bridges

If i were an architecture student, my thesis would be to design a number of bridges for third world countries. Would give me a reason to travel to a variety of places at my leisure, since i'd have to travel by my own means in order to study the land and surrounding area.

Christmas in Peru

The last Ann Arbor Christmas Eve that i remember was the night i walked around town until shortly past midnight - the streets were cold and dead. As i returned home, a car pulled up next to me and a young man inside asked me if i wanted a blowjob. Without breaking my stride, I responded, "no thank you", and continued on my way.

Christmas in Peru is a little different. The streets were still very lively when we drove home from my grandmother's house at 2am, and are still noisy as i write this. One thing latinos always do on time is Christmas; the moment the clock turns to 12am, fireworks explode (less after recent disasters led to strict fireworks laws in various countries) and hugs and presents are shared all around. The rest of the 25th is left for relaxation and recovery.

Mountains

We went to Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world. The deepest is a few hundred km away, Cotahuasi Canyon, but would take at least a day to get there, provided the road is actually passable. Colca Canyon is famous for its farmland views and the possibility of sighting the Andean Condor, one of the largest birds in the world. The drive from Lima to Chivay (in Colca Canyon) is rather nice: sandstorms, 1000m drops, winding roads with plenty of switchbacks, falling rocks, gutted dirt roads, lots of dust, steep climbs, views of altiplanos, vicuñas and the other andean dromedaries, ichu, etc, etc. Oh, supposedly the highest sand dune in the world is along that path, just outside of Nazca.

There's nothing like the air at 4000m. I'd like to own a hotel and bar up in Chivay, i bet it'll start doing very, very good business up there in a couple years.

Also close to Nazca (the place mainly famed for its lines, like the one on my arm) is a 1700 year old aqueduct, still in use. I got to crawl through part of it - it is too low to stand up in and very narrow, probably much like the tunnels the Viet Cong built during the Vietnam War. These Nazca were quite smart; one reason the aqueduct is still in use is that it uses redundant supplies of water: some coming from the closest river and some coming from the mountain springs. More redundancy is built in for the water to areate - the aqueduct itself runs underground (the area gets quite hot and dry), with entrances every few meters. These entrances are spiralled in different directions so that any way the wind blows, air will blow into the well and provide oxygen for the water.

Driving in Peru

My father paid $33 for 6.7 gallons of gas, roughly $4.90/gallon.

Driving here is worse than Rome, which is worse than Boston, which is worse than New York. About 5% of the vehicles here don't use their lights at night. Lanes and lights are suggestions. There are three methods of letting people know they are about to hit you: flashing your lights, creating sound (horn or other variet of squeals, yelps, twirly noises), and swerving in their direction. There aren't many bikes or motos, not like Rome or Phnom Penh or Amsterdam. Some parts of town have covered trikes, like the tuk-tuks in Bangkok, but they are forbidden from travelling in other parts. For the most part people go in the right direction down the road, not like Cambodia. The roads are severely torn up in spots, watch out for people swerving to avoid those. Buses are plentiful, all sizes, and apparently random (read the sign in front, and know your map). Most of the cars are sedan or smaller, not as small as Rome, some pickup trucks and fewer SUV's. There are many, many taxis on the roads, more than anywhere i've seen.

Vacation Time

Supposedly i've been on vacation since Wednesday, yet i've logged almost as many work hours as i have vacation hours. I don't mind - i enjoy my work and it keeps my mind someplace where i feel i'm doing something halfway worthwhile.

In the hours that i don't work, i get to read. Tonight i also visited and ate with my abuelita at her house, along with my father and uncle. We then went over to see one of my aunt's - she recently opened an internet shop in her garage, a nice little place with 10 computers set up for use. In 6 hours my mother arrives in town and in around 12 we head for Arequipa, and, eventually, the world's second deepest canyon and then the deepest canyon, if i can convince them of it. The air at 4000m; i'm looking forward to it.

Arrived in Lima

Flew to Lima earlier today.

I checked my mail from the Dallas airport and saw that one of my more important servers had crashed (it also came back up ok, total downtime of maybe 20 minutes, if even). Is it a coincidence that i also happened to be reading about the H.F. Harlow "the Nature of Love" study - the one which determined that creatures need the physical proximity of a comfortable figure in order to work properly?

I was the last person through immigration, and arrived at my father's place around 3:15am. I logged into my machine at WCC and have been working ever since. This is my vacation!

I've reached the point in my sleep deprivation pattern where i am feeling wavy as my mind starts to black out every now and then. Time to pull over to the side of the road and run around a bit, that should buy me another hour of driving time (or another good near-death story).

Situation & Perspective

If you knew more about my life then you'd understand why it was relevant that a certain someone happened upon me today, and why the comments about that from other certain someones are relevant. As is, i could reveal those and not have them mean anything. How do i capture what i was reading, add that to what i had been feeling, mix in what i had been doing, and only then touch it up with desire, impact, and actuality, and still end up with a digestible story? I'm no English major; some stories and events of my life will only exist within the realm of personal reality. Otherwise, all our blogs are but words in the ether to the majority of people, like, you know what i mean?

Other stories exist outside the realm of situation and perspective, or require such little situation and perspective that the story is easily relayed in a couple paragraphs (how my brother taught me mistrust is one such story).

Perhaps some day aspects of all the stories i am unable to fully convey will melt their way into one giant, perfect story. Perhaps i'll say reality is how we remember it and how it affects us; science is what actually happened.

I'm no scientist, but one day i'd like to be a badass storyteller.

Will to Work

Every night when 2am rolls around i get a desire to head to work. It's late, i should be sleeping, i'm going to wake up in 5 hours no matter what, but i'd like to head to work right now, even if it's just so i can sleep on my office floor for a couple hours, wake up and type. To a degree it's escapist (deal with work instead of the rest of my life) but also it's invigorating to try to do good work when really tired, drunk, or otherwise less than fully abled.

To know that i can still ramble off solutions to problems even when asleep is rather refreshing. The first time i realised this i was a few beers into a conversation with Michael Anne - Nil called be up with some work problem. I rambled off "type in [long strings of commands], does it say [error codes]? Ok, do this: [longer strings of commands]. Is it working again? Good, e-mail [relevant person] and let them know what happened, thanks." Michael Anne was staring at me, amazed that i could recall such random (and most likely strange-sounding) strings at the bar, i too realised that i must know my job pretty well to have been that sure with Nil, and ever since have enjoyed such challenges. I'm sure it helps that i keep remembering the look on her face; she's a great woman and truly a best friend.

Depressive solutions

Once every 3 or 4 hours i become frustrated with everything. Usually it's not so wretched that i become non-functional, but sometimes it is. Over the years i've learned various things i can do to overcome this depression, such as sleeping, starving and drinking. Sleep isn't always possible, starving takes too long for results, and drinking has some serious drawbacks. There are a few other activities that work predictably well, and some of them are non-hazardous to my health as well. One of these activities is taking apart computer hard drives.

Joe brought me an ancient 10mb disk drive today. It's one of the really, really old cases about the size of two cd drives. Three large, thick platters, brown instead of the shiny metallic in today's drives, circuitry that was designed to need patch cables and bent pins, and a head drive mechanism that i've never seen before. Was quite fun to take apart.

Another of those activities is finding ways to bypass security measures. We've recently installed keycard access on some of the doors. The inside, secure area has sensors which detect movement and unlock the door upon detection. Is it possible to set off the detector from the outside? This would open the door from the outside and security would see it as someone on the inside leaving. As i started to fool around with the door, a number of other people gathered around me, helping out, including my boss, the head of the IS dept. We weren't successful, but only spent an hour experimenting with the mechanism by throwing objects towards the sensor and slipping cardboard underneath the door, and didn't actually look up the specs on the device. Soon enough, though, i plan on proving that our security measures are detrimental.

shirt update, work, alternate reality

3 hours pathing out the original screen capture plus 2 hours fine tuning the image, and i have a final image of the shirt ready for printing. That link leads to a smaller version, but if you compare that smaller version to the link in the previous post, you'll see a difference in the sharpness (hair isn't filled in, i'm debating leaving it white in the final print, there are already so many colours that need to get done, and the image i'm working off of is about 5 times as big). I don't have enough materials to make the screens just yet, though, and i might have to order them, so it might be another week before i begin the laborious process of transfering ink onto shirt, but it'll be so worth it...

Last night i gave a tour of the server room for one of the compsec classes, kept me here a bit late. This morning got to do it again for the unix admin class. Kind of hoarse now, having to talk for hours over the roar of the HVAC and servers is something i'm not so used to.

Spent too much work time looking through the CIA World Factbook , one of my favourite pasttimes. If i could write, i'd write a book in which UofM (approx 50k students, $3.8 billion total revenue) invades Belize (68k available military manpower, $18 million military expenditure) and forms the Republic of the University of Michigan, or in which Bill Gates (net worth: $48 billion) hires 6 million Chinese men for one year (GDP per capita: $5k, total cost of $30 billion), spends $10 billion to equip them, invades North Korea (~6 million available manpower, $5 billion military expenditure), uses his remaining $8 billion to rebuild the country afterwards, and is hailed as the greatest US patriot ever for taking out one of the Axis of Evil countries- i'm sure either would be a best seller.
Thinking about war in terms of raw numbers reminds me of The Fog of War : in one part Robert McNamara describes more efficiently bombing Japan during WWII while numbers fall from planes in vintage footage - quite a disturbing scene.

New T-Shirt (wip)

I'm bored at work and so have started up again on a side-project of mine: making this t-shirt a reality. It's from the Blame it on Lisa Simpsons Episode, and there are CafePress alternatives for this shirt, but i don't care for industrial iron-on quality in a shirt that i consider important - screenprinting is the only way to go.