alex chiang: web 6.0

One of the last things that Phil suggested I do was this really cool walk up Mt. Fox, near the Fox glacier. Sounded good to me, so he printed off a b&w topo for me, and bade Wendy and him adieu.

A few hours later, I arrived at the Fox glacier village, filled out an intentions form at the Department of Conservation (DOC), and drove back out to the trailhead.

My plan was to walk up Mt. Fox, bivy on the ridge leading up to Mt. Craig, tag Craig in the morning, and then return to the car. Having returned all the stuff Wendy and Phil had lent me and a desire to travel somewhat on the lighter side, I basically had my bivy sack, sleeping bag, food, and camera.

Deliberately, I decided not to bring the one man tent, since it was heavy and bulky, and as I had no stove, only had cold food like canned tuna (and chocolate :).

I quickly blasted up the trailhead and just as quickly, immediately lost the trail. Now for those people who have never walked in New Zealand, let me just say that the trails (well, called “tracks” in their parlance) are not really anything like what we have in the States, and this being a not highly trafficked trail meant that it was more overgrown than normal.

Literally two minutes after starting, I found myself faffing about and writhing around in dense undergrowth. For ten minutes, I thrashed around until I finally found a triangle marking the track.

The poison track.

You see, the Kiwis use plastic orange triangles to mark the track meant for humans, and they use both blue and pink triangles to mark the tracks where they lay out poison traps to kill off the possums and stoats so as to give the native birds a chance to live.

The poison tracks are way bushier than the human tracks, so I knew I was in a bad way. Frustated and feeling stupid,, I finally pulled out the topo, and slapped myself across the face for being so dumb. Don’t cross the river, dummy! D’oh!

Ok, that problem solved, I basically had to fight my way all the way back to the start and tried to keep a better eye on the orange triangles. Returning back to the initial point of confusion, I was … still confused. For the life of me, I really couldn’t find the next happy orange triangle, so I made another guess, and luckily, due to my finely honed mountaineering instinct (or the fact that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while), saw a flash of orange … after more bushwhacking.

Seriously, this track was third class jungleering, at multiple points having to climb straight up 6 and 7 foot high root formations to keep going. I estimate that the majority of this track at 60% or steeper grade.

What would make things better? A game! I started playing a game where I would give myself a point every time I got concerned about getting seriously lost and not being able to find my way either up or down. Well, the point was only scored after experiencing those feelings and then successfully finding the next blessed orange triangle.

At this point in my trip, I was actually back in hiking shape, and was able to actually make decent progress. The guidebook author suggested that it would take 2 hours of “climbing through the beech forest before gaining the ridge” and it took me about 1:45 of writhing up slippery roots, muddy rocks, huge mossy trees, and scoring points, so that’s not too shabby.

Finally, I reached the trig point (a white tower thingy used for surveying), and breathed a sigh of relief. “A ha!” I thought — no more bushwhacking! Yay!

Well, kinda. See, there were these 6 foot high tussock grasses completely growing and reaching across the trail. Normally not a problem, but when a giant cloud is sitting on top of the mountain, and further when one recalls that clouds are made of water and observes the gentle mist condensing on the huge grasses, well, simply walking through the giant grasses means one is going to end up as soaked and wet as if it were actually raining.

So much for the “fine weather” report from the DOC.

I kept at it for about another half K and maybe another 50 vertical metres, and while i found the track to be extremely easygoing, I was completely wet wet wet.

Maybe I shouldn’t have started my endeavour at 4:20 pm. Oopsie.

The astute reader will now deduct that it was 6:30 pm or thereabouts, and darkfall was going to happen at 8:45 or so. It was scheduled to be another hour or so to the Mt. Fox summit, but the huge cloud simply wasn’t lifting.

I was at a decision point — keep on trucking or retreat? The factors for consideration:

• all of the clothing I was wearing was wet
• my sleeping bag and vest (for warmth) were down
• my long pants (dry) were cotton, but I did have a polypro base layer long sleeve top
• I had no way to make a fire
• no tent, only a bivy sack, which wouldn’t have been so great in a real rain
• the descent was going to take at least another two hours, probably longer due to a sore and achy knee
• I hate retreating

Well, it seems that I have learned something in my old age. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I made the decision to turn around.

Two and a half miserable hours later, I was back at the car and reading the LP for hostel recommendations.

Now realize that I like to spin a good yarn, and I like to make myself look and sound kinda bumbly because let’s face it, that kind of writing is much more interesting, but for those of you who might be wondering about my decision making skills, here was how I decided to attempt this walk in the first place:

• The DOC projected “fine weather” for several days, and there was a huge high pressure system parked off the west coast; at no time did it actually ever precipitate on the ground
• I was actually quite dry in the forest, even though it was somewhat wet and muddy. It wasn’t until walking through the tussock grass clumps near the ridgeline that I got soaked (and the description didn’t really mention anything about the grass)
• the cloud buildup on the mountain was actually a common afternoon occurrence and normally lifts in the evenings; this particular cloud sat there for another 36 hours
• I was fit (knee notwithstanding), so I knew timewise, I could do it in less than the projected time (total time projected at 8-12 hours for just Mt. Fox; at my pace, it would have been 6 hrs total), and starting off at 4pm or so wasn’t actually that unreasonable

So you see, I’m not 100% stupid, let’s call it just 80% or so, and leave it at that. In any case, I ran away so that I can blog about a successful trip in the future. :)

cheers.

I bought an OLPC XO through the G1G1 program for several reasons, among them my theory that the requirements and use case of a travelling backpacker and developing nation child might be pretty similar.

This is my field report after three weeks in Australia and New Zealand.

I appreciated the ruggedness due to sealed keyboard, sealed I/O ports, and no moving parts. Made me feel confident when shoving it into my daypack and lugging it around hostels, bus stations, etc. Not having to worry constantly about a disk head crash was pretty nice.

The LCD’s sunlight mode actually came in rather handy quite often, as I commonly sat outside at a coffee shop enjoying my short black (aka espresso for the Americans) and the internets simultaneously.

I rarely used the XO in ebook / tablet configuration, although I did try once. I downloaded Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python in pdf format, but couldn’t figure out how to get the interface to recognize it as an e-book. I ended up searching through the filesystem for the other pdfs on the disk and sticking my download in the same directory. I had to munge the HTML file to get a link to appear in the XO’s “library”. There’s gotta be an easier way, but I couldn’t figure it out.

The power consumption was a mixed story. Simply suspending the XO leaves the wireless on (this is by design) and I found that all the packet flinging really decreased the useful life of the battery. Doing a full shutdown was much better to conserve batt-life across sessions, but the XO takes a really long time to shutdown/boot. Bleah. I did attempt to use the dimmest possible LCD setting whenever possible, and that obviously helped increase batt-life. Doing a full recharge on the battery (when plugged in, duh) seemed to take quite a long time, but I was frequently “topping off” whenever I could, so that didn’t really matter.

The control key on my original XO had a defect and was stuck, but Jim Gettys was nice enough to just swap me a new one at LCA, and the replacement has been fine thus far. I can actually type at a decent rate (maybe 50-60 wpm vs my normal 90+ wpm), but it should be noted that I have nimble Asian fingers. ;)

The handle allowed me to quickly and blindly grope my XO out of my bag so that the TSA could helpfully scan it and keep our skies safer.

Ok, enough of the hardware, on to the software! Although I did install Debian on my XO, along the way I made the decision to stay entirely in Sugar to see what 99.9% of OLPC users would be experiencing.

The mechanism to pick a wifi network to connect to was dead simple. Heaps better than the piece of crap network manager that Ubuntu ships.

Unsurprisingly, much of my time was spent in the browser app (not much use for TamTam or Record or whatever ;), and as a technologist, I was frustrated with the primitive browser interface (note that website rendering was fine as the layout engine is gecko-based). No tabbed interface, no way to block ads, and my inability to understand the bookmarks were my main gripes. Now, I understand the KISS principle, so for kids, I say keep the existing browser. However, it would be great if a slightly better browser app was available too. Minimally, it would have to have tabs and better bookmarks; ad-blocking would just be a plus.

I also spent a lot of time in the console, ssh’ing both to my personal account and to my work account (had to manually find a tsocks rpm and install it to get to the HP net). Only two virtual terminals are enabled by default; I would have liked more, but was afraid to mess with the settings while on the road, so that one will have to wait until I get home.

So the software experience was decent for me; I didn’t push the system too hard and stayed away from youtube and other blingy websites, but Facebook works just fine. :)

And finally, the intangibles. I found that people everywhere were completely intrigued by my XO and wanted to touch it and talk about it. I used those opportunities to evangelize the OLPC program and people were pretty receptive. A bunch of other backpackers could immediately see the utility of the XO in their travels, but alas, I don’t think anyone ran out and bought one after talking to me.

In conclusion, I’d give the OLPC XO a 7/10 as a backpacker’s laptop, losing points on the browser and power issues during suspend.

Edit: most of the browser woes can be fixed by installing Opera, which is actually quite damn nice. Color me impressed. Check out these links:

• Make the OLPC useful
• Cat Moran’s OLPC tips

Also, I forgot to mention that just about every New Zealand blog entry I wrote was done on my XO. :)

One of my many weird personality quirks is that I like to eat at McDonald’s in every new country that I visit. Hey, since American “culture” is our biggest export, I figure I may as well check in on it and see how it’s doing in other countries…

First up, the mcd’s at MEL. They were no longer serving the Aussie burger, much to my disappointment, but they did have a tandoori chicken wrap! How odd. The flavor of the chicken was actually quite adequate, but there was a lot of disgusting mayo in there too. Blech.

Today, I dined at a combination BP petrol station / mcd’s in Wellington, NZ, and of course, I got the Kiwi burger, which is essentially a burger with a fried egg and a huge slice of pickled beet, which is perhaps the oddest combination of flavors I’ve had thus far in my experiments. Not being a huge fan of beets to begin with, I must say this was not my favorite burger. But if you like beets, I suppose it’d be good.

These are added to my list of other burgers I’ve eaten: the McRosti in Switzerland (a burger with basically a hashbrown on top, which is supposed to represent rosti potatoes) and a McPalta in Peru, which is a burger with avocado. Yum.

In Mexico, I ate some weird refried bean, cheese, and jalapeno pepper combination served on top of english muffin halves for breakfast food. Surprisingly, not too shabby.

One thing I really appreciate is getting proper ketchup while out of the country. I’m not a heavy ketchup user to begin with, but when I do use it, I’ve found that I really like the Heinz recipe. Other countries tend to add too much sugar or do other things that make the ketchup taste weird. Thanks to the McDonald’s corporation for going through the effort to spread good American ketchup across the world.

When you find kindred spirits vibrating along the same superstring in our cosmic universe, life becomes a Miles Davis milkshake. Falling back in the groove with Wendy and Philip was smoother than apple pie.

With open arms, huge smiles, and glasses of fine wines endemic to the greater Tasman region, they welcomed me into their home and without skipping a beat, started sending me on little missions.

“Of course go check out Milford Sound, but we reckon there’s some good climbing and walking on the way back.”

“You might like Cascade Saddle, heaps o’ good tramping in the Matukituki, Dart, and Rees valleys.”

“Views from Mt. Fox might be pretty amazing.”

Multiple days, tens of Ks, hundreds of photos, and thousands of vertical metres later; with achey creaky knees, itchy insect bites, reeking shoes, dorky farmer’s tan, and one tiny blister, I’m smiling.

Life is good here in the N-Zed and leaving is hard.

Reluctantly rapidly, wending my way up the west, cursing the arrow of time; my only consolation comes from a whispered MacArthurian promise to myself.

/ac

Howdy folks,

A quick email just to let y’all know I’m still tramping around NZ. Past few days have seen some hiking, climbing, and goggling at the landscapes.

I’m off in a bit to do some more tramping, but here is a very quick photo dump, or “ode to my ego” as I like to call it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chizang/sets/72157603895800127/

Off to dinner. Details within the fortnight. ;)

cheers,

/ac

So it turns that Kiwi immigration laws aren’t so conducive to a devil-may-care attitude to travel.

During my checkin attempt at MEL, the ticket agent asked for my return flight information. My response of “Um, I only bought a one-way ticket because I don’t know when and where I plan on flying out of” resulted in the forced purchase of a return ticket at the counter. Whoopsie.

And it turns out when the border official at CHC asks you, “what are your plans for the next three weeks?”, that is not the proper time nor place to impart your romantic notions of wanderlust upon said official. Trust me, leading off with “I’m not really sure yet” and a charming smile… well, my smile must not be as dazzling as I’d thought, and only results in alarm and concern in exactly the one person on the planet at the moment who you are trying very hard not to alarm. My bad, New Zealand.

In the end, they let me in anyhow, so +1 Alex. Whoo.

Alas, the struggle to travel unencumbered and carefree is foregone. In what is becoming a disturbing trend in my holiday travels, I’ve hired a car with which to zoom around the island.

Yes, someone is going to give a 1000 kilo metallic missile to the guy who was complaining about not even being able to figure out how to walk properly in this country. Good thing New Zealand doesn’t read my blog.

My time in Christchurch was short but idyllic, having spent it with my hostel roommates, an unlikely combination of two French, two Germans, and YT, yammering away in the international language of globe-ish, wandering around the city generally enjoying life, and wrapping it up at an even unlikelier Chinese restaurant called “Luck” where the owners were from Taiwan, and I was able to manage enough Chinese to order a fantastic meal that included delish veggies from their own garden. Not too shabby.

The small bitey beastie population of Christchurch seem to have a penchant for eating Chinese too and have discovered a new favorite hangout, namely me.

Now I turn my face south and aim towards Queenstown to meet up with some old climbing friends I met on the slopes of the Peruvian Andes so many years ago. After that, who knows, so please don’t tell the New Zealand Department of Immigrations.

Spent the past few days wandering around Melbourne. After checking out of the expensive but crappy hotel that HP paid for, found a real gem of a hostel, called the Nunnery. Resplendant with religious relics, but I’m still undecided as to whether they’re ironic or genuine. Regardless, ’twas a good find.

One day, spent a few hours wandering around the Royal Botannical Gardens (everything is more magnificent when prefixed with “royal”). Another day was whiled away at the local rock gym (thought process: climbers are cool, I’ll go where they hang out — “Hi! I’m an American and I don’t want to invade your country! Wanna be friends?”). The few hours remaining ere boarding the flight to CHC were used to explore the Fitzroy section of Melbourne (far and away coolest part of the city; wish I’d discovered it earlier).

An observation: the shortcut approach to figuring out the cool part of the city (aka, where all the interesting people hang out) is to find the district highest in density of such things as all day brekky cafes and used book stores. Record shops and vintage clothing stores appear as corollaries, but aren’t as strong a predictor. If that sounds like too much work, just ask where the gay district is. Seriously. It works.

Your Aussie colloquialism for the day: AC/DC is referred to as “akka dakka”. I’m McLovin’ it.

Allow me to indulge in a rant. Dear annoying American guy from Brooklyn: you are American. You have an American accent. It’s just the way it is, so get used to it. When you speak in a confused jumbled mealy-mouthed mishmash of Aussie, English, Irish, Brooklyn, Welsh, and Moron, everyone can tell. The people you’re trying to impress can hear the differences between individual flats in London, nevermind the bitches’ brew of mangled Commonwealth you’ve decided to puke out at any given moment. This PSA has been brought to you by the department of “shut the hell up, you blithering idiot”.

Howdy friends and family!

First, an apology to the non-nerds out there (aka, 98% of you)
who were attempting to glean something interesting out of my blog
for the past week. Sorry about the extreme nerd overload, but on
the other hand, that’s actually the world I live in so be thankful
that I attempt to be interesting when interfacing with normals.

You get a pony (or a puppy, as Rusty would say). Stay tuned to
the rest of the email for deets. (Ooh! A teaser!)

In any case, the first week in Jaustralia is finally wrapping up,
much to the relief of YT. It’s been a simultaneously energizing
and exhausting week, and these days, I’m finding that I fall
asleep within 45 seconds of hitting the pillow and require
approximately a pint of coffee throughout the day to keep
operating.

There are some seriously smart people here, and I’ve heard some
really interesting, deep ideas, which is exciting. I’m reminded
of Quad Day during University, which is when every single club on
campus comes to the central quad to show off how cool they are,
and all the freshmen join every single club, only to realize that
there’s no possible way to spread onesself so thinly. So because
I can learn from my mistakes, I’m going to spend some time in the
next few weeks thinking about which of the myriad of jawesome
projects to join up with.

And some random assorted tidbits that’ve been knocking about my
brain recently…

Jaustralia day was lovely; heaps and heaps of Jaussies walking
around Sydney with all sorts of Jaussie flags, tattoos, stickers,
clothing, and the like. YT wanted to be part of the fun too, so I
picked up a pair of Jaussie flag boxer briefs. TMI? Never!

Hung out in Melbourne’s Federation Square to watch the men’s
final of the Jaustralian Open, which was grand. Sitting with
hundreds of other people on the ground watching the big screen
was big fun.

I’m still having somewhat of a tough time adjusting to the whole
“drive on the left” concept. I’ve managed to figure out the
correct direction to look when first crossing a street, but when
I get to the median, I get confused and forget which way to look,
so to the locals, it seems as if a normal person starts crossing
the street only to be possessed midway by a schizoid paranoid
freak (page 648 of the DSM IV) who frantically examines every
single direction before taking another step.

And unsurprisingly if you think about it, the convention is for
people to *walk* on the left too, which has been *much* harder to
adjust to. Walking on the right seems to be firmly wedged into my
brain and I’m constantly walking into people and mumbling
apologies. Sorry Jaustralians! I’m apparently stupid!

On the plus side, I have figured out how to eat Vegemite. Turns
out that you’re *not* supposed to just eat a dollop of it off a
spoon (*that* particular experiment results in thinking that
you’d just bitten into a rabid racoon and praying for death).
Rather, the solution is obvious in retrospect. One word: butter.

In other words, you actually slather butter on a piece of toast
(quantity: a metric barrel of monkeys’ worth), and then spread
the thinnest possible layer of Vegemite on top that you can
manage. I’ve actually seen locals depositing individual Vegemite
atoms with an electron microscope. Anything more than a sheen is
asking for dead racoons in your mouth. But the end result is
actually pretty good, so go figure.

To wrap it all up, my time here in Jaustralia is coming to a
close. I’ve got a few days left in Melbourne, and then I’ve got a
one-way ticket to Christchurch, New Zealand. Blue skies, blue
water, no agenda. I’d not have it any other way.

Oh! Your pony! I almost forgot! I’ve managed to dump a few pics,
although woefully, editing RAW images in Linux is nowhere near as
good as my Mac, so the quality is a bit lower than I’d like, but
tough cookie. Ya gets what ya pays.

These’ll probably be the only pics you’ll see for a while, so
enjoy.

• lca2008 geekery
• lca2008 scenery

cheers,

/ac

Whoops, one last nerdlinger entry, and that’s just to give a quick report on Open Day. This year, we (HP) had a few ideas on how to make Open Day better (from our perspective), namely, giving away schwag and actually bringing a product running Linux. Good ideas, right?

On the first front, for some reason, the free shirts we wanted to give out ended up in Honolulu, so that was somewhat of a bust. On the plus side, we did have two HP r927 cameras to raffle away, which worked out really well.

As for the Linux part, we brought an HP MediaVault 2100, which is a cool little NAS running a 2.6.12 kernel and some oldish busybox installation. I’d spent about half an hour in Fort Collins grilling the developers about two weeks before departure, and had a nice little cheat sheet to help talk it up. Most importantly, I convinced the developer that he wanted to give me the root password to the machine because our audience at Open Day would care about it. And it all would have been great except…

It turns out that the 2100 can only do wired ethernet. It also turns out that we were situated at a table where the courageous conference organizers could not run a cable. Solution? A quick ‘apt-get install dhcp’, and then carefully double-checking to make sure the daemon was bound only to my wired port (so as not to completely destroy the wireless network), and with a final bit of magic in that HP laptops have built-in crossover capabilities, the MediaVault was happily obtaining a DHCP address from my machine, and I could open a root console on my laptop. Voila!

The demo was actually a great hit, which was surprising to me, but it turns out if you let a bunch of Linux nerds poke around on a neat little piece of hardware and cat some procfs and sysfs entries, they’re happier than cats in a twine factory. It’s the digital equivalent of kicking the tyres (as my colleage tpot put it so eloquently); doesn’t actually prove much but it’s quite satisfying nonetheless. One enterprising fellow tried to write and build a hello world, but gcc was interacting weirdly with busybox and it didn’t quite work. Oh well.

In any case, Open Day 2008 was a whopping success and it was quite satisfying to see people walk away with a positive impression of HP and open source. Ok, now I’m done with the techno-babble. I promise.