and continue to request more connections. I found the search tools to be pretty rudimentary, but I'm sure they will improve over time.

My biggest complaint with the site is that it's purely superficial. There's nothing there but mini-bios of each person in the network. There's no cumulative knowledge, no writing, no forums, no educated opinions, no links - in short, no community. Without something to keep me coming back to the site, why should I bother? The goal of the site should be a social network that facilitates reputation management. It's just another online Rolodex, otherwise.

I would love to see some discussion areas on the site, or some kind of content that's going to bring me back. After I've gotten past the initial ego-boost of sending connection requests to everyone I know, there's not a whole lot else to do. With this many smart people in one place, it'd be foolish to watch them all get bored and wander off to find something more exciting to participate in. You've built a network; now where's the community?

What I Hate About Your Programming Language

OnLamp: What I Hate About Your Programming Language

Another good read is this article: How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It

Random Image + Metadata

I'm currently trying to figure out a way to randomly display an image from my extensive collection of digital photography, but I want to do more than just pick a random image from a directory and display it. That's what Hiveware's Image Rotator does with PHP and also what this Random Image Displayer script does in Perl.

What I want is a little script that can pull both an image plus some stored metadata (see left column), and display it randomly. I've looked at Menalto Gallery, but it seems like ovekill for what I want. Does anyone have pointers to a script (in PHP or Perl) that does what I need? The metadata would likely be stored in a MySQL table or even in a flat file.

Update: I found this recent tutorial on how to integrate Gallery into MovableType. Very interesting. I'm going to have to rethink my requirements.

Content Management Design

David Rodriguez has written an extensive paper on the subject of Content Management Design, which should be good reading for anyone working in the content management system industry.

Also read: Where is the knowledge in a content management system?

CSS Tabs

The CSS tabs are modified from Joshua Kaufmann's nicely designed set. With some tweaking, this entire index page will have just one graphic, the new Camworld logo which is still under development...

Update: I just looked at this design in IE 5.x/MacOS 9.2 and the CSS tabs fall apart completely. I'll have to find a different implementation to try....

Construction Zone: Things will be broken for a while

Don't mind the mess here. I'm just building a new CSS-based template. Re-launching soon.

The entries for 1997 are now imported. I need to hand-enter everything up to June of 1999. Everything from then until December of 2002 is in nicely formatted flat-file archive that I can scrape with a little Perl script and import into MovableType using the import/export tools. If anyone has written such a script and cares to share it, drop me a note so I don't have to re-invent the wheel.