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π 2007-05-29 09:39 by Merlin in Flying, Nflying

I went to work there for a few days and flew to Santa Monica airport with a coworker and my boss. I wasn't able to rent the Trinidad TB20 I like to fly (cheap and fast), but I got a C182 G1000 instead, which while expensive got us there and back in a bit less than 2.5H each way.

Since I was feeling a bit weak/tired during the flight, I used the O2 bottle I had when we climbed at 12500ft, to stay focussed. This turned out to be a little hard because for some strange reason, I had a very bad need to go pee, even though I had gone right before the flight, and hadn't drunk much of anything at home. Before some of you ask, I had the pilot pee bags in my flight bag, but unless it was an absolute necessity (which it got close to in the end :), I wanted to avoid doing #1 in front of my manager in the right seat :)

This flight was nice for me as it was the first flight where I was able to use my IFR rating solo: LA was still mostly overcast at 2200ft when we arrived around 12:30.
The only little problem was when I messed up my last radio handoff where I got two frequency digits swapped and lost radio comm for a little while. I've always wondered if I'm slightly dyslexic sometimes or if it's just the occasional brainfart... Anyway LA Center got worried a bit when they lost me for a few minutes, and they were glad to have me back when I checked back in on the old frequency and got the correct frequency instead.
Flying IFR over LA can always be challenging when they give you a victor airway to find and join, and the map is full of them, but I eventually found it and got on it.
It was a soft IFR day, just the usual overcast over LA and I wasn't in the clouds long, but I shot the VOR/GPS alpha into Santa Monica, went through the layer and was nicely pointed at the runway, and managed a nice and soft uneventful landing even though I had to pee so badly by then that I could barely raise my legs to put them on the rudder pedals.
Once the plane was parked, I barely managed to make it out the plane to the FBO's restrooms, my kidneys were hurting by then, but all was well a few minutes later :)

A few days later, we flew to Catalina, which I wanted to do VFR because there's no reason to fly IFR if it's going to be a scenic flight, but we had to wait past 13:00 to have reasonable VFR conditions over overcast/smoky/foggy LA.
We headed for Catalina via the special VFR corridor over LAX, but we weren't able to circle the Island because one half of Catalina was still low IFR.
That said from what we were able to see of the Island on the flight out (after the obligatory Buffalo burger at the restaurant there), there were more obvious signs of the fire that raged over the Island a few weeks prior (although the Island's vegetation did look a bit sparse like I'm pretty sure it was before)

The flight back to SMO was uneventful, and so was the flight back to PAO, in nice VFR conditions each time. Oh, and Rob did a great job flying the plane on the way back (and he gets credit for the a few of the pictures)

The rest of the pictures are here

π 2007-05-28 23:59 by Merlin in Hiking

This time, the point was to do a hike closeby and something that would be a good exercise/practise run for our upcoming 10 day hike on the Jon Muir trail. Jennifer remarked that the Henry Coe was rated a difficulty 8 out of 10 and therefore would be a good trail to try take. I agreed.
On top of that, I also ended up with a backpack/fanny pack combination of about 50 lbs, which there again was more weight than necessary, but was meant to be practise for John Muir where we'll have to lug around around 15lbs of food.

We had a little bit of a late start on Saturday, and it was interesting finding the new but badly marked entrance on hwy 152. It's actually here .

But before I start, here are the stats for the 3 days:

Day	Moving Speed	Avg Speed	Distance	Moving Time	Total Time	Total Ascent	Total Descent	Avg Heart Rate	Max HR
Day 1	2.5mph?	1.6mph	13mi	?	7H46	?	?	?	?
Day 2 Lake Loop	2.7mph	?	3.45mi	1H15	1H28	+777ft	-773ft	97bpm	126bpm
Day 2	2.2mph	1.5mph	9.05mi	4H06	6H13	+3683ft	-3697ft	99bpm	130bpm
Day 3	2.3mph	1.7mph	7.25mi	3H06	4H53	+2271ft	-2731ft	104bpm	145bpm

(sorry the first day is missing data due to the forerunner 305 deleting its first day's worth of stats when it ran out of internal plot memory)

The planned hike (not actually matching reality quite due to the Topo! maps not being up to date compared to actual trails) is shown on this picture and this is the actual hike as shown on mapsource (incidently, the mapsource maps were even more inaccurate than the Topo! ones).
While I'm at it, you can get the GPS track here and the Google Earth track (kml) used to make these pictures (make sure to select size original for full res pictures))

Technology

I brought my Garmin Etrex Vista Cx at my Forerunner 305 to get a better track recording (since Garmin didn't see fit to put a Sirf III chip in the Vista Cx unfortunately).
On top of that, the 3 day hike overflowed the Forerunner buffer and I lost the first day's worth by the time the 3rd day was over :( (so the resulting track I have has bad quality points for the 1st day as those come from the crappy Vista Cx's reception. Update: Garmin just came out with a Vista HCx with apparently has a GPS receiver at least as good as Sirf3, which could make this problem mostly go away).
On the toy section, I brought a solar panel generating 6V USB power (yes, USB is supposed to be 5V, but they overvolt it to charge cell phones like the nokias that require at least 6V). It came in handy right away as my forerunner turned out to have dead batteries when I started the hike (apparently, it got turned on after I charged it)
Later during the hike, I used the solar panels to recharge the forerunner as I went along, and the Vista Cx ran the entire 3 days on a set of AA NiMh 2200mAh batteries.
The last tech piece was a multiband radio that we would only have used for emergencies, and that thankfully stayed mostly unused

Day 1

Anyway, we were on the trail by 12:45 and I made the mistake of thinking that about 2l of water would be enough to carry until we hit the next water point. The only thing is that the next water point ended up being much further than expected. We really should have carried 3l each, if not close to 4 (all the creeks except the one 1m down the trail from where we started), were effectively dry).

Actually, if it weren't for a remnant of creek which we were barely able to pump water from (after a scum pond that looked so bad that it was unclear we could get usable water out of it), we could have been in trouble I think. Moral of the story for Henry Coe outside of the winter: bring plenty of water (3-4l per person for a day hike with a full pack).
In hindsight there was one watering hole a bit off the trail that we should definitely have filled up at (picture below)

Anyway, after a long walk (13 miles, a bit more than planned due to us not taking the main roads), we got to Mississippi Lake soon before sunset and setup camp by the lake.
It was a bit windy that night, but we otherwise were able to get a decent amount of sleep. The bad part is the blisters I got on my first day, especially on both pinky toes which scored double blisters (one on each side of the toe). That's what I get for my feet being too wide: they don't even fit in a wide boot.

Here's 50lbs worth of gear :) (10lbs in the fanny pack)

This was the only (already quite low) water point we found on the way. We should have walked off the trail and filled there

this was the only water we found by the trail, and only thanks to intel from another hiker

Day 2

Since we had more time to hike a somewhat shorter distance on Day 2, we figured we'd first hike around Mississippi lake. We didn't quite realize that it was actually a 3.5 mile hike around the lake, but eh, we were there, and hiking without our packs wasn't too bad. We also found a nice alternate camp site with a picnic table.
Day 2 was going to be a somewhat shorter hike but we missed a turn somewhere due to trying to climb a hill a little too hard, and ignoring a path that actually would have ended up taking us a slightly shorter route.
After that, the next shortcut we could have taken, just didn't exist, and looking at the topo map, the 0.1 mile shortcut would likely not have been able to exist.
We just took the longer route around and eventually ended up at Coit Lake in time to find a nice camp site (sheltered from the wind, and with water access). For Day 2, we ended up carrying way more water than needed, but better safe than sorry this time (we actually passed by a house at Pacheco Camp for park rangers and volunteers with running water, a fridge, and even a shower outside!)
The second night meant more blisters to heal, but we had a great night at that site.

Day 3

Day 3 was supposed to be an easy short day, but it was actually a gruesome hike in the baking sun. In order to not needlessly carry even more weight, I left with only 2.5l of water instead of a total possible of 4.5l (as 2.5l had been more than enough for the previous day). It turned out not to be a very wise decision, as the short hike too much more water and energy than I had planned for.
We went up some pretty steep climbs and descents that were even steeper (and quite dicy to walk in pebbles and dirt), Jennifer started to overheat (heat exhaustion), and we had to stop to let her body cool off a bit, as we were already hydrating pretty well. I ended up picking another 5-6lbs from Jennifer's pack which in addition to the extra water I had, brought my pack up to 60lbs I think.
I was still doing reasonably well with the weight, but I was worrying that I'd run out of water before getting to the end.
Turns out we got back to Dowdy Ranch with enough water left (a bit more than 1l combined between us), but considering the hard walking and weather, I was still nervous about it until it was clear that we'd make it, and 1l isn't just that much to have left for that terrain and weather.
The last picture shows the elevation gain/loss. It's not that much until you see how steep some of those descents were, and on gravel no less... (check out around mile 4 to see what I mean)

We're almost there!!!

And on the way back we saw some wildlife on the road, including a mountain lion (probably not a bobcat)

Conclusion

The hike went reasonably well considering. The GPS and maps did help, we got lucky with water on the first day, and saw very few ticks considering (we were told they were very abundant).
The park was not the most scenic place ever, but it was decent, and made for a good exercise/proving grounds that was close by
The good part is also how google earth had 3D info for the park, and does a good job showing the trail in the mountains. If it weren't for the bad blisters which I hope to avoid with sock liners next time, it would almost have been a perfect trip

To end, you can look at all the pictures of the hike at Henry Coe Park
Oh yeah, and if you go during the summer, assume that the only water you'll see are the lakes (which is close to being accurate), so carry up to 3-4l of water per day to be safe. Running out there does suck...

π 2007-05-19 23:58 by Merlin in Exercising

Jennifer and I went for a local bike ride to check out a Sunnyvale John Christian Greenbelt bike path I didn't know about (suggested by my coworker Eric). Here's a map of the ride in green (vs a longer 45 mile redo 13 years later from Cupertino in 2020 in blue):

Thanks to the Satellite map, you can actually see the trail

Once we connected it up to the bay, we rode to Alviso (North San Jose) and did a 9 mile loop there. I had more or less seen Alviso a bit before but hadn't stopped there and paid enough attention on what was there, nor did I really find the long trail that was there before I had a GPS and a picture of where the trail was supposed to start.
Turns out Alviso is actually a quite interesting place as it was meant to be a major port of entry for the South Bay about 100 years ago (it's the furthest point south that boats can reach when they've come from the bay or the ocean), and it had connection with a railroad that's still there. They even came up with the name 'New Chicago' for it, but in the end things didn't quite work out. There were also some leftovers from the gold rush.
While the area has a yacht club as it's the closest place to have a boat at if you're in San Jose, the rest of the area looks pretty run down. Odds are that it'll get cleaned up and improved in the next years, maybe ten, maybe more, but people are going to be building nice houses there sooner or later I think.

In the end, it made for a nice 24 mile ride, with wicked wind around the Alviso bay trail
You can get the rest of the pictures of the Alviso Bay Trail, and the Green Belt as well as a collection of biking maps I photographed .
You can also get the Garmin GPS GDB track of the Alviso Bay Trail, Green Belt, and the San Tomas Aquino Saratoga Creek Trail

π 2007-05-18 23:04 by Merlin in Rc

Another friday, another baylands day.
After my by wheel upgrade, I managed to do some takeoffs from the grass, which is challenging since the grass is thick and the plane not that big (it tends to get stuck and to nose over).
I also managed a few grass landings without tipping over, I'm getting a bit better at flaring and doing soft landings at low speeds (at least some of the time).
That said, in my last approach to landing, I clipped a tree right in front of the runway :)
The tree impact was apparently at fairly high speed, it shattered the propeller, and upset the wing quite a bit. Nothing that some glue won't fix, but it looked like a pretty tough impact. Luckily the motor still looks ok this time :)
Some guy was flying a very nice biplane with a wooden prop, it looked pretty cool.

Ricoh Caplio R6

I'll start with the Ricoh Caplio R6. While it doesn't look much smaller, it actually is noticeably smaller when you're carrying it (it fits in my canon SD550 belt pouch, where the TZ3 doesn't come close).
I also liked the good old Ricoh resolution downsize digital zoom. Along with a 7x optical zoom, if you accept to scale your picture down to 640x480, about 7 times smaller resolution-wise, you end up with up to 45x zoom for a VGA sized picture. Now, in real life, I found that the details on those 45x pictures, usually aren't that sharp, and that the camera sometimes has a hard time focussing in those conditions, but it's still a nice feature.
The R6 uses a similar resolution downsize trick to give you some kind of zoom during videos, still yielding a stable 640x480 picture. The zoom is however jerky and only gives you 3x. It's not great, but understandable considering the optical zoom is pretty noisy. I also need to note that it does a good job of changing the light exposure if you move the camera from a dark spot to a bright one while filming (my canons wouldn't do that)
What's a bit awkward is that the R6 tries to do without a rolling selector button, but has to hide some functions in menus and submenus instead. You can't easily switch from 100 Iso to high iso mode by just rolling a switch (although the preset setting option might help a bit here). What's more awkward is that to record a movie, you have to go in scene mode and select the movie scene. The R6, while doing without a rolling selector button, however does have a button that you can program settings on: it's a nice idea.

As far as scene modes, it doesn't have many, but then again, I personally couldn't care less about scene modes. As far as I am concerned, scene modes are only presets for people who don't know how to set their preferred manual settings for each kind of shot.
One nice preset however is the option to take a slide or a poster from an angle, have the camera detect the trapezoid, and fix it back to a rectangle.

More generally, the camera can take any previously taken picture and fix it after the fact. It's slow for a 7Mpix picture (about 30 seconds), but it works remarkably well.
From the few tests I've done, in low light situations, the R6 seems be a bit less noisy than the TZ3, and its flash seemed decent. It takes around 5 seconds to recharge. You can find the low light pictures here
For night pictures, it can take pictures with a 1 to 8 second shutter time, which is ok for most shots, although not quite enough for very low light situations (night sky). You can see night pictures here
The R6 is like other Ricohs, nice for its manual focus option, and very good macro capability.
Last, but not least, the R6 has a novel fast shot mode where it can capture 16 800x600 shots at high speed and make one picture out of it, or (better), take high speed pictures for as long as you press the shutter, and it'll keep the last 16 shots and make one pictures out of it (perfect for when you're waiting for sommeone to jump or some event to start). See this picture for an example of what it looks like

The first negative point for me is that Ricoh did not seem fit to put an image orientation sensor in the camera. I'm sorry, but I stopped rotating pictures by hand on my computer years ago. Get with the program Ricoh...
However, another problem that made me uncomfortable with the camera was the fact that I got some blurry pictures in full daylight. It only happened a few times, I can't tell you why, but here's an example: 102_Bad_R6_Picts_100iso_0.0023s_noflash (sorry, it was inconvenient to go back in a plane and try some other settings after the fact

). I also have a couple of pictures taken in auto high ISO with flash in wide angle ( 400 ISO/0.031s and 800 ISO/0.028s ), and that turned out quite blurry. I'm sorry, but that should absolutely not happen! (in years of using Canon cameras, I've never had that, especially not for two short range, short exposure time flash pictures taken in a row).
That said, most pictures were good thankfully, see more day pictures .

If you would like a longer review, you can read this other Ricoh Caplio R6 and a list of specs

Summary

Pros:

much more compact than the TZ3, and yet a good 7x optical zoom
zoom past 7x with resolution downsize zoom
some amount of zoom during videos, but resolution, not optical zoom based (i.e. not that good, but better than nothing)
during movies, camera adjusts for lighting
Very nice image straightening feature (take a picture/whiteboard from the side, the camera can change the trapeze back into a rectangle)
can take 3 pictures in a row with white balance or exposure settings offsets
Very good macro capability
Manual focus as well as infinite focus options
Cool option of letting you save a bunch of settings in a preset memory for later recall
Less noisy than R6 at 200, 400, and 800 ISO
Battery life feels a bit better than TZ3
Standard mini USB connector on the camera

Cons:

No viewfinder
no orientation sensor!
no underwater housing that I could find
videos don't seem to work with mplayer
doesn't seem to show ISO that was used after picture was taken (you need to go to play and review the picture later to find out)
Some daytime pictures had some white wash out requiring EV correction
Occasional blurry pictures
ISO high triggers too quickly (250 ISO for pictures in full daylight)
Cannot take night pictures for longer than 8 seconds (not enough for night skies or some burning man shots )
No stich assist

Panasonic DMZ TZ3

First, I've stated earlier, the TZ3 is unfortunately noticeably bigger than the R6. After having a canon SD550 on my belt for a while, switching to the R6 wasn't bad, but switching to the TZ3 definitely makes my belt pouch bigger. Unfortunately, the batteries' form factor doesn't help, they are much thicker than wide, making your belt pouch even thicker as a result (usually the batteries sit in front of the camera in most belt pouches)
The absence of viewfinder is a problem when the camera freezes its picture while trying to auto focus on a moving object. I tried to take pictures of moving birds at full zoom, the picture froze for several seconds while the camera was trying to focus, and I entirely lost my moving subject and the pictures as a result. I would have been happy with a simple viewfinder with an aiming cross, even if it didn't go through the lens.
Update : there is continuous autofocus option doesn't prevent freezes altogether, but may help. The other gotcha is some autofocus modes are actually documented to freeze the picture (notably the H 3 area focus mode, while the 9 point mode doesn't seem to hang much or at all). I still miss the viewfinder, but it makes its absence more bearable.
It's also sad that the LCD is of questionable quality. It needs a special mode to be visible from high angles (i.e. holding the camera above your head) where the R6 and canon LCDs just work all the time from all angles. Overall, the TZ3 LCD just didn't seem as good compared to the other ones I've used. It's usable enough though.
I'm disappointed that the camera doesn't let you zoom at all during movies. They should really have allowed use of the very quiet optical zoom, or at least some digital resolution based zoom.
For night pictures, while the camera did somewhat decent shots, but forces you to select specific night scene modes depending on the shutter speed you want (that's unfortunate and non intuitive). Once you figured out how to use the scene modes, you can get decent night pictures and long shutter modes of 15 to 60 seconds allow for quite nice night pictures .
During low light situations, the 200 to 800 ISO modes are usable, but somewhat noisy and clearly more noisy than the R6 as you can see in this picture gallery .
All this said, the 10x optical zoom is good, and you can get up to 15x if you are willing to downgrade your resolution to 3Mpix, but it's awkward: you can't just keep zooming in like you can on the R6. Picture quality at 10x zoom is pretty good for a camera this size though, you can check them out . For that matter, I didn't take any pictures outside where the lighting was all wrong, or the picture blurry.
Flash pictures looked ok, and the flash also recharges in about 5 seconds. The camera makes that fact clear by turning the screen off, likely to divert more power to the flash. It's both a nice idea, but also a bit annoying when you're trying to keep a subject in your screen on a camera that doesn't have a viewfinder.

A few other random noteworthy things about the camera: it has a nice dual picture review mode (where you can view side by side any two pictures you took, and compare them), it has an exposure bracketing mode where it'll take 3 pictures at different EV values and leave you with hopefully one good one, it has a clipboard which is basically an internal memory for a few low res pictures like maybe road signs, or a map you saw on a wall, and it can extract a single picture from a movie (although at a silly 1920x1080 resolution that is about 6x bigger than the actual frame resolution and is therefore digitally blown up), but it has a nicer option to create a picture with 9 frames of a movie to show a stop motion scene.
The last important thing you need to be aware of: my original review listed several things that I thought the camera couldn't do because those options were absent in the list of manual options. It turns out that Panasonic has unfortunately decided that some of the options would only be available in the scene modes.
You need to use a scene mode to:

take a picture with more than 1/2sec shutter speed (night mode lets you go up to 8 seconds, but it will decide for you how long is enough, you can't set it yourself). Then, beyond 8 seconds, you have the starry sky mode which lets you pick 15, 30, or 60 seconds
The camera has a potentially nice (even if super grainy) 3200 ISO mode. I'd rather have a super grainy picture that's not blurry and I'm happy that it's there. I'm unhappy that they had to hide it in a scene mode, outside of which you cannot use it.
The infinite distance focus that I think is missing, might be in a couple of scene modes without being documented. Again, why? Just make it a simple manual option to chose from.

If you would like a longer review, you can read this Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ2 and DMC-TZ3 dpreview / Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 dcrp review and list of specs , list of specs2

Summary

Pros:

10x zoom with a poor orientation downsize zoom
orientation sensor
during movies, camera adjusts for lighting
Zoom is very quiet and with a reasonable speed.
cool even if mostly useless jitter measurement screen (shows how much you are moving the camera and how much your subject is moving)
$200 underwater housing
view by date calendar
Decent macro capability
option to resize and trim pictures after they were taken.
dual picture view/review mode
3200 ISO mode (very grainy as expected though)
Exposure bracketing mode (takes 3 pictures with different EVs) like the R6
clipboard could potentially be useful to some
While battery life isn't great, a power save mode lets you shut off the LCD while the flash is recharging

Cons:

No viewfinder and screen hangs while autofocus happens, so you cannot follow a moving target at full zoom until the camera is ready to take the shot (typically it means you'll miss it)
a little big for compact camera, especially compared to the R6
on top of the someone large form factor, the batteries are too thick, which makes even more of a bulge on your belt carrying pouch. The R6 batteries are much more convenient size-wise.
No Zoom during videos, which is sad considering that optical zoom is quiet
Zoom with resolution downsize is clumsy compared to the R6 (you need to manually downsize the resolution before you can zoom more)
LCD viewing angle and quality is poor, it requires 3 LCD settings as a result and there's all poorer than the R6's unique LCD setting.
No manual focus.
I couldn't find a way to set the focus infinite mode, which be useful when taking pictures of planes in the sky (you don't need the autofocus to waste time and maybe mess up). Maybe the scenery mode helps, the manual doesn't make it clear.
Noticeably more noisy than R6 at 200, 400, and 800 ISO
No stich assist
No standard mini USB connector, but some custom connector. Come on, the camera isn't small, you could have fit a small usb connector on it (this is as silly as a big brick phone putting a super small microSD card when it could have fit an entire compact flash card, and a normal SD card without sweating)
no USB2? What is wrong with you Panasonic? But then again, since you put a stupid custom plug that I won't be carrying an otherwise yet other custom cable for, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore. I'll just copy the pictures from the SD card directly. Still, that's sad!

First, feel free to review all the comparative pictures I've taken on them, you can decide for yourself.
The batteries on the DMC are a bit bigger, but don't last any longer. Considering that the Ricoh R6 actually ships with a battery smaller than the slot it can fit in and comes with larger upgrades, it should have better battery life than the DMC TZ3 with an extended battery.
The Ricoh's high ISO pictures looked a bit better overall.
Macro pictures were slightly better on the R6, but the TZ3 was a close enough second so that both will work fine for your typical macro pictures.
I liked the rolling selector on the TZ3, it was quicker to select options on the TZ3 than the R6 with fewer buttons.
While both cameras had a quick picture review option, the R6 would not show the shutter speed or the ISO after a picture was taken. I found this to be a problem when taking pictures in auto-hi ISO mode, and not knowing how high the ISO had been pushed.
As already mentioned the zoom is a bit better on the TZ3, but the camera is also larger. Now, coming to image quality, I wish I had more details to give you, I'm not saying that pictures taken from the Ricoh R6 are routinely bad, I'm just saying that I saw a few pictures that worried me: A picture taken indoors close to the subject in a well lit environment with flash, cannot be blurry. If I take two such pictures in a row, and they are both blurry, that is a problem. A few outside pictures that were blurry for no good reason that I could find also worried me. I'm not a professional photographer, but I've taken about 40,000 digital pictures in the last 8 years, and rarely in the automatic mode. I can't promise that I didn't do anything wrong with the R6, but at least I gave it my best shot and I felt it let me down a few times where it shouldn't have.

I really wanted to have liked the Caplio R6, for its size and its cool features, but first the lack of orientation sensor, and then those few pictures of questionable quality, were enough to turn me off (I also couldn't find a diving/underwater housing for it, although one may show up sooner or later, there was none that I could find).
While it's true that the camera is bigger, I feel that the pictures were a little bit better, especially in high zoom situations, and call me silly but I didn't want to rotate my pictures by hand. Sorry Ricoh, but that's your fault.

I still think that both cameras are the best choices today. If you can live without an orientation sensor, and aren't as picky as me on picture quality in all cases (I've had canons for many years, and they were slow to take pictures, they got me used to good pictures, even from a small camera), the Ricoh Caplio R6 is a nice camera with a very good zoom for its size.
Now, if you want a diving housing, auto-rotated pictures, a 10X zoom instead of 7x, and pretty good picture quality for its size, then the Panasonic DMC TZ3 is likely what you want.
I hope this helps you, good luck finding the right camera for you, and feel free to tell your salespeople from Ricoh/Panasonic/Canon other what features you'd like and what they're missing.
While I can't help you with your individual camera, if you have found factual errors or clear omissions in this page, feel free to contact me (you can also send me a quick thanks if the 10 or so hours I spent on it were useful to you and link to this page if you think it'll be useful to others)

π 2007-05-12 01:01 in Aquariums

See more images for Monterey Bay Aquarium

π 2007-05-07 01:01 in Clubbing

See more images for Where's Waldo?

π 2007-05-06 23:04 by Merlin in Family

My mom came over to visit for a couple of days, and funny thing is that my brother came for work a few days later.
On Saturday, I took her for a bay tour flight. We flew up to San Francisco, and looked around from the sky, came back through the Golden Gate, and flew to Half Moon Bay where we stopped for lunch.
It took a quick flight (20mn) to head home after that.

( more pictures here , thanks to Jennifer for those)

Sunday, I took her to skyline (up pagemill) in the two seater, and we looked at the Bay and the Ocean from there, before coming back down around woodside. My mom ended up not likely the curvy roads as much as I did :)

( more pictures here )

After that, we went to check out the nesting birds at Baylands near Palo Alto airport.

( more pictures here )

π 2007-05-04 08:34 by Merlin in Public

In March, Comcast disconnected my cable internet service, ultimately due to a problem about overusage (too much "unlimited" data used). While they were hard to get a hold of (or at least someone who had any clue what was happening), you eventually have to call a number where they make you feel you are a criminal, and they won't talk to you: you have to leave a number on your answering machine and hope they call you back while you are able to pick up (and leave you shutoff for as long as it takes). Luckily, I had my cell phone with me when they called me back in the evening and explained "you used too much data in February, and got disconnected as a result".
Ok, great, never mind that unlimited is not unlimited, they were likely correct about the data usage (400GB in a month) so I fixed the problem (mostly an rsync backup script that was doing something wrong and using at 20-40x the amount of bandwidth it should have). Their representative said "you have one month to fix it and we'll resume monitoring and shut you down if it happens again". This was March 14th.
About 6 weeks later, in early April, they shut me down again with no warning or call. I call back after going through the useless 1st level support who wanted me to reconfigure my windows DHCP settings and then said I shouldn't be trying to use the service if I had linux, and I eventually talked to their security staff who said "you had an overusage for March again, so we shut you down for good this time"
Me: "Mmmh, you warned me on March 14th, I couldn't fix anything that happened before you warned me, but fixed it after that date"
Him: "You had an overusage for the second month in a row, we had to shut you down, it's our policy"
Me: "Why don't you look at my usage numbers after you warned me and I fixed it"
Him: "We don't have those numbers, we only have all of March"
Me: "But you know March was almost half over before you warned me, and I had no way to go back in time and make that go away"
Him: "Sorry, it's our policy"
Me: "So, what's the point of warning people if you don't give them a chance to fix the problem. What about the one month grace period your collegue told me about"
Him: "There isn't any grace period, sorry"
Me: "So there was nothing I could do then"
Him: "In your case, I guess not, sorry"

Putting aside the unlimited which obviously not unlimited, it's pretty pathetic that while Comcast tries to do the right thing by warning you and giving you a chance to fix an overusage problem, their braindead-ness and refusal to follow basic logic, causes them to shut you down before you can actually fix the problem.
Good job, comcast!
Verdict: "Sorry, you can't be our customer for 1 year". Considering how they work, I'm not sure I want to be their customer at all ever again.

Until they fix their warning system to match logging cycles, or honor the one month grace period they promised me, and then pretended they never had, I can see how they're going to get many other people shut down that way.
If comcast is actually meaning to give their customers a chance to fix a usage over an arbitrary limit they won't disclose, they have some serious fixing to do, starting by not putting their customers in the criminal/DMCA pile that their regular support folks are not even allowed to help.