Sun Alumni Blogs

I haven't been doing much reading lately but today I finished One Man's Wilderness- An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith from the Journals and Photographs of Richard Proenneke

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In 1968 Richard Proenneke built himself a cabin on lake in Alaska 40 air miles from the nearest people. One Man's Wilderness is the story of the building of the cabin and his first 16 months living there.  The book was originally published in 1973. I read the 1999 edition. It is a wonderful book which makes me almost want to move to Alaska and live in the wilderness. The wonderful color pictures are worth enjoying even if you  don't read the text of the book.But the story is wonderful and engaging too. It is a great book.

According to Wikipedia, Proenneke lived in the cabin pretty much full time most of the next 30 years, coming to the lower 48 states only occasionally to visit family. I didn't read the introduction very carefully so as I was reading I assumed that he was in his 30s. Actually he was 52 when he built the cabin and lived there until he was 82. He died in 2003 at he age of 86. What an inspiration!

Here is a great quote from the book. Words to live by.

"I have often thought about what I would do out here if I were stricken with a serious illness. if I broke a leg, cut myself badly, or had an attack of appendicitis. Almost as quickly as the thought came, I dismissed it. Why worry about something that isn't? Worrying about something that might happen is not a healthy pastime. A man's a fool to live his life under a shadow like that. Maybe that's how an ulcer begins."

I decided to try this footwear as physical therapy. My left arch is high but weak, resulting in a flat foot. I also have scoliosis that seems to be causing some sciatic pain in my left leg.


Here's a few tips, if you plan to buy a pair of the vibram FiveFingers;
  • Go to a well stocked store so you can try some different models/styles and sizes. My ideal size was a 44, which was close to my cycling road shoe size (45). If they don't have the style you want, then at least you'll know your size for an online order.
  • I was told that your toes should just touch the front of the toe-pockets. You don't want them so loose that your toes pop out while running or too tight either.
  • I got the KSO's, but looking back, the Sprint or Flow might be a better choice for first-timers. Why? The KSO has a single top strap that loops through the back, but it's stitched at the back of the heal, making it a little harder to place on the foot. Where as the Sprint and Flow have separate top and heal straps, so they should be a little easier to get on.
I kept my first run short, I did about 1-1/2 miles on a treadmill, so that I could control the pace. My stride is still pretty much heal-toe, but I could feel times when I was making a more balance footfall. I didn't notice any unusual pain after the run, but I could tell that I was using calve and ankle muscles that I hadn't used in a while. I'm planning to take it slow at first, so I'll do my running every other day.
Rodger Bower
Our family has been so preoccupied with the insanity of the global warmists that we have not taken a good look at the oncoming threat of 20 years of global cooling until very recently.

The latest series of snow storms have dumped several feet of snow on our property in Floyd VA and we have been fortunate to have our neighbor Rodger Bower to dig us out each time we became snowbound.

Because we have been getting mixed snow and rain, the snow becomes so heavy that it is very difficult to shovel. If we did not have access to someone like Rodger and his tractor, we would have been confined to the house for weeks at a time. The snow was deep enough that the usually reliable all wheel drive Subaru could not get us out to the plowed road.

Bird Feeding We have been very fortunate this year, but I am beginning to wonder what will happen when the winters are significantly longer and colder. Are we going to be able to handle months and months of deep snow drifts and 10 degree weather?

We have been able, with the help of friends and family, to amass a store of firewood that was many times larger than what we gathered in previous years, but we have burned our supply faster than in any previous year.

We will need to cut and split another few cords of wood to make it through to warmer weather. Fortunately, we have a supply of standing dead trees that can be easily dropped and rendered into usable firewood. I can see several years supply, but I wonder what will happen when the several years of colder weather turn into a decade or two?

Our backup heating is electrical baseboards which work like a charm but are quite expensive and are used as a last resort. I shudder to think what out heating bills would look like if we had propane or electrical heat.

Global cooling will seriously impact our growing seasons. Our micro garden (foot square gardening) was barely satisfactory because of the short growing season. Local farmers were also affected and did not have the crop yields they had last year. If we are in for a long siege of shorter growing seasons, I am sure that we will soon be constructing greenhouses to make the most of the cooler summers to come.

AR-RPeople are resourceful when pressed to the wall and I think we will see many changes in how we heat our homes, how we grow food, and how we live during the colder years to come.

 Our clothing styles may even change as time goes on. In May, we will change from our winter mukluks to lightweight summer mukluks. You read it here first...

Simon Phipps often feeds me tidbits — intellectual rather than gustatory — having to do with nutrition. Recently he recommended I watch a lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF in August of last year, called Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

This lecture is really better described as a call to action with biochemistry diagrams. Lustig argues that fructose is an evil that’s been behind the rise in obesity and metabolic syndrome of the last few decades; that soda, juice, and sports drinks loaded with sucrose or HFCS are the single biggest factor in childhood obesity (his specialty); and that we had better start treating fructose as the chronic hepatotoxin it is and stay the heck away from it. I agree.

The lecture series is called Current Controversies in Nutrition: Letting Science Be the Guide. Well, yeah — what other guide have they been using all this time, for goodness’ sake? You know, I started my carbgrrl.com series admitting a worry about looking like a loon…no more. Richard Nikoley, primal blogger extraordinaire, often talks about Modern Ignorance and the ways in which supposed experts tie themselves in knots because of broken preconceptions about stuff we used to understand instinctively. (Richard blogged this lecture, and also another I’ll touch on here sometime soon…) It sure looks like Lustig is emerging from a cave of institutional ignorance, blinking — and pissed off. Good.

Lustig’s obsession with fructose probably doesn’t give an accurate picture of all the factors in play. He seems to think glucose is just fine to consume in whatever quantity — it’s the “energy of life”, he says (around 1:26:00) — and so I suspect he’s misguided about the evils of spiking one’s insulin over and over, in addition to spiking one’s triglycerides. Remember that the glucose that feeds our brains and bodies can be made from practically any old thing lying around, as I’ve discussed before. And in GCBC, (The Great) Gary Taubes discusses the pernicious effects of eating fructose and glucose in combination:

Because sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55) are both effectively half glucose and half fructose, they offer the worst of both sugars. The fructose will stimulate the liver to produce triglycerides, while the glucose will stimulate insulin secretion. And the glucose-induced insulin response in turn will prompt the liver to secrete even more triglycerides than it would from the fructose alone, while the insulin will also elevate blood pressure apart from the effect of fructose. [GCBC, Ch. 12, p. 201]

I have a couple of other quibbles (I’m not sure Lustig’s lust for fiber is entirely warranted), but it’s absolutely worth watching if you care about this stuff.

 Adventure sidecar classes (S/TEP) and tours in the Pacific Northwest 2010, from Adventure Sidecar.

image from adventuresidecar.comNovice S/TEP class the following weekends:
    May 14, 15 & 16
    June 11, 12 & 13
    August 27, 28 & 29

These classes cover basic sidecar motorcycle operation and riding skills with and without a passenger. This is what you need to learn to corner with confidence cope with the unexpected challenges that traffic and road conditions present.

The registration fee is $260. Class is limited to a maximum of 12 students. Sidecars are available for use in the Novice Class at no extra charge.

Sidecar Skills Mini Tour Weekend Package - $550 - Sidecars are not included in price

July 16~18, 2010 Western Columbia Gorge Mini Tour

September 17~19, 2010 Eastern Columbia Gorge Mini Tour

You can bring your own rig or rent one of theirs. There will only be a very limited number of rental sidecars available and the mini tour will be kept to a small group to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience.

The Sidecar Skills Mini Tour is geared towards folks that already have some experience or training. Friday evening and Saturday morning is the Advanced S/TEP class. They will brush up on technique and work towards perfection during the Advanced S/TEP class, then apply it during the rides Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. The routes will be a mixture of highway and secondary roads with some gravel and dirt roads as well, touring the spectacular Columbia River Gorge and surrounding mountains.

Visit Adventure Sidecar.




Introduction
In my previous post, I introduced version 1.0.0 of Cowley, a Hudson plugin for IBM's Rational Team Concert (RTC) SCM system. I'd love for the plugin to be a simple one-click install like many others in the ecosystem, but unfortunately it currently relies on the RTC Build System Toolkit which is freely available, but isn't in any public Maven repositories. This means, in order to simply use the plugin, or to build it from source, you need to do a little Maven / Ant / Jar magic. This post in the series will tell you how.

Note: This post is specifically geared towards getting the required pieces of the Build Toolkit into a Maven-usable state. However, there is nothing here which couldn't be taken and reused in many other circumstances.

Pre-Requisites
I'm assuming for the rest of the instructions that you have Java 1.6 and Maven 2.x installed. If not, why not? Get to it!

Obtaining the RTC Build System Toolkit
Job 1 is to get the Jazz RTC Build System Toolkit. You can download it from jazz.net (Windows) (Linux) (registration required).

NOTE: The rest of the instructions are based on the Windows version of the toolkit. I guess, as its all Java based, it's really similar. Post comments on this blog if there is additional info I need to add here.

Once you have the Build System Toolkit downloaded, unzip it somewhere temporary.

The Maven / Ant / Jar Magic
Next you need to get all the jars which come with the IBM Toolkit, wrap them up as a single jar, and add it to Maven for quick access and reuse. To do this, you'll need the following maven pom.xml. Cut and paste it into a file for use.

Now if you create a directory, put this new pom.xml file into it, edit the property "rtc.build.toolkit.plugins.dir" property and run the "mvn install" command. This will get the maven plugins and dependencies required, create your uber-jar, and "install" (i.e. copy) it into your local maven repository.

Congratulations!
You now have the required elements of the RTC Build Toolkit installed in maven, ready to either be added direct to your Hudson install to enable your Cowley plugin, or so you can compile my RTC Proxy API from source.

Either way, look out for the later posts in this series to find out how to obtain and use the Cowley Plugin without looking at any more code, as well as the gory details of the plugin development (if you're feeling sadistic).

This story is a continuation of  Alone, Illegal and Broke Down in China

Part II of the first story from my upcoming book Alone, Illegal and Broke Down: Stories from motorcycling in China

A man pushes his way through the girls and speaks in sharp tones that makes them stop giggling and stand aside. He is very young and so thin that his brown wool pinstriped suit hangs on him in folds like on a coat hanger. His hair is carefully clipped and gelled into a stiff American fifties-style flat-top, with one lock left long to hang rakishly in his face. He tosses his head back to fling the lock out of his eye, and says something to me that makes the girls laugh nervously and flutter a little farther away.

I greet him with a Chinese hello and a look straight in the eye, and the girls giggle again, their hands flying up to cover their mouths. Sighing, he beckons me to his office, a lit doorway just in front of us, and takes me by the arm to guide me inside. Surprisingly, he is a few inches taller than I, perhaps 5 feet 10 inches tall..

The girls follow us in but after few sharp words from the boss they reced into the darkness and we are left alone in the office: a square concrete box with a steel desk and a ratty Naugahyde couch bursting at the seams. I fish through the pockets of my black leather motorcycle jacket and hand him 20 yuan, the amount the woman at the gas station had quoted. He laughs and pushes it back to me. I am too tired to go through an extended haggling process, and too tired to remember that I am desperate for sleep. After riding all day in the heat, after the stress of being lost, the uncertainty of the motorcycle, finding gasoline, night falling unmercifully black and those tiny villages with fires and stray pigs and white-trunked trees, I am exhausted, and I could strangle him for what he is doing, opening drawers to find a pencil so that he can write the digits 200 on a piece of paper, ten times price the woman at the gas station had quoted.

I hold the paper and we stand silently together on the stained burgundy carpet. It is as thin as denim, and glued badly onto the concrete floor. The walls are covered in crackling stucco, and the sagging ceiling is stained with water. The black and white television set is turned on full volume, the sound horribly distorted. Two attractive anchorpeople, a man and a woman, report the news. Their announcements are a combination of guttural and singsong nasal whining. Footage of a public execution flits across the screen: two kneeling men, blindfolded with hands bound behind their backs, a mass of enraged or excited people. Would they be shot or beheaded or hanged? Then they show blond Russian children digging through a vast garbage dump for scraps of food, followed by stills of President Clinton who is due to visit in a few months. I’d seen the same footage in Beijing, over and over and over again. It is 1998, the year that China would remove borders and other barriers to sharing in first world wealth.

I study the piece of paper. I could counter with thirty, and he would insist upon 100, and I would write down thirty five, and he would then write fifty, and then I would hand him forty. He would take it, and I really should do all that except that the woman at the gas station already gave me the price of twenty yuan and in my exhausted state I’m not thinking about all the trouble I will cause here with paperwork and lack of language and writing skills and my need for hot water. I shove the paper back at him and explain in succinct English that the owner told me it was twenty yuan and twenty yuan was all I was damn well going to pay and hadn’t he heard that the days of Foreigner price were over. I wave the twenty toward the gas station and tell him that if he thinks I’m going to pay two hundred for a dump like this he was crazy and I push it into his hand. He takes it with a little shrug and a smile that means, “Well, I had to try,” and I stomp back to the motorcycle but it’s not there any more. Stunned, I look around and see, with no little relief, that it had only been pushed away into the crook of the L-shaped compound near the wooden gates. I feel the manager watching me as I stomp across to it. I jerk my suitcase out of the sidecar, unlock and open the trunk to get my computer case and camera, and two of the girls suddenly appear to escort me to my room.

The hallway is glassed in, and we step up two shallow stairs onto the same thin, wrinkled burgundy carpet that was in the manager’s office, and even more blotched. Standing by each door is a little yellow pot decorated delicately with pink fleur-de-lis, a quarter full of water. As I puzzle over the purpose of these, moths bash themselves to death on the bare light bulbs in front of each door, falling in the collected heap in front of each threshold. Every tiny impact creates a tinging sound that is just audible over the sound of a river.

The room is a concrete box. One of the girls pushes by me to rush in and turn on the television set at full volume. The other girl walks in behind me bearing a thermos of hot water and a small, thin towel. I walk into the bathroom—it built into the corner of the room like an afterthought, with walls that fall short of the ceiling by a foot. The hot water tap runs cold, as does the cold water tap. I request more thermoses of hot water, and she returns shortly with three more.

I put my suitcase on the double bed and the girls come closer as I unzip it. I packed very little but carefully; a Gortex rain suit, a fine-gauge, bicycle-weight wool sweater, long silk underwear, thick hiking socks and boots, sports-bras and tights, quick-dry shirts and a toiletries kit with neat little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, moisturizer and sunscreen and a clear plastic bag full of bottles of medicines I might need.

I wonder how to get the girls out of my room so I can have some privacy, and then the manager strides in, barking at the girls, who wander out reluctantly. Alone again, he looks at me and sighs, then hands me a form, knowing that this is going to be an ordeal for it’s in Chinese and I’m illiterate. We settle ourselves down at the fake walnut desk at the foot of the bed and study the form and my passport, attempting to figure out which information goes in which box. After studying each others documents, we look up at each other, shrug, and begin.

I ought to have asked a clerk in a Beijing tourist hotel to give me a form that was printed in both English and Chinese, as a reference, but I didn’t, and so with a combination of my phrasebook, sign-language, grimaces, and some laughter, we manage to fill out about a third of the boxes when he abruptly pulls the paper away, indicating that’s all that’s required. Now that we were done I wished that I had given him more money. He was really just a very young man trying to be a big deal, and I had already been a lot of trouble because of the form and demands for many thermoses of hot water. Maybe I’d give him twenty more, anyway, in the morning. That was “tourist price” anyway, even though China had officially revoked the two-price policy.

I put my passport away and we walk outside, parting ways as he returns to the office and I go to cover and lock the motorcycle. Suddenly, a large blue truck roars in at an alarming speed, just at the place where I’d first parked the motorcycle. No wonder they’d moved it—it would have been run over. Two girls in peach polyester pyjamas run to the door as it opens. One literally catches the driver as he falls from the high truck cab waving a nearly-empty bottle in his hand like a prize. It drops to the ground, empty and unbroken, and the girls help him, stumbling, to a room next to the manager’s office. The door remains open for a moment, and I hear the sound of retching. Two different girls break the passenger fall out of the truck and drag him to a different room.

So fabulous, this is who I’m sharing the road with. I’d been warned that these big blue trucks were piloted by drivers fueled by amphetamines and alcohol. They’d would be my most frequent companions on the road, though that was changing, fast. Even though private cars have been allowed for many years, most Chinese haven’t been able to afford them, and so trucks and official vehicles make up ninety percent of the traffic out here in the country.

I lock and cover the bike to discourage theft and to hide the attention-getting black Beijing plates, go back to my room, the door of which, I now notice, doesn’t have a lock. But I’d brought a solution for that—an alarm that worked by sliding into the doorjamb. If the door opened, a piercing alarm would sound.

I pour the hot water from the thermoses into a red plastic basin on the bathroom floor and took a sponge bath. Brushing my teeth, I peer out from between the tattered curtains to catch the action in the compound. Apparently I had arrived just ahead of rush hour. Blue truck after blue truck roar in, their drivers and passengers falling out like the first ones, spilling empty bottles of high-octane liquor. From the courtyard the sound of broken glass and giggling penetrates my walls. The same scene occurs again and again, the girls in orange pajamas dragging drunken truckers to their rooms. I am forgotten.

I settle into bed and try to sleep, but my mind turns over and over on the problems of my trip. I am traveling without a license, nor permissions of any sort from the Chinese government or mine, and risk arrest at any moment. In addition, the first day into the countryside I  found that I couldn’t rely on road signs or local people to tell me the way. Since I just generally wanted to head west, that didn’t matter so much. I had no particular place to be at any certain time. But it is also now obvious that hotels are difficult to find. Although I still doubt my trip is dangerous, since I felt perfectly safe even in this brothel, I wonder if I'm not  taking too much of a risk this time. Tomorrow will be the time to turn back if I'm going to, only one day’s ride from Beijing.

I miss Beijing. In Beijing people  interacted with me. Foreigners are not rare, and they laugh good-naturedly when I practicde my traveler's Mandarin. They willingly look at maps and point me in the right direction. I miss hanging out with Teresa, the agricultural attaché at the US Embassy. We rode motorcycles together through the countryside once before I left, and the farmers were astonished at us, the motorcycles, and at her fluent Mandarin. She talked endlessly with them about the state of the crops, the weather, and whether the government had paid them in cash or pink IOU slips. Tonight, at the brothel, I long for Beijing.

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Tahoe Meadows to Chickadee Ridge

One of the wonderful things about living in Reno is that there are great opportunities nearby to hike in the summer and go snow shoeing in the winter. Last Thursday I went for my first snowshoeing outing of the winter. My friend Linda had only been on snow shoes once before and agreed to go along on what I told her would be an easy hike. We snowshoed from Tahoe Meadows to Chickadee Ridge. It was an absolutely beautiful day. The sun reflecting off the snow reminded us of the glitter our friend Pat sometimes uses.

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The only thing was that the hike turned out to be a much more difficult than I remembered. It didn't help that we started just below the top of the Mount Rose Highway at about 8,550 feet altitude or that by the time we got to Chickadee Ridge where we could see Lake Tahoe we were at almost 9000 feet. We still had a wonderful time and Linda was a great sport even when I am sure she wasn't quite sure what I had gotten her into.

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We stopped for hot chocolate and snacks on the ridge overlooking Lake Tahoe

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Here is the view from the ridge.
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Here is the GPS plot of our route. I guess it was a bit steep!

GPS - rpoute Chickadee Ridge 


  If you would like to see all of my pictures from our trip they are available on Flickr here.

Donner Lake

In spite of our misadventures last week Linda and her husband Ray agreed to go snowshoeing again today. We snowshoed along the shore of Donner Lake in Donner Memorial State Park. It is a wonderful place to snowshoe. It is scenic and right off interstate 80 just west of Truckee. Our route was out and back and was a total of 2.3 miles.

Donner Lake GPS route

It was overcast today and we even had a bit of wind and snow falling but it was a lot easier than last week. and we had a lot of fun.

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If you would like to see all my pictures form today's hike they are available on Flickr here.

In a previous post, I created a set of sculpt-map images to make animated wave shapes in Second Life. I was using a tool from nand Nerd. He has since updated the tool to automate wave making. Thanks, nand.
I will be presenting a 3-day training session for systems and storage administrators on ZFS and NexentaStor in the Atlanta area March 16-18, 2010. The team has put together a fantastic syllabus including in-depth exposure to the latest ZFS and NAS trends.


Attendees can choose to attend the three-day program, or the two-day advanced portion. The course is structured as follows:

  • Day 1: Introduction to ZFS and Nexenta Systems Storage Technologies
  • Day 2: De-duplication in a VM World
  • Day 3: Optimizing NAS Performance

Attendees should have some familiarity with storage concepts and terminology, but does not assume any knowledge of ZFS or familiarity with the NexentaStor storage appliance.
The course will include hands-on exercises with ZFS and NexentaStor.
Best of all, lunch will be provided each day.
To sign up or view the detailed syllabus, visit the nexenta-atlanta.eventbrite.com event registration site

Last night Yan was reading Proverbs to the children.

Proverbs 12:1 (New International Version)

1 Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge,
       but he who hates correction is stupid.

The last word caught Gracia's attention. She has been disobedient the whole day and when the word was read, she cried! Literally, she could not contain it. She does not want to be stupid. She wants to clever. A clever girl. And she wonders whether she will be 'not stupid anymore'.

We prayed together as a family and seek God's wisdom to love discipline. When we love the discipline that God place in our lives, we love Him. Not that we will enjoy the discipline while we go through it, but we have the safe assurance that He does it for our good and it will turn out that way in the end.

 Last week Apple released their latest product destined to change the world (the iPad).  At least that's what they want us to believe.  Perhaps the biggest controversy over the thing is the lack of Flash capability.  However this being java.net I have to wonder out loud, where is Java capability, and more importantly why isn't as much controversy being raised over Java being missing? But I think we all can enumerate some reasons for both being missing.  And it's worth it for the Java community to ponder this issue.

read more

n order to put a great conference together we need your help. We would like you to join us for an informal meeting in Los Angeles where we will discuss the essence of Latino2 and where we will lay down the basis for the implementation of this magnificent event. Please join us on February 6th, 2009 at Seven Restaurant in L.A. at 8 PM. Giovanni Rodriguez, David Vallejo and Kety Esquivel will be hosting the event. We already have 24 people that have signed up to attend the event. We have 16 more free tickets that we have released so please go ahead and get your free ticket now. Related posts:
  1. Digital Natives: Creators and Participants not marketing targets
  2. The Paradox of Latino Leaders. Are they really different?
  3. Introducing: Creating something from nothing: Exploring Startups and the Latino Influence
  • Cross Domain Solutions
    The Cross Domain Enterprise Service provides support to Combatant Commands, Services and Agencies (CC/S/A) by implementing, fielding and providing life cycle support for cross domain solution technologies that provide secure interoperable capabilities throughout the Department of Defense (DoD).
पुकारें सुन सुन के वो खुदा शायद थक गया होगा,ईमेल है नहीं मेरा "अच्छा है" ये फिर भी सोचता होगा।गर चीखें मेल से आतीं तो कैसे हेल्प करता मैं,जो टाइम खोलने में लगता बेचारा मर गया होता।कंप्यूटर ना बनाया मैं पर तालीमें दी बहुत सी हैं,रहम एसेमेस से जो जाता, मस्जिदों में क्या बिल भरता?