I had intended on writing several entries regarding the end of the semester (it was busy and we submitted our CCS but not AsiaCrypt paper), my drive back to Buffalo (I hate Ohio), my drive to White Plains (New York is a lot more attractive than Indiana or Ohio), and my start at IBM (it’s corporate, but fun). Then I realized that no one reads this who I don’t have regular contact with, so what’s the point? After going over two weeks without Internet access, the posts didn’t seem very relevant, so this is all you get.
Fence Building
Eleven 4×4s, twenty-two 2×4s, 165 1×6 dog-ear fence panels, nine bags of concrete, three pounds of screws, and random lag and concrete screws later, and the yard is fenced. We’ve wanted to finish fencing off the third length of the yard ever since we got Murphy, but it wasn’t until this spring that we finally got the time and resources to finish the job. Well, technically I didn’t have the time, but I did it anyway.
When we originally planned on building the fence, we were going to use chain link since we thought it would be cheaper. This was partially based on the assumption that if we used wood, we would buy the pre-made 6×8 foot fence panels, and that we had around 83 feet to fence. In the end we ended up doing everything manually (i.e. no pre-made sections of fence) and only had 67 feet to fence. Since chain link is sold in 50-foot increments, that meant we were paying for around 30 feet of wasted fencing. After pricing everything out, wood was $3 cheaper.
Was is cheaper in the end? No. First, I forgot that lumber companies, like hard drive companies, are fond is mislabeling dimensions. I know my father explained why a 2×4 is only 3.5 inches wide once, but in my mind, this is no different than GB v. GiB. Half an inch times 140+ boards and suddenly you’re around 16 short. Oh, and I forgot to add in the cost of screws.
The fence building process was actually fun in the end. I got to play with all of my “Big-Boy Toys” like my miter saw, circular saw, and hammering drill. It took a lot longer than I expected, but that’s because the weather here has been bipolar. It went from blue and sunny to thunderstorms and back about six times in one day.
The biggest problem was actually putting the gate in, since my shed is off-square by about 10 degrees. I had to add a 2×4, ripped to 3 inches and attached to the frame of the shed with lag screws. Even after all of that, the gate frame is slightly off-square and I have no idea why, but it swings smoothly on its hinges.
In the end, all of the work was worth it when we get to watch Murphy run laps around the yard.
1337 H4×0ring
So apparently I must be 1337. How 1337, one may ask? Well, apparently, I’m capable of h4×0ring other’s blogs without even trying. I’m so good I’ve done this twice now. Only problem is, I won’t tell myself how I did it.
Earlier this morning, tired of being bombarded with Moderation Requests for comments that are all spam (I believe I have four valid comments on my blog, and one might even be me), I decided to do something about it. I figured a simple captcha, no matter how trivial, should be sufficient to filter at least some of the bots. Minimal effort on my part, and it will hopefully save me a lot of time pressing the “Filter as Spam” button.
When I logged in, however, I was greeted with two new incoming links. Since I’ve said very few profound things on here (few = zero?), I was immediately curious who was linking to me. The two links were:
http://www.ragamuffinsoul.com/?p=601 and http://blog.oraclebrains.com/.
I visited both sites, realized there was (and probably shouldn’t be) any links to me. A little source viewing and I realized why: they were hacked. I can’t really confirm anything at this point, but looking through their source, it appears hundred of links to my blog and another were injected. You can see for yourself in the images below.
Part of it makes me worried that perhaps I’m infected with some Javascript and am acting as a puppetnet master. If I am, it can only help my Google ranking.
The FC Picture Page
Filed under FC07
I’ve put up a page (thanks to iWeb and iPhoto) of the better of the FC / Tobago picture here. I plan on writing more about the trip, papers I found interesting, etc. later, but suddenly I find myself a week behind. Funny, isn’t it?
The Party is Over
Filed under FC07
So, last night was the “End of FC — Begin USEC” Party at a particular Indiana University professor’s condo on the Plantation property here in Tobago. There was a pool and rum. and the top three quotes were “Hey! There’s a grad student! Get him!” “Hey! Those are my shorts.” and “Wait! My drink!”
I’m purposely being vague here.
Tonight I’ll fly back to Trinidad, stay another horrible night in the Bel Air, and then fly back home early sat.
Financial Cryptography Day Two
Filed under FC07
While this is a conference, and we are holding sessions, panels, and presenting papers, this is also Tobago, and yesterday we ended the sessions with box lunches at noon and boarded a bus for a tour of the island. While I’d love to comment on the papers that were presented the last few days, Lafayette has received seventeen inches of snow and has canceled classes on the 13th and 14th, and I would feel too bad not showing people my trip yesterday. Hopefully this warms you up. ^_^
I should first mention that, in the desire for full disclosure it’s 86°, the door to my balcony is open to the ocean where i have a nice breeze and the sounds of the waves, and 100 feet away there’s a wedding, and they’re playing the wedding music on steel drums.
The first stop on the trip was Fort King James. The fort was built on the top of one of the mountains on the coast (which is a hill compared to the rest of the island, but hey, you have to build forts on coasts). It had an old barracks, lots of cannons, and some great views of the Lowlands and Scarborough.
The fort also had this great old house with the most amazing tree I’ve ever seen. It was truly massive, was far reaching branches that grew more out than up.
To top it off, symbiotic plants, many that were flowering, were growing over it’s entire mass.
After that, we went on a walk in the rain-forest to reach a waterfall. The park was adjacent to a chocolate orchard (do you call them orchards?) and were were given the raw beans encases in a sweet milky mucus membrane that the locals suck on. The large yellow pods are chocolate, and you pull out the small white beans.
A show of the rain-forest from the trail to the waterfall. This was at a slight valley.
An attempt to take a dramatic shot with the little camera on a timer without the proper lens to take the shot.
The waterfall from the bottom. There are three tiers with a large wading pool on the upper and lower levels that people swam in.
A close up of the top of the waterfall from the upper level.
King of the Mountain.
Meet Omer, enjoying some coconut juice. We bought them in the rain-forest after our hike on the side of the road at a shack for less than US$1. Omer can obtain your credit/debit card PIN in less than 1/1000 of a second, but the card companies don’t seem to care. Ok, on to non-FC material.
I took this pic of a really cool tree for Alicia. I thought she would like it, and the sun was lighting it in amazing ways. (Taken from our bus)
The sun setting on the Caribbean sea. Our hotel is on the Atlantic side of the island.
Welcome to Tobago
Filed under FC07
So, Tobago is quite a different island compared to Trinidad. From the moment I stepped into the Toyota Crown taxi with only a Japanese computer (”I only know how to turn on the air conditioner, and that’s all I need”) and far less congested roads, I knew I was somewhere better. My taxi driver assured me several times how much calmer Tobago was. “Trinidad is for the partying and Carnivale. Tobago is where to go to relax and recover from Trinidad.” If it weren’t for my horrible Trinidad hotel (Kevin Fu from UMass told me he too had reservations there, but when he checked the reviews online and one said “My daughter cried herself to sleep and I slept in my clothes,” he decided to cancel and opted for an ultra religious hotel instead) I would have compared this dying while in heaven and going to a better place. I should mention that I went to the airport early and got a much earlier flight, allowing me to get to Tobago much sooner than expected, and enjoy some of the hotel before the conference started up.
I thought I should mention a little about the security I’ve observed during my trip. Besides the annoyances of the Miami airport, my Trinidad hotel has rather lax security. Here you can see me circumventing the lock on my room door
On the other hand the Trinidad airport was a little different. The airport security looked like military in their tan Gestapo like uniforms and somehow managed a very thorough and extremely lax job of security. For example, I didn’t set off the metal detector, but was patted down. Several people after me went through with all of their jewelry on, and were waved through. That didn’t stop Tobago Express airlines from trying to leak as little information as possible about which flight I was on
And finally, just in case any of my students read this, here’s the view from my hotel. I should probably mention that as I write this, Purdue is expecting around one foot of snow tonight. Tobago, as usual, is 88/72/sunny/365.
Life of Pi
Filed under Books
On my flight from Indianapolis to Miami I finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which I’ve heard everyone raving about. Based on how much people liked it, and the paragraph summary on the back of the book, I expected something quite different. Based on the first part of the book, in which Pi Patel, the main character becomes a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim at the same time, I expected the second part, in which Pi is stranded on a life boat with “a hyena, an orang-utan, a zebra with a broken leg, [and] a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger” to take a vastly different turn. I expected something more philosophical. Personified animals discussing their predicament, the existence of god, the meaning of life, irony, even if it was the result of dehydration and hallucination. What I got was more My Side of the Mountain and Hatchet, staple reading for every young boy.
I feel as though the end really pulls everything to together and makes you question the last 300 pages of reading. It’s this part that makes to book worth reading. Obviously, I can’t (shouldn’t) say anything more.
Flying to Trinidad
Filed under FC07, Uncategorized
After twelve hours traveling, I finally made it into Trinidad, and I’m exhausted. So far, there isn’t too much to mention about my trip. From Indianapolis I flew to Miami with a plan full of senior citizens. I chatted with a few of them, and they were all part of this senior’s cruse in the Caribbean. One thing to note about the group was one couple with a surnamed Thorn sat on either side of a woman named Rose. You can imagine the senior humor that resulted. To top it off, several of them were discussing the many names they have had over the years. (How many times were some of these women married? How many times can a woman become a widow?)
Flying into Miami was pretty much as to be expected: the opening sequence to CSI:Miami. The Miami airport has an O’Hare-like star shape to it, with the annoying exception that you enter in the center, and to move between any two gates, you must pass through security again. The end of my gate (the rest of which is long and thin) erupted into a large, open hub. The individual gates were dense and the employees were scarce. After making a big deal about the boarding time when I got my ticket, the plane started boarding over 25 minutes late. During the flight, there was little to no turbulence, sweet and spicy chicken dinner, and a movie. The man I sat next to was en route back home to Guyana after visiting Miami with his unsuccessful attempt to have doctors diagnose his trick knee. All in all, the flights were good.
During the flight, however, a bottle broke in someone else’s bad, spilling god knows what all over my suitcase. It smells like a cross between some alcohol and suntan lotion. Annoying, but it’s not going to kill me.
My hotel in Trinidad on the other hand, that might kill me. I snapped a few pictures of the room which will serve its purpose of providing me a place to stay overnight for my flight to Tobago tomorrow, but not much beyond that. When I booked my tickets originally, I wanted to make sure I got to see both Trinidad and Tobago, so I opted for a late flight the next day. I figured I could spend the morning doing some touristy things; shopping, eating vendor roti, etc. but I hadn’t realized that my hotel is against the airport, near the military air base, and appears to be quite a distance from anything reasonable. I’m over 20km / US$20 / 30-60 minutes from anything reasonable in Port of Spain. I really wanted to walk around Port of Spain before my flight, but I would have had to have checked out of my hotel, and stowed my bags somewhere. When I mentioned these were my thoughts when checking into the hotel I got a “We don’t do that here,” from the guy behind the desk. This hotel is set up exclusively for people to sleep prior to flights; early flights, since the constant sounds of the airport make long, deep sleep impossible.
Alicia’s simply going to say I screwed this one up, and should have read my tour book more before going. That’s probably a fair assessment. The better thing to do would have been to fly to Tobago early, and arranged things with the Hilton. They’re more set up for that. Here’s to me being an idiot.
