Internet is becoming more and more polluted with junk-mail, people selling crap, and businesses which don't know their place on the net. They're all trying to make this wonderful place (i.e.: the net) in to hell (i.e.: real world). Internet should be viewed as a place of imagination, creativity, and most of all: fun. Internet is not some really advanced tool for searching for people to rip-off. It's about searching, and finding, things which are useful, helpful, and promote the sharing of ideas. This is what this site is striving to become.

Obama wants 28% corporate tax rate. Yey! If they really want to stimulate economy, they should make dividents tax free, and increase capital gains to perhaps 90%. Suddenly all corps will dramatically increase dividends and stop hoarding moneh.

- Alex; Wed Feb 22 08:20:06 EST 2012
February 22nd at wikipedia...

Eurozone approves new $173B bailout for Greece. Hmm... ``The finance ministers from the 17 nations that use the euro, known as the Eurogroup, gave Greece the funding it needs to avoid a potential default next month.'' Hmm... So ``17 nations'' generate $173B in their own bonds (borrow from "somewhere") lend the moneh to Greece so that Greece doesn't default on its own bonds? So who pays interest on the ``17 nations'' bonds? Hmm... the interest payments from Greece will just be applied towards that, no? So if Greece into more trouble, suddenly it's the ``17 nations'' that are on the hook for the $173B...and would have no choice either to default themselves, raise *their* taxes, or bailout Greece again.

Somehow I don't see this move as anything other than "digging a deep hole even deeper". Only ugly way to get out of this mess is to foregive the national debts... Only way that could happen if Greece defaults. And that would be "bad" for everyone... including Greece.

Solution: Eurozone comes up with some law that equires favorable treatment of bankrupt states, then lets Greece default. Pension funds and investors are hurt (and speculators who bought into Greece in the last year), Greece recovers quickly due to ``favorable treatment'' by Eurozone. Everyone learns a lesson of not betting your future on municipal bonds (virtually safe is NOT absolutely perfectly safe, like US bonds :-)

- Alex; Tue Feb 21 08:41:38 EST 2012

Continue to drive drive drive home.

Missed (dozed off) an exit, so ended up on a path that's ~2 hours longer than the shortest one.

The actual trip is a huge loop in the north east US (let me try google maps iframe thing):

View Larger Map

That's ~2100 miles on the map, and ~2300 miles on my odometer. I trust my odometer.

The way back was mostly driving and then more driving and then more driving. My non-scientific hunch is it's due to spin of the earth, it's easier to drive west-ward (since relative to the earth, you're slowing down), and harder to drive east-ward since relative to the earth, you have to speed up. (same goes for going north/south).

Got back in the evening... and then my brain turned off.

- Alex; 20120220

What I didn't realize when I set out on this short-planned road trip, was that Springer Mountain is not easy to reach. For one, it's in an area where my car GPS refuses to navigate---none of the roads within 50 miles of the mountain are in there (Toyota in-built GPS sucks, apparently).

So using my cellphone (with no service---driving to gas station with wifi, etc.) google maps plotted a route to the mountain. So drove on twisty mountain roads while loading cellphone for navigation... Yey.

But but but... then suddenly road goes gravel... then mud. Apparently Toyota GPS had a good sense of not wanting to drive over that. You're like 15 miles from the destination, and phone GPS tells me I'm still 2 hours away---and it was right!

So anyway, there's a forest service road that gets you close---it pretty much requires a 4wd car (it's been raining, so the steep dirt road up the mountain is a mud-slide). Google navigation (phone) seems to have been very brave indeed! Had a moment where the car was skidding and nearly skidded off the mountain... with literally inches to spare (even took a pic of the tracks in the mud... was driving *too* slow after that).

Anyways, at this point, all this mud driving I'm doing is at night, in the rain, on a mountain, in the mud. So I get to the trailhead, and... surprisingly, there are a few SUVs parked there. Decided to wait until dawn to hike Mt.Springer, so dozed off in the back of my 4runner.

Shortly before dawn, like at 5:30am-ish, woke up, ... why wait? Decided to start out on the hike. It will get light by the time I get there. No? Headlamp, 3 leters of water, warm clothing, everything on me, I set out.

So the whole of 15 minutes later, I was at the summit. And it doesn't get light for another hour or so. Yes, apparently the summit is only 0.9 miles away from the trialhead parking, and it's really an easy hike with no elevation gain, or anything. It's like a walk in a park... So took a few pix with flash, and headed back.

Since car gps refuses to navigate, and there's no internet connection for android navigation, pretty much was guessing my way out of this mess of a neighbourhood, with dirt roads, mountain roads, etc. Took sometime to find a road where car gps agreed to consider navigating.

Now onto Nashville, TN.

Apparently I came at a right time---right time to hit a major snow storm! First time I've experienced snow that sticks to windshield and refuses to come off. Normally, snow is dry, and doesn't stick to windshield. The wipers usually get the rain and any wet stuff. But this ``snow'' hit the windshield, and stuck---wipers went over it, not remove it. So within a minute or so windshield went opaque (that's on a highway). Everyone slowed down to ~20mph, probably trying to figure out how to clean the windshield on a highway.

Drove through Nashville... wasn't in the mood to stop.

Now onto Mammoth Cave National Park. This turned out to be pretty neat. Essentially it's a HUGE underground cave system. Unfortunately, you cannot explore stuff on your own, and have to take tours, that only happen once every few hours, and cost moneh.

Anyways, I get there at 1:20-ish, and the "general purpose historical tour" is at 1pm and 3pm... I don't feel like waiting for 3pm tour. So ask ranger what's there to do. And they say "well, you can take the 1pm tour"... Apparently, I've crossed into another timezone without realizing it---so it was 12:20-ish.

Went on the 1pm tour: which is a 2-mile, 2-hour walk underground in the cave. All bits of the cave are lighted (touristy), and you go with a group of *many* people, so that aspect sucks. There are a few crawly bits in the cave, when you're almost on all fours, and nearly the entire 2 hours I was afraid of bumping by head on the ceiling (I think all ceilings there are like 5'7-ish or something, so most folks just walk upright, but if you're a bit taller than that, you're walking with a crooked neck.

After the tour, you walk through a sponge mat filled with lysol and other stuff to kill any fungus that may have stuck to your boots. e.g. don't wear sandals to the cave!

Since I'm in Kentucky, I gotta eat some "local" KFC :-)

...and now, drive drive drive home.

- Alex; 20120219

So... a 3 day weekend... better do something as opposed to nutn. Mt.Washington weather still sux (it seems to go bad for the weekends, and seems ok during the week). Anyways, decided to go for a road trip in the opposite direction---to hike Springer Mountain, mostly, and to drive around in that part of the country.

Got out around midnight, and was by Gettysburg National Military Park by dawn. The park is pretty neat, more guns than I've ever seen in any single place.

Next stop, Shenandoah National Park, and southbound on the Skyline drive. Everything in the park is closed for the reason :-/.

Beyond Shenandoah, that Skyline drive continues, and is now called Blue Ridge Parkway...and it's "long" --- continues on for hundreds of miles. Much longer than Shenandoah itself. Took that south a few hundred miles, all the way to Natural Bridge.

Then it's off to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The few "towns" on the way to Smoky (such as Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, etc.) can best be described as amusement parks (with rides and everything!) than "towns". Heck, there's even a model of the Titanic (large kind).

The Great Smoky itself... sucks. Every national park I've visited so far has something special, on a national scale. Something that can only be seen in the park. E.g. Sequoia... has stuff that you can see only in Sequoia, the Death Valley is... well... Death Valley. National parks are usually very special places. Not so with Smoky. Well, perhaps locally, it's the best thing around, BUT, by that standard, they could've made Adirondack in NY a national park, or even Catskills, or Harriman State Park could've been a "national park". Heck, might as well if we're doing it for Great Smoky, no? Needless to say, I didn't find anything impressive in that park that warrants "national park" status---just a twisty road in an average forest. Would've been great for a "state park" :-)

And now, off to Mt.Springer...

- Alex; 20120218

Finally got around to package up SQLRunner. It's perhaps one of my better unknown productivity tools. I use it almost daily to do nearly everything related to databases. It's mostly impossible to figure out or appriciate without some sorta demo, so this release is mostly for folks whove seen it used and asked for it. Have fun folks :-)

- Alex; Tue Feb 14 22:44:22 EST 2012

Good article: Warren Buffett: Why stocks beat gold and bonds.

- Alex; Fri Feb 10 08:11:28 EST 2012

Java applets are dead. But... I need something to write mini demos in. So wrote a simple HTML5 bouncy experiment. If it doesn't work, try it in firefox. Essentially I'm porting my 3D mini-library written in Java (what my java applets are based on) to JavaScript...

Trivia: What happens when you use JDBC to insert over 2 billion (well, over 2^31) records into Postgres?... The JDBC driver blows up, since it uses parseInt to read status, and fails with number format execption when number of inserted records is greater than 2^31 (max value for Java "int").

- Alex; Wed Feb 8 01:10:10 EST 2012

Jobless rate drops to 8.3%. Hmm... Any increate is good news, obviously, but... wouldn't a better measure be: total payroll value? (e.g. salary * number of employees). E.g. you take 100k workers each at ~$50k/year each (~$50b payroll) fire them, and re-hire them in 12 months for ~$25k/year...and your unemployment number is unchanged, but your payroll value is half (and those same workers are now seriously struggling). It's pretty easy to find "a job" that pay nutn---it's the "well paid" jobs that aren't out there, and is the reason for high unemployment.

- Alex; Fri Feb 3 07:14:18 EST 2012

A bit of old news: Facebook files for $5 billion IPO. And no, I'm sure I'm not the only one on the planet who doesn't and never had a facebook account :-)

- Alex; Thu Feb 2 02:27:56 EST 2012

First day of class.

- Alex; 20120201

Eh, jet lag... can't wait for next vacation.

A coworker got tickets to visit the 9/11 memorial site, so went during lunch. I can't believe how much pointless security they got there. I mean, they make you take off your belt! I mean, it's a freaking park, what could anyone do in a park?

Besides the security, the fountains look nice, though perhaps in a slightly wrong spot from what I remember of where the buildings were... they put some other structure right smack in the middle of where the central fountain was, which messes up my perception of the place.

But yah, I think they should just do away with the security... e.g. it's no more dangerous place than the zuchini park (however you spell that) right next door.

- Alex; 20120131

Flight from Los Angeles back to JFK... yey!

And... that's all for the trip :-)

- Alex; 20120130

Discovered the waterslide at the hotel, and went so many times, that I lost count. That's amazing fun!

Then drove to Kahuku Unit of Volcano National Park (the HIDDEN entrance is at: 19.058183,-155.675247, and is only open on saturdays and sundays). You can drive offroad for about 6 miles to amazing grassy fields.

Then ate something called dragon fruit, and passion fruit, and relaxed until the flight... back to Los Angeles.

- Alex; 20120129

This is my Mauna Kea day; so after a short hot tub trip, drove to Mauna Kea, right in time for a weekend 1pm tour of the Keck telescope and summit.

So at 1pm, at visitor's center, they showed us a video about native Hawaiian culture thing, and how they're not fans of telescopes on their sacret land, etc., and an hour later, the convoy of about a dozen jeeps started up the mountain.

So here's the big moment: we arrive at Keck,...and walk in... into the "Visitor Center"... the *same* visitor center I went to two years ago, without any tour. Yes, that's right, you get to see Keck... from behind bars, and glass! You're in the building only in a sense that you're not outside, but you might as well be outside. Not sure why I went on this tour anyway. It's absolutely not worth it. Better would've been to just drive up the mountain myself.

Though... I did see Keck move... from behind the bars.

Anyways, after totally pointless tour, went on two hikes. First, went to visit Lake Waiau, and then hiked out to the Mauna Kea summit to watch the sunset.

After sunset, drove back to visitor's center to enjoy the astonomy thingies; some astronomy club was there with extra nerdy atmosphere, along with a music night of some native hawaiian singing.

Throughout my whole trip, I've been eating through the McDonalds free-big-mac-and-fries cupon booklet. So on the way back to hotel, got a bigmac :-)

- Alex; 20120128

Mr0ning hot tub. I guess we weren't drunk enough to go into the pool at night :-/

Now back to traveling the Big Island... The North West area... onto Waipio Valley.

Stupid me, set the GPS to end of Akoni Pule Hwy, which ends at a valley with a rather nice hike down. There's a black sand beach in the valley, with terrain very similar to one in Kalalau trail... though very very short (~20 min hike).

After correcting GPS to point to Waipio Valley, arrived at the 25% grade road down Waipio...and took my jeep wrangler down.

That was a very fun road to drive! (from wikipedia: ``...the steepest road of its length in the United States and possibly the world.''). After the very steep section, the road crosses a few streams---where front of my jeep started steaming (water wapor), and after yesterday's jeep fire on another island, it was a bit...amm... kwaizy.

Then decided to visit Kalapana, and walk the black sand beach there... and talk to the natives about lava flow (and no, it's not flowing).

Then... since I'm there, and everything, `one-last-time' to Jagger point to relax a bit, and then onto Kona Sheraton.

- Alex; 20120127

So there are a few other places on Kauai I wanted to visit, so without wasting time on sleep, decided to just go there. It's a long day ahead, might as well get an early start on it (them 5-hour energy drinks really work...back to back... for days at a time)

Drove to Waimea Canyon, spent a few hours there... trying to figure what's so interesting to see in the rain/fog. Apparently, nothing of interest is in that area (more on that in a few paragraphs). Well, granted there's nothing to see there in thick fog...

Then met up with friends (on a 4-door Jeep; more on that in a minute), and onto Polihale State Park... which is an amazing beach. Spent a few hours there. It was lightly raining, but that's fine...

And then... onto Koke'e State Park which was... never reached:

So here I am, driving on a hill in Waimea behind my friend's 4-door jeep, when I notice a bit of yellow under his car. Then that yellow gets a bit big... and smoky. I honk and flash brights... the jeep dies, and a minute or two later, is engulfed in flames. Luckily a friend of mine and his kid got out of the jeep just in time, with a few seconds to grab most of the belongings. The jeep became an inferno, and cremated a teddy bear! Tires blew one by one, and other parts kept poping out with small explosions.

As luck would have it, a tourist bus was passing, and was able to call the police/fire department (cellphone reception in that area sucks). After about 10 minutes, the fire department arrived, and in pouring rain, doused the car with water, and then some white foam.

All the while I was running around barefoot with a camera (I couldn't wear any footwear due to blisters from the hike).

It was a miracle nobody got hurt.

So there you have it... one day, you're driving along enjoying your vacation, the next minute you're jumping out of a flaming jeep, lucky to be alive.

Not much of travel after that... drove to airport, returned car, fly to Oahu, and back to Hilo.

Then drove to Jagger point `one-last-time', and onto Kona.... Sheraton hotel...with a water slide! Yey!

After the car thing, we all got a bit drunk (Jameson Irish Whiskey), and for first time in Hawaii, I got a good night's sleep.

- Alex; 20120126

Off on a flight from Hilo to Oahu, and from there, to Kauai.

Rented Dodge Charger, walmart to get Beef Jercky and water, and then off to Napali Coast, for the Kalalau hike. Yes, the 11-mile crazy-man trip.

Did I mention all the chickens on this island? They're everywhere!

And now, onto the 11-mile nightmare. The first 2 miles feel like 10. Yes, you're really are that tired after just the first 2. And then it gets worse. Much worse. There's like no safety net... Certain areas are doubly slippery, and... if you slip, you fall 1000 feet off the mountain. It's an amazing hike... though not sure I'm to ever doing it again.

On mile 7-9 somewhereish, fet a fellow hiker, who, after a short conversation, offered me a puff out of a glass pipe... after he hook a whiff out of it. Not sure what that was (crack? meth?), but... I suddenly decided not to camp outside in my hammock there at night. Then other hikers casually asked me if I had any papers to make joints... my guess, this is a great place to get away from the world and get high.

Anyways, it's getting dark, and I'm barely reaching the end. My initial plan was to spend the night there, then after encounters with other fellow hikers, my plan was to rest for a few hours and turn back around 3am-ish timeframe. However, when I got to the end, I just decided to turn around walk back immediately (after taking a few pix of course... in the dark though).

Surprisingly it felt safer to walk those clifs at night, 'cause... you can't see the bottom. So you don't know how far you'd fall if you slipped. E.g. safer!

Slipped and one leg went off the cliff, and landed on knee on 2nd leg. Meh. Good thing for friction, I guess.

So I'm walking in total darkness (well, headlamp) in the jungle, and I hear grunting noises of something big in the bushes. Then it's louder. There are MANY big things in the bushes. I'm a bit concerned that these aren't bears....though there shouldn't be bears in Hawaii.... should there?

A bit later, it turned out to be a bunch of wild hogs. And throughout the night, I ended up having a dozen or so encounters with them. You don't see'em during the day, but at night, they make use of the trail themselves... so I had to stomp and talk to myself (and them) to scare'em off [they're not really afraid of humans... it turns out].

Then there were frogs. Stupid frogs who sit on the trail, and make absolutely no reaction to anything. You stomp you foot near them, and they just continue on sitting. You shine light on them, and they just sit there. You nudge them with your foot, and they just push over, right themselves, and continue on sitting there. It took great effort not to step on any of them during the night.

This walk back was torture. It was hot, long, tiring, my backpack was super heavy (I carried 3 galons of water with me, since I forgot my waterfilter at home, and had to load up on water). I also stupidly carried all my "warm" clothing with me, thinking that it might be cold at night (nights on Big Island near volcano village get pretty chilly).

About 22 miles later, with no breaks, at 3:30-am-ish, 14 hours later (~7 hours each way), I arrived back at the car. I really think I'm the only crazy person to do that hike in one day. Ruined my feet big time, and could barely walk. Blisters on top of blisters.

So anyways, on the highway after the hike, the road is *covered* in frogs (or toads, whatever). Anyways, they're literally every few feet. Thousands of them. So I try honking, and flashing my lights at them, and they no move. So slowly, I roll car, and... they no move... and then I hear "squish"... "squish"... I speed up, and hear "squish, squish, squish, squish..." Yep, them stupid frogs. I really feel sorry about that... my car wasn't the first one there---there were tracks of dead frogs on the road... but it still feels wrong and weird to just drive over living things like that. Even if they are stupidly just sitting there.

And then all the roosters went off in the mr0ning... ALL of them! Everywhere.

- Alex; 20120125

Green sand beach day. After long trek over lava field yesterday, this short (~2miles one way) hike is a great walk-in-the-park :-)

Looked for USGA south point marker, but didn't find it.

Went to do Thursten lava tube (Volcano National Park)... all the way to the end, but... only the first section was open. Meh.

Discovered a pretty neat crater... Iki. Apparently I drove by it a dozen times, but never actually noticed how neat it looked. Took a hike to walk down through the middle of the crater.

Then off to Jagger to enjoy the yello/red lava glow that seems to only be visible at night.

Since it's not bed-time-yet, onto Mauna Kea to enjoy the astronomy stuff. To see the Orion Nebula, etc.

Found out that apparently there's a tour of Keck telescope every saturday and sunday at 1pm. This is something I definitely have to do. ``you get to go inside the telescope, and see it move''. Yah, definitely gotta do that.

- Alex; 20120124

On flight from LA to Kona, Hawaii; mostly sleep, 'cause haven't slept since Thursday night.

In Kona, rented 2-door Jeep, and drove to Hilo area (Volcano Village).

From there, to Volcano National Park, to see the glowing crater in the dark at Jagger point.

Then in a hope of seeing-lava-where-I-saw-it-last-year, to the end of Chain of Craters Road, and hiked out about 6 miles long the coast over a lava field.

Yes, there's still hot stuff there. Jumped off the lava a few times. Nothing "yellow" (only hot fuming dark/hard lava rock). Boots got a bit cut up.

After hiking back to car, picked up my hammock (I brought it with me for another hike), and went to the small palm-tree area near water (at end of chain of craters road). Strung up the hammock, and... slept for 3 hours.

Went to Jagger point again, stopping at every turnout along chain of craters road.

- Alex; 20120123

Fell asleep on the side of highway near Las Vegas, and later decided to skip Death Valley and simply drive to LA---warm up on the beach by Pacific Coast Highway.

After getting to LA, and realizing I still had about 6 hours before returning car, drove up ~3 hours north (and 3 hours back south) on the PCH, stopping along the way to enjoy the scenery and going for a walk on the beach.

- Alex; 20120122