In other news, SurvivingTheWorld.net points out that the Living Dead are already among us (for certain values of “among” limited mostly to India).

Caution! Zombies! Ahead!!!

I’d like to welcome everyone stopping by to our first ever Zombie Apocalypse week. John is a huge zombie fan and been majorly sad about the last of posts in our ZA category. We talked about doing a series of posts for it, which eventually turned into a week, which eventually got done. Tada!

This week we’ll be covering anything and everything Zombie related. From zombies in modern media to your contingency plans in case of a real life zombie apocalypse. If you’re not a zombie fan… well… just come back next week. If you are a zombie fan, sit down, tune in, and get ready to crack some skulls.

IPv6 Wiki – As you might have noticed, I’ve been doing a bit of work under IPv6.  During which I found out that the internet as a whole was lacking real world IPv6 information.  Sure, there is plenty out there about the RFCs and theoretical models, but not much about how to implement it.  While I haven’t gotten a lot onto the wiki yet, it is my hope that this can serve as a repository for useful IPv6 implementation information.

Where is Gibson? – One of my friends has decided that he’s going to join the armed forces, good for him.  The only problem is that he likes to hide and is hard enough to trackdown now, let alone when he has the ability to be deployed halfway around the world.  He threatened to not tell us where he was, or would be going.  So we threatened to start a blog to keep everyone up to date.  I think he’s mostly amused by this idea.  We’ll see how it works out.  (P.S. If you know Gibson, and hear about his exploits after actually going into the military – make sure to let me know – so I can post it).

Jon and I are currently at Fanime. Jon went last year (and the year before that), and as I previously mentioned, he convinced me to go this year.
I flew down to meet Jon (and get my motorcycle back) yesterday and after an enjoyable dinner we headed back to his place to finish final preparations.

If you are in the San Jose area, we both encourage you to come on down and stop by; we will be there for the whole show. The show is fairly inexpensive and a single day pass is between $25 and $35 depending on the day.

• Press next on the iPod to get the next song name.

• Grab mouse, navigate over to the top right to the search box
• Move over to keyboard, type in song name
• Grab mouse again, grab song, drag it to play list
• Rinse, Repeat

Why, for the love of god, can some of this not be done with keyboard shortcuts? I’m “only” transcribing two playlists (80 songs in one, 53 in the second). My wrist started to bug me by #50 of the first playlist, really started to hurt me by #15 of the second list. I’ve got to take a break for a few minutes. If iTunes had even some shortcut keys that could eliminate some use of the mouse, this wouldn’t be such a big deal.

I know technical users such as myself are “keyboard ninjas”. We can get all around any useful operating system and application strictly sans mouse. It isn’t because we abhor mice from our Linux upbringings, we simply can get there faster with the keyboard. I’m not even asking Apple to make them readily apparent to the user, god forbid someone using a Mac has to even look at a keyboard. I know it would blow their little minds and destroy their tiny worlds to have a second mouse button.

God forbid the rest of us get something done…

Me, as a single individual, I’ve got TBs in hard drives on my computers. I could spend an extra 600GB and not be that upset, other than the cost of another external HD. Google has tens (hundreds?) of thousands of machines and TRILLIONS of pages indexed. Hell, they give every Gmail account 7+GB just because they have the extra hard drive space. They measure their storage capacity in Petabytes. A petabyte, for those that don’t know, is 1024 Terabytes or 1,048,576 Gigabytes. I’m fairly sure you’re not going to notice a loss of 600GB out of several MILLION.

So, if they didn’t notice the space being taken up now, what about in collection? Think about the number of hours a fleet of street view vehicles can run up in 3 years. 25 vehicles * 8 Hours a day * 250 business days a year * 3 years = 150,000 hours – and this is very conservative. 600GB / 150k Hrs = 1.17KB/s of data (per car). I wouldn’t notice if I was downloading an extra 1 KB/s of data, and I’m not Google. That isn’t much extra considering that they are doing numerous things at the same time: Taking 8-10 pictures, recording GPS data, laser scanning buildings and recording the SSID/MAC/Location information for WiFi.

What this boils down to is their software captured and kept more of the WiFi packets than they needed to. I do wardriving and I too have recorded packets over open WiFi connections. Guess who’s fault this is? Yours! You, the end user, have an open WiFi connection – your data is being sent in the CLEAR. Don’t blame Google because they accidentally picked up some stray raw packets, and never did anything with them. Just hope someone else didn’t pick up your packets, someone that has ill intentions for you. Oh, and let’s not forget that all they probably manged to pick up was a couple of (unusable) packets of your porn surfing.

I was never a huge Facebook fan to start with, but everyone is on there. I hardly even login these days, maybe one every other day, depending on how I’m feeling. Once I tried to use it for an “event” and by the end of it I wanted to gouge my eyes out; it wasn’t pretty. Really, the only reason I keep it is because my Twitter is connected to it. A lot of my friends don’t twitter, but they do Facebook – so FB is how they get my status updates. I don’t think too many people really care about the miscellaneous crap I post on Twitter, heck, I know for fact that more than a few of my friends have me “hidden” on their update lists. In the end, the extra exposure to the blog (for which I basically don’t make any money), is the entire reason I keep it around.

But… we’ve all read the news about the security/privacy concerns of Facebook. I’m not naive enough to believe that my “info” is safe normally, but when your online life hangs in the balance of Zuckerberg not going nuts… might be time to rethink things. Hell, just writing this I sadly realize that I’m older than that nut job (not by much, not much at all, but I am). Obviously privacy is a big deal in the online world, but true anonymity is a fairly new concept historically.

In the end, I don’t really care if you know where I went to high school. It was a hell hole, just like every other high school is, no matter how good or bad it is – we hate them. I just don’t want my entire life sold out from under me for nothing. Now if you’re giving me free email, free document storage, and basically free everything… be my guest, sell better advertisements based on what you’ve learned about me. At least I’m getting something out of it.

PS. I foxtrotting hate those god damn applications in Facebook, especially the games. Those are an entirely separate security/privacy nightmare (Which I don’t use for a reason).

Being located in different parts of the country, we flew separately. My brother made it down without incident, alas I was not so lucky.

I was flying US Airways and was scheduled to go Reno to Phoenix to Philadelphia to Cancun, leaving at 6:34 PM on a Friday and getting into Cancun at 12:53 PM the next day. Not the most exciting series of flights to be on, but it was what I had to work with at the time. What actually happened was that the flight from Reno to Phoenix was repeatedly delayed. Initially, this was not a problem as I had a 3 hour layover in Phoenix. However as the delays continued to add up (some of which occurred before boarding, some after), I started to stare at the clock a bit more. Eventually we depart Reno (a little over 3 hours late) and are on our way to Phoenix.
In general, I only ever fly Southwest Airlines, and my experience with them has always been that they will bend over backward to take care of you, including (but most definitely not limited to) holding your connecting flight for you. My many experiences with Southwest were the reason this next part was particularly jarring.

As we pull into the gate, I watch as the plane next to me has its chocks removed and backs up from the gate. I remember thinking to myself, “I bet that’s my flight”. As we had arrived right as it was scheduled to depart. As I exited the aircraft I was proven correct. We had parked right next to my connecting flight and it would have taken me less than 15 minutes to get from where I was sitting on my previous flight to where I should have been sitting on my next flight.
I, along with my fellow passengers, was pissed. I joined the queue for customer service and after 45 minutes in line (it now being after midnight) I am told that I will be moved onto a different flight the next day going direct from Phoenix to Cancun (yay!) and that they have agreements with the local Crowne Plaza Hotel to offer us at a reduced rate.
That’s right, I need to pay for my own hotel for the evening. And the flight in the morning leaves around 6 AM, and since it is international, I need to be back at the airport 2 hours ahead of time. Some of my fellow passengers have opted to sleep in the airport. I opt to go to the hotel (and pay what feels to be an exorbitant fee for what amounts to a couple hours in a room), and the customer service agent lets me know that there is a free shuttle that will take me there (wonderful). I then ask if I need to go get my checked luggage to get some clothes out of it. She tells me that not only do I not need to, it is not possible. This seems odd to me, but what do I know?

Off I go to the hotel, sleep for 2 hours, wake up, shower, can’t have breakfast at the hotel (kitchen doesn’t open till after I am supposed to be at the airport), take the free shuttle back to the airport, go through security, find an open shop and get something resembling a breakfast. Then, a bit of wonderful, very exciting news: I’ve been upgraded to first class.
Yeah, that’s right first class on an international flight. And let me tell you, it was nice! Free meal, free dessert, free headphones, free booze, free movie(s). Basically, everything you might have to pay for in coach, you get for free in first class (or at least that’s how it was back then). It was a very enjoyable trip down to Cancun and I felt like the whole business the night before was totally worth the upgrade to first class.

I land in Cancun and my brother meets me there in the terminal. We wait as the luggage gets unloaded. The carousel spins up and… after a while it spins down… after everyone else has their luggage. Uh oh… turns out my bag was lost/left in Phoenix. I then have to go through the process of explaining what my bag looks like to the local US Airways agent. Telling them where I will be staying (they asked for my room number as well, which I of course didn’t have as I had yet to check into the hotel). I gave them all my info and they said they usually get the bag found within 2-3 days. We’re only staying in Mexico for 3 nights so I am a bit perturbed by this news.
At this point I form a new rule for traveling: If you are checking bags, make sure you have at least a day’s worth of comfortable clothing on your person.

Fortunately, my brother and I were roughly the same size so I could use some of his clothes, and the hotel gift shop took care of the rest of the necessities. My bag did eventually show up and the trip was in no way ruined, but it did end up costing me a bit more since I had to buy new clothes from the resort. Also, no free upgrade on the way back to the states (if I wanted to pay for the upgrade it would have been around $600 to $1000, don’t recall exact amount), but such is life.

In summary, Southwest good, US Airways, not so much, which is probably the reason why I generally feel that if Southwest doesn’t fly there (at least inside the US), it probably isn’t worth visiting.

Travel
Well… I would hope this one is fairly self explanatory: Anything involving traveling & trips. For instance I’ve previously talked about my amusements during flight. When I was young I traveled a lot (thanks to my parents), though since about college I’ve not had nearly the same amount of time nor money to do so. Now that looks to be turning around so, yay! I like to travel. Just one clarification, when I say “travel” I mean on a trip that is more than 300 miles away from home or is somehow vacation related. I regularly drive to and from Tahoe (200 miles) and I have no intention of boring you with that mundane information. For that you can check twitter.

Japan 2011
Since this category is a child of travel, it should also be fairly simple to guess. But for those of you who are stupid, dense, or EXTREMELY obtuse: I’m going to Japan next year. This is what falls under the subject head of a “big deal” for me. I’ve been a Japanophile (yes, there really is a Wikipedia article on that) for at least 15 years. I’m also most definitely an otaku. Regardless, it has been my dream to go to Japan for a very long time, and it is finally happening.

I intend on covering this trip, everything leading up to it, as well as the trip itself, very extensively. I’m doing so for a few reasons. First, I’ve never planned a big trip like this before. Sure, I’ve booked flights and planned vacations before, but never to a foreign country. While I’ve traveled internationally many times, the last time I did so was in high school, and I was under my parents’ control (Editor’s Note: for certain definitions of “control”). Second, I find the lack of recent information on other people’s travels to Japan annoying. For example, I found a great article about taking an iPhone to Japan, and WiFi accessibility but it is 3 years out of date (4 years, by the time I travel there). Third, I’m doing a lot of research, combing through and condensing a lot of information, and I think that should be shared with everyone.

PS. I’m really excited about this trip, and it isn’t until April of 2011. Expect a lot of posts in the near future on it in regards to the early planning. As the trip gets closer, there won’t be much to report since all the prep will be “done”. Once I get on the trip, the blog posts may or may not be showing up immediately – depends on how accessible the internet is/if I have time. By the time it is over though, there will be a LOT of material to post.