Maiden Voyage

Well, we are out and about in our new RV. Today we drove to Foxboro and are now parked at the Normandy Farms campground. But on the way we stopped at a storage facility to make our first "deposit" of goods to be held until we finish our ultimate road trip, and a shopping trip to Bass Pro Shop near Patriot Stadium to get some camping supplies.

Couch to 5K - Week 3

It is going pretty well. I am keeping up with the training, although I have had to do most of it on the treadmill. It has been too cold out in the morning to run outside. If it will get back up around 40 in the morning, I will probably run outside.

Training Days

Ok, I have finally started training for a 5K. I am following the "Couch to 5K" program from coolrunning.com. I started once using the podcasts put out by Robert Ullrey, but I found the music to be too "techno" for my tastes. Also, there was only one for each week, so I had to run to the same music each day for a week before getting a change. Finally, I found there was no pause for stretching after the warm-up.

This lead to me creating my own MP3's for exercising, using classic rock, and a voice track I created using Audacity. Simple and I can change the music each day and will change the voice track each week. I have done the first week's MP3s and will be following the final one on Friday.

Now, if I could just do the training while standing at a computer, this would be much easier.

Tileable Escher Images

I recently started looking around for some new background images for my desktop. I found some Escher images which are really intriguing but were created mostly by hand, and so are not very symmetrical and so do not tile well. To be tileable and look really nice on a background, without noticeable defects, they have to be exactly the same at the edges.

So I started putting them into an image editor and tweaking them until they were tileable. Then I could use them. This got a bit obsessive as I had more and more success and then found more Escher images I liked.

So here are the ones I have converted.

A Toad/Dinghy for the Road

In our quest for an RV, we have also been considering a tow vehicle. We had thought the best thing would be to get something smaller and lighter than the cars we have now (Accord and CR-V). Also, we are going to sell the Accord before we sell our house so we thought we would pay off and then sell the CR-V as well and then get a smaller car for towing. We had seen the Honda Fit and thought that might work out. After talking to our financial expert, I thought that we might not want the extra expense of purchasing a new car, and I thought about just keeping the CR-V.

After telling Ellyn about this idea and finding the weight of the CR-V to be about 4,000 lbs., Ellyn was searching the forums online to see what people thought was the best car for towing behind a motorhome. Guess what? The CR-V came up most often. Not only that, it looks like it does not even need to be modified, except to put on the towing hardware.

The owners manual has a couple of pages describing the exact procedure for towing a CR-V. (Click the picture to the left to read) Notably, it says to shift through all gears, then to drive, then to neutral and let the engine run for 3 minutes before shutting off and towing. DO NOT shift from reverse to neutral before towing. Odd. You have to repeat every 8 hours if continually towing and it can only be towed on "all fours" or you can damage the AWD system. Perfect!

BTW, "toad" and "dinghy" are both names for the vehicle towed behind a motorhome. I haven't decided which I like yet.

Jumping The Gun

Well, I hope we didn't mess up big time here but we found the RV we wanted to get and so...we got it. Had to jump into financing and put the down payment on our credit card but it is ours. It is staying at the dealer for a while though, for one because we have nowhere to put it and they will keep it indoors for us, and two so they can continue to show it. Ok that last one is no advantage to us but we will allow it anyway.

We were at a show in Foxboro on Saturday and we were unhappy that we did not see very many Class "C" RVs, which was what we thought we wanted. We talked to a factory rep. for Jayco and he gave us the info on some of their Class "C"s. We looked in a couple of Winnebago Class "C"s but they seemed too small. When we walked by a Bay Star Class "A" that looked smaller than many of the others there, we decided to take a look. Turned out it was about the same length as the Class "C" we were thinking about, but had noticeably more room, mainly because the cab seats were at the same level as the rest of the living space, and was more a part of it. Also the windshield is the front of the vehicle instead of having a long hood out in front. The driver and passenger seats in the cab also swivel to become part of the living area seating.

We left the show thinking that the 29' long Class "A" might be the way to go. It is really the smallest of the Class "A" motor homes available. That night, Ellyn found a used 2007 Bay Star on line at a dealership here in Danbury. We stopped there on the way home on Sunday and thought it really looked good.

On Monday, we called the dealer to see if it was still available and he said he could put us in a new 2008  for about  the same amount the seller of the 2007 wanted. We went and talked with him and looked at the 2008, and decided we wanted it. If we waited, we would probably have had to get a 2009 and pay more or place a special order and pay more. He was selling this one off the lot. We had seen the list prices at about $15,000 more than his price and he was sell this for about $4000 less than the show price on the one we saw in Foxboro. It also was a color we liked better.

So we applied for the loan and got accepted (suckers!) and, when the house sells, we can pay the loan off right away without a penalty. We took it for a short test drive. It handled like a bus, I guess, but I have never driven anything this big and did not know what to expect. Plus, it was a bit windy today so probably not ideal conditions. They suggested we do some local camping with it before going on a big trip. Sounds like a plan. Now we just have to figure out how to travel with the kayaks if we are not towing a car (yet).

 

"We're On Our Way"

This has been running through my head for a few days now and I just had to put it on paper.

(Sung To Billy Joel's "You May Be Right")

We'll sell our home of 20 years
And hit the road for who-know-where
A year of wanderin' 'round the USA
We'll go looking for some fun
Living life upon the run
And we'll see all of the sights there are to see


We raised our kids and watched them bloom
We worked so hard in corporate gloom
And now we want to reap what we have sown
But when we say we'll make the best
Out of a home with GPS
People look at us like fuses might have blown

They may be right, we may be crazy
But it just may be the lunacy we're lookin' for
We're on our way, don't call in Oprah
They may be right for all we know, but we're on our way


Well, remember how we landed here
In '86, with sobs and tears
Who knew we'd live so long at this address
You said "Now we need a change"
I said "RV life's quite strange"
But it could be fun to be livin' with less stress

Now think of all those years we tried to
See the country from our Volvo
We might have been as crazy way back then
But, if we're crazy now we're owed
A leisure life upon the road
And we might not get this kind of chance again

They may be right, we may be crazy
Oh, but it just may be the lunacy we're lookin' for
We're on our way, like the "Who" we're mobile
They may be right for all we know, but we're on our way

{Instrumental}

They may be right, we may be crazy
Hey, but it just may be the lunacy we're lookin' for
We're on our way, who needs a landline?
They may be right for all we know, but we're on our way

They may be right but we're on our way! (6x)

Everyone Thinks We're Nuts...

...and they may be right but, here we go. Ellyn is retiring from her IBM job of 34+ years on Leap Day and we are preparing our house to go onto the market in May. If all goes well with that and with other plans we have, we would like to be on the road in an RV by mid-summer. Our dream has been to take a one-year, open-road-ahead, where-do-we-want-to-go-next type of excursion of North America.

When we tell people this they look at us like "are you sure your meds are working correctly?". Hopefully the reality of it will not be as hectic as the lead-up is going to be. We had a realtor go through the house with us yesterday and talk about everything we should do before putting it up for sale and the list is very long. However, with a little elbow grease and perhaps some help from outside sources, we can do it and divest ourselves of much of the worldly goods we have hoarded over the past 21 years in Danbury plus the other 9 years we have been married.

In April we will celebrate 30 years of marital bliss and hopefully, shortly after that, we will start another 30 of retired bliss. You may be right, we may be crazy, but it just may be the lunacy we're looking for.

Family Chat Time #1

The text from a recent chat with my brother Wes in San Diego, CA:

[10:06] Wes: Where's the least likely place you'd think you'd have a fire?

[10:07] GeoffNascar: in the bathtub

[10:07] Wes: Try again.

[10:07] GeoffNascar: swimming pool?

[10:08] Wes: Refridgerator.

[10:08] GeoffNascar: I have some pretty old stuff in mine. Some of it smells flamable

[10:09] GeoffNascar: So yours was a torch?

[10:10] Wes: I was making scrambled eggs last week and kept smelling paper burning. I usually scortch my arm hairs while cooking, but they never smelled like that. I checked the bottom of the pan, but couldn't find any paper stuck to it.

[10:11] Wes: After eating, the smell hadn't gone away even though I had opened the windows. Kim and I had a hard time trying to locate it.

[10:11] Wes: She kind of gave up and opened the fridge door to find something to eat, and smoke came billowing out.

[10:12] Wes: I thought it was the motor, so I pulled out the fridge and unplugged it. But when I opened the door again, the smoke seemed to be still building. (It wasn't just sitting there, it was climbing).

[10:13] Wes: Closer examination showed the paper egg carton burned entirely in two and still glowing at the ragged edges.

[10:14] Wes: I'm not sure exactly when it caught fire, but obviously it wasn't an inferno when I carried it to the fridge.

[10:15] Wes: The inside wall has a spot where the heat bubbled the plastic. But, otherwise, the only damage is the smell of smoke that continues to linger.

[10:15] GeoffNascar: I'm getting ready to make breakfast, but now I'm trying to get the smell of scorched arm hair out of my head.

[10:16] Wes: Luckily, I didn't go to bed (and Kim was still home). Otherwise it probably would have continued to spread.

[10:17] Wes: It was a duece to find because the fridge seal did an almost perfect job of containing the smoke.

[10:18] GeoffNascar: So I'm guessing you set fire to the egg carton on the stove and then put it back into the fridge?

[10:18] Wes: That's my guess, too. I'm not sure if it caught when I lit the stove, or when I picked it up and passed too close to the fire, or what.

[10:19] GeoffNascar: So when does the video hit YouTube?

[10:19] Wes: It would have to be a reconstruction. I don't vid tape my life like some people.

[10:21] Wes: (I'm thinking to the vidoe on AFV where the guy is shooting POV and lights the wrong stove burner with a newspaper sitting on it.)

[10:21] Wes: And then he contines to shoot while trying to put it out.

[10:21] GeoffNascar: I'm thinking of putting in security cameras just for that purpose. We gotta have some blunders around here that are AFV worthy.

[10:22] Wes: Hi def video? Or convenience store quality?

[10:24] GeoffNascar: There are some nice new little HD video cameras which write to SD cards and come in bubble packs.

[10:25] GeoffNascar: I'm thinking my old DV tape camera may be a dinosaur.

[10:25] Wes: It would be better to feed them to a central location, so you'll have a clear video of the guy that steals them.

[10:26] GeoffNascar: Get any thing noteworthy for Xmas? I only wanted one thing and got it. An iPod Touch. Very nice little device.

[10:27] Wes: Not really. Pat kept asking me what I wanted for Xmas and I would say "For it to be over".

[10:28] Wes: I'm going to bed, now. I've got one more night before my "weekend". You enjoy your burnt hair breakfast.

[10:29] GeoffNascar: Thanks. G'nite.

[10:29] Wes: Speaking of burnt hair ... it reminds me of the final scene it Ghostbusters. "Smells like burnt dog."

[10:30] Wes: Speaking of Ghostbusters, I saw a link to a video of the fairwell scene in "Broken Flowers". Someone enhanced the sound until they were able to make out what Bill Murray whispered to the girl.

[10:32] GeoffNascar: Never heard of it. What did he say?

[10:33] Wes: Sorry ... it was "Lost in Translation".

[10:33] Wes: Broken Flowers was a different Bill Murray movie.

[10:34] Wes: In "Lost", when Bill is leaving Japan, he says to the girl "I have to be going now, but I won't hold it between us. Okay?"

[10:38] GeoffNascar: We just saw the girl in another movie this week. "A Love Song For Bobby Long" with John Travolta. Really nice movie. Wonder why I don't remember hearing of it either.

[10:39] Wes: Speaking of things seen on the web ... in the same page of blurbs that had the "Lost" info, there was an entry from Neil Gaiman's blog. He was commenting on the recent find in Jakarta of giant rats (you may have heard about it (http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/17/giant.rat.ap/index.html ). Neil's take on it was ... "Giant Rat near Sumatra". He must be a Firesign Theatre fan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Giant_Rat_of_Sumatra).

[10:41] Wes: See ya!

[10:42] GeoffNascar: Ta;ta

Windows Live Writer

This post was created by using the latest version of the Windows Writer, a part of the Windows Live Suite by Microsoft. It has many more features than the Blogger interface. It is easier to add pictures and links, and also other things like tables, maps, tags, and videos.

 

 

And the beat goes on

The 60's and the 70's do not seem so long ago to me, but to my kids, they were the equivalent of the 30's and the 40's to me. It is funny that the trends, themes, and nearly all of the music of those decades lives on today, and today's kids are nearly as familiar with much of it as we are. Recently there were a couple of comic strips I follow which had a running theme regarding the 60's and the 70's. Click on the images below to see the panels I collected. They are from Zits and Jumpstart.

I was so young!

I was listening to music on XM Radio channel 6, which has music fom the 60's, nad they said something about this week in 1967 and I suddenly realized that it was 40 years ago this past week, 11/6 to be exact, that I shipped off from home to Navy boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago. I was only 18 and had never been away from home and my parents for more than a week (Summer Camp one year when I was about 13) except when I went off to my Grandparents' cottage in Manistee, MI with them when I was probably about 6.

I went downtown to the recruiting station and they put us on a bus to Detroit. There we were put on an airplane for the flight to Chicago and then another bus ride to Glakes NTC. I guess it was pretty easy to make the transition from home life to Navy life; all I had to do was just what I was told. They took all of our civilian clothes and shipped them back home. They gave us all the clothes we would need for the two months we would be training. After that, they would pay us a regular allowance to keep up our clothing.

Acorn Barrage

We are under fire! Send in reinforcements!

Oops, a flashback to my war experience. Well, not really, I spent the Viet Nam War underwater. Anyway, we are getting literally pelted by acorns. They are hitting the deck about 10 a minute on the average. It is down right dangerous out there. I am running the video camera to try to catch some of the sounds of them in the trees around our property.

Good thing this only happens every other year. But then we have to contend with oak flowers all over the place on the even years. Walking on our deck is like the cave scene in The Temple Of Doom. "Feel like walking on fortune cookies"

CSI: New Haven - The I.T. Files.

I can now put "Expert Witness" on my business card. I was called up by a lawyer in New Haven, CT to sign a court affidavit, and then to appear in court, to provide IT information about a technique for gathering data from a computer hard drive. Then today, I actually made copies of the data from a laptop HDD and a Maxtor OneTouch backup drive. Very exciting.

My First Rootkit

I actually came across a rootkit in the wild this week. I did not recognize it as such at first. It was obvious that there was malware at work, since email would spontaneously begin sending about 1 minute after the Windows desktop appeared, and Norton AV would begin a scan on each one, but would not apparently complete the scan. Then a message window would pop up that indicated that either the ISP rejected sending the email because it contained a known virus or because it was obvious spam.

Shutting off the wireless connection would stop it but scanning with Norton, either in normal or safe mode, turned up nothing. I also installed Spybot S&D and scanned, but still no luck. I thought that the Norton AV application "DoScan.exe" might be infected or a trojan because there was a bigger copy in the prefetch area than the real one, so I deleted it. I also thought I got it, but it still was infected.

I finally had to give up for the day and come back. I thought Norton might actually be infected so I was going to go back and install AVG to see if it could have better luck. This morning I woke up thinking about something I had heard about on a "Security Now" podcast; rootkits. Designed to hide files and registry entries from the operating system, they can also hide from scanners who rely on the OS to show them the files to be scanned. They can also be detected by comparing the OS results to data read and parsed from a BIOS level read of the HDD.

"Rootkit Revealer" was a scanner I had heard about on the podcast and had downloaded and played with it. I had it in my thumbdrive toolkit, so I thought I would try a scan before doing any other detective work. Bingo. Two hidden files and several hidden entries in the registry to load a service. Armed with the names of the hidden files, I went to the internet and found references to similar, but not exact file names. The posts indicated to download and run Smitfraud.exe and ComboFix.exe. I already had Smifraud, and had run it, with no apparent results. So I downloaded ComboFix and it indicated that it had removed the two hidden files.

A final scan by Rootkit Revealer showed no hidden files or registry entries. When the network connection was turned back on and the system rebooted, no sign of any infection. Ta Da!

Update: Had my second today. I was a lot quicker on the uptake this time.

Interactive Radar Map

Weather.com now has an interactive storm radar map. This is really cool. You can drag the map around to other locations, zoom easily, it is very up-to-date (as little as 4 minutes delay) and the animation updates itself as new data is available. I signed up for the gold edition, which displays without ads, larger, and does not time out, and put it on my active desktop. The way the weather has been so far this year, I should get a lot of use out of it.

Technician, Heal Thyself....'s Computer

Ok, so it was risky, taking a soldering iron to the surface mount connections on a printed circuit board inside my laptop, but I was desperate. I had not been able to get the second RAM slot to work. The memory card is good but the slot would not recognize it unless it was pressed down toward the board. I had tried a mechanical work-around but that only had limited success.

So it was time to try the electrical fix. I figured there had to be a cracked or cold solder joint in one of the connections to the main board. Unfortunately, they are barely big enough to see, let alone attack with a hot iron 8 times bigger. I got it good and clean (solder flux is a wonderful thing) and tinned up with my best silver-bearing solder and went to work. I tried to see if the solder was heating and flowing on each connection as I went, but even with my highest mag reading glasses, I could not see them very well.

I saw an old SLR 50mm lens nearby which I had used to take some extreme closeup pictures before and thought it might work as a "jeweler's loop". I was then able to examine all of the connections and see if any looked like they were still not connected. I was able to see a few which were questionable and then work on them as I watched through the lens. finally, I think I got it properly soldered in and the memory is now working.

I was afraid for a while that I had killed my laptop. I had partially melted some of the resistors close to the connections and was getting some blue-screens on boot up. Finally it would not even go into POST. Upon further examination, I realized there may be some solder bridges between the connections, so I scraped them out with a pin and tried again. Success!

The weekend airplane flight trip from heck!

Ok, now I understand why people are sometime reluctant to take trips by air. For the most part, Ellyn and I have been fortunate over the years to have had very good luck with flight scheduling, reliability, baggage handling, on-time departure and arrival, etc. We have had some trouble with unforeseen problems, but NOTHING like this past weekend. Holy Moly!

We went to Cincinnati, OH to attend the ordination of a very good friend of ours as a Rabbi. The events in Ohio involving the ceremony and the parties afterward went off without a hitch and we had a wonderful time. It was the approach and return which are the subject of this story.

We left on Friday from Danbury with two really good friends of ours, Barbara and Albert Uziel, for Laguardia Airport in NY for a direct flight to Dayton. OH. They picked us up in their car early Friday AM and we parked at a offsite lot in Queens and shuttled to the terminal. Ellyn and I checked our luggage with the airline, US Airways, and we all went for a leisurely breakfast in the terminal before heading to the gate.

As we were walking down the concourse, Barbara looked at one of the banks of screens showing the departures and arrivals and exclaimed "It's been canceled!". Um, what? She ran to the gate and then we headed for the service desk, where we could be rebooked on another flight. No explanation of why it was canceled, it just was. (I suspect equipment failure)

As we were waiting, Ellyn and Barbara got on the phone with Travelocity.com and US Airways respectively and tried to get new flights. Ellyn had some problems, but Barbara was able to get them booked on a flight leaving in just 20 minutes to Charlotte, NC and then to Cincinnati. We "piggybacked" on that move and were able to get onto the same flights. Great! But our luggage was ticketed to Dayton. Oops. And we had a rental car reserved in Dayton. Oops. Ok, those can be fixed when we get to Charlotte, since we had to hustle to make the flight.

The rental car was an easy fix. Ellyn's and my luggage had to be picked up by the airline and delivered to us in Cincinnati. It took some explaining, first by phone and then at the Cincinnati airport before it was set up to be accomplished. However, we were going to services on Friday evening at the synagogue and need some appropriate clothing. Barbara and Albert got a cab from the airport to the hotel while Ellyn and I got into the rental car and went to a nearby mall to shop for clothes. Fortunately, we found a Macy's and they had many things on sale, so we were able to outfit ourselves pretty reasonably and just in the nick of time.

Our luggage was delivered to the hotel that evening at midnight. We thought the worst was over. Silly us.

Since we had picked the car up in Cincinnati, we decided to save ourselves an hour drive to Dayton to fly back to NY, and changed our flights to go back through Charlotte. The day started out with a delay in Cincinnati, which turned our 2 hour leisurely stroll in Charlotte into a one hour hustle to get food and get to the gate. That flight also got off a little late but we were on our way. Then the pilot came on the intercom and told us that air traffic had us in a holding pattern near Virginia, probably due to weather in the NY area, although he never confirmed this. After a while he said we had spent too much fuel waiting and had to return to Charlotte. Uh.

When we landed in Charlotte, everyone, including me and Barbara, got on their cell phones and called US Airways for new arrangements. I talked with someone who said he had confirmed us on a later flight to Laguardia, but Barbara said they had told her that all flights for that evening into the NY area airports were all full. When we got inside the terminal, they sprinted off to try to get onto a flight to Newark, NJ on standby. Ellyn and I sauntered off to a US Airways ticket window to get boarding passes for our new flight.

A complication was that the crew of the returning flight told us our bags would be delivered to the carousels in the terminal, since they assumed many of us would be in hotels for the night, so, if we had a flight out that evening, we would have to re-check the bags. But, we needed the boarding passes to get back into the concourse if we went out to get the bags. So we waited patiently until someone was able to get us our passes. After visits to two different agents, we finally found out that the "Einstein" I had talked to on the phone from the plane had booked on the 9:55 PM flight on Monday, instead of Sunday. No wonder there was seats for us.

So know we are resigned to staying over and the earliest flight home would not be until 2:15 on Monday. Barbara and Albert were still trying to get on a flight standby but had also confirmed seats on a flight on Monday. But Barbara mentioned she had seen a flight to Hartford that evening, which would not help them, since their car was at Laguardia airport. We checked that out and decided to take a chance on it, although weather could still be a factor. Also, it was already delayed nearly an hour until 10:40 PM.

Still, there was the baggage problem, although the ticket agent thought the baggage would still be in holding for a flight. I grabbed my boarding pass anyway and headed for the main terminal. Sure enough. the bags were on their umteenth turn around the carousel. I grabbed them and ran upstairs to check them onto the Hartford flight. I had to jump ahead of a line of passengers trying to get onto any flights that night or the next day themselves, so I could get the bags checked and get back through security before it closed (!) at 10:15 PM. I just made that and Ellyn and I were able to get onto the flight and make it to Hartford. We also found out that Barbara and Albert had been able to get onto the NJ flight on standby.

A quick rental car reservation in Hartford was able to get us home by 2:30 AM on Monday (groan). The last we heard from Barbara and Albert was when we had gotten into the rental car, and they were in Newark trying to get a cab or other transportation to Laguardia to get their car.

Ellyn had to drag herself out of bed this morning so we could return the rental car and she could get to work by 9:00 for a meeting. On Thursday, we get to start the whole process over again when we fly to the bay area of California for her Father's 80th birthday celebration. Hopefully the travel plans will go off with somewhat less of a hitch this time. Keep your fingers crossed.

My sons get me!

This is great. I guess I raised my sons right. You know you have arrived as a great father when, at the ripe old age of 58, they both buy you gifts that you would normally get for a 10 year old. No socks, no shirts, no ties. Also I have given them an idea for Father's Day; renew my pro account on Flickr.

Thanks Logan, Maureen, and Brian.

Pop goes the Leo

On the latest "This Week In Tech" netcast from Leo LaPorte, Leo had a bit of an "on mic" incident. Listen carefully to this excerpt from the show. Sure wish it was a v-cast!