MAY

15

2008

when i finally wrapped up the project in the early evening, it felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted from my shoulders, yet at the same token i didn't know what to do with my newly regained free time. i made some dinner, finally digging into some of that specially prepared ground beef i rolled yesterday. i enjoy a good burger every once in a while but there's just too much burger to go around. what even worse is i put a lot of garlic and onion, which taste great, but smells terrible for anyone who dares talk to me within the next few days.

whenever i have the chance to steal some free time, i like to fiddle around with the m0n0wall firewall server i've been trying to set up. i've been rummaging online looking for relevant documentation, but no single place has a complete set of easy to follow steps. i've managed to piece together some useful information from various different sources. the way i have it set up is the internet comes into my place through my cablemodem, which goes into a wireless router. one of the lines of the router goes to my bedroom into an ethernet hub. the m0n0wall machine is connected to the hub. i'm booting m0n0wall off of a cd-rom and using an usb thumb drive to save the configuration data.

i've only gotten as far as the console setup screen (access directly via keyboard and monitor connected to the firewall computer), where i got to assign which of the 2 ethernet port is for the WAN and the LAN. i connected the internet cable coming to the WAN port, and the connection going out to the ethernet hub. i then connected my laptop and my other computers to the hub and tried getting to the webGUI interface through a browser. that's where i hit a dead end. even when i connected the computer directly to the LAN output of the m0n0wall, i still couldn't get a signal.

then i read something about how the m0n0wall machine has to be in the same subnet as my other computers. so i changed the LAN ip address and set up the client address range. then from my wireless laptop i finally managed to gain access to the web interface when i entered the new LAN ip number. if all this sounds confusing and esoteric and technical, i feel the same way. i'm basically just playing around with the stuff, reconnecting and disconnecting, testing along the way. i know very little about networking, but hopefully through trial and error i'll manage to pick up some hands-on knowledge.

i'm still confused about the WAN LAN though. i could only see the web interface if the WAN cable was attached to the LAN output. it sort of doesn't make sense, kind of like having two dueling routers, each one with it's own DHCP server. i'm not even sure how my computers managed to see the internet amidst all this networking confusion. hopefully i can get my hands on a wireless router next week and set it up as a wireless access point (WAP). i could use the wifi router i have now, but i'm afraid to play around with the settings because everything works fine now and i don't want to screw up my own network while testing out the m0n0wall machine.

MAY

14

2008

even though i had some work to do, the weather was just too good to let it go to waste. so bruce and i took the subway this morning to the arnold arboretum to check out the blooming lilacs. i figured it'd be a short excursion, and then i could be back at home in a few hours to continue coding. it took us an hour to get to jamaica plain. the temperature hit the 70's underneath a canopy of clear blue sky. we could smell the arboretum before we even walked through the entrance. the place was actually more crowded than i thought. a lot of day care groups, noisy litters of toddlers accompanied by their chaperones. that group however was eclipsed by the senior citizens who were out in force, whether pushing strollers with attached oxygen tanks, or touring in mini buses. in fact, the road next to the lilac garden was almost like a parking lot for these senior citizen shuttle transports.

after the lilacs we wandered the arboretum some more, on the lookout for other flowering trees and bushes. of the noteworthy birds we saw, orioles were pretty common, although normally we'd just see them flying overhead, a flash of bright orange. there were these other birds, noisy, robin-sized: i thought they were some kind of thrush but turned out they were catbirds (they didn't sound like cats though).

the most interesting tree i saw was on the chinese path: a dove tree. i'd never seen one before but i knew they were very rare. their strange asymmetrical white flowers either resemble flutter doves or handkerchiefs. another thing i learned: they flower biannually, so if you don't go see them within the next few weeks, you're going to have to wait until 2010. i'll probably go back again next week and get some better photos.

we walked to the eastern edge of the arboretum, across south street onto blackwell path. a sign informed us that we were entering an "urban wild" area. this side was less manicured and trees didn't have identification tags. people probably only used it as a route on their bike path or a jogging circuit. in the sky we spotted a red-tailed hawk being mobbed by two aggressive starlings.

julie forgot to tell me she wasn't coming over for dinner tonight. earlier i'd gone to the supermarket and gotten ingredients to make some blue cheese burgers. it was for the best though: it meant i could work a little bit more (gasp!), didn't have to clean up the house, and get to watch the celtics-cavaliers game uninterrupted. a great game 5: celtics trailed throughout the first half, at one point down 13 points, hushing the fans at boston garden. when they came back out on the court in the second half though, they played with more intensity, attacking the basket, getting rebounds, and more importantly, finally making their shots. once the celtics got the lead, they never trailed again, although it got a little scary in the final few minutes when cleveland were just 2 possessions away from either tying it up or regaining the lead. celtics win, and now back to cleveland for game 6, where hopefully boston can finish the series.

although i had the burger patties ready, i wasn't very hungry tonight. could be because i had a filling late lunch of italian sausages on onion bagel. later i had more of the leftover sausages. i cook some burgers tomorrow night.

MAY

13

2008

i woke up earlier than usual and managed to go out for a run. wasn't able to go non-stop this time, started cramping up on my left side and had to walk it off. must remember to download some new songs into my mp3 player. the ones that i have have lost most of their inspirational qualities and i spend most of my run skipping songs.

a crazy day of computers. first, my father's dell laptop finally arrived, shipped to the cafe; i knew this because i was diligently tracking the package online. then my craig's list contact got in touch with me, said he was in the neighborhood and didn't mind delivering the used pc i was buying from him. i spent some time setting up the new machine. i discovered it was an AMD athlon as well, which meant i could replace the slower (600mhz) slot A CPU cartridge with my slightly faster AMD athlon (800mhz). my father dropped by briefly with the laptop and we set it up. i'd never used windows vista before, it's true what they say, it has some similarities to OS X (things like the gadgets, which are OS X widgets).

rest of the day i worked on a rush job project for SRM, due thursday.

later in the evening i made an emergency computer house call back at my parents' place, when my father couldn't figure out how to connect to their wifi network. fortunately it wasn't that cold (in the 50's) and i managed to make it there and back without freezing.

books that i've read (and reading) within the past 2 months:

a lot of asian history, i know. i actually didn't read shadow of the silk road or perfect spy. shadow seemed more like a pretentious travelogue than a factual history book. perfect spy i just didn't have time to read. out of all these books, the early chinese empires was the best but it's dense. i'm currently working on god machine, the story of helicopters.

MAY

12

2008

major earthquake in china, that was the breaking news saturating the air waves when i woke up this morning. nearly 10,000 people killed with the death toll rising. this after the burmese cyclone last week that might've killed more than 100,000 people in myanmar. so i'm watching television, and guess what story they cut to after the earthquake report? tornado in the midwest, 22 dead. i did a double take. 22 dead? for real? how does that even compare to tens of thousands dead in asia? maybe those in the midwest got off lucky. at least it wasn't 10,000 dead. or maybe the catastrophes in asia don't seem tragic enough, especially when there are so many dead, not compared to real folks in oklahoma and missouri. it seemed a little weird, that's all. high death tolls in china is nothing new though: because of overpopulation, any small natural disaster can result in death tolls many magnitudes greater than here in the US. funniest thing i heard about the earthquake: one reporter noted that the epicenter was close to a panda refuge. "let's hope they're okay," he said. i think so long as the pandas stay away from structurally-unsafe high rises, they'll be fine in their bamboo forests.

monday is my weakest day of the week. i seem to suffer from monday-blindness, always overlooking this particular day and thinking that it's tuesday instead. monday for me doesn't have the same resonance that it does for folks who actually have to work in an office (not counting home office). nevertheless, i still carry some of that vestigial monday blues, the imaginary pains of my phantom work limb.

i woke up early this morning with a todo list. first, visit the cambridge recycling department and ask about buying a rain water collector. second, get some gasoline ($3.59/gallon at the local hess). third, visit the library to return some books and get some new ones. all this before it started raining, which according to the online doppler radar was probably an hour away, hovering ominously over rhode island and southern massachusetts. i made it back home before i got soaked. feeling lucky, i went out again to the dollar store to get some kleenex and toilet paper. i bumped into my neighbor renee who was throwing away boxes of mildewy books from her basement. i grabbed a vegetarian cookbook and a fungus biology text book.

i should've gone out for a run but i got lazy and rationalized that it was too cold and windy and would probably start raining at any moment. however, it didn't rain the entire day, even though the sky was dramatically overcasted throughout the day.

my father came over in the afternoon, his car packed with old computers. we were going to test the machines, patch one up that could actually run from all the various broken parts. this machine i would then convert to a glorified network router capable of running a captive portal. one machine had been stripped by the son of a family friend (suhan), maybe sold for parts on ebay. it was missing all sorts of key components that we managed to replace with the exception of the processor fan, which was broken and the machine couldn't start without one (never mind it was also missing a serial keyboard). the other machine was newer (even though i bought it used many years ago for a now outrageous $220) but the AMD chip was dead for some strange reason. in the end we couldn't assemble a working pc so i contacted one of my local craig's list vendors who was getting rid of an old computer for $20. i actually got in touch with him yesterday about buying the machine, but then told him i wasn't interested when he called me. so i felt kind of sheepish writing him again asking if the pc was still available. fortunately he was a nice guy about it and said i could have it.

later i went with my father to the supermarket where the only thing i got was a case of root beer. two somerville hipsters were blocking the aisle and i had to interrupt their conversation in order to get to my drinks. they were giving me some playful attitude but i was in such a hurry i didn't have time to banter.

elsewhere, in a story unrelated to my life, both my father and sister called me today to let me know what the dog did this morning. apparently a squirrel had gotten into my parents' house last night. since nobody was home at the time, they didn't want to leave the windows open (to let the squirrel out) for fear of burglars. when they finally returned home, they couldn't find the squirrel anywhere, and they figured it was probably hiding in the sun room and they could try letting it out again tomorrow morning. fast forward to this morning. my mother was actually the first person to see it, when she was getting ready for work. at first she thought the dog was just playing with one of her many stuffed chew toys, but then my mother saw the blood and realized the dog had actually caught the squirrel. not only that, but she also wouldn't let it go and would eventually eat the whole thing. later, my father saw the dog catch a mouse in the backyard and eat it too. apparently huskies aren't that far removed from wolves and still retain a strong hunting (and killing and eating) instinct when it comes to small animals. nevertheless, they make bad guard dogs because they're not wary of humans. unless the intruder happens to be a squirrel. or a mouse. what happens if it's a neighbor's cat?

finally tonight, i watched game 4 of the celtics vs. cavaliers matchup. to their credit, the celtics kept the game close throughout the 4 quarters but they just couldn't close it out and the cavaliers ended up winning. now the series is tied at 2-2, going back to boston. for a team that had a pretty good road record, the celtics haven't won a single away game in the playoffs. this is great for ratings and the advertisers but in the long term bodes badly for boston. if they almost lost to the hawks and now seem to have problems getting past the cavaliers, this is not going to end well. who to blame? fire doc rivers. he's an awful coach. in the snippets of coaching i hear him make during the games, he seems to be always berating his players. nothing's ever good for enough for him, and the players are probably motivated to play well just so they don't get a lecture for him. for my money, former celtics coach jim o'brien was the best. under his tutelage, the celtics made it as far as the eastern conference in 2002. the fact that he was fired is proof that danny ainge is a moron.

MAY

11

2008

i was on the fence about checking out the cambridge may fair until alisa got in touch with me. i met her along with a classmate down at harvard square. for whatever reason (the rain postponed date, mother day's, ongoing construction work) the turnout seemed much less than in years past. the event seems like a glorified place for vendors to sell stuff (handicrafts, food, local services). my favorite part is the chalk murals, although nothing really stood out. after we walked around a bit i called it a day and went home.

my parents and sister came over to my place for dinner. i was making barbecue chicken pizza. i went to market basket this morning to get some ingredients and made some pizza dough earlier with the bread machine. the pizza came out better than expect, but the crust seemed a little dry and stale for some reason, the opposite of my last homemade pizza, where the crust was too soft.

MAY

10

2008

my godmother's son alex came over in the late afternoon, said he wanted to check out my tamron 17-50/2.8 lens, but i think he really wanted to come over to show me the new lenses he bought. seems like every few weeks he's buying another one. i hope he doesn't fall into that trap where he spends all his time buying equipment instead of actually going out and taking photos.

sort of an abbreviated saturday. i meant to wake up early to go check out the fort point open studios, but ended up sleeping in late. i had enough art from last weekend to last me for the rest of the month. i had a small bowl of apple cinnamon oatmeal for lunch while watching the indiana jones marathon on the USA network. for dinner i finally baked the sweet potatoes that'd been lying on my kitchen counter for the past few months along with some miso soup. celtics ending up losing to the cavaliers. can boston win on the road during this playoff season?

MAY

09

2008

i was going to my second EMAWD meeting. brian told me michael was going back to SRM but i already knew, and had suspected for months even. the turnout was low, which just meant more cookies for me in the conference room. matt gave a demonstration where he built a flex application within an hour. it was a rebus generation, parsing RSS feeds and replacing words with search result images.

why i really wanted to take the bike was because i wanted to get some food in chinatown. the motorcycle would allow me to get back home and eat before my food got cold. but since i had such a big lunch, i wasn't very hungry. instead, after the meeting, i wandered the financial district a little bit. i deposited a check at the bank of america headquarter. outside i was taking photos of building across the street, 75 federal, an amazingly intricate example of art deco architecture. a bank security guard actually questioned me, asked what i was doing, and then said something i interpreted as slightly threatening: "so if i ever see these photos in a magazine, i'll know who took them."

i kept wandering, walked up milk street. did you know: benjamin franklin is so a part of philadelphia, but actually he was born right here in boston. in downtown crossing, i saw that the old filene's building was being demolished. looking around, i noticed a lot of empty store fronts. gone are the heydays when downtown crossing used to be a great place to go shopping. nowadays, i guess everything's being done online.

finally finished hellgate with my cabalist character. there was a bug in the ending though: after killing off 5 bosses and then dispatching the uberboss, i still couldn't get the payoff movie. i need to take a break from hellgate for a while, wean myself off of that addiction with another (hopefully more productive) addiction.

for dinner i made some noodles and added it to the leftover beef stew my parents left for my last night. i watched battlestar while i ate. the show seems to be getting better, but maybe because things are starting to happen now. the cylons are behaving even more humanlike now. i heard a rumor that scifi might split this final season into two halves just to milk it even more.

tonight i was doing a lot of research on captive portals. that is, enabling an open wifi connection but when somebody connects to my network it redirects them to a specific portal page first. i can then either make them provide a username and password or let them in for free. there's many different choices, from m0n0wall and pfSense (using an old pc modified to be a smart router) to wifidog (hack the router's firmware in combination with an authorization server). i have to get my hands on an old computer first though, so it looks like i'm back to craig's list trolling.

MAY

08

2008

i set out some tomatoes and tomatillo outside today, in an attempt to harden then up before transplanting. i'm hedging my bets because i'm only volunteering the less healthy seedlings first; that way if these don't survive the transplant, i still have some healthier plants for when the weather does get better. for lunch i had a bacon & egg english muffin sandwich, first rendering out a quarter cup of bacon fat with the foreman grille. in the afternoon i went to chinatown with my father. when we got back, my parents came over to my place for dinner (noodles). my mother was complaining about her allergies. i gave her some sudafed and some nasal spray but they didn't seem to help. although it rained briefly earlier this morning, the weather for the rest of the day was dry and windy, with tree pollen coating everything.

the highlight of the evening was game 2 between the celtics and the cavaliers; boston beat cleveland in a resounding victory. game 3 saturday night. my great uncle - a lifelong celtics fan - doesn't believe celtics will win the championship this year. i think he's going to be surprised!

MAY

07

2008

with the new gps giving us directions, i went with my father to the supermarket. preloaded with a database of all the local businesses, we selected "market basket, somerville avenue". it plotted out a recommended route but we took an alternate path via a shortcut instead. the great thing about these navigation gps is as soon as you deviate from the recommended course, it quickly recalculates a new course based on your current location. it's amazingly accurate and pretty fast in figuring out a new set of directions. it really is like having an all-knowing co-pilot who tells you where to turn and how far to drive. you can even change the voices, male or female, and a host of accents and nationalities, like british or australian, or even french or spanish. the nuvi 650 model will even read the street names, instead of just a possibly-ambiguous "make a right turn." it's so smart about directions that it almost seems alive.

once i returned home i went out for a run before lunch since i like to run on an empty stomach. for the first time since i started running again i managed to do my 3-mile loop without stopping. today was another picture perfect day with temperature in the 70's. i saw a few harvard students sunbathing on the grass along the bank of the charles river.

i didn't eat very much for lunch since i knew julie would be coming over to make dinner; just two slices of pound cake and a glass of milk. julie came by in the evening with her sandwich press to make some panini sandwiches. not sure what it was called, but it involved strips of rotisserie chicken and something called chipotle mayonnaise. it was pretty good and i could've easily have a few more although julie only made one each. she said she caught a cold and went home early before she could see the red sox tie up the game and take the lead only to be beaten by the detroit tigers in a walk-off victory. even though the red sox lost, it was a great game nevertheless and to be fair, the tigers had already lost their previous two games against the sox.

MAY

06

2008

jesse came to pick me up early this morning at 5:45am to go birdwatching at the mt.auburn cemetery. we tried going last year but at the last minute she discovered her car wouldn't start because somebody had stolen the spark plugs out of the engine. we had much better luck this time around. we parked at the star market parking lot and got to the cemetery entrance by 6am, with a large group of people already waiting outside. "wait for her!" a taxicab driver shouted as a woman got out of the cab right when we all started filing inside.

i've been to a few of these early morning birding sessions last spring, and today was particularly crowded, with about a few dozen people showing up, each armed with a pair of binoculars. the group leader for the day was a novice and not a particularly good one at that. this may have something to do with the fact that there was just too many people, and amateur birders were drowned out by the more expert watchers who from prior experience could easily pick out a bird hiding in a tree or identify one from song alone while the newbies (like us) were left clueless. also because of the all the rain we received last week and now all the sun this week, many of the trees were blooming so it was more difficult to see the birds. all and all didn't see as many birds as i did last year, despite my promises to jesse. i've come to realize that i just like birds; compared to these hardcore watchers, who love birds and want to marry it. if i ever go back again, i think i rather do my own thing instead of tagging along with the group.

we left around 8am. since jesse had to go to newton in about an hour (during peak rush hour), i volunteered to walk home instead on this sunny morning. i was overdressed and by the time i had it to the cafe halfway down huron avenue, i had already worked up a sweat. i thought my mother would be working but it just was my aunt. i continued walking all the way back to my place. in all it took about 45 minutes. i immediately took a shower.

2 hours later at 11am i met up with bruce (back for the summer) for some naturing. i decided last night we'd be visiting noanet woods in dover. it's one of my favorite places ever since i first discovered it back in 2005, and i've visited it a few times since then (1 2 3 4). before i left, julie came over to borrow my keyboard after hers died when she spilled some drink on it.

it was warm enough that i just had on my t-shirt. there were a few flying bugs but they didn't seem to be mosquitoes so i didn't have to spray even though i was carrying precautionary repellent. we were hoping to see some wildflowers but we were too early by a week or two. we didn't see any migrating birds (like the warblers) but i was more preoccupied with looking for things on the ground.

the most exciting find of the day was a grey tree frog. i'd only seen one one other time before, at moose hill in 2004.

when i first saw the frog i thought it was just a rock (about 2 inches long). what caught my attention was the fact that it was glistening, and a few seconds later i realized it was actually a frog, a grey tree frog no less. it looked dead, and we couldn't see any breathing. but when bruce nudged it with a twig, it spread out its two front legs, as if to brace itself. it was probably just sunning, trying to stay warm. or maybe it just recently emerged from the ground (normally they'd be up in the trees, hence the name).

we climbed to the top of noanet peak to have lunch. there was nobody up there and the only people we saw were some joggers and dogwalkers earlier. for a brief moment we saw something flying very high up in the air, probably a vulture.

back in cambridge, i was going to go on a grocery run but instead went to the cafe, where the new garmin nuvi 650 gps had arrived. i played with it a little bit. the route it picked from the cafe back to my place was one that i normally don't take and seemed sort of circuitous. but after i selected "fastest route" to "shorted route", it picked a new route very similar to the shortcut i usually take. when asked to navigate from my place to my parents' place, it managed to give me the exact route i take, so i was pretty impressed.

after a shower i watched some television on the couch. mostly election primary coverage focusing on indiana and north carolina. i felt really tired, both from waking up so early but also from carrying my heavy camera all day. it wasn't long before i fell asleep. i woke up before it got dark to close the blinds. i then alternated between the celtics cavaliers game and more election coverage. a good night all around: obama won north carolina by 14%, and lost to hillary in indiana by only 2% to make that contest nearly a tie. the pundits mostly agreed that clinton is now probably out the race in all but name, and debated when she would make her withdrawal official. the celtics ended up beating the cavs in game 1 with a narrow victory and a thrilling final few minutes. and the red sox won too but who's got time for baseball when i have NBA fever?