Happy 4th of July!

Still July 4th for the next hour or so (and definitely still the 4th in Hawaii ), so I want to wish my American readers a happy Independence Day.

I just came back from a 4th of July concert at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.
The SF Philharmonic played space-related classical pieces, and George Takei (Sulu from Star Trek) narrated. The evening ended with a nice fireworks show, to the tune of John Williams' Star Wars theme (coincidentally, Skywalker Ranch, where the movie was created, is 50 miles north of here).

It was fun to watch and fun to take part in. Happy 4th!

PS: I'm uploading the videos and pictures as I write this. Will update later with links.

PPS: Here are the videos:
1. George Takei and Star Trek
2. Fireworks to the tune of Star Wars

Some More Funny Pictures

In my travels I see many things that make me laugh, and I try to snap a shot of them, yet I have no one category to bundle them other. Therefore, without no connecting thread, here are some pictures I took over the last few months:

1. Why is this car smiling at me?

2. Doesn't this building in Tel Aviv look like it's about to take off?

3. How do you "send away" bees? (was posted at my local Borders)

4. This bike looks so strange, that even its owner recognized it in the license plate:

5. I saw this one outside a hospital. It really put a large smile on my face:

6. Finally, not that funny - but still interesting. Have you ever wondered what an earthquake would feel like at the top floor of an apartment building? Here's a video I took while visiting one of my customers that deals with risk assessment:

Short explanation:
The building on the left is re-enforced, per the California 197? code, the one on the right (taller) isn't. The simulator creates an effect similar to an 8 Richter scale wave. The graph on the top shows the left building's G-forces, the one in the middle that of the right. People on the top floors of the right building will not survive - even if their building doesn't break - they'll be crushed by the G forces.

3 Days in Green Oregon

I had a free open ticket from Southwest and a friend suggested I take a flight to the neighboring state of Oregon.

I never visited that state, but was intrigued by the stories about its forests, mountains, beaches etc. But I really had no time to plan the trip. I called my good friend Remco, who has moved there 2 years ago and was kind enough to build a route that would show me the highlights of that beautiful state in 3 days.

Try searching for Portland airport (PDX) on Google maps and you get the right map, but the title “Portland Air Force Base”. When you land there and see the long line of F-15s with open canopies along the runway, you understand why.

At Portland I rented a 4 wheel drive car (you never know if the mountain passes are open or not) and headed along the (very) scenic Route 26 to Mount Hood. You cannot escape that mountain for hours. You see it everywhere you look – still covered in snow at the end of May.

Remco recommended a stop for lunch at the Timberline Lodge and it was a great recommendation. The lodge is built into the mountain, meaning you see snow through the windows of the bottom 2 floors, and people skiing at eye level on the third, which is where the restaurant was. The food was good and not too expensive.

From there along Rt. 26 and 97, I reached Bend and proceeded to Remco’s place. Without a 4WD it would be impossible to visit that place during the winter, but thankfully we had great weather that week. We visited one of the many breweries in Bend (the name eludes me, but the menu did a great job of explaining the differences between the beers in a way even a novice could grasp). We later poured over the maps for the rest of the route. Sadly, Crater Lake was taken off the route of this trip, as it would have added close to 6 extra hours of driving to my trip.

The next day, I thanked Remco and his wife for their great hospitality and headed up to Paulina Lake. While part of the park was closed due to snow, I still got to the lake and watched fisherman launching their boats (and this was another place I was happy I took a 4WD car, as the whole place was muddy).

From there I took Rt. 58 – another very scenic route, but this time, more forests and lakes than mountains. I’ve seen so much green and blue that at one point it became almost to much to bear. Originally from an arid country, I always enjoy seeing a abundance of water – and this leg of the trip was an overdose.

I reached Eugene, a university town, before dark and took a room at a Courtyard right by the river – where I also had my dinner, and prepared for the last leg of my trip – going down to the ocean.

The next day I started my drive to Newport. This was a much more leisurely drive, as some of the roads have a low speed limit, or just one lane, or both. Don’t be tempted to speed – I’ve seen many people pulled over by highway patrolmen emerging from behind trees or shrubberies on the median.

After 3 hours I reached Newport and the Pacific ocean. Along it runs Hwy 101 – the same one that passes by house in California, a mere 13 hours drive to the south.

I visited several beaches and ate lunch at an Irish pub in Newport. Now, I spent nearly 2 months in Ireland and North Ireland and I tend to scoff at “Irish Pubs” in American cities – but this one is actually run by Irish people, along with their happy disposition, lilting accent and great cider (I hate Guinness – there, I’ve said it).

I continued north along the 101 for a couple of hours until I had enough of the ocean and started heading east back towards Portland. It’s amazing how the flora, fauna and weather changed as I was going back east. This state has it all: mountains, valleys, lakes and ocean. The air is extremely clean and so is the water – many people just a drill a well to get their water – and I understand why.

I spent one more evening in Portland and flew back to SJC the following morning. This trip added Oregon to the list of states I would one day want to move to – and it put it very close to the top of the list. Here's a link to the rest of the pictures I took. It really is about time to buy a more serious camera...

Stonehenge in Georgia

I'm subscribed to Wired Magazine. Yes, the excessive ads may drive you nuts from time to time, but the articles are interesting, smart and touch on current tech issues.

Last month, an article described the Georgia Guidestones and the mystery surrounding their erection. I never heard of that site before. Apparently, nearly 30 years ago, a mysterious person purchased a plot of land outside Elberton, GA and paid a granite quarry a handsome sum to erect 4 large slabs of granite, inscribed with instructions in 8 languages. These, he claimed, were instructions for mankind on how to behave after the next apocalypse strikes (read the Wired article here).

Sounds crazy, right? I called my friend Yaniv, who lives in Atlanta - he never heard of it either -> perfect reason for a road trip. So last weekend we headed east of Atlanta for the 2 hours drive to Elberton - "the granite capital of the world"

When you reach Elberton, drive north on SR 77, until you reach Guidestones road. You'll see them on the hill to your right.

The stones are about 10 meters in height. They're inscribed in 8 languages (English, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Sanskrit, Chinese, Russian, Spanish) and as far as I could tell (I can read English, Hebrew and some Spanish), they all say the same thing.

It starts with keeping humanity below 500 million people (less than 8% the current population) and continues with instructions on how to live as one with nature and avoid politicians. All in all, its sounds like hippie agenda.

But some people take it more seriously. Religious people feel it's a satanic sect's doing. Atheists feel it's an fanatically religious group that's behind the stones. Both sides smear hateful (and sometimes racist) graffiti on the stones, turning what could be a nice and curious monument into a testament to why this world could actually benefit from a little apocalypse.

Other than the instructions, the stones have some other nifty features built in, such as a hole in the top stone, where every day at noon a sun ray points to the day of the year, or a hole through which the north star is visible at night etc. All leading me to believe that a lot of planning went into these stones - with no apparent reason.

As I've mentioned, the stones bring out the worst emotions out of visitors. One of them, a Harley driving, cigar chomping huge fellow, approached Yaniv and I and after asking us if we're American (to which we've answered "no"), proceeded to tell us why foreigners destroy this great country and why it has all come down to "this" (pointing at the stones). All we could do was keep quiet and wait for the idiot to leave .

All in all, a great day trip to an interesting and unheard of location (I've asked several other people in Atlanta - they never heard of it either). On the way back we stopped for late lunch at Athens - a nice college town (and the hometown of REM). A tour of the old college buildings is recommended.

To see all pictures from the trip, go to my album, and here are some pictures I took at the real Stonehenge in England .

PS: funny anecdote: right by the stones, there's a seafood restaurant called "Red Minnow Lighthouse" that has the subtitle "Matthew 5:14-16" on its sign. A short Google search yielded the verse "You are the light...". Guess you have to know your New Testament to eat there .

Consumer Rants: Amazon

This post is a positive one. Last December I bought an internal WD 500GB HD for my laptop.
2 weeks ago, it started making weird clicking noises and return read errors. I sent an email to Amazon asking for a replacement and they've notified me that since it has been 6 months since my purchase, I should contact Western Digital.

While filling up the simple RMA form on the WD site, I suddenly got an email from a customer care dude at Amazon. They've decided to send me a brand new HD, since I was a good customer (and as you probably know by now - I am one. I could have probably bought a house with the the money I paid Amazon ). I emailed back thanking him, and explaining I'd need the new HD first, so I can back up the old one.

And wouldn't you know it, the next day, the new HD arrived - along with a box to send the old one in when I'm done. I used my BlacX enclosure to back up the old HD, formatted the old one several times, and shipped it back.

I've been a customer of theirs since 1995 and will keep being one as long as they hold up to the high customer care standards they've set for themselves. Thanks Amazon!

PS: This post is not endorsed or requested by Amazon. Although I do link to products on their site, this post is not any type of an endorsement, but a true story. I encourage everyone to buy ONLY in online stores that respect and handle their customers well. And report any other bastard to the BBB.

Gadget Review: DNS-323 NAS

I have plenty of hard disks lying around my apartment, all in all, probably in excess of 2TB. The problem is they are too disparate: many are still IDE disks, some lie in USB enclosures, one in a FireWire enclosure (in hindsight, a waste of money, as USB 2 trumps FireWire 400). These disks grow old and fail one by one.

I needed a central storage location to serve both as a trusted backup facility and a media server to allow single access to all the movies, songs and photos I’ve acquired. Another thing I learned the hard way over the years is that hard disks fail – and they do so at the most inopportune time, usually taking with them to the next life the most data they can. I needed to break my reliance on a single hardware source, but without the overhead of double and triple backups that I was using so far.

Essentially, NAS (Network Attached Storage) is just a hard disk with an IP address. It exposes the storage as a volume to be mapped locally on any machine that needs to access it. NAS has been around for quite a while (I remember working on a NAS visualization solution for my last company back in 2002). Then it was rare and expensive, today it’s quite affordable and becoming more and more ubiquitous.

I went through much deliberation, reading and comparisons (hint: if you’re considering buying any device or gadget, search for its name along with the word “problem”. You’ll find out what do people complain about and what issues to anticipate. There are several other methods – this merits a full post in the future). I finally decided to buy the D-Link DNS-323 2 disk NAS enclosure. The DNS 323 has several features that attracted my attention:

1. It supports 2 hard disks of up to 1.5TB each, in RAID 0 (striping) or RAID 1 (redundancy) configurations. RAID 1 particularly suited my needs, keeping a copy of the data on the 2 hard disks, in case one fails, and doing so automatically (read more about RAID configurations).
2. It has a UPnP media server that is compatible with my Xbox 360. All you have to do is drop your media files into a certain directory, and all files and folders beneath it are available to play on the Xbox (and at this point, I’m happy I got that HD-DVD player – it came with a media remote for the Xbox which makes it that much easier to play those files). Those files are also available to any PC running Media Center (supported in the Premium and Ultimate versions of Vista and 7), but this is redundant, since you can access the files directly from the OS.
3. There’s an iTunes server, for all your Apple-bought songs and videos. I elected to turn my iTunes songs to MP3 files long ago, so I won’t be using this feature.
4. A Printer Server allows you to turn any USB printer to a network printer, accessible by all machines on the network. I still haven’t mastered this feature and I’m running into slowness issues constantly.
5. A Bittorrent client can download files in the background, freeing precious cycles on your laptops. Simply drop a .torrent file into a directory, and look at the “incoming” folder later for the result.
6. The power management on this unit is superb. It conserves energy by switching to a lower consumption mode when it detects a long period of no action, and wakes up immediately as needed.
7. Since the NAS runs Linux as its operating system, it’s easily hackable and expendable (which as my reader, you know by now is a major decision factor for me).
   A little extension called Fun Plug adds telnet access, sFTP, and even a web server to the NAS, opening endless opportunities, and various communities like DSM-G600 and DNS323Wiki will educate you further.
8. Finally, the entire device is managed through an easy web interface. And the nice think D-Link offers (for all their products, BTW) is the chance to experience it hands-on prior to making a buying decision. To access the D-Link emulator for DNS-323 use "admin" as user and leave the password empty.

I bought 2 WD Green 1TB hard disks (SATA 3Gb, 7200RPM, 32MB cache) and dropped them into the NAS (it formats them immediately, taking 3 minutes for both). I then mapped 2 volumes: a 500GB Raid 1 (for backup purposes – takes 1TB - 1/2TB) and a 1TB JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks – a way to accumulate all left storage into a single volume). I used the small no-need-to-install utility to map the 2 volumes to letters in all my machines. I use volume 1 for backup purposes and volume 2 for media sharing purposes – you expose the top folder in that volume on the UPnP server screen – and it immediately becomes available on the Xbox.

All in all, 2 HDs + NAS enclosure set me back $340 ($160 for the enclosure and $90 for each HD. There’s a $30 mail-in rebate on the NAS, if you elect to fill the card).

I also added the $36 ThermalTake BlacX external SATA enclosure to verify that the HDs work OK, and for general SATA direct access purposes. It allows plugging in any 2.5” or 3.5” HD and accessing it over USB or eSATA – great for verification, imaging and backup purposes.

Filler Post

I just looked at my blog and realized I haven’t updated it in nearly a month.

And what a month it was. A lot of traveling and a lot of tech happened. Probably the less prominent thing that happened to me was that I was laid off. Other than that, I travelled like crazy, added new devices to my home network, launched a consulting company, risked my life, rode a mule, fished trout, climbed a volcano and many more exciting things, each deserving it’s own post.

And I promise I’ll dedicate posts to:

• my trip to Ecuador
• my trip to Oregon
• my visit to Atlanta, and the Georgia Guidestones
• my new NAS and other gadgets…

All in good time. Once I’m completely out of my contract with my current employer (sometime towards the end of June), I’ll dedicate a post or two to why it is not enough to have the greatest software in the world to succeed. Come to think of it, it might merit writing a book :)

I leave you now with a map of the places I visited over the last couple of weeks:

View Traveling Tech Guy 5/09 in a larger map