kahunaburger

Pia owns a small “Thomas the tank engine” model train set called Thomas at Action Canyon (by the way, we paid about 1/5 of the price quoted at Amazon – I had no idea it was a “collectible” now). Yesterday evening we tried to setup the track in her room. It gets complicated around the bridge and we started a Google search to find a photo (the above) of the track. While I was in her room assembling parts of the track, I also mentioned to her that we still need to change the battery in the engine and we didn’t know how to get to the battery compartment. Pia shot up and said she would search for it. When I came back to my computer, I saw this in the browser:

… keep on going!” (Winston Churchill)

said Janice at work! And she knows, because she’s slightly older than me!

I was among the nerds who grabbed an HP Touchpad when they went on a fire-sale recently. The sole reason why I got one was the prospect of running Android on it. It was a gamble, because nobody was sure at that time whether Android would ever work on the device.

This morning I grabbed one of the early developer releases of the Android port and installed it on the Touchpad. I was pleasantly surprised by how much stuff is already working. Yes, there are screen-flickering issues and some parts don’t work yet, but my experience tells me that they (the Android porters) are not far away from having a fully running system.

And to be fair: the Touchpad’s original WebOS is actually quite nice to work with. They would have deserved more customers, but I guess nowadays it’s all a matter of the number of apps available for any tablet OS …

I went to the ATM today to deposit a check. While there I received an on-screen message that said there is an important change I should be aware of. The machine asked me whether I wanted to print the message and I acknowledged. Here’s what the message read:

We want to make you aware of an important upcoming change when you make purchases or payments using your card.

Your primary linked Wells Fargo checking account will be charged one $3 Monthly Debit Card Activity Fee each month when you make purchases or payments (including recurring payments) on or after October 14, 2011 using any debit card, check card or ATM card linked to that account. Bla, bla, bla …

You are charging me to bring you money? And you could not even wait until the end of the month to start collecting the fee?

Tomorrow I will go into the branch and close my last account with them. Then I will head over to Del Norte Credit Union and deposit my money there. If you are still banking with one of the “big guys”, I suggest you do the same and send them a message.

Aquacue, an exciting Silicon Valley start-up that attempts to address water conservation issues with technology, just came up a really cool concept to encourage students at the University of California, Merced to do precisely that: conserve water.

Aquacue develops a device called the “Aquacue Barnacle” which straps on to existing analog water meters and automatically transmits readings wirelessly to dedicated servers. At regular intervals the current meter reading is sent to Aquacue’s servers, stored in a database and the owner of the meter(s) can use a browser interface to get up-to-date charts showing current and historical water usage. This is an awesome tool for companies/institutions with high water use, because it allows to quickly identify areas where usage reduction would have the biggest impact as far as water bill reduction and environmental impact are concerned. It also helps to quickly detect water leaks and pinpoint the exact location of the leak, because each barnacle is registered with its precise location. Cities and Parks, Water Utilities and Campuses are among the institutions that can most benefit from this technology.

And that brings me back to the campus at UC Merced. At the beginning of October nine residence halls started to participate in the “Water Battle”. A baseline water usage was recorded in Gallons/Person/Day. A number of barnacles track the ongoing water usage in real-time and display the standings at http://aquacue.net/ucmerced. If a residence hall reduces the amount of water used per person per day, they go up in the ranks. If water usage increases, they will drop in the ranks. At this very moment it looks like “San Joaquin Hall” is in the lead with 17 Gallons/Person/Day. This is already 40% (!) less water usage compared to what they started with (28 Gallons/Person/Day):

What’s in it for the students to conserve water and end up at rank #1 at the end of the “Water Battle”? A pizza party for the residence hall and $1000 that they can donate to a charity of their choice. The pizza party would have been incentive enough …

And here comes the really cool part that shows the potential of Aquacue’s technology: given that the readings happen in real-time, 24/7, the system can start to generate water usage patterns and detect unusual behavior. In a typical residence hall you would expect to see the highest water use in the mornings and evenings. If a meter shows continuous use throughout the day, when the halls are usually not occupied, there’s a high probability that somebody either forgot to switch off a faucet or that there is indeed a leak somewhere. Aquacue detected just that for a few of the residences at UC Merced. Here’s one example for “Merced Hall” (click on the image to go to the details page):

Now extrapolate that idea to a whole city with schools and parks as the major water users. Imagine how much money and water could be saved with an early leak detection system like this one!

I will do everything it takes to bring this to the attention of the city of Santa Fe.

Good luck Aquacue – you won’t need it!

Last weekend Loe’s and Joe’s yearly Lantern Festival was going on. They live just past Espanola in the middle of the desert somewhere on this map (I kid you not – start zooming out to see where this place really is).

They build their own house there and live together with a number of critters including 80 ducks, turkeys and pheasants.

Once a year they throw a party and invite tons of people for fun, food and remote camping. Oakley, Pia and I plus Frisco and Max went this year to check it out.

The afternoon started out well for the dogs, because they got to run next to the car on the dirt road leading up to our destination. Once there we were happy to see a bunch of other dogs and a really nice crowd of people. And I mean nice people.
Pia immediately hit it off with a girl named Zoe who was around her age. The two ran a few times back and forth on the property until they discovered … WATER! It didn’t take half an hour longer and the two had changed into swimsuits and were making serious use of the water tanks:

hot tub

The first one above is Loe’s and Joe’s hot-tub/warm bath. It’s warmed by a fire next to, well actually inside the water. This photo also gives you a sense how remote this place is.

And the 2nd tank is a fresh water, irrigation storage tank. The water was way too cold for me, but I guess it’s easier to handle if you sit in the hot-tub first:

cold tub

I did not see Pia for about 4-5 hrs. She and Zoe went constantly between the two tubs and had the most fun. Only once they got hungry they changed back into their normal clothes and asked “what’s for dinner?”.

Dinner was a combined effort by all of those who attended the party. We had made some fresh pretzels (which turned very well this time using an NY Times recipe), some pulled pork and a birthday cake (because it happened to be somebody’s birthday as well).

Once the band started playing we grabbed the dogs and a seriously tired Pia and headed back home to Santa Fe. I think it did not take more than 3 mins before it was quiet in the back of the car …

Holy shiat! Somebody please make that happen! Thanks for the link, Oakley.

Things have changed a lot since Pia started to go to a new school for the 2nd grade. We are definitely happy with the move to Atalaya Elementary School. It takes a bit longer to get there in the morning, but there’s a completely different “vibe” compared to Gonzales. And they give out “Pride Tickets” when kids do something nice that’s out of the ordinary. Here’s one she got the other day for cleaning up in the classroom without being asked:

When I returned from a recent business trip I told Pia about it in the car. I also mentioned that I had to pay $600 for the four-night stay at a hotel in San Jose. Next question was: how much is that per night? Within a second she responds: $150. I was very surprised that she figured it out so quickly and I asked her how she had done it. She responded with: “4 times $100 was not enough and 4 times $200 was too much – so I picked the number right in between”. Smart (and lucky) girl …

Pia is obsessed with an application called “Differences” on the HP TouchPad. You are supposed to find differences between two photos on the 10″ screen. The concept is simple, but seems to work well with 2nd graders. Should be easy to create an app on my own using the photos I snapped over the years …

This weekend we tried again to get lucky at hunting mushrooms at the ski basin. Let’s just say we were not as successful as a week ago. While Oakley and I were out in the open between forests we encountered another hunter who had a net full of nice-sized shrooms. We talked to him briefly about his collecting experience and he finished with a comment (in accented English): “The old ladies come here on the weekend and empty the lower section of the mountain.”

He likened us to “Old Ladies”!

That did not sit well and we went up into higher elevations and more challenging grounds only to be disappointed even more.

Two and a half hours of collecting resulted in way less than a pound of mushrooms!

Oh well, at least we got some exercise and the dogs loved it!

After the rains over the last days I decided to try my luck again hunting mushrooms up at the Ski Area. I looked at a different area today and I’m delighted to report that things looked a lot better there. I don’t know if that means that other areas are also more populated, but today was certainly the best hunting session of them all. I have a feeling that things will peak in the next 2-3 weeks.

Unfortunately Frisco got stung by a wasp five minutes into the walk and limped around for a while. He seemed to recover and the 2nd half of the walk he was totally fine. Now that we are back at home, he seems to be a bit sore from the sting. Everything should be fine tomorrow morning.

Today I covered the area to the right of the Super Chief (the first lift up the mountain). The area where I found most of the stuff is circled in yellow (Jim, I hope this helps):

I actually went up all the way to the end of the first lift, but noticed that, once above 11,000 feet, there was not too much to be found.

What I found today is the crème de la crème of mushrooms, the King Boletes (also called Porcini or “Steinpilz” in German). There were some very nice sized ones and I was happy to see that they did not have any worms. The 2nd species I collected were Aspen Boletes (“Birkenroehrling” in German). The ones on the right are the King Boletes (there’s a quarter at the bottom of the photo to give you an idea about the size of the shrooms; the big King Bolete in the back weighs about 2 pounds):

mushrooms!!!

I know some will argue that Aspen Boletes are not the best choice, but I’ve collected them for a long time back in Europe and never experienced any ill effects.

I bet we find some more stuff in the following weeks, that is if we survive this meal …

When we returned from Europe, I was surprised to see the interior of my car all messed up: there was evidence that at least one dog was in the car during our absence. A few days later I found out what the reason for all the dirt was. When I went into the garage to let the dogs into the house, I could not find Max. He was not in the garage and he was also not in the kennel. After some yelling and whistling I finally found him in the car. The windows of my car are usually open while it is parked and Max must have jumped through one of the open windows to hang out in the car.

Needless to say that’s not an optimal situation and since then the windows are only opened a crack while the car is in the garage.

Fast forward to a few days ago. We had another thunderstorm come through. Max hates thunderstorms and that’s usually the time when he seeks refuge inside the car. For some reason he feels more comfortable in there while thunder and lightning are going on outside. Not a problem this time, because the windows are only opened a crack and there’s no way he can squeeze through there. You should have seen the surprised look on my face when I found him again inside the car. If you guessed sun-roof, you guessed right. That bastard dog jumped onto the hood of the car, climbed up on the roof and dropped into the car through the sun-roof!!!

I’m at wits end how to deal with this situation. I can see scratch marks, paw prints and slobber all over the car. I know he must have tried a few more times to get inside, but now I’m also closing the sun-roof while the car is parked. If you have any suggestions, please let me know …

For years I’d wanted to get to know the local mushroom population. Back in Germany I went quite often to the forest to collect mushrooms for meals at home. I wasn’t sure whether the local species would be comparable to the ones I found back in Germany and decided that the Mushroom Identification Class offered by the Santa Fe Community College would be the right way to go.

This morning Oakley and I met with 9 others and our teacher, Art Judd, to get an introduction to what’s available around Santa Fe.

After an extensive introduction to fungi in general, we visited three different sites up Hyde Park Road. It had rained in the last few days and the conditions were better than ever before this season. Art informed us that the season here starts as early as July 4th, but given the lack of precipitation in July, only now things started to look better.
We found “some” mushrooms, but by far not enough. I guess we’ll have to wait for a few more weeks, before this year’s high season starts.

I was excited to see that some other parties had found young Porcini (“Steinpilze” how we call them in Germany) on their hunts. This is THE mushroom to collect and quite rare where I come from. Give it another week or two and those things should pop up all over the place.

I also promised to host some of the material we were handed during the class. And here it comes:

First up a PDF of all the handouts that we were given. Some general information, recipes, bibliography and links (click the image to download the PDF).

Art also gave an “ABCs to Mushrooms” CD-ROM to one randomly drawn participant. As much as I tried to analyze the content of the CD-ROM, it appears to only contain 45 images of local mushrooms, but no further details (edible vs. non-edible, names, etc.). So here’s the collection of images that I found on the CD. It’s a slightly bigger 37MB download, so please be patient (again, click the image to download the PDF version of the images).

All in all it was a day worth spent. I feel more confident going up into the forests now and will most likely continue what I started back in Germany.

It was nice meeting you all today and if there are any questions, please contact me at tobias -at- kahunaburger.com. Art, thanks for guiding us through the forest! Happy hunting everybody!

PS: Pilard, I’d be happy to return your CD to you. Please let me know and I can drop it off!

As I mentioned recently, a few weeks ago I switched over to a pfSense-based router and ditched my old consumer, closed-box Netgear router. It’s still sitting in the garage (in case I run into pfSense troubles), but it’s collecting dust very quickly.

After I’ve used pfSense for a while now, I can’t imagine going back to one of the traditional routers and here are a few reasons why.

1. Line quality graphs: pfSense automatically generates graphs that represent the “line quality” of your connection to your ISP. On a regular basis, the device will “ping” the gateway at your ISP and record how long the round-trip of the ping took. Ideally this number should be almost constant and in the msec-range. You end up with a graph like this:
   
   The higher the bar, the longer it took to receive a response to a ping. Ignore the fact that between 4am and 10:30am the bars seem to be higher, because that was an error that I had introduced. You can clearly see that at around 8am something was not quite right with the connection to my ISP and packets took longer than normally. This is valuable information when you try to troubleshoot problems or need to prove to your ISP that something is wrong on their end (which I love to do).
2. Traffic graphs: It’s always good to know when your line and how much it is being utilized. Another category of graphs shows me that as well.
   
   Yesterday at 1pm I had a rather large and long-running download (the red stuff to the left). The barely visible gray stuff at the bottom of the graph is the amount of data I’m sending out.
3. unbound: pfSense integrates nicely with the validating, recursive and caching DNS resolver called “unbound”. A DNS resolver simply maps hostnames (like “www.google.com”) to IP addresses (“74.125.73.105″ being one that is assign to “www.google.com”). DNS resolution takes some time and slows you down while you’re browsing.
   With “unbound” on the pfSense unit I can define a cache (currently set to 10000 hostnames), which only have to be resolved once and are fetched from the cache the next time the same hostname is requested. So if I go to www.google.com on my computer in the kitchen the official IP address is resolved. If I then do the same on my PC in the office, the IP address is returned from the cache almost instantly.
   The cache itself is written to disk and if the pfSense unit restart the cached information will again be immediately available.
   End result = faster browsing.
   
4. Snort: The intrusion detection and prevention system “snort” is also integrated in pfSense. “snort” listens in on all traffic that passes through the router. If it sees patterns that are recognized as potential attacks or infections it will automatically block the traffic from either entering your network or leaving it. This is a feature that is usually found in specialized devices (think Cisco) costing thousands of dollars.
   
5. Squid: And finally there is the web proxy server “squid”. Again directly integrated into pfSense. “squid” relays all my browsing traffic and again caches all information on disk. A web page is usually compromised of dozens and even hundreds of objects (think text, images, javascript, etc.). Each object has to be fetched from the server and again it takes time to download all the pieces. Quite often those pieces don’t change from one day to the next, but your browser will re-fetch them more often than necessary. I’ve setup 1GB of disk space to keep a lot of those non-changing items around. Now every computer in the house will benefit from those items being cached instead of having to be re-fetched.
   

Overall I’m more than pleased with pfSense and can’t wait what I else I’ll discover in the future. Now on to getting an IPSEC tunnel to work defined …

That about sums it up how I feel these days. Bravo!

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Originally found here on MEGS!