Rethinking how we Travel

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Michael Perry

After my last post, I thought I would “serious up” here a bit and tell you some stuff I am looking at for future travels both here in the states and internationally. I end up traveling here every few months somewhere and internationally every few months as well. Packing a bag, selecting what I need to take, wondering why I always over-pack and take things I never use; has been a interesting sidetrip over the past few days. Let me ask you fellow travelers. What is it that you really want when traveling? I want a single bag that I can check-in which will hold the sum total of the stuff I really need for the trip. Laptop, kindle, mp3 player, clothing, toiletries, medications. Is that even possible? One bag to rule them all? Well this site says so. I really have not bought any new luggage for quite some time and have gotten by with a two bag approach. One larger laptop bag I carry-on to flights and a roller bag which is checked. Its a hassle though checking things now. At some airports I end up waiting for almost 45 minutes for the bag to exit. So I embarked on a virtual trip to find a bag which is highly recommended and forget the cost since I figure its made up more than a few times with the travel I do. I ended up getting a RedOxx Air Boss as the first new piece of luggage I have procured in some years.

I will also revolutionize how I pack this bag according to the data on the One Bag site. But the main thing I always contend with is all the jinky little plugs and adapters it seems technology travelers are forever stuck with. The worst thing is losing one that cannot be replaced in some far distant hotel. So enter some devices which I think solve that in a few ways:

Chargepod Cellpod – This cute little thing was first recommended by my friend Setuid from a facebook posting about getting things all charged up. I took this thing with me to Portland, Oregon on a test run and it works really well. It powers my phone, my Archos 5 media player, and my kindle all at one time with one little adaptor valued at 110 to 240 which means it goes with me as is to India and Singapore.

Fellowes 4 Port Charger – Next get one of these things which will enrich your hotel electrical supplies. Face it travelers, when have you found a hotel business area which offers sufficient power? This travels easily and well. Count the number of things now I will plug in here. First is the cellpod that does 6 different devices. Second is the netbook or laptop adaptor.

Some International Power adapter like the Kensington – So the order with this little goodie is to plug this in first, then the 4 port charger. Make sure that the 4 port charger will work where you are going. For me, it all works in Singapore, India, KL, and Japan easily. But be careful. Electricity unmanaged will ruin your whole day.

Now you need a bag to put stuff in. I have come to realize in my new goals for travel, that the stuff you bring should do double duty. In other words, you pack a daypack type bag into your carry on bag and it will provide comfort for you on the airplane or train journey but also give you a flexible day of walking with the same bag. Why carry extra bags? I settled on this one. We’ll see how it does.

Now I am down to a single bag for my upcoming 10 day trip. A packing approach which will mean no more checked luggage for this kid. Abiding by the TSA rules for liquids means I adopt a leaner and meaner toiletry list of articles. Next trip is one to India for some time coming up. We’ll see how that goes in planning. Now I have a packing list I am still working on and I am going to only take what’s on the list. No more sets of clothing I never really wear. No more multiple AC adapters which all add to the weight. Lean and mean for this kid. This next trip I only go with my Ubuntu powered netbook. As I have blogged about before Linux makes a great travel OS. Its secure, networking just works, and you select when to reboot.

As I get closer to my departure, I will be packing my one bag, checking out how things work and keeping some detailed log and journal diaries on my personal wiki on what works and what needs help.

If you are the one or two people who happen to read the junk I put out; remember that this is a personal website that I own. My feelings, philosophies, technology leanings should not be construed as representing how I feel about work. This is just my passion at a personal level. I am very passionate about work at that level as well. What I say here stays here hopefully :-)

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Linux versus Windows Smackdown

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Michael Perry

Oh yeah. So Linux ain’t ready for the desktop. Others say it just ain’t ready. Others say Windows is easier, faster, cleaner, and it has all those great modern graphical user interfaces to guide you through all the hard parts. In other lives, I’ve had up to 400 servers to manage in two data centers in two states. Somehow, I cannot imagine launching that many rdp or terminal sessions. How do you manage that many Windows 2008 R2 servers at one time? Or do you? My take is you let them manage themselves. Then what happens…

Yeah baby! That’s what happens. Welcome to the real world of windows computing. Go visit 2 data centers in 2 different geo’s to reboot or perhaps use a power rebooter to reach out to all those poor, stranded Windows servers.

Better yet, by far. Unplug the Cat5 cable and have perfect Windows security. Windows sucks. It always has sucked in data centers and it always will.

When I had 400 servers in two data centers, you know how many windows servers we had? We had one. You know how many debian linux servers we had? We had 399. That one windows server demanded more time than any 10 or 100 linux servers. The most resilient was our FreeBSD firewall box though. That OS is one stud workhorse. Windows is like a severely pimped out i386 of a nothing hardware platform.

Oh by the way; this is a subterfuge post. Don’t like it? Tough. I own this real estate.

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Catching up a bit

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Michael Perry

This is probably a placeholder blogpost. Things have been kinda busy yet I noticed I have not written any of my usual inane drivel here. Just a few notes of this and that. I’m leaving for 2 weeks of vacation a week from Monday. Going to Linuxcon in Boston. Then I ride the rails back all the way across the US. This is the most ambitious train trip yet and I will take days off inbetween and cover the entire distance back east coast to west coast. Very cool.

I’ve started a few posts here about some things but decided to not finalize or post them. One big note is I am changing internet service providers next Tuesday. This blog will be down for quite some time I believe. I will need to re-think how I do the hosting part of things since I am moving to Comcast Cable internet and will need to do dynamic DNS for my domain. I’ll probably get that accomplished after a few weeks. I may get ambitious and do it quicker so I can post my thoughts to the blog as I train across the US.

On the toy front, I purchased a pandigital novel just for fun and hacked it to become a basic android tablet. Now it can read Barnes and Noble, Aldiko, and Kindle books. After seeing it, I prefer the Kindle experience. Its just a nicer reading experience. I don’t think I could do the iPad reading experience either so I will stick with the superlative kindle and wait for the 3rd generation kindle to come which is lighter, has more memory and will last a much longer time on battery with no wifi active.

That’s really about it now. Time for yet another work call. My life is judged by how many times in a week I can do evening calls I guess.

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Crawling through History

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Michael Perry

While gone to OSCON in Portland, I watched the History Channel in my lesser favorite Motel 6 from Hell room. One of the shows which really got me going was the Tunguska Event. This event occurred in a very remote area in Russia and sponsored decades of replication, study, and analysis of everything from peat soil to tree rings. One scientist patiently recreated the entire forest shrunk down to small poles in the ground and then exploded a scale level piece of explosive. Interestingly, trees directly under the epi-center of the explosion were not even touched but the explosion radiated outward and knocked down trees in a certain pattern in a so-called butterfly pattern. Another study claimed this event could not have been caused by human interaction and must have been extra-terrrestrial and a spaceship able to travel at nuclear speed blew up at some elevation over the earth but within the atmosphere.

I think the thing I enjoyed the most was the replicative effort that scientists attempt and achieve when faced with an unknown scientific proposition. Back in the day, we did this to patiently recreate how prehistoric cultures made flaked-stone tools. I think this replication is a necessary first step to understanding anything human produced or even other. At the human level, tool stone always acts in a certain way, detaches from its parent in certain ways, exhibits a blade or lack thereof in certain ways. I think geological forces act the same way. Glacial moraines act a certain way, deposit these lonely boulders in unlikely places but with a studied nonchalance. Its all measurable when you understand the measurement. I felt this way with how prehistoric humans built their warming or cooking pits.

I think it works this way for things like the Tunguska and for how we used to build our incredible stone tools. There are interactions that are caused by either natural aptitudes or limitations of the event. We either influence these interactions or learn by them and then influence them. In the case of the Tunguska event, scientists found multiple rationales for a thing. I think this is normal. Its the same with replicating stone tools. There are a few ways of achieving a goal but when you get down to watching an accomplished flintknapper at work; there is almost this detachment from the world around them. Its the stone, the hammer-stone, the material. You become the material. You know its stresses and limitations. Its a piece of you; that obsidian or chert. Same with the Tunguska at a bigger level, but we have not learned the right questions or replications even yet. Hell, we still don’t know why certain animals disappeared from the scene in our geologic past or why they occurred.

Science gains from replication, theory, hypothesis, creation. We need the entire sequence to gain an understanding of some event in the past. I truly enjoyed watching the Tunguska researchers painstakingly recreate the environment, take peat bog samples, take tree rings. What has occurred to me though is that we simply don’t know the right question yet so the answer eludes us. Once we know the right question to ask, we will start understanding how to replicate the event. Then we will be closer to knowing what really happened.

As a friend anthropologist once noted to me, “never stop questioning”. It works the same for prehistoric stone tools and mega-geologic happenings. Crawl through time and you can find all kinds of samples of this where we learned the next question which lead to the next answer. Will we ever know all the questions? No. Its not our fate to know all the questions.

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Leaving for Home Today

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Michael Perry

Today I check out of Motel Hell/Six and hit the road on AMTRAK back home. I leave at 225pm so I get to see the sights until 930pm or so this evening which gets me back to California just about. Its been an interesting trip but I forecast I will not do a repeat to OSCON until they drop their costs down to a reasonable level. Never have I seen so many MAC this and that than at this conference. iPhones, MAC laptops, iPads. These guys/gals come iPrepared for iConference at the iConvention center. So what becomes clear seeing all the expensive hardware is that these guys can afford the passage costs to this show. For open source quality in a reasonably priced show, I’ll stick to SCALE and their announced 9x show. The price to attend this one is down at a level that regular human beings and not the iCreme of the crowd can go. It also has more signal to noise ratio than OSCON.

Mr. O’Reilly lower the costs to OSCON. The show is not open when you forbid a whole segment of folks from attending due to price. Drop the session which don’t provide any real value and trim the tutorials down. Drop the lunch or make it a sandwich thing. In other words, make the show accessible to the wide range of open source enthusiasts that would love to attend but cannot. Perhaps then we would see more Linux laptops and other Android stuff at the show.

Anyways, I pull out of this wondrous Motel 6 adventure by noonish today and head back to the PDX AMTRAK station for my train ride home. Next week is a week full of work; same with the following week. Then I head to Boston for a show lesser in cost but with many interesting sounding papers. I know some of the folks that will attend that show having worked with them before.

Catch you all on the flipside of the train tracks.

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Mornings at the Motel 6

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Michael Perry

Don’t believe the commercials about “leaving a light on”. Here are some evil and downright bad factoids about the wondrous Motel 6 experience:

  1. The mattress was never turned and created a spot where a thousand or so butts had slept. I felt like I was slipping through a hole in the universe down into a padded world of badly supported inner springs.
  2. The stairs to the second level make weird noises when ascend or descend. Well, they are metal and not really insulated. Going up or down makes people on each level know you are doing such.
  3. The room floor makes strange noises when I pad across to the bathroom. I imagine there are sensors that tell the persons in room 106 right below me when I wake up at night to take care of biological necessity or when I awaken and realize I am not going to sleep any more.
  4. Finally, the insulation at this particular hotel sucks. Its either too warm or too cold. There is nothing in between.

So what are the lessons learned? Never, ever stay in a Motel 6 ever again whether the guy tells me the light is on or not. I’ll opt to spend more money out of my own pocket to not replicate the issues faced for 4 nights in this particular room.

Motel 6 dudes. You need to sleep for some nights in the rooms you rent out. Pay particular attention to the bed. Do you really expect people to sleep in a bed where the mattress has no remaining support?

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Time Travels

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Michael Perry

Its Tuesday night and went through two tutorials here at OSCON today. One on Chef which is an infrastructure management tool and the other on Puppet which turns us all into Masters of the Puppet Kingdom. Both were okay. My take on OSCON for the most part is that its interesting but I won’t be doing it again. I think honestly the cost point for the quality is a bit over the top. I think they should drop the cost to $250.00 for the entire thing. All tutorials, sessions, events. The cost now is ridiculous and out of the reach of a whole group of open source devleopers, QA, documentarians, users. My feedback is make the cost more reachable and stop with the elitism based on price. We all want to feel the power of open source; but O’Reilly has priced it beyond the reach of mere mortals. C’mon dudes. Do what’s right here. Drop the cost.

Tomorrow I’ll go to a few sessions on community, business and stuff and a evening BOF. That will be just about it for me I think unless I go to a Thursday morning session or two. May do that and leave the hotel for the AMTRAK station by 1pm. Then I get back on the train and start the voyaging part of things again. Back to home, back to that reality. I’ll be leaving again in about two weeks though to go to a Linux show in Boston. I think I will fit better there. I know a few linux people here and there. Perhaps the one or two I know will even be there…

I also used my NexusOne’s wifi tethering today to good effect. The wireless that OSCON provided sucked big time most of the day. Hardly could do gmail. Anyways, the freely available wifi tethering works like a charm. So glad I had the phone with me. I got to put my Nexus One next to a Droid X at the show. Very snazzy phone. But I’m glad to not own one. Its pretty but its not really there. I want a developer phone which has the same characteristics made by HTC and not big, bad Moto. I guess I am a HTC fanbois.

Anyways, end of this here thing. I’ll capture my trip back hopefully on Thursday on the blog here.

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In Portland for OSCON

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Michael Perry

Arrived early in the morning. Wonderful train journey even though we were a few hours delayed due to a freight train that was out of service ahead of us. Tomorrow I have a full day of tutorials and Wednesday going to do sessions all day. Today is a free day for me so will go on a walk about this afternoon and see the northeast/southeast side of Portland. There is a historic walk I would like to do as well. Note  to self: resist the urge to stay at Motel 6 ever again. I’m spoiled and like nicer hotels. This place is okay but basic niceties are missing. No cute little shampoo bottles. No bottled water in the room. Shoulda stayed at the Marriott.

My phone as usual is very useful with the Google Places application and Google Maps at getting me around on foot here. Its about 60 some degrees today. Rather cool. Spent this morning talking with a guy in Denny’s after breakfast about life in general, getting older. He is in his 70′s. Told me his story about catching cancer from Agent Orange in Vietnam. The VA wanting to cut off his foot. His desire to save his foot. He said “born this way. Two hands and two feet. Wanna go out this way too”. Very powerful looking character inside and out.

Sometimes you meet people that you would like to do a Amtrak train trip with. They have these larger than life stories. His story stretched out and touched many of the places I’ve been. But his had this humorous, sad, and unfinished element. Truly we all have the same. I probably will never see him again unless I go to Denny’s tomorrow morning at 9am. That is in the cards I think.

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On the way

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Michael Perry

Time has come for me to start my travels. I am quite excited to be leaving the place here. I’ll be boarding the Coast Starlight at 950pm at Oakland Jack London Square. I also get to pick up my AMTRAK tickets for the next journey which will be from Boston to Emeryville with stops along the way in Chicago, Denver, and Reno. I have always wanted to cross the US on rail. This one should be cool. I have stops at each segment for a night so I can get out and see each city a bit.

This trip is meant for me to go to OSCON but more its a therapeutic away thing which I feel I need. I’ll be doing a few day walks across the Northeast and Southeast sections of Portland. I have a kindle ebook queued up on my Archos 5 Android Tablet which I’ll use to chart my progress. I wish I would have had the kindle android app when I was in Tokyo.

Thanks to a few folks at Celestix and other places for encouraging me to do this trip on the train. I really want to see the places and just experience the train itself. It gives me a great feeling of solitude and wonder to ride the rails and I need that.

Take care all. Will be finding you here in my Portland-based blog posts.

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Departing Soon for Portland

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Michael Perry

My AMTRAK train trip to Portland is coming up soon. Time to sit on a train again; watch the various landscapes go rushing by; have precious moments to just sit. Like the old saying goes “sometimes I sits and thinks and other times I just sits”. I’m planning on just sitting for awhile. I bought this cool little USB charger called a ChargePod which allows charging of six different devices from a central source. This is one of those “duh” things and thanks to Setuid for providing me the information. Its a “duh” thing if you travel with numerous micro USB gizmos like phones, media players like my Archos 5, my kindle. Combine this with my 4 port slim power strip and you get a nice traveler’s boost. I also have a smallish D-link travel router which turns a wired connection to wireless in hotel rooms. Very handy for most hotel rooms. Thanks to Art Tyde for the hint on the travel routers. I settled on the D-link because it has no external antenna so it takes less room. The other hint if you travel internationally is to be careful of the power adapters for things. Some are rated 110 to 240 and you are okay where I often go like Singapore and India. Others are not. You will also need a plug adapter that will plug into international electrical outlets. My approach is to plug this travel adapter in first; then the 4 port slim strip and then the ChargePod to one of the outlets. Voila! Everything charges with only one plug. This is necessary when traveling and you don’t want to carry lots of little AC bricks which just weigh you down.

I’ll pack some of this infrastructure during my upcoming trip. I have a small infrastructure bag that fits into my luggage easily that keeps me going wirelessly, with power, with numerous adapters. The ChargePod is the most recent acquisition in my goal to effortlessly provide power to my USB devices. I’m gonna test things out in travel mode to Portland.

I’ll be on/off the so-called grid starting Saturday evening while I do the “no thinking” thing. I’m pretty excited about going.

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