Jadebug

Isaiah 65:24

2008-06-15T02:40:00.002-04:00

If you know me personally, you might know that I want God to be the center of my life (and I apologize to you all for when I misrepresent Him)... Anyways, this morning I was on the way to church and just had something on my mind that was worrying me. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was definitely taking away from my enjoyment of the day. Somewhat out of frustration, I told God "if you take this away, I'll post on my blog about it".

Lots of people try to make bargains with God. A lot of times it's when they're on a Titanic that's sinking, or an airplane that's going down, or they are realizing that they made some really bad decisions. It's too easily done out of a desire to control God, or a fear of consequences, rather than real repentance. I know I've done it out of poor motivations in the past, usually when I was doing something stupid and was too stubborn to take the steps needed to fix the situation, and I never followed through on my part of the "bargain".

So anyways, here's a blog post to say that I had the best day in a while and can't remember what was bothering me. Whether or not He gives the answer we want, God does always give the best answer.

Dealing with Camera Flashes in Smoothcam'd Footage

2008-05-07T22:39:00.002-04:00

I wanted to post a quick video editing tip that I discovered while trying to stabilize some wedding footage in Final Cut Pro. The "easy" way to do this is to apply the Smoothcam filter to the clip. However, if the footage includes frames with camera flashes going off, the optical flow analysis used by Smoothcam frequently has problems analyzing the footage, and usually winds up adding sharp jumps right around the time of the flashes.

Here's the workaround I've found. I'm assuming you've already got a FCP sequence with the Smoothcam filter applied.
1. Right click (Ctrl+click) on the clip in your FCP sequence.
2. Choose "Send to -> Motion" from the menu.
3. Choose the filename and directory to save the new Motion project as.
4. When Motion opens up with the new project, go to the Motion Layers window and select the clip (which will be underneath a 'Group 1'). Make sure the current time is set to the beginning of the clip.
5. Go to the Inspector tab, and then the 'Behaviors' tab under that. You'll see the "Stabilize" behavior listed.
6. The key to this workaround is to add "trackers" to specific points the scene background that retain their contrast even during a camera flash, and also don't get obscured by foreground objects during the action. Click the "Add" button next to the Tracker label.
7. There should be a "Tracker 1" listed below in the Stabilize behavior's inspector. Click on the "Tracker 1" line to make sure you can see its location.
8. Drag the tracker's crosshairs to a place in the image where there's a high-contrast intersection. If you change "Auto-zoom mode" to "Edge", you'll be able to better see the places that Motion considers "high contrast". It's best if they are an intersection of two somewhat perpendicular lines.
9. In order for rotation and scaling smoothing to work properly, you'll want to add at least one more tracker, using steps similar to steps 6-8 that you used for Tracker 1. Even more trackers wouldn't hurt at all.
10. When you're done adding trackers, click the "Analyze" button next to the "Movement" label. Motion should start analyzing the whole clip.
11. Save the Motion project and exit back to Final Cut Pro.

That should do it! Hopefully Apple will eventually fix their optical flow algorithm to ignore camera flashes.

LinuxConf Australia 2008 Talk: Virtualization Tools

2008-01-20T21:22:00.000-05:00

As part of the Virtualization Miniconf at LinuxConf Australia 2008, Ragavan Srinivasan and I are going to be giving a talk on the Open Virtual Machine Tools as a set of technologies and a project, at 1:30pm on January 28, 2008. If you'll be at LCA 2008, please stop by for the talk, or just to say hello!

SVLUG Talk about Virtualization Tools

2007-12-28T18:27:00.000-05:00

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm going to be helping give a talk about the Open Virtual Machine Tools project at Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) next Wednesday evening, January 2, 2008. Join us for an interesting discussion on one of the active fronts of virtualization technology. The SVLUG link has details of when and where...

All Kinds of Pictures

2007-10-07T00:44:00.000-04:00

Just a couple of spare-time projects to mention:

1. Finished the trailer for a friend's wedding that I shot recently. Apple's Color software has substantial issues, on top of the bugs inside Final Cut Pro itself... But they're also really powerful tools that are (sometimes) fun to work with. It was also neat learning about high-definition workflow for the first time. On the editing side of things, it's basically the same as standard-definition, but a lot slower. The harder part is probably on the shooting side, where you have to worry more about keeping things focused properly... Autofocus and video just aren't perfect, which is why all the pros use manual focus. (Every shot in every Hollywood movie you see is focused by a dedicated assistant called a focus puller, who walks alongside the camera and turns the follow-focus knob.) Oh, I'd also like to take this opportunity to flog my video production blog aggregator, for anyone interested in video/film tools and techniques who'd rather get it all in one place.

2. Over a year ago I went to Peru, came back, and posted pictures from the second half of the trip. I promised the sightseeing pictures from the first half, but never delivered. Instead of waiting for an infinite amount of free time to come along so I could polish everything up, I'm just going to post the sightseeing pictures in their semi-edited form, and see if anyone complains... Oh, and check out the panoramas too - half-baked, but still pretty cool.

2006 Peru sightseeing pictures from the first half of the trip

Two spherical panoramas of Machu Picchu

Next spare-time project coming up is likely to be finishing up my brother's wedding video. It's getting close to a year and a half since that event - sorry, Martin & Sarah!

Work is going well; no news is good news. If you're interested in working on new ways to integrate host & guest OS's in a virtualization environment, feel free to join the open-vm-tools open source project that VMware is starting.

Virtually There

2007-09-11T11:46:00.000-04:00

I have been keeping friends a bit in the dark about this new job I started at the end of August. Now's the day when all is revealed...

I'm at VMware's VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco. There is a variety of VMware news that might be considered "big", but the biggest from my perspective is the open-sourcing of much of VMware Tools, the tools that run inside the guest operating system to make the guest run better and handle the guest-side integration with the host OS. Think drag-and-drop between guest & host, automatic clock synchronization, etc...

The new project, Open Virtual Machine Tools is not such big news as far as the open source community , but VMware is big enough that this small change should matter to quite a few people. For example, I just ran into Marty Wesley of rPath, and no doubt the hackers over there will be very happy to hear this announcement, since it will make their work easier. And I get to help increase the amount of open source software, which is partly why I came here. :)

There is plenty of work to be done on all fronts, so if you're interested in joining in, make sure to sign up for the mailing lists.

Fedora Passes the Grandmother Test

2007-09-02T19:05:00.000-04:00

I've posted a few interesting photos from the past week or so, including one that illustrates that Fedora has passed the "grandmother test" :-) (Now if only I had a few months to dedicate to actually teaching her Linux...)

2007-08-23T23:41:00.000-04:00

Sea to Shining Sea

If you didn't know, I ~~am moving~~ have moved to California. New job in Silicon Valley, details to follow eventually. Anyways, here are pictures of the trip (4046 miles, rental truck towing car on trailer, lots of fun). I have video footage that I need to edit (hah, funny joke, I don't even have a place to stay yet, and things are generally chaotic). In the meantime, enjoy the photos!

2007-07-22T12:23:00.000-04:00

Told You

Unfortunately, I was right.

Sounds like the problem is getting addressed, which is all that really matters. :)

Update: Just to clarify, the computers that were involved in the Nigerian incident were not OLPC units. However, the OLPC rep did seem to say that OLPC's would be fitted with filters as a result of the lessons learned...

2007-06-15T10:43:00.000-04:00

Why Are Patents Important?

Last night I went to the TriLUG meeting to listen to a talk about the GPLv3 in general, and how it relates to software patents in particular. Everyone was rightly incensed at the generally sorry state of the US patent system, especially when it comes to software patents. Being a gathering of free software supporters, there was pretty much universal agreement that software patents = bad, no further argument.

At the same time, I look out there and see developments like the new Kodak image sensor filter pattern. Anyone who knows anything about video probably remembers that the human eye is much more sensitive to luminance (brightness levels) than chrominance (color values). However, it took 31 years for someone to figure out how to apply that to image sensors and come up with a replacement for the Bayer filter pattern. It takes thirty seconds to explain to someone who knows what a Bayer pattern is, and in a few years, I'm sure people will start mumbling that this is an obvious invention, how dare someone patent things as simple as this, etc. etc. etc. Yet it's a fairly big deal in imaging that has been waiting 31 years to be invented. If it was so obvious, why didn't you think of it before?

In the interest of enhancing the software patent debate and encouraging new perspectives, I have to ask: is the problem with software patents really that they cover software per se? Could it perhaps be something else, like the fact that 17 years in the USA is an eternity when it comes to software innovation? Could it be that making good decisions about obviousness is so hard, and we need a better way of organizing and navigating all the existing patents out there? (Maybe the best solution to bad patents is hooking up the patent examiners with the information retrieval experts at Google.) The best inventions are always "obvious" in hindsight - anything that's too complicated to be intuitive and obvious is probably also too specialized to be a truly revolutionary innovation. At the same time, there are a lot of silly patents filed in all areas; when you are moving towards an information economy, a land grab for intellectual property shouldn't be a surprise. It does not seem like anyone has articulated a clear vision for the patent system that properly accounts for the interests of all the stakeholders.

I think it would be worthwhile to step back and figure out the way things ought to be before complaining too much about the way things are. Given that innovation in software is as important as innovation in any other field, how can we come up with a patent system that maximizes societal benefit from those innovations? Where is the scientific analysis of the length of patent & copyright terms and their impact on societal welfare? What is a general rule for deciding the patentability of a particular type of cleverness in a particular field? How much power should patent holders be given over those who practice the patented inventions? How can we reduce the costs of patent examination, licensing, and enforcement to make the existing patent system run more smoothly?

Above all, there's one key question that will have to be answered for society as a whole, and not just for "people that develop open source software". What makes software patents /wrong/? What makes them more than just another of this world's many problems, along with acne, bureaucracy, and automobile maintenance? Being able to articulate that answer simply and effectively is really the key to persuading people to make a change.

What would the perfect intellectual property system look like? What do you think?

2007-06-03T23:19:00.000-04:00

Visto - Run iTunes Visualization Plug-Ins On Live Sound

Ever been to a music concert and seen these psychadelicotronic images dancing across big screens in time to the music? Ever wanted to do the same thing?

Well, the pros don't do it quite this way, but I've had this code sitting around for about a year, and finally decided I should just go ahead and release it to see what happens. Announcing Visto, a small MacOS program to display iTunes visualization plugins with live data from the system soundcard.

It worked on about half the plugins I could find when I was developing it. I'm more than happy to help others make it work better, but I don't have the motivation to move it beyond its "for hackers only" state right now. If nothing else, hopefully someone else will write to tell me that there's already something like this out there!

LGPL, MacOS-only, source code-only - comments and questions welcome.

2007-04-01T23:41:00.000-04:00

A few photos

Just a quick post to link to a few photos that I thought were worth sharing. I'm planning to help take photos of the Andrews University Passion Play next weekend, so I've been actually using my cameras a little lately. And although the water fountain is from last fall, I thought it was just too neat not to include.

I still do plan on editing and posting those shots from last year's trip to Peru. Someday. :)

An update to my previous post - I've found that the Linux device mapper (and therefore LVM) causes a major performance hit. dd from my RAID-5 array (/dev/md0) directly gives 210MB/s throughput. dd from a device mapper 'linear' device layered directly over /dev/md0 gives 80MB/s. I know benchmarks can be fickle, but this is a major difference. Benchmarking LVM on my workstation at work (only one hard drive) shows a major (although smaller) hit as well. Unfortunately, this is not an April Fool's joke. If performance is vital, Linux LVM is probably not the thing to use right now.

2007-02-26T19:24:00.000-05:00

There's Work, and Then There's Projects

Here's what I've been up to in the three months since my last post:

Work - Lulu has its ups and downs like any place. I've spent the past few weeks learning Javascript in some depth, and MSIE6 is now officially evil. And of course, there's plenty of PHP code to wade through as well.

My Projects™ - Every once in a while I'll get an idea that I need to take on a big new project, but of course they just keep adding up because it takes longer to finish them than to start them. I still haven't processed the photos from the sightseeing portion of last August's trip to Peru, and I only recently ingested all the video footage I shot on that trip. Fro these, I hope to create an additional photo gallery and three videos (general sightseeing, mission trip, and a funny video about Machu Picchu). I also need to do a video for a friend's wedding over a year ago (sorry Isaac!) and another one for my brother's wedding (which can be excused by the fact that my uncle-in-law hasn't had time to get me all the footage yet). Add to these a rather complicated tax return, a motorcycle that just doesn't want to be repaired, and the usual housekeeping, and I'm booked solid until 2010. And I just remembered that I'm supposed to redesign a website by Wednesday.

Anyways, one cool thing people might be interested in is the video editing setup I've been putting together. This consists of a storage server running Fedora Core 6, and a MacBook Pro running OS X with Final Cut Studio.

The storage server is cool because it has 2TB of RAID-5'd storage across 5 disks. I played around with various filesystems before going with ext3 (xfs and jfs were both faster but I really don't trust them, and ext4 should help performance a lot). There's also a 200GB LTO-2 tape drive for backup - I got a really good deal on this on eBay, and it gives me virtually unlimited archival storage at only $0.15/gigabyte.

The MacBook Pro is a refurb 15.4" Core2Duo system. I upgraded it to 2G of RAM (unfortunately, the 4G limitation of 32-bit systems means that prices of >= 2G DIMMs are insane).
The MBP only has 120G of disk space - I am looking forward to the release of Fujitsu's 300GB 2.5" drive, which should give me room to install Linux and Windows as well, and a speed-up in transfer rates as well. The system runs fine and I have no complaints other than the fact that OS X is not open source :)

Speaking of transfer rates, here are some interesting stats:

After enabling jumbo frames, raw GbE network throughput between the storage server (hereafter called 'monolith') and the Macbook Pro (hereafter called 'slab') is in the neighborhood of 110-120 MB/s

The disk array in monolith can sustain a transfer rate of just under 80 MB/s

The ext3 filesystem overhead reduces that to 65-70 MB/s

Samba talking to the SMB client implementation in OS X reduces that to 39 MB/s

If you use the default OS X NFS mount options, you'll get something like 3 MB/s

I'm not kidding on the last point there... MacOS X has default NFS options that are really aweful for performance. There are some ways that you can use to bring it up to a decent level ('decent' as in "on par with SMB", which is not that exciting when the server can theoretically do a lot better).

First step in improving MacOS X NFS performance: edit /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS and change the 'nfsiod -n 4' line to 'nfsiod -n 16' or even 'nfsiod -n 32'. (Reboot your system after, or just kill & restart nfsiod.) This will give you maybe 3-4x the transfer rate.

Switching to NFS-over-TCP will easily double your throughput as well, but the really critical factor using either TCP or UDP is to bump the rwsize up to something like 64k. This means that the magic line for mounting would look something like:


mount_nfs -o tcp,rwsize=65536,readahead=16 monolith:/repo /mnt/monolith/repo

The result should be roughly 35-40 MB/s of throughput (assuming jumbo frames, GbE, and no other bottlenecks). I say "should be" because I can't replicate that benchmark at the moment. SMB is faster anyways and requires no special options, so you can use the Finder to attach the share.

If anyone knows of a network filesystem for both Linux & MacOS that can perform better than this, please let me know! For now, I've resigned myself to the SMB throughput - not ideal for playing 5 simultaneous DV streams. I would guess that Apple is too happy with Xsan to pay much attention to NFS & SMB. It'd be nice if NFSv4 was in Leopard!

Final Cut Studio is fairly neat, but quickly toggling the caps-lock key seems to crash it about 20% of the time, and it has plenty of other warts. I'll have to write more about video another time.

2006-11-24T16:19:00.000-05:00

OLPC = Often Looking at Porn by Children ?

Most people have heard of the OLPC project which aims to change the world by providing kids with a laptop computer that can also serve as a textbook-on-everything. It's a neat idea - kind of.

What just occurred to me is that nobody seems to have thought of the full implications of giving every child a device that can access the closest Internet connection. Giving kids great technology is one thing - being able to educate them how to make wise decisions with it is another thing. And from what I can tell, the OLPC units have no technical mechanisms in place to help parents educate & direct children when it comes to morally questionable content such as pornography. Nigeria & Libya are both pilot countries - how do you think people in Nigeria (50% Muslim) or Libya (97% Muslim) are going to react when all their children start exploring (like kids do) and stumble across objectionable content online or in the built-in Wikipedia? You're going to be reading about a fatwa for Mr. Negroponte's death before you can say "terrorist threat".

Yes, we all know that filtering mechanisms are very imperfect, but there should be a mechanism in place to let parents use a password to (a) control a whitelist & blacklist of sites (b) subscribe to filter updates published over the mesh or on the Internet. It's a good way to make life easier for the educators (who really will need all the help they can get).

There are existing open source filtering mechanisms (e.g. dansguardian.org) that should provide a good framework for this. And simply saying "have the ISP do the filtering" isn't going to make parents support this initiative.

Hopefully someone within the project can shed more light on this topic - the project's wiki sure doesn't seem to do this.

2006-11-24T15:53:00.000-05:00

New Job

Last Monday I started work at Lulu, a company that publishes books, CDs, DVDs, calendars, etc. on demand (no setup fees or minimum order size). I owe a lot of thanks to very many people, including all the Fedora hackers, Tim Burke, Tomen Tse, Martha Michaux, and many others, who all were very helpful and supportive during the job search. If there are people out there who have open source-related skillz and are looking for a job, please feel free to contact me - I would love to be able to make their search easier based on what I found from my own experience.

The new job has been an interesting experience so far - a little like stepping in a time machine and winding up 7 years ago in an alternate reality. The fact that I keep typing '.redhat.com' at the end of hostnames reminds me how much I miss that place and its people. On the other hand, I know Lulu is the place I'm supposed to be for the forseeable future, so it will be interesting to see how things unfold.

2006-10-22T17:38:00.000-04:00

Life Goes On

Having decided that I don't know enough about selling (or have a good enough business idea) to really start a business, Finding A Job has become a recent priority. It has been enlightening and humbling to find out how my past experience fits in with the current needs of companies out there.
I've been spending quite a bit of time doing the job hunt, and of course the neat thing about it is that I'm learning a bit about selling as part of the job hunt experience. (My about page has links to various resume versions, if you know someone who is hiring somewhere near the intersection of technical consultant, project manager, and software engineer.) One very cool site I've found useful in the search is indeed.com. In particular, their salary estimator is the first one I've seen that gives good results with minimal user effort. You can tell from their whole business model and interface that they wouldn't mind being acquired by Google.

I've also been doing a lot of eBay selling (check out the listings for some one-penny bargains). It's amazing how many things I can dig up that I haven't used in ages. It's equally amazing how much people will pay for them - I'm not sure whether this reinforces or shatters my faith in capitalism... :)

Finally, I've been working a bit on a small web site I help maintain. It's Yet Another One of those personal projects that have been needing my attention for too long.

2006-09-21T13:22:00.000-04:00

2006 Pacasmayo, Peru Project Photos

If it seems like I've dropped out of sight since my last post, it's because I've been working on getting these photos together from my trip to Peru last month. In fact, what I'd like to point you at now is only really the gallery for the second half of the trip. It's taken an incredible amount of time to just pull that much together. The rest of the trip's photos, and the video footage I took, will have to wait until demand for them exceeds the amount of free time I have. E-mails making demands of this sort are always welcome, but in the meantime, you can always review my gallery of highlights from the first half of the trip.

So without further ado, here is a photo experience of the 2006 Maranatha Volunteers International project in Pacasmayo, Peru. Share and enjoy!

2006-08-27T16:46:00.000-04:00

To the list of ways that open source ideals have impacted the world beyond computer software, add travel: the Hospitality Club is an online community of people willing to provide free accomodation and advice to travelers visiting their part of the world. A really interesting way to find a place for that trip over to the next continent or the next town.

2006-08-24T17:10:00.000-04:00

The Shower Dilemma, a mini-story

There's the seemingly pointless question of whether to take a shower as part of personal hygiene. However, my experience with visiting at high altitudes has me wondering whether it should be more in the "life or death" category.

At high altitudes, the ambient temperature is usually a lot lower. None of the places I've stayed have had central heating, and most of them had nothing at all. This means that a room at a typical hostal is not likely to be very warm. Most places have hot water for at least part of the day though.

After you take a hot shower in an otherwise cold room, and the moment you get out of the shower, you're likely to start shivering. The problem is that shivering counts as exertion, and exerting yourself is one sure way to get altitude sickness. There's a limited supply of oxygen, and shivering uses up more of that oxygen while your body is still trying to adjust to the altitude. So, the dilemma is: do you take a shower and feel dizzy and keel over and die, or stink a little longer and cause others around you to keel over and die?

2006-08-22T12:50:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone! After a couple of days of living in buses and airplanes, I arrived back from Peru yesterday. I hope to have more photos available within a few weeks - there are over 2000 to sort through. It was definitely an interesting trip of a lifetime, and I'll have to write up some of the stories that happened along the way. Thanks for all your e-mails while I was gone.

2006-08-07T20:26:00.000-04:00

Travel Images, a perspective

Having had the opportunity to take a whirlwind tour of a foreign country
while toting along some cool camera stuff, I've learned a few things:

If you really need to get superb photographs for a particular
purpose, don't count on shooting them through the grimy window of a
moving vehicle. I can't count the number of times I have thought "wow,
that'd make a nice photo, if only I could stop for ten minutes, set up a
tripod with camera, and get the composition and exposure right". It's
not that it's impossible to get good photos while "on the run", but in
order to guarantee it, you need to be in control of your transportation.
That's aweful hard to do in some locations (such as the very beautiful
train route between Cusco and Machu Picchu) but it's a choice between
shooting a hundred shots and hoping that one of them will turn out
right, or shooting ten shots and knowing that one of them will turn out
right.

On a related note, photography/videography while travelling can be
very hard to get right because you find yourself too tired from the
basic survival and sightseeing tasks to really put all your energy into
things like composing a really nice shot. It's easy to get into a
routine of pointing at random nice-looking stuff, hitting the shutter
button, and checking for blown highlights, but that's not really art. If
you want to get good photos of a particular place, imagine the amount of
time you'll need just to do sightseeing there, triple that, and double
it again if you will be working in unusual situations (e.g. having to
cart a lot of gear around, or in an unusual environment). The reason for
this is not just to have more time to compose shots and think
artistically, but to avoid dumb mistakes caused by fatigue (like the
many photos I have ruined by having a lens hood that was not fully
rotated into place). Those numbers are just made up, but that type of
rule is something to keep in mind when planning a trip and deciding on
its purpose.

If you carry much camera stuff into Machu Picchu, you will get
hassled. I think they had a TV crew sneak onto the site at night a few
years back, and in the process of filming their beer commercial they
marred the "hitching post of the sun" stone. Since the Machu Picchu
management was commenting something about tripods when I got pulled
aside, my guess is that tripods with spiked feet sometimes get used in
all the wrong places. Be sensitive to the fact that it's more than just
a great photo op, and that people do visit these places just for the fun
of taking them in. (Overheard, a husband speaking rather loudly to his wife: "Check your histogram. Is your histogram good? Then the shot's fine!")

You can be sure that you won't use all the gear that you take, but you can't predict which gear that will be. I brought four pairs of batteries for my camera, and after the first week of shooting hadn't even finished one. On the other hand, gear like the photo tank and four memory cards has been invaluable.

With those points in mind, here
is a gallery with a few photo highlights from the trip so far.

2006-08-07T20:03:00.000-04:00

The Great Repack, a mini-story

Some people know that I have brought way too much stuff along with me on
this trip. It mostly consists of photo/video gear, along with a few
personal necessities. When I got done packing a week ago, I had two
large duffel bags (approximately 45 lbs/20 kg each), plus a carry-on
backpack (just under 40 lbs/18 kg). Needless to say, this move has been
widely viewed as crazy by many people in both hemispheres.

For the first portion of my trip, I chose to only carry around one pack.
This is the part where I unabashedly promote the Kinesis Gear system that has been
working very well so far. The system is targeted towards photographers,
but the basic idea is that you can buy various packs, pack frames,
belts, harnesses, and cases that you then arrange in a multitude of
configurations.

For this trip, I have mainly used the Kinesis pieces in two
configurations. The first one is the "everything in one big pack" setup.
This consists of hanging the backpack and a compression sack from the
pack frame, with my tripod on one side, and a video camera piggybacked
on the backpack in a smaller pack. The whole setup including a few
liters of water has to easily weigh over 65 lbs/30 kg.

When I got to Machu Picchu, I had planned to use my full pack with frame
for the day, but holding only water and my camera stuff. However, the
rules prohibit backpacks over 20 liters. Thanks to the modularity of the
Kinesis system, I was able to quickly store the pack frame and backpack,
and convert to a harness and belt setup, with camera holster and lens
cases hanging off the belt, and my small video camera pack and tripod
hanging on my back. I've been using variations of this second
configuration ever since when I go out on picture-taking expeditions.

For peace of mind I'm using the Pac
Safe to keep my pack secure when it's not in my room or on me. The
duffel bags got the same treatment when I stored them at the airport.
Which brings me back to the main story - the great repack.

Obviously I wanted to travel the first half of the trip with this
monster backpack, and obviously that monster backpack would not be
something you could possibly carry on (or even check without extra
charges). So last Monday morning at around 6am, I pulled two large
duffel bags and my carryon backpack into a bathroom stall in the Lima
airport. The goal: create the superpack that I would carry around the
next ten days.

A bull in a china shop would have a better time manuvering than I did in
that tiny bathroom stall. I had planned in advance to have all the
additional superpack stuff in one of the duffel bags, but it still took
me the better part of two hours to get the pack frame out, attach all the pieces to it, and get stuff back into the duffel bags. It didn't help that I hadn't gotten any sleep the previous night, or that the bathroom
attendant seemed to be confused by this person who kept making sounds of velcro ripping without ever emerging from the stall.

When I get back to Lima on Wednesday, I will try to "undo" this repack by putting most of my big pack back into one of the duffel bags at the airport luggage storage. I'm currently getting good practice by
unpacking and repacking the superpack as I move from place to place.
Still, this is all relatively easy compared to the "great repack", and I think people will be hard pressed to beat my record of the most luggage crammed into a bathroom stall at once.

2006-08-05T20:25:00.000-04:00

A Story About IF

Yesterday (August 4, 2006) I took the bus from Cusco to Puno here in Peru. Puno is a Peruvian city on the edge of Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake at around 4000 meters (13,000 ft) asl. I was worried that when I arrived, the altitude would be so bad that I wouldn't be able to walk my 30kg pack from the bus to a taxi. Fortunately, there is still some air around here, and after a few rest stops, I managed to make it to a taxi and to the hostal I had planned on staying in, Hostal Pukkara.

IF I had known that I had to confirm my reservation at that place, I wouldn't have had to have been very kindly punted to another hotel a few blocks away. The man at Hostal Pukkara was nice enough to come along with me in the taxi and help me with my bags - an extremely helpful guy with no reason to be. So my new digs were at the Silustani Hotel. The Silustani is a bit more uppity (i.e. hot water around the clock) for $5/night more, and is nicely situated between the Plaza de Armas and the Pi–a Plaza.

Every town here has a Plaza de Armas (aka "Plaza Principal" or "Plaza Mejor"). It usually has a police station, courthouse, bank, city government office, and other "main area place" type of shops, all surrounding a nice little park area with benches and maybe a fountain. In more touristy towns such as Cusco, the Plaza Principal includes a small supermarket and tons of tourist-trap restaurants around its periphery. And there is always a Catholic Church on one side of the plaza. By Peruvian law, each town must make land available for a Catholic church.

But anyways, here I am at the conveniently located Silustani Hotel. I wanted to make sure I had food all ready for Sabbath and all that, and I was feeling a little adventurous, so I got directions to the area's supermarkets. Finding a North American-style supermarket is unlikely in most Peruvian towns. Lima has E.Wongs that are bound to be just as good as any North American supermarket, but that's just Lima. In Puno, there is the Supermercado, which means a big marketplace with rows of stalls selling a wide variety of products. The first floor has a row for "cereals", "frutas", and "verduras" (vegetables), as well as a whole butcher section. The second floor has clothing stalls where you can buy a new pair of trousers from Se–or Pantalones. Near the Supermercado is a storefront that has a variety of Americano foods such as loaves of sliced bread, snack chips, and ice cream.

So anyways, I got plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, and a loaf of bread, all for about S/.13 ($4) total, and headed back to the hotel with my finds. IF I had not been returning to my new hotel, I would not have noticed the bakery next door to the hotel advertising empanadas. (If you're wondering what an empanada is, it's kind of like a small calzone that you put salsa on.) Some of my friends at Red Hat will remember going to Sarah's Empanadas restaurant near the old office location, and I have a lot of good memories of that food.

IF, after depositing my purchases in my room, I hadn't decided to go back to the bakery, I wouldn't have been told that they only had chicken or beef empanadas. However, there was a restaurant down the street that might be able to help me. The woman at the bakery even walked me down the street when I didn't quite understand where she was pointing. I found myself at a vegetarian restaurant, which was cool with me because I happen to be "una vegetariana".

At this vegetarian restaurant dive, I would have liked empanadas con verduras, but that wasn't on the menu. I tried ordering the vegetarian ceviche, ceviche been something close to the national dish of Peru. I think it's like the sushi of South America - normally made with raw fish and all that. IF the restaurant hadn't been out of ingredients then, I wouldn't have disappointedly requested "una plata authentico" (authentic plate) instead. It took a long time to make, but a waitress was nice enough to bring out a glass of apple juice on the house. As an aside, drinks and desserts here in Peru seem to be a lot less sugary. I've had lemonade twice, pi–a (pineapple) juice once, and then this apple juice, and every single time they have been very frothy, not very sweet, and with a little pulp, as if someone decided to just blend the fruit up and put it straight in a glass. It's nice to not be in a nation of sugar addicts (probably due, sadly enough, to the poor state of dental care here).

When the plate of food I had ordered finally arrived, I devoured it in short order and asked for the check. After paying and thanking, I commented to my waiter that "yo returno ma–ana noche por ceviche" ("I'll return tomorrow night for ceviche"). IF I had not been sufficiently intrigued by ceviche for my introverted self to make an offhand comment like that, I wouldn't have gotten the speech from se–ora chef about how the place wouldn't be open then because they didn't work on "Sabado" (Saturday). And IF that hadn't raised my curiosity enough to ask about their religious preferences...

So there you have it. I got to meet a bunch of cool people who have the same beliefs as me, who gave me the directions to church services today that I had been worried about finding, and who invited me to lunch after services (score!). Add to that the subsequently revealed fact that they had only been operating the restaurant at its new location for ten days (previous location: the street where my previously scheduled hostel was), and you have a story that amazes me. What are the odds of meeting family, a million miles from home?

2006-08-02T23:10:00.000-04:00

I'm in Aguas Calientes, Peru at the moment. Even though my first post just showed up, it was regarding the first few days of my trip. This is the first time I've had Internet access since I left.

Tons of stories to tell, and none fatal so far. I think it will not be possible to post most of the photos and any of the video until after the trip, but I'm getting some great stuff. I went up to the Machu Picchu ruins today and got some nice stuff, including a couple of panoramas. My only question is why President Bush doesn't boycott the totalitarian regimes of history - this stuff is sort of impressive, and it wouldn't have happened unless some ruler guy was enslaving millions for his terrorist empire.

The pictures don't do Machu Picchu justice because (a) you don't really see how "on the summit of a mountain" this place is (b) you don't see the 3rd dimension that helps you understand all the climbing you have to do to just get around the city. Someone needs to invent a good 3D camera that takes Canon lenses... :)

Instead of taking the bus back down, I hiked back down from Machu Picchu after closing, and had a pretty scary experience trying to make it back through the dark. Main problem was that I was already very tired, after getting 5 hours of sleep, taking photos all day, walking up and down the steep slopes of Machu Picchu City this afternoon, etc. God deserves the credit for guiding me back when I could have broken my leg or fell many times. More details on that story later.

I'm heading back to Cusco tomorrow evening on the train, then to Puno (on another bus!) on Friday morning, assuming Ramon has picked up the ticket I paid him for. S/.30 (30 soles, about $8) for a first-class bus ride of about 6 hours. Not bad.

Stories I still need to tell from the past few days:
. More on dealing with the altitude, aka yesterday's evening in Cusco.
. More observations on the differences between here and North America.
. Details of the "great luggage repack" at the airport on Monday morning (this one's a good one!).

Anyways, enough rambling - I apologize for not having a nice photo-summary for today, but that will come soon enough. From a very tired guy, in a very touristy town on a satellite Internet connection in an Internet cafe listening to odd Beatles covers, "buenos noches!"

2006-08-02T22:40:00.000-04:00

Way High Up

It has been a crazy few days, but I am alive and well! A lot has happened since Sunday evening.

After flying into Miami on Sunday afternoon, July 30, I waited at a food court where I had to save the world from a very large cockroach. And then I had to find something to eat at the same food court.

The flight from Miami to Lima was delayed because the computer double-booked a seat, and as a result six people's luggage had to be pulled off the plane.

When the plane landed in Lima around 04:30 Peru time July 31, (one hour behind the Eastern coast of the USA), it hit me that I was really there. I got the red light at customs, and when they searched my luggage they gave me a hard time about my second video camera ("solo uno, señor!"), but let me through. I hung around the Lima airport, resting, restocking my water supply, and trying to get over the culture shock. It is just so mind boggling to be in a place where you can't communicate easily, even though the airport is otherwise pretty much like any airport in North America. with the Brunch was two Papa John's personal pizzas at the food court - this was my only square meal so far.

My bus from Lima to Cusco was scheduled to depart A taxi driver named Carlos found in me a willing victim to overcharge (S/.50, or $15) for a ride to the bus station. I didn't really mind though - it felt so good be outside on the move, and he came inside the bus station to help me pick my ticket before he left.

Note to the curious: If travelling out of Lima via Cruz Del Sur, book your tickets out of of Cruz Del Sur's Javier Prado station instead of the one on Jiron Quilca. The Javier Prado station is much nicer, and in a nicer neighborhood.

One thing I noticed about Lima was all the private security around the place. There was an armed guard outside the supermarket (which, admittedly, is something mainly for rich people). Another interesting thing was the difference in scale of everything. In the USA, people who are going to open a store will at least find a good-sized place to stick it in. Here, all it takes is a room that opens onto the street. Peruvians just don't seem to have delusions of grandeur.

Anyways, the bus ride was a very interesting one. This was Imperial-class bus service (urinal at the back, seats that reclined a good ways, plenty of DVDs to watch, and a bingo game that turned out to be good Spanish practice for me :). I knew I was pretty much going to be OK when I managed to ask the luggage guy at the bus station in Spanish whether I could carry my whole backpack at my feet, or whether I need to check it.
Fortunately, the modular Kinesis backpack system made it easy to pull out some essentials and check the rest of my "equipaje".

The bus left at 13:15 on Monday, July 31 and after picking up passengers at the other Lima station, it drove south to Nazca/Ica well after dark. Then we turned east into the foothills of the Andes. These are pretty high foothills though - my GPS recorded an altitude of 4200m at one point during the night. In addition to a few stops for the driver to urinate or switch off, at about 05:30 on Tuesday, August 1, we stopped in Abancay to pick up passengers.

It was really hard to sleep when the bus kept going around curves - for those of my friends that have been on the New River Gorge rafting trip, this was a "class six bus ride" It wasn't quite as fast driving as the NRG bus, but there were a lot more sharp turns.
I managed to doze off at some points in the night, but at about 06:45, everyone on the bus was awakened by a very loud thump that. This leads to

the first photo of the day - the bus had collided with a truck holding "Peligro Combustible". The bus mainly got a bent fender and busted front left tire out of it, but while it meant a delay of an hour or two, I really didn't mind because I got to see scenery like that shown in the second photo of the day.

We eventually made it to Cusco around 11:30 today (instead of the expected 08:45), and Ramon, the guy from the Hostal Cusi Wasi where I'm staying, was still waiting for me at the bus station. Talk about service!

Anyways, I'm hoping to go out to pay for tomorrow's train ticket, buy Friday's bus ticket, and pick up a Claro SIM Chip, although my Cingular one has been roaming down here OK. I have to be careful not to exert myself too much or my lip tingles - that's a sign of the 3400m altitude here right now, and if I'm not careful it could lead to altitude sickness. I've been on Diamox (a diuretic known to help with altitude sickness) since Saturday, so as long as I'm willing to pant when my muscles don't feel tired, I hope to adjust in time for the coming weekend in Puno (where the altitude is 13000 feet or so).

I have plenty more pictures already, but I can either run tons of pictures through workflow or get out and get to the activities of the afternoon!