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.
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.
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.
Today I stopped at a nearby Starbucks to take advantage of the free wifi and truth be told, get away for a short time from office, family, other stuff. Starbucks is an escape for me for the most part so I like going to this one particular one which is a few miles from the office. I will resist mentioning where exactly it is because its my secret. The wifi seems better, the number of electrical outlets is cool, the coffee always is decent. So I sit there sometimes after work with an iced coffee, watching. Watching what you may ask. Well, watching others. Others seem to have interesting, frustrating, unhappy, or happy lives. I hear snippets of conversation while they talk.
In front of the place, there is this set of regulars that arrive each morning. These are the guys that all meet, perhaps retired, and also watch people. I heard one of them say when he watched this young asian woman walk in with a short skirt, “Damn Ed, she has legs all the way up to her a**”. They all laughed. Then this group of young yuppie looking business tycoons walked in. They all watched the young guys walk in with their office buds. Nothing was said. They all just laughed. Secret joke time.
So today I sat at a table next to them. One of the regulars looked at me and nodded. I guess I was welcomed to the clan. I felt included. Suddenly I was talking to this guy named “Earl”. He told me a bit of his story. Employed at Nummi and then not employed. Twenty-some years building fine cars. Then not. I casually enquired what was next for him. He told me that nothing was next. He was living in the moment.
Living in the moment. Seeing things as they are. Such is truth.
Been there; done that.
For a long time, I purchased cell phones and their plans. I bought into the same mentality which Yahoo! reports on here. Each new phone not only cost me the phone itself but with ATT (always terrible telephone/graph), I also got suckered into paying separately for each service. One time I traveled to singapore with the phone (A Windows Mobile MotoQ). The phone was set to manually sync my exchange email; but after an evening of a few beers, I inadvertently left it doing “push”. So my wallet was pushed. ATT has this terrible approach to charging lots of dollars if you do not have a plan which covers charges. When I got back home, my cell phone bill was 599.00. All of it was international data.
At that point, I got tired of the whole thing boys and girls. I decided to move to another phone provider and chose T-Mobile. T seems more open about a few things. I ported my good ole number over which I have always loved and actually got first at Sprint. Then I purchased my pick of a new phone; the Nexus One. But this time, I chose to buy the phone unlocked. So when I travel now, I open the phone up, plop in a new SIM card for Singapore or India and off I go. Its only here where we have this strange and demented set of carrier conditions. In India, things are much more open. SIM cards are everywhere; so my office got me a post-paid card which they pay for me every month. I also purchased a card in Singapore which was as easy as going to a 24-hour convenience store and getting it.
Then I inherited a second Nexus One and went to the big T and got a month by month plan with the android data plan on it. When I tire of, its canceled. I’ve loaned it a few times to folks. Its handy to have a second plan and phone for a variety of reasons.
My advice FWIW. Don’t give in and spend the 200.00 plus the coupla K for the plan. Go to the big T and get a month by month. Change it out and get an unlocked phone. It costs more; but what the heck. What’s more important? The phone or the number?
Lets face it. The new laptops are nothing like the pride of the pack from either IBM or Lenovo. I’m talking the titanium wonders of the T line of Thinkpads. Particularly the T60s. The T43 was nice but it has this screwy PATA to SATA adaptor thing which causes problems and errors like the fabled 2010 error if you install a hard drive that is not in some uber secret firmware list. In some BIOS’es, you had to hit escape or enter or something to continue. Later BIOS revisions let you not do that. But still… In the life of man and beast, I liked this feature least. Just another roadblock to laptop nirvana.
Then the T60 came along. This laptop is a workhorse. It handles either Windows or Ubuntu gracefully and I’ve dropped them on the floor, had them fall out of carriers when traveling, and done other mischief and they just continue to tick. Way back when at Linuxcare we developed a custom Linux distribution for the IBM Thinkpad group on the T23′s. Those were very nice for their time too.
If you want a laptop that’s still a laptop and that has that fabled thinkpad staying power; I suggest something along the lines of the T60 to T61p for computing that will keep on going. You can find them on overstock. Get one with a gig of memory and a 60g SATA drive for about $390.00. Now go shopping at a memory store and get the memory upgrade and a 500g SATA drive. Plug both in. The memory will require remove the handpad reset thing in front of the keyboard. Its easy though. The disk drive has these dinky screws in the hard drive caddy on the right front of the laptop. Watch out there. If there is one funky thing, its how they have the disk drives mounted. But get done and you have a laptop for the ages. It will work for you for years and its cheap. Put Ubuntu Lucid on it and enjoy computing with no licensing restrictions. If you need Windows, why not just do it virtually? I do both at work. I have a native Windows 7 T60 and then my daily ubuntu escape laptop. Things are cheap enough now to have two of them.
Consider this a unsolicited positive statement for the quality that IBM and then Lenovo packed into the T line of laptops. Serious computing power dudes.
I really like Ubuntu Lucid guys. It just seems solidly put together and the ubuntuforums guys plus other forum sites really provide howto information for a few things which need some extra work. I buy all music from Amazon these days since I want to really own it and not just borrow it like on iTunes. I also don’t need something to “manage my digital life”. I don’t want or need a digital life. Having a blog is enough. But there are a few applications I like which take some extra steps to get working. The Amazon MP3 downloader is one of them. Here’s a post to get it working in a few steps. Now if you want a command line alternative try clamz which also needs just a bit of work which is listed here. I can hear ya now. Why use anything command line when there are beautiful and wonderful graphical luser interfaces. Why indeed. Because I can get things done faster in a command line way it seems sometimes but if you want both, I am here to serve 
.
Here is a question for ya. What are the first things you add to a Ubuntu install? For me, I do the update thing. I notice that it takes about 250mb of data to do the upgrade now. I also add in a few applications which I tend to use a lot. Stuff like ssh so I get a server, inkscape so I can draw pretty (useless) stuff, xchat so I can waste time on freenode, and pidgin because I don’t like the one bundled at all. I also install Adobe Air because I really like tweetdeck for twitter. I also have to do an apt-get install openvpn and then ubuntu-restricted-extras so I can listen to mp3s. I usually get done with setting up something in about an hour and work has some decent network connectivity so over lunch I do the big upgrades. I end up with VirtualBox and then rebooting to get the new kernel revision in place.
Now what is the first thing you add to a Windows 7 install? I always have to get rid of the senseless and stupid Internet Exploder 8 which always seems to border on the heights and depths of stupidity. Give me Firefox or give me Opera! I actually don’t really like Opera that much either; but Google Chrome is cool. Then the box seems to want to do updates. It reboots. It does more updates and I install office 2007 professional plus from my technet account. Then it reboots. I end up adding in some open source windows programs or freebies that make Windows easier. I always need Cygwin so I can have a real terminal to type commands into, have ssh on the command line, rsync, etc. I end up installing AVG Free and a VNC client. It reboots some more. Sometimes I think Windows just likes reboots and that you really don’t need to reboot after installing things. Why do you have to reboot anyways? What is it that Windows really needs to do? I think it should pop up a message that says,
Windows 7 is tired and is pissed off at you for making its registry huge. Download a registry repair program that has malware attached immediately!
Yeah baby! Anyways, I actually like Windows 7 and use it on a T60 every day now for work. Its much nicer than Vista. But how much is that really saying? Lets be serious here. Vista had serious suckage power. If Windows 7 is nicer does it tip the scale to the positive side or just borderline? Even if its much, much nicer; its still not nice. After all, its Windows.
So, that’s my story for the day and you made it through the whole thing. You should be proud. I usually post inane BS on this thing and this was no exception.
I decided to take a night away from $HOME. I actually did not go that far but accomplished really nothing at all besides enjoying my own company for awhile. It appears I will be going to India in September for awhile. Yay!! I really want another trip back there this year to work out of that office, be with the guys, be in my “native place”. Truth be told, I feel more at home in Chennai most of the time than here. I’ll most likely stay at the Hotel New Woodlands for a few weeks and will enjoy the highlights and wonder of Mylapore yet again. If you have never been to Chennai, Mylapore represents the most interesting cultural blend, restaurants and nightlife, and I’ll get back to my friend that drives a auto there. I really want to get back.
In other news, my Nexus One Android Phone is happily perking along using the Modaco Custom ROM which operates on the latest release of Android. It seems to be much faster in regular operation but there are still some rough spots with things. I would expect nothing less from a operating system that is not done and will never be done. I looked at the new iPhone for awhile last night on the web and read some reviews. Is it really true that it actually sucks that much? Did you hear the rumor about the new miniPad which will be one inch in size and use OSX? Just kidding there fanbois. I’m always really shocked by the apple hardcore though who buy just about anything from them.
I’m working on a slipstreamed Ubuntu install which will have everything I commonly use in an image I can quickly deploy to new hardware. I have the AMD64 version done and I’ve tested it. Now on to the laptop one. I guess the pesky activation screens will not be bothering this project at all
I’ll be back home tonight. Back to the usual occurrences of life, kids, and home fun times. Yay. Blech.
Check it and disagree if you can.
Today a subset of the family unit was here at home. For the first time in memory, my wife and daughter left to go out with the so-called “other family” which leaves me feeling rather peculiar. Watching how this whole thing has evolved since my 6 months last year in Chennai have left me a bit out of sorts. Usually on the 4th we have a BBQ, we do safe and sane fireworks, we are together. Last year though I was not. I was in Chennai, India working. Truth be told, I love Chennai as this second city of mine where the people are generous with their time, energy, compassion. I miss it.
This year, my son and I were at home together. We BBQ’ed a turkey breast, tri-tip beef roast, broccoli with Newman’s lite Italian dressing and some hotlink beef sausages. Very good. I don’t want to overstate this but I am good at the BBQ thing when it comes to things like entire turkey breasts or whole turkeys or chickens. A whole turkey on the Weber is something no one should ever miss. It makes an oven cooked turkey into a dried out boot.
So we ate today and talked a bit. I made Ore-ida Crispy french fries because my son loves them and they’re easy. We ate too well and we laughed a bit. Too soon it was over and he repositioned himself to his room. My daughter would stay with me, help in the kitchen, laugh at my stupid jokes. I miss some of that. In honesty, I miss less and less of my wife as the whole thing goes on. She is just not instrumental in my polarity . I’ll always love you Val. Liking you is kinda hard sometimes.
Happy 4th family unit and to the other 3 or 4 people that read this thing.
