Road With Irons

I’m coming home
I’m coming home
tell the World I’m coming home
Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday
I know my kingdom awaits and they’ve forgiven my mistakes
I’m coming home, I’m coming home
tell the World I’m coming

Hi.

This is the tale of yet another philly trip.

First, we begin with the latest evolution of my packing strategy:

Two backpacks (fun fact: the one on the right is a girl's snowboarding backpack).  I got 5 days of crap down to two backpacks.  I feel like I've come along way from a backpack and a large suitcase for a 2 night stay.  The reason my second back needs to be a backpack is that it fits in the overhead bins of turboprops (like the one I flew in from Seattle to Portland) and they are easier to fit into the overhead bins of the turbine jets, which always fill up quick because of the bullshit with bag checking fees.  In summary, two bags gives you the best chance of arriving at your destination with all 5 days worth of stuff.

My first night I arrived in philly at 12:30 am, and I couldn't think of anyone in the city that liked me enough to pick me up that late if given only 24 hours notice, so I booked a room at the embassy suites.  Embassy suites was pretty badass.  All rooms, even with only one bed, are actually multi-room suites with a couch and stuff.  The walls were a bit thin, but it still might be a cool place to hang out.

My strategy for this visit was to really only announce my arrival to a few people that I knew I'd be able to hang out with;  I didn't even plan for a single night in philly itself.  It seemed to work out better this way;  I spent almost all of my time hanging out with people and very little of it wasted on my own.  I didn't tell Jordan I'd be in philly, since he plans its schedule like an entire week in advance, but I ran into him anyway on the street and we got coffee.  That was pretty awesome.

Spent a night in pheonixville.  A lot of my old friends came out.  I think I've been undervaluing good friends these past few years.  I don't mean friends like, people you don't mind seeing, I mean like close, awesome friends.  The kind of people that you can say whatever you want around and not worry about what they think of you.  The kind of people who always have your back, and will adjust their schedule to see you and with whom you can pick up with after years as if you never left.  The kind of people that are rarely lame and boring.  I think I need more friends like that.  There was a time when I was totally content despite being girlfriend-less, and it was because I had friends like that.

Next night:  the graduation party.  Laura and Rachel both had graduation parties.  I figured I might as well go to one of them, and Rachel's coincided with this Via Ferrata thing my sister wanted to do.  Most of the people were people I barely knew, which is always a challenge for me at parties, but I managed to do all right.  Not knowing anyone actually works out fine if a lot of the people are cool.  So...Laura was there.  I mentioned that I'm planning to have (another) pirate party in the next couple months.  She told me she owns 4 corsets and would fly to seattle just to be there.  We were also talking about my next visit to philly and how it will likely involve japanese-style karaoke and salsa dancing.  Laura said she would totally come out for the dancing.  This was basically a complete reversal from her position the last time I saw her, which was that she didn't dance, ever, and refused to even do a couple bachatta steps with me, even if I put her feet on my feet, which was itself a reversal of the night we watched her favorite movie and danced a merengue in the middle of it.  Girls make no fucking sense to me.

Cassandra, the girl who sold me Katie and taught me to ride--was also at the party.  We traded stories about the MSF Rider Coach training program.

Jelloshots taste good when they are home made.

The next night I headed down to Virginia to hang out with my older sisters family.  My sis noticed immediately that was "dressing stylish" or whatever she called it, so I guess the ridiculous amount of money that I spent on clothing was...justified for a second.

One of my nieces is learning to play the guitar.  I borrowed her child-sized guitar and performed my version of love story for them.  I really need to get around to recording that--especially after this whole bit with Hot Lego Girl--that makes like 7 fucking times this has happened.

At one point my brother in law and I watched Point Break, an apparently classic action movie that was referenced in Hot Fuzz.  It had a striking similarity to Fast and the Furious.

The Via Ferrata.

My younger sister and I drove to West Virginia in order to participate in what must be one of the most dangerous climbing-related sports I've ever heard of.  Don't get me wrong--it was a good time, but this is not something you're gonna do every weekend.  In top rope climbing, you're hanging on a rope constantly, with an active belayer below you, and at most you'll fall a few feet.  Typically, there is nothing that you will bash your face on, because you are scaling a flat-ish wall.  Via Ferrata climbing is different:  you don't have a top rope.  You are clipped into a steel cable running up the mountain via a y-cable with carabiners on the end (the y cable allows you to move them to the next section of steel cable one at a time, ensuring you are always connected).  Instead of groping up raw rock you typically hold onto steel rungs, similar to a ladder but more difficult.  You could easily fall up to ten feet, and on the way down there are those steel rungs to bash your face into.  Falling is not really an option like it is with climbing, and seemed like it was almost a guaranteed trip to the hostpial.

Ironically, though, I felt safer than when I'm climbing.  Turns out, ladder rungs made excellent handholds, and you feel very secure when you're feet and hands are all over them.  In contrast, the probably safest part of the climb was when we crossed basically a glorified rope ladder over a valley:  a fall there would just scrape you up, and you'd be find hanging on the cable, but despite being the safest spot, it was the scariest part of the climb.  Dangling a couple hundred feet up in the air reminded me of that rickety blue ledge you jump off of when bungie jumping off the stratesphere.  After cafeful consideration and a lot of looking down, I realized I was more scared of slipping and hanging midair from the safety line than I was of slipping and plummeting to my death.  The rope ladder had a steel wire above it, which is where your carabiners clip into.  There were two steel cables at your sides that served as railings.  I gripped them, sliding my hands along them with each careful step, dragging my y-cable and carabiners along with my elbow.  Taking a step or two to the next boards and then bumping my y-cable along the safety line put in my mind an unmistakable image of an elderly person walking and dragging an ivy line.  I told myself it would be a great idea to kind of stare down to the bottom of the canyon, since I had to stare down at my feet anyway to place them on the tiny planks, and I told myself that this is how I would "master my fear" like in the movies.  I did make it to the other side, but I couldn't tell you what the hell "mastering you fear" means, because I still don't know.

Later, I looked back, and we were even higher than the rope bridge.  Like, twice as high. We were standing on a ledge that was only like 5 to 10 feet wide, but it felt incredibly safe because my feet were on solid rock.  It looked like the kind of thing that would impress people, so I made sure to get some pictures:

This mountain summit could be reached via a simple hike and is not even part of the via ferrata, but here's a pic from it anyway:

Then we were done, and we both forgot to tip our guide, who was super helpful, and this was made worse by the fact that we were the only two people who showed up, because everyone else assumed it would be canceled by rain.  So...we feel bad.  I'm trying to get my sister to like send him a tip in the mail or something.

Michael Crichton did lots of cool climbing and diving stuff with his sister--maybe we will end up doing that as well.

September.

Remember, remember, the fifth of novem--oh wrong month.  Well it still rhymes.  Anyway.  My next visit is for this girl Holly's wedding, in september.  Holly IMed me to yell at me for not RSVPing yet.  I told her I can't handle planning more than one trip at a time.  She told me she can't understand how I'm still single.  Then she told me I should give in and sign up for The Bachelor, and also that maybe I should lower my standards.  I told her about my experimental lowering of standards on okcupid and how I almost went on a date with a guy.

There was lots of talk about my next philly visit.  Talk as in interest.  I think we're gonna do something cool for once.  I'm trying to get a bunch of people to go in on a couple hotel suites in downtown philly for like two nights, and we will go out, drink the best rum (captain), dance salsa at the best nightclub (brasils) and do japanese-style karaoke with the private rooms and the sushi and stuff in chinatown.  And anything else cool that people think of.  Rizo, Rachel, Laura, Allison, Adam...crap tons of people said they were interested.  Lets see what happens.


No word from Hot Lego Girl.  Allison says I need to not call her ever and act like I've moved on.  So far acting like I'm moving on has been, to me, indistinguishable from actually moving on.  So far it doesn't appear to be working;  Hot Lego Girl hasn't called me or anything, and its been weeks, and I'm pretty sure she is fine without me.  I thought we had something going...she was super scared of this trip she did to Honduras and she called me on my cell from the other side of the security checkpoint and I stayed with her on the phone.  And I have no idea how she can possibly not want to be more than friends after that monday night when the got back, but apparently there is nothing I can do about it, so my only choice is to move on and try again.  Wolverine doesn't cry over crazy girls.

I have other girls in the pipeline, but they are mostly just a pain in the ass right now.  I guess something could happen there, but I'm still going to tell Holly that I'm bringing zero guests to her wedding.

I spent some time watching car chases on the internet.  It looks like most of the guys get caught just because they make a mistake--a bad move, or their (usually stolen) car is completely underpowered compared to the police cruisers.  I always root for the cars being chased, but they almost never get away.  It looks like, to get away in the real world, you have to perfectly execute a move with foreknowledge of the terrain and before a police chopper arrives on the scene.


The Linux Wars

I finally got linux working on my brand new expensive desktop.  In fact, I'm back in linux right now.  Yay!  Its been a rather long adventure.  Ubuntu was pure trash, Gentoo had some horrific problem that I've already blocked out of my memory, Fedora's live cd froze while trying to load, and Arch linux failed to boot with either mysterious grub errors or mysterious kernel panics.  Yeah, this is what happens when I use technology.  Probably not the best idea to become a programmer.  Anyway.

I solved the problem with Arch and got it running.  I probably ran the installer 20 times but I got it working.  IT TURNS OUT that I have two hard drives in my computer.  Yes, I knew that obviously.  What I didn't know, though, was that the bootloader, grub, thinks that hard drive #0 and hard drive #1 are both hard drive 0.  I'm not even kidding.  If you don't believe me, flying to fucking Seattle and I'll show you this little technological wonder I have at my desk.

The mysterious kernel panics were because of problem were I was using grub's command line to select the kernel manually and then boot.  Every time it gave me a kernel panic about being unable to load the file system.  I re-ran the entire operating system installer from scratch many, many times (because you can't do it piecemeal), each time trying different combinations of mount points and different filesystems, and one time I reinstalled the entire operations system just because I wanted to check if the kernel was compiled with ext3 drivers, only to realize that the installer doesnt let you configure the kernel at all, a fact that I should have fucking known since I had just run the installer ten times.

I finally solved the kernel problem by realizing that you cant just type "kernel ..." and then "boot" in grub.  You have to also use this "initrd" command to set up some kind of ram filesystem just for booting.  That was my problem--the kernel wasn't panicking because it couldn't read the root filesystem (even though that is exactly what it said it was doing), it was panicking because it couldn't read the nonexistent, temporary, weird-ass ram filesystem used for booting.

Once I had arch linux booting, finally, it was a simple matter to realized that the hand-booting procedure only worked when I told it that the root of the oeprating system was on the wrong hard drive.  For a day or two, I quite manually booted my computer by entering raw grub commands like:

root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdb5
initrd /kernel26.img
boot

I felt pretty badass, until I realized that all the people in the world who could even understand what I was doing would not be impressed.

So, I fixed grub's configuration to point at the wrong hard drive and now my computer boots all the way to run level 3 without intervention!  Someday I'll make it do runlevel 5 automatically, you know, start x for me, but I don't want to press my luck.

Oh, and then I tried to use my external usb "backup" drive.  That was fun.  "Backup" is in quotes because the data I put on it is mostly pirated movies, which I can afford to lose, however I was still quite upset when the drive wouldn't mount.  It was working perfectly with my old computer, but suddenly it had a bad super block.  Either my old computer fucked it up with a power surge the moment it died (unlikely to occur through a USB cable) or windows saw an ext3 formatted drive and decided to fuck it up.  Whatever the case, it took me hours to fix, and I now know a lot more about hard drive partitions and superblocks than I ever really wanted.  If this ever happens to you, though, here's the secret:

First, gpart doesn't work on my installation of arch.  Who the fuck knows why.
Second, install and run:  gparted.  I don't remember why, but its important.
sudo partprobe  (i actually have to do this every time I turn the drive on)
sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdc1   (this finds the backup superblocks and prints the block size)
sudo e2fsck -b 32768 -B 4096 /dev/sdc1 (-b is one of the superblock backups, and -B is the blocksize)

So yeah that was a lot of fun.  I'm liking arch linux though.  You know why?  Because instead of tearing my hair out trying to unfuck whatever the ubuntu morons came up with, all I have to do with an arch install is just run a couple commands.  I could put these in a script!

pacman -Sy
pacman -S sudo
(edit /etc/sudoers)
pacman -S vim
pacman -Syu
pacman -S gnome
pacman -S gnome-extra
(edit /etc/rc.conf)
pacman -S gdm
pacman -S sorg
startx
killall X
(edit /etc/inittab)
/sbin/telinit 3
/sbin/telinit 5
pacman -S firefox
pacman -S autofs
modprobe autofs4
pacman -S mplayer
pacman -S gthumb
pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils
gconf-editor (apps -- metacity -- global_keybindings)
(edit /etc/pacman.conf to enable multilib repo)
pacman -Syu
pacman -S lib32-libxdamage
pacman -S flashplugin
pacman -S lib32-libvdpau
(edit /etc/adobe/mms.cfg to uncomment EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1)
(edit some about:config thing in firefox)
pacman -S gimp
pacman -S unzip
pacman -S python  (this is actually python3)
pacman -S twisted
pacman -S python2
pacman -S make
sudo pacman -S setuptools (for python easy_install ?)
sudo pacman -S gcc
sudo easy_install numpy

pacman -S bc
pacman -S cups ghostscript gsfonts
pacman -S cups-pdf
pacman -S hplip
pacman -S openssh


Yeah.  And now my computer works.



Next Moves

pirate party 2.0
weekend roller coaster
weekend salsa in vancouver
side businesses w/ chris and kev
build shelves, sofa
work weekends
plan september
motorcycle
salsa
climbing
sailing
record love story