Author: fheald

“The Gods do not deduct from a man’s allotted time, the hours spent in whale watching…” – sign above the door here

I’m winding slowly along Highway One, taking pictures and doing a bit of walking; I’d been having problems with my big toe but fortunately the cortisone shot I got last week seems to be working (although it prevented me from giving blood last weekend).

I don’t think I’ve quite relaxed yet. Didn’t sleep very well last night; I recall that after a beer or two I might fall asleep, but end up waking in a few hours and being unable to get back to sleep. Which I suppose means I ought to confine my drinking to daylight hours.

This morning was my first visit Hearst Castle. The location and scale were impressive of course, but actually I was struck by how thrown-together it seemed; the kind of thing inordinately rich people might do, with artworks and architectural styles from vastly different cultures and time periods – Ancient Egyptian, Roman, Renaissance European – mixed together apparently at random; it also seemed as if works may have been selected based on visual appeal or monetary value rather than based on significance or quality. Or maybe I should have started the day with a little more caffiene. I did enjoy myself. Think I may drop by the Monterey Aquarium this afternoon or more likely tomorrow.

Got the second battery hooked up in the van; with overpriced instructions and wires from the Westy place it was simple so I guess I got my money’s worth; have yet to check whether it’s actually charging the battery. I have a solar panel I’d like to get put up on the roof not so much because I need the power (though it will be useful at Burning Man) but so that I can get it out of my living space. The fridge is being cranky; it works when stopped but doesn’t stay on; but it’s not a fansastic fridge anyhow and I’m happy using my supercooler, just have to get a block of ice every few days. I’m happier if I don’t have any food that I actually need to keep cool, but other than a bit of smoked salmon my Uncle Mario gave me (from his trip to Alaska) and a little margerine and cheese, I think I’m clear there. Need more quick snack foods. I have three bottles of two-buck-chuck, but didn’t bring a corkscrew (tire bouchon, corkenseer) and every place I’ve checked it would have cost me more than the wine so I couldn’t justify it.

I need to make a plane reservation to have Becke visit me in Seattle, but I’m not entirely sure when I’ll be there; I could easily burn up there in about two days if I wanted to but I’m thinking it’ll be around the weekend of the 21st; need to check with Chris and Kwren to see when they’re headed to the San Juans. Can’t get away from schedules and agendas, quite yet.

I suppose the fact that I’m eating the fries that came with this overpriced sandwich means I’m slipping on the diet; if I can do more beach walking than sitting on my butt in the truck I should be okay.

Highway One seems a little old hat to me; I’m looking forward to the Northern California coast and Oregon, which I’ve only been to once, about ten years ago, at which point I was in a hurry to get back down South, and as I recall was carrying Telenomics’ server in the back seat of my tiny car.

Hmph. First occurrance of restroom doors marked “Gulls” and “Bouys”.

(18:53 – downtown Carmel)

I don’t know if I’ll grab dinner here, or more likely up in Monterey, but I grabbed a wireless connection, and now my email is working again so I suppose I might as well send. Photos to come tomorrow.

I can get an Internet connection, parked in front of a cafe (thanks!) but I can’t get a Sprint signal.

Stayed overnight at San Simeon campground, made myself breakfast – I do need more practice at that, especially with the tiny sink and stove. Visited Hearst Castle this morning.

Truck is running well. Hope to relax this afternoon and deal with photos and such this afternoon, perhaps upload them tomorrow from Carmel.

I’m here on the reccommendation of Tom “Kingsley” Brown, who suggested I sample the food and the Porter; am currently in the midst of a nice thick “Saphead” stout. I’ve gotten to be quite the beer snob in the past few years; I particularly prefer the darker Nut Browns, Porters, and Stouts. Which brings to mind a friend’s (Todd) Theory of Guiness.

The first Guiness you drink, of an evening, tastes like a Guiness.
The second, really tastes like a Guiness.
The third, really REALLY tastes like a Guiness.
The fourth, and any subsequent, taste like root beer floats.

I stayed with my cousin Beckie last night, in her new guest room – they’ve been working on their house for about two years, now, including a year while they were in Ireland when they had it torn down. The new house is a “manufactured home” which means it came in sections and was assembled on-site – it bears no resemblance whatsoever to a “mobile home”. I’m told they’re created in Corona and trucked to the site, which means they must bear a trailer registration, but they have nice woodgrain floors and a beautiful kitchen and bullnosed drywall. Showed their kids Greg and Jennica how to use the poi and the fire staff, tho we didn’t get around to lighting them on fire, probably better off.

Just spoke to some people next to me at the bar – been meaning to do that more often – they’re from Cardiff but live here now, and have been vacationing in Gig Harbor, Washington; they’re beerheads and the woman had several places to reccommend if and when I get up that way.

Stopped briefly in Solvang, which wasn’t really worth a visit unless you’re into kitchy touristy crap; and paid a visit to GoWesty who specializes in Westfala Vanagons, for some minor spare parts. I decided to pass on the van-side awnign on the grounds that it would probably be ruined at Burning Man, and I can just as easily pick up a cheap easy-up somewhere if I decide I need one.

And I spoke with my friend Dana, who runs the Total Escape travel site (Visit it! Buy something!) and talked to her about my trip. She likes to drive fast down unmarked dirt roads but apparently makes her salary by click-throughs from people buying Newage (rhymes with Sewage) books from Amazon.

Tonight I’ll try to find a campsite by the side of the road somewhere in Cambria; I’m told that unless it’s marked otherwise roadside camping is tolerated.

And my “i” key is flaky. The keyboard on the iBook is easily (and relatively cheaply) replacable, but still it’s a bit of a pain; perhaps there’s something signifcant in the fact that the first key for me to wear out is the “i”. Speaking of which, my niece Lydia, the second child and a year and a half younger than her nearly three-year old sister Chloe, apparently favorite words are “no” and “mine”.

Just a quick note; trip report later if I can be bothered and then find an internet connection.

I’m on the road north to SF, Portland, and Seattle, then on to Black Rock. I’ll be on the road for about six weeks total. I moved out of my house and moved all my crap into storage (with no help asked or given except from dear close friend box and kitchen packers – don’t worry, I’ll give y’all a chance when I move back in somewhere sometime.) The Pinz and Rover are in storage (anyone want to borrow the Pinz for Burning Man? Let me know!) and I’m in a new (to me) 1987 VW Vanagon Camper “Tortuga Vagabundo”. I have Internet access in cafes (as now, from the Planet Java in Halcyon, CA), 802.11 “drive-bys”/wardriving, or from my cellphone (slower, but still works – but is lacking the joy of “stealing” internet”). Cellphone still works, too, and if you’ve got my number I’m happy to chat if I’m in an area with reception, but damn it don’t call when I’m already on the phone with someone – two calls I’ve gotten today, both in the same two minutes.

I’m planning on camping with/near Mithra at Thermal Shock, and should get there around Saturday the 28th if I can get in that early.

Reports from the road should appear at http://www.obtainium.org presently. If you have suggestions for coastal brewpubs, hot springs, or can’t miss cultural attractions (“Hey Mildred, I think the tourist trap just bagged another one”), let me know!

If you’ve been reading this looking for news on what’s up with me, I’ve been woefully inadequate at updating the site. Mea culpa. I promise there will be more news soon, perhaps on a daily basis!

I was released from Cybertel about a month ago, and I’ve been packing up my house and getting ready to go on the road. Picked up a 1987 VW Vanagon Westfalia camper, the Pinz and the Rover get to go into storage for the duration. Pictures to come soon!

I’m planning to head out this weekend and slowly make my way up the coast of California, Oregon, Washington, visiting friends along the way, ending up at Burning Man at the end of August. Then…the plan is to come back here and start looking for work and housing again.

Hello, is thing thing on? (tap, tap, tap – or perhaps ping, ping, ping…) Ah, there we go!

Please welcome Obtainium to its new digs! I’ve traded the stench of failure (ahem) for the heady aroma of fresh-brewed java – in Encinitas at the E Street Cafe. The cafe isn’t open yet, but through a friend I’ve got Obtainium’s Powermac G4 connected to their high speed internet pipe. (Thanks again, Greg!)

Switching locations, which I’d been dreading, was as simple as plugging in the box and setting the ip address. Also had to change DNS settings for all the websites I host.

If I can’t be sitting in a cybercafe near the beach – at least my server can.

The database I use at work is Microsoft SQL Server. It uses a program called “Enterprise Manager” to manage your databases – building tables and fields and indexes; backing up and compressing the database, etc.

It’s built to be almost as “friendly” as Microsoft Access, since apparently a lot of people who use SQL Server have migrated from Access. To edit a table, you right-click on it, and select Design Table. To see data, Open Table/Return All Rows. When you double-click a table, the default is the nearly useless View Properties, where in Access the default is the equivalent of Return All Rows. So if you go back and forth from Access to Enterprise Manager, just a little annoyance.

Return All Rows is pretty cool; you can even edit data there by hand, and you can go to SQL view or Diagram View to customise the query. You can perform action queries, such as DELETE FROM merchants WHERE merchant_status = ’99’. But there’s something wrong with the engine that EM uses to perform these queries – it times out on complex actions such as multiple table joins.

So there’s another tool you can use, from one of the inscrutable “Tools” menu of EM: SQL Query Analyzer. QA lets you do very complex queries, save them, and has not only a long timeout but a timer in the window showing how long the query has taken. And I suppose you could even analyze your queries, but I’ve never managed to need that.

You can’t hand-edit data in QA, though you can of course mass-edit. “TRUNCATE TABLE users”. So you still go back to Return All Rows for that.

And neither QA or Return All Rows has the nifty feature Access has, where you can right-click to filter data – “Filter By Selection” or “Filter Excluding Selection”. This is useful enough that it’s often a good idea to ODBC link an Access database to your SQL server tables, to do ad-hoc queries and instant reports. So there’s yet another query tool for your SQL server data.

Now, technically, you really shouldn’t be allowed to hand-edit that data at all. Going in and changing, say, merchant_status, with no log of who did it (“audit trail”) and no control to prevent people from doing it, is what got Diebold in trouble for their voting system. There are ways to limit this, but in most cases the DBA (Database Administrator) can override that and edit any data he pleases, including deleting automatic audit trails, if he knows the database well enough.

From my vague reccollection, Oracle uses similar tools for database administration and management. Lance can probably correct me on this. But when I used them they weren’t exactly user friendly.

And yet I find this is one of my annoyances with MySQL. There’s a nifty open-source tool called phpMyAdmin (I can never remember the name) allows many of the same capabilities as EM, but is entirely php web-based. It doesn’t suck, but still has some challenges of its own.

While I’m at it, one of my annoyances with SQL, is that the syntax of the INSERT statement is significantly different from that of the UPDATE statement.


INSERT INTO users (username, user_status) VALUES ('fred', 1)


versus


UPDATE users SET username = 'fred', user_status='1' WHERE user_id = '123'


Couldn’t they have just allowed the syntax


INSERT INTO users username = 'fred', user_status='1'


and/or


UPDATE users (username, user_status) VALUES ('fred', 1)


so that I could copy and paste my code for update and insert? For that matter, how about


INSERT_OR_UPDATE users SET username = 'fred', user_status='1' WHERE user_id = '123'


and/or


INSERT_OR_UPDATE users (user_id, username, user_status) VALUES ('123', 'fred', 1)


My friend John Scalzi got hit by adware on his PC, and has an entertaining rant about it at the linked address.

The comments host yet another Mac versus PC argument, to which I couldn’t help but contribute. I might as well throw it in here, though I’m sure you all are tired of my broken record by now.

Apologies for continuing the Mac/PC thread, but count me on the Mac side. (This is a “rant” after all.)

-I’m a heavy user, I use all sorts of software I download off the web (tho mainly VersionTracker, which checks for viruses itself). I’ve never had a virus on my Mac. In 20 years. Never. Never had spyware or adware. And I’ve NEVER NEEDED VIRUS PROTECTION SOFTWARE. Beyond this, I still have data I created 20 years ago because I’ve never had my Mac totally crash and die so I couldn’t retrieve the data. This is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I consider all data on Windows to be disposable unless I have a recent backup, because who knows what evil is coming down the line tomorrow. It truly amazes me that there hasn’t been an effective widespread assassin virus that wipes out people’s data irretrivably – but one day soon there will be.

-Purchase price of a Mac is nearly identical to that of an identical Windows PC. I built a PC recently, a Shuttle (for work); it cost around $1000. I can get an iBook for around $1000 with equivalent performance, in a laptop with an OS that doesn’t suck. A high-end PC or Mac is around $2000. As mentioned earlier, buying a new Mac actually makes me happy. Buying a new Wintel PC is another several thousand dollars down the toilet for questionable gains and another ugly grey box.

-I don’t even use Windows XP at work – I’m still stuck on W2K, because XP isn’t a technical improvement, and the OS itself spys on me – they don’t trust that I didn’t steal it! Outlook is the single most offensive program I have to deal with daily, and it’s a massive unprotected target for viruses! Did you know that a lot of the email we get comes from hijacked outlook machines? And yet people are afraid to load Microsoft updates, because who knows what evil DRM or new vulnerabilities it’ll contain?

-Apple does a better job considering user needs than Microsoft. The OS, the browser, the email program – what I use the most – are all better at filtering spam and malware on MacOS. I honestly believe that Microsoft doesn’t give a shit about anything but making money; Apple is working to make quality products and hoping the money will follow, someday. No doubt a worse business strategy. Sure, someday someone could write a virus for Mac – I’d think it’d be fairly easy. But I trust Apple to come up with a solution quickly, that I would trust to download and install the day it came out.

-The biggest difference to me is that I get to actually use my Mac for productive work, and I don’t have to spend time dicking with it. I know there are a lot of computer folx whose raison d’etre (side note: http://www.dogfish.com/beer/raisondetre.cfm is my favorite beer, try it!) is messing with cards and irqs and dlls and shareware. I just want to use my computer to get work done.

Aside from rants like this (more of which are available on my website), I’ve given up on trying to “convert” people. And at the same time I refuse to help people with Windows problems, because I know how bad they can get and I tend to take it personally that there’s no way to really fix them. (shrug) “Don’t know, it’s Windows. There’s always something wrong. Good luck.”

Does anyone remember when Banana Republic stores used to be cool? I remember back in around 1987 there was one in Pasadena that had a parachute and half a Land Rover in the front window. (yeah, okay, so the Rover hooked me, what can I say?) My girlfriend would make a special trip to Pasadena just to go there! The stores looked cool, and they had cool clothes – at least they seemed like real travel adventure clothing (referred to somewhere as the “Hemingway look”). Lots of loose-fitting dirt-colored linen and cotton. But mainly they had an “image”, and probably an attitude as well, that made me pleased to shop there, even tho I don’t recall actually buying that much there.

Then it got bought by the Gap and perverted into another foo foo garbage mall store. I was shopping for shoes yesterday at the Carlsbad outlet mall (shudder, but not quite as bad as the actual mall mall) and I stopped in to see what BR was up to lately. I actually bought a shirt that might have even been sold in the old store if it was still around. But the atmosphere? It’s the Gap. Bleh! The same for most of the clothes there.

Take a look at their website. No personality whatsoever (no doubt, you might say, like the people who shop there)!

No one could accuse me of being a clothes horse, but I guess I still like to identify a little with the places I shop.

I did find some cool stuff at the Timberland store, actually – two pairs of shoes, shorts, socks – yeah, they got me. The place had personality.

“Dog’s got personality; personality goes a long way.” “Ahh, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?” “Well, we’d have to be talking one charming mother-fu**ing pig.” – Pulp Fiction

(Sorry, where was I?) They had cool rolling metal fixtures so that they could rearrange in minutes. Unlike the Rockport store, they actually had benches to sit on and try on shoes (duh!). And to top it all off, much of the stuff they had was cool looking, even if I didn’t actually want it – work boots, ripstop neon backpacks, canvas stuff. Their website has, at least a little, attitude – the homepage when I looked at it (I bet it’s set to change regularly) had an image of a sailboat and the slogan in uppercase casual, “BE THE ONE WHO STEERS THE COURSE” – a little snobbish, but hard-working snobbish. And they’ve got links to granola earthday environmental volunteer stuff (“Don’t Wear It, Use It.”) BR had “new looks we crave for summer…shop now” with a lipstick’d model.

“Throughout my life, I’ve dreamed of going to different places.

Just did some work on the code behind this page (which I bravely – and foolishly – write myself in php); if I did everything right nothing much should have changed. And indeed it appears to be working still. Most of the changes mainly affect when I log in to add things, and those seem to be working too.

Strange, the differences between coding in PHP, and in ASP.NET which I’m still working on for The Giving Card. PHP is all manual – I use BBEdit (“It doesn’t suck”) for editing, and I edit code in place – when I make a change it just works. With ASP.NET I’m using Visual Studio, and I have to compile and test locally; once it tests okay, I have to FTP it up to the actual website. But the main difference seems to be that in PHP nothing is hidden – what I write is what I get. ASP does a bunch of translation before things get to screen, so “view code” shows me all sorts of junk that I haven’t written. Actually the biggest difference is probably that PHP lacks my underlying deep resentment of all things Microsoft.