Seattle

I was really impressed with Seattle.  I thought it was going to be a small town, but turned out to be quite a nice city.

Last Flight

The last flight for the Shuttle.  When I was a kid I remember seeing this plane in Edwards.  It's ironic to see the last flight over San Francisco, like the end of a era.

Printing Press

At the Mannheim technology museum they have this old and amazing printing press.

Winter

Living in California you end up missing a proper winter.

Photography with Binoculars

This was really fun, I took a old pair of Russian-Made binoculars and just put my point-and-shoot camera up to the eyepiece.

I really like the movie look of the vignetting.  I'm also amazing how sharp the image is.

Venice at Night

Visiting Venice is a amazing experience.  Visiting it at night is even better.

The best attractions are packed during the day, but what many people don't relise is that night the city is near a ghost town.  Only a few local and die-hard tourists remain.  And you get to enjoy the glamor all to yourself.

Guinness

There's no doubt, that when someone mentions Ireland, Guinness will flow.

Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain

Polish pilots played a important role in the Battle of Britain.  Before the Americans' entered the European war, the Poles were flying British Spitfires with small "Poland" insignia's on their fuselages.

The US Air Force brought in a much bigger force, their own planes and pilots.  After that, Polish contribution was mostly forgotten.  These planes are at the Duxford airport and museum where one can buy a ticket and fly in one.

Concorde

At the Sinsheim Technical Museum in Germany, one can visit the Concorde and also the Soviet version, the TU-144, also known as the Concordsky.

Both are amazing planes, both flew and both carried passengers   Even thought both programs were criticized for being too costly, it's still amazing to think that the US never have a super-sonic passenger aircraft.

Network installation for Commerzbank

I think this was one of the coolest networking projects I've worked on.  These new switches were undergoing firmware testing for the new Commerzbank tower in Frankfurt.  There were 100 Cisco 6500 switches and my job was to install firmware and software to do QA testings.  Basically a lot of scripting with multiple CF cards.

This was back in 2008, I'm sure these modules are sold as scrap on ebay now.

Outer Hebrides Islands

We are now watching the BBC TV series Coast and one episode was about the Outer Hebrides islands. Looks like an amazing place, with rough cliffs and the elements pounding them.

Ireland's coast was also quite amazing, even though I was not really impressed with the Cliffs of Moher.  To me they seemed a bit over-sold for American tourists.

Not impressed

Northern Ireland does have the Giant's Causeway, and when I first heard about it, we jumped in our car and drove up there.  This place I did enjoy and it's one of my favorite places on the Irish Island.

Now when we watched Coast, and they showed the Outer Hebrides, I also want to jump in my car and visit them!

What also amazed me is the wild-life, and the Puffin birds.  These guys live in caves on land, look like tropical birds, mate for life and can dive down to 60m underwater.  Amazing.

Proud little guy

The cures of mobile email communications

How often do you get an email from a coworker that is vague and pointless, only to see that the last line says: Send from my iPhone.

Really, are some emails that important that need to be answered quickly and can't wait till your at a real computer where proper research can be done to write a proper email?

I guess part of the problem is that the iPhone can't mark email.  SNMP/POP/IMAP (protocols used by email) don't have a provision for flagging messages.  Almost all email clients have this built it, but you can't share this little flag among clients.

Perhaps it's time to write an RFC to incorporate the flag feature into IMAP?

End of Dialects

After reading about how Apple's speech recognition is having problems, I was thinking that the because we don't have a uniform dialect or even language among humas to interact with technology, the technology is having problems understanding our commands.  One thing that I foresee is that people will start uniforming their speech to be compatible with computer speech recognition software.  Could this mean an end to speech dialects?

Computer have changes out lives a lot in the past 20 years.  Look at hand writing, typography and language.  50 years ago there were many more languages and regional dialects.  If someone needed to learn English it was because they were interested in British/American culture, not to interact with someone from Brazil.

You can see it also in typography, where older signs and other print media had interesting fonts.  Now days almost everything is in Helvetica, old German Fraktur script is pretty much dead and only left to WWII themes.

So I wonder if it will be the same with regional dialects in America's south or parts of the UK.  Will our speek all become hegemonized to a standard that computers will be happy with?

Fort Ross

One of the amazing and interesting chapters in California history is Fort Ross, located north of San Francisco, this fort was built by the Russian fur traders to supply food to Alaska.  When the fort was is use by the Russian traders, they did not have the same goal of colonization and converting the local population as the Spanish did with their Missions.  For this reason, not many people know about its existence.

The Russian River, located between Fort Ross and San Francisco was the unofficial border between the Spanish and Russian traders.

Russian supplies

Supplies from the Chinese traders

Workshop