At the end of May I flew down to San Jose (California!) to visit my parents for Memorial Day. The first day consisted of having lunch at Alice's Restaurant (with burgers named after motorcycle brands; the Yamaha burger that I had was really good...pineapple + teriyaki sauce is surprisingly tasty on a burger!), then driving down coast through Santa Cruz to Monterey (& back). Second day was sightseeing in San Francisco (yay! finally got to ride the cable cars & see Ghirardelli Square!). The last day included trips to Beard Papa's (a nice recommendation from Ms. Snootypurse), In-N-Out Burger, and Half Moon Bay to see the beach and the house my parent's are trying to buy.

Overall, a fun trip...not terribly relaxing, but the change of scenery was nice.

And now, the photos: (full album @ Bay Area, California (2010-05))

Pacific Ocean at Pebble Beach on Monterey Bay, California

The "Lone Cyprus" on the 17-mile drive in Monterey

Union Square, San Francisco

Now playing: The New Pornographers – Together – 08 Up In the Dark

Went down to New Orleans a month ago for a vendor conference/training session. Overall it was fairly informative, and possibly worth the money to the company (6 people from my division went...to an event with 40-something attendees...with 3 main session tracks...). The three days went kind of fast. In any case, I got to see New Orleans! Never been down to "the South" like that before (sorry, I don't really consider Florida during Spring Break to be very old-south-ish). We were at the Hotel Monteleone, which is a cool old style luxury hotel. With a unique floor plan that caused me to spent 15 minutes trying to get to the rooftop patio for the initial sign in. Found out that Bourbon Street isn't really my sort of thing. But, on the advice of a friend, I got to go out and have fun my way, by looking for better wifi, and failing that, any cell coverage. And by getting up early and walking around the French Quarter taking some pictures of course!

Looking up Royal Street towards Canal Street in the evening.

St. Louis Cathedral ("a minor basilica")

And of course, the Mississippi River, with a steamboat (the Natchez)!

Now playing: The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights – 07 Only Good Days Caught on Camera

Back in April I headed down to the Bay Area again. Drove this time instead of flying. It's a looooong way down there! But, it was pretty, and now I've at least seen southern Oregon, Mount Shasta, and the Sacramento Valley. Plus driving was cheaper than flying – just two tanks of gas each way, so ~half the cost of flying. Driving down at Christmas should be an even better deal...although then I might need to head down the coast instead of taking I-5...driving through the snowstorm at the end of April was bad enough!

So, here are some pictures (full album here):

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California

Coast Guard ship heading out of San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge. It actually came back an hour or so later escorting a grain freighter/tanker of some sort. And sorry, I did a bit of quick internet searching, but I couldn't find the name!

South side of the Golden Gate, looking out towards what maps say is "Baker Beach".

Now playing: Vienna Teng – Inland Territory – 07 Stray Italian Greyhound

Remember that trip I was thinking of taking down to Berkeley? Well, it happened!

Got a flight down after work in the middle of the week (Wednesday) on Southwest, with a direct flight into Oakland (much nicer than those flights into Oakland via SFO & DEN...). I was late heading to the airport, and then the Max broke down en route, so I was worried about missing the flight and got chastised by the security checkpoint people for being in such a hurry (I mandate this was merely because of the contrast of my efficiency with the sloth immediately preceding me...). But I made it with plenty of time to spare. And the flight was only a quarter or third full, so I ended up with no one next to me (nice change of pace from most flights where I seem to be singled out by "larger" individuals as a good seatmate...).

Anyway, landed a bit early and promptly found out Emil (the friend I was going down to visit & stay with) had only just left. And then he got lost because of GPS issues. So, I ended up hanging around curbside for an hour. There's not much to see at an airport at night. Eventually we met up & headed back to Berkeley. Only to end up on Treasure Island. Oops...silly GPS units...but I did get a good view of San Francisco at night, which was cool (sorry; no pics, we were in the car and couldn't really stop to get out the cameras).

The next day was spent walking around the Berkeley campus. I liked how it was hilly and had vegetation. Purdue just seems kind of...flat...in comparison. I think Purdue had better architecture though, and more modern facilities. So maybe all that construction that my tuition paid for was worth it after all...

: Tree on campus (near the Life Science's building)

: Soda Hall, UC Berkeley campus

The next day was supposed to be tourist day in San Francisco. Which started off really well; we got to San Francisco without getting lost again (hehe...). But the weather didn’t really cooperate & it rained. A lot. We still walked around Fisherman's Wharf, which was pretty deserted. On the bright side, parking was really easy! So after grabbing lunch & getting wet, we got back into the car to see the other attraction at the top of my list: the Golden Gate Bridge :

: Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

By the time we got to the view point though, the weather had turned a bit worse. Winds came in and the rain started coming down harder. After grabbing a photo or two, I got the brilliant idea of heading over to the visitor center (50 feet away). Those 50 feet resulted in my rain jacket getting soaked through. The 50 feet back to the car meant that we were both totally soaked. At which point it seemed like a good idea to conclude the site seeing for the day and just head back. For dinner, I met up with a friend from high school (John) that works in the Valley. Which was a lot of fun (even if I don't feel like I helped the conversation much...:( ... meh).

The last full day there consisted of a lot of driving. Headed over to South San Francisco to see where my parent's are going to be living now & hit up a couple of Filipino Bake Shops to get goodies for my coworkers. :-) Got to see the big "South San Francisco" sign, stopped at Red Ribbon & Goldilocks, and then headed out to the coast at Pacifica. Drove down route 1 to Half Moon Bay...the coast there is beautiful!

: Montara Beach (?)

On the way back we swung through Mountain View, Santa Clara, and San Jose. Honestly, that was probably the part of the trip I liked the least. Too many strip malls, suburbs, cars, & people. Which to be honest is kind of what I was expecting from California... Seeing all the tech companies there was sort of interesting, but didn't outweigh the dislike of the environment. On the plus side, I did find out that Skype video conferencing actually works really well over my WWAN connection from AT&T (you still need to come out & see it in person though, Matt!).

So, California...liked San Francisco, liked Berkeley, liked the coast, but didn't really like Silicon Valley all that much (nor the East Bay Area much either...). I'll have to go back sometime & hope for better weather so I can actually do the touristy stuff. Maybe in April...got some time off there...might drive down this time though...

(full picture album)

Now playing: In-Flight Safety – The Coast is Clear – 07 Fear

So I used to religiously backup my data...well, at least up until the last major hardware failure I had back in '06, at which point I discovered that it didn't really matter because the "important" data that I was backing up wasn't enough to fully recover. So I just switched to buying reliable equipment, which has worked out much better. Unfortunately it means that in 10 years I wont be able to come back and spend a week distracting myself by popping CD's in & out, reminiscing...

ANYWAY, while digging through those backups (& slating them for destruction), I came across a bunch of photos from high school Spring Break (2001), when my family went down to Clearwater, Florida for the week. So here's the album (sorry for the low resolutions!):

• 2001-03 Spring Break (Kennedy Space Center, Florida)

Heh…okay, so I was already a geek back then, and only took pictures of the day we spent at Kennedy Space Center, and didn't take any of the beach...or Busch Gardens...or...well, Florida itself...

Now playing: Julie Fader – Outside In – 08 Goodbye Before Hello

Waaaay back, right after graduating from high school, I went to Europe with my French class from high school. Unfortunately, I didn't have a digital camera yet at that point, so all the pictures had to be scanned. While digging around, I found the scans of those pictures, so after a bit of cleaning up, here they are!

• 2003-06 French Trip

Now playing: The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights – 07 Only Good Days Caught on Camera
(okay, so that's not actually the song I'm listening too...actually, it's 11 I Hurt the Ones That Love Me, but the title of track 7 seemed more appropriate for a picture post)
(i.e., putting in all (2) the links took longer than I was planning...)

I wish there was a way in Windows Live Photos to let me get an RSS feed of the albums, not just the photos within an album...

• Crabbing at Rockaway Beach
• Motorcycle riding at Bend, Oregon (& the return trip)
• Miscellaneous from November
• Emptied Reservoir #3 in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon
• Christmas in Indiana

(they're in order of date taken, not necessarily date posted...yeah, I need to be better about posting things on time...)

Now playing: You Say Party! We Say Die! – XXXX – 10 Heart of Gold

So as a follow on to the Grand Coolie Dam trip back in June, my friends up in Seattle for the summer decided to head up no the North Cascades National Park area and see that. On the whole, the trip wasn’t a whole lot of fun (for a bunch of reasons); but the area was really pretty and get back there sometime. Maybe make it all the way through the park next time…maybe actually hike the trails a bit… Oh well; here’s pictures!

Top of Baker Dam…it creates Baker Lake (to the right). To the left there’s a canyon/gorge that was fairly impressive…too bad none of the pictures turned out.

We stopped at Lake Shannon too & I was able to get a picture of this old abandoned(?) building (house?).

I like the curvature of Diablo Dam…makes it easier to get pictures of the dam face than the straight ones like the one at Baker Lake :).

Decent capture of what North Cascades National Park is like (that’s a little bit of Diablo Lake in the bottom left).

Now playing: Amy Millan – Masters of the Burial – 09 I Will Follow You into the Dark

So back at the end of June I headed up to Seattle to hang out with my friends Emil & his girlfriend. First goal: stop by Leavenworth, see the faux-Bavarian-ness, and have Emil's girlfriend eat one of the pig legs (there’s an actual German-ish name for it that I can’t remember…) that had been recommended to her by her coworkers (co-interns?) at Microsoft. It was…larger…than anticipated. Leavenworth was fun in a ludicrously touristy way, complete with the crazy thick crowds. Second goal: get to Grand Coulee Dam and check out that engineering marvel. It’s definitely impressive! And the laser show at night was really cool. Third goal: stop at Lake Chelan and see that “gateway to the North Cascades”. That was less interesting for me, but it was still a nice chance to get out of the car for a bit. Yeah, there was lots of driving on this trip :). And all of this was just on the weekend!

So after that weekend I had another 2 days up in Seattle, so I did touristy stuff around the city. Got to finally the Space Needle, the Experience Music Project (EMP), general downtown (was looking for the SafeCo office, but I couldn’t remember the address at all, so it ended up just being just wandering over dozens of blocks), and the wharf area. Also stopped by Pike Place Market, the University of Washington campus, Gasworks Park, and took the Ride-the-Ducks tour. So lots of stuff, and lots of fun!

And lots of pictures :). But here are a select few; the full photo set can be found in the Seattle, WA Vacation (2009-06) album.

US-2 on the way out to Grand Coulee Dam

Grand Coulee Dam itself, as seen from the top of the extension added to accommodate the third powerhouse

Marion Oliver McCaw Hall screen-thingys at Seattle Center

Space Needle (and a little bit of the Experience Music Project (EMP))

Seattle waterfront, seen from a pier on the wharf

Hill in Gasworks Park, Seattle, plus a bit of the tops of the remains of the gasworks

Now playing: Learn Filipino – Book 1, Disc 1 – 12 Pronunciation-Malumay-03-82*
* Note on now playing: yes, I’m trying to multitask, and no, this probably isn’t a good idea…hehe…but it’s now abundantly clear that my mapping of sounds-to-language needs mountains of work…

Okay, okay, so these are all from Fleet Week rather than the Rose Festival itself. I can’t help it; parades get to be boring, and the International Rose Test Garden is too busy.

HMCS Algonquin, HMCS Nanaimo, HMCS Whitehorse, USS Shoup during Fleet Week in Portland. Note the fact that 3 Canadian Forces vessels were present, and only 1 US Navy ship was...

No ships in this one. Instead, there’s the esplanade, interstate highways, the Oregon Convention Center, and Liberty Center (where I work). Yes, this shot (& posting) is just a gratuitous attempt at showing people where I work. And I know it’d work a lot better if I wasn’t on the 3rd floor, which is conveniently hidden behind the concrete of an interstate ramp and 1/2 mile of buildings.

Steel Bridge with TriMet MAX train. See! It wasn’t entirely cloudy that day!

USS Shoup in profile against part of downtown Portland.

The Canadian Forces ships again. HMCS Algonquin, HMCS Whitehorse, HMCS Nanaimo (not visible; hidden behind HMCS Whitehorse).

Now playing: Emm Gryner – Science Fair – 06 Good Riddance

So, apparently there's some confusion about what the picture in the last post was. Something from someone about "dude, why’s there a picture of an airplane crashing into a white tower with a grey skeleton walking by." Ahem.

IT'S A FREAKING WIND TURBINE! See! Here's what they look like when complete! :

Here, maybe it'll help more if I show a bigger panorama (click for large size so the white things sticking up in the background are more visible):

(ignore the car in the picture; it's not really relevant to the windmills/wind turbines (sorry, I still think of them as windmills & have finally gotten tired of correcting myself) that are under construction.)

Also, I'd think that following the link to the XKCD comic would be a bit of a tip-off as to what the picture was off…never mind the direct reference to Don Quixote (the inference of which the comic leaves "as an exercise to the reader"). Whatever. :)

Now playing: Maybe Smith – Animals & Architects – 02 Hearts Like Bears

Thank goodness Don Quixote was here! Knocked the top right off the fearsome turbine-alien.

Now playing: Wintersleep – Welcome to the Night Sky – 04 Weighty Ghost

So, from April 5th through the 8th I was in San Antonio, Texas on business for the annual Ratabase conference. I’d been planning on live blogging it again like I did last year (actually, I was planning on doing it better than last year), but things didn’t quite work out that way. So, instead of the latest news on cool new things you can do with an insurance rating calculator (stop laughing!), I’ve got a cautionary tail about relying on new equipment, planning before doing things, and generally about how I do stupid stuff with technology.

Now for a bit of background. Windows Vista & 7 have this cool feature called “BitLocker”. Basically, it encrypts your hard drive so that if the computer/drive is stolen, an attacker would have to go through the OS level security mechanisms (usernames/passwords/smartcards/ACL’s). The attacker wouldn’t be able to circumvent the OS mechanisms by, say, editing the password store to give change the passwords. Or they could go after the EFS keys and just decrypt files that you had encrypted explicitly so that other people wouldn’t be able to read them!

One “mode” of Bitlocker relies on this cool hardware device called a TPM (trusted platform module). The TPM is involved in the key management/access process, and basically serves to ensure that the entire system, starting from the beginning of the boot process, is “trusted”. After all, you wouldn’t want some nefarious person coming in, booting to a different environment that can impersonate the BitLocker process, and then unlocking/decrypting the BitLocker volume and thus bypassing all the security it was supposed to offer. If the TPM/BitLocker (not sure which actually does the checks) detects that the system is under attack (for example, the order of the devices that the system boots from has changed), the system will require that a 56 digit recovery key be entered. Assuming you created a recovery key initially…but everyone does that & keeps that key safe, right?

A week before I was to head to San Antonio, my new Tablet PC (a Lenovo X200T) arrived. Incidentally, it’s a very nice system…fast, light, long battery life, lots of accessories (I bought most of the options…X-Base so I have an optical drive, webcam, fingerprint reader, WiMAX, HSDPA/UMTS, GPS, etc.). And it has a TPM v1.2. Which was cool, because it meant I could use BitLocker!

So I put Windows 7 (beta) on the system, enabled BitLocker, created the recovery key, and used the system successfully for a week. One time while rebooting the system I had to enter the recovery key, which I thought was kind of funny at the time, but didn’t really worry that much about it. So along came Sunday morning, it’s 5:00AM and I need to head out to the airport, so I hibernate my tablet and pull it out of the docking station (X Base). Figured I wouldn’t need the optical drive, and certainly wouldn’t need the extra weight. Thought about putting the recovery key on a flash drive or the external hard drive I was taking, but then thought “nah, I wouldn’t need that”. Besides, the key would be a lot more exposed to compromise if I had it with me and, say, my flash drive got lost/stolen.

Remember how I said the boot order mattered to the TPM? And remember how 1) I installed the OS shortly before this (from a DVD), & 2) how I wasn’t taking the X-Base with the DVD drive with me? And how I ignored the fact that when I’d last attached the X-Base I had to enter the recovery key? And how I wasn’t taking the recovery key with me? (this is where it should become apparent to most people that I am, in fact, an idiot.)

Of course I got all the way to the airport, through security, and was sitting at the gate with 30 minutes until boarding started when I went to use my tablet. And of course it saw that the DVD drive was no longer present and began going “oh noes! I’m under attack!”. Which then caused me to first realize exactly what mistakes I’d made, then freak out (it’s amazing what sorts of brief, complete clarity you can have when a situation goes to crap).

Part of the freak out was calling up a trusted friend and giving him all the details of connecting back to my network via VPN (including user names and passwords). I figured “okay, get connected to the internal network, then the administrator account can be used to login to the online CA and security server to retrieve the recovery key”. Yes, it was a moment of weakness and complete stupidity. Fortunately, years ago when I got the VPN stuff working, I had the foresight to use L2TP and require certificates to connect in addition to passwords. So no VPN connection could be established, giving the passwords did absolutely no good (but no harm either), and the recovery key couldn’t be retrieved. Hurray for defense-in-depth.

I was not totally without my tablet during the trip though. Remember how I brought an external hard drive with me? Well, that drive is the bootable one that I use to make OS recovery images. And I’d used it just a week before to backup the Lenovo factory default config. So I spent the flight down to Texas doing restores until I got the system working again.

Here are some pictures from the trip (more (and higher res ones) can be found on my Windows Live Photos album for the trip):

Westin La Cantera Resort gulf course outbuilding

San Antonio, TX Riverwalk. There’s a boat ride around it that’s kind of cool too (+). Lots of people (-). On the whole, it was a cool area, and made for a good change of pace from the conference.

The Alamo (of course!).

Now playing: Greg Laswell – Three Flights From Alto Nido – 04 Comes & Goes (In Waves)

http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml

http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/timetravelling.jpg

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2009/04/08/9537233.aspx

We need more Engineers

And lastly, for anyone that reads the blog just via the RSS feed and never visits the sites, my pictures are now hosted via Windows Live Photos. We’ll see how well that works out in the long run… URL is http://cid-348cb3ddffbdf313.photos.live.com/

Now playing: Emm Gryner — Get Brave

One lane bridge on the road to the coast between Carlton, OR & Beaver, OR. It has a couple different names depending on where you’re at on it: Meadow Lake Road, Nestucca River Road, Upper Nestucca River Road, & Blaine Road. It was fun to drive when I took it, but I imagine that would change as soon as some snow got on it. So probably only safe to take it from late spring to early fall. In mid-April 2008 it was passable enough, and there’s a number of campgrounds that were completely empty along the National Forest parts. There are some nice views towards the Carlton side that I wish I had captured pictures of. Maybe for next year!

Cape Kiwanda, as viewed from the south near Pacific City.

Offshore rock at Cape Kiwanda.

Now Playing: Brenda Weiler – Live – 18 Sweet Lullaby

Taken back in March when Emil & his girlfriend were visiting. For some reason I didn’t take pictures of the informational signs, so I don’t actually remember which waterfalls these are pictures of. They’re in the Columbia River Gorge, off the old highway. I’ll have to head back out there sometime & capture what the names are...

Now playing: Stars – Sad Robots (EP) – 05 14 Forever

Lewis and Clark Bridge across the Columbia River between Rainier, OR and Longview, WA. Taken last year while heading to the coast via Astoria.

Fort Clatsop (replica) in the Fort Clatsop National Historical Park. It was prettier when I was there in July (2007), but unfortunately I don’t seem to have any pictures from that!

Astoria Bridge that carries US 101 across the Columbia River at Astoria, OR.

The beach at Nehalem Bay State Park. See, not all days out at the coast during winter are that bad...

...just don’t look in the other direction.

Or maybe it was just luck that there was a clear patch right over the part of the beach I was walking on.

On the dune right next to the beach at Nehalem Bay State Park.

Cannon Beach. The water seemed colder then at Nehalem beach when I was walking around out in it.

Now playing: Lifehouse – Lifehouse – 01 Come Back Down

It was hot Friday and Saturday. Which meant I was busy being lazy and staying cool by sitting in my car (with its AC running). I should have posted this when it was 100+ degrees out, but I didn't, but now it's appropriate again because snow is predicted to fall in the mountains tomorrow!

Yes, the weather has gone crazy this year.

Outside my apartment window, back in February.

Now Playing: Brenda Weiler – Fly Me Back – 09 Fly Me Back

US 26, right after/before the tunnel through the west hills. Looking towards downtown & PSU.

Houses/apartments/condos/whatever built on the side of the west hills.

Now Playing: Po' Girl – Home to You – 09 9 hrs to Go

Downtown Portland, from the Vista Viaduct over Goose Hollow. That's the MAX (public transit train) just starting to go by.

The viaduct (looking east-ish towards downtown). This picture was taken in February instead of January, so that's why the sky isn't as dreary a shade of gray.

Another picture from February of the Viaduct.

Now Playing: Coldplay – Viva la Vida – 07 Viva la Vida

Here are some more pictures of Reservoir #3 in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon. I took them back in February, so you can tell I'm a bit behind on posting things...

Now Playing: Josh Ritter – Hello Starling – Bone Of Song