Steve's Rants and Raves!

It was a sunny day in the Yosemite Valley 13 years ago, I sat at the top of Nevada Fall, completely exhausted from the 3.3 mile hike up the approximately 2,000 ft elevation gain, looking at the river on top of the fall, and the seemingly flat path leading further into the wilderness, wondered when and if I'd ever come back again and continue further.

Time sure flies, and on Sunday I was back, with a vengeance no less. After training for Bay-to-Breakers this year, and a few prep hikes, I felt I was in good enough shape to do Half Dome. The first 4,000 ft of elevation gain was quite easy and I did not break much of a sweat, but then the last two rocks, with about 800 ft in elevation gain, took almost every bit of strength I had left, especially the cable run on the steep rock where I had to grab the cables tight and pull myself up with both hands.

One amazing gadget that saved my day was this little hiking water pump, which allowed us to bring just a small amount of water with us, refill along the way by the creeks, so we could drink as much as we felt like. Without that I don't think I would have made it. One just can't help being amazed at how smart people are and how much such inventions help folks... Of course, I later realized I also couldn't have done it without a few other things: a guy who carried lots of food for the rest of us, the walking sticks, the other partners who helped us set a slower pace at the beginning, and of course the 3 training hikes beforehand.

In the end, the hike took 12 hours even, with 50 minutes on the top (30 of them a nap for me), 30 minutes at Nevada Fall on our way back, and various breaks here and there.

 

Barely recovering from jetlag, I went with the gang to Shoreline on this freezing cold July 4th evening for a night of wonderingful music by the SF Symphony (I think). Too bad the cheap tickets we got only afforded us some space on the sloping lawn in the cross wind. No matter, we found ways to enjoy ourselves, especially with the controlled substances I just managed to get past the customs at SFO (no, not *those* types of controlled substances, shame on you).

 

15 minutes into the music I was awestruck hearing the announcer introduce the one and only Ms. Lauren Bacall to read the narratives of the next music number. Well, I'm tempted to say that I've always known her as Betty Joan Perske but nobody would believe me. More believeable to refer to her as Mrs. Bogey, but then that would diminish all of her own accomplishment in her own long and illustrious career.  On this July 4th evening, she would not dissapoint and delivered a clear and meticulous narration accompanied by the great symphony orchestra.

 

Yeah, of course, there was fireworks too towards the end.

 

So let's say you have some stuff, like pictures, you want to share with others over the web, but don't exactly want others to make a copy off it. What do you do?

 

Well, it's a never ending battle between the spears and shields, like one of my ancestors would casually discuss with the likes of Confucius many thousands of years ago. There won't be a completely fool-proof solution, but there's stuff you can do. First things first, you knock out the easy method first. Many people use the right mouse button to do "save picture as", one can simply use some Java script to disable right mouse button, this eliminates 90% of the would-be offenders.

 

Then there are the more determined, who knows how to do screen capture and perhaps "paste" into other programs. This is slightly harder to deal with, but still possible. A clever way would be to use the Java script in your web page to constantly "copy" to the clipboard and therefore erase the result of screen capture, rendering that blank. This I think would eliminate another 95% of the attempts.

 

Finally, for the really determined, they will try read the HTML source code and figure out exactly where the images are coming from, and retrieve the images directly. In this case, the images should better be protected by water marks to make it virtually impossible to generate anything close to the original.

 

Well, such is what the Bay-to-Breakers 2008 people did for the pictures they took for all the 80k-ish contestants, I was lucky enough to rank about 8000-ish among the 16,000-ish who finished the 12k race, from one end and clocked in at about 1h24m. But then I had a hard time retrieving my pictures off their web site without paying them an arm and a leg, turned out, it was an equally interesting adventure to try to break the first 2 protectionsthey put in place, but still in the end I had to live with pictures with water marks. Oh well...

  

 

There it is, right around the corner from Picadilly Circus, my favorate bar, and I think the favorate of half a generation of folks, stood out in the busy night. Two of us went in, chuckled at the menu filled with Norm, and Cliff's favorates, Carla's recommendations, and of course, Sam's choices.

 

I"ve never been to the one in Boston, only heard it was actually quite a cramped place in a basement or something, this one is very nice.

 

Too bad nobody knew my name.

 

 

 

So I was fiddling around with the on-board entertainment system aboard this Virgin Atlantic flight when I stumbled onto the corner of the system, where they allowed me to send and receive emails and text messages in flight! How cool is that. Plus there's a message from Richard Branson (well, some no-name underling I'm sure) telling you how, plus welcoming me to the "email-high club" (Virgin humor of questionable taste). This was very exciting and it was actually quite easy to use, and I was able to quickly send and receive text messages from perhaps somewhere along the coast of New Foundland.

 

When all is said and done, money changed hands in the amount of $4.50 from mine to his.

 

 

 

 

 

Was lucky enough to get a freebie ticket to sit in the Penthouse suite at the HP Pavilion to watch a couple of the SAP Open games, the Bryan brothers were pretty awesome.

 

 

Yes, it's also a city in Alaska, but that's not how the girl got her name. She's a 16 year old high school student in Minnesota, became pregnant unexpectedly, had a last minute change of heart at the abortion clinic, then went on to arrange an adoption with a young wealthy family. But the marriage in the family was falling apart, the guy wanted to pursue a dream to be in a rock band rather than a commerical composer, what to do?

 

So went the plot line of Juno, a corky but well made movie. It cost $6.5m to make, and they made it back one day after their initial 19 days of limited release, and went on to make dozen times more of it...

 

Highly recommended.

 

The guy was 36 years old, a software engineer (aka code monkey), wife just had a child, wakes up one day and decided that he wanted to be a rock star after all. One "excuse" was that he didn't want to set an example for his new born daugher to settle with the safe choice. Well, he is successful...

 

 

Full article:

So there I was, making a quick trip from London to Israel, had one free Sunday in my schedule, which later I learned is actually a working day in Israel. Anyway, I took that day off and went to see all the holy places in this land. Starting of course, from the hotel I stayed in by the beach...

 

 

Well... a picture is worth a thousand words, I have tens of thousands of words here at: http://www.flickr.com/gp/92972250@N00/33540V